The Saturn lifted from the ground, startlingly quickly, trailing a column of white smoke which glowed orange within, as if it were burning. The booster was a splinter of bone white riding on a lozenge of liquid, yellow-white light — the fire of the Solid Rocket Boosters — light that was stunningly bright. This, the brilliance of rocket light, was what the pictures never captured, he thought; at this moment the TV images would be stopped down so much they would tame the rocket light, turn the sky dark blue, make the smoke a dull gray.

The stack arched over, following a steep curve away from the tower: the pitchover maneuver, violent, visible. Already the gantry was dwarfed by the smoke column; it looked denuded.

The Saturn punched through an isolated thin cloud, threading it like thread through a needle. The surface of the barge canal rippled, glaring with the reflected rocket light.

Then, after maybe ten seconds of the flight, the sound reached him. There was a deep reverberation that he sensed in his gut and chest, and then a clattering thunder which rained down from the sky above him, in sharp multiple slaps: that was shock waves from the booster engines, huge nonlinear waveforms collapsing and battering at each other. Through this bass pounding he could hear the people around him whooping and clapping.

Before him, silhouetted in rocket light, JFK raised up a wizened fist.

Muldoon could feel that he was in the presence of a huge release of energy: it was like being close to a huge waterfall, maybe. But this energy was made and controlled by humans. He felt a surge of triumph, a deep exhilaration… a huge outpouring of relief.

It was done. And after this last effort, he thought morbidly, he could get to work on pickling his liver seriously. It was a kind of release. No more goals.

The Saturn arced upward, its vapor trail leading right into the sun; Muldoon, dazzled, couldn’t see the first staging.

His vision was blurred. He was crying, damn it. “Go, baby!” he shouted.

MERRITT ISLAND

Seger had been leading his group in hymns, and handing out leaflets about how Ares was carrying plutonium casks, for its SNAP generators, into space. ST. JOSEPH OF CUPERTINO IS THE PATRON SAINT OF ASTRONAUTS. JOIN WITH US IN PRAYER…

But they were mainly ignored by the crowds around them on the road, with their cameras and binoculars, their eyes shaded by hands against the sun.

When the Saturn light burst over the road, the hymn dissolved, as the members of the group turned to look.

The white needle, clearly visible, had lifted off the ground on a stick of fire. There was no sound yet.