No matter how many times you left Earth, Dr. Heywood Floyd told himself, the excitement never really palled. He had been to Mars once, to the Moon three times, and to the various space stations more often than he could remember. Yet as the moment of takeoff approached, he was conscious of a rising tension, a feeling of wonder and awe – yes; and of nervousness – which put him on the same level as any Earthlubber about to receive his first baptism of space.

The jet that had rushed him here from Washington, after that midnight briefing with the President, was now dropping down toward one of the most familiar, yet most exciting, landscapes in all the world. There lay the first two generations of the Space Age, spanning twenty miles of the Florida coast to the south, outlined by winking red warning lights, were the giant gantries of the Saturns and Neptunes, that had set men on the path to the planets, and had now passed into history. Near the horizon, a gleaming silver tower bathed in floodlights, stood the last of the Saturn V's, for almost twenty years a national monument and place of pilgrimage. Not far away, looming against the sky like a man-made mountain, was the incredible bulk of the Vehicle Assembly Building, still the largest single structure on Earth.

But these things now belonged to the past, and he was flying toward the future. As they banked, Dr. Floyd could see below him a maze of buildings, then a great airstrip, then a broad, dead-straight scar across the fiat Florida landscape – the multiple rails of a giant launch-lug track. At its end, surrounded by vehicles and gantries, a spaceplane lay gleaming in a pool of light, being prepared for its leap to the stars. In a sudden failure of perspective, brought on by his swift changes of speed and height, it seemed to Floyd that he was looking down on a small silver moth, caught in the beam of a flashlight.

Then the tiny, scurrying figures on the ground brought home to him the real size of the spacecraft; it must have been two hundred feet across the narrow V of its wings.

And that enormous vehicle, Floyd told himself with some incredulity – yet also with some pride – is waiting for me. As far as he knew, it was the first time that an entire mission had been set up to take a single man to the Moon.

Though, it was two o'clock in the morning, a group of reporters and cameramen intercepted him on his way to the floodlit Orion III spacecraft. He knew several of them by sight, for as Chairman of the National Council of Astronautics, the news conference was part of his way of life. This was neither the time nor the place for one, and he had nothing to say; but it was important not to offend the gentlemen of the communications media.

"Dr. Floyd? I'm Jim Forster of Associated News. Could you give us a few words about this flight of yours?"

"I'm very sorry – I can't say anything."

"But you did meet with the President earlier this evening?" asked a familiar voice.

"Oh – hello, Mike. I'm afraid you've been dragged out of bed for nothing. Definitely no comment."

"Can you at least confirm or deny that some kind of epidemic has broken out on the Moon?" a TV reporter asked, managing to jog alongside and keep Floyd properly framed in his miniature TV camera.

"Sorry," said Floyd, shaking his head.

"What about the quarantine?" asked another reporter. "How long will it be kept on?"

"Still no comment."

"Dr. Floyd," demanded a very short and determined lady of the press, "what possible justification can there be for this total blackout of news from the Moon? Has it anything to do with the political situation?"

"What political situation?" Floyd asked dryly. There was a sprinkle of laughter, and someone called, "Have a good trip, Doctor!" as he made his way into the sanctuary of the boarding gantry.

As long, as he could remember, it had been not a "situation" so much as a permanent crisis. Since the 1970s, the world had been dominated by two problems which, ironically, tended to cancel each other out.

Though birth control was cheap, reliable, and endorsed by all the main religions, it had come too late; the population of the world was now six billion – a third of them in the Chinese Empire. Laws had even been passed in some authoritarian societies limiting families to two children, but their enforcement had proved impracticable. As a result, food was short in every country; even the United States had meatless days, and widespread famine was predicted within fifteen years, despite heroic efforts to farm the sea and to develop synthetic foods.

With the need for international cooperation more urgent than ever, there were still as many frontiers as in any earlier age. In a million years, the human race had lost few of its aggressive instincts; along symbolic lines visible only to politicians, the thirty-eight nuclear powers watched one another with belligerent anxiety. Among them, they possessed sufficient megatonnage to remove the entire surface crust of the planet. Although there had been – miraculously – no use of atomic weapons, this situation could hardly last forever.

And now, for their own inscrutable reasons, the Chinese were offering to the smallest have-not nations a complete nuclear capability of fifty warheads and delivery systems. The cost was under $200,000,000, and easy terms could be arranged.

Perhaps they were only trying to shore up their sagging economy, by turning obsolete weapons systems into hard cash, as some observers had suggested. Or perhaps they had discovered methods of warfare so advanced that they no longer had need of such toys; there had been talk of radio-hypnosis from satellite transmitters, compulsion viruses, and blackmail by synthetic diseases for which they alone possessed the antidote.

These charming ideas were almost certainly propaganda or pure fantasy, but it was not safe to discount any of them. Every time Floyd took off from Earth, he wondered if it would still be there when the time came to return.

The trim stewardess greeted him as he entered the cabin. "Good morning, Dr. Floyd. I'm Miss Simmons – I'd like to welcome you aboard on behalf of Captain Tynes and our copilot, First Officer Ballard."

"Thank you," said Floyd with a smile, wondering why stewardesses always had to sound like robot tour guides.

"Takeoff's in five minutes," she said, gesturing into the empty twenty-passenger cabin. "You can take any seat you want, but Captain Tynes recommends the forward window seat on the left, if you want to watch the docking operations."

"I'll do that," he answered, moving toward the preferred seat. The stewardess fussed over him awhile and then moved to her cubicle at the rear of the cabin.

Floyd settled down in his seat, adjusted the safety harness around waist and shoulders, and strapped his briefcase to the adjacent seat. A moment later, the loudspeaker came on with a soft popping noise. "Good morning," said Miss Simmons' voice. "This is Special Flight 3, Kennedy to Space Station One."

She was determined, it seemed, to go through the full routine for her solitary passenger, and Floyd could not resist a smile as she continued inexorably.

"Our transit time will be fifty-five minutes. Maximum acceleration will be two-gee, and we will be weightless for thirty minutes. Please do not leave your seat until the safety sign is lit."

Floyd looked over his shoulder and called, "Thank you." He caught a glimpse of a slightly embarrassed but charming smile.

He leaned back into his seat and relaxed. This trip, he calculated, would cost the taxpayers slightly over a million dollars. If it was not justified, he would be out of his job; but he could always go back to the university and to his interrupted studies of planetary formation.