reminded
them that they were both smoking; when they extinguished, respectively,
their cigarette and pipe, he waved the jeep on and went back to his
argument with a carload of tourists who wanted to get a good view of the
launching.

"There, now, Lee; do you need anything else to convince you that this
isn't a weapon project?" Pitov asked.

"No, now that you mention it. I don't. You know, I don't believe I've
had to show an identity card the whole time I've been here."

"I don't believe I have an identity card," Pitov said. "Think of that."

The lights blazed everywhere around them, but mostly about the rocket
that towered above everything else, so thick that it seemed squat. The
gantry-cranes had been hauled away, now, and it stood alone, but it was
still wreathed in thick electric cables. They were pouring enough
current into that thing to light half the street-lights in Buenos Aires;
when the cables were blown free by separation charges at the blastoff,
the generators powered by the rocket-engines had better be able to take
over, because if the magnetic field collapsed and that fifty-kilo chunk
of negative-proton matter came in contact with natural positive-proton
matter, an old-fashioned H-bomb would be a firecracker to what would
happen. Just one hundred kilos of pure, two-hundred proof MC2.

The driver took them around the rocket, dodging assorted trucks and
mobile machinery that were being hurried out of the way. The countdown
was just beyond two hours five minutes. The jeep stopped at the edge of
a crowd around three more trucks, and Doctor Eugenio Galvez, the
director of the Institute, left the crowd and approached at an awkward
half-run as they got down.

"Is everything checked, gentlemen?" he wanted to know.

"It was this afternoon at 1730," Pitov told him. "And nobody's been
burning my telephone to report anything different. Are the balloons and
the drone planes ready?"

"The Air Force just finished checking; they're ready. Captain Urquiola
flew one of the planes over the course and made a guidance-tape; that's
been duplicated and all the planes are equipped with copies."

"How's the wind?" Richardson asked.

"Still steady. We won't have any trouble about fallout or with the
balloons."

"Then we'd better go back to the bunker and make sure everybody there is
on the job."

The loudspeaker was counting down to Two Hours One Minute.

"Could you spare a few minutes to talk to the press?" Eugenio