decided was allowable, and so on. His heart began to pound a little and he agonized over it. If they decided it was acting queer....

He found himself praying again. Please, God, don't let them find anything wrong with me! I want so much to do this!

Randy didn't look at him. A good guy, Randy. He'd know it was panic over those doggone doctors poking stethoscopes at him and going off to mutter together about what they'd heard.

"Randy, if I look scared, it's because I am," McCauley said between his teeth. "There's a medic in that blockhouse who wanted his brother-in-law to get this job. He'd be just the kind to mess me up now!"

Randy offered a cigarette. McCauley shook his head.

The blockhouse was sunk in the dry earth. It was concrete, yards thick, with nothing visible from this side except a deep-sunk door in the wall. On the other side there was a narrow slit to look out of, and there were periscopes and in a pit over yonder the close-by trackers. There were other trackers in other spots—as far away as the mountains. But there wasn't much of anything to be seen here.

... No. There was the rocket. One of the new big Aerobees. Nothing fancy about it. The Atlas and the long-distance jobs generally got all the publicity these days. But the Aerobees were solid and workmanlike, veteran performers. Fancy hardware broke the records and was what people meant when they talked about missiles and rockets, but Aerobees were the workhorses that went up without fanfare, got the information they were sent up for, and got it back down again. It was an Aerobee that had proved matter-of-factly that most of the stuff in the textbooks about the upper air simply wasn't so. Aerobees were the first to disprove the belief that the tropopause was a motionless, featureless calm belt up aloft. Aerobees brought back conclusive evidence of vertical currents in that supposed utter calm, currents that shot upward at three hundred meters per second. And it was Aerobees that brought back proof of ultraviolet light reaching Earth on its dark side, so the theory boys could go quietly mad figuring out where the light came from.

Yes. The pointed nose and sleek shape of the Aerobee was a comfort, standing by its straight-up launching tower. McCauley'd seen dozens of shoots of Aerobees. He felt the affection a man feels for something that does its job competently and casually, day in and day out, when called upon to do it.

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