Take a Deep Breath

Clarke, Arthur C. "Take a Deep Breath." Infinity Science Fiction, Sept. 1957. Collected The Other Side of the Sky. NYC: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1958. Rpt. NYC: NAL-Signet, 1959. See Internet Speculative Fiction Database for translations and other reprints.[1]

Well known in the field for participating in the debate over (and motif of) exposure to vacuum. Listed in Benford and Zebrowski's Skylife: Space Habitats in Story and Science — so relevant for protection inside a human-built space structure as opposed to exposure, even if the exposure is less deadly than SF convention to the time had allowed (for which note Dave Bowman's entry into Discovery in — especially powerfully — the film version, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY).

Opening of story:

A long time ago I discovered that people who've never left Earth have certain fixed ideas about conditions in space. Everyone "knows," for example, that a man dies instantly and horribly when exposed to the vacuum that exists beyond the atmosphere. You'll find numerous gory descriptions of exploded space travelers in the popular literature, and I won't spoil your appetite by repeating them here. Many of those tales, indeed, are basically true. I've pulled men back through the air lock who were very poor advertisements for space flight.

Yet at the same time, there are exceptions to every rule — even this one. I should know, for I learned the hard way. (Signet edn. p. 32)

Erlich saw 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY at its first run in New York City in 1968, where the audience found on our seats a handout explaining that the convention of immediate explosion of humans upon exposure to vacuum was wrong. Erlich read the handout completely, checking the back side, looking for a citation: he and a fair number of people in his "War Baby" generation knew the experimental data behind such knowledge from reports on the Nazi "medical" experiments in William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960).[2][3] There were no citations on the handout, which avoided debate on the ethics of using such experimental data (Erlich would allow, if ever consulted, using the data, but not avoiding the ethical question).[4]

RDE, finishing, 14Jun22, 10Feb24