And so, in test after test, one of the chosen astronauts had lain on the couch in the capsule, wired through his spacesuit to the dozens of dials and graph recorders on the consoles at which sat the watching specialists. It seemed there was nothing that could happen inside his body that they could not know about. They could read every flexing of his muscles, every heartbeat, every tiny shifting of temperature, every reaction of his blood and of his complicated nervous system. On the encephalograph, they could even detect reactions in the mass of gray matter which was his brain, any sign of tension there, and above all, any symptom of that strange phenomenon of which so little was yet known, and which was called the "breakoff"--the eerie sensation of complete isolation from Earth, the trancelike apathy and indifference to survival that can attack not only high-flying pilots, but deep-sea divers, "the rapture of the depths," and sometimes it was accompanied by hallucinations in which strange forms and sounds were seen and heard. * * * * * In the case of Lieutenant Hamilton Richardson, USN, there had been no mysterious troubles of this kind--in fact, no troubles of any kind at all. Aged thirty-six, he had been one of the first of the astronauts to volunteer. He had passed with flying colors every one of the grueling preliminary tests, mental and physical, and as far as could be judged by science, he had seemed to be the perfect specimen, mentally and physically, for the job. In the many tests made with him inside the capsule, nothing had gone wrong with him. There had been no signs of fatigue or failure of any kind. Had Snow been asked who, in his opinion, would be the first man--or, at any rate, the first American--to go into deep space, he would unhesitatingly have nominated Richardson. That is to say, until that afternoon when the thing had happened. It had been a long test, one made for the first time. The object of it was to find out how the spacesuit, which was sealed off from the rest of the capsule, would stand up if something happened to the capsule itself. If, for instance, in its headlong flight through space, something struck it, something, maybe, no bigger than a small pebble. The odds were that in collision with even so small a meteor, the shell of the capsule would be punctured, and within a minute or less, the atmospheric pressure inside it, fixed at about five thousand feet above sea level, would be reduced to zero. In other words, the capsule would become a vacuum in which nothing on Earth could live. The astronaut would then have to depend upon his spacesuit which, being pressurized, and being really a capsule within a capsule, with its own supply of oxygen, would be the one hope of survival.