Far from Home | Page 4

sun. He turned his oxygen down to the bare
minimum and the thermostat as low as he dared. He commenced a
relaxation exercise and was pleased when it worked after a fashion--a
mental note for Beaufort at the station. A drowsiness crept over him,
dulling a little the thin edge of fear that probed his consciousness.
Face down towards the earth he hung. The slow noise of his breathing
only intensified the complete silence outside. The well padded suit
encompassed him so gently there was no sense of pressure on his body
to make up for the weightlessness. Johnny felt as though he were
bodiless, a naked brain with eyes only hanging in nothingness.
Beneath, Earth rolled over with slow majesty, once every two hours.
His altered course was evident now, passing almost directly over the
geographic poles proper instead of paralleling the twilight zone where
night and day met. Sometimes he caught the faint glow of a big city on
the night side but the sight only stirred the worm of anxiety and he
closed his eyes.
Johnny was beginning to feel very comfortable. He supposed sleepily

that this was the way you were assumed to feel while freezing to death
in a snowbank, or so he'd heard. Air and heat too low perhaps. He
should really turn it up a notch.
On the other hand it was perhaps a solution to the problem of dying--a
gentle sleep while the stomach was still full enough from the last meal
to be reasonably comfortable and the throat yet unparched. Would it be
the act of an unbalanced mind or one of the most supreme sanity?
He dozed and dreamed a bit in fragments and snatches but it was not a
good sleep--there was no peace in it. At one time he seemed to be
standing outside the old fretworked boarding house he lived in--looking
in at the window of the "sitting room" where the ancient, wispy
landlady sat among her antimacassared chairs and the ridiculous tiny
seashell ashtrays that overflowed after two butts. He wanted
desperately to get in and sprawl in the huge bat-winged chair by the fire
and stroke the enormous old gray cat that would leap up and trample
and paw his stomach before settling down to grumble to itself
asthmatically for hours.
It was cold and dark out here and he wanted to get in to the friendliness
and the warmth and the peaceful, familiar security, but he didn't dare go
around to the door because he knew if he did the vision would vanish
and he'd never find it again.
He scratched and beat at the window but his fingers made no sound, he
tried to shout but his cries were only strangled whispers and the old
lady sat and rocked and talked to the big gray cat and never turned her
head.
The fire seemed to be flaring up suddenly, it was filling the whole
room--a monstrous furnace; it shouldn't do that he knew, but the old
lady didn't seem to mind sitting there rocking amid the flames--and it
was so nice and warm. The fire kept growing and swelling
though--soon it burst through the window and engulfed him. Too hot.
Too hot.
* * * * *

Johnny swam hazily back to consciousness with an aching head and
thick mouth. He saw that he had drifted clear of his protective screen
somehow and the sun beat full on him. With clumsy, fumbling hands
that seemed to belong to somebody else he managed the air valve; the
increased oxygen reviving him enough to find the pedals and jet
erratically about till he gained the shadow once more.
Now he was entering upon the worst phase of the living nightmare.
Awake, the doubts and fears of his position tormented him; wearied, he
feared to sleep, yet continually he found himself nodding only to jerk
awake with that suddenness that is like a physical blow. Each one of
these awakenings took away a little more of his self-control till he was
reduced to near hysteria, muttering abstractly, sometimes whimpering
like a lost child; now seized with a feverish concern for his air supply.
He would at one instant cut it down to a dangerous minimum, then,
remembering the near disaster of his first attempt at economy,
frantically turn it up till he was in danger of an oxygen jag. In a
moment he would forget and start all over again.
In addition, he was now realizing bitterly what he had subconsciously
denied to himself for so long, that they had found Able Jake and drawn
the obvious conclusion. That he had been obliterated or blown out
through the hull by the collision without warning or preparation. That
he was undoubtedly dead if not vaporized altogether and, as they