8
All the sensations were familiar, the small fleet of improbable objectsrose and rose. Of all flying objects ever imagined by man, the launchingcages supported by pushpots were most irrational.
The squadron, though, went bumbling upward. In the manned ship, Joe wasmore tense than on his other take-off--if such a thing was possible. Hiswork was harder this trip. Before, he'd had Mike at communications andthe Chief at the steering rockets while Haney kept the pushpots balancedfor thrust. Now Joe flew the manned ship alone. Headphones and a mikegave him communications with the Shed direct, and the pushpots werebalanced in groups, which cost efficiency but helped on control. Hewould have, moreover, to handle his own steering rockets duringacceleration and when he could--and dared--he should supervise theothers. Because each of the other three had two drone-ships to guide.True, they had only to keep their drones in formation, but Joe had tonavigate for all. The four of them had been assigned this flight becauseof its importance. They happened to be the only crew alive who had everflown a space ship designed for maneuvering, and their experienceconsisted of a single trip.
The jet stream was higher this time than on that other journey now twomonths past. They blundered into it at 36,000 feet. Joe's headphonesbuzzed tinnily. Radar from the ground told him his rate-of-rise, hisground speed, his orbital speed, and added comments on the handling ofthe drones.
The last was not a precision job. On the way up Joe protested,"Somebody's ship--Number Four--is lagging! Snap it up!"
Mike said crisply, "Got it, Joe. Coming up!"
"The Shed says three separate ships are getting out of formation. And weneed due east pointing. Check it."
The Chief muttered, "Something whacky here ... come round, you! Okay,Joe."
Joe had no time for reflection. He was in charge of the clumsiestoperation ever designed for an exact result. The squadron went wallowingtoward the sky. The noise was horrible. A tinny voice in his headphones:
"_You are at 65,000 feet. Your rate-of-climb curve is flattening. Youshould fire your jatos when practical. You have some leeway in rocketpower._"
Joe spoke into the extraordinary maze of noise waves and pressuresystems in the air of the cabin.
"We should blast. I'm throwing in the series circuit for jatos. Try toline up. We want the drones above us and with a spread, remember! Go toit!"
He watched his direction indicator and the small graphic indicatorstelling of the drones. The sky outside the ports was dark purple. Thelaunching cage responded sluggishly. Its open end came around toward theeast. It wobbled and wavered. It touched the due-east point. Joe stabbedthe firing-button.
Nothing happened. He hadn't expected it. The seven ships had to keep information. They had to start off on one course--with a slight spread asa safety measure--and at one time. So the firing-circuits were keyed torelays in series. Only when all seven firing-keys were down at the sametime would any of the jatos fire. Then all would blast together.
The pilots in the cockpit-bubbles of the pushpots had an extraordinaryview of the scene. At something over twelve miles height, sevenaggregations of clumsy black things clung to frameworks of steel,pushing valorously. Far below there were clouds and there was Earth.There was a horizon, which wavered and tilted. The pushpots struggledwith seeming lack of purpose. One of the seven seemed to drop below theothers. They pointed vaguely this way and that--all of them. Butgradually they seemed to arrive at an uncertain unanimity.
Joe pushed the firing-button again as his own ship touched the due-eastmark. Again nothing happened. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Haneypressing down both buttons. The Chief's finger lifted. Mike pushed downone button and held off the other.
Roarings and howlings of pushpots. Wobblings and heart-breakingclumsinesses of the drone-ships. They hung in the sky while the pushpotsused up their fuel.
"We've got to make it soon," said Joe grimly. "We've got forty seconds.Or we'll have to go down and try again."
There was a clock dial with a red sweep-hand which moved steadily andominously toward a deadline time for firing. Up to that deadline, thepushpots could let the ships back down to Earth without crashing them.After it, they'd run out of fuel before a landing could be made.
The deadline came closer and closer. Joe snapped:
"Take a degree leeway. We've got ten seconds."
He had the manned ship nearly steady. He held down the firing-button,holding aim by infinitesimal movements of the controls. Haney pushedboth hands down, raised one, pushed again. The Chief had one fingerdown. Mike had both firing buttons depressed.... The Chief pushed downhis second button, quietly.
There was a monstrous impact. Every jato in every pushpot about everylaunching cage fired at once. Joe felt himself flung back into hisacceleration chair. Six gravities. He began the horrible fight to stayalive, while the blood tried to drain from the conscious forepart of hisbrain, and while every button of his garments pressed noticeably againsthim, and objects in his pockets pushed. The sides of his mouth draggedback, and his cheeks sagged, and his tongue strove to sink back into histhroat and strangle him.
It was very bad. It seemed to last for centuries.
Then the jatos burned out. There was that ghastly feeling of lungingforward to weightlessness. One instant, Joe's body weighed half a ton.The next instant, it weighed less than a dust grain. His head throbbedtwice as if his skull were about to split open and let his brains runout. But these things he had experienced before.
There were pantings in the cabin about him. The ship fell. It happenedto be going up, but the sensation and the fact was free fall. Joe hadbeen through this before, too. He gasped for breath and croaked,"Drones?"
"Right," said Haney.
Mike panted anxiously, "Four's off course. I'll fix it."
The Chief grunted guttural Mohawk. His hands stirred on the panel forremote control of the drones he had to handle.
"Crazy!" he growled. "Got it now, Joe. Fire when ready."
"Okay, Mike?"
A half-second pause.
"Okay!"
Joe pressed the firing-button for the take-off rockets. And he wasslammed back into his acceleration chair again. But this was threegravities only. Pressed heavily against the acceleration cushions, hecould perform the navigation for the fleet. He did. The mother-ship hadto steer a true course, regardless of the vagaries of its rockets. Thedrones had simply to be kept in formation with it. The second task wassimpler. But Joe was relieved, this time, of the need to report backinstrument-readings. A telemetering device took care of that.
The take-off rockets blasted and blasted and blasted. The mere matter ofstaying alive grew very tedious. The ordeal seemed to last forcenturies. Actually it could be measured only in minutes. But it seemedmillennia before the headphones said, staccato fashion: "_You are oncourse and will reach speed in fourteen seconds. I will count for you._"
"Relays for rocket release," panted Joe. "Throw 'em over!"
Three hands moved to obey. Joe could release the drive rockets on allseven ships at will.
The voice counted:
"_Ten ... nine ... eight ... seven ... six ... five ... four ... three... two ... one ... cut!_"
Joe pressed the master-key. The remnants of the solid-fuel take-offrockets let go. They flashed off into nothingness at unbelievable speed,consuming themselves as they went.
There was again no weight.
This time there was no resting. No eager gazing out the cabin ports. Nowthey weren't curious. They'd had over a month in space, and somethinglike sixteen days back on Earth, and now they were back in space again.
Mike and Haney and the Chief worked doggedly at their control boards.The radar bowls outside the cabin shifted and moved and quivered. Thesix drone ships showed on the screens. But they also had telemeteringapparatus. They faithfully reported their condition and the direction inwhich their bows pointed. The radars plotted their position withrelation to each other and the mother-ship.
Presently Joe cast a glanc
e out of a port and saw that the dark line ofsunset was almost below. The take-off had been timed to get the shipsinto Earth's shadow above the area from which war rockets were mostlikely to rise. It wouldn't prevent bombing, of course. But there was agadget....
Joe spoke into the microphone: "Reporting everything all right so far.But you know it."
The voice from solid ground said, "_Report acknowledged._"
The ships went on and on and on. The Chief muttered to himself and madevery minute adjustments of the movement of one of his drones. Mikefussed with his. Haney regarded the controls of his drones with aprofound calm.
Nothing happened, except that they seemed to be falling into abottomless pit and their stomach-muscles knotted and cramped in purelyreflex response to the sensation. Even that grew tedious.
The headphones said, "_You will enter Earth's shadow in three minutes.Prepare for combat._"
Joe said drily, "We're to prepare for combat."
The Chief growled. "I'd like to do just that!"
The phrasing, of course, was intentional--in case enemy ears werelistening. Actually, the small fleet was to use a variant on the tin canshield which protected the Platform. It would be most effective ifvisual observation was impossible. The fleet was seven ships in veryragged formation. Most improbably, after the long three-gravityacceleration, they were still within a fifty-mile globe of space. NumberFour loitered behind, but was being brought up by judicious bursts ofsteering-rocket fire. Number Two was some distance ahead. The otherswere simply scattered. They went floating on like a group of meteors.Out the ports, two of them were visible. The others might be picked outby the naked eye--but it wasn't likely.
Drone Two, far ahead and clearly visible, turned from a shining steelspeck to a reddish pin-point of light. The red color deepened. It winkedout. The sunlight in the ports of the mother-ship turned red. Then itblacked out.
"Shoot the ghosts," said Joe.
The three drone-handlers pushed their buttons. Nothing happened thatanybody could see. Actually, though, a small gadget outside the hullbegan to cough rhythmically. Similar devices on the drones coughed, too.They were small, multiple-barreled guns. Rifle shells fired two-poundmissiles at random targets in emptiness. They wouldn't damage anythingthey hit. They'd go varying distances, explode and shoot small lead shotahead to check their missile-velocity, and then emit dense masses ofaluminum foil. There was no air resistance. The shredded foil wouldcontinue to move through emptiness at the same rate as the convoy-fleet.The seven ships had fired a total of eighty-four such objects away intothe blackness of Earth's shadow. There were, then, seven ships andeighty-four masses of aluminum foil moving through emptiness. Theycould not be seen by telescopes.
And radars could not tell ships from masses of aluminum foil.
If enemy radars came probing upward, they reported ninety-one spaceships in ragged but coherent formation, soaring through emptiness towardthe Platform. And a fleet like that was too strong to attack.
The radar operators had been prepared to forward details of the speedand course of a single ship to waiting rocket-launching submarineshalf-way across the Pacific. But they reported to Very High Authorityinstead.
He received the report of an armada--an incredible fleet--in space. Hedidn't believe it. But he didn't dare disbelieve it.
So the fleet swam peacefully through the darkness that was Earth'sshadow, and no attempt at attack was made. They came out into sunlightto look down at the western shore of America itself. With seven ships toget on an exact course, at an exact speed, at an exact moment, time wasneeded. So the fleet made almost a complete circuit of the Earth beforereaching the height of the Platform's orbit.
They joined it. A single man in a space suit, anchored to its outerplates, directed a plastic hose which stretched out impossibly far andclamped to one drone with a magnetic grapple. He maneuvered it to thehull and made it fast. He captured a second, which was worked delicatelywithin reach by coy puffs of steering-rocket vapor.
One by one, the drones were made fast. Then the manned ship went in thelock and the great outer door closed, and the plastic-fabric wallscollapsed behind their nets, and air came in.
Lieutenant Commander Brown was the one to come into the lock to greetthem. He shook hands all around--and it again seemed strange to all thefour from Earth to find themselves with their feet more or less firmlyplanted on a solid floor, but their bodies wavering erratically to rightand left and before and back, because there was no up or down.
"Just had reports from Earth," Brown told Joe comfortably. "The news ofyour take-off was released to avoid panic in Europe. But everybody whodoesn't like us is yelling blue murder. Somebody--you may guess who--isannouncing that a fleet of ninety-one war rockets took off from theUnited States and now hangs poised in space while the decadent Americanwar-mongers prepare an ultimatum to all the world. Everybody'sfrightened."
"If they'll only stay scared until we get unloaded," said Joe in somesatisfaction, "the government back home can tell them how many we wereand what we came up for. But we'll probably make out all right, anyhow."
"My crew will unload," said Brown, in conscious thoughtfulness. "Youmust have gotten pretty well exhausted by that acceleration."
Joe shook his head. "I think we can handle the freight faster. We foundout a few things by going back to Earth."
A section of plating at the top of the lock--at least it had been thetop when the Platform was built on Earth--opened up as on the firstjourney here. A face grinned down. But from this point on, the procedurewas changed. Haney and Joe went into the cargo-section of the rocketshipand heaved its contents smoothly through weightlessness to the storagechamber above. The Chief and Mike stowed it there. The speed andprecision of their work was out of all reason. Brown staredincredulously.
The fact was simply that on their first trip to the Platform, Joe andhis crew didn't know how to use their strength where there was noweight. By the time they'd learned, their muscles had lost all tone. Nowthey were fresh from Earth, with Earth-strength muscles--and they knewhow to use them.
"When we got back," Joe told Brown, "we were practically invalids. Noexercise up here. This time we've brought some harness to wear. We'vesome for you, too."
They moved out of the airlock, and the ship was maneuvered to a mooringoutside, and a drone took its place. Brown's eyes blinked at theunloading of the drone. But he said, "Navy style work, that!"
"Out here," said Joe, "you take no more exercise than an invalid onEarth--in fact, not as much. By now the original crew would have troublestanding up on a trip back to Earth. You'd feel pretty heavy, yourself."
Brown frowned.
"Hm. I--ah--I shall ask for instructions on the matter."
He stood erect. He didn't waver on his feet as the others did. But hewore the same magnetic-soled shoes. Joe knew, with private amusement,that Brown must have worked hard to get a dignified stance inweightlessness.
"Mr. Kenmore," said Brown suddenly. "Have you been assigned a definiterank as yet?"
"Not that I know of," said Joe without interest. "I skipper the ship Ijust brought up. But----"
"Your ship has no rating!" protested Brown irritably. "The skipper of aNavy ship may be anything from a lieutenant junior grade to a captain,depending on the size and rating of the ship. In certain circumstanceseven a noncommissioned officer. Are you an enlisted man?"
"Again, not that I know of," Joe told him. "Nor my crew, either."
Brown looked at once annoyed and distressed.
"It isn't regular!" he objected. "It isn't shipshape! I should knowwhether you are under my command or not! For discipline! Fororganization! It should be cleared up! I shall put through an urgentinquiry."
Joe looked at him incredulously. Lieutenant Commander Brown was aperfectly amiable man, but he had to have things in a certain patternfor him to recognize that they were in a pattern at all. He was moreexcited over the fact that he didn't know whether he ranked Joe, thanover the much more important matte
r of physical deterioration in theabsence of gravity. Yet he surely understood their relative importance.The fact was, of course, that he could confidently expect exactinstructions about the last, while he had to settle matters ofdiscipline and routine for himself.
"I shall ask for clarification of your status," he said worriedly. "Itshouldn't have been left unclear. I'd better attend to it at once."
He looked at Joe as if expecting a salute. He didn't get it. He clankedaway, his magnetic shoe-soles beating out a singularly martial rhythm.He must have practised that walk, in private.
Joe got out of the airlock as another of the space barges was warped in.Brent, the crew's psychologist, joined him when he went to unload. Brentnodded in a friendly fashion to Joe.
"Quite a change, eh?" he said drily. "Sanford turned out to be acrackpot with his notions of grandeur. I'm not sure that Brown's notionsof discipline aren't worse."
Joe said, "I've something rather important to pass on," and told aboutthe newly discovered physical effects of a long stay where there was nogravity. The doctors now predicted that anybody who spent six monthswithout weight would suffer a deterioration of muscle tone which couldmake a return to Earth impossible without a long preliminary process ofretraining. One's heart would adjust to the absence of any need to pumpblood against gravity.
"Which," said Joe, "means that you're going to have to be relievedbefore too long. But we brought up some gravity-simulator harness thatmay help."
Brent said desolately: "And I was so pleased! We all had trouble withinsomnia, at first, but lately we've all been sleeping well! Now I seewhy! Normally one sleeps because he's tired. We had trouble sleepinguntil our muscles got so weak we tired anyhow!"
Another drone came in and was unloaded. And another and another. But thelast of them wasn't only unloaded. Haney took over the Platform'scontrol board and--grinning to himself--sent faint, especially-tunedshort wave impulses to the steering-rockets of the drone. Theliquid-fuel rockets were designed to steer a loaded ship. With theairlock door open, the silvery ship leaped out of the dock like afrightened horse. The liquid-fuel rocket had a nearly empty hull toaccelerate. It responded skittishly.
Joe watched out a port as it went hurtling away. The vast Earth rolledbeneath it. It sped on and vanished. Its fumes ceased to be visible. Joetold Brent:
"Another nice job, that! We sent it backward, slowing it a little. It'llhave a new orbit, independent of ours and below it. But come sixty hoursit will be directly underneath. We'll haul it up and refuel it. And ourfriends the enemy will hate it. It's a radio repeater. It'll pick upshort-wave stuff beamed to it, and repeat it down to Earth. And they cantry to jam that!"
It was a mildly malicious trick to play. Behind the Iron Curtain,broadcasts from the free world couldn't be heard because of stationsbuilt to emit pure noise and drown them out. But the jamming stationswere on the enemy nations' borders. If radio programs came down fromoverhead, jamming would be ineffective at least in the center of thenations. Populations would hear the truth, even though their governmentsobjected.
But that was a minor matter, after all. With space ship hulls cominginto being by dozens, and with one convoy of hundreds of tons ofequipment gotten aloft, the whole picture of supply for the Platform hadchanged.
Part of the new picture was two devices that Haney and the Chief wereassembling. They were mostly metal backbone and a series of tanks, withrocket motors mounted on ball and socket joints. They looked like hugered insects, but they were officially rocket recovery vehicles, andJoe's crew referred to them as space wagons. They had no cabin, butsomething like a saddle. Before it there was a control-board completewith radar-screens. And there were racks to which solid-fuel rockets ofdivers sizes could be attached. They were literally short-range towcraft for travel in space. They had the stripped, barren look of farmmachinery. So the name "space wagon" fitted. There were two of them.
"We're putting the pair together," the Chief told Joe. "Looks kindapeculiar."
"It's only for temporary use," said Joe. "There's a bigger and betterone being built with a regular cabin and hull. But some experience withthese two will be useful in running a regular space tug."
The Chief said with a trace too much of casualness: "I'm kind of lookingforward to testing this."
"No," said Joe doggedly. "I'm responsible. I take the first chance. Butwe should all be able to handle them. When this is assembled you canstand by with the second one. If the first one works all right, we'lltry the second."
The Chief grimaced, but he went back to the assembly of the spiderydevice.
Joe got out the gravity-simulator harnesses. He showed Brent how theyworked. Brown hadn't official instructions to order their use, but Joeput one on himself, set for full Earth-gravity simulation. He couldn'timitate actual gravity, of course. Only the effect of gravity on one'smuscles. There were springs and elastic webbing pulling one's shouldersand feet together, so that it was as much effort to stand extended--withone's legs straight out--as to stand upright on Earth. Joe felt betterwith a pull on his body.
Brent was upset when he found that to him more than a tenth of normalgravity was unbearable. But he kept it on at that. If he increased thepull a very little every day, he might be able to return to Earth, intime. Now it would be a very dangerous business indeed. He went off toput the other members of the crew in the same sort of harness.
After ten hours, a second drone broadcaster went off into space. By thattime the articulated red frameworks were assembled. They looked morethan ever like farm machinery, save that their bulging tanks made themlook insectile, too. They were actually something between smalltow-boats and crash-wagons. A man in a space suit could climb into thesaddle of one of these creations, plug in the air-line of his suit tothe crash-wagon's tanks, and travel in space by means of the spacewagon's rockets. These weird vehicles had remarkably powerful magneticgrapples. They were equipped with steering rockets as powerful as thoseof a ship. They had banks of solid-fuel rockets of divers power andlength of burning. And they even mounted rocket missiles, small guidedrockets which could be used to destroy what could not be recovered. Theywere intended to handle unmanned rocket shipments of supplies to thePlatform. There were reasons why the trick should be economical, if itshould happen to work at all.
When they were ready for testing, they seemed very small in the greatspace lock. Joe and the Chief very carefully checked an extremely longlist of things that had to work right or nothing would work at all. Thatpart of the job wasn't thrilling, but Joe no longer looked for thrills.He painstakingly did the things that produced results. If a sense ofadventure seemed to disappear, the sensations of achievement more thanmade up for it.
They got into space suits. They were in an odd position on the Platform.Lieutenant Commander Brown had avoided Joe as much as possible since hisarrival. So far he'd carefully avoided giving him direct orders, becauseJoe was not certainly and officially his subordinate. Lacking exactinformation, the only thing a conscientious rank-conscious naval officercould do was exercise the maximum of tact and insistently ask authorityfor a ruling on Joe's place in the hierarchy of rank.
Joe flung a leg over his eccentric, red-painted mount. He clipped hissafety-belt, plugged in his suit air-supply to the space wagon's tanks,and spoke into his helmet transmitter.
"Okay to open the lock. Chief, you keep watch. If I make out all right,you can join me. If I get in serious trouble, come after me in the shipwe rode up. But only if it's practical! Not otherwise!"
The Chief said something in Mohawk. He sounded indignant.
The plastic walls of the lock swelled inward, burying and overwhelmingthem. Pumps pounded briefly, removing what air was left. Then the wallsdrew back, straining against their netting, and Joe waited for the doorto open to empty space.
Instead, there came a sharp voice in his helmet-phones. It was Brown."_Radar says there's a rocket on the way up! It's over at what is theedge of the world from here. Three gravities only. Better not go out!_"
> Joe hesitated. Brown still issued no order. But defense against a singlerocket would be a matter of guided missiles--Brown's business--if thetin can screen didn't handle it. Joe would have no part in it. Hewouldn't be needed. He couldn't help. And there'd be all the elaboratebusiness of checking to go through again. He said uncomfortably:
"It'll be a long time before it gets here--and three gravities is low!Maybe it's a defective job. There have been misfires and so on. It won'ttake long to try this wagon, anyhow. They're anxious to send up a robotship from the Shed and these have to be tested first. Give me tenminutes."
He heard the Chief grumbling to himself. But one tested space wagon wasbetter than none.
The airlock doors opened. Huge round valves swung wide. Bright, remote,swarming stars filled the opening. Joe cracked the control of hisforward liquid-fuel rockets. The lock filled instantly with swirlingfumes. And instantly the tiny space wagon moved. It did not have to liftfrom the lock floor. Once the magnetic clamps were released it was freeof the floor. But it did have mass. One brief push of the rockets sentit floating out of the lock. It was in space. It kept on.
Joe felt a peculiar twinge of panic. Nobody who is accustomed only toEarth can quite realize at the beginning the conditions of handlingvehicles in space. But Joe cracked the braking rockets. He stopped. Hehung seemingly motionless in space. The Platform was a good half-mileaway.
He tried the gyros, and the space wagon went into swift spinning. Hereversed them and straightened out--almost. The vastness of all creationseemed still to revolve slowly about him. The monstrous globe which wasEarth moved sedately from above his head to under his feet and continuedthe slow revolution. The Platform rotated in a clockwise direction. Hewas drifting very slowly away.
"Chief," he said wrily, "you can't do worse than I'm doing, and we'rerushed for time. You might come out. But listen! You don't run yourrockets! On Earth you keep a motor going because when it stops, you do.But out here you have to use your motor to stop, but not to keep ongoing. Get it? When you do come out, don't burn your rockets more thanhalf a second at a time."
The Chief's voice came booming:
"_Right, Joe! Here I come!_"
There was a billowing of frantically writhing fumes, which darted madlyin every direction until they ceased to be. The Chief in his insect-likecontraption came bolting out of the hole which was the airlock. He was agood half-mile away. The rocket fumes ceased. He kept on going. Joeheard him swear. The Chief felt the utterly helpless sensation of a manin a car when his brakes don't work. But a moment later the brakingrockets did flare briefly, yet still too long. The Chief was not onlystopped, but drifting backwards toward the Platform. He evidently triedto turn, and he spun as dizzily as Joe had done. But after a moment hestopped--almost. There were, then, two red-painted things in space,somewhat like giant water-spiders floating forlornly in emptiness. Theyseemed very remote from the great bright steel Platform and thatgigantic ball which was Earth, turning very slowly and filling a goodfourth of all that could be seen.
"Suppose you head toward me, Chief," said Joe absorbedly. "Aim to pass,and remember that what you have to estimate is not where I am, but whereyou have to put on the brakes to stop close by. That's where you useyour braking-rockets."
The Chief tried it. He came to a stop a quarter-mile past Joe.
"_I'm heavy-handed_," said his voice disgustedly.
"I'll try to join you," said Joe.
He did try. He stopped a little short. The two weird objects driftedalmost together. The Chief was upside down with regard to Joe. Presentlyhe was sidewise on.
"This takes thinking," said Joe ruefully.
A voice in his headphones, from the Platform, said:
"_That rocket from Earth is still accelerating. Still at threegravities. It looks like it isn't defective. It might be carrying a man.Hadn't you better come in?_"
The Chief growled: "_We won't be any safer there! I want to get the hangof this._" Then his voice changed sharply. "_Joe! D'you get that?_"
Joe heard his own voice, very cold.
"I didn't. I do now. Brown, I'd suggest a guided missile at that rocketcoming up. If there's a man in it, he's coming up to take over guidedmissiles that'll overtake him, and try to smash the Platform by directcontrol, since proximity fuses don't work. I'd smash him as far away aspossible."
Brown's voice came very curt and worried. "_Right._"
There was an eruption of rocket fumes from the side of the Platform.Something went foaming away toward Earth. It dwindled with incrediblerapidity. Then Joe said:
"Chief, I think we'd better go down and meet that rocket. We'll learn tohandle these wagons on the way. I think we're going to have a fight onour hands. Whoever's in that rocket isn't coming up just to shake handswith us."
He steadied the small red vehicle and pointed it for Earth. He added:
"I'm firing a six-two solid-fuel job, Chief. Counting three.Three--two--one."
His mount vanished in rocket fumes. But after six seconds at twogravities acceleration the rocket burned out. The Chief had fired amatching rocket. They were miles apart, but speeding Earthward on verynearly identical courses.
The Platform grew smaller. That was their only proof of motion.
A very, very long time passed. The Chief fired his steering rockets tobring him closer to Joe. It did not work. He had to aim for Joe and firea blast to move noticeably nearer. Presently he would have to blastagain to keep from passing.
Joe made calculations in his head. He worried. He and the Chief werespeeding Earthward--away from the Platform--at more than four miles aminute, but it was not enough. The manned rocket was accelerating at agreat deal more than that rate. And if the Platform's enemies down onEarth had sent a manned rocket up to destroy the Platform, the man in itwould have ways of defending himself. He would expect guidedmissiles--but he probably wouldn't expect to be attacked by spacewagons.
Joe said suddenly:
"Chief! I'm going to burn a twelve-two. We've got to match velocitiescoming back. Join me? Three--two--one."
He fired a twelve-two. Twelve seconds burning, two gravitiesacceleration. It built up his speed away from the Platform to a ratewhich would have been breathless, on Earth. But here there was nosensation of motion, and the distances were enormous. Things whichhappen in space happen with insensate violence and incredible swiftness.But long, long, long intervals elapse between events. The twelve-tworocket burned out. The Chief had matched that also.
Brown's voice in the headphones said, "_The rocket's cut acceleration.It's floating up, now. It should reach our orbit fifty miles behind us.But our missile should hit it in forty seconds._"
"I wouldn't bet on that," said Joe coldly. "Figure interception data forthe Chief and me. Make it fast!"
He spotted the Chief, a dozen miles away and burning his steeringrockets to close, again. The Chief had the hang of it, now. He didn'ttry to steer. He drove toward Joe.
But nothing happened. And nothing happened. And nothing happened. Thetwo tiny space wagons were 90 miles from the Platform, which was nowmerely a glittering speck, hardly brighter than the brightest stars.
There was a flare of light to Earthward. It was brighter than the sun.The light vanished.
Brown's voice came in the headphones, "_Our missile went off 200 milesshort! He sent an interceptor to set it off!_"
"Then he's dangerous," said Joe. "There'll be war rockets coming up anysecond now for him to control from right at hand. We won't be fightingrockets controlled from 4,000 miles away! They've found proximity fusesdon't work, so he's going to work in close. Give us our course and data,quick! The Chief and I have got to try to smash things!"
The two tiny space wagons--like stick-insects in form, absurdly painteda brilliant red--seemed inordinately lonely. It was hardly possible topick out the Platform with the naked eyes. The Earth was thousands ofmiles below. Joe and the Chief, in space suits, rode tiny metalframeworks in an emptiness more vast, more lonely, more terrible thaneither
could have imagined.
Then the war rockets started up. There were eight of them. They came outto do murder at ten gravities acceleration.