saw the final components taking shape. He figured he needed only about twenty more minutes to complete it which was way too much time at this point, but there was no way to hasten the process.
He worked desperately on, all the while, scanning for any detection signals from L-1-Con. The nano-timer he had set now signaled with, “Only nine-teen minutes to go.” He thought to himself that it was going to be agonizing getting through the next nineteen minutes. He tried to take his mind off of the time by working out all of the coordinates of the many communication dishes that he would have to take out with the gun, in order to cut the control station off from Lunar-One.
“Eighteen minutes to go,” a new signal communicated, piercing through his hectic activity. And though each moment that passed brought him closer to safety, he didn’t feel the least bit encouraged, but instead even more anxious. He was feeling more and more terror at the fact of being utterly immobile in the snake force field. He had always been claustrophobic in small spaces and was deathly afraid of getting into a situation where he could not move. So here he was, faced with his ultimate dread and he was beginning to succumb to it, his mental capacity getting less by the minute, as the fear took him over.
Suddenly he realized that he had not been aware or thinking at all but was just staring into the snake machine void of mind. He wondered how much time had gone by. He was having an awful time trying to orient himself to the situation about him and the task at hand. And then the next signal communicated with, “Twelve minutes to go.” He was stunned; he had missed six minutes. Seeing that he had lost time impelled him back into action with
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