Chapter 6

A good deal of that landing remained confused in Joe’s mind. While it was going on he was much too busy to be absorbing impressions. When he landed, he was as completely exhausted as anybody wants to be. It was only during the next day that he even tried to sort out his recollections.

Then he woke up suddenly, with a muffled roaring going on all about him. He blinked his eyes open and listened. Presently he realized what the noise was, and wondered that he hadn’t realized before. It was the roaring of the motors of a multi-engined plane. He knew, without remembering the details at the moment, that he and the other three were on a plane bound across the Pacific for America. He was in a bunk--and he felt extraordinarily heavy. He tried to move, and it was an enormous effort to move his arm. He struggled to turn over, and found straps holding his body down.

He fumbled at them. They had readily releasable clasps, and he loosened them easily. After a bit he struggled to sit upright. He was horribly heavy or horribly weak. He couldn’t tell which. And each separate muscle in his whole body ached. Twinges of pain accompanied every movement. He sat up, swaying a little with the slow movements of the plane, and gradually, things came back.

The landing in the ribbon-chute. They’d come down somewhere on the west coast of India, not too far from the sea. He remembered crashing into the edge of a thin jungle and finding the Chief, and the two of them searching out Haney and stumbling to open ground. After laying out a signal for air searchers, they went off into worn-out slumber while they waited.

He remembered that there’d been a patrol of American destroyers in the Arabian Sea, as everywhere under the orbit of the Platform. Their radar had reported the destruction of one space ship and the frantic diving of the other, its division into two parts, and then the tiny objects, which flew out from the smaller cabin section, which had descended as only ejection-seat parachutes could possibly have done. Two destroyers steamed onward underneath those drifting specks, to pick them up when they should come down. But the other nearby destroyers had other business in hand.

The two trailing destroyers reached Goa harbor within hours of the landing of the four from space. A helicopter found the first three of them within hours after that. They were twenty miles inland and thirty south from Goa. Mike wasn’t located until the next day. He’d been shot out of the ship’s cabin earlier and higher; he was lighter, and he’d floated farther.

But things--satisfying things--had happened in the interval. Sitting almost dizzily on the bunk in the swiftly roaring plane while blood began sluggishly to flow through his body, Joe remembered the gleeful, unofficial news passed around on the destroyers. They waited for Mike to be brought in. But they rejoiced vengefully.

The report was quite true, but it never reached the newspapers. Nobody would ever admit it, but the rockets aimed at the returning space ships had been spotted by Navy radar as they went up from the Arabian Sea. And the ships of the radar patrol couldn’t do anything about the rockets, but they could and did converge savagely upon the places from which they had been launched. Planes sped out to spot and bomb. Destroyers arrived.

Somewhere there was a navy department that could write off two modern submarines with rocket-launching equipment, last heard from west of India. American naval men would profess bland ignorance of any such event, but there were acres of dead fish floating on the ocean where depth-bombs had hunted down and killed two shapes much too big to be fish, which didn’t float when they were killed and which would never report back how they’d destroyed two space ships. There’d be seagulls feasting over that area, and there’d be vague tales about the happening in the bazaars of Hadhramaut. But nobody would ever admit knowing anything for certain.

But Joe knew. He got to his feet, wobbling a little bit in the soaring plane. He ached everywhere. His muscles protested the strain of holding him erect. He held fast, summoning strength. Before his little ship broke up he’d been shaken intolerably, and his body had weighed half a ton. Where his safety-belt had held him, his body was one wide bruise. There’d been that killing acceleration when the ship split in two. The others--except Mike--were in as bad a case or worse. Haney and the Chief were like men who’d been rolled down Mount Everest in a barrel. All of them had slept for fourteen hours straight before they even woke up for food. Even now, Joe didn’t remember boarding this plane or getting into the bunk. He’d probably been carried in.

Joe stood up, doggedly, until enough strength came to him to justify his sitting down again. He began to dress. It was astonishing how many places about his body were sore to the touch. It was startling how heavy his arms and legs felt, and how much of an effort even sitting erect was. But he began to remember Mike’s adventure, and managed to grin feebly. It was the only thing worth a smile in all the things that had happened.

Because Mike’s landing had been quite unlike the others. Joe and the Chief landed near the edge of a jungle. Haney landed in a canebrake. But Mike came floating down from the sky, swaying splendidly, into the estate of a minor godling.

He was relatively unharmed by the shaking-up he’d had. The strength of muscles depends on their cross-section, but their weight depends on their volume. The strength of a man depends on the square of his size, but his weight on the cube. So Mike had taken the deceleration and the murderous vibration almost in his stride. He floated longer and landed more gently than the rest.

Joe grinned painfully at the memory of Mike’s tale. He’d come on board the rescue destroyer in a towering, explosive rage. When his ribbon-parachute let him down out of the sky, it deposited him gently on ploughed fields not far from a small and primitive Hindu village. He’d been seen to descend from the heavens. He was a midget--not as other men--and he was dressed in a space suit with glittering metal harness.

The pagan villagers greeted him with rapture.

When the searching-party found Mike, they were just in time to prevent a massacre--by Mike. Adoring natives had seized upon him, conveyed him in high state to a red mud temple, seemingly tried to suffocate him with evidences of their pride and joy at his arrival, and dark-skinned maidens were trying hopefully to win his approval of their dancing. But the rescue-party found him with a club in his hand and blood in his eye, setting out furiously to change the tone of his reception.

Joe still didn’t know all the details, but he tried to concentrate on what he did know as he put his uniform on again. He didn’t want to think how little it meant, now. The silver space ship badge didn’t mean a thing, any more. There weren’t any more space ships. The Platform wasn’t a ship, but a satellite. There’d never been but two ships. Both had ceased to exist.

Joe walked painfully forward in the huge, roaring plane. The motors made a constant, humming thunder in his ears. It was not easy to walk. He held on to handholds as he moved. But he progressed past the bunk space. And there was Mike, sitting at a table and stuffing himself with good honest food. There was a glass port beside him, and Joe caught a glimpse of illimitable distances filled with cloud and sky and sea.

Mike nodded. He didn’t offer to help Joe walk. That wouldn’t have been practical. He waited until Joe sank into a seat opposite.

“Good sleep?” asked Mike.

“I guess so,” said Joe. He added ruefully, “It hurts to nod, and I think it would hurt worse to shake my head. What’s the matter with me, Mike? I didn’t get banged up in the landing!”

“You got banged up before you landed,” said Mike. “Worse than that, you spent better than six weeks out of gravity, where in an average day you took less actual exercise than a guy in bed with two broken legs!”

Joe eased himself back into his chair. He felt about 600 years old. Somebody poked a head into view and withdrew it. Joe lifted his arm and regarded it.

“Weighty! I guess you’re right, Mike.”

“I know I’m right!” said Mike. “If you spent six weeks in bed you’d expect to feel wobbly when you tried to walk. Up on the Platform you didn’t even use energy to stand up! We didn’t realize it, but we were living like invalids! We’ll get our strength back, but next time we’ll take measures. Huh! Take a trip to Mars in free fall, and by the time a guy got there his muscles’d be so flabby he couldn’t stand up in half-gravity! Something’s got to be done about that, Joe!”

Joe said sombrely, “Something’s got to be done about space ships before that comes up again!”

Somebody appeared with a tray. There was food on it. Smoking hot food. Joe looked at it and knew that his appetite, anyhow, was back to Earth normal.

“Thanks!” he mumbled appreciatively, and attacked the food.

Mike drank his coffee. Then he said, “Joe, do you know anything about powder metallurgy?”

Joe shrugged. It hurt. “Powder metallurgy? Yes, I’ve seen it used, at my father’s plant. They’ve made small precision parts with it. Why?”

“D’you know if anybody ever made a weld with it?” asked Mike.

Joe chewed. Then he said:

“I think so. Yes. At the plant they did. They had trouble getting the surfaces properly cleaned for welding. But they managed it. Why?”

“One more question,” said Mike tensely. “How much Portland cement is used to make a cubic yard of concrete?”

“I wouldn’t know,” admitted Joe. “Why? What’s all this about?”

“Haney and the Chief. Those two big apes have been kidding me--as long as they could stay awake--for what happened to me when I landed. Those infernal savages--” Mike seethed. “They got my clothes off and they had me smeared all over with butter and forty-’leven necklaces around my neck and flowers in my hair! They thought I was some kind of heathen god! Hanuman, somebody told me. The Hindu monkey-god!” He raged. “And those two big apes think it’s funny! Joe, I never knew I knew all the words for the cussings I gave those heathen before our fellas found me! And Haney and the Chief will drive me crazy if I can’t slap ‘em down! Powder metallurgy does the trick, from what you told me. That’s okay, then.”

He stood up and stalked toward the front of the plane. Joe roused himself with an effort. He turned to look about him. Haney lay slumped in a reclining chair, on the other side of the plane cabin. His eyes were closed. The Chief lay limply in another chair. He smiled faintly at Joe, but he didn’t try to talk. He was too tired. The return to normal gravity bothered him, as it did Joe.

Joe looked out the window. In neat, geometric spacing on either side of the transport there were fighter jets. There was another flight above and farther away. Joe saw, suddenly, a peeling-off of planes from the farther formation. They dived down through the clouds. He never knew what they went to look for or what they found. He went groggily back to his bunk in a strange and embarrassing weakness.

He woke when the plane landed. He didn’t know where it might be. It was, he knew, an island. He could see the wide, sun-baked white of the runways. He could see sea-birds in clouds over at the edge. The plane trundled and lurched slowly to a stop. A service-truck came growling up, and somebody led cables from it up into the engines. Somebody watched dials, and waved a hand.

There was silence. There was stillness. Joe heard voices and footsteps. Presently he heard the dull booming of surf.

The plane seemed to wait for a very long time. Then there was a faint, faint distant whine of jets, and a plane came from the east. It was first a dot and then a vague shape, and then an infinitely graceful dark object which swooped down and landed at the other end of the strip. It came taxiing up alongside the transport ship and stopped.

An officer in uniform climbed out, waved his hand, and walked over to the transport. He climbed up the ladder and the pilot and co-pilot followed him. They took their places. The door closed. One by one, the jets chugged, then roared to life.

The officer talked to the pilot and co-pilot for a moment. He came down the aisle toward Joe. Mike the midget regarded him suspiciously.

The plane stirred. The newly arrived officer said pleasantly, “The Navy Department’s sent me out here, Kenmore, to be briefed on what you know and to do a little briefing in turn.”

The transport plane turned clumsily and began to taxi down the runway. It jolted and bumped over the tarmac, then lifted, and Joe saw that the island was nearly all airfield. There were a few small buildings and distance-dwarfed hangars. Beyond the field proper there was a ring of white surf. That was all. The rest was ocean.

“I haven’t much briefing to do,” admitted Joe.

Then he looked at the briefcase the other man opened. It had sheets and sheets of paper in it--hundreds, it seemed. They were filled with questions. He’d be called on to find answers for most of them, and to admit he didn’t know the answers to the rest. When he was through with this questioning, every possible useful fact he knew would be on file for future use. And now he wrily recognized that this was part payment for the efficiency and speed with which the Navy had trailed them on their landing, and for the use of a transport plane to take them back to the United States.

“I’ll try to answer what I can,” he said cautiously. “But what’re you to brief me about?”

“That you’re not back on Earth yet,” said the officer curtly, pulling out the first sheaf of questions. “Officially you haven’t even started back. Ostensibly you’re still on the Platform.”

Joe blinked at him.

“If your return were known,” continued the lieutenant, “the public would want to make heroes of you. First space travelers, and so on. They’d want you on television--all of you--telling about your adventures and your return. Inevitably, what happened to your ship would leak out. And if the public knew you’d been waylaid and shot down there’d be demands that the government take violent action to avenge the attack. It’d be something like the tumult over the sinking of the Maine, or the Lusitania--or even Pearl Harbor. It’s much better for your return to be a secret for now.”

Joe said wrily: “I don’t think any of us want to be ridden around to have ticker-tape dumped on us. That part’s all right. I’m sure the others will agree.”

“Good! One more difficulty. We had two space ships. Now we have none. Our most likely enemies haven’t only been building rockets, they’ve got a space fleet coming along. Intelligence just found out they’re nearly ready for trial trips. They’ve been yelling to high heaven that we were building a space fleet to conquer the world. We weren’t. They were. And it looks very much as if they may have beaten us.”

The lieutenant got out the dreary mass of papers, intended to call for every conscious or unconscious observation Joe might have made in space. It was the equivalent of the interviews extracted from fliers after a bombing raid, and it was necessary, but Joe was very tired.

Wearily, he said, “Start your questions. I’ll try to answer them.”

They arrived in Bootstrap some forty-six hours after the crashing of their ship. Joe, at least, had slept nearly thirty of those hours. So while he was still wobbly on his feet and would be for days to come, his disposition was vastly improved.

There was nobody waiting on the airfield by the town of Bootstrap, but as they landed a black car came smoothly out and stopped close by the transport. Joe got down and climbed into it. Sally Holt was inside. She took both his hands and cried, and he was horribly embarrassed when the Chief came blundering into the car after him. But the Chief growled, “If he didn’t kiss you, Sally, I’m going to kick his pants for him.”

“He--he did,” said Sally, gulping. “And I’m glad you’re back, Chief. And Haney. And Mike.”

Mike grinned as he climbed in the back too. Haney crowded in after him. They filled the rear of the car entirely. It started off swiftly across the field, swerving to the roadway that led to the highway out of Bootstrap to the Shed. It sped out that long white concrete ribbon, and the desert was abruptly all around them. Far ahead, the great round half-dome of the Shed looked like a cherry-pit on the horizon.

“It’s good to be back!” said the Chief warmly. “I feel like I weigh a ton, but it’s good to be back! Mike’s the only one who was happier out yonder. He figures he belongs there. I got a story to tell you, Sally----”