10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

landing location. If it wasn't one thing, it was another. NASA ordered a four-minute delay.

Finally at 12.54 p.m., Atlantis boomed from its launchpad. Rising up from the Kennedy Center, streaking a trail of twin flames from its huge solid-fuel boosters, the shuttle reached above the atmosphere and into space.

At 7.15 p.m., exactly 6 hours and 21 minutes after lift-off, Galileo began its solo journey into space. And at 8.15 p.m., Galileo's booster ignited.

Inside shuttle mission control, NASA spokesman Brian Welch announced, 'The spacecraft Galileo . . . has achieved Earth escape velocity'.17

❖

Monday, 30 October 1989 NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland

The week starting 16 October had been a long one for the SPAN team. They were keeping twelve-hour days and dealing with hysterical people all day long. Still, they managed to get copies of anti-WANK out, despite the limitations of the dated SPAN records and the paucity of good logs allowing them to retrace the worm's path. 'What we learned that week was just how much data is not collected,' McMahon observed.

By Friday, 20 October, there were no new reports of worm attacks. It looked as though the crisis had passed. Things could be tidied up by the rest of the SPAN team and McMahon returned to his own work.

A week passed. All the while, though, McMahon was on edge. He doubted that someone who had gone to all that trouble of creating the WANK worm would let his baby be exterminated so quickly. The decoy-duck strategy only worked as long as the worm kept the same process name, and as long as it was programmed not to activate itself on systems which were