showed the way he was breathing. Then they took samples of his breath and his blood and other body fluids, and his temperature and the electrical resistance of his skin and forty-seven other things. They'd done all this before. They'd done it while he was resting and while he was taking hard exercise, when he was tired and when he'd just waked up from a good night's sleep.

They had blown-up pictures of every square inch of his skin, so they could check for sputters at high altitude. A sputter might occur if a cosmic particle at just the right speed happened to hit him. He hadn't any privacy left. The docs knew everything about him, except that he was absolutely the right person for man's first ascent in a pure rocket, and his return to Earth in one piece. No rocket had ever landed intact, of course. They smashed. Invariably. But a way had been worked out to get instruments back unshattered. That was the way he'd land.

One of the doctors nodded.

"With that pulse rate your system's pumping out plenty of adrenalin. That's good!"

McCauley relaxed a little. He watched as they checked his reflexes. He could tell that they looked all right, anyway. They gave him a pencil and timed him while he did a page of IQ stuff. In the past few weeks they'd established his personal norm for all sorts of things, and now they were checking to see whether anticipation pushed him too far off normal. He began to sweat when he realized that he needed to act exactly as usual, and they knew it, and he sweated more because of it. They checked him over as they would a guinea pig before an experiment, only he was the guinea pig. But he was desperately anxious for all this to be over and for the experiment to start.

Presently they finished and looked at each other and nodded. Then one of them said, "You'll do," and McCauley went almost sick with relief. Then, infuriatingly, he knew from their expressions that they'd looked for exactly that reaction. He couldn't do anything they wouldn't analyze and think about. And he burned a little, but it was all right. Everything was all right!

When Ed came out to the main part of the blockhouse again, Randy knew from his expression that he'd been checked out for the flight, but he asked politely:

"Mother and child doing well?"

By that time McCauley wanted to hug somebody for sheer joy, but instead he said sedately,

"The 

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