touched them together. Nothing happened. He felt sweat on his forehead, despite the cold. Why was this not working? The answer came into his head: Wrong wire. He felt under the dash again. There was another wire to the right of the ignition. He pulled it out and touched it to the wire on the left.
The engine started.
He pressed the gas pedal, and the engine raced.
He put the transmission into drive, released the parking brake, flicked the indicator, and pulled out The car was pointing towards the station, so he did a U-turn. Then he drove off.
A smile crossed his face. Unless he was very unlucky, he had a complete set of fresh clothes in the bag. He felt he had begun to take charge of his life.
Now he needed somewhere to shower and change.
.
12 NOON
The second stage consists of eleven Baby Sergeant rockets in an annular ring around a central tube. The third stage has three Baby Sergeant motors held together by three transverse bulkheads. On top of the third stage is the fourth, a single rocket, with the satellite in its nose.
The countdown stood at X minus 630 minutes, and Cape Canaveral was buzzing.
Rocket men 'were all the same: they would design weapons, if the government wanted, but what they dreamed about was outer space. The Explorer team had built and launched many missiles, but this would be the first of them to break free of the Earth's pull and fly beyond the atmosphere. For most of the team, tonight's launch would be the fulfillment of a lifetime's hopes. Elspeth felt the same way.
They were based in Hangar D and Hangar R, which were side by side. The standard aircraft hangar design had been found to be well suited to missiles: there was a large central space where the rockets could be checked out, with two-storey wings either side for offices and smaller laboratories.
Elspeth was in Hangar R. She had a typewriter and a desk in the office of her boss, Wily Fredrickson, the launch conductor, who spent almost all his time elsewhere. Her job was to prepare and distribute the launch timetable.
Trouble was, the timetable changed constantly. Nobody in America had sent a rocket into space before. New problems arose all the time, and the engineers were forever improvising ways to jury-rig a component or bypass a system. Here, duct tape was called missile tape.
So Elspeth produced regular updates of the timetable. She had to stay in touch with every group on the team, record changes of plan in her shorthand notebook, then transfer her notes to typed and Xeroxed sheets and distribute them. The job required her to go everywhere and know almost everything. When there was a hitch, she learned of it right away; and she was among the first to know about the solution, too. Her title was secretary, and she was paid a secretary's wages, but no one could have done the job without a science degree. However, she did not resent the low pay. She was grateful for a job that challenged her. Some of her Radcliffe classmates were still taking dictation from men in grey flannel suits.
Her noon update was ready, and she picked Up the stack of papers and set out to distribute them. She was rushed off her feet, 'but that suited her today: it stopped her worrying constantly about Luke. If she followed her inclination, she would be on the phone to Anthony every few minutes, asking if there was any news. But that would be stupid. He would contact her if anything went wrong, she told herself. Meanwhile she should concentrate on her work, Elspeth went first to the press department, where public relations officers were working the phones, telling trusted reporters that there would be a launch tonight The army wanted journalists on the scene to witness their triumph. However, the information was not to be released until after the event. -Scheduled launches were often delayed, or even cancelled, as unforeseen snags arose. The missile men had learned, from bitter experience, that a routine postponement to solve technical problems could be made to look like an abject failure when the newspapers reported it So they had a deal with all the major news organizations. They gave advance notification of launches only on condition that nothing would be published until there was 'fire in the tail', which meant that the rocket engine had been ignited.
It was an all-male office, and several men stared at Elspeth as she walked across the room and handed a timetable to the chief press officer. She knew she was attractive, with her pale Viking looks and tall, statuesque figure; but there was something formidable about her - the determined set of her mouth, maybe, or the dangerous light in her green eyes - that made men who were inclined to whistle, or call her 'Honeybunch', think again.
In the Missile Firing Laboratory she found five shirt-sleeved scientists standing at a bench, staring worriedly at a flat piece of metal that looked as if it had been in a fire. The group leader, Dr Keller, said: 'Good afternoon, Elspeth.' He spoke in heavily accented English. Like most of the scientists, he was a German who had been captured at the end of the war and brought to America to work on the missile programme.
She handed him a copy of her update, and he took it without looking at it. Elspeth nodded at the object on the table and said: 'What's that?'
'A jet vane.'
Elspeth knew that the first stage was steered by vanes inside the tail. 'What happened to it?'
'The burning fuel erodes the metal,' he explained. His German accent became stronger as he warmed to his subject 'This always happens, to some extent However, with normal alcohol fuel, the vanes last long enough to. do their job. Today, by contrast we are using a new fuel, Hydyne, that has a longer burning time and higher exhaust velocity - but it may erode the vanes so much that they become ineffective for steering.' He spread his hands in a gesture of exasperation. 'We have not had time to run sufficiently many tests.'
'I guess all I need to know is whether this is going to delay the launch.' She felt she could not stand ' a postponement The suspense was already killing her.
'That's what we're trying to decide.' Keller looked around at his colleagues. 'And I think our answer is going to be: Let's take the chance.' The others nodded gloomily.
Elspeth felt relieved. 'I'll keep my fingers crossed,' she said, turning to leave.
'That's about as useful as anything we can do,' Keller said, and the others laughed ruefully.
She went outside into the scorching Florida sun. The hangars stood in a sandy clearing hacked out of the low scrub that covered the Cape - palmetto palms and scrub oaks and sharp sandspur grass that would cut your skin if you walked barefoot. She crossed a dusty apron and entered Hangar D, its welcome shade falling across her face like the touch of a cool breeze.
In the telemetry room Elspeth saw Hans Mueller, known as Hank. He pointed a finger at her and said: 'One hundred thirty-five.'
It was a game they played. She had to say what was unusual about the number. 'Too easy,' she said. 'Take the first digit, add the square of the second digit, plus the cube of the third, and you get the number you first thought of.' She gave him the equation.
'All right,' he said. 'So what is the next-highest number that follows the pattern?'
She thought hard, then said: 'One hundred and seventy-five.'
1 + 7 squared + 5 cubed = 175
'Correct! You win the big prize.' He fished in his pocket and brought out a dime.
She took it I'll give you a chance to win it back,' she said. 'One hundred thirty-six.'
'Ah.' He frowned. 'Wait. Sum the cubes of its digits.'
1 cubed +3 cubed + 6 cubed =244
'Now repeat the process, and you get the number you first thought of!'
2 cubed +4 cubed +4 cubed =136
She gave him back his dime, and a copy of her update.
As she went out, her eye was caught by a telegram pinned to the wall: I'VE HAD MY LITTLE SATELLITE, NOW YOU HAVE YOURS. Mueller noticed her reading it and explained: 'It's from Stuhlinger's wife.' Stuhlinger was chief of research. 'She had a baby boy.' Elspeth smiled.
She found Willy Fredrickson in the communications room with two army technicians, testing the teletype link to the Pentagon. Her boss was a tally thin man, bald with a fringe of curly hair, like a medieval monk. The teletype machine was not working, and Willy was frustrated, but as he took the update he gave her a grateful look and said: 'Elspeth, you are twenty-two-carat gold.'
A moment later, two people approached Willy: a young army officer carrying a chart, and Stimmens, one of the scientists. The officer said: 'We got a problem.' He handed Willy the chart, and went on: 'The jet stream has
