Project Daedalus

He glanced back one last time at the white centrifuge, a fifty-foot propeller with the simulated cockpit on one blade and a counterbalancing weight on the other. The centrifuge itself was pure white enamel, spotless, just like the room. A little honest Russian dirt would actually have made him feel better. Riding in that "cockpit" was like being strapped inside a video game, all lights and nothing real.

Frowning, he shrugged and passed on through the door, greeted the milling technicians, and tossed his crumpled flight suit toward two medics from the foreign team who caught it in midair, bowed, and hurried it into the medical lab for... the devil take it, he didn't know and he didn't care.

The fluorescent-lit hall was crowded with white-shirted technicians returning from the morning's test in Number One