were going well, and sputtering despairingly and unintelligibly in German when they went wrong.

They went wrong pretty often in the beginning, back ten years or so ago. There was the time a rocket went up and simply vanished. All the trackers lost it and nobody had the least idea where it'd gone. All the men sat around biting their nails and wondering where in blazes it was. Finally there'd been a telephone call from a woman in Alamogordo. She'd managed to reach someone with authority to route her call though to the blockhouse.

"Ah hear you folks are shootin' up rockets," she said in an indignant drawl. "Well, you-all better come an' get your rocket outa my backyard right now!"

It had landed in her backyard, many miles away, and it had missed her house by no more than twenty feet.

Another time—a long, long while ago—a V-2 tied itself into knots and headed for Mexico. When it came down near Juarez, all the Mexicans for miles around came on the run with hacksaws. After they'd cut off pieces of it for "space souvenirs," there wasn't much left to be hauled back to base....

McCauley followed Randy around to the front. They walked over the hot sandy ground to the launching tower. There was a fuel truck there, and the sickly-sweet but bitter smell of hydrazine. The fueling gang wore plastic coveralls with hoods and clear plastic faceplates. McCauley knew this process; he'd helped with it. But today he kept carefully out of the way. The fueling gang was finicky about its work. Each man was extravagantly careful not to spill a drop of hydrazine, because if somebody stepped on a drop that had spilled and then, later on, stepped on a drop of nitric that had spilled, he'd have a hotfoot to end all hotfoots—on that foot, anyhow, because he wouldn't have it any longer.

The hydrazine topped off. The truck went away, with everything carefully closed up lest a drop of anything spill on to the ground. The fueling gang went to change coveralls, for they wore coveralls of a different color when they were going to load up the nitric acid. Never the twain—hydrazine and nitric—should meet until pumped together into a rocket engine.

The Aerobee was tall and sleek and smooth and streamlined, but now there were ladders leaning against it. Somebody was working through a door in the sidewall. McCauley went around and glanced at the guide rail. The Aerobee used a short-time booster to start up. The booster ran up the rail to the top of the launching 

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