It was a week before the Mars launch.

THE launch, everybody was calling it around Cape Kennedy.

Big deal! thought Rolf Gunnarson as he opened the garage door. The door slipped out of his hands and rattled noisily up on its tracks, slamming against the end of the tracks with a loud thump! For a moment Rolf winced, thinking the noise would wake his baby sister, then he set his jaw. Let it!

Rolf squeezed past his father’s white official NASA car to get to his old three-speed bicycle. So, I don’t need a ten-speed, do I? he muttered to himself. He’s just too busy with his space shot to listen to me. I really need that bike to get back and forth to the Wildlife Refuge. But he doesn’t care about the ecology, the Refuge, or anything—except being Launch Director for this Mars flight!

His face set in an unhappy scowl, Rolf wheeled the three-speed out of the garage and through the half-dozen cars parked along the driveway. Out on the street a big TV truck was parked. Inside the house the TV men were laying cables and setting up lights and cameras. They were going to interview his father. THE launch was only a few days away.

“You’d think he was one of them—one of the astronauts going to Mars,” Rolf said to Shep, who was lying in the shade of the orange tree in the Gunnarsons’ front yard. Shep looked like a ball of brown and white wool with a red tongue hanging out.

It was as hot a day as Florida can produce in August. The sun blazed out of a brilliant blue sky that was flecked here and there with gleaming white, puffy clouds. But Rolf couldn’t hang around the house any longer. First it was his father telling him, “Not now, Rolf! Can’t you see I’m busy? After THE launch we’ll talk about it.” Then it was the TV crew bustling around the house, saying, “Hey kid, wouldya mind gettin’ outta the way?”