When the noise reached us a second later, we recognized it as the loudest any of us had ever heard, louder of course than thunder, jets, and the explosive charges set off in quarries, the concentrated energies of tens of millions of years of solar energy being released in an instant. We recognized that we were caught up in an irreproducible and irrepresentable event.Moreover, what lent the scene its particular drama, though it would invariably be omitted from later accounts, was our terror as to what would happen next, for it seemed unlikely that there could ever be a sane, bloodless conclusion to the cataclysm.
The rocket rose, and there was a collective gasp, a most naive, amazed Ahh, inarticulate and primordial, as all of us for a moment forgot ourselves — our education, manners, and sense of irony - to follow the fine white javelin on its ascent through the southern skies.
