“Two seconds, one second.  Firing!”

It was a second later that his eyes focussed on the left hand view-screen.  Red and yellow flames were gushing out at the bottom of the rocket, and it was beginning to tremble.  Then the upper jets, the ones that furnished power for the generators, began firing.  He looked anxiously at the meters; the generators were building up power.  Finally, when he was sure that the rocket would be blasting off anyhow, the separator-charges fired and the heavy cables fell away.  An instant later, the big missile started inching upward, gaining speed by the second, first slowly and jerkily and then more rapidly, until it passed out of the field of the pickup.  He watched the rising spout of fire from the other screen until it passed from sight.

By that time, Pitov had twisted a dial and gotten another view on the left hand screen, this time from close to the target.  That camera was radar-controlled; it had fastened onto the approaching missile, which was still invisible.  The stars swung slowly across the screen until Richardson recognized the ones he had spotted at the zenith.  In a moment, now, the rocket, a hundred miles overhead, would be nosing down, and then the warhead would open and the magnetic field inside would alter and the mass of negamatter would be ejected.

The stars were blotted out by a sudden glow of light.  Even at a hundred miles, there was enough atmospheric density to produce considerable energy release.  Pitov, beside him, was muttering, partly in German and partly in Russian; most of what Richardson caught was figures.  Trying to calculate how much of the mass of unnatural iron would get down for the ground blast.  Then the right hand screen broke into a wriggling orgy of color, and at the same time every scrap of radio-transmitted apparatus either went out or began reporting erratically.  The left hand screen, connected by wiring to the pickup on the roof, was still functioning.  For a moment, Richardson wondered what was going on, and then shocked recognition drove that from his mind as he stared at the ever-brightening glare in the sky.

It was the Auburn Bomb again!  He was back, in memory, to the night on the shore of Lake Ontario; the party breaking up in the early hours of morning; he and Janet and the people with whom they had been spending a vacation week standing on the lawn as the guests were getting into their cars.  And then the sudden light in the sky.  The cries of surprise, and then of alarm as it seemed to be rushing straight down upon them.  He and Janet, clutching each other and staring up in terror at the falling blaze from which there seemed no escape.  Then relief, as it curved away from them and fell to the south.  And then the explosion, lighting the whole southern sky.

There was a similar explosion in the screen, when the mass of nega-iron landed—­a sheet of pure white light, so bright and so quick as to almost pass above the limit of visibility, and then a moment’s darkness that was in his stunned eyes more than in the screen, and then the rising glow of updrawn incandescent dust.