"Thank you." Elías replies, with perhaps too much relief. He hangs up.
________________________________________________

Building a safe rocket is no easy task. But once you accept 50-50 odds of returning alive things get a lot simpler. It took a slide rule and fifteen minutes to figure out what they had to do--a few phone calls later, and Nico Fermi and Roman Dirac had what they needed.
It's amazing what physicists can accomplish with a couple ICBMs and no adult supervision.

They already have their spaceship--an orbiter craft, [i]Bohr[/i], which, after welding a couple intercontinental missiles to its sides, becomes an effective, if horribly unsafe, interplanetary spacecraft. But there are other problems: Sañira has no real astronauts--[i]Bohr's[/i] previous occupant, a dog-like animal by the name of Oscar, had cooked when the radiator systems failed.

So when Dirac and Fermi decide they were going up in [i]Bohr[/i], no one is in a position to stop them.

The ascent is unsteady; three times [i]Bohr[/i] threatens to tumble, but RCS systems keep it on course. There is no gravity turn for a ship this unstable, but the ICBMs give it delta-v to spare, and so the scientists make it to orbit in their makeshift rocket, silhouetted against the empty sky. 
[img=http://i.imgur.com/rn3SRL4.jpg]