happened after that wouldn't be failure on his part. He wanted to pray again, this time about the blockhouse. But he didn't.

The two men left the officers'-quarters building together. There was a jeep waiting, with Sergeant Hall at its wheel.

"Mornin', Lieuten't. How you feeling?"

The sergeant looked at McCauley with the same combination of envy and anxiety that Randy had shown—envy for what McCauley had ahead of him, anxiety for whether he felt all right so that he could go through with it.

"Look!" said McCauley, annoyed. "I'm all right! There's nothing to worry about! The thing's been done before with instruments, dummies, monkeys, and now it's me. I'm just another ape. That's all! For the love of Saint Aloysius stop worrying!"

Sergeant Hall let in the clutch.

"Okay, Lieuten't," he said mildly. "I was just going to wish you good luck."

"Cross your fingers against the medics," said McCauley dourly. "I never liked doctors. I've got to get by some of them."

He settled back in the jeep and it went bolting out into the already blazing sunlight beyond the shadow of the building.

The landscape wasn't pretty—sun-baked clay and sand on the road, and mesquite and more mesquite all around. The sunshine was hotter here than anywhere else in the world. It was still long before noon, but already the horizon shimmered in the heat and occasional little sand-devils rose up half-heartedly and then subsided as if it were too hot even for whirlwinds. Far away there were the mountains. McCauley had gone over there once, and they'd towered impossibly toward the sky. But presently he'd have trouble picking them out because they'd be so small and the ground so nearly flat. Heat beat up from the ground and through the windshield. After a quarter of an hour he could see the spindly launching tower—no gantry cranes here!—above one of the ridges over which the jeep went rolling, kicking up a monstrous cloud of yellow dust behind it.

McCauley didn't mind the heat. He felt remarkably aware of being alive and breathing, of the sunlight, and of a wrinkle in his pants on the jeep seat. After a little he saw the flat roof of the blockhouse. Then he felt scared. He was afraid of the blockhouse. There'd be a last checkup to make sure he was perfectly all right, perfectly normal, no more tense than the doctors 

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