ter's rim:

"_We're ready. Visual and records, and we've got the timers set to clock
the auto-beacon signals as they come in._"

The voice was not enthusiastic. Cochrane had had to put up his own money
to have the nearside lunar observatory put a low-power telescope to
watch the rocket's flight. In theory, this distress-rocket should make a
twenty-mile streak of relatively long-burning red sparks. A tiny
auto-beacon in its nose was set to send microwave signals at ten-second
intervals. On the face of it, it had looked like a rather futile
performance.

"Let's go," said Cochrane.

He noted with surprise that his mouth was suddenly dry. This affair was
out of all reason. A producer of television shows should not be the
person to discover in an abstruse scientific development the way to
reach the stars. A neurotic son-in-law of an advertising tycoon should
not be the instrument by which the discovery should come about. A
psychiatrist should not be the means of associating Jones--a very junior
physicist with no money--and Cochrane and the things Cochrane was
prepared to bring about if only this unlikely-looking gadget worked.

"Jones," said Cochrane with a little difficulty, "let's follow an
ancient tradition. Let Babs christen the enterprise by throwing the
switch."

Jones pointed there in the shadow of the crater-wall, and Babs moved to
the switch he indicated. She said absorbedly:

"Five, four, three, two, one--"

She threw the switch. There was a spout of lurid red flame.

The rocket vanished.

It vanished. It did not rise, visibly. It simply went away from where it
was, with all the abruptness of a light going out. There was a flurry of
the most brilliant imaginable carmine flame. That light remained. But
the rocket did not so much rise as disappear.

Cochrane jerked his head up. He was close to the line of the rocket's
ascent. He could see a trail of red sparks which stretched to
invisibility. It was an extraordinarily thin line. The separate flecks
of crimson light which comprised it were distant in space. They were so
far from each other that the signal-rocket was a complete failure as a
device making a streak of light that should be visible.

The muffled voice in the helmet-phones said blankly:

"_Hey! What'd you do to that rocket?_"

The others did not move. They seemed stunned. The vanishing of the
rocket was no way for a rocket to act. In all expectation, it should
have soared skyward with a re