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.

It was the dead black of outer space now, a black beyond conception, black with nothing in it to reflect. And against it an inconceivable array of brilliant points of light—the stars in numbers beyond any seen through the blanket of atmosphere. White, with some yellows and reds, and a few bluish ones here and there. The Earth moved again into sight and it was distinctly smaller—though still an impressively vast bowl—but beginning distinctly to resemble a monstrous globe in bas-relief, breathtakingly impressive with its living face, its shifting misty veil of air and water vapor.

Robin became aware that he was thirsty. Yes, and hungry too. He took stock of his situation. He felt through his pockets, came up with one of the candy bars he had taken. He hefted it thoughtfully. Should he eat it now or save it?

That raised the question he had been unconsciously avoiding. Save it for what?

If he was indeed heading for the boundless regions of space, then he was a doomed man. If he ate now, it would mean that starvation would come sooner. If he delayed, doled it to himself in small bits, it could only prolong the agony awhile, but would not the result still be the same?

There was the chance, the odd chance, that the rocket somehow might yet return to Earth. It might describe a circle, an arc, finally begin to fall back. If it did so, the parachute would operate and perhaps land Robin in safety.

Somehow it didn't seem likely to Robin, yet that chance existed. If so, it would have to return to Earth before a full starvation period could result in death. Robin had read somewhere that one could go without food for as much as thirty days, but without water for not more than seven or eight. If the rocket were describing an arc or a parabola, then it would surely start its return within less than that week's leeway.

With this in mind, Robin unwrapped the candy bar and ate it. The second one he would save as long as possible. But what about water?

The squeaking of the test animals broke in on his thoughts. Surely they must have been supplied with some sort of food for their flight? Robin switched himself around to face the floor and began to dig at the padding there. He managed to loosen it, pull it to one side, revealing the floor of the compartment. As he had hoped, it was not a metal plate. His own chamber, the one for the instruments, was not a section in itself but only part of a section paneled off by braced plasterboard. And what was more there were already holes drilled through it so that the air in both sections would be equalized.

This answered another question Robin had been trying to avoid. How was it the air was remaining fresh now, though it had gone stale while he was hiding? Apparently there was a small supply of oxygen operating automatically in the animal section that seeped through into the upper compartment too. Evidently once the rocket went into flight this started to work and would continue for the originally calculated period.

Robin dug his fingers into the openings and pulled. Gradually the plasterboard bent away and opened a space into the section below. He looked down, using his flashlight.

There were two cages below, well padded. In one, two little brown monkeys clung together floating just above the floor and looking terrified. They chattered when they saw him, but remained tightly locked in each other's arms. In the other, four small rabbits were placidly nibbling bits of lettuce, although one rabbit was upside down, another sideways on the side of the cage.

There were a couple of small boxes set in each cage, and Robin could see that they dispensed food and water to the animals at presumably regular intervals. Robin reached down next to the monkeys' cage and started to work loose the small water holder there. He found it slid out of place once he turned the holding bolt. As he drew the little flask upward, one of the monkeys made an effort to nip his finger, but he withdrew it in time.

The water flask drawn up into Robin's compartment made him feel better. This would make his stay a little more comfortable for a while. He felt sorry for the monkeys, who might go thirsty now, but he had a suspicion that the two little beasts were probably too hysterically frightened to eat or drink anyway. Robin wet his throat a little.

He looked back down, reached out, and investigated the food compartment. Sure enough, there were several bananas in the monkeys' food container. They would do also.

He glanced around the space below again. There were the oxygen tanks, set up with a timer, one gently hissing away. There also was a small heating unit with a thermostat that evidently kept the temperature in the animal division at a level—and almost certainly was doing the same for the whole section.

Robin grimaced to himself as he worked the padding back into place on the floor. He might manage to be quite comfortable for a while longer—a day or so more. While there's life, there's hope, he said to himself. Better check the parachute question, too, while I'm at it.

He reversed himself in a neatly executed weightless somersault and making what had once been his roof the floor, worked the padding out there. But here he was thwarted, for he found the rounded metal side of the section's nose. If there were a parachute, it obviously occupied its own compartment at the very tip of the rocket's nose.

He looked out the peephole from his upside-down perch, stared musingly at the panoply of the stars. He wondered if he could recognize a planet should one swing across his narrow field of vision, decided that perhaps he might not be able to do so, so vast were the number of stars present. He looked again at Earth, noticing that it had visibly rotated on its axis. That meant that time had passed, a good deal of it. Mentally he tried to calculate just how much. He was looking at the Eastern Hemisphere now, or a corner of it. At least half a day, or maybe a day and a half, or more. How could he tell how long he had been asleep, how long unconscious?

He realized that he was tired, that his body still ached from the painful take-off. He closed his eyes, and without actually wanting to, fell asleep.

His sleeping body swung slowly to and fro in the tiny space, bumping gently from one side to the other. As he slept he dreamed of falling, dreamed of falling over huge endless cliffs, of dropping down strange chasms, of being carried by huge birds and suddenly being dropped.

His subconscious mind would never give up the insistent awareness that his body was falling. It was a certain thing that such would be the dreams of anyone in space flight. The built-in machinery of self-protection identifies a sense of loss of weight with the automatic warning of a fall. Ten thousand thousand generations of climb from primeval arboreal ancestry found the warning valid—no conscious knowledge otherwise would ever shut off this instinctive alarm.

He awoke again with a start and a convulsive grasp for a tree branch. But he shook off the sensation and rubbed his eyes. He took another sip from the water flask, reached into the compartment below and took one of the bananas. The monkeys were still in each other's arms, but now asleep. The rabbits were nosing the corners of their cage as if everything were perfectly normal.

He looked through his peephole and saw the Moon.

It was large, it was vast, it took up most of the view in his range. It looked as close as the Earth had looked before. He looked upon the stupendous moonscape with awe. It was the vision one strains to see through a telescope. He had often paid a dime to look at it through the six-inch telescope at the City Science Museum. This was the same vision, but bigger and clearer, so very, very clear.

He could see only a small section of the Moon, but that was impressive. A particularly rugged area of jagged mountains, huge craters, high walled and wide bottomed, with long rills and ridges running across the surfaces.

It shone white under the sun, with immensely black shadows breaking it where the sun failed to penetrate. Yet there were more than whites and grays and blacks here. He saw that without the atmosphere of Earth there were other more delicate shadings. The sides of some mountains had bluish and greenish tinges, and more than one crater bottom showed a distinct faint tinge of pale green, or in other spots yellowish blotches. And in one small spot he distinctly saw a mistiness of the surface, saw that a faint fuzziness barred the clear sight of the crater bottom.

He stared with wonder at the sight and the Moon slowly turned out of his vision as the rocket turned. He looked away, deep in thought.

He had read enough about the Moon in his astronomical readings. He knew the various theories, the latest conjectures. He knew that mistiness, that evidences of clouding had been seen often by astronomers, but the sight was nevertheless rare. No two astronomers ever happened to be looking at the same place at the same time. It was always one man's word, and it was never possible to predict such a thing, nor to photograph it.

He knew that those men who made a special study of the Moon recognized these things and had come to accept them as evidence that what was once regarded as a dead world was not entirely dead. They had charted these color shifts in certain spots, one or two areas could be predicted well enough to occasionally be provable to others. Pickering had seen many such color changes, had even attributed it to some sort of fast-growing vegetation.

Robin remembered that it was now largely believed that the Moon had not quite ceased its volcanic internal action. He recalled that astronomers had begun to admit that the evidence of these bits of mist and the further evidence of actual mapped changes in the Lunar topography had proved that something was still warm and boiling within the crust of Old Luna.

Then it occurred to Robin that if the Moon were that close to him, he might really be falling upon it!

He peered out, saw again a section of Luna in view. It was close. Evidently the nose of the rocket had indeed been propelled far beyond Earth's atmosphere, beyond its gravitational grip. If the Moon had been elsewhere, perhaps the rocket nose would have swung about and eventually returned to fall upon the Earth, as Robin had originally surmised. But by chance his orbit, that of the rocket nose in free space, had cut too close to the body of the Moon. The rocket was dangerously near to being seized in the grip of the Moon's gravity and pulled down to it.

Robin mulled this thought over and realized that it was possibly the truth. He glued his eye to the peephole and tried to determine where he was.

After a while, he saw that the Moon was gradually increasing in size. The rocket nose was definitely approaching the Lunar sphere. Because the Earth no longer swung into view, Robin also realized that the rocket nose must have reversed itself, must be heading moonward, must be falling to the Moon!

It would fall faster and faster now, as its trip through space was ending. It was held in the grip of a new world and would speed to its final destruction like a meteoric bullet. It would be another meteor blasting into the surface to flash instantly into powder!