“Pilot Pirx, are you ready for blast-off?”

“Ready!” Pirx replied. Right now he was conscious of only one desire: to be in the control cabin. He dreamed of the moment when he could unzip his space suit, or at least the neck ring.

The CO stepped back.

“Board your rocket!” he bellowed in a magnificent voice, a voice that rose above the muffled roar of the cavernous hangar like a cathedral bell.

Pirx did an about-face, grabbed the red pennon, bumped against the railing but regained his balance in the nick of time, and marched down the narrow gangway like a zombie. He was not halfway across when Boerst—looking for all the world like a soccer ball from the back—had already boarded his rocket ship.

He stuck his legs inside, braced himself against the metal housing, and scooted down the flexible chute without so much as touching the ladder rungs—“Rungs are only for the goners,” was one of Bullpen’s pet sayings—and proceeded to “button up” the cabin. They had practiced it a hundred, even a thousand times, on mock-ups and on a real manhatch dismantled from a rocket and mounted in the training hangar. It was enough to make a man giddy: a half-turn of the left crank, a half-turn of the right one, gasket control, another half-turn of both cranks, clamp, airtight pressure control, inside manhole plate, meteor deflector shield, transfer from air lock to cabin, pressure valve, first one crank, then the other, and last of all the crossbar—whew!

It crossed his mind that, while he was still busy turning the manhole cover, Boerst was probably already settled in his glass cocoon. But then, he told himself, what was the rush? The lift-offs were always staggered at six-minute intervals to avoid a simultaneous launch. Even so, he was anxious to get behind the controls and hook up the radiophone—if only to eavesdrop on Boerst’s commands. He was curious to know what Boerst’s mission was.