Al Marcusson had gone up quietly to his room. Later, his special gift for languages and math got him through college and engineering school; his sense of direction and lack of inner-ear trouble helped to get him chosen for Astronaut training while he was in the Air Force. While in training at the Cape he had met and married a luscious brunette librarian in one of the sponge-fishing towns, a brunette with a rather complicated last name that became forgotten as she turned into Mrs. Marcusson, and unbeatable recipes for the most bewitching cocktails since Circe held the shaker for Ulysses. Marcusson's hobbies included scuba diving, electronic tinkering and reading. His psychiatrists noted a tendency to reserve, even secrecy, which was not entirely bad in a man who worked with classified material and had to face long periods of time alone. Besides, his ability to get along with people largely compensated. * * * * * With slowly returning consciousness the last months of training swam in Al Marcusson's mind. The orbital flight--the only part of it he'd really enjoyed was the quarter-hour alone with SARAH, the electronic beacon, cut off from Control and even from the rescue team just over the horizon, alone with the music of wind and sea. For the moon shot he'd been responsible for communications, recording and sensing systems inside the capsule, as Hatter had for the life-support systems and their two back-up men for propulsion and ground systems coordination respectively. He relived the maddening, risky business of the master switch to be secretly connected with the capsule's several brains and camouflaged. The strap to be weakened. Then the blind terror of launch when his pulse had topped 120; blurred vision, clenched teeth, the suit digging into him, the brief relief of weightlessness erased by the cramped, terrifying ride filled with new sensations and endless petty tasks. The camera eye pitilessly trained on his helmet. The way things had of staying there when you'd put them away. On Earth--already it was "On Earth," as if Earth was a port he'd sailed from--you put things out of your mind, but here they bobbed before you still, like the good luck charm in its little leather bag, for instance, the charm his wife had tied to one of his fastener tabs and that kept dancing in the air like a puppet, jerking every time he breathed.