been smashed around his ears in the autumn of 1969. He was doing that so
often, now, when he should be thinking about--

"_Two seconds, one second_. FIRING!"

It was a second later that his eyes focussed on the left hand
view-screen. Red and yellow flames were gushing out at the bottom of the
rocket, and it was beginning to tremble. Then the upper jets, the ones
that furnished power for the generators, began firing. He looked
anxiously at the meters; the generators were building up power. Finally,
when he was sure that the rocket would be blasting off anyhow, the
separator-charges fired and the heavy cables fell away. An instant
later, the big missile started inching upward, gaining speed by the
second, first slowly and jerkily and then more rapidly, until it passed
out of the field of the pickup. He watched the rising spout of fire from
the other screen until it passed from sight.

By that time, Pitov had twisted a dial and gotten another view on the
left hand screen, this time from close to the target. That camera was
radar-controlled; it had fastened onto the approaching missile, which
was still invisible. The stars swung slowly across the screen until
Richardson recognized the ones he had spotted at the zenith. In a
moment, now, the rocket, a hundred miles overhead, would be nosing down,
and then the warhead would open and the magnetic field inside would
alter and the mass of negamatter would be ejected.

The stars were blotted out by a sudden glow of light. Even at a hundred
miles, there was enough atmospheric density to produce considerable
energy release. Pitov, beside him, was muttering, partly in German and
partly in Russian; most of what Richardson caught was figures. Trying to