 Why wasn't the narrator's compartment clean during blastoff?
"It'll be the biggest break a writer ever got," he told me, two days before blastoff. A you-are-there type of report? Dwight Kroger, the biochemist, is rather old to take the "rigors of the journey," as he puts it, but the government had a choice between sending a green scientist who could stand the trip or an accomplished man who would probably not survive, so they picked Kroger. Jones (that's the co-pilot; I didn't quite catch his first name) is scarlet-faced, barrel-chested and gives the general appearance of belonging under the spreading chestnut tree, not in a metal bullet flinging itself out into airless space. He keeps bent low over a welded-to-the-wall (they call it the bulkhead, for some reason or other) table, scratching away with a ballpoint pen on the maps, and now and then calling numbers over a microphone to the pilot. I asked to look, but he said not yet; the instrument panel is Top Secret. Actually, he explained to me, the screen is supposed to keep the image of space locked into place no matter how much we spin. When I got back to my compartment, Lloyd had taken away the chessboard and all his buttons. Pat slept mostly all day in his compartment, and Jones sat and watched the screen revolve.
 The gyroscopic spin caused the narrator to vomit.
 The crew ransacked the narrator's room. They were not happy to have a journalist forced upon them for this journey.  The narrator forgot to secure his belongings when they boarded the ship. The gyroscopic spin knocked unsecured items all around the room.  The force of the inertial gravities knocked unsecured items all around the room. The narrator did not secure his belongings when he boarded the ship.  The gyroscopic spin caused the narrator to vomit.