Part 2 (1/2)

”You can start on the pushpot motors, Haney,” he said curtly.

Joe moved to his own, the pilot's seat. Haney pushed a b.u.t.ton. Through the fabric of the s.h.i.+p came the muted uproar of a pushpot engine starting. Haney pushed another b.u.t.ton. 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.

Haney said with enormous calm, ”All pushpot motors running, Joe.”

”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. n.o.body can strike an att.i.tude 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 s.h.i.+p's insulated hull. Then it grew louder, and louder still, and Joe stirred the controls by ever so tiny a movement.

Suddenly the s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p wobbled a little. Out the quartz-gla.s.s windows, the great door seemed to descend. In reality the cl.u.s.tered pushpots and the launching cage rose some thirty feet from the Shed floor and hovered there uncertainly. Joe s.h.i.+fted the lever that governed the vanes in the jet motor blasts. s.h.i.+p and cage and pushpots, all together, wavered toward the doorway. They pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce. It looked rather like--well--if a swarm of b.u.mblebees 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 s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p 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 s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p as a unit. But it rose!

The ground dropped so swiftly that even the Shed seemed to shrivel like a p.r.i.c.ked 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 s.h.i.+p, of course.

Sealed against the vacuum of s.p.a.ce, barometric pressure outside made no difference. Height had no effect on the air inside the s.h.i.+p.

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 s.h.i.+p 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 s.p.a.cecraft and build up the highest possible forward speed. It couldn't be kept up, of course. The pushpots couldn't carry enough fuel.