Chapter 9

But even at ten gravities’ drive it takes time to travel 4,000 miles. At three, and coasting a great deal of the way, it takes much longer. The Platform circled Earth in four hours and a little more. Anything intending interception and rising straight up needed to start skyward long before the Platform was overhead. A three-g rocket would start while the Platform was still below the western horizon from its launching-spot. Especially if it planned to coast part of its journey--and a three-gravity rocket would have to coast most of the way.

So there was time. Coasting, the rising manned rocket would be losing speed. If it planned to go no higher than the Platform’s orbit, its upward velocity would be zero there. If it were intercepted 500 miles down, it would be rising at an almost leisurely rate, and Joe and the Chief could check their Earthward plunge and match its rising rate.

This they did. But what they couldn’t do was match its orbital velocity, which was zero. They had the Platform’s eastward speed to start with--over 200 miles a minute. No matter how desperately they fired braking-rockets, they couldn’t stop and maneuver around the rising control-ship. Inevitably they would simply flash past it in the fraction of an instant. To fire their tiny guided missiles on ahead would be almost to assure that they would miss. Also, the enemy ship was manned. It could fight back.

But Joe had been on the receiving end of one attack in space. It wasn’t much experience, but it was more than anybody but he and his own crew possessed.

“Chief,” said Joe softly into his helmet-mike, as if by speaking softly he could keep from being overheard, “get close enough to me to see what I do, and do it too. I can’t tell you more. Whoever’s running this rocket might know English.”

There was a flaring of vapor in space. The Chief was using his steering-rockets to draw near.

Joe spun his little space wagon about, so that it pointed back in the direction from which he had come. He had four guided missiles, demolition type. Very deliberately, he fired the four of them astern--away from the rising rocket. They were relatively low-speed missiles, intended to blow up a robot ship that couldn’t be hooked onto, because it was traveling too much faster or slower than the Platform it was intended to reach. The missiles went away. Then Joe faced about again in the direction of his prospective target. The Chief fumed--Joe heard him--but he duplicated Joe’s maneuver. He faced his own eccentric vessel in the direction of its line of flight.

Then his fuming suddenly ceased. Joe’s headphones brought his explosive grunt when he suddenly saw the idea.

“Joe! I wish you could talk Indian! I could kiss you for this trick!“

Brown’s voice said anxiously: “_I’m going to let that manned rocket have a couple more shots._”

“Let us get by first,” said Joe. “Then maybe you can use them on the bombs coming up.”

He could see the trails of war-rockets on the way out from Earth. They were infinitesimal threads of vapor. They were the thinnest possible filaments of gossamer white. But they enlarged as they rose. They were climbing at better than two miles per second, now, and still increasing their speed.

But the arena in which this conflict took place was so vast that everything seemed to take place in slow motion. There was time to reason out not only the method of attack from Earth, but the excuse for it. If the Platform vanished from space, no matter from what cause, its enemies would announce vociferously that it had been destroyed by its own atomic bombs, exploding spontaneously. Even in the face of proof of murder, enemy nations would stridently insist that bombs intended for the enslavement of humanity--in the Platform--had providentially detonated and removed that instrument of war-mongering scoundrelly imperialists from the skies. There might be somebody, somewhere, who would believe it.

Joe and the Chief were steadied now nearly on a line to intercept the rising manned rocket. They had already fired their missiles, which trailed them. They went into battle, not prepared to shoot, but with their ammunition expended. For which there was excellent reason.

Something came foaming toward them from the nearby man-carrying rocket. It seemed like a side-spout from the column of vapor rising from Earth. Actually it was a guided missile.

“Now we dodge,” said Joe cheerfully. “Remember the trick of this maneuvering business!”

It was simple. Speeding toward the rising assassin, and with his missiles rushing toward them, the relative speeds of the wagons and the missiles were added together. If the space wagons dodged, the missile operator had less time to swing his guided rockets to match the change of target course. And besides, the attacker hadn’t made a single turn in space. Not yet. He might know that a rocket doesn’t go where it’s pointed, as a matter of theory. He might even know intellectually that the final speed and course of a rocket is the sum of all its previous speeds and courses. But he hadn’t used the knowledge Joe and the Chief had.

Something rushed at them. They went into evasive action. And they didn’t merely turn the noses of their space wagons. They flung them about end-for-end, and blasted. They used wholly different accelerations at odd angles. Joe shot away from Earth on steering rocket thrust, and touched off a four-three while he faced toward Earth’s north pole, and halfway along that four-second rush he flipped his craft in a somersault and the result was nearly a right-angled turn. When the four-three burned out he set off a twelve-two, and halfway through its burning fired a three-two with it, so that at the beginning he had two gravities acceleration, then four gravities for three seconds, and then two again.

With long practice, a man might learn marksmanship in space. But all a man’s judgment of speeds is learned on Earth, where things always, always, always move steadily. Nobody making his first space-flight could possibly hit such targets as Joe and the Chief made of themselves. The man in the enemy rocket was making his first flight. Also, Joe and the Chief had an initial velocity of 200 miles a minute toward him. The marksman in the rising rocket hadn’t a chance. He fired four more missiles and tried desperately to home them in. But----

They flashed past his rising course. And then they were quite safe from his fire, because it would take a very long time indeed for anything he shot after them to catch up. But their missiles had still to pass him--and Joe and the Chief could steer them without any concern about their own safety or anything else but a hit.

They made a hit.

Two of the eight little missiles flashed luridly, almost together, where the radar-pips showed the rocket to be. Then there were two parts to the rocket, separating. One was small and one was fairly large. Another demolition-missile hit the larger section. Still another exploded as that was going to pieces. The smaller fragment ceased to be important. The explosions weren’t atomic bombs, of course. They were only demolition-charges. But they demolished the manned rocket admirably.

Brown’s voice came in the headphones, still tense. “_You got it! How about the others?_”

Joe felt a remarkable exhilaration. Later he might think about the poor devil--there could have been only one--who had been destroyed some 3,700 miles above the surface of the Earth. He might think unhappily of that man as a victim of hatred rather than as a hater. He might become extremely uncomfortable about this, but at the moment he felt merely that he and the Chief had won a startling victory.

“I think,” he said, “that you can treat them with silent contempt. They won’t have proximity fuses. Those friends of ours who want so badly to kill us have found that proximity fuses don’t work. Unless one is on a collision course I don’t think you need to do anything about them.”

The Chief was muttering to himself in Mohawk, twenty miles away. Joe said:

“Chief, how about getting back to the Platform?”

The Chief growled. “_My great-grandfather would disown me! Winning a fight and no scalp to show! Not even counting coup! He’d disown me!_”

But Joe saw his rockets flare, away off against the stars.

The war rockets were very near, now. They still emitted monstrous jettings of thick white vapor. They climbed up with incredible speed. One went by Joe at a distance of little more than a mile, and its fumes eddied out to half that before they thinned to nothingness. They went on and on and on...

They burned out somewhere. It would be a long time before they fell back to Earth. Hours, probably. Then they would be meteors. They’d vaporize before they touched solidity. They wouldn’t even explode.

But Joe and the Chief rode back to the Platform. It was surprising how hard it was to match speed with it again, to make a good entrance into the giant lock. They barely made it before the Platform made its plunge into that horrible blackness which was the Earth’s shadow. And Joe was very glad they did make it before then. He wouldn’t have liked to be merely astride a skinny framework in that ghastly darkness, with the monstrous blackness of the Abyss seeming to be trying to devour him.

Haney met them in the airlock. He grinned.

“Nice job, Joe! Nice job, Chief!” he said warmly. “Uh--the Lieutenant Commander wants you to report to him, Joe. Right away.”

Joe cocked an eyebrow at him.

“What for?”

Haney spread out his hands. The Chief grunted. “That guy bothers me. I’ll bet, Joe, he’s going to explain you shouldn’t’ve gone out when he didn’t want you to. Me, I’m keeping away from him!”

The Chief shed his space suit and swaggered away, as well as anyone could swagger while walking on what happened to be the ceiling, from Joe’s point of view. Joe put his space gear in its proper place. He went to the small cubbyhole that Brown had appropriated for the office of the Platform Commander. Joe went in, naturally without saluting.

Brown sat in a fastened-down chair with thigh grips holding him in place. He was writing. On Joe’s entry, he carefully put the pen down on a magnetized plate that would hold it until he wanted it again. Otherwise it could have floated anywhere about the room.

“Mr. Kenmore,” said Brown awkwardly, “you did a very nice piece of work. It’s too bad you aren’t in the Navy.”

Joe said: “It did work out pretty fortunately. It’s lucky the Chief and I were out practicing, but now we can take off when a rocket’s reported, any time.”

Brown cleared his throat. “I can thank you personally,” he said unhappily, “and I do. But--really this situation is intolerable! How can I report this affair? I can’t suggest commendation, or a promotion, or--anything! I don’t even know how to refer to you! I am going to ask you, Mr. Kenmore, to put through a request that your status be clarified. I would imagine that your status would mean a rank--hm--about equivalent to a lieutenant junior grade in the Navy.”

Joe grinned.

“I have--ah--prepared a draft you might find helpful,” said Brown earnestly. “It’s necessary for something to be done. It’s urgent! It’s important!”

“Sorry,” said Joe. “The important thing to me is getting ready to load up the Platform with supplies from Earth. Excuse me.”

He went out of the office. He made his way to the quarters assigned himself and his crew. Mike greeted him with reproachful eyes. Joe waved his hand.

“Don’t say it, Mike! The answer is yes. See that the tanks are refilled, and new rockets put in place. Then you and Haney go out and practice. But no farther than ten miles from the Platform. Understand?”

“No!” said Mike rebelliously. “It’s a dirty trick!”

“Which,” Joe assured him, “I commit only because there’s a robot ship from Bootstrap coming up any time now. And we’ll need to pick it up and tow it here.”

He went to the control-room to see if he could get a vision connection to Earth.

He got the beam, and he got Sally on the screen. A report of the attack on the Platform had evidently already gone down to Earth. Sally’s expression was somehow drawn and haunted. But she tried to talk lightly.

“Derring-do and stuff, Joe?” she asked. “How does it feel to be a victorious warrior?”

“It feels rotten,” he told her. “There must have been somebody in the rocket we blew up. He felt like a patriot, I guess, trying to murder us; But I feel like a butcher.”

“Maybe you didn’t do it,” she said. “Maybe the Chief’s bombs----”

“Maybe,” said Joe. He hesitated. “Hold up your hand.”

She held it up. His ring was still on it. She nodded. “Still there. When will you be back?”

He shook his head. He didn’t know. It was curious that one wanted so badly to talk to a girl after doing something that was blood-stirring--and left one rather sickish afterward. This business of space travel and even space battle was what he’d dreamed of, and he still wanted it. But it was very comforting to talk to Sally, who hadn’t had to go through any of it.

“Write me a letter, will you?” he asked. “We can’t tie up this beam very long.”

“I’ll write you all the news that’s allowed to go out,” she assured him. “Be seeing you, Joe.”

Her image faded from the screen. And, thinking it over, he couldn’t see that either of them had said anything of any importance at all. But he was very glad they’d talked together.

The first robot ship came up some eight hours later--two revolutions after the television call. Mike was ready hours in advance, fidgeting. The robot ship started up while the Platform was over the middle of the Pacific. It didn’t try to make a spiral approach as all other ships had done. It came straight up, and it started from the ground. No pushpots. Its take-off rockets were monsters. They pushed upward at ten gravities until it was out of atmosphere, and then they stepped up to fifteen. Much later, the robot turned on its side and fired orbital speed rockets to match velocity with the Platform.

There were two reasons for the vertical rise, and the high acceleration. If a robot ship went straight up, it wouldn’t pass over enemy territory until it was high enough to be protected by the Platform. And--it costs fuel to carry fuel to be burned. So if the rocketship could get up speed for coasting to orbit in the first couple of hundred miles, it needn’t haul its fuel so far. It was economical to burn one’s fuel fast and get an acceleration that would kill a human crew. Hence robots.

The landing of the first robot ship at the Platform was almost as matter-of-fact as if it had been done a thousand times before. From the Platform its dramatic take-off couldn’t be seen, of course. It first appeared aloft as a pip on a radar screen. Then Mike prepared to go out and hook on to it and tow it in. He was in his space suit and in the landing lock, though his helmet faceplate was still open. A loudspeaker boomed suddenly in Brown’s voice: “_Evacuate airlock and prepare to take off!_”

Joe roared: “Hold that!”

Brown’s voice, very official, came: “_Withhold execution of that order. You should not be in the airlock, Mr. Kenmore. You will please make way for operational procedure._”

“We’re checking the space wagon,” snapped Joe. “That’s operational procedure!”

The loudspeaker said severely: “_The checking should have been done earlier!_”

There was silence. Mike and Joe, together, painstakingly checked over the very many items that had to be made sure. Every rocket had to have its firing circuit inspected. The tanks’ contents and pressure verified. The air connection to Mike’s space suit. The air pressure. The device that made sure that air going to Mike’s space suit was neither as hot as metal in burning sunlight, nor cold as the chill of a shadow in space.

Everything checked. Mike straddled his red-painted mount. Joe left the lock and said curtly:

“Okay to pump the airlock. Okay to open airlock doors when ready. Go ahead.”

Mike went out, and Joe watched from a port in the Platform’s hull. The drone from Earth was five miles behind the Platform in its orbit, and twenty miles below, and all of ten miles off-course. Joe saw Mike scoot the red space wagon to it, stop short with a sort of cocky self-assurance, hook on to the tow-ring in the floating space-barge’s nose, and blast off back toward the Platform with it in tow.