just this ship. She would take off on jato thrust which would get her off the ground and traveling fast enough for the ramjets in the wings to catch. The ramjets would take her up to the very edge of the atmosphere. When there wasn't enough air left for even ramjets to work with, the rocket should take over. In theory the ship might be called a three-stage design, but in fact it didn't fit into any category. It did, though, have one standard property of a hydrazine-nitric rocket. If it made other than a feather-light landing with any rocket fuel remaining, it would almost certainly blow itself to blazes.

But the point was that if—if—everything went all right, McCauley ought to get up into space with a full load of rocket fuel and a few hundred miles an hour eastward velocity. On the way up he'd try to hit the jetstream at thirty thousand feet or so and pick up some speed from that. And when he started his rocket engine he was supposed to put the ship in orbit.

That was the trick. That was what had never been done before. Men had orbited in missiles and gotten down again. There was a man on the moon—or so it was believed—though he was dead before he arrived there. There were satellites circling Earth in all directions, some of them as much as ten years aloft. But nobody had ever yet sent a ship up under its pilot's control, its pilot achieving an orbit and then bringing the ship down to the surface of the earth again. When that was accomplished, it could be said that a spaceship existed. Until then, there were only missiles.

McCauley worked his way thoughtfully around the monster, whistling soundlessly as he looked it over, checking everything he saw with what he knew, and thereby getting more information than was seemingly possible. Presently he went in the cabin and worked the controls. They felt just like the mock-up.

He was back in his quarters, thinking somberly, when there was a knock on the door. When he answered, the door was pushed open and the remarkably personable Major Furness appeared.

"Hi," he said. "They tell me you got here."

"Yes," agreed McCauley. "I did."

"They tell me you looked over the ship," said Furness exuberantly. "Good, eh?"

"It looks good," agreed McCauley.

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