Chapter 8

All the sensations were familiar, the small fleet of improbable objects rose and rose. Of all flying objects ever imagined by man, the launching cages supported by pushpots were most irrational.

The squadron, though, went bumbling upward. In the manned ship, Joe was more tense than on his other take-off--if such a thing was possible. His work was harder this trip. Before, he’d had Mike at communications and the Chief at the steering rockets while Haney kept the pushpots balanced for thrust. Now Joe flew the manned ship alone. Headphones and a mike gave him communications with the Shed direct, and the pushpots were balanced in groups, which cost efficiency but helped on control. He would have, moreover, to handle his own steering rockets during acceleration and when he could--and dared--he should supervise the others. 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 to navigate for all. The four of them had been assigned this flight because of its importance. They happened to be the only crew alive who had ever flown a space ship designed for maneuvering, and their experience consisted of a single trip.

The jet stream was higher this time than on that other journey now two months past. They blundered into it at 36,000 feet. Joe’s headphones buzzed tinnily. Radar from the ground told him his rate-of-rise, his ground speed, his orbital speed, and added comments on the handling of the 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 we need 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 clumsiest operation ever designed for an exact result. The squadron went wallowing toward 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. You should fire your jatos when practical. You have some leeway in rocket power._”

Joe spoke into the extraordinary maze of noise waves and pressure systems in the air of the cabin.

“We should blast. I’m throwing in the series circuit for jatos. Try to line up. We want the drones above us and with a spread, remember! Go to it!”

He watched his direction indicator and the small graphic indicators telling of the drones. The sky outside the ports was dark purple. The launching cage responded sluggishly. Its open end came around toward the east. It wobbled and wavered. It touched the due-east point. Joe stabbed the firing-button.

Nothing happened. He hadn’t expected it. The seven ships had to keep in formation. They had to start off on one course--with a slight spread as a safety measure--and at one time. So the firing-circuits were keyed to relays in series. Only when all seven firing-keys were down at the same time would any of the jatos fire. Then all would blast together.

The pilots in the cockpit-bubbles of the pushpots had an extraordinary view of the scene. At something over twelve miles height, seven aggregations 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 struggled with seeming lack of purpose. One of the seven seemed to drop below the others. They pointed vaguely this way and that--all of them. But gradually they seemed to arrive at an uncertain unanimity.

Joe pushed the firing-button again as his own ship touched the due-east mark. Again nothing happened. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Haney pressing down both buttons. The Chief’s finger lifted. Mike pushed down one button and held off the other.

Roarings and howlings of pushpots. Wobblings and heart-breaking clumsinesses of the drone-ships. They hung in the sky while the pushpots used 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 and ominously toward a deadline time for firing. Up to that deadline, the pushpots 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 pushed both hands down, raised one, pushed again. The Chief had one finger down. Mike had both firing buttons depressed ... The Chief pushed down his second button, quietly.

There was a monstrous impact. Every jato in every pushpot about every launching cage fired at once. Joe felt himself flung back into his acceleration chair. Six gravities. He began the horrible fight to stay alive, while the blood tried to drain from the conscious forepart of his brain, and while every button of his garments pressed noticeably against him, and objects in his pockets pushed. The sides of his mouth dragged back, and his cheeks sagged, and his tongue strove to sink back into his throat and strangle him.

It was very bad. It seemed to last for centuries.

Then the jatos burned out. There was that ghastly feeling of lunging forward to weightlessness. One instant, Joe’s body weighed half a ton. The next instant, it weighed less than a dust grain. His head throbbed twice as if his skull were about to split open and let his brains run out. But these things he had experienced before.

There were pantings in the cabin about him. The ship fell. It happened to be going up, but the sensation and the fact was free fall. Joe had been 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 for remote 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 was slammed back into his acceleration chair again. But this was three gravities only. Pressed heavily against the acceleration cushions, he could perform the navigation for the fleet. He did. The mother-ship had to steer a true course, regardless of the vagaries of its rockets. The drones had simply to be kept in formation with it. The second task was simpler. But Joe was relieved, this time, of the need to report back instrument-readings. A telemetering device took care of that.

The take-off rockets blasted and blasted and blasted. The mere matter of staying alive grew very tedious. The ordeal seemed to last for centuries. Actually it could be measured only in minutes. But it seemed millennia before the headphones said, staccato fashion: “_You are on course 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 all seven 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-off rockets 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. Now they weren’t curious. They’d had over a month in space, and something like 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. The six drone ships showed on the screens. But they also had telemetering apparatus. They faithfully reported their condition and the direction in which their bows pointed. The radars plotted their position with relation to each other and the mother-ship.

Presently Joe cast a glance out of a port and saw that the dark line of sunset was almost below. The take-off had been timed to get the ships into Earth’s shadow above the area from which war rockets were most likely to rise. It wouldn’t prevent bombing, of course. But there was a gadget...

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 made very minute adjustments of the movement of one of his drones. Mike fussed with his. Haney regarded the controls of his drones with a profound calm.

Nothing happened, except that they seemed to be falling into a bottomless pit and their stomach-muscles knotted and cramped in purely reflex 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 were listening. Actually, the small fleet was to use a variant on the tin can shield which protected the Platform. It would be most effective if visual observation was impossible. The fleet was seven ships in very ragged formation. Most improbably, after the long three-gravity acceleration, they were still within a fifty-mile globe of space. Number Four loitered behind, but was being brought up by judicious bursts of steering-rocket fire. Number Two was some distance ahead. The others were simply scattered. They went floating on like a group of meteors. Out the ports, two of them were visible. The others might be picked out by the naked eye--but it wasn’t likely.

Drone Two, far ahead and clearly visible, turned from a shining steel speck to a reddish pin-point of light. The red color deepened. It winked out. The sunlight in the ports of the mother-ship turned red. Then it blacked out.

“Shoot the ghosts,” said Joe.

The three drone-handlers pushed their buttons. Nothing happened that anybody could see. Actually, though, a small gadget outside the hull began to cough rhythmically. Similar devices on the drones coughed, too. They were small, multiple-barreled guns. Rifle shells fired two-pound missiles at random targets in emptiness. They wouldn’t damage anything they hit. They’d go varying distances, explode and shoot small lead shot ahead to check their missile-velocity, and then emit dense masses of aluminum foil. There was no air resistance. The shredded foil would continue 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 into the blackness of Earth’s shadow. There were, then, seven ships and eighty-four masses of aluminum foil moving through emptiness. They could 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 space ships in ragged but coherent formation, soaring through emptiness toward the Platform. And a fleet like that was too strong to attack.

The radar operators had been prepared to forward details of the speed and course of a single ship to waiting rocket-launching submarines half-way across the Pacific. But they reported to Very High Authority instead.

He received the report of an armada--an incredible fleet--in space. He didn’t believe it. But he didn’t dare disbelieve it.

So the fleet swam peacefully through the darkness that was Earth’s shadow, and no attempt at attack was made. They came out into sunlight to look down at the western shore of America itself. With seven ships to get on an exact course, at an exact speed, at an exact moment, time was needed. So the fleet made almost a complete circuit of the Earth before reaching the height of the Platform’s orbit.

They joined it. A single man in a space suit, anchored to its outer plates, directed a plastic hose which stretched out impossibly far and clamped to one drone with a magnetic grapple. He maneuvered it to the hull and made it fast. He captured a second, which was worked delicately within reach by coy puffs of steering-rocket vapor.

One by one, the drones were made fast. Then the manned ship went in the lock and the great outer door closed, and the plastic-fabric walls collapsed behind their nets, and air came in.

Lieutenant Commander Brown was the one to come into the lock to greet them. He shook hands all around--and it again seemed strange to all the four from Earth to find themselves with their feet more or less firmly planted on a solid floor, but their bodies wavering erratically to right and left and before and back, because there was no up or down.

“Just had reports from Earth,” Brown told Joe comfortably. “The news of your take-off was released to avoid panic in Europe. But everybody who doesn’t like us is yelling blue murder. Somebody--you may guess who--is announcing that a fleet of ninety-one war rockets took off from the United States and now hangs poised in space while the decadent American war-mongers prepare an ultimatum to all the world. Everybody’s frightened.”

“If they’ll only stay scared until we get unloaded,” said Joe in some satisfaction, “the government back home can tell them how many we were and what we came up for. But we’ll probably make out all right, anyhow.”

“My crew will unload,” said Brown, in conscious thoughtfulness. “You must have gotten pretty well exhausted by that acceleration.”

Joe shook his head. “I think we can handle the freight faster. We found out a few things by going back to Earth.”

A section of plating at the top of the lock--at least it had been the top when the Platform was built on Earth--opened up as on the first journey here. A face grinned down. But from this point on, the procedure was changed. Haney and Joe went into the cargo-section of the rocketship and heaved its contents smoothly through weightlessness to the storage chamber above. The Chief and Mike stowed it there. The speed and precision of their work was out of all reason. Brown stared incredulously.

The fact was simply that on their first trip to the Platform, Joe and his crew didn’t know how to use their strength where there was no weight. By the time they’d learned, their muscles had lost all tone. Now they were fresh from Earth, with Earth-strength muscles--and they knew how to use them.

“When we got back,” Joe told Brown, “we were practically invalids. No exercise up here. This time we’ve brought some harness to wear. We’ve some for you, too.”

They moved out of the airlock, and the ship was maneuvered to a mooring outside, and a drone took its place. Brown’s eyes blinked at the unloading of the drone. But he said, “Navy style work, that!”

“Out here,” said Joe, “you take no more exercise than an invalid on Earth--in fact, not as much. By now the original crew would have trouble standing 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 he wore the same magnetic-soled shoes. Joe knew, with private amusement, that Brown must have worked hard to get a dignified stance in weightlessness.

“Mr. Kenmore,” said Brown suddenly. “Have you been assigned a definite rank as yet?”

“Not that I know of,” said Joe without interest. “I skipper the ship I just brought up. But----”

“Your ship has no rating!” protested Brown irritably. “The skipper of a Navy ship may be anything from a lieutenant junior grade to a captain, depending on the size and rating of the ship. In certain circumstances even 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 know whether you are under my command or not! For discipline! For organization! It should be cleared up! I shall put through an urgent inquiry.”

Joe looked at him incredulously. Lieutenant Commander Brown was a perfectly amiable man, but he had to have things in a certain pattern for him to recognize that they were in a pattern at all. He was more excited over the fact that he didn’t know whether he ranked Joe, than over the much more important matter of physical deterioration in the absence of gravity. Yet he surely understood their relative importance. The fact was, of course, that he could confidently expect exact instructions about the last, while he had to settle matters of discipline and routine for himself.