I must be breaking through the clouds, he thought. His mind, though somewhat slower on the uptake, was totally relaxed. As time went by, he felt increasingly like a spectator to some strange comedy. There he was, lying fiat on his back in his “dentist’s chair,” arms and legs paralyzed, not a cloud in sight, surrounded by a phony pastel-blue sky… Hey, were those stars over there, or what?

Stars they were. Meanwhile the gauges were working steadily away—on the ceiling, on the walls—each in its own way, each with a different function to perform. And he was supposed to monitor each and every one of them—and with two eyes, no less! At the sound of a bleeping signal in his earphones, his left hand—again by instinct—fired the booster separation, immediately lowering the pressure. He was cruising at a velocity of 7.1 kilometers per second, he was at an altitude of 201 kilometers, and his acceleration was 1.9 as he pitched out of his assigned launch path. Now he could afford to relax a while, but not for long, because pretty soon he would have his hands full—and how!

He was just starting to make himself comfortable, pressing the armrest to raise the seat in back, when he suddenly went numb all over.

“The crib! Where’s the cribsheet!”

This was that awfully important detail he couldn’t remember at the time. He scoured the deck with his eyes, now totally oblivious of the swarm of pulsating gauges. The cribsheet had slipped down under the contour couch. He tried to bend over, was held back by his torso straps; without a moment to lose, with a sinking sensation as if perched on top of some collapsing tower, he flipped open his navigation book—which until now had been stored in his thigh pocket—and yanked the flight plan from the envelope. A mental blackout. Where the hell was orbit B68, anyway? That must be it there! He checked the trajectory and went into a roll. Much to his surprise, it worked.