relief man grinning cynically at the Bunch. Then there was more
country, rolling and speeding past. Wakefulness was half sleep, and
vice-versa. And the hours, through the day and another night, dwindled
toward blastoff time, at eleven o'clock tomorrow morning.

When the second dawn came, the Bunch were all tautly and wearily alert
again, peering ahead, across dun desert. There wasn't much fallout from
the carefully developed hydrogen-fusion engines of the GO rockets, but
maybe there was enough to distort the genes of the cacti a little,
making their forms more grotesque.

Along the highway there were arrows and signs. When the trucks had
labored to the top of a ridge, the spaceport installations came into
view all at once:

Barbed-wire fences, low, olive-drab gate buildings, guidance tower, the
magnesium dome of a powerhouse reactor, repair and maintenance shops,
personnel-housing area carefully shielded against radiation by a huge
stellene bubble, sealed and air-conditioned, with double-doored
entrances and exits. Inside it were visible neat bungalows, lawns,
gardens, supermarket, swimming pools, swings, a kid's bike left casually
here or there.

The first sunshine glinted on the two rockets and their single,
attendant gantry tower, waiting on the launching pad. The rockets were
as gaunt as sharks. They might almost have been natural spires on the
Moon, or ruined towers left by the extinct beings of Mars. At first they
were impersonal and expected parts of the scene, until the numbers,
ceramic-enamelled on their striped flanks, were noticed: GO-11 and
GO-12.

"They're us--up the old roller coaster!" Charlie Reynolds shouted.

Then everybody was checking his blastoff ticket, as if he didn't
remember the number primly typed on it. Frank Nelsen had GO-12.
GO--Ground-to-Orbit. But it might as well mean go! glory, or gallows, he
thought.

The trucks reached the gate. The Bunch met the bored and cynical
reception committee--a half-dozen U.S.S.F. men in radiation coveralls.

Each of the Bunch held his blastoff ticket, his space-fitness and his
equipment-inspection cards meekly in sweaty fingers. It was an old
story--the unknowing standing vulnerable before the knowing and perhaps
harsh.

Nelsen guessed at some of the significance of the looks they all
received: Another batch of greenhorns--to conquer and develop and
populate the extra-terrestrial regions. They all come the same way, and
look alike. Poor saps...