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was a derrick from an oil rig, adapted for this purpose and coated with orange rust-resistant paint to protect it from corrosion by the humid, salty Florida air. At one side was an elevator for access to the platforms. The whole edifice was brutally practical, quite without grace, Elspeth thought; a functional structure bolted together with no regard for how it looked.

The long white pencil of the Jupiter G rocket seemed caught in the tangle of orange girders like a dragonfly in a spiderweb. The men called it 'she', despite its phallic shape, and Elspeth too thought of the rocket as female. A bridal veil of canvas covers had concealed the upper stages from prying eyes since it arrived here; but that had now been removed, and the missile stood fully revealed, sunshine gleaming off its spotless paintwork.

The scientists were not very political, but even they knew that the eyes of the world were on them. Four months ago, the Soviet Union had stunned the world by sending up the first space satellite, the Sputnik. In all the countries where the tug-of-war between capitalism and communism was still going on, from Italy to India, throughout Latin America and Africa arid Indochina, the message was heard: Communist science is best. A month later the Soviets had sent up a second satellite, Sputnik 2, with a dog on board. Americans were devastated. A dog today, a man tomorrow.

Ill

President Eisenhower promised an American satellite before the end of the year. On the first Friday in December, at fifteen minutes to noon, the US Navy launched its Vanguard rocket in front of the world's press. It rose a few feet into the air, burst into flames, toppled sideways and smashed to pieces on the concrete. IT'S A FLOPNIK! said one headline.

The Jupiter C was America's last hope.' There was no third option. If this failed today, the United States was out of the space race. The propaganda defeat was the least of the consequences. The American space programme would be in total disarray, and the USSR would control outer space for the foreseeable future.

All that, Elspeth thought, resting on this one rocket

Vehicles were banned from the launch-pad area, except for essential ones such as fuel trucks, so she left her car and walked across the open space between blockhouse and gantry, following the line of a metal conduit that housed the cables linking the two locations. Attached to the back of the derrick at ground level was a long steel cabin, the same orange colour, containing offices and machinery. Elspeth entered by a metal door at the rear.

The gantry supervisor, Harry Lane, sat on a folding chair, wearing a hard hat and engineer boots, studying a blueprint 'Hi, Harry,' she said brightly.

He grunted. He did not like to see women around the launch pad, and no sense of courtesy constrained him from letting her know it

She dropped an update on a metal table and left She returned to the blockhouse, a low white building with slit windows of thick green glass. The blast doors stood open, and she walked inside. There were three compartments: an instrumentation room, which ran the width of the building, and two firing rooms, A on the left and B on the right, angled towards the two launch pads served by this blockhouse. Elspeth stepped into Firing Room B.

The strong sunlight coming through the green glass cast a weird light over the whole place, so that it looked like the inside of an aquarium. In front of the windows, a row of scientists sat at a bank of control panels. They all wore short-sleeved shirts, she noticed, as if it were a uniform. They had headsets through which they could talk to the men on the launch pad. They could look over their panels and see the rocket through the windows, or check the colour television screens that showed the same picture. Along the back wall of the firing room, a row of pen recorders stood shoulder to shoulder, tracking temperatures, pressures in the fuel system, and electrical activity. In the far corner was a scale showing the weight of the missile on the launch pad. There was an air of quiet urgency as the men murmured into their headsets and worked their panels, turning a knob here, throwing a switch there, constantly checking the dials and counters. Over their heads, a countdown clock showed the minutes left to ignition. As Elspeth looked, the hand clicked down from 600 to