rocket. A moment later the metallic, robot-toned voice of the tube starter crackled from the loudspeaker, announcing the line-up for the Double Century.

At the finish of this announcement, the boom swung down to lift the first of the big racing rockets into the starting racks. Its appearance brought an instant responsive roar from the stands. That sound beat down into the pits with all the solidness of a slab from Sirius.

A quarter million voices, hiked to scream-pitch by excitement, is impressive beyond description, and Astrola, with its vast network of vacuum tube trains, often draws crowds of that size.

Four years ago, when Maza Boruu first introduced this brand new sport of rocket racing on Mars, nobody would have dreamed he was turning loose a sensation that would sweep the planetary system like a Jupiterian fire storm. But a year after the first rocket took the magnet bends at Zonuu, you couldn't have counted the tracks on a family of centipedes.

On Earth, especially, the response was tremendous. With the perfection of the Celetron robot, and its introduction into industry, time was beginning to become an item of increasingly boring magnitude to the majority of the populace. The result was that this new and exceedingly dangerous sport was pounced on by the people of Earth with all the gusto of a hungry carnivore on a juicy side of caveman.

Even so, jaded nerves or not, there's nothing else this side of the fourth dimension that for sheer thrill can touch rocket racing. The spectacle of twenty big torpedoes thundering along before the ground-quivering blast impact of their jets, unleashing power better suited to the vastness of space than to a race track, is soul shaking. That riotous kaleidoscope of shifting, glow-colored cylinders would move a Cela pulp man.

Even after years of racing, the mere anticipation of the coming ride was enough to start my pulse to pounding. In an effort to counteract this stirring excitement, I tried to concentrate on the track.

Since the last time Skid and I had jammed around the big elliptic here at Astrola, the place had undergone a thorough remodelling. The old stands had been dismantled and replaced with new ones fabricated of jadette, that dark green bubble plastic recently developed in the Fabraglas Laboratories. The design of these stands followed closely the weird atomic style of the architecture of Mars.

The infield of the 

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