It did. McCauley's muscles were already getting weary of lifting his whole chest for breathing when a voice said in the phones: "_Beautiful shoot! Beautiful! Everything's going fine!_" He grunted in acknowledgment. It would be too much effort to talk. Also he felt an obscure anger, which was his body's reaction to the unreasonable suffering imposed upon it. A little green light flashed, and he was supposed to grunt at it, and he did. He grunted a second time when it flashed again. Quickly. A third and fourth and fifth time. Something would be learned from the quickness with which he could respond to signals during this second-stage thrust. A pause, and the green light flashed and kept on flashing too fast for him to respond, and he said, "Cripes!" very wearily. Then it stopped. The roaring went on and on, and abruptly there were violent coughings below. Instantly his head tried to split wide open because the acceleration ceased between two heartbeats, while his heart kept on trying to pump blood against a static head which was many times normal, and suddenly there was no static head at all. There was no gravity to be pumped against. There was no weight to anything. Then his heart tried to adjust to that, and it skipped beats, and all his insides that had been dragged downward now rose up and tried to climb out of his throat. He gagged and swallowed. "Okay!" he panted. "In free fall! The light changed to reddish but it's back to normal. I feel fighting mad. Over." "_First puzzle_," said a brisk voice in the headphones. McCauley reached out into the arrangement of objects before him. He took out a puzzle. It wasn't complicated, but he had to recognize it and then remember how to do it. He tossed it aside, finished, and his working time was undoubtedly recorded. The voice said: "_Name two things in the same class among these: robin, shovel, tree, ibis, shark._" McCauley answered. Again the time was noted. This was straight IQ stuff, to see how soon and how well his brain was functioning after the beating he'd taken in the booster-stage take-off and the second-stage acceleration of the rocket itself. He knew what it was all about, even when they told him to solve puzzle six, and then four, and then asked more silly questions. He responded as well as he could, with no idea how good that was. But he felt a great irrational anger and indignation. When he was asked to recite a paragraph of prose he'd memorized for the exact purpose of reciting it, on demand, he recited it. But he was unreasonably angry. It was his body's response to the suffering just past. Presently he snapped: "Doggone it, I want to see something!" "_Go ahead_," said the voice from the ground. "_But keep on talking. It doesn't matter what you say. Talk._"