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Chapter 2

There had been only darkness, but now there was pain also.

He wished that the pain would go away, and cease to trouble his comfortable not-being, not-feeling. But it did not go away. Instead, it got worse, a fiery, rasping agony of his lungs each time he tried to breathe.

How could he breathe when he had died? That was Hammond's first dazed and bewildered thought. The thing was impossible. Yet his lungs were pumping in and out, burning up, gasping for air that was not there.

Hammond's brain struggled numbly with the problem. He tried to open his eyes, and could not. He could not move a muscle. But he could feel. Each moment the fiery agony in his lungs spread and crept in his body, and now he could also feel that the metal arms of the ejection-seat on which his hands rested were blistering hot.

He could hear, also. There was a thin, hissing screaming sound somewhere close to his ears. It went on and on without varying in pitch or volume.

The pain very swiftly became a torment too great to be borne. He was strangling, suffocating, he was going to die again. It was not fair that he should have to die again. He made a convulsive effort, and his body moved jerkily.

His eyes opened.

He saw through a red haze. He was still seated in the ejection-seat of the satellite. Its hatch was open a tiny crack and the screaming sound came from that. Thin air, air so thin and ozone-laden that his lungs could not breathe it, was streaming in through it. The air or mockery of air was utterly cold, yet the metal of the satellite itself was scorching hot.

Hammond was only one-third consciousness but he knew that he was dying for lack of oxygen. The drill back at Rocket Base had been stamped deep into his memory, and a phrase from it flashed across his fading mind. The Time of Useful Consciousness. The time a man had to save himself when his oxygen ran out. Even at five miles up in the atmosphere, it was less than two minutes. Further up, in space equivalent, it could be counted in seconds. His seconds were running out. Remember the drill . . . .

He remembered. He groped with leaden arms and hands that felt like muffs, for the oxygen tube of the ejection capsule. He got it into his mouth, and then fumbled blindly at the valve. His fingers would not work right, he had to paw the little metal handle as a dog might until it opened.

The blessed relief of oxygen pouring into his starved, super-heated lungs set him to quivering and shaking.

He sat breathing, trembling, looking with vacant and uncomprehending eyes at the blazing star-fields that slid by outside the forward port as the satellite slowly rotated. Then, swinging slow and majestically into view, came a gray-green thing so vast that it completely filled the port. A cloudy, striated surface swept past the glass, and then a curved limb and then the stars again.

Hammond watched, numbly. In less than a minute the phenomenon was repeated.

Now the first faint curiosity stirred in his dulled brain. The oxygen was taking effect, and he could think and wonder, and it was about the vast gray-green object that he wondered. He hitched the chair forward in its gimbals so that he could get a wider view through the port.

A hoarse cry burst from Hammond. Gigantic in starry space beneath the satellite, arcing vastly across the heavens, was a familiar spherical bulk of gray and green.

"Earth." He whispered the word, but it was only an automatic recognition, he did not believe it yet.

The glass was blistering his face, the whole satellite was heating up by the minute, yet he would not take his face away from the glass until the revolving of the satellite brought the vast bulk again into view. And after this second look, there was no doubt about it at all. His brain suddenly clamored, shocked into full wakefulness. He yelled the name, this time. He waited, trembling, unbelieving, until the rotation of the satellite brought Earth, or him, around again.

This time he studied its surface with more care. He estimated that Explorer Nineteen was no more than forty miles above the surface of Earth, and revolving around it at a velocity in excess of twenty thousand miles an hour. He had been headed for the outer reaches of the Solar System, when he had opened the hatch. He had been certain that Nineteen would go out and out, for days, for years. There seemed no way in which it could return to Earth. Yet, somehow, it had.

"—a chance unknown gravitational factors might bring you back into orbit—"

He remembered that penultimate message from Canaveral. He had thought that they were merely trying to soften the end for him with a little hope. But maybe they had been right? One thing was sure. Nineteen had fallen back toward Earth, and was now spinning around it in a tightening spiral.

But there was a bigger mystery. He had sought quick death by opening the hatch in space. He had died. Yet now he was alive.

How could a man be frozen instantly in death, and then live again?

Solemn, majestic, the vast sphere of Earth returned into his view each few minutes, and he clung, and gasped the life-giving oxygen, and stared. His body was one great ache, and the scorching breath from hot metal and the icy blast of thin air that screamed through the partly-opened hatch simultaneously blistered and froze him.

Hammond's dazed mind groped for some explanation of the incredible fact of his awakening. Suppose, instead of being really dead, he had only been in a state of ultra-hypothermia? Hypothermia, or radically lowered body temperatures, was a common tool of medicine and surgery these days. The first experiments back in the '40's and early '50's had proved that you could almost literally freeze a man and then bring him back to life by applying warmth, if you did it right. Even back at the time of the first Sputnik, American scientists had frozen dogs and then re-started their heart action after an hour or so. The Russians were supposed to have done the same thing with people, and their claims for their hypothermic techniques had been astonishing.

Hypothermia . . . And what, Hammond thought, if the thing were done suddenly as it had never been done before, as it could not be done in any laboratory, by the absolute cold of space? A super-hypothermia acting with incredible speed, freezing every cell in his body rigid before any cellular or organic damage could begin, plunging him into a rock-like state of suspended animation. And then, when the satellite dropped back toward Earth, wouldn't the thin air of the upper atmosphere and the increasing warmth of the friction-heated sphere gradually revive him?

It all went whirling through Hammond's brain, the instinctive attempt of a 2oth Century man to find a rational explanation for the incredible. And then he forgot it. For he suddenly realized that however he had come back to life he had done so only to die again very quickly, unless he did something. The satellite was getting hotter by the minute. He could no longer stand the touch of the hot metal. As it whirled round and round Earth in the upper atmosphere, friction was heating Explorer Nineteen to the point where it would soon burn up like a falling meteor.

He would burn with it, if he didn't get out.

Until now, he had been too amazed and numb with wonder to feel a personal concern. But now the instinct of self-preservation set up a frantic clamor in his mind. By some strange freak of cosmic factors, Explorer Nineteen had been brought back to Earth. It was up to him now to get out of it in time. His body still felt leaden, his head heavy to bursting, but he began an urgent study of his exact situation.

Below lay the sunlit side of Earth, most of it veiled in drifting cloud. He thought he could recognize the coastline of the Iberian Peninsula through a gap in the clouds. If that were so, he was moving westward over the Atlantic toward North America, that was now on the night side. He must time his ejection from the satellite to make sure he came down over land.

As Hammond's fingers fumbled clumsily over the levers and switches, an oddly humorous thought shot across his mind.

"Won't they be surprised when their dead hero chutes down alive? Wonder if they'll take that medal away from me?"

The chair in which Hammond sat strapped was suspended so that it hung inside a semi-globular plastic bowl, inside the satellite. Now, as the controls responded, other curved plastic sections swung up from underneath him, enclosing him and the chair and the ejection emergency gimmicks, inside a round plastic sphere. That type of enclosure had been mandatory in planning for a man to bail out of a satellite.

Hammond kept the oxygen-tube in his mouth, and peered through both the plastic and the filter-glass port together, to estimate Nineteen's progress around the Earth.

"Damn those clouds! I won't be able to see any lights of cities when I do pass over!"

Nineteen was rushing on toward the dark shadow of Earth, toward its nighted side. And below, the clouds were an almost solid mass.

Inside the closer confines of the plastic sphere, it was getting hotter very rapidly. His skin felt parched and withering. And now, with sudden sharp alarm, he saw that the aluminum rim of the filter port was glowing faintly in the darkness. Explorer Nineteen, sinking into denser atmosphere with each pass around the Earth, was beginning to reach the critical stage of frictional heat.

Hammond resisted a strong temptation to pull the ejection lever at once. He must be over mid-Atlantic, it was night, he might not be picked up for a long time. No, wait-wait till he was sure he was over land.

But could he wait? The sinister, faint red glow was suffusing the whole skin of the satellite now, and his brain reeled from the heat. He hung on and waited. It was all guess work for he hadn't been able to gauge speed and altitude too closely, but he thought he must be already sweeping across the coast. Wait a little, and be sure . . . .

Hammond yanked one of the two levers set in the central axle of the plastic sphere's gimbaled framework.

Nothing happened.

Panic clamored again in him. If he couldn't get the ejection bay open, he'd never get out. Frantically, he tugged the lever.

This time, it took hold. With a grating sound audible even over the thin screaming of air, the whole bottom plate of the satellite vanished, unlinked and then blown clear by a small explosive charge. He could now look right down through the plastic, right down past his feet, at the cloudy darkness below. His fingers gripped the other lever, the one with the big "E" on it. It was too hot to hold, everything was getting too hot, he couldn't wait any longer, surely he must be well over land by now.

Hammond pulled the "E" lever.

He was flung violently against the straps as the charge shot the ejection-capsule out of the now-open satellite. The plastic bubble whirled over and over, falling. His leaden hulk of a body rocked back and forth and the oxygen tube fell out of his mouth. He groped for it but there was a fiery mist obscuring his vision and he could not find it. His breathing became agonized again. The pain in his lungs made him flail his hands frantically till they touched the dangling tube. He got back into his mouth and then almost lost it as another sharp shock threw him against the chair-straps again.

He did not quite lose the tube. And presently his mind cleared a little. The ejection-bubble was not now spinning. He looked up and saw the blaze of the starry night sky steady over his head, for the first time since his awakening. Against the star-fields up there a great round darkness bulked, and Hammond knew what it was. The parachute of the ejection-bubble had opened right on time, and he was drifting steadily down toward the nighted surface of the Earth.

He felt a shivering relief. Until now, almost everything he had done had been semi-mechanical, from habit of training. But now the thin edge of excitement rose in his numb brain.

"I'm going to make it—"

Blood pounded through his veins. He felt horribly weak but an access of new life swept away the leaden heaviness. Hammond looked eagerly down. There was nothing but the dark clouds. Until he got down through them, there would be nothing.

It seemed to take the parachuted plastic sphere a long time to float down into the clouds. His heart suddenly began to hammer violently, and he took the oxygen tube out of his mouth. No need for that now . . . .

He kept peering down, alert for the first lights that he would see when he came out of the clouds.

He saw no lights.

There was only the solid, frustrating darkness, and he could not even be sure that he was out of the clouds yet he must be, he ought to be clear and able to see by now. Then, suddenly, his eyes caught a vague loom below, a faintly glistening expanse that made contrast with the darkness. Of a sudden, badly startled, he realized that the glistening was not far beneath but was close under him, and he realized what it was.

It was the sea. He had misjudged and jumped the satellite too soon.

The plastic ball hit the water and was swept away on a long wave-crest. Hammond just in time remembered the parachute-release and actuated it, cutting loose the vast billowing fabric before it smothered down on him. The ejection-sphere had been designed for a possible water landing. Its air-intakes were opposite its slightly weighted "keel". It bobbed up and down on the dark ocean with Hammond in it feeling like a minnikin in a floating bottle.

Hammond sagged in the straps, feeling now a horrible reaction. He slept.

When he awoke, he thought that hours had passed. A wind was tossing the sea, and the motion of the sphere was sickening. But the wind had swept away the clouds overhead. The stars shone now across the whole sky. He peered westward. Surely he could not be far from the coast. He saw a dark, low line of blackness where stars and ocean met. He felt sure it was the coast, and the wind was driving the bubble in that direction.

Hammond looked up at the sky. Incredible, to think he had come back from out there, surviving the pseudo-death of space, wakening again when some strange quirk of circumstance had brought the satellite back toward Earth. What could have brought it back?

But that tremendous question faded from Hammond's mind as he continued to stare at the sky. His gaze became fixed upon the stars in the northern heavens.

There was something wrong about the stars. Something impossibly, insanely wrong.

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Framed