A muffled voice said boredly, by short-wave from the observatory up on the crater’s rim: 

“We’re ready.  Visual and records, and we’ve got the timers set to clock the auto-beacon signals as they come in.”

The voice was not enthusiastic.  Cochrane had had to put up his own money to have the nearside lunar observatory put a low-power telescope to watch the rocket’s flight.  In theory, this distress-rocket should make a twenty-mile streak of relatively long-burning red sparks.  A tiny auto-beacon in its nose was set to send microwave signals at ten-second intervals.  On the face of it, it had looked like a rather futile performance.

“Let’s go,” said Cochrane.

He noted with surprise that his mouth was suddenly dry.  This affair was out of all reason.  A producer of television shows should not be the person to discover in an abstruse scientific development the way to reach the stars.  A neurotic son-in-law of an advertising tycoon should not be the instrument by which the discovery should come about.  A psychiatrist should not be the means of associating Jones—­a very junior physicist with no money—­and Cochrane and the things Cochrane was prepared to bring about if only this unlikely-looking gadget worked.

“Jones,” said Cochrane with a little difficulty, “let’s follow an ancient tradition.  Let Babs christen the enterprise by throwing the switch.”

Jones pointed there in the shadow of the crater-wall, and Babs moved to the switch he indicated.  She said absorbedly: 

“Five, four, three, two, one—­”

She threw the switch.  There was a spout of lurid red flame.

The rocket vanished.

It vanished.  It did not rise, visibly.  It simply went away from where it was, with all the abruptness of a light going out.  There was a flurry of the most brilliant imaginable carmine flame.  That light remained.  But the rocket did not so much rise as disappear.

Cochrane jerked his head up.  He was close to the line of the rocket’s ascent.  He could see a trail of red sparks which stretched to invisibility.  It was an extraordinarily thin line.  The separate flecks of crimson light which comprised it were distant in space.  They were so far from each other that the signal-rocket was a complete failure as a device making a streak of light that should be visible.

The muffled voice in the helmet-phones said blankly: 

“Hey!  What’d you do to that rocket?”

The others did not move.  They seemed stunned.  The vanishing of the rocket was no way for a rocket to act.  In all expectation, it should have soared skyward with a reasonable velocity, and should have accelerated rather more swiftly from the moon’s surface than it would have done from Earth.  But it should have remained visible during all its flight.  Its trail should have been a thick red line.  Instead, the red sparks were so far separated—­the trail was so attenuated that it was visible only from a spot near its base.  The observatory voice said more blankly still: