McCauley turned back obediently. The fuel gang was pumping in the nitric as he left. It stank, and he knew that if the smell gets under the faceplate of your hood you throw back the hood and faceplate together and gasp for breath. He realized that he wasn't breathing too easily. The doctors were going to make their final check on him, and what they said would be it. He felt the familiar panicky conviction that they'd find something wrong with him. For instance, panic would be something wrong. He caught hold of himself as he and Randy entered the blockhouse. Somehow the confusion and busyness of everybody there were reassuring. On the way to where the doctors waited, he heard people talking into telephones about wind velocities and barometric pressures and how in thunder did that civilian automobile get into the test area? Somebody had to get it out fast, because there was a shoot on, in case nobody'd heard. The last was pure sarcasm. Anyhow the technical crew thought he was all right. So McCauley submitted himself to the doctors in a sort of truculent readiness to put up an argument if they said anything critical of his condition or his readiness to go where nobody had ever gone before. With everything else all ready, they'd have a nerve to suggest anything but a go-ahead! They took his blood pressure and did a cardiogram, and they put a tape around his chest and a stylus drew a crazy curve which showed the way he was breathing. Then they took samples of his breath and his blood and other body fluids, and his temperature and the electrical resistance of his skin and forty-seven other things. They'd done all this before. They'd done it while he was resting and while he was taking hard exercise, when he was tired and when he'd just waked up from a good night's sleep. They had blown-up pictures of every square inch of his skin, so they could check for sputters at high altitude. A sputter might occur if a cosmic particle at just the right speed happened to hit him. He hadn't any privacy left. The docs knew everything about him, except that he was absolutely the right person for man's first ascent in a pure rocket, and his return to Earth in one piece. No rocket had ever landed intact, of course. They smashed. Invariably. But a way had been worked out to get instruments back unshattered. That was the way he'd land. One of the doctors nodded. "With that pulse rate your system's pumping out plenty of adrenalin. That's good!"