14.

  I didn't employ a lot of time to understand that I would not have succeeded.

  I had been leaving the orbital station for different minutes, by now, and also the Earth was to my shoulders.

  In front of me a boundless ocean of stars and the side Moon. I watched the parameters of rout and I pushed the motors up to the acceleration suggested by the system. I spun fast, now, but without any perception of movement.

  Around me there was the enormousness: I was not on board of a vehicle, surrounded by paratie and plates, inside an overall or stretched out on the berth of a cabin.

  I was directly in the space, incapable to touch anything, also myself.

  My hands hung petrified without I succeeded in moving a single finger of it, a phalanx, without I extracted some tactile, even though disagreeable provided that real feeling of it.

  The slim network of coordinates overlapped to my vision of the space showing me figures and unbelievable distances.

  And I didn't see a rectangle of space: my sight embraced the whole celestial sphere in the whole range of frequencies.

  It was something that went beyond the human ability to elaborate the perceptions.

  The radio kept silent as the web. The silence was deafening. I had to distract me, I knew him/it: I had a boundless database with which to play, a lot of things to be learned before reaching destination, an universe of sites and people to be contacted away web.

  But I was impotent, frozen. The propellers pushed me toward the nothing and only a residual glare of wish prevented one attempt of mine of return the station.

  But I would not even have known whether to make the manoeuvre, at that time.

  I would have continued, incapable to govern the vehicle and myself, over Mars, until the nourishing substances of my capoccione you/they were not exhausted and my arrested brain, with who knows what feelings. A terminal man.

  The astronauts on Mars would be dead.

  I became unaware of the time that passed, until something it didn't happen that attracted my attention.

  «Dad?» it said the voice of Daylight interrupting the thread of my thoughts.

  You/he/she had opened a window web and the face of my daughter you/he/she had appeared from the nothing.

  «Dad?» it repeated the image wrinkling the forehead.

  It was a beautiful forehead; Daylight had always been nice, since small. It resembled a lot to his/her mother. I stupidly stared at her.

  «Clicca on me, dad» it suggested my daughter.