Time passed after Ed McCauley became Major Ed McCauley, and most people forgot him. If his name was mentioned, someone might say vaguely: “McCauley ... McCauley? It seems to me I’ve heard the name.” This was because remarkable events don’t stay remarkable as time goes past. There was a two-hundred-pound satellite circling the moon these days, industriously sending back not only pictures of the moon’s far side, but pictures of cloud masses on Earth which told much more about Earth’s weather than had been known before. A drone missile had gone out to Mars, and its instruments suggested that men had better not come out just yet, and other drones had gone past Venus and said definitely that men better not come out just yet. So something had to be done to make those journeys possible. Men had t
