"Ralph, I've always looked upon people who put property above human life as just about the lowest worms that crawl. But for a minute--God pity me--I almost felt that way. It's just that--it's fifty billion dollars worth of big, tremendous sky ship and that cylinder is so small--" "It won't seem small if it blows up and takes the spaceport with it," I said. "It won't seem small at all." "I know, Ralph. I said once I was old enough to be your father and I still think I am. But if you put me across your knee and gave me the drubbing a dumb six-year old would rate I'd have no right to complain. I should have thought of it myself." "We don't always think of things that stand out like sore thumbs when we're under tremendous stress," I said. "Don't blame yourself for being human, Commander." "I hope it won't take me much longer than that to finish the job, Ralph," he said. "I'll do my best. There are only three crewmen on board and all of the passengers have been cleared." He swung about without another word and went striding out of the enclosure. I would have followed him if Joan hadn't picked that moment to come back into my arms. It held me up for a minute or two. * * * * * The incandescent burst of flame that makes a big sky ship's ascent into space seem for an instant almost cataclysmic, as if the sky itself had been ripped apart in some terrible and incomprehensible way, came exactly eight minutes, thirty-two seconds later. I timed it myself, not mentally this time but with a watch in my hand. I stood with Joan at my side a hundred feet from the launching pad, watching the cylinder disappear into the sky. It was the cylinder and not the big rocket itself that I seemed to see as I stared upward, as if the sky ship had turned to glass and the deadly thing it was carrying out into space was beginning to stir and vibrate in a quite ghastly way, with its contours enlarged to sky-spanning dimensions under the glass. To my inward vision it was bigger than the ship itself and it was hard to understand how even a huge sky ship could be carrying anything so enormous and death-freighted when a short while before it had been discharging passengers in the bright Martian sunlight who had given no thought to Death ... only what life had in store for them on a new world. My fingers were clenched around the watch and I wasn't even aware that Commander Littlefield had joined me until he tapped me on the arm. "We can see and hear it when it happens--all of it, just as if we were taking it out into space ourselves. Every tele-communicator on the sky ship is turned on and tuned to big screen wave length. If there was a crewman on board he could talk to us and we could talk to him." "Thank God there isn't a living man on board," I breathed.