You sat with Howie on the roof, but you weren’t there looking for flying saucers, nor even to watching the distant movies at Oakleigh drive-in. We were searching for Sputnik.
    “We’re not going to see it. There’s too much cloud,” Howie fretted.
    “It would have gone over half an hour ago, if it was on schedule,” you said.
    “Maybe its running late.”
    “I don’t think it can...”
    And then it was there. Just a faint star, but one that moved, drifting at a leisurely pace straight overhead. It was just a light metal ball with a beeper inside but it’s proud repetitious signal scared the living daylights out of the Yanks. And demolished utterly their certainty of world domination and scientific leadership. But we kids didn’t give a damn who did it, just as long as someone did. The Americans were being far too slow about it all—they still are. They will be known to posterity as the morons who went to the moon and couldn’t figure out that you go to Mars next.
        As Sputnik traversed the Southern Cross, it vanished in a haze that you only slowly realised was a film of tears in your eyes. Your heart melted. Reality had finally caught up with science fiction. This was better than anything you’d ever seen on television.
   And you refused to be disillusioned by the subsequent news that Sputnik was in fact far too small to be visible and what we had actually observed was one of the booster rockets trailing along behind it.