He stopped thrashing, let himself rest. He bumped against the tight side again, took the opportunity to stretch his body out straight and found he could not. He was touching both sides of the narrow space. His eyes found the space not entirely dark. A faint trace of light showed from a couple of spots somewhere in the dark enclosure. He realized where he was. He remembered now the take-off, the pressure. Why, he thought with a shock, the rocket went off. And I'm in it! We must be falling back to the sands now. In a few minutes we'll crash and that will be the end. He waited awhile, expecting to be snuffed out at any instant. But there was nothing. Just silence. And now a faint rustling sound where something was stirring and squeaking below him. The animals, he thought, are alive in the space below me. Then it occurred to him that he was not falling back, but perhaps falling away. His mind, which had been numbed from the pain and pressure, began to reassemble what he knew about rockets. And consciously the thought formed--the sensation of free fall is the same as the sensation of weightlessness found in space rockets. He thought he was falling, but was it not just as likely that instead he was simply beyond gravity? He felt himself over for broken spots, but somehow miraculously he had not been damaged. His eyes burned and he supposed they were bloodshot. A smear of stickiness around his face convinced him he'd suffered a nosebleed. But otherwise he was sound. He patted the jacket he wore and his hand encountered the cylindrical hardness of the flashlight he'd borrowed from the supply truck. He took it out, snapped it on. The little padded compartment was the same, the door still tightly wedged. He turned the light carefully around it, saw that the faint break in the total darkness before had come from two tiny openings--glass insets. Probably, he thought, the openings for the instruments, possibly the lens spots for cameras. He switched off his flashlight, put an eye to an opening. The spot of glass was thick but amazingly clear. He caught a glimpse of blue-black sky and a jagged line of misty gray and white, beneath which stretched the edge of a great brown-and-green bowl. He stared at it in puzzlement, watching it as it swung slowly away. He realized that the rocket had developed a slow spin, that his viewing spot would gradually circle the region around him. And he realized that the great brownish bowl was the Earth. From the darkness of the sky he realized that he must already be high in the stratosphere, possibly well beyond it. From the curvature of the horizon, he must be far up, several hundred miles, he guessed. And he could see that the curvature was increasing as he watched. The rocket was still traveling upward, traveling at an immense rate of speed. Its last rockets had blasted away and had left it with a heritage of unparalleled speed.