into conducting some dangerous rocket tests with Rausch. Rausch is tense and jittery and gives coworkers an impression that he is concealing personal inexperience in conducting such tests. There is an explosion, and Brack's friend Sim suffers terrible injuries: physical and chemical burns and lung damage that leaves him close to death. Brack's fiancée, a witness, tells Brack that Rausch was panicky during the test and "never stopped fiddling with the switches... he was like some hot-head whose car won't start but who keeps on turning the ignition switch." She thinks Rausch could have caused the explosion (a concern which ultimately turns out to be unfounded). Brack furiously argues with Rausch, then debates with his superior about the project's future and who should lead it. Brack convinces his superior to let him continue as leader. As the discussion closes, his superior says "Okay, it's all settled." But he adds "One other thing—I'm firing the girl." Brack's protest sticks in his throat; "ashamed, he looked at his feet, and then he nodded." The book closes with Brack and Rausch standing together literally arm in arm, watching the conclusion of a successful missile test. "Did you see it, Gunther?" Brack says. "Yah," breaths Rausch, "Just like a star. A shooting star." "And we made it," says Brack, proudly, as the tale ends. The New York Times reviewer says that "the question arises... whether Brack is to be regarded as an all-wool idealist pursuing heroically his destiny despite any and all distractions tossed in his way. Or is he a less desirable type, possessed of the ability to abandon all pretense to ethical conduct in his ambitious pursuit after self-advancement?" Although the Times calls it an "absorbing narrative," to a modern reader much of the interest lies, not in the broad story outline, but in the dozens of little details and circumstantial touches which bring times, places, and situations—not well documented elsewhere—to life. Quotations At night, floodlights glare from artfully concealing shrubbery and lave the main building with a white light that emphasizes black-trimmed, three-story windows rising in uninterrupted, eye-leading verticals toward a dominant, austere dome mimicked from some classic pile of ancient Rome. On every slab-sided cornice, like proclamations of faith needing no explanation, are chiseled Darwin, Newton, Aristotle and, in lesser letters, the names of the more numerous Lavoisiers and Eulers and Faradays who have discovered the chemical elements or evolved