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room to accommodate the four of us. We paused as Jet, leading the way, climbed the ladder that led through another circular hole in the ceiling and into the cabin.
    I went next. The rungs of the ladder felt cold to my hands which, I must confess, were sweating a little at the palms. Once through I turned to give a hand to Lemmy who was following me.
    “Here we are,” he said as his head popped out of the hole. “Home, sweet home.”
    I heaved him out of the opening and then gave my hand to Mitch. We were now under Jet’s orders. He wasted no time. “Lemmy,” he said, “open up the radio. Carry out pre-take-off checks.”
    “Yes, Jet.” Lemmy moved over to the control table.
    “Carry out your checks, Doc, and you, Mitch.”
    We set to. Base was contacted, televiewers, radar, fuel gauges and oxygen supply checked. Suddenly a siren sounded, its wail coming up through the air lock like a voice from another world.’
    “Second warning,” said Lemmy unnecessarily.
    The wailing faded away just as the check routine was completed. We reported our findings to Jet who logged “Check OK” on the tape recorder. Then he turned to the three of us and said: “It will be half an hour before they remove the gantry and are ready for firing. We’ll all lie down while we’re waiting. Relax. Don’t talk unless you have to. Radio will be left on. Ignore it if you can.”
    I stretched out on my bunk which was underneath Jet’s. We had gone through this routine often, the last three times within the ship. Take-off procedure had been rehearsed in every detail, the only difference between then and now being that we had not left the ground. Jet’s orders had always been couched in exactly the same words. Even so they sounded fresh, had a different tone about them. The very cabin looked different. The atmosphere was different. This was real; before it had seemed play.
    For the first time I noticed how small the cabin was. I could, by reaching up, almost touch the underside of Jet’s bunk and my own was less than two feet from the floor. The other two bunks, their official designation was ‘take-off couches’, were only ten feet away. They were of exactly the same design as mine and Jet’s, of course, and were occupied by Mitch below and Lemmy above. Short ladders led to the upper bunks.
    The shiny-new cabin was spherical, its flat floor being set low in the sphere. Consequently the walls and ceiling, except where control boards had been built against them, were dome-shaped. In the centre of the ceiling was a circular hatch. This was the entrance to the pilot’s cabin, used only during the landing period of the return journey to Earth for, although the ship took off vertically, it landed horizontally like a superstratocruiser. For such flights our bunks could be converted into chairs. The cabin then became lopsided, like a living room that had been tipped over to allow one of its walls to become the floor and the opposite one the ceiling. But this was unimportant for, by the time this tipping-up process was necessary, our journey would be virtually over and there would be nothing to do but sit tight until the landing had been made.
    Below the cabin floor was the airlock and the emergency access hatch to the fuel tank area. Running from below the cabin floor and deep down into the motor was a long, narrow tube which carried the connecting wires from the control boards. Almost immediately it ran through a specially treated, thick sheet of circular lead which served to separate us from the radio activity set up by the motor. Below the protective sheet were the spherical fuel tanks; below them the motor itself. The fuel tanks and motor combined filled a greater area of space than the rest of the second stage put together.
    The pilot’s cabin, the crew’s cabin, the fuel tanks and all but the exhaust of the motor were enclosed in a conventional, rocket-shaped shell which, as protection against the unlikely possibility of a meteoric