Joe was relieved. Sally Holt had been somewhere around underfoot all
his life. She was a swell girl, but he was grateful that he didn't have
to talk to her just now.
He poured coffee and looked at his watch. He went to the window. The
faraway howling was much nearer, and dawn had definitely arrived. Small
cloudlets in a pale blue sky were tinted pinkish by the rising sun.
Patches of yucca and mesquite and sage out beyond the officers' quarters
area stretched away to a far-off horizon. They were now visibly
different in color from the red-yellow earth between them, and cast
long, streaky shadows. The cause of the howling was still invisible.
But Joe cared nothing for that. He stared skyward, searching. And he saw
what he looked for.
There was a small bright sliver of sunlight high aloft. It moved slowly
toward the east. It showed the unmistakable glint of sunshine upon
polished steel. It was the artificial satellite--a huge steel
hull--which had been built in the gigantic Shed from whose shadow Joe
looked upward. It was the size of an ocean liner, and six weeks since
some hundreds of pushpots, all straining at once, had gotten it out of
the Shed and panted toward the sky with it. They'd gotten it twelve
miles high and speeding eastward at the ultimate speed they could
manage. They'd fired jato rockets, all at once, and so pushed its speed
up to the preposterous. Then they'd dropped away and the giant steel
thing had fired its own rockets--which made mile-long flames--and swept
on out to emptiness. Before its rockets were consumed it was in an orbit
4,000 miles above the Earth's surface, and it hurtled through space at
something over 12,000 miles an hour. It circled the Earth in exactly
four hours, fourteen minutes, and twenty-two seconds. And it would
continue its circling forever, needing no fuel and never descending. It
was a second moon for the planet Earth.
But it could be destroyed.
Joe watched hungrily as it went on to meet the sun. Smoothly,
unhurriedly, serenely, the remote and twinkling speck floated on out of
sight. And then Joe went back to the table and ate his breakfast
quickly. He wolfed it. He had an appointment to meet that minute speck
some 4,000 miles out in space. His appointment was for a very few hours
hence.
He'd been training for just this morning's effort since before the
Platform's launching. There was a great box swinging in twenty-foot
gimbal rings over in the Shed. There were motors and projectors and over
two thousand vacuum tubes, relays and electronic units. It was a space
flight simulator--a descendant of the Link trainer which once taught
plane pilots how to fly. But this offered the problems and the
sensations of rocketship control, and for many hours every day Joe and
the three members of his crew had labored in it. The simulator
duplicated every sight and sound and feeling--all but heavy
acceleration--to be experienced in the take-off of a rocketship to
space. The similitude of flight was utterly convincing. Sometimes it was
appallingly so when emergencies and catastrophes and calamities were
staged in horrifying detail for them to learn to respond to. In six
weeks they'd learned how to handle a spaceship so far as anybody could
learn on solid ground--if the simulator was correctly built. Nobody
could be sure about that. But it was the best training that could be
devised.
In minutes Joe had finished the coffee and was out of Major Holt's
quarters and headed for the Shed's nearest entrance. The Shed was a
gigantic metal structure rising out of sheer flat desert. There were
hills to the westward, but only arid plain to the east and south and
north. There was but one town in hundreds of miles and that was
Bootstrap, built to house the workmen who'd built the Platform and the
still invisible, ferociously howling pushpots and now the small supply
ships, the first of which was to make its first trip today.
The Shed seemed very near because of its monstrous size. When he was
actually at the base of its wall, it seemed to fill half the firmament
and more than half the horizon. He went in, and felt self-conscious when
the guard's eyes fell on his uniform. There was a tiny vestibule. Then
he was in the Shed itself, and it was enormous.
There were acres of wood-block flooring. There was a vast,
steel-girdered arching roof which was fifty stories high in the center.
All this size had been needed when the Space Platform was being built.
Men on the far side were merely specks, and the rows of windows to
admit light usually did no more than make a gray twilight inside. But
there was light enough today. To the east the Shed's wall was split from
top to bottom. A colossal triangular gore had been loosened and thrust
out and rolled aside, and a doorway a hundred and fifty feet wide let in
the sunshine. Through it, Joe could see the fiery red ball which was the
sun just leaving the horizon.
But there was something more urgent for him to look at. Pelican One had
been moved into its launching cage. Only Joe, perhaps, would really have
recognized it. Actually it was a streamlined hull of steel, eighty feet
long by twenty in diameter. There were stubby metal fins--useless in
space, and even on take-off, but essential for the planned method of
landing on its return. There were thick quartz ports in the bow-section.
But its form was completely concealed now by the attached, exterior
take-off rockets. It had been shifted into the huge cradle of steel
beams from which it was to be launched. Men swarmed about it and over
it, in and out of the launching cage, checking and rechecking every
possible thing that could make for the success of its flight to space.
The other three crew-members were ready--Haney and Chief Bender and Mike
Scandia. They were especially entitled to be the crew of this first
supply ship. When the Platform was being built, its pilot-gyros had been
built by a precision tool firm owned by Joe's father. He'd gone by plane
with the infinitely precise apparatus to Bootstrap, to deliver and
install it in the Platform. And the plane was sabotaged, and the gyros
were ruined. They'd consumed four months in the building, and four
months more for balancing with absolute no-tolerance accuracy. The
Platform couldn't wait so long for duplicates. So Joe had improvised a
method of repair. And with Haney to devise special machine-tool setups
and the Chief to use fanatically fine workmanship, and Mike and Joe
aiding according to their gifts, they'd rebuilt the apparatus in an
impossibly short time. The original notion was Joe's, but he couldn't
have done the job without the others.
And there had been other, incidental triumphs by the team of four. They
were not the only ones who worked feverishly for the glory of having
helped to build the Earth's first artificial moon, but they had
accomplished more than most. Joe had even been appointed to be an
alternate member of the Platform's crew. But the man he was to have
substituted for recovered from an illness, and Joe was left behind at
the Platform's launching. But all of them had rated some reward, and it
was to serve in the small ships that would supply the man-made
satellite.
Now they were ready to begin. The Chief grinned exuberantly as Joe
ducked through the bars of the launching cage and approached the ship.
He was a Mohawk Indian--one of that tribe which for two generations had
supplied steel workers to every bridge and dam and skyscraper job on the
continent. He was brown and bulky and explosive. Haney looked tense and
strained. He was tall and lean and spare, and a good man in any sort of
trouble. Mike blazed excitement. Mike was forty-one inches high and he
was full-grown. He had worked on the Platform, bucking rivets and making
welds and inspections in places too small for a normal-sized man to
reach. He frantically resented any concessions to his size and he was as
good a man as any. He simply was the small, economy size.
"Hiya, Joe," boomed the Chief. "All set? Had breakfast?"
Joe nodded. He began to ask anxious questions. About steering-rocket
fuel and the launching cage release and the take-off rockets and the
reduction valve from the air tanks--he'd thought of that on the way
over--and the short wave and loran and radar. Haney nodded to some
questions. Mike said briskly, "I checked" to others.
The Chief grunted amiably, "Look, Joe! We checked everything last night.
We checked it again this morning. I even caught Mike polishing the
ejection seats, because there wasn't anything else to make sure of!"
Joe managed a smile. The ejection seats were assuredly the most unlikely
of all devices to be useful today. They were supposedly life-saving
devices. If the ship came a cropper on take-off, the four of them were
supposed to use ejection-seats like those supplied to jet pilots. They
would be thrown clear of the ship and ribbon-parachutes might open and
might let them land alive. But it wasn't likely. Joe had objected to
their presence. If a feather dropped to Earth from a height of 600
miles, it would be falling so fast when it hit the atmosphere that it
would heat up and burn to ashes from pure air-friction. It wasn't likely
that they could get out of the ship if anything went wrong.
Somebody marched stiffly toward the four of them. Joe's expression grew
rueful. The Space Project was neither Army nor Navy nor Air Corps, but
something that so far was its own individual self. But the man marching
toward Joe was Lieutenant Commander Brown, strictly Navy, assigned to
the Shed as an observer. And there were some times when he baffled Joe.
Like now.
He halted, and looked as if he expected Joe to salute. Joe didn't.
Lieutenant Commander Brown said, formally: "I would like to offer my
best wishes for your trip, Mr. Kenmore."
"Thanks," said Joe.
Brown smiled distantly. "You understand, of course, that I consider
navigation essentially a naval function, and it does seem to me that any
ship, including a spaceship, should be manned by naval personnel. But I
assuredly wish you good fortune."
"Thanks," said Joe again.
Brown shook hands, then stalked off.
Haney rumbled in his throat. "How come, Joe, he doesn't wish all of us
good luck?"
"He does," said Joe. "But his mind's in uniform too. He's been trained
that way. I'd like to make a bet that we have him as a passenger out to
the Platform some day."
"Heaven forbid!" growled Haney.
There was an outrageous tumult outside the wide-open gap in the Shed's
wall. Something went shrieking by the doorway. It looked like the
magnified top half of a loaf of baker's bread, painted gray and equipped
with an air-scoop in front and a plastic bubble for a pilot. It howled
like a lost baby dragon, its flat underside tilted up and up until it
was almost vertical. It had no wings, but a blue-white flame spurted
out of its rear, wobbling from side to side for reasons best known to
itself. It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane
because it could not possibly fly. Only it did. It settled down on its
flame-spouting tail, and the sparse vegetation burst into smoky flame
and shriveled, and the thing--still shrieking like a fog-horn in a
tunnel--flopped flat forward with a resounding _clank!_ It was abruptly
silent.
But the total noise was not lessened. Another pushpot came soaring
wildly into view, making hysterical outcries. It touched and banged
violently to earth. Others appeared in the air beyond the construction
Shed. One flopped so hard on landing that its tail rose in the air and
it attempted a somersault. It made ten times more noise than before--the
flame from its tail making wild gyrations--and flopped back again with a
crash. Two others rolled over on their sides after touching ground. One
ended up on its back like a tumble-bug, wriggling.
They seemed to land by hundreds, but their number was actually in
dozens. It was not until the last one was down that Joe could make
himself heard. The pushpots were jet motors in frames and metal skin,
with built-in jato rocket tubes besides their engines. On the ground
they were quite helpless. In the air they were unbelievably clumsy. They
were actually balanced and steered by vanes in the blasts of their jets,
and they combined the absolute maximum of sheer thrust with the
irreducible minimum of flyability.
Crane-trucks went out to pick them up. Joe said anxiously, "We'd better
check our flight plan again. We have to know it absolutely!"
He headed across the floor to the flight data board. He passed the hull
of another ship like his own, which was near completion, and the bare
skeletons of two others which needed a lot of work yet. They'd been
begun at distant plants and then hauled here on monstrous trailers for
completion. The wooden mockup of the design for all the ships--in which
every possible arrangement of instruments and machinery had been tested
out--lay neglected by the Shed wall.
The four stood before the flight data board. It listed the readings
every instrument should show during every instant of the flight. The
readings had been calculated with infinite care, and Joe and the others
needed to know them rather better than they knew their multiplication
tables. Once they started out, they wouldn't have time to wonder if
everything was right for the time and place. They needed to know.
They stood there, soaking up the information the board contained,
forming mental pictures of it, making as sure as possible that any one
of them would spot anything wrong the instant it showed up, and would
instantly know what had to be done about it.
A gigantic crane-truck came in through the wide doorway. It dangled a
pushpot. It rolled over to the launching cage in which the spaceship lay
and set the unwieldy metal object against that cage. There was a _clank_
as the pushpot caught hold of the magnetic grapples. The crane went out
again, passing a second crane carrying a second pushpot. The second
beetle-like thing was presented to the cage. It stuck fast. The crane
went out for more.
Major Holt came across the floor of the Shed. It took him a long time to
walk the distance from the Security offices to the launching cage. When
he got there, he looked impatiently around. His daughter Sally came out
of nowhere and blew her nose as if she'd been crying, and pointed to the
data board. The major shrugged his shoulders and looked uneasily at her.
She regarded him with some defiance. The major spoke to her sternly.
They waited.
The cranes brought in more pushpots and set them up against the steel
launching cage. The ship had been nearly hidden before by the rocket
tubes fastened outside its hull. It went completely out of sight behind
the metal monsters banked about it.
The major looked at his watch and the group about the data board. They
moved away from it and back toward the ship. Joe saw the major and
swerved over to him.
"I have brought you," said the major in an official voice, "the invoice
of your cargo. You will deliver the invoice with the cargo and bring
back proper receipts."
"I hope," said Joe.
"_We_ hope!" said Sally in a strained tone. "Good luck, Joe!"
"Thanks."
"There is not much to say to you," said the major without visible
emotion. "Of course the next crew will start its training immediately,
but it may be a month before another ship can take off. It is extremely
desirable that you reach the Platform today."
"Yes, sir," said Joe wrily. "I have even a personal motive to get there.
If I don't, I break my neck."
The major ignored the comment. He shook hands formally and marched away.
Sally smiled up at Joe, but her eyes were suddenly full of tears.
"I--do hope everything goes all right, Joe," she said unsteadily.
"I--I'll be praying for you."
"I can use some of that, too," admitted Joe.
She looked at her hand. Joe's ring was on her finger--wrapped with
string on the inside of the band to make it fit. Then she looked up
again and was crying unashamedly.
"I--will," she repeated. Then she said fiercely, "I don't care if
somebody's looking, Joe. It's time for you to go in the ship."
He kissed her, and turned and went quickly to the peculiar mass of
clustered pushpots, touching and almost overlapping each other.
He ducked under and looked back. Sally waved. He waved back. Then he
climbed up the ladder into Pelican One's cabin. Somebody pulled the
ladder away and scuttled out of the cage.
The others were in their places. Joe slowly closed the door from the
cabin to the outer world. There was suddenly a cushioned silence about
him. Out the quartz-glass ports he could see ahead, out the end of the
cage through the monstrous doorway to the desert beyond. Overhead he
could see the dark, girder-lined roof of the Shed. On either side,
though, he could see only the scratched, dented, flat undersides of the
pushpots ready to lift the ship upward.
"You can start on the pushpot motors, Haney," he said curtly.
Joe moved to his own, the pilot's seat. Haney pushed a button. Through
the fabric of the ship came the muted uproar of a pushpot engine
starting. Haney pushed another button. Another. Another. More jet
engines bellowed. The tumult in the Shed would be past endurance, now.
Joe strapped himself into his seat. He made sure that the Chief at the
steering-rocket manual controls was fastened properly, and Mike at the
radio panel was firmly belted past the chance of injury.