k
a lot of psych tests--trick questioning and so forth to reveal defects
of conviction and control. But we were all pretty well indoctrinated
and steady. Etl had taken so many tests already that, if there were
any flaws still hidden in him, they would probably never be found.

Mars and Earth were approaching closer to each other again in their
orbital positions. A month before takeoff time, Craig, Klein and I
took Etl, in a small air-conditioned cage, to White Sands. The ship
towered there, silvery, already completed. We knew its structure and
the function of its machinery intimately from study of its blueprints.
But our acquaintance with it had to be actual, too. So we went over it
again and again, under Miller's tutelage.

Miller wrote a last message, to be handed to the newscast boys after
our departure:

"_If by Martian action, we fail to return, don't blame the Martians
too quickly, because there is a difference and a doubt. Contact
between worlds is worth more than the poison of a grudge...._"

I said good-by to Alice and the kids, who had come out to see me off.
I felt pretty punk. Maybe I was a stinker, going off like that. But,
on the other hand, that wasn't entirely the right way to look at
things, because Patty's and Ron's faces fairly glowed with pride for
their pa. The tough part, then, was for Alice, who knew what it was
all about. Yet she looked proud, too. And she didn't go damp.

"If it weren't for the kids, I'd be trying to go along, Louie," she
told me. "Take care of yourself."

She knew that a guy has to do what's in his heart. I think that the
basic and initial motive of exploration is that richest of human
commodities--high romance. The metallic ores and other commercial
stuff that get involved later are only cheap by-products. To make the
dream of space travel a reality was one of our purposes. But to try to
forestall the danger behind it was at least as important.

* * * * *

We blasted off in a rush of fire that must have knocked down some
self-operating television cameras. We endured the strangling thrust of
acceleration, and then the weightlessness of just coasting on our
built-up velocity. We saw the stars and the black sky of space. We saw
the Earth dwindle away behind us.

But the journey itself, though it lasted ninety days, was no real
adventure--comparatively speaking. There was nothing unpredictable in
it. Space conditions were known. We even kn