her hands, fluttering aimlessly from button to switch. He reached out, swept them away.

"Stop it!" he said hoarsely. "Nothing you can do will stop the automatic action of the capsule now!"

Gail seemed to wilt. Spartan released her hands and she sat there helplessly. Behind her Spartan looked like some kind of understudy of Satan, his black beard, dark eyes and sharp features blending into the illusion. He was tall and gaunt to begin with—now he looked taller and more gaunt. Was it a suspicion of a smile that I saw on his face for a brief, fleeting instant? But surely he didn't want Willy to fail. He had a greater stake in this operation than any of us. For him it would mean immortality as the leader of the first manned flight to Mars.

Again the fleeting smile. I tried to tell myself that it was the result of nervousness. I'd often seen men under stress grinning like fools, because laughter is an emotional reflex. But I'd never suspected Spartan of having emotions before. He'd had a wealth of experience and had seen men die in space.

For ten years he'd been one of the top astronauts of the nation—ever since he had risen to fame as the genius who had developed a certain method of converting nuclear energy directly into electricity. In those days he'd been a poorly paid instructor at some obscure mid-western college. Now he was famous as a spaceman, and wealthy from his discoveries.

His apparent nervousness lasted only an instant. Then he became his cold self again. Not that it served to reassure anybody—we all knew that northeast of where we stood, far out over the Atlantic, Willy's capsule was screaming into the atmosphere. It mattered little that the parachutes were open, since the men who had been watching the instruments recording Willy's heartbeat said he had been hurt badly.

There was no button to push, no knob to turn, no switch to flip which would make everything A-okay. And there certainly was no magic wand to break the evil enchantment of the moment.

The loud-speaker squawked out a report from the Navy carrier. Its helicopters were airborne, attempting to reach the place where Willy would come down, but they were hundreds of miles west—at the place where Willy would have come down after his next lap, not this one.

Then there was an awful silence, broken only by a sob from Gail. Spartan looked down at her, his lips curling with displeasure. She clasped her hands to 

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