As a brand-new lieutenant, McCauley had been the first man to ride a rocket out of atmosphere. As a major, he was in the first piloted space craft to achieve an orbit and land again in one piece, and he helped to build the Space Platform. But it seemed likely that after he made colonel he was likely to be stuck with administrative tasks and go on no more trips. There was the affair of the Bramwell-Faraday screen, to be sure, but that was pure luck. He gloomily expected nothing more exciting than desk duty in some deadly tedious minor base upon the moon. But it happened that the asteroid Eros—very small, very irregular in shape, and very, very eccentric in its orbit—was due to pass close to Earth again as it went out from the sun. It had passed within two million miles of Earth in the 1930s
