alarm control box, barefoot. He was working the combination dial for
the third or fourth time when he noticed that his feet were getting
wet. His kick must have jammed some relays in the control box; the bath
water was overflowing. Since the box was sealed to prevent him from
fooling with it, he had had to prevent a flood by limping downstairs
and pulling the master switch.

With no electricity, his breakfast consisted of cold fruit juice, cold
cereal, and cold milk. When he got to his office, he ordered a pot of
coffee and made out a requisition for a pipe wrench. If it ever
happened again, he was going to shut the water off instead.

His secretary came in with the coffee and poured him a cup.

"I have some letters for you to sign," she said brightly, to cheer him
up. Dr. Brinton drank his coffee. "Our new filing system is working
very well," she added, pouring him another cup. The doctor's face
relaxed a little, but it was because the snow bank in his stomach was
beginning to melt. His secretary played her trump. "And somebody from
the Fuels Department phoned and said something was passing the yellow
line and might make the blue."

She was never sure afterward whether Dr. Brinton had gone around his
desk, or over it. She had blinked and by the time her eyes were open
again, he was gone.

Dr. Brinton found a crowd in the indoor test lab, chuckling over the
line being drawn by a differential analyzer. He elbowed his way to the
front, looked himself, and began a little dance of impatience. The
analyzer was connected with linkages to the test stand where a tiny
rocket motor was thrusting out a hot blue pencil of flame. The results
from the analyzer were plotted as range capability against time on a
piece of graph paper which had four curved colored lines overprinted on
it. The curved lines were marked in succession: "Earth," "Moon," "Moon"
and "Earth."

If the first Earth line, colored red, was passed, the fuel under test
could power a rocket to leave Earth, carrying men with it. If the
yellow line--the first Moon line--was reached, the rocket could
theoretically land men on the Moon. Several rockets, carrying dummy
loads, had already tried and failed: their fuels, though the best
available, barely reached the yellow line when under test.

The blue--second--Moon line was calculated to indicate an escape from,
the Moon without refueling, and the last line, in green, was a
theoretical powered landing back on Earth.