control settings in your ship. Everything is all prenavigated and proper setting will be phoned to you for your return.

"All instructions are here in this packet."

Angel shoved the brown envelope into his jacket and felt twinges of pain as he did so.

"My boy," said the general, getting a word in there somehow, "this is a glorious occasion. You have been chosen for your courage and loyalty and it is a great honor. A great honor, my boy. You will, I am sure, be a credit to your country."

Angel didn't mean it to be a groan but that is the way it came out. They had chosen him because he was the smallest man ever to enter West Point, his height having been waived because of the lump of tin—the Congressional Medal of Honor, no less—he had won as an enlisted man (under age) in the war.

They had needed a topographer who wouldn't subtract from pay load. Space travel was to begin with seeming to create a demand for a race of small men. But he didn't tell the general this and they came to the end of the ride.

The aide expertly ushered Angel out into the bleak blackness of the take-off field, where every officer and newspaperman who could wangle it was all buttoned up to the ears and massed about the whitish blob of the ship.

The flight surgeon took over and protected Angel from the back swats and got him through to the ladder. The two smallish master sergeants—Whittaker and Boyd—were waiting at the top in the open door of the ship. Metal glinted beyond them in the lighted interior.

Whittaker was methodically chewing a huge wad of tobacco and Boyd was humming a bawdy tune as he stared up at the romantically round and glowing moon in the west. They were taking off away from it for reasons best known to the U.S. Navy navigators who had set the course.

A commander was hurrying about, muttering sums, and he paused only long enough to glare at Angel. "Don't touch those sets!" he growled, and rushed off to take station at the pushbutton which, when all was well, would fire the assist rockets under the carriage on the rails. These were keyed in with the ship's rockets. The commander glared at his ticking standard chronometer.

The flight surgeon said, "Well, you've got a week to sober up, boy. You won't like this take-off."

Angel gave him a green 

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