"That's fine," Fred said. "Look, Doc, I feel beat."
"You're meant to. Hell, man, I've been tiring you for two hours now. And what's more, I'll give you a little warning in advance. We aren't going to let you eat for three days either. You're going to be so tired that your body is going to loosen its grip. Don't worry, you won't die. Ten people have done this before you and they're all right. You'll meet them all soon. Now just hold still."
Dr. Howard Sprinnell slipped a hypo needle swiftly into Fred's neck, withdrew it and dabbed with a piece of surgical wool.
He was breaking into pieces, but he didn't care. He slept and woke and slept and woke in the chair in old Cloud Spinner's office and now he was coming apart and he just did not care. Fred Williams had had several years of simple apathy. It came naturally to him. His body rested, tired and inert, lacking in vigor from lack of food, and his mind separated slowly from it, like a man standing up in a pool of pygmies. His heart, hands, liver, stomach, viscera had their pygmy minds all bundled in with his, and now falling away in separation as he rose from them.
His mind rose away from his body in the chair altogether. He viewed his body with unconcern, and the chair in which it sat, and the room, and through the walls the surrounding offices, and the rooms of the Federal police station, where the Security trooper named Joe who had taken the beer sat picking his teeth and gabbing with a pair of young Federal cops, and the roof of the block in which the station stood.
His mind went up like a balloon, rising swiftly into the atmosphere, and the city shrank away under him like a toy plan, a kid's aid to Better Civics, Home Town box VI, no Solar Credits necessary. He shifted automatically away from the main airport, but a moment later he went clean through an airliner cockpit, cabins with passengers, exhaust, and out exactly where he was before. His mind followed the airliner involuntarily, until he asked himself why, and immediately continued rising into the sky, looking down at the ground and the great spherical horizon.
His mind rose into cloud and examined minutely a water molecule floating from a piece of dust as big as a rock. His sense of proportion sent him shooting out of the top of the cloud suddenly, like a startled fish. The ground became a globe gradually, and as the clouds below became little wisps over the light blue haze of the Earth, his feeling of liberation increased and he rose faster. He went through layer after layer of radiation sparking fitfully around him, and fiercer belts. And then the dust thinned out like scattered transparent ball bearings, and his mind approached the satellite stations riding over the Earth. He was tempted to go through one, but it seemed unimportant and he rose out.