stage had burned out, Spartan's hands grasped the controls, his eyes on a small television screen in front of him.

"Right on the nose," he said, as if talking to himself. "At least, Operations has done one thing right."

It was a typical remark, because as a perfectionist, Dr. Spartan was aware of and magnified each minor imperfection in everyone else. So far as I knew the entire operation had gone smoothly and without a hitch.

Spartan continued to operate the controls. I felt slight pressures as the ship adjusted its orbit. We were moving alongside and close to the plasma ship.

Six years, and as many billions of dollars, had been spent to build the Jehad, which was the most revolutionary space craft ever to be put in orbit.

To be accurate, the Jehad never had been put in orbit in one piece. Each part, and all of the equipment needed to put those parts together, had been rocketed into orbit from the ground. A team of highly skilled scientists and construction workers had pieced it together, an amazing job considering they had done this in a state of weightlessness. Eight men had lost their lives as a result of punctured spacesuits.

The strange thing about the Jehad was that it could never have lifted off the earth under its own power. Although the twelve generators which would drive the Jehad to Mars produced fantastic voltage, their force would not have knocked down a child—in fact, the push from a single motor was about equal to the power exerted by a pigeon in flight.

However, it was the most efficient and most economical motor man could use to travel ninety million miles to Mars—which is not the shortest route, but the most practical since it makes use of the earth's motion and the sun's gravitational power.

The plasma motor, more correctly the traveling-wave plasma motor, was developed after several years of research at the NASA laboratories near Cleveland, expressly for space propulsion. The first big breakthroughs, which led to the eventual perfection of the machine, were made in 1961. Because the machine was so complicated, involving principles laymen found hard to understand, it had received very little publicity.

In the simplest terms, the plasma engine, like the rocket, makes use of Newton's law on the conservation of energy—for every action there is a corresponding and opposite reaction. But here the similarity with rockets ends.

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