Every time he breathed in the familiar sweat-plastic-chemicals smell, familiar because he'd been smelling it in training, in the transfer truck, in the capsule mock-up for months. All that should be new and adventurous had become stale and automatic through relentless training. His eyes rested on the color-coded meters and switches that were associated with nausea in the centrifuge tumbler-trainer. The couch made him think of long hours in the chlorinated pool--he always used to come out with his stomach rumbling and wrinkled white fingers, despite the tablets and the silicone creams. His skin itched beneath the adhesive pads that held the prying electrodes to his body, itched like the salt and sand itch he felt after swimming between training bouts. It was still Florida air he breathed, but filters had taken out its oil-fouled hot smell, its whiffs of canteen cooking, fish, seaweed and raw concrete in the sun. Hatter's and his own sing-song bit talk, so deliciously new to television audiences, rang trite in his own ears: a makeshift vocabulary, primer sentences chosen for maximum transmission efficiency to Control. The Control center he remembered from having watched orbital flights himself. Machines that patiently followed pulse rate, breathing, temperature. Squiggly lines, awkward computer handwriting, screens where dots jumped, screens that showed instrument panels, screens where his own helmet showed, and inside it the squirming blob that was his own face, rendered as a kind of rubberized black-and-white tragic mask. He felt the metal ears turning, questing for signals, the little black boxes, miniaturized colossi tracking, listening, spewing tape. On the capsule itself--all folded in like Japanese water flowers--sensors, cameras, listeners, analyzers should have burgeoned on impact, shot up, reached out, grasped, retracted, analyzed, counted, transmitted. But he'd cut the switch. * * * * * Al Marcusson blinked awake. He set about freeing himself, a task comparable to getting a butterfly alive out of a spider web. Every creak of his suit and of the moulded couch sounded loud and flat in the newly silent capsule. His breathing soughed about him. But no signal went out from the electrodes taped to his chest to say that his heart beat had again topped a hundred, that he sweated, that his stomach contracted--even though he was under no gravity strain, the emergency cooling worked, and his latest no-crumbs, low-residue meal had been welcomed by the same stomach an hour earlier. He sat up. The port gave off a pale creamy glow. He leaned forward and could see nothing except for a cream- or eggshell-colored mist, even and opaque.