He pressed the button that slid the port shutters aside. The shutters were necessary. There'd been terrific heat outside when the nose-cone flung upward through the denser lower atmosphere near ground level. He looked eagerly out. For a moment he couldn't speak. He saw the horizon as an almost white line against a star-specked black sky. It was curved! There were innumerable flecks of whiteness--they'd be clouds--below him; they grew thicker farther away. He saw the ocean, which was hundreds of miles away. The world visibly tilted downwards, downhill away from him. He looked below and it was paradoxically a bowl. Quite close he saw a fleeting, rushing, tormented spurt of vapor which vanished instantly. It was a steam-jet correcting yaw or spin or tumbling, up here where the air was so thin that the fins themselves could take no grip on it. Years ago, when a WAC corporal made the first flight up to the then incredible height of two hundred and fifty miles, the machine turned end for end five times as it rose, and its tumbling made no difference. It was practically in a vacuum. McCauley was higher than that, already. But this Aerobee pointed straight, balanced by little puffings of steam. It didn't even rotate. He could see stars all around, and then he turned to the one filtered port and looked at the sun through it. It was a monstrous brilliance, with writhing fire-fringes around its edges. He saw Mercury off to its right. It was the first time in his life that he'd ever seen that planet, and he'd had to get out of the atmosphere to do it. Not one person in ten thousand has ever seen the sun's closest satellite, even as a tiny speck of light in the sky. But McCauley saw it, not hidden by the daytime sky. There was no air here to speak of. At this height a man not in a pressure-tight cabin, trying to breathe what few molecules of air were present, would die in thirteen seconds because of anoxia and explosive decompression. He'd die no more quickly out between the galaxies. "_Keep talking_," said the voice in the headphones. "_Keep talking, man!_" McCauley found himself stammering. What he said wasn't particularly coherent, and he knew his taped speech would be studied to find out exactly what mental state he was in. The headphones asked questions. Could he see this? Could he see that? He answered yes and no. The voice asked him to write something. He did, not looking at it. He stared out at the monstrousness of the universe, with Earth merely a dimpled gigantic ball below him. He had no weight, but he did not notice. He gazed and gazed and exulted, and absent-mindedly obeyed the orders which came insistently to his ears. He wanted to saturate his mind and his memory with the sight that nobody had ever seen before, except in pictures taken at this height by robots. Presently the sky wasn't totally black with innumerable tiny lights in it. It was a deep, dark purple. The stars seemed fainter. He said so.