Uranium is a strange element, slightly understood. Its atom is the
heaviest known. It is the mother of a dozen others, even of magic
radium. For its radioactive atom breaks down to form a chain of other
elements, but so slowly that only half the mass is consumed in six
billion years.
The uranium salts in that drug must have been responsible for my sleep.
At first there was only blank darkness.
Then out of it spoke a low, clear voice, terribly familiar--the voice
of Dona Carridan and of the woman in the crystal box--calling urgently:
"Barry! Wake up, Barry Horn."
Then, out of trembling awe, I came back to a queer sort of subliminal
awareness. Something I had never experienced before, it was the sort of
perception that might be possessed by a truly disembodied mind--yet I
had an odd feeling that it came to me through the voice that had called.
I remember reading of Rhine's famous experiments in "parapsychology."
It must have been some phenomenon of what he calls extra-sensory
perception, independent of nerves and sense-organs, even of distance
and time, that came to my sleeping brain.
It was a thing of thought alone. I was aware of my stiff body, slumped
awkwardly over the controls of the silent, hurtling rocket. But the
rigid flesh seemed no more real, no more a part of me, than the
run-down chronometer or the cold rocket muzzles.
It was nothing of feeling or hearing or sight, and I knew that it was
guided by another mind. Gradually it spread, an expanding sphere of
awareness. It went beyond the rocket. I perceived Venus, and knew that
indeed I had missed it.
The _Astronaut_ was plunging toward the Sun!
Filled with an oddly vague alarm, I made a dim effort to move my body,
long enough at least to correct the course of the rocket. But that
proved altogether hopeless. And I soon forgot all danger, in the wonder
of this new perception.
For I _had_ missed Venus!
Crosno, I knew, had allowed eighty-nine days for me to reach
intersection with its orbit. But already the cloud-shrouded globe of it
had flashed back beside me, fleet as a silver shadow.
Three months gone!
The next instant, I thought, the rocket would strike the Sun! No, its
original momentum carried it by. Yet the star of day filled an enormous
fiery circle. The rocket flung about it like a stone on a string. Then,
like the stone when the string breaks, it hurtled outward again into
space.