Subject: Cooperation and courtesy in rocket recovery vehicle
launchings.
1. There is a regrettable lack of coordination and courtesy in the
launching of rocket-recovery vehicles (space wagons) in the
normal operation of the Platform.
2. The maintenance of discipline and efficiency requires that the
commanding officer maintain overall control of all operations at
all times.
3. Hereafter when a space vehicle of any type is to be launched, the
commanding officer will be notified in writing not less than one
hour before such launching.
4. The time of such proposed launching will be given in such
notification in hours and minutes and seconds, Greenwich Mean
Time.
5. All commands for launching will be given by the commanding
officer or an officer designated by him._"
Joe received the memo as he was in the act of writing a painstaking
report on the maneuver Mike had carried out. Mike was radiant as he
discussed possible improvements with later and better equipment. After
all, this had been a lucky landing. For a robot to end up no more than
30 miles from its target, after a journey of 4,000 miles, and with a
difference in velocity that was almost immeasurable--such good fortune
couldn't be expected as a regular thing. The space wagons were tiny. If
they had to travel long distances to recover erratic ships coming up
from Earth----
Joe forgot all about Lieutenant Commander Brown and his memo when the
mail was distributed. Joe had three letters from Sally. He read them in
the great living compartment of the Platform with its sixty-foot length
and its carpet on floor and ceiling, and the galleries without stairs
outside the sleeping cabins. He sat in a chair with thigh grips to hold
him in place, and he wore a gravity simulation harness. It was
necessary. The regular crew of the Platform, by this time, couldn't have
handled space wagons in action against enemy manned rockets. Joe meant
to stay able to take acceleration.
It was just as he finished his mail that Brent came in.
"Big news!" said Brent. "They're building a big new ship of new
design--almost half as big as the Platform. With concreted metal they
can do it in weeks."
"What's it for?" demanded Joe.
"It'll be a human base on the Moon," said Brent relievedly. "An
expedition will start in six weeks, according to plan. As long as we're
the only American base in space, we're going to be shot at. But a base
on the Moon will be invulnerable. So they're going ahead with it."
Joe said hopefully:
"Any orders for me to join it?"
Brent shook his head. "We're to be loaded up with supplies for the Moon
expedition. We're to be ready to take a robot ship every round.
Actually, they can't hope to send us more than two a day for a while,
but even that'll be eighty tons of supplies to be stored away."
The Chief grumbled, but somehow his grumbling did not sound genuine.
"They're going to the Moon--and leave us here to do stevedore stuff?"
His tone was odd. He looked at a letter he'd been reading and gave up
pretense. He said self-consciously: "Listen, you guys.... My tribe's got
all excited. I just got a letter from the council. They've been having
an argument about me. Wanna hear?"
He was a little amused, and a little embarrassed, but something had
happened to make him feel good.
"Let's have it," said Joe. Mike was very still in another chair. He
didn't look up, though he must have heard. Haney cocked an interested
ear.
The Chief said awkwardly, "You know--us Mohawks are kinda proud. We got
something to be proud of. We were one of the Five Nations, when that was
a sort of United Nations and all Europe was dog-eat-dog. My tribe had a
big pow-wow about me. There's a tribe member that's a professor of
anthropology out in Chicago. He was there. And a couple of guys that do
electronic research, and doctors and farmers and all sorts of guys. All
Mohawks. They got together in tribal council."
He stopped and flushed under his dark skin. "I wouldn't tell you, only
you guys are in on it."
Still he hesitated. Joe found a curious picture forming in his mind.
He'd known the Chief a long time, and he knew that part of the tribe
lived in Brooklyn, and individual members were widely scattered. But
still there was a certain remote village which to all the tribesmen was
home. Everybody went back there from time to time, to rest from the
strangeness of being Indians in a world of pale-skinned folk.
Joe could almost imagine the council. There'd be old, old men who could
nearly remember the days of the tribe's former glory, who'd heard
stories of forest warfare and zestful hunts, and scalpings and heroic
deeds from their grandfathers. But there were also doctors and lawyers
and technical men in that council which met to talk about the Chief.
"It's addressed to me," said the Chief with sudden clumsiness, "in the
World-by-itself Canoe. That's the Platform here. And it says--I'll have
to translate, because it's in Mohawk." He took a deep breath. "It says,
'We your tribesmen have heard of your journeyings off the Earth where
men have never traveled before. This has given us great pride, that one
of our tribe and kin had ventured so valiantly.'" The Chief grinned
abashedly. He went on. "'In full assembly, the elders of the tribe have
held counsel on a way to express their pride in you, and in the friends
you have made who accompanied you. It was proposed that you be given a
new name to be borne by your sons after you. It was proposed that the
tribe accept from each of its members a gift to be given you in the name
of the tribe. But these were not considered great enough. Therefore the
tribe, in full council, has decreed that your name shall be named at
every tribal council of the Mohawks from this day to the end of time, as
one the young braves would do well to copy in all ways. And the names of
your friends Joe Kenmore, Mike Scandia, and Thomas Haney shall also be
named as friends whose like all young braves should strive to seek out
and to be.'"
The Chief sweated a little, but he looked enormously proud. Joe went
over to him and shook hands warmly. The Chief almost broke his fingers.
It was, of course, as high an honor as could be paid to anybody by the
people who paid it.
Haney said awkwardly, "Lucky they don't know me like you do, Chief. But
it's swell!"
Which it was. But Mike hadn't said a word. The Chief said exuberantly:
"Did you hear that, Mike? Every Mohawk for ten thousand years is gonna
be told that you were a swell guy! Crazy, huh?"
Mike said in an odd voice: "Yeah. I didn't mean that, Chief. It's fine!
But I--I got a letter. I--never thought to get a letter like this."
He looked unbelievingly at the paper in his hands.
"Mash note?" asked the Chief. His tone was a little bit harsh. Mike was
a midget. And there were women who were fools. It would be unbearable if
some half-witted female had written Mike the sort of gushing letter
that some half-witted females might write.
Mike shook his head, with an odd, quick smile.
"Not what you think, Chief. But it is from a girl. She sent me her
picture. It's a--swell letter. I'm--going to answer it. You can look at
her picture. She looks kind of--nice."
He handed the Chief a snapshot. The Chief's face changed. Haney looked
over his shoulder. He passed the picture to Joe and said ferociously:
"You Mike! You doggoned Don Juan! The Chief and me have got to warn her
what kinda guy you are! Stealing from blind men! Fighting cops----"
Joe looked at the picture. It was a very sweet small face, and the eyes
that looked out of the photograph were very honest and yearning. And Joe
understood. He grinned at Mike. Because this girl had the distinctive
look that Mike had. She was a midget, too.
"She's--thirty-nine inches tall," said Mike, almost stunned. "She's just
two inches shorter than me. And--she says she doesn't mind being a
midget so much since she heard about me. I'm going to write her."
But it would be, of course, a long time before there was a way for mail
to get down to Earth.
It was a long time. Now it was possible to send up robot rockets to the
Platform. They came up. When the second arrived, Haney went out to pull
it in. Joe forgot to notify Brown, in writing, an hour before launching
a rocket recovery vehicle (space wagon) according to paragraph 3 of the
formal memo, nor the time of launching in hours, minutes, etc., by
Greenwich Mean Time (paragraph 4), nor was the testing of all equipment
made before moving it into the airlock. This was because the testing
equipment was in the airlock, where it belonged. And the commands for
launching were not given by Brown or an officer designated by him,
because Joe forgot all about it.
Brown made a stormy scene about the matter, and Joe was honestly
apologetic, but the Chief and Haney and Mike glared venomously.
The result was completely inconclusive. Joe had not been put under
Brown's command. He and his crew were the only people on the Platform
physically in shape to operate the space wagons, considering the
acceleration involved. Brent and the others were wearing gravity
simulators, and were building back to strength. But they weren't up to
par as yet. They'd been in space too long.
So there was nothing Brown could do. He retreated into icily correct,
outraged dignity. And the others hauled in and unloaded rockets as they
arrived. They came up fast. The processes of making them had been
improved. They could be made faster, heated to sintering temperature
faster, and the hulls cooled to usefulness in a quarter of the former
time. The production of space ship hulls went up to four a day, while
the molds for the Moonship were being worked even faster. The Moonship,
actually, was assembled from precast individual cells which then were
welded together. It would have features the Platform lacked, because it
was designed to be a base for exploration and military activities in
addition to research.
But only twenty days after the recovery and docking of the first robot
ship to rise, a new sort of ship entirely came blindly up as a robot.
The little space wagons hauled it to the airlock and inside. They
unloaded it--and it was no longer a robot. It was a modified hull
designed for the duties of a tug in space. It could carry a crew of
four, and its cargohold was accessible from the cabin. It had an
airlock. More, it carried a cargo of solid-fuel rockets which could be
shifted to firing racks outside its hull. Starting from the platform,
where it had no effective weight, it was capable of direct descent to
the Earth without spiralling or atmospheric braking. To make that
descent it would, obviously, expend four-fifths of its loaded weight in
rockets. And since it had no weight at the Platform, but only mass, it
was capable of far-ranging journeying. It could literally take off from
the Platform and reach the Moon and land on it, and then return to the
Platform.
But that had to wait.
"Sure we could do it," agreed Joe, when Mike wistfully pointed out the
possibility. "It would be good to try it. But unfortunately, space
exploration isn't a stunt. We've gotten this far because--somebody
wanted to do something. But----" Then he said, "It could be done and the
United Nations wouldn't do it. So the United States had to, or--somebody
else would have. You can figure who that would be, and what use they'd
make of space travel! So it's important. It's more important than stunt
flights we could make!"
"Nobody could stop us if we wanted to take off!" Mike said rebelliously.
"True," Joe said. "But we four can stand three gravities acceleration
and handle any more manned rockets that start out here. We've lived
through plenty more than that! But Brent and the others couldn't put up
a fight in space. They're wearing harness now, and they're coming back
to strength. But we're going to stay right here and do stevedoring--and
fighting too, if it comes to that--until the job is done."
And that was the way it was, too. Of stevedoring there was plenty. Two
robot ships a day for weeks on end. Three ships a day for a time. Four.
Sometimes things went smoothly, and the little space wagons could go out
and bring back the great, rocket-scarred hulls from Earth. But once in
three times the robots were going too fast or too slow. The space wagons
couldn't handle them. Then the new ship, the space tug, went out and
hooked onto the robot with a chain and used the power it had to bring
them to their destination. And sometimes the robots didn't climb
straight. At least once the space tug captured an erratic robot 400
miles from its destination and hauled it in. It used some heavy
solid-fuel rockets on that trip.
The Platform had become, in fact, a port in space, though so far it had
had only arrivals and no departures. Its storage compartments almost
bulged with fuel stores and food stores and equipment of every
imaginable variety. It had a stock of rockets which were enough to land
it safely on Earth, though there was surely no intention of doing so. It
had food and air for centuries. It had repair parts for all its own
equipment. And it had weapons. It contained, in robot hulls anchored to
its sides, enough fissionable material to conduct a deadly war--which
was only stored for transfer to the Moon base when that should be
established.
And it had communication with Earth of high quality. So far the actual
mail was only a one-way service, but even entertainment came up, and
news. Once there was a television shot of the interior of the Shed. It
was carefully scrambled before transmission, but it was a heartening
sight. The Shed on the TV screen appeared a place of swarming activity.
Robot hulls were being made. They were even improved, fined down to ten
tons of empty weight apiece, and their controls were assembly line
products now. And there was the space flight simulator with men
practicing in it, although for the time being only robots were taking
off from Earth. And there was the Moonship.
It didn't look like the Platform, but rather like something a child
might have put together out of building blocks. It was built up out of
welded-together cells with strengthening members added. It was 60 feet
high from the floor and twice as long, and it did not weigh nearly what
it seemed to. Already it was being clad in that thick layer of heat
insulation it would need to endure the two-week-long lunar night. It
could take off very soon now.
The pictured preparations back on Earth meant round-the-clock drudgery
for Joe and the others. They wore themselves out. But the storage space
on the Platform filled up. Days and weeks went by. Then there came a
time when literally nothing else could be stored, so Joe and his crew
made ready to go back to Earth.
They ate hugely and packed a very small cargo in their ship. They picked
up one bag of mail and four bags of scientific records and photographs
which had only been transmitted by facsimile TV before. They got into
the space tug. It floated free.
"_You will fire in ten seconds_," said a crisp voice in Joe's
headphones. "_Ten ... nine ... eight ... seven ... six ... five ... four
... three ... two ... one ... fire!_"
Joe crooked his index finger. There was an explosive jolt. Rockets
flamed terribly in emptiness. The space tug rushed toward the west. The
Platform seemed to dwindle with startling suddenness. It seemed to rush
away and become lost in the myriads of stars. The space tug accelerated
at four gravities in the direction opposed to its orbital motion.
As the acceleration built up, it dropped toward Earth and home like a
tumbled stone.
10
There was bright sunshine at the Shed, not a single cloud in all the
sky. The radar bowls atop the roof--they seemed almost invisibly small
compared with its vastness--wavered and shifted and quivered. Completely
invisible beams of microwaves lanced upward. Atop the Shed, in the
communication room, there was the busy quiet of absolute intentness.
Signals came down and were translated into visible records which fed
instantly into computers. Then the computers clicked and hummed and
performed incomprehensible integrations, and out of their slot-mouths
poured billowing ribbons of printed tape. Men read those tapes and
talked crisply into microphones, and their words went swiftly aloft
again.
Down by the open eastern door of the Shed at the desert's edge, Sally
Holt and Joe's father waited together, watching the sky. Sally was white
and scared. Joe's father patted her shoulder reassuringly.
"He'll make it, all right," said Sally, dry-throated.
Joe's father nodded. "Of course he will!" But his voice was not steady.
"Nothing could happen to him now!" said Sally fiercely.
"Of course not," said Joe's father.