The jeep stopped. Randy got out and McCauley followed him. The sergeant opened his mouth but thought better of it. He drove away without saying anything more about luck.

The doorway of the blockhouse was cool. Inside, as the door closed behind him, McCauley felt the air-conditioned chill and the clatter of the place almost as if he'd been struck a blow. There were people everywhere. Practically everybody wore a phone headset and chest microphone and everybody was talking to somebody somewhere else, paying no attention to anyone nearby.

McCauley stood still, waiting to be told where to go. Somebody called to him:

"The docs aren't ready for you yet, Lieutenant. You're early."

"Okay," McCauley said. "Where'll I go to get out of the way?"

It didn't look as if anybody else could possibly wait around in the blockhouse without further fouling up the already-present confusion.

"Let's go look at the transportation," Randy suggested.

McCauley shrugged and followed Randy outside. It was comforting that nobody paid any attention to him. At least the people in charge of the shoot weren't worrying about his not being okayed for the job.

In the sunshine again, he saw familiar things. The close-by trackers in their pits, sunk below ground level in case something blew. The telemeter receivers looked like huge wire bowls, decorated with rolls of toilet tissue, aimed at the sky. They moved back and forth, testing. They'd get back telemetered information and sort it out and make tapes of it, and whoever read those tapes would know more about what was happening than McCauley did. A telemetering system will sample a practically indefinite number of instrument readings three hundred times a second and send back the information in wild banshee howls or else in scratchy noises that sound like all the static in the world coming out of one loud-speaker.

Even so, things were better than they used to be, for there was a time when not nearly so much information got back. For that matter, McCauley'd heard about the tame German scientist—formerly of Peenemünde—who used to stand out in the open behind the blockhouse when those first rockets went up, sweating and squinting and saying, "Goot!" "Goot!" as long as he could see that things 

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