Robin screwed up his eyes again, mentally calculated. He revised his estimate of his height, doubled it, redoubled it. Why, he might be a thousand miles up, two thousand, perhaps many times that! How fast was he traveling? He didn't know. He couldn't tell. He remembered the talk about atomic fuels he had overheard. Could it be that the inventors had miscalculated? Could it be that he was already in outer space, heading for the void, never to return to Earth? He screwed his eye again to the outlet. In the short time since he'd first looked the sky had darkened. It was black, jet-black, and the stars were fiery points of white. The Earth now seemed like a ball, a vast ball whose fringes glowed with the pale mistiness of a sun-lit blanket of air. But where he was there was no air. He was beyond any atmosphere. No whistling of atmospheric friction was present in the length of the silent rocket. And then a blinding white glow poked a piercing beam through the tiny eye-spot. It was the sun, unshielded, brilliant. In a moment the tiny ray vanished as the rocket continued its slow turning, but Robin in that instant had come to realize what had happened. He was in outer space, beyond Earth, never to return. He was the first man to reach that untracked void that bounded on all the stars and suns of a universe. He was the first--but who would ever know? Who could ever hear of him, whose helpless body, imprisoned in its shining airtight shell, now seemed doomed to float unsuspected forever on the cosmic tides of interplanetary space? _5. Fall Without End_ For a moment Robin felt dizzy again, and the falling sensation wracked him. It was the weightlessness, he knew. The sensation of being without weight was the same as that of being in free fall. And he was operating beyond the effects of gravity. Somehow the atomic rocket fuels had been far greater or far more effective than the inventors had calculated. He knew that they had never intended this rocket to be shot beyond Earth's grip--for if they had, they would not have loaded it with the test animals and they would not have placed a parachute-release arrangement in the nose. However, it now occurred to him he might be wrong about this. He had seen the reference to the parachute on the loading chart, and he now remembered lettering indicating parachute on the body of the rocket just above the little entryway to the topmost cargo compartment. Still, perhaps there was no parachute there. He squirmed around again, trying to get used to the nauseating sensation of free fall. He felt as if he had to exert conscious effort to keep his stomach from turning inside out. He felt an impulse to scream, to thrash his hands, and he had to remind himself that it was an illusion. For a while he just rested, floating in the little space, bumping steadily against one wall or another, with barely inches to spare. The tiny burning sunbeam pierced through again and vanished. Robin looked through the peephole.