Suddenly it felt as if a giant had placed his huge palm squarely on Robin's chest and was pushing him down. As he tried to exert pressure against the door, the counter pressure of the invisible hand increased. For an instant Robin was thunderstruck. Had he suddenly become weak? What was this?

His first emotion, that of amazement, changed in a split second to one of terror at his newly discovered weakness, and again from that to a feeling of stunned shock. There was no invisible hand! It was the rocket itself moving!

Without thinking, Robin struggled to rise, but his muscles could not obey him. In the first seconds the pressure on him was mild, he might have been able to move if he'd given some extra effort. But by the time his astonishment had worn off, the pressure had climbed beyond the limitations of the cramped space and his young muscles.

The rocket had started slowly as these great towering constructions do. The first blasts barely served to push it away from its launching guides. It seemed to tremble in every plate as if precariously perched upon the short, furious blast of yellow. Then the fiery tail lengthened as the tall, thin metal body rose slowly, lifted like a thin white pencil on the roaring cataract of burning gases.

Now it was its own length from the ground, now pushing up faster, giving in split seconds the curious impression that it might topple over at any instant. But the steady rise gained in speed, the rocket pushed away from its burning tail ever faster, the fire turned from yellow to blue, and within a few more blinks of the eye it was hurtling into the sky, vanishing into a dot, and then was beyond sight.

To Robin it seemed again as if a giant hand were pressing down. He felt it spreading over his body, felt himself being pushed relentlessly by superior weight against the matting of the compartment floor. His head was thrust down as if by a giant forefinger of this invisible monster leaning over him. Now it seemed as if the giant, in maniacal malice, was leaning his weight on his hand, pressing on Robin, trying to shove him through the floor if possible.

He gasped for breath, could barely catch it against the growing pressure on his chest. His eyes sank into their sockets and he tried to close them but found the effort too much.

All about him there was a roaring sound, a humming and thrumming, and now began a thin, piercing whistling, which was the air outside rushing past. The whistle rapidly increased to an ear-splitting shriek, then vanished, leaving eddies of unheard auditory vibrations. Robin tried to close his mouth, which had been forced open by the prying finger of pressure. He felt as if in another moment he must cave in, be squashed flat. His brain reeled dizzily, then suddenly a merciful blackness fell over him and he knew no more.

At that very moment, though he could no longer sense it, there was a click, audible through the length of the vibrating column of metal, and the first section snapped off. Its great fuel tanks, so full of volatile gases an instant before, had emptied themselves in a fury of chemical combustion. The automatic releases had loosened the whole bottom half, the main fuel section, thrust it into space to fall and shatter upon the desert miles below. At that same split second, another series of relays touched off the second firing section.

The new firing tubes blasted into action. Of a design different from those that preceded it, of a design new to the world of man, the experimental jet burst forth. For an instant it seemed as if the pressure had vanished in the rocket, for a split second the rocket stopped accelerating as it waited for the new impact. Then like a blast of lightning newly released from a storm, a shot of energy flashed through the racing metal body. The giant hand came down on everything within it with a firmness and power not sensed before.

There was a blast now emerging from the tail of the flying rocket something like that of an atomic bomb, but not quite. It was not an explosion, but an atomic reaction. It was a rocket flare of an intensity and heat beyond all the potential of mere chemical reactions. It was atomic fire, chained and harnessed to the tail of a rocket.

The thin white pencil, reduced in length, raced on into the dark stratospheric sky.

Back at Red Sands there was intense excitement in the control dugout. Major Bronck was racing around, anxiously yelling into telephones, watching the checkers, trying to keep track of everything happening at once.

At first the ascent had been neat and according to routine. The crew in the dugout, the radar crew at the main camp, and the one co-operating with them from White Sands itself were checking all right. Then in an instant all three almost lost touch as their objective nearly swooped out of range. The trackers fought to get it back in focus, and one by one finally caught it again, farther and faster than they had planned for.

"It's running wild!" was the way one startled crew chief told the major. "Going up and out like crazy!"

The crew on the tracking telescopes racing around the desert were calling in their story. Visually they had lost it completely. They had gotten a nice set of telescopic photos of the first phase, then they had failed to adjust quickly enough to the unexpected second phase. Now they were sweeping the sky desperately hoping to pick it up again, but without success.

Major Bronck called for a check on the last and surest guide. Among the instruments loaded in the nose of the rocket was a radio tone-signal sender. As a last resort, they should be able to pick up that signal from the rocket itself, confirm the story they were getting from their radar men. But the men at the radio listening posts reported no sound. And when the major asked if they had had it in the first place, the men admitted that they had not. There had never been any buzz on the ether from the rocket at all!

At that moment, the main Red Sands camp got on the phone. A voice from the commander's office wanted to know why the instruments had not been loaded. It seems that the man responsible for them had just turned up at camp. Jackson had reported his jacket stolen, his pass along with it.

Therefore the instruments for whose installation he had been charged with were still reposing in the camp! There had been a series of bungles, the major thought, as he tried to explain the situation. Obviously the rocket had not been checked as it should have been. Obviously whoever had calculated the course and power of the new fuels had erred very considerably.

"But we've still got it on radar. Yes, sir. We'll hold it. We'll definitely see where it comes down, sir."

The major listened, white-faced, to the commander's angry spluttering. "Yes, I know, sir. Top-secret stuff. But even if it lands a thousand miles away, we'll know, we'll spot it. Even if it managed to assume a satellite orbit, we could keep track of it. It's still going straight up. It might make an orbit. If it did, there'd be no chance of it coming down intact for foreign examination. It would probably circle the Earth a few times in a wild ellipse and then burn up in the atmosphere. We won't lose it."

But lose it they did. The radars held it for two hours more, until finally it was beyond even the limits of their extended capacities. It was going up, up, and out, and even at the last there was no sign of it slowing down enough to form an orbit.

When they finally checked it off as permanently lost, they knew they had witnessed the dawn of a new era. This rocket had assumed and passed the escape velocity. It was headed out into the trackless bounds of outer space. It would never return to Earth.

There was even speculation that its last known course might intersect the Moon's orbit. Opinion in Washington, after all the reports were in, was divided on that. But, in spite of the bungling, the rocket had proved a valuable point. From that day onward, rocketry in the United States took a new tack.

Robin Carew was dreaming. He was falling down an elevator shaft, falling swiftly floor after floor. Looking down at him from the space at the top of the high shaft was a gigantic face, leering at him while stretching a giant arm down the shaft trying to reach him.

In his dream he had the curious mixed-up feeling of wishing the giant could catch him and stop his fall and at the same time being afraid that the giant might be successful and crush him in his huge fingers. He was falling, falling, and squirm as he might, the bottom of this terrible shaft was nowhere in sight.

Robin thrashed around, trying to grab a cable, trying to catch one of the innumerable doors as they rushed past. He banged his hand against one, grabbed tight, jerked.

His eyes snapped open, his mind struggled to gain a grasp of where he was. Nothing seemed to make sense. It was dark and he was bumping around in a tiny, tight space. Yet somehow he couldn't get his feet down, he still was falling. Suddenly he felt dizzy and then became aware of the aches all over his body.

He stopped thrashing, let himself rest. He bumped against the tight side again, took the opportunity to stretch his body out straight and found he could not. He was touching both sides of the narrow space.

His eyes found the space not entirely dark. A faint trace of light showed from a couple of spots somewhere in the dark enclosure. He realized where he was. He remembered now the take-off, the pressure. Why, he thought with a shock, the rocket went off. And I'm in it! We must be falling back to the sands now. In a few minutes we'll crash and that will be the end.

He waited awhile, expecting to be snuffed out at any instant. But there was nothing. Just silence. And now a faint rustling sound where something was stirring and squeaking below him. The animals, he thought, are alive in the space below me.

Then it occurred to him that he was not falling back, but perhaps falling away. His mind, which had been numbed from the pain and pressure, began to reassemble what he knew about rockets. And consciously the thought formed—the sensation of free fall is the same as the sensation of weightlessness found in space rockets. He thought he was falling, but was it not just as likely that instead he was simply beyond gravity?

He felt himself over for broken spots, but somehow miraculously he had not been damaged. His eyes burned and he supposed they were bloodshot. A smear of stickiness around his face convinced him he'd suffered a nosebleed. But otherwise he was sound. He patted the jacket he wore and his hand encountered the cylindrical hardness of the flashlight he'd borrowed from the supply truck. He took it out, snapped it on.

The little padded compartment was the same, the door still tightly wedged. He turned the light carefully around it, saw that the faint break in the total darkness before had come from two tiny openings—glass insets. Probably, he thought, the openings for the instruments, possibly the lens spots for cameras.

He switched off his flashlight, put an eye to an opening. The spot of glass was thick but amazingly clear. He caught a glimpse of blue-black sky and a jagged line of misty gray and white, beneath which stretched the edge of a great brown-and-green bowl. He stared at it in puzzlement, watching it as it swung slowly away.

He realized that the rocket had developed a slow spin, that his viewing spot would gradually circle the region around him. And he realized that the great brownish bowl was the Earth.

From the darkness of the sky he realized that he must already be high in the stratosphere, possibly well beyond it. From the curvature of the horizon, he must be far up, several hundred miles, he guessed. And he could see that the curvature was increasing as he watched. The rocket was still traveling upward, traveling at an immense rate of speed. Its last rockets had blasted away and had left it with a heritage of unparalleled speed.

Robin screwed up his eyes again, mentally calculated. He revised his estimate of his height, doubled it, redoubled it. Why, he might be a thousand miles up, two thousand, perhaps many times that! How fast was he traveling?

He didn't know. He couldn't tell. He remembered the talk about atomic fuels he had overheard. Could it be that the inventors had miscalculated? Could it be that he was already in outer space, heading for the void, never to return to Earth?

He screwed his eye again to the outlet. In the short time since he'd first looked the sky had darkened. It was black, jet-black, and the stars were fiery points of white. The Earth now seemed like a ball, a vast ball whose fringes glowed with the pale mistiness of a sun-lit blanket of air. But where he was there was no air. He was beyond any atmosphere. No whistling of atmospheric friction was present in the length of the silent rocket.

And then a blinding white glow poked a piercing beam through the tiny eye-spot. It was the sun, unshielded, brilliant. In a moment the tiny ray vanished as the rocket continued its slow turning, but Robin in that instant had come to realize what had happened.

He was in outer space, beyond Earth, never to return. He was the first man to reach that untracked void that bounded on all the stars and suns of a universe. He was the first—but who would ever know? Who could ever hear of him, whose helpless body, imprisoned in its shining airtight shell, now seemed doomed to float unsuspected forever on the cosmic tides of interplanetary space?