I hang,suspended, swaying beneath my ballute, swinging as if the hangman had just released the trapdoor. The universe is all around and below now is brilliant Venus. I had completed three orbits before the explosion hung the stars on my arms. Three orbits of precious data, which now spirals down ahead of me toward Venus, the Virgin.

AND I REMEMBER back to Earth and to midnight when a ten year old boy had lain frozen in fear in the night with the realization that the universe is all there is. But he'd never told anyone-the terrible secret was his alone. He'd never told anyone a lot of things.

There was the quiet, layering between the interruptions of the radio. The stars blazed like ice beyond the window and Venus was a torch in the night, as my module screamed silently toward its goal. My hands moved across the panel around me, clicking, thumping, adjusting, like dismembered parts trained in some unforgotten skill: roll, correct,pressure stabilization, radio too loud, trajectory check, chronometer reading; man and machine, a june-bug spinning on a string of gravity, sensing and recording.

THE BOYS had run yelling and bumping toward the creek. "Last one in is a rotten egg!" Down they had tumbled, cheeks flushed, breath quickened, lazurite and chocolate eyes laughing, onto the moss-slick rocks and into the cold dancing water.

He had been the rotten egg as usual. The others had jeered and splashed him while holding their noses in mock derision.

I hang here with the universe strung out all around with ever increasing speed, inevevitably reeling me in. Venus is much closer now: the pull of 0.82 mass is beginning to draw my body out.

From this proximity Venus is more than just a white ball; the many densities in the cloud layers and their reflective variancies give it a swirling mottled effect. It's like some great fluid marble surging with fantastic convections, the values swarming like a time-lapse sky.

THE BOY HAD always loved caves. On this day he had sat in his secret cave, huddled among his secret thoughts and dreams. He had heard the the laughter of the others floating in on an unseasonal breeze. But in his darkness he could not be disturbed. Today he wouldn't be the last one chosen.

To him caves had been places to hide and forget who you were, and to dream of who you might be and what you might do. Caves had been places to be alone, a million miles from the human race.

Increased computer orentationgave me the first one-man interplanetary spacecraft. I wasn't really aware of the stars until Earth orbit was broken: millions, billions--an infinity of stars. What was it Olbers had said? "Then why isn't the night sky as bright as the day?"

That was all before the explosion.

The great, unexplored planet sn now pushing across most of space. The stars blinking out as molecules of atmosphere begin to thicken. Am I sorry for myself? No. I am smiling.

Halfway out from Earth the first touches of an incredible sorrow reached out for me. It was a sorrow from my past: one of loneliness and of friends never made.

I laughed bitterly to myself. Here I was, out in space in my cave. Was I always destined to be a rotten egg? I was alone out here. But many men and women had come out into space and at this very moment I was the last.

I could talk to the radio, but it only mocked my aloneless in a wash of solid state static. I guess that's when I started talking to myself.

BY THE AGE of ten the stars had beckome a great mystery in his life. He had stood on clear Summer nights looking up in awe and wonder at the perpetual sky. It had been one night that Summer that he had decided that he belonged among the stars. There he would find his destiny. And some day he had known he would go.

Venus loomed beneath me on my third orbit. My hands dutifully adjusted, my mouth redorded. THe radio blared and crackled. Suddenly there was the explosion and I hung among the stars, no longer in orbit but falling in with my ballute, multifoliate above me, not yet able to cope with atmospheric displacement. I was falling into the arms of Venus.

The atmosphere was thicker now and the first tendrils of clouds of hydrochloric acid were licking up at me. My suit was all that was between me and the heat which must have climbed to over 300 K.

THE BOY OF TEN had stood beneath the stars trying in vain to see into the future. He had stood with visions of conquest and adventure swimming before his eyes. Surely he wouldn't be a rotten egg then.

I sat in my ship talking to myself, trying to ward off that sadness which closed about my head. And I stared at my old friends burning outside my window.

The static from the radio seemed somehow very alarmed. I laughed and I laughed at my laugh. Suddebnly the radio was quiet. I could see my arm floating in front of me with a heavy wrench clasped in my fingers; the other arm hovering above the manual override. The first man on Venus. Retro. Eject. Explosive charge.

I guess it was when my cave began to smell like rotten eggs that I decided to jump.