The start was a drag. Eighteen hours before blast-off Sid and I went into a tank so that we would get rid of our nitrogen. We breathed the standard helium-oxygen mix at normal pressure until about four hours before H-hour. They wouldn't even let me smoke. Then we suited up and were lifted by a crane and stuck in the control room of _Nelly Bly_, as I had named our Dyna-Soar rocket-glider. The hatch stayed open, but we were buttoned up tight in our suits. They had a couple of mods that were supposed to fit them better for the mission. Instead of the usual metal helmet with face plate, we had full-vision bubble helmets of clear plastic. The necks were large enough so that we could, in theory, drag our arms out of our suits and clean the inside of the bubbles. That was in case I sicked up out in space, which all experience said was a real enough hazard. They figured that filling me full of motion sickness pills was partial prevention. These space-jockeys have their own vocabulary, and their own oh, so cool way of playing it during the countdown. I'm pretty familiar with complex components, but they were checking off equipment I never heard of. We had gyros--hell, our _gyros_ had gyros. And we had tanks, and pressures and temperatures and voltages and who-stuck-John. It was all very impressive. There were suited men up on the gantry unplugging our air feed and closing our hatch. Sid was straining up from where he lay on his back to dog it down tight. "Roger," Sid was saying to somebody, as he had been all morning. The white vapor from our umbilical stopped, which let me know our tanks had been topped off and sealed, and that we were about to blast off. "This is it, Seaman," Sid Stein said. "Now for Pete's sake don't move, don't speak, just lie there. I've got the con." That was a bunch of baloney. He really had nothing to do until we were in orbit. The delicate accelerometers and inertial guidance components did all the piloting until the second stage kicked us loose. But I kept my mouth shut. He'd have some work to do before the ride was over, and I might need him. * * * * * When the lift-off came, it was gentle as a dove's wing. But as we burned off fuel, the twenty-million pound thrust of our Apollo booster began to tell, and my vision started to go black. The gee-meter said we were pulling about ten gees when I could no longer read it, and I learned later we peaked out at eleven gees in the final seconds before first-stage burn-out. I didn't like it a little bit. The liquid hydrogen second stage kicked in like a hopped up mule, and we pulled ten gees, right at the limit of my vision, for its whole four minutes of burning. My earphones were talking now as Sid gave it the A-OK and Roger bit all the way. This was the stuff, kid!