My Gawd, I’m next, now it’s my turn! suddenly flashed through his mind.

Instantaneously, he started getting the lift-off controls into ready position, manipulating each of them with his fingers in the proper sequence and counting to himself: “One, two three… Now where’s the fourth? There it is… okay… now for the gauge… then the pedal… No, not the pedal—the handgrip… First the red one and then the green one… Now for the automatic sequencer… right… Or was it the other way around—first green, then red…?!”

“Pilot Pirx aboard AMU-27!” The voice booming into his ear roused him from his predicament. “Lift-off on automatic countdown of zero! Attention, are you ready, pilot?”

“Not yet!” he felt like yelling, but said instead:

“Pilot Boer… Pilot Pirx aboard AMU-27 and ready for—uh—lift-off on automatic countdown of zero.”

He had been on the verge of saying “Pilot Boerst” because he still had Boerst’s words fresh in his memory. “You nut,” he said to himself in the ensuing silence. Then the automatic countdown—why did these recorded voices always have to sound like an NCO?—barked:

“Minus sixteen, fifteen, fourteen…”

Pirx broke out in a cold sweat. There was something he was forgetting, something terribly important, a matter of life and death.

“…six, five, four…”

His sweaty fingers squeezed the handgrip. Luckily it had a rough finish. Does everyone work up such a sweat? he wondered. Probably—it crossed his mind just before the earphones snarled:

“Zero!!!”

His left hand—instinctively—pulled back on the lever until it reached the halfway mark. There was a terrific blast, and his chest and skull were flattened by some resilient, rubber-like press. The booster! was his last thought before his eyesight began to dim. But only a little, and then not for long. Gradually his vision improved, though the unrelenting pressure had spread to the rest of his body. Before long he could make out all the video screens—at least the three opposite him—now inundated with a torrent of milk gushing from a million overturned cans.