he hall, ashed my badge again, and entered the room reserved for the

panel that was going to pass or unk Willy Zinder.

Doc Spartan was the man in charge. He was the leader of our little group,
but that was no break for Willy Zinder. Doc Spartan was an old space
hand. He'd been to the moon and he had conducted the trial ight of the
plasma engine. First, last and middle, he was a perfectionist. I hated him,
so did everyone else, but there was one thing that we all could say: if Doc
stamped you okay, you were as good as he expected to nd. And there was
another thing that could be said: Doc Spartan made a top sergeant of the
Marine Corps look like Peter Pan.
He was there, along with three other men who looked as if they'd been
without sleep for a week. Maybe they'd taken a few naps during the
twenty-four hours, but it didn't show. They were red-eyed, their hair was
uncombed and they each showed a day's growth of beard. Although the
room was air-conditioned, they looked sweaty and hot. Mugs full of black
coffee were on their desks and there were bread crusts and half-eaten
sandwiches on trays nearby.
Axel Ludson stood back against the rear wall. Like me, he had nothing to
do but watch and he had probably hurried over after eating breakfast, just
as I had, in order to be on hand when Willy made his re-entry.
Axel was a big, raw-boned Swede, which is a description you could give
of a large portion of the male population of his home town in Minnesota.
He had light brown hair, blue eyes and a long straight nose. His jaw looked
big and solid enough to crush concrete. He winked at me and I walked
over to him.
"Willy is doing ne," he said, which was an accolade. Axel made his
words count. "Doc has thrown everything at him but a ock of asteroids
and Willy hasn't missed a pitch."
"Good!" I said. "Where is Willy now?"
Axel nodded toward a screen on the left wall. On it was projected a portion
of a globe showing Northern Siberia. A little spot of light showed up in the
middle of it.
"In thirty minutes he'll begin his last orbit."
"How did he do on the emergencies?" I asked.
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 Axel grinned. "He acted like they were the real thing."
The space capsule carrying Willy was the old-fashioned type, with room
enough for only one man. However, it had special controls which made its
manual operation similar to that used on the plasma craft. Throughout the
ight, Willy was in charge of the operation. Without warning, certain
simulated emergencies were signaled to instruments aboard the capsule
and Willy was expected to meet them.
Although space ight sounds dangerous, most of it isn't because space is
more empty than anything most of us ever saw. The only critical times are
usually at the lift-off, the re-entry and the landing. However, other
emergencies can arise. The worst would be the sudden appearance of a
large meteor, meaning a pebble a quarter of an inch in diameter or bigger.
Since about 95 per cent of the meteors in space are less than that size,
chances of meeting one, even on a trip las
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