"But suppose the ship fails on you?" Foster demanded tersely. "Suppose you're forced down?"
"We're visitors from outer space!" Smitty replied, grinning.
Foster wasn't amused. "Let's not be foolish about this," he argued. "We've got something here that we can't let loose! The world isn't ready for it—"
"But we've got to have it perfected when the world is ready," Morrow said firmly. "Once the tension wears out and the world situation changes, we've got to act! If we aren't ready, the world will go right ahead and get mixed up in some other squabble. Then we'd have to wait again."
Smitty laid a hand on Foster's shoulder. "You can get a few days off from the plant, can't you?"
"What? Well, yes," Foster stammered. "Of course! But—"
They took off at noon on a cloudy winter day.
They spent the afternoon dividing their attention between the test-flight instruments and the surrounding sky. They hadn't the money to afford elaborate recording mechanisms to graph every moment of the flight onto neat tape-spools; they had to rely on the human eye, the questionably analytical human mind, and the servo-mechanism of a human hand wielding a pencil on a loose-leaf notebook. And they constantly expected to see a razor-winged jet fighter hurtling down from the stratosphere above them, its cannon sparkling the bright flame-color of death.
They didn't talk much that afternoon.