part of his mind said indignantly, "_Wait till I get Hopkins on the
phone! It was a mixup! He wouldn't send me off anywhere with the
Dikkipatti Hour depending on me! He's not that crazy!_" But he was on
his way to the space-port, regardless. He'd raged when the message
reached him. He'd insisted that he had to talk to Hopkins in person
before he obeyed any such instructions. But he was on his way to the
space-port. He was riding in a helicab, and he was making adjustments in
his own mind to the humiliation he unconsciously foresaw. There were
really three levels of thought in his mind. One had adopted a defensive
cynicism, and one desperately insisted that he couldn't be as
unimportant as his instructions implied, and the third watched the other
two as the helicab flew with cushioned booming noises over the dark
canyons of the city and the innumerable lonely lights of the rooftops.

There was a thin roaring sound, high aloft. Cochrane jerked his head
back. The stars filled all the firmament, but he knew what to look for.
He stared upward.

One of the stars grew brighter. He didn't know when he first picked it
out, but he knew when he'd found it. He fixed his eyes on it. It was a
very white star, and for a space of minutes it seemed in no wise
different from its fellows. But it grew brighter. Presently it was very
bright. It was brighter than Sirius. In seconds more it was brighter
than Venus. It increased more and more rapidly in its brilliance. It
became the brightest object in all the heavens except the crescent moon,
and the cold intensity of its light was greater than any part of that.
Then Cochrane could see that this star was not quite round. He could
detect the quarter-mile-long flame of the rocket-blast.

It came down with a rush. He saw the vertical, stabbing pencil of light
plunge earthward. It slowed remarkably as it plunged, with all the
flying aircraft above the city harshly lighted by its glare. The
space-port itself showed clearly. Cochrane saw the buildings, and the
other moon-rockets waiting to take off in half an hour or less.

The white flame hit the ground and splashed. It spread out in a wide
flat disk of intolerable brightness. The sleek hull of the ship which
still rode the flame down glinted vividly as it settled into the inferno
of its own making.

Then the light went out. The glare cut off abruptly. There was only a
dim redness where the space-port tarmac had been made incandescent for a
l