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and myself, is "Thank you". We are going to do our best to prove ourselves worthy of such a reception. Again, "Thank you".'
    He paused and tightened his hold on the hanging rope.
    'And now,' he added, 'here is my Gloria Mundi.'
    He pulled on the rope. For a breathless second nothing seemed to happen. Then the canvas fell away from the top, slithering down the polished metal sides to subside in billowing waves on the ground. The earlier cheers had been but a murmur compared with the volume of sound which now roared from the packed crowds.
    The Gloria Mundi gleamed in the sunlight. She towered on the level plain like a monstrous shell designed for the artillery of giants; a shapely mass of glistening metal poised on a tripod of three great flanges, her blunt nose pointing already into the blue sky whither if all went well she would presently leap.
    And then, surprisingly, the cheering died away. It was as though it had come home to the mass of sightseers for the first time that the five men on the platform were volunteers for almost certain death; that the shell like shape beside them was indeed a shell, the greatest projectile the world had ever seen, and that all of it, save for a small part near the nose where the circular windows showed, was filled with the most powerful known explosives.
    When the crowd began to talk again a new note was dominant. The spirit of bank holiday jubilation had become impregnated with anxiety and a sense of trepidation. Even the phlegmatic Sergeant Yarder was aware of its injection.
    The proposed flight had hitherto stirred his imagination only slightly; and that because the crowd attending its start was the largest on record. Now he looked across at the rocket with a new curiosity. Why wasn't the Earth big enough for them? It must be a queer kind of man who could find so little of interest in all the five continents and seven seas that he wished to shoot himself out into the emptiness of space. And what good would it do anybody; even if they managed it? What good had any of these rockets ever done? Even Drivers' Right round the Moon hadn't meant anybody's betterment. There had been millions of money wasted and scores of good men killed . . .
    The sergeant sniffed and pulled out his watch. It was useful, though not an instrument of precision.
    'Just gone 'alf past three. They got an hour yet,' he murmured, half to himself.
    His small neighbour ventured a correction.
    'Twenty to four, I think, Sergeant. They'll be going inside soon.'
    The sergeant shook a disapproving head.
    'Why do they do it? Blamed if I'd ever go up in one of them things not for millions, I wouldn't. Bein' a national 'ero's all right but it ain't much good to you if you're all in little bits so small that nobody can find 'em And it ain't no good if you go the way Drivers did, poor devil.'
    'I don't think Curtance will do that, the other shook his head. 'He's a great man, and this Gloria Mundi of his is the greatest ship yet. He ought to do it.'
    'Suppose it blows up?' asked the sergeant.
    The small man smiled. 'We shan't know much about that, I think.'
    The sergeant moved uneasily. 'But it can't 'urt us 'ere, can it? Look at the distance.'
    'But the distance is only to keep us out of the way of the exhausts. If the Gloria Mundi should blow up well, remember Simpson at Chicago; his rocket was only half the size of this.'
    For a few silent moments the sergeant remembered Simpson uncomfortably.
    'But what do they want to do it for?' he inquired again, plaintively.
    The other shrugged his shoulders. 'It seems not so much that they want to as that they must, I think. Something seems to drive them on and on whether they want it or not.'
    The small circular door high up in the rocket's side shut with a decisive thud. The few favoured pressmen who had been allowed upon the small staging beside it clattered down the wooden steps and joined their less privileged fellows on the ground. Almost before the last of them was clear a squad of