 What portion of the journey was spent in cryosleep?
Illustrated by WOOD My agent was the one who got me the job of going along to write up the first trip to Mars. "It'll be the biggest break a writer ever got," he told me, two days before blastoff. A you-are-there type of report? Trip time is supposed to take 260 days (that's one way), so we're aimed toward where Mars will be (had better be, or else). A pilot, co-pilot, navigator and biochemist. 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. The inertial gravities didn't bother me so much as the gyroscopic spin they put on the ship so we have a sort of artificial gravity to hold us against the curved floor. He passed my room on the way to the galley (the kitchen) for a cup of dark brown coffee (they like it thick) and told me that we were almost past the Moon. October 3, 1960 Also, I am one of the first five men in the history of the world to see the opposite side of the Moon, with a bluish blurred crescent beyond it that Pat said was the Earth. Actually, he explained to me, the screen is supposed to keep the image of space locked into place no matter how much we spin. There's just no awesomeness to it, no sense of depth or immensity. Pat slept mostly all day in his compartment, and Jones sat and watched the screen revolve. With Martian rime, Venusian slime, And a radioactive hoe. He says it may prove to be environmentally accurate, but that I should stick to prose. April 1, 1961 I've skipped over the last 177 days or so, because there's nothing much new. And only 78 days to go. No sign of canals, but Pat says that's because of the dust storm down below. It's nice to have a "down below" again. We're going to land, so I have to go to my bunk. He's all for going out and looking for lichen, but Pat says he's got to set up camp, then get instructions from Earth. Walked for maybe an hour; then the oxygen gauge got past the halfway mark, so I started back toward the rocket.
 They did not use cryosleep.
 4 months  They did not use cryosleep.  6 months  8 months