- Prof. Henry Craif: He has reason to love that doll, Alicia, just as you have reasons for wanting to be a woman.
- Maggie O'Hara: We have a magnificent selection of odors, such as braised wild duck grand-mere, coq de bruyere au vin rouge, kidneys bourguignon, barbecued spare ribs...
- Joe Dix: Oh, stop. You're killin' me.
- Control Voice: Panic button pressed. Passengers returned. One side always in the sunlight, the other always in darkness. The known and the unknown, frightening to each other only when they are both unknown and misunderstood.
- Prof. Henry Craif: Out of your own experience, what do you think is the greatest danger in space flight, especially for untrained people like us?
- Capt. Harvey Branson: The greatest danger... I don't know. There're so many. Maybe the worst are the ones that we make for ourselves, by seeing things that don't exist except in our own imaginations.
- Joe Dix: Oh, what an act.
- Michael Lint: You'd die just to spite me, wouldn't you? You ungrateful monsters. Well, I am beginning to hate you as much as you hate me, but I won't let you die. We've come this far. We'll go all the way.
- [prologue]
- Surface Control: The great unknown. Limitless heavens crowded with sparkling mysteries challenging Man's curiosity; but, the heavens are not oceans. Man can not push a boat into its currents and set sail for the next horizon. The heavens are the mystery only science can solve as it penetrates the unknown.
- Joe Dix: I guess you newspaper guys don't worry too much about the truth.
- Michael Lint: Oh, we get used to it, except when it concerns people, politicians and parasites.
- Surface Control: You have been listening to the voice of the futire, when interplanetary space flights will be as conmmonplace as flights from New York to Los Angeles. This is a final briefing, a summation of everything you already know. Try to believe it, even though you know there is no planetary station, that the spacecraft in which you are now sitting is a design for the space transport of the future, and that the space though which you will fly is the length of a tunnel built over desert sands. You have been invited to make this first experimental flight because of your special professions. Through you, we will determine whether or not people untrained in space flight can survive the physical and psychological stress of long confinement in close quarters completely detached from Earth. Good luck.