found the
thermocouple that would be attached to the marmoset's body, traced the
circuit to the oscillator, then called, "Watch my own body heat." He
tucked the sensing element under his armpit.

"Hotter than a pistol," Dick said.

"Why? Do I have a fever?"

"Not unless you're a monkey. Next?"

"Sphygmomanometer. And don't worry about the pronunciation. The
blood-pressure cuff." He traced the circuit, then inflated the rubber
and fabric cuff.

"You just had heart failure," Dick reported.

They continued work, checking the radar equipment, the photon counters,
cameras, the temperature-sensing devices, and myriad other instruments.
Each instrument would feed its information to the oscillator, through
the measurand transmitter and into the telemetering circuit, traveling
by radio circuit back to the blockhouse. In the blockhouse it would
appear in several forms. The information from the marmoset's instruments
would appear as a series of waves on continually moving strips of
special paper, in a machine called the display.

Finally Rick and Gee-Gee left the nose section and started to work down.
It was already dark outside. The nose section was finished. The
cameraman had arrived and loaded the cameras and departed. Now it
remained only to place Prince Machiavelli, which was among the very last
things to be done. Rick had hoped to carry the little monk to his seat,
but Frank Miller and Dr. Bond had been given that job. He and Gee-Gee
would be too busy with last-minute checks.

Gee-Gee was hard to satisfy. He told a guard, "Watch the nose section.
No one is authorized to enter now until the monk is placed at zero minus
thirty minutes." Then he led Rick across the desert to the blockhouse.

There were sandwiches and coffee on a table near the door. They helped
themselves, then went and stood behind Dick Earle, who was paired off
with Charlie Kassick.

"Punch up the nose section," Gee-Gee requested.

Dick ticked off the circuits as he pressed the buttons. One by one the
red lights switched to green. All were operating. Only then did Gee-Gee
nod his satisfaction. "Okay, Rick. Let's get back to work. Most of it's
done, but we still have some checking to do in the first and second
stages."

As they mounted the crane again Rick looked up at the festooned cables
that terminated in the nose cone. At the moment of firing, the cables
would drop off. After that, Pegasus would be on its own.

It was after dawn when the t