Thinking of the Jamison-French Layer, Bonny remembered the event of the day, which she was missing. She went at once to the TV set in the living room and switched it on. Has it been fired off yet? she wondered, examining her watch. No, not for another half hour. The screen lighted, and sure enough, there was the rocket and its tower, the personnel, trucks, gear; it was decidedly still on the ground, and probably Walter Dangerfield and Mrs. Dangerfield had not even boarded it yet.

The first couple to emigrate to Mars, she said to herself archly, wondering how Lydia Dangerfield felt at this moment… the tall blond woman, knowing ‘that their chances of getting to Mars were computed at only about sixty per cent. Great equipment, vast diggings and constructions, awaited them, but so what if they were incinerated along the way? Anyhow, it would impress the Soviet bloc, which had failed to establish its colony on Luna; the Russians had cheerfully suffocated or starved—no one knew exactly for sure. In any case, the colony was gone. It had passed out of history as it had come in, mysteriously.

The idea of NASA sending just a couple, one man and his wife, instead of a group, appalled her; she felt instinctively that they were courting failure by not randomizing their bets. It should be a few people leaving New York, a few leaving California, she thought as she watched on the TV screen the technicians giving the rocket last-minute inspections. What do they call that? Hedging your bets? Anyhow, not all the eggs should be in this one basket… and yet this was how NASA had always done it: one astronaut at a time from the beginning, and plenty of publicity. When Henry Chancellor, back in 1967, had burned to particles in his space platform, the entire world had watched on TV—grief-stricken, to be sure, but nonetheless they had been permitted to watch. And the public reaction had set back space exploration in the West five years.

“As you can see now,” the NBC announcer said in a soft but urgent voice, “final preparations are being made. The arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Dangerfield is expected momentarily. Let us review just for the sake of the record the enormous preparations made to insure—”