"Steering rockets ready," the Chief reported.
"Radio operating," came from Mike. "Communications room all set."
Joe reached to the maneuver controls. He should have been sweating. His
hands, perhaps, should have quivered with tension. But he was too much
worried about too many things. Nobody can strike an attitude or go into
a blue funk while they are worrying about things to be done. Joe heard
the small gyro motors as their speed went up. A hum and a whine and then
a shrill whistle which went up in pitch until it wasn't anything at all.
He frowned anxiously and said to Haney, "I'm taking over the pushpots."
Haney nodded. Joe took the over-all control. The roar of engines outside
grew loud on the right-hand side, and died down. It grew thunderous to
the left, and dwindled. The ones ahead pushed. Then the ones behind. Joe
nodded and wet his lips. He said: "Here we go."
There was no more ceremony than that. The noise of the jet motors
outside rose to a thunderous volume which came even through the little
ship's insulated hull. Then it grew louder, and louder still, and Joe
stirred the controls by ever so tiny a movement.
Suddenly the ship did not feel solid. It stirred a little. Joe held his
breath and cracked the over-all control of the pushpots' speed a tiny
trace further. The ship wobbled a little. Out the quartz-glass windows,
the great door seemed to descend. In reality the clustered pushpots and
the launching cage rose some thirty feet from the Shed floor and hovered
there uncertainly. Joe shifted the lever that governed the vanes in the
jet motor blasts. Ship and cage and pushpots, all together, wavered
toward the doorway. They passed out of it, rocking a little and pitching
a little and wallowing a little. As a flying device, the combination was
a howling tumult and a horror. It was an aviation designer's nightmare.
It was a bad dream by any standard.
But it wasn't meant as a way to fly from one place to another on Earth.
It was the first booster stage of a three-stage rocket aimed at outer
space. It looked rather like--well--if a swarm of bumblebees clung
fiercely to a wire-gauze cage in which lay a silver minnow wrapped in
match-sticks; and if the bees buzzed furiously and lifted it in a
straining, clumsy, and altogether unreasonable manner; and if the
appearance and the noise together were multiplied a good many thousands
of times--why--it would present a great similarity to the take-off of
the spaceship under Joe's command. Nothing like it could be graceful or
neatly controllable or even very speedy in the thick atmosphere near the
ground. But higher, it would be another matter.
It _was_ another matter. Once clear of the Shed, and with flat, sere
desert ahead to the very horizon, Joe threw on full power to the pushpot
motors. The clumsy-seeming aggregation of grotesque objects began to
climb. Ungainly it was, and clumsy it was, but it went upward at a rate
a jet-fighter might have trouble matching. It wobbled, and it swung
around and around, and it tipped crazily, the whole aggregation of jet
motors and cage and burden of spaceship as a unit. But it rose!
The ground dropped so swiftly that even the Shed seemed to shrivel like
a pricked balloon. The horizon retreated as if a carpet were hastily
unrolled by magic. The barometric pressure needles turned.
"Communications says our rate-of-climb is 4,000 feet a minute and going
up fast," Mike announced. "It's five.... We're at 17,000 feet ...
18,000. We should get some eastward velocity at 32,000 feet. Our height
is now 21,000 feet...."
There was no change in the feel of things inside the ship, of course.
Sealed against the vacuum of space, barometric pressure outside made no
difference. Height had no effect on the air inside the ship.
At 25,000 feet the Chief said suddenly: "We're pointed due east, Joe.
Freeze it?"
"Right," said Joe. "Freeze it."
The Chief threw a lever. The gyros were running at full operating speed.
By engaging them, the Chief had all their stored-up kinetic energy
available to resist any change of direction the pushpots might produce
by minor variations in their thrusts. Haney brooded over the reports
from the individual engines outside. He made minute adjustments to keep
them balanced. Mike uttered curt comments into the communicator from
time to time.
At 33,000 feet there was a momentary sensation as if the ship were
tilted sharply. It wasn't. The instruments denied any change from level
rise. The upward-soaring complex of flying things had simply risen into
a jet-stream, one of those wildly rushing wind-floods of the upper
atmosphere.
"Eastern velocity four hundred," said Mike from the communicator. "Now
four-twenty-five.... Four-forty."
There was a 300-mile-an-hour wind behind them. A tail-wind, west to
east. The pushpots struggled now to get the maximum possible forward
thrust before they rose out of that east-bound hurricane. They added a
fierce push to eastward to their upward thrust. Mike's cracked voice
reported 500 miles an hour. Presently it was 600.
At 40,000 feet they were moving eastward at 680 miles an hour. A
jet-motor cannot be rated except indirectly, but there was over 200,000
horsepower at work to raise the spacecraft and build up the highest
possible forward speed. It couldn't be kept up, of course. The pushpots
couldn't carry enough fuel.
But they reached 55,000 feet, which is where space begins for humankind.
A man exposed to emptiness at that height will die just as quickly as
anywhere between the stars. But it wasn't quite empty space for the
pushpots. There was still a very, very little air. The pushpots could
still thrust upward. Feebly, now, but they still thrust.