Part 11 (1/2)

”Three hours plus or minus something,” said Joe, dry-throated. ”We'll hear from the ground.”

Mike said in a cracked voice: ”Radar reports we went a little bit too low. They think we weren't tilted up far enough. We didn't bounce as soon as we should.”

Joe unstrapped himself.

”How about the other s.h.i.+p?”

”It did better than we did,” said Mike. ”It's a good 200 miles ahead.

Down at the Shed, they're recalculating for us. We'll have to land with six grazes instead of eight. We lost too much speed.”

Joe went staggering, again weightless, to look out a port for the other s.h.i.+p. He should have known better. One does not spot an eighty-foot s.p.a.ce s.h.i.+p with the naked eye when it is 200 miles away.

But he saw something, though for seconds he didn't know what it was.

Now the little s.h.i.+p was 300 miles high and still rising. Joe was dazed and battered by the vibration of the s.h.i.+p in the graze just past. The sister s.p.a.ce s.h.i.+p hadn't lost speed so fast. It would be traveling faster. It would be leaving him farther behind every second. It was rising more sharply. It would rise higher.

Joe stared numbly out of a port, thinking confusedly that his hull would be dull red on its outer surface, though the heating had been so fast that the inner surfaces of the plating might still be cold. He saw the vast area which was the curve of the edge of the world. He saw the sunlight upon clouds below and glimpses of the surface of the Earth itself.

And he saw something rising out of the mists at the far horizon. It was a thread of white vapor. The other rockets.h.i.+p was a speck, a mote, invisible because of its size and distance. This thread of vapor was already 100 miles long, and it expanded to a column of whiteness half a mile across before it seemed to dissipate. It rose and rose, as if following something which sped upward. It was a rocket trail. The violence of its writhings proved the fury with which the rocket climbed.

It was on its way to meet the other s.p.a.ce s.h.i.+p.

It did. Joe saw the thread of vapor extend and grow until it was higher than he was. He never saw the other s.h.i.+p, which was too small. But he saw the burst of flame, bright as the sun itself, which was the explosion of a proximity fuse bomb. He knew, then, that nothing but incandescent, radioactive gas remained of the other s.h.i.+p and its crew.

Then he saw the trail of the second rocket. It was rising to meet him.

5

The four of them watched through the ports as the thread of vapor sped upward. They hated the rocket and the people who had built it. Joe said between his teeth, ”We could spend our landing-rockets and make it chase us, but it'll have fuel for that!”

The Chief muttered in Mohawk. The words sounded as if they ought to have blue fire at their edges and smell of sulphur. Mike the midget said crackling things in his small voice. Haney stared, his eyes burning.

Their s.h.i.+p was a little over 400 miles up, now. The rocket was 100 or better. The rendezvous would be probably 200 miles ahead and correspondingly higher. The rocket was accelerating furiously. It had farther to travel, but its rate of climb was already enormous and it increased every second.

The s.h.i.+p could swing to right or left on steering rockets, but the war rocket could swerve also. It was controlled from the ground. It did not need to crash the small s.h.i.+p from s.p.a.ce. Within a limited number of miles the blast of its atomic warhead would vaporize any substance that could exist. And of course the s.h.i.+p could not turn back. Even the expenditure of all its landing-rockets could not bring twenty tons of s.h.i.+p to a halt. They could speed it up, so it would pa.s.s the calculated meeting place ahead of the war rocket. But the bomb would simply follow in a stern chase. In any case, the s.h.i.+p could not stop.

But neither could the rocket.

Joe never knew how he saw the significance of that fact. On land or sea, of course, an automobile or a s.h.i.+p moves in the direction in which it is pointed. Even an airplane needs to make only minor corrections for air currents which affect it. But an object in s.p.a.ce moves on a course which is the sum of all its previous speeds and courses. Joe's s.h.i.+p was moving eastward above the Earth at so many miles per second. If he drove north--at a right angle to his present course--the s.h.i.+p would not cease to move to the east. It would simply move northward in addition to moving east. If the rocket from Earth turned north or east it would continue to move up and merely add the other motion to its vertical rise.

Joe stared at the uncoiling thread of vapor which was the murder rocket's trail. He hated it so fiercely that he wanted to escape it even at the cost of destruction, merely to foil its makers. At one moment, he was hardly aware of anything but his own fury and the frantic desire to frustrate the rocket at any cost. The next instant, somehow, he was not angry at all. Because somehow his brain had dredged up the fact that the war rocket could no more turn back than he could--and he saw its meaning.

”Mike!” he snapped sharply. ”Get set! Report what we do! Everybody set for acceleration! Steering rockets ready, Chief! Get set to help, Haney!

I don't know whether we'll get out of this alive, but we'd better get into our s.p.a.ce suits.”

Then he literally dived back to his acceleration chair and strapped in in feverish haste. The s.h.i.+p was then a quarter of the way to the meeting place and the rocket had very much farther to go. But it was rising faster.

The s.h.i.+p's gyros whined and squealed as Joe jammed on their controls.