Feeling scared was natural and nothing to be ashamed of, because we all got butterflies on our first solo orbit. But when I took my ASD tests, I'd managed to keep my teeth from chattering. Willy hadn't and somehow I got the feeling that he was suffering as much as all the rest of us combined. He looked so ready to collapse that I wondered what was holding him up. Finally I gave up trying to sleep. It was daylight anyhow and I dressed, hurried to a restaurant and had scrambled eggs and coffee. Then I went over to the reservation to see how things were going. Dr. Spartan probably had spent the night there, but the rest of us had knocked off when the midnight operations shift came on duty. If they'd all spent a night like I had, the other members of the Jehad crew would be on hand almost as soon as me. Besides Spartan, the others were Axel Ludkin, the big Swede from Minnesota; Dr. Warner Joel, who probably would hide his feelings by slapping people on the back and trying to joke about inconsequential things; and Morrie Grover, who was a pink-cheeked kid. We, plus Dr. Lewis Spartan, had already qualified for the first manned trip to Mars. But plans had been made for six and Willy Zinder was our last candidate. To say we were scraping the bottom of the barrel would be selling Willy short. He was Number 12 out of 100 fine physical and mental specimens who had been selected for astronaut training three years before. Eighty-eight others had been washed out, one way or another, before twelve were fingered for Operation Jehad--so named because Jehad means holy war to Moslems. We were going to Mars, which was named after the Roman war god, so that accounted for the war part of the name, but I don't know what was holy about it except that going to Mars would materialize an ancient dream of man to travel through space to another world. Willy was as healthy as a mountain and even if he looked scared I could tell he had guts. By the time the lift-off date of the operation got a few months away, Willy had climbed to position Number Six. Two higher numbers had flunked the ASD--Aeronautical Systems Division--tests, Dr. Spartan had said two others wouldn't do--the space boys in Washington took Doc's word as gospel--one had been banged up in a car wreck and was still in the hospital, and the sixth man had undergone an emergency appendectomy which left him too weak to lift off for Mars at the scheduled time. There wasn't time now to train more men for the job, which meant that Willy _had_ to pass and Doc Spartan was enough of a perfectionist to insist that Willy get as thorough a testing as the others of the crew. Sure, there were other astronauts. There were ten or twelve working on other projects, but the plasma space engine isn't an ordinary spaceship that anybody can take on a 150,000,000-mile round trip without rigorous training. I reached the gate that separated spacemen from mere Earthlings and flashed my badge on the security guard.