red to him that Haney and Mike and the Chief would
rather be left behind with him, as a gang, than go on to individual high
achievement in a first landing on the Moon.

It felt good. It felt _real_ good.

* * * * *

But that, and all other sources of satisfaction, was wiped out by news
that came back from the Moonship a bare six hours later.

The Moonship was in trouble. The sequence and timing of its rocket
blasts were worked out on Earth, and checked by visual and radar
observation. The computations were done by electronic brains the
Moonship could not possibly have carried. And everything worked out. The
ship was on course and its firings were on schedule.

But then the unexpected happened. It was an error which no machine could
ever have predicted, for which statistics and computations could never
have compensated. It was a _human_ error. At the signal for the final
acceleration blast, the pilot of the Moonship had fired the wrong set of
rockets.

Inexperience, stupidity, negligence, excitement--the reason didn't
matter. After years of planning and working and dreaming, one human
finger had made a mistake. And the mistake was fatal!

When the mistake was realized, they'd had sense enough to cut loose the
still-firing rockets. But the damage had been done. The ship was still
plunging on. It would reach the Moon. But it wouldn't land in
Aristarchus crater as planned. It would crash. If every rocket remaining
mounted on the hull were to be fired at the best possible instant, the
Moonship would hit near Copernicus, and it would land with a terminal
velocity of 800 feet per second--540 miles an hour.

It could even be calculated that when the Moonship landed, the explosion
ought to be visible from Earth with a fairly good telescope. It was due
to take place in thirty-two hours plus or minus a few minutes.

11

The others got the space tug into the platform's lock and did things to
it, in the way of loading, that its designers never intended, while Joe
was calling Earth for calculations. The result was infuriating. The
Moonship had taken off for the Moon on the other side of the Platform's
orbit, when it had a velocity of more than 12,000 miles an hour in the
direction it wished to go. The Platform and of course the space tug was
now on the reverse side of the Platform's orbit. And of course they now
had a velocity of more than 12,000 miles per hour away from the
directio