rounds, the
countdown progressed past minus one hour, and at minus twenty minutes
all the overhead lights went off and the small instrument operators'
lights came on.

Pitov turned on a couple of view-screens, one from a pickup on the roof
of the bunker and another from the launching-pad. They sat down side by
side and waited. Richardson got his pipe out and began loading it. The
loudspeaker was saying: "_Minus two minutes, one fifty nine, fifty
eight, fifty seven_--"

He let his mind drift away from the test, back to the world that had
been smashed around his ears in the autumn of 1969. He was doing that so
often, now, when he should be thinking about--

"_Two seconds, one second_. FIRING!"

It was a second later that his eyes focussed on the left hand
view-screen. Red and yellow flames were gushing out at the bottom of the
rocket, and it was beginning to tremble. Then the upper jets, the ones
that furnished power for the generators, began firing. He looked
anxiously at the meters; the generators were building up power. Finally,
when he was sure that the rocket would be blasting off anyhow, the
separator-charges fired and the heavy cables fell away. An instant
later, the big missile started inching upward, gaining speed by the
second, first slowly and jerkily and then more rapidly, until it passed
out of the field of the pickup. He watched the rising spout of fire from
the other screen until it passed from sight.

By that time, Pitov had twisted a dial and gotten another view on the
left hand screen, this time from close to the target. That camera was
radar-controlled; it had fastened onto the approaching missile, which
was still invisible. The stars swung slowly across the screen until
Richardson recognized the ones he had spotted at the zenith. In a
moment, now, the rocket, a hundred miles overhead, would be nosing down,
and then the warhead would open and the magnetic field inside would
alter and the mass of negamatter would be ejected.

The stars were blotted out by a sudden glow of light. Even at a hundred
miles, there was enough atmospheric density to produce considerable
energy release. Pitov, beside him, was muttering, partly in German and
partly in Russian; most of what Richardson caught was figures. Trying to
calculate how much of the mass of unnatural iron would get down for the
ground blast. Then the right hand screen broke into a wriggling orgy of
color, and at the same time every scrap of radio-tra