<h2><SPAN name="c4" id="c4"></SPAN><i>4</i></h2>
<p>There was a babbling of angry, strained, tense
voices in Joe's headphones. Then the Chief roared for silence.
It fell, save for Sanford's quiet, hysterical chuckling. Joe
found himself rather absurdly thinking that Sanford was not
actually insane, except as any man may be who believes only
in his own cleverness. Sooner or later it is bound to fail him.
On Earth, Sanford's pride in his own intellect had been useful.
He had been brilliant because he accepted every problem<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_54" id="Page_54"></SPAN></span>
and every difficulty as a challenge. But with the Platform's
situation seemingly hopeless, he'd been starkly unable to face
the fact that he wasn't clever or brilliant or intelligent enough.
If Joe's solution to the proximity fuse bombs had been offered
before his emotional collapse, he could have accepted it
grandly, and in so doing have made it his own. But it was too
late for that now. He'd given up and worked up a frantic
scorn for the universe he could not cope with. For Joe's
trick to work would have made him inferior even to Joe in
his own view. And he couldn't have that! Even to die, with
the prospect that others would survive him, was an intolerable
prospect. He had to be smarter than anybody else.</p>
<p>So he chuckled. The Chief roared wrathfully into his transmitter:
"Quiet! This crazy fool's tried to commit suicide for
all of us! How about it? Why can't we get back in? How
many locks——"</p>
<p>Joe found himself thinking hard. He could be angry later.
Now there wasn't time. Thirty or forty minutes of breathing.
No tools. A steel hull. The airlocks were naturally arranged
for the greatest possible safety under normal conditions. In
every airlock it had naturally been arranged so that the door
to space and the door to the interior could not be open at the
same time. That was to save lives. To save air, it would naturally
be arranged that the door to space couldn't be opened
until the lock was pumped empty.</p>
<p>That in itself could be an answer. Joe said sharply, "Hold it,
Chief! Somebody watch Sanford! All we've got to do is find
which lock he came out of. He couldn't get out until he
pumped it empty—and that unlocks the outer door!"</p>
<p>But Sanford laughed once more. He sounded like someone
in the highest of high good humor.</p>
<p>"Heroic again, eh? But I took a compressed air bottle in the
lock with me. When the outer door was open, I opened the
stopcock and shut the door. The air bottle filled the lock behind
me. Naturally I'd fasten the door after I came out! One
must be intelligent!"</p>
<p>Joe heard Brent muttering, "Yes, he'd do that!"</p>
<p>"Somebody check it!" snapped Joe. "Make sure! It might<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_55" id="Page_55"></SPAN></span>
amuse him to watch us die while he knew we could get back
in if we were as smart as he is."</p>
<p>There were clankings on the hull. Men moved, unfastening
the lines which held them to the hull to get freedom of movement,
but not breaking the links which bound them to each
other. Joe saw Haney go grimly back to the task of throwing
away the stuff that they had brought out for the purpose.
Then Mike's voice, brittle and cagey: "Haney! Quit it!"</p>
<p>Sanford's voice again, horribly amused. "By all means!
Don't throw away our garbage! We may need it!"</p>
<p>A voice snapped, "This lock's fastened." Another voice:
"And this...." Other voices, with increasing desperation,
verified that every airlock was implacably sealed fast by the
presence of air pressure inside the lock itself.</p>
<p>Time was passing. Joe had never noticed, before, the minute
noises of the air pressure apparatus strapped to his back. His
exhaled breath went to a tiny pump that forced it through a
hygroscopic filter which at once extracted excess moisture and
removed carbon dioxide. The same pump carefully measured
a volume of oxygen equal to the removed CO<sub>2</sub> and added it
to the air it released. The pump made very small sounds indeed,
and the valves were almost noiseless, but Joe could hear
their clickings.</p>
<p>Something burned him. He had been standing perfectly
still while trying to concentrate on a way out. Sunshine had
shone uninterruptedly on one side of his space suit for as long
as five minutes. Despite the insulation inside, that was too
long. He turned quickly to expose another part of himself
to the sunlight. He knew abstractedly that the metal underfoot
would sear bare flesh that touched it. A few yards away, in
the shadow, the metal of the hull would be cold enough to
freeze hydrogen. But here it was fiercely hot. It would melt
solder. It might—</p>
<p>Mike was fumbling tin cans out of the net bag from which
Haney had been throwing them away. He was a singular
small figure, standing on shining steel, looking at one tin can
after another and impatiently putting them aside.</p>
<p>He found one that seemed to suit him. It was a large can.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_56" id="Page_56"></SPAN></span>
He knelt with it, pressing a part of it to the hot metal of the
satellite's hull. A moment later he was ripping it apart. The
solder had softened. He unrolled a sort of cylinder, then bent
again, using the curved inner surface to concentrate the intolerable
sunshine.</p>
<p>Joe caught his breath at the implication. Concentrated
sunshine can be incredibly hot. Starting with unshielded,
empty-space sunshine, practically any imaginable temperature
is possible with a large enough mirror. Mike didn't have
a concave mirror. He had only a cylindrical one. He couldn't
reflect light to a point, but only to a line. Mike couldn't hope
to do more than double or triple the temperature of a given
spot. But considering what he wore on his back—!</p>
<p>Joe made his way clumsily to the spot where Mike now
gesticulated to Haney, trying to convey his meaning by
gestures since Sanford would overhear any spoken word.</p>
<p>"I get it, Mike," said Joe. "I'll help." He added: "Chief!
You watch Sanford. The rest of you try to flatten out some tin
cans or find some with flat round ends!"</p>
<p>He reached the spot where Mike bent over the plating.
His hand moved to cast a shadow where the light had played.</p>
<p>"I need more reflectors," Mike said brusquely, "but we can
do it!"</p>
<p>Joe beckoned. There were more, hurried clankings. Space-suited
figures gathered about.</p>
<p>The Platform rolled on through space. Where it was bright
it was very, very bright, and where it was dark it was blackness.
Off in emptiness the many-colored mass of Earth shone
hugely, rolling past. Innumerable incurious stars looked on.
The sun flamed malevolently. The moon floated abstractedly
far away.</p>
<p>Mike was bent above a small round airlock door. He had
a distorted half-cylinder of sheet tin between his space-gloved
hands. It reflected a line of intensified sunlight to the edge
of the airlock seal. Haney ripped fiercely at other tin cans.
Joe held another strip of polished metal. It focused crudely—very
crudely—on top of Mike's line of reflected sunshine.
Someone else held the end of a tin can to reflect<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_57" id="Page_57"></SPAN></span>
more sunshine. Someone else had a larger disk of tin.</p>
<p>They stood carefully still. It looked completely foolish.
There were six men in frozen attitudes, trying to reflect sunshine
down to a single blindingly-bright spot on an airlock
door. They seemed breathlessly tense. They ignored the
glories of the firmament. They were utterly absorbed in trying
to make a spot of unbearable brightness glow more brightly
still.</p>
<p>Mike moved his hand to cast a shadow. The steel was a
little more than red-hot for the space of an inch. It would not
melt, of course. It could not. And they had no tools to bend
or pierce the presumably softened metal. But Mike said
fiercely:</p>
<p>"Keep it hot!"</p>
<p>He squirmed. His space suit was fabric, like the rest, but it
had been cut down to permit him to use it. It was bulkier on
him than the suits of the others. He shifted his shoulder pack.
The brass valve-nipple by which the oxygen tank was
filled....</p>
<p>He jammed a ragged fragment of tin in place. He pressed
down fiercely. A blazing jet of fierce, scintillating, streaking
sparks leaped up from the spot where the metal glowed
brightly. A hollow in the metal plate appeared. The metal
disintegrated in gushing flecks of light....</p>
<p>White-hot iron in pure oxygen happens to be inflammable.
Iron is not incombustible at all. Powdered steel, ground fine
enough, will burn if simply exposed to air. Really fine steel
wool will make an excellent blaze if a match is touched to it.
White-hot iron, with a jet of oxygen played upon it, explodes
to steaming sparks. Technically, Mike had used the perfectly
well-known trick of an oxygen lance to pierce the airlock door,
let the air out of the lock, and so allow the outer door to be
opened.</p>
<p>There was a rush of vapor. The door was drilled through.
Haney picked Mike up bodily, Joe heaved the door open, and
Haney climbed into it, practically carrying Mike by the
scruff of the neck. Joe panted, "Plug the hole from the inside.
Sit on it if you have to!" and slammed the door shut.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_58" id="Page_58"></SPAN></span></p>
<p>They waited. Sanford's voice came in the ear-phones. It
was higher in pitch than it had been.</p>
<p>"You fools!" he raged. "It's useless! It's stupid to do useless
things! It's stupid to do anything at all—"</p>
<p>There were sudden scuffling clankings. Joe swung about.
The Chief and Sanford were struggling. Sanford flailed his
arms about, trying to break the Chief's faceplate while he
screamed furious things about futility.</p>
<p>The Chief got exactly the hold he wanted. He lifted Sanford
from the metal deck. He could have thrown him away to
emptiness, then, but he did not.</p>
<p>He set Sanford in mid-space as if upon a shelf. The raging
man hung in the void an exact man-height above the Platform's
surface. The Chief drew back and left him there, Sanford
could writhe there for a century before the Platform's infinitesimal
gravity brought him down.</p>
<p>"Huh!" said the Chief wrathfully. "How's Haney and Mike
making out?"</p>
<p>Almost on the instant, twenty yards away, a tiny airlock
door thrust out from the surface of glittering metal, and
helmet and antenna appeared.</p>
<p>"You guys can come in now," said Haney's voice in Joe's
headphones. "It's all okay. Mike's pumping out the other
locks too, so you can come in at any of 'em."</p>
<p>The space-suited figures clumped loudly to airlock doors.
There were a dozen or more small airlocks in various parts of
the hull, besides the great door to admit supply ships. The
Chief growled and moved toward Sanford now raging like
the madman his helplessness made him.</p>
<p>"No," said Joe shortly. "He'd fight again. Go inside. That's
an order, Chief."</p>
<p>The Chief grunted and obeyed. Joe went to the nearest
airlock and entered the great steel hull.</p>
<p>Sanford floated in emptiness, two yards from the Space
Platform he would have turned into a derelict. He did not
move farther away. He did not fall toward it. There was nobody
to listen to him. He cried out in blood-curdling fury because
other men were smarter than he was. Other men had<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_59" id="Page_59"></SPAN></span>
solved problems he could not solve. Other men were his
superiors. He screamed his rage.</p>
<p>Presently the Platform revolved slowly beneath him. It
was turned, of course, by the monster gyros which in turn
were controlled by the pilot gyros Joe and Haney and the
Chief and Mike had repaired when saboteurs smashed them.</p>
<p>The Platform rotated sedately. A great gap appeared in it.
The door of the supply ship lock moved until Sanford, floating
helplessly, was opposite its mouth.</p>
<p>A rod with a rounded object at its end appeared past the
docked supply ship. It reached out and touched Sanford's helmet.
It was the magnetic grapple which drew space ships into
their dock.</p>
<p>It drew Sanford, squirming and streaming, into the great
lock. The outer doors closed. Before air was admitted to the
inside, Sanford went suddenly still.</p>
<p>When they took him out of his suit he was apparently unconscious.
He could not be roused. Freed, he drew his knees
up to his chin in the position in which primitive peoples bury
their dead. He seemed to sleep. Brent examined him carefully.</p>
<p>"Catatonia," he said distastefully. "He spent his life thinking
he was smarter than anybody else—smarter, probably,
than all the universe. He believed it. He couldn't face the
fact that he was wrong. He couldn't stay conscious and not
know it. So he's blacked out. He refuses to be anything unless
he can be smartest. We'll have to do artificial feeding and all
that until we can get him down to Earth to a hospital." He
shrugged.</p>
<p>"We'd better report this down to Earth," Joe said. "By the
way, better not describe our screen of tin cans on radio waves.
Not even microwaves. It might leak. And we want to see if it
works."</p>
<p>Just forty-two hours later they found out that it did work.
A single rocket came climbing furiously out from Earth. It
came from the night-side, and they could not see where it was
launched, though they could make excellent guesses. They got
a single guided missile ready to crash it if necessary.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_60" id="Page_60"></SPAN></span></p>
<p>It wasn't necessary. The bomb from Earth detonated 300
miles below the artificial satellite. Its proximity fuse, sending
out small radar-type waves, had them reflected back by an
empty sardine can thrown away from the Platform by Mike
Scandia forty-some hours ago. The sardine can had been
traveling in its own private orbit ever since. The effect of
Mike's muscles had not been to send it back to Earth, but to
change the center of the circular orbit in which it floated.
Sometimes it floated above the Platform—that was on one side
of Earth—and sometimes below it. It was about 300 miles
under the Platform when it reflected urgent, squealing radar
frequency waves to a complex proximity fuse in the climbing
rocket. The rocket couldn't tell the difference between a sardine
can and a Space Platform.</p>
<p>It exploded with a blast of pure brightness like that of the
sun.</p>
<p>The Platform went on its monotonous round about the
planet from which it had risen only weeks before. Sanford
was strapped in a bunk and fed through a tube, and on occasion
massaged and variously tended to keep him alive. The
men on the Platform worked. They made telephoto maps of
Earth. They took highly magnified, long-exposure photographs
of Mars, pictures that could not possibly be made with such
distinctness from the bottom of Earth's turbulent ocean of air.</p>
<p>There was a great deal of official business to be done.
Weather observations of the form and distribution of cloud
masses were an important matter. The Platform could make
much more precise measurements of the solar constant than
could be obtained below. The flickering radar was gathering
information for studies of the frequency and size of meteoric
particles outside the atmosphere. There was the extremely important
project for securing and sealing in really good vacua
in various electronic devices brought up by Joe and his crew in
the supply ship.</p>
<p>But sometimes Joe managed to talk to Sally.</p>
<p>It was very satisfying to see her on the television screen
in personal conversation. Their talk couldn't be exactly private,
because it could be picked up elsewhere. It probably<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_61" id="Page_61"></SPAN></span>
was. But she told Joe how she felt, and she wanted to read
him the newspaper stories based on the reports Brent had sent
down. Brent was in command of the Platform now that Sanford
lay in a resolute coma in his bunk. But Joe discouraged
such waste of time.</p>
<p>"How's the food?" asked Sally. "Are you people getting
any fresh vegetables from the hydroponic garden?"</p>
<p>They were, and Joe told her so. The huge chamber in
which sun-lamps glowed for a measured number of hours
in each twenty-four produced incredibly luxuriant vegetation.
It kept the air of the ship breathable. It even changed the
smell of it from time to time, so that there was no feeling of
staleness.</p>
<p>"And the cooking system's really good?" she wanted to
know. Sally was partly responsible for that, too. "And how
about the bunks?"</p>
<p>"I sleep now," Joe admitted.</p>
<p>That had been difficult. It was possible to get used to
weightlessness while awake. One would slip, sometimes, and
find himself suddenly tense and panicky because he'd abruptly
noticed all over again that he was falling. But—and yet again
Sally was partly responsible—the bunks were designed to help
in that difficulty. Each bunk had an inflatable top blanket.
One crawled in and settled down, and turned the petcock
that inflated the cover. Then it held one quite gently but reassuringly
in place. It was possible to stir and to turn over,
but the feeling of being held fast was very comforting. With
a little care about what one thought of before going to sleep,
one could get a refreshing eight hours' rest. The bunks were
luxury.</p>
<p>Sally said: "The date and time's a secret, of course, because
it might be overheard, but there'll be another ship up before
too long. It's bringing landing rockets for you to come back
with."</p>
<p>"That's good!" said Joe. It would feel good to set foot on
solid ground again. He looked at Sally and said eagerly,
"We've got a date the evening I get back?"</p>
<p>"We've got a date," she said, nodding.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_62" id="Page_62"></SPAN></span></p>
<p>But it couldn't very well be a definite date. There were
people with ideas that ran counter to plans for Joe to get back
to Earth and a date with Sally Holt. The Space Platform was
not admired uniformly by all the nations of Earth. The United
States had built it because the United Nations couldn't, and
one of the attractions of the idea had been that once it got out
to space and was armed, peace must reign upon Earth because
it could smack down anybody who made war.</p>
<p>The trouble was that it wasn't armed well enough. Six
guided missiles couldn't defend it indefinitely. It looked as
helpless as isolated Berlin did before the first airlift proved
what men and planes could do in the way of transport. And
the Platform's enemies didn't intend for it to be saved by
a rocketlift. They would try to smash it before such a lift
could get started.</p>
<p>A week after Joe got to it with the guided missiles, three
rockets attacked. They went up from somewhere in the middle
of the Pacific. One blew up 250 miles below the Platform.
Another detonated 190 miles away. For safety's sake the
third was crashed—at the cost of one guided missile—when it
had come within 50 miles.</p>
<p>The screen of tin cans worked, but it wasn't thick enough.
The occupants of the Platform went about hunting for sheet
metal that could be spared. They pulled out minor partitions
here and there, and went out on the surface and threw away
thousands of small glittering scraps of metal in all directions.</p>
<p>Two weeks later, there was another attack. It could be
calculated that Joe couldn't have carried up more than six
guided missiles. There might be as few as two of them left.
So eight rockets came up together—and the first of them
went off 400 miles from the Platform. Only one got as close as
200 miles. No guided missiles were expended in defense.</p>
<p>The Platform's enemies tried once more. This time the
rockets arched up above the Platform's orbit and dived on
the satellite from above. There were two of them. They went
off at 180 and 270 miles from the Platform. Joe's trash screen
would not work on Earth, but in space it was an adequate
defense against anything equipped with proximity fuses. It<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_63" id="Page_63"></SPAN></span>
could be assumed that in a full-scale space-war nuts, bolts,
rusty nails and beer bottle caps would become essential military
equipment.</p>
<p>Three days after this last attack, a second supply ship took
off from Earth. Lieutenant Commander Brown was a passenger.
Its start was just like the one Joe's ship had made.
Pushpots lifted it, jatos hurled it on, and then the furious,
flaming take-off rockets drove it valiantly out toward the
stars.</p>
<p>Joe's ship had been moved out of the landing lock and was
moored against the Platform's hull. The second ship made
contact in two hours and seventeen minutes from take-off.
It arrived with its own landing rockets intact, and it brought
a set of forty-foot metal tubes for Joe's ship to get back to
Earth with. But those landing rockets and Lieutenant Commander
Brown constituted all its payload. It couldn't bring up
anything else.</p>
<p>And Lieutenant Commander Brown called a very formal
meeting in the huge living space at the Platform's center. He
stood up grandly in full uniform—and had to hook his feet
around a chair leg to keep from floating absurdly in mid-air.
This detracted slightly from the dignity of his stance, but not
from the official voice with which he read two documents
aloud.</p>
<p>The first paper detached Lieutenant Commander Brown
from his regular naval duties and assigned him pro tem to
service with the Space Exploration Project. The second was
an order directing him to take command and assume direction
of the Space Platform.</p>
<p>Having read his orders, he cleared his throat and said
cordially, "I am honored to serve here with you. Frankly, I
expect to learn much from you and to have very few orders
to give. I expect merely to exercise such authority as experience
at sea has taught me is necessary for a tight and
happy ship. I trust this will be one."</p>
<p>He beamed. Nobody was impressed. It was perfectly obvious
that he'd simply been sent up to acquire experience in
space for later naval use, and that he'd been placed in command<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_64" id="Page_64"></SPAN></span>
because it was unthinkable that he serve under anyone
without official rank and authority. And he quite honestly believed
that his coming, with experience in command, was a
blessing to the Platform. In fact, there was no danger that this
commander of the Platform would crack up under stress as
Sanford had.</p>
<p>But it was too bad that he hadn't brought some long-range
guided missiles with him.</p>
<p>Joe's ship had brought up twenty tons of cargo and twenty
tons of landing rockets. The second ship brought up twenty
tons of landing rockets for Joe, and twenty tons of landing
rockets for itself. That was all. The second trip out to the
Space Platform was a rescue mission and nothing else. Arithmetic
wouldn't let it be anything else. And there couldn't be
any idea of noble self-sacrifice and staying out at the Platform,
either, because only four ships like Joe's had been begun, and
only two were even near completion. Joe's had taken off the
instant it was finished. The second had done the same. The
second pair of spaceships wouldn't be ready for two months
or more. The ships that could be used had to be used.</p>
<p>So, only thirty-six hours after the arrival of the second
rocketship at the Platform, the two of them took off together
to return to Earth. Joe's ship left the airlock first. Sanford
was loaded in the cabin of the other ship as cargo. Lieutenant
Commander Brown stayed out at the Platform to replace him.</p>
<p>Obviously, in order to get back to Earth they headed away
from it in fleet formation. They pointed their rounded noses
toward the Milky Way.</p>
<p>The upward course was an application of the principle
that made the screen of tin cans and oddments remain about
the Platform. Each of those small objects had had the Platform's
own velocity and orbit. Thrown away from it, the centers
of their orbits changed. In theory, the center of the Platform's
orbit was the center of Earth. But the centers of the
orbits of the thrown-away objects were pushed a few miles—twenty—fifty—a
hundred—away from the center of Earth.</p>
<p>The returning space ships also had the orbit and speed
of the Platform. They wanted to shift the centers of their orbits<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_65" id="Page_65"></SPAN></span>
by very nearly 4,000 miles, so that at one point they would
just barely graze Earth's atmosphere, lose some speed to it,
and then bounce out to empty space again before they melted.
Cooled off, they'd make another grazing bounce. After eight
such bounces they'd stay in the air, and the stubby fins would
give them a sort of gliding angle and controllability, while the
landing rockets would let them down to solid ground. Or so
it was hoped.</p>
<p>Meanwhile they headed out instead of in toward Earth.
They went out on their steering-rockets only, using the liquid
fuel that had not been needed for course correction on the
way out. At 4,000 miles up, the force of gravity is just one-fourth
of that at the Earth's surface. It still exists; it is merely
canceled out in an orbit. The ships could move outward at
less cost in fuel than they could move in.</p>
<p>So they went out and out on parallel courses, and the Platform
dwindled behind them. Night flowed below until the hull
of the artificial satellite shone brightly against a background of
seeming sheer nothingness.</p>
<p>The twilight zone of Earth's shadow reached the Platform.
It glowed redly, glowed crimson, glowed the deepest possible
color that could be seen, and winked out. The ships climbed
on, using their tiny steering rockets.</p>
<p>Nothing happened. The ships drew away from each other
for safety. They were 50, then 60 miles apart. One glowed red
and vanished in the shadow of the Earth. The other was extinguished
in the same way. Then they went hurtling through
the blackness of the night side of Earth. Microwaves from the
ground played upon them—radar used by friend and foe
alike—and the friendly radar guided tight-beam communicator
waves to them with comforting assurance that their joint
course and height and speed were exactly the calculated optimum.
But they could not be seen at all.</p>
<p>When they appeared again they were still farther out from
Earth than the Platform's orbit, but no farther from each other.
And they were descending. The centers of their orbits had
been displaced very, very far indeed.</p>
<p>Going out, naturally, the ships had lost angular speed as<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_66" id="Page_66"></SPAN></span>
they gained in height. Descending, they gained in angular
velocity as they lost height. They were not quite 30 miles apart
as they sped with increasing, headlong speed and rushed toward
the edge of the world's disk. When they were only
2,000 miles high, the Earth's surface under them moved much
faster than it had on the way up. When they were only
1,000 miles high, the seas and continents seemed to flow past
like a rushing river. At 500 miles, mountains and plains were
just distinguishable as they raced past underneath. At 200
miles there was merely a churning, hurtling surface on which
one could not focus one's eyes because of the speed of its
movement.</p>
<p>They missed the solid surface of Earth by barely 40 miles.
They were moving at a completely impossible speed. The
energy of their position 4,000 miles high had been transformed
into kinetic energy of motion. And at 40 miles there
is something very close to a vacuum, compared to sea-level.
But compared to true emptiness, and at the speed of meteors,
the thin air had a violent effect.</p>
<p>A thin humming sound began. It grew louder. The substance
of the ship was responding to the impact of the thin
air upon it. The sound rose to a roar, to a bellow, to a thunderous
tumult. The ship quivered and trembled. It shook. A
violent vibration set up and grew more and more savage. The
whole ship shook with a dreadful persistence, each vibration
more monstrous, more straining, more ominous than before.</p>
<p>The four in the space ship cabin knew torture. Weight returned
to them, weight more violent than the six gravities
they had known for a bare fourteen seconds at take-off. But
that, at least, had been smoothly applied. This was deceleration
at a higher figure yet, and accompanied by the shaking
of bodies which weighed seven times as much as ever before—and
bodies, too, which for weeks past had been subject to no
weight at all.</p>
<p>They endured. Nothing at all could be done. At so many
miles per second no possible human action could be determined
upon and attempted in time to have any effect upon
the course of the ship. Joe could see out a quartzite port. The<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_67" id="Page_67"></SPAN></span>
ground 40 miles below was merely a blur. There was a black
sky overhead, which did not seem to stir. But cloud-masses
rushed at express-train speed below him, and his body
weighed more than half a ton, and the ship made the sound
of innumerable thunders and shook, and shook and
shook....</p>
<p>And then, when it seemed that it must fly utterly to pieces,
the thunder diminished gradually to a bellow, and the bellow
to a roar, and the roaring.... And the unthinkable weight
oppressing him grew less.</p>
<p>The Earth was farther away and moving farther still. They
were 100 miles high. They were 200 miles high....</p>
<p>There was no longer any sound at all, except their gaspings
for breath. Their muscles had refused to lift their chests at
all during the most brutal of the deceleration period.</p>
<p>Presently Joe croaked a question. He looked at the hull-temperature
indicators. They were very, very high. He found
that he was bruised where he had strapped himself in. The
places where each strap had held his heavy body against the
ship's vibrations were deeply black-and-blue.</p>
<p>The Chief said thickly: "Joe, somehow I don't think this
is going to work. When do we hit again?"</p>
<p>"Three hours plus or minus something," said Joe, dry-throated.
"We'll hear from the ground."</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>Joe unstrapped himself.</p>
<p>"How about the other ship?"</p>
<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."</p>
<p>Joe went staggering, again weightless, to look out a port
for the other ship. He should have known better. One does
not spot an eighty-foot space ship with the naked eye when
it is 200 miles away.<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_68" id="Page_68"></SPAN></span></p>
<p>But he saw something, though for seconds he didn't know
what it was.</p>
<p>Now the little ship was 300 miles high and still rising. Joe
was dazed and battered by the vibration of the ship in the
graze just past. The sister space ship 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>And he saw something rising out of the mists at the far
horizon. It was a thread of white vapor. The other rocketship
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.</p>
<p>It was on its way to meet the other space ship.</p>
<p>It did. Joe saw the thread of vapor extend and grow until
it was higher than he was. He never saw the other ship, 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 ship and its crew.</p>
<p>Then he saw the trail of the second rocket. It was rising to
meet him.</p>
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