The panel changed its red glowing sign.  It said:  “Take-off forty-five seconds.”

Somewhere down below a door closed with a cushioned soft definiteness.  The inside of the rocket suddenly seemed extraordinarily still.  The silence was oppressive.  It was dead.  Then there came the whirring of very many electric fans, stirring up the air.

The stewardess’ voice came matter-of-factly from below him in the upended cylinder which was the passenger-space.

“We take off in forty-five seconds.  You will find yourself feeling very heavy.  There is no cause to be alarmed.  If you observe that breathing is oppressive, the oxygen content of the air in this ship is well above earth-level, and you will not need to breathe so deeply.  Simply relax in your chair.  Everything has been thought of.  Everything has been tested repeatedly.  You need not disturb yourself at all.  Simply relax.”

Silence.  Two heart-beats.  Three.

There was a roar.  It was a deep, booming, numbing roar that came from somewhere outside the rocket’s hull.  Simultaneously, something thrust Cochrane deep into the foam-cushions of his contour-chair.  He felt the cushion piling up on all sides of his body so that it literally surrounded him.  It resisted the tendency of his arms and legs and abdomen to flatten out and flow sidewise, to spread him in a thin layer over the chair in which he rested.

He felt his cheeks dragged back.  He was unduly conscious of the weight of objects in his pockets.  His stomach pressed hard against his backbone.  His sensations were those of someone being struck a hard, prolonged blow all over his body.

It was so startling a sensation, though he’d read about it, that he simply stayed still and blankly submitted to it.  Presently he felt himself gasp.  Presently, again, he noticed that one of his feet was going to sleep.  He tried to move it and succeeded only in stirring it feebly.  The roaring went on and on and on....

The red letters in the panel said:  “First stage ends in five seconds.”

By the time he’d read it, the rocket hiccoughed and stopped.  Then he felt a surge of panic.  He was falling!  He had no weight!  It was the sensation of a suddenly dropping elevator a hundred times multiplied.  He bounced out of the depression in the foam-cushion.  He was prevented from floating away only by the straps that held him.

There was a sputter and a series of jerks.  Then he had weight again as roarings began once more.  This was not the ghastly continued impact of the take-off, but still it was weight—­considerably greater weight than the normal weight of Earth.  Cochrane wiggled the foot that had gone to sleep.  Pins and needles lessened their annoyance as sensation returned to it.  He was able to move his arms and hands.  They felt abnormally heavy, and he experienced an extreme and intolerable weariness.  He wanted to go to sleep.