 Why was Hank lying down for months?
There was the usual welcoming crowd for a celebrity, and the usual speeches by the usual politicians who met him at the airport which had once been twenty miles outside of Croton, but which the growing city had since engulfed and placed well within its boundaries. There he sat between the mayor and a nervous young coed chosen as homecoming queen, and looked out at the police and fire department bands, the National Guard, the boy scouts and girl scouts, the Elks and Masons. Several of the churches in town had shown indecision as to how to instruct their parishioners to treat him. He was a very tired man and he had come farther, traveled longer and over darker country, than any man who'd ever lived before. He had traveled and he had returned and his voyage was very much like the voyages of the great mariners, from Columbus onward—long, dull periods of time passing, passing, and then the arrival. The head of the American Legion and the chief of police, who had escorted him on this trip from the square, didn't ask to go in with him. He walked up what had once been a concrete path and was now an ornate flagstone path. They held onto each other as if seeking mutual support, the thirty-three-year old woman and ten-year-old boy. So he put him down and told himself that it would all change, that everything would loosen up just as his commanding officer, General Carlisle, had said it would early this morning before he left Washington. Carlisle had said his position was analogous to Columbus', to Vasco De Gama's, to Preshoff's when the Russian returned from the Moon—but more so. They had feared for him, having read of the many launchings gone wrong even in continent-to-continent experimental flight. Without waiting for an answer, he waved his hand—it shook; a ten-year-old boy's hand that shook—and ran from the room and from the house. But they didn't expect it of him; they wouldn't let him; they felt he had changed too much. He saw twin beds separated by an ornate little table with an ornate little lamp, and this looked more ominous a barrier to him than the twelve-foot concrete-and-barbed-wire fence around the experimental station.
 Hank's body was lying in a tank designed to regenerate his body processes.
 Hank's body was lying in a cryostasis tank while the doctors figured out how to bring him back to life.  Hank was lying in a stasis tank on the way back from the moon.  Hank was lying in a stasis tank on the way back from Mars.  Hank's body was lying in a tank designed to regenerate his body processes.