on its way, and as I said, it's six years now. After four minutes, the return vehicle was activated and as it broke away from the capsule, Lynds blacked out for twenty seconds. That was the only time I was out of direct contact with him after he went into orbit.

"Now do you understand about the manual controls?" Bannister said.

"He'll come out of it in less than a minute."

"One can never be sure."

"There's still no reason why you can't use duplicate control systems."

"With a switch-off on the automatic, if they fail?"

"Yes. If for nothing more than to give a man a chance to save his own neck."

"They won't fail."

"The simplest things fail, Bannister. Campbell was killed in a far less elaborate way."

He looked at me. "Campbell? Oh, yes. The landing over the reef. I had nothing to do with that."

"You designed the power shut-off that failed."

"Improper servicing. A simple mechanical failure."

"Or the inability of a mechanism to compensate. The wind shifted after computer coordination. A pilot can feel it. Your instruments can't. There was no failure, there. The shut-off worked perfectly and Campbell was killed because of it."

I watched the tracking screen, listened to the high keening noises coming from the receivers. The computers clicked rapidly, feeding out triangulated data on the positions of the escape vehicle and the capsule. The capsule had been diverted from its path slightly by reaction to the vehicle's ejection. Its speed, however, was increasing as it moved farther out. The vehicle with Lynds was in a path parabolic to the capsule, almost like the start of an orbit, but at a fantastic distance. He was, of course, traveling at escape velocity or better, and you do not orbit at escape velocity.

"Harry. Harry, how long was I out?" We heard Lynds' voice come alive suddenly through the crackling static.

"Hello, Dennis. Listen to me. How are you?"

"I'm fine, Harry. What's wrong? How long was I out?"

"Nothing is wrong. You were out less than half a minute. The ejection gear worked perfectly."

"That's good." The tension left his voice and he settled back to a checking and rechecking of instruments, reactions and what he would see. They activated the scanner. The transmitting equipment brought us a view that was little more than a spotty blackness. But I think the equipment was not working properly. You see, what Lynds said did not quite match what we saw. They later used the recording of his voice together with an affidavit sworn to by a technician that our receiver was operating perfectly, as evidence in my hearing. They proved, in their own way, that Lynds had suffered continual delirium after blacking out. The speed, they said, was the cause. It became known as Danger V. Nobody ever bothered to explain why I never encountered the phenomenon of Danger V. It became official record, and my experience was the deviant. It was Bannister's alibi.

We watched the spotty blackness on the screen and listened to Lynds.

"Harry, I can see it all pretty well now," he began. "There's slight spin on this bomb so it comes and goes. About sixty second revolutions. Nice and slow. Terribly nauseating to look at. But I'm feeling fine now, better than fine. Give me a stick and I'll move the Earth. Who was it said that? Clever fellow. You say I was out about half a minute. That makes it about three more minutes until Bannister's controls are supposed to bring me back."

"Yes, Dennis, but what do you see? Do you hear me? What do you see?"

"Let me tell you something, Harry," he said. "They aren't going to work. They're not wrecked or anything. I just know they aren't worth sweet damn all. Like when Campbell had it. He knew it was going to happen. You can trust the machines just so long. After that, you're batty to lay anything on them at all. But can you see the screen? There it is again. We're turning into view. I can see the earth now. The whole of it."