The interior lights automatically went on the moment he closed the outside hatch. After sealing off the cabin, he climbed a small flight of steps padded with a rough but pliant material, before reaching the pilot’s seat.

Now why in hell’s name did they have to squeeze the pilot into a glass blister three meters in diameter when these one-man rockets were cramped enough as it was? wondered Pirx. The blister, though transparent, was made not of glass, of course, but of some Plexiglas material having roughly the same texture and resilience as extremely hard rubber. The pilot’s encapsulated contour couch was situated in the very center of the control room proper. Thanks to the cabin’s cone-shaped design, the pilot, by sitting in his “dentist’s chair”—as it was called in spaceman’s parlance—and rotating on its vertical axis, was able to monitor the entire instrument panel through the walls of the blister, with all its dials, meters, video screens (located fore, aft, and at the side), computer displays, astrograph, as well as that holy of holies, the trajectometer. This was an instrument whose luminous band was capable of tracking a vehicle’s flight path on a low-luster convex screen, relative to the fixed stars in the Harelsberg projection. A pilot was expected to know all the components of this projection by heart, and to be able to take a readout from virtually any position—even upside down. Once seated in a semisupine position, the pilot had, to the right and left of him, two reactor and attitude control levers, three emergency controls, six manual stick controls, the ignition and idling switches, along with the power, thrust, and purge controls. Standing just above the floor was a sprawling, spoke-wheeled hub that housed the air-conditioning system, oxygen supply, fire-protection bay, catapult (in the event of an uncontrollable chain reaction), and a cord with a loop attached to a bay containing Thermoses and food.