Space Tug Part 24

"I don't know of any. Oh, yes! Mike got a letter from his girl. I don't know what she said, but he's walking on air."

"But it isn't funny!" said Sally indignantly. "Mike's a person! A fine person! If he'll let me, I'll write to his girl myself and--try to make friends with her so when you come back I--maybe I can be a sort of match-maker."

"That, I like!" Joe said warmly. "You're swell sometimes, Sally!"

Sally looked at him enigmatically in the moonlight.

"There are times when it seems to escape your attention," she observed.

The next morning she cried a little when he left her, to climb in the s.p.a.ce tug which was so small a part of today's activity. Joe and his crew were the only living men who had ever made a round trip to the Platform and back. But now there was the Moons.h.i.+p to go farther than they'd been allowed. It was even clumsier in design than the Platform, though it was smaller. But it wasn't designed to stay in s.p.a.ce. It was to rest on the powdery floor of a ring-mountain's central plain.

Let it get off into s.p.a.ce, and somehow get to the Platform to reload.

Then let it replace the rockets it would burn in this take-off and it could go on out to emptiness. It would make history as the first serious attempt by human beings to reach the Moon.

Joe and his followers would go along simply to handle guided missiles if it came to a fight, and to tow the Moons.h.i.+p to its wharf--the Platform--and out into midstream again when it resumed its journey. And that was all.

The Moons.h.i.+p lifted from the floor of the Shed to the sound of hundreds of pushpot engines.

Then the s.p.a.ce tug roared skyward. Her take-off rockets here subst.i.tuted for the pushpots. Her second-stage rockets were also of the nonpoisonous variety, because she fired them at a bare 60,000 feet. They were subst.i.tutes for the jatos the pushpots carried.

She was out in s.p.a.ce when the third-stage rockets roared dully outside her hull.

When the Moons.h.i.+p crossed the west coast of Africa, the s.p.a.ce tug was 400 miles below and 500 miles behind. When the Moons.h.i.+p crossed Arabia, the difference was 200 miles vertically and less than 100 in line.

Then the Moons.h.i.+p released small objects, steadied by gyroscopes and flung away by puffs of compressed air. The small objects spread out.

Haney and Mike and the Chief had reloaded the firing racks from inside the s.h.i.+p, and now were intent upon control boards and radar. They pressed b.u.t.tons. One by one, little puffs of smoke appeared in s.p.a.ce.

They had armed the little s.p.a.ce missiles, setting off tiny flares which had no function except to prove that each missile was ready for use.

By the time the two s.p.a.ce craft floated toward India, above an area from which war rockets had been known to rise, there were more little weapons floating with them. One screen of missiles hurtled on before the s.p.a.ce tug, and another behind. Anything that came up from Earth would instantly be attacked by dozens of midget s.h.i.+ps bent upon suicide.

Radar probed the s.p.a.ce formation, but enemies of the fleet and the Platform very wisely did no more than probe. The Moons.h.i.+p and its attendants went across the Pacific, still rising. Above the longitude of Was.h.i.+ngton, the s.p.a.ce tug left its former post and climbed, nudging the Moons.h.i.+p this way and that. And from behind, the Platform came floating splendidly.

Tiny figures in s.p.a.ce suits extended the incredibly straight lines which were plastic hoses filled with air. Very, very gently indeed, the great, bulbous Platform and the squat, flat Moons.h.i.+p came together and touched.

They moored in contact.

And then the inert small missiles that had floated below, all the way up, flared simultaneously. Their rockets emitted smoke. In fine alignment, they plunged forward through emptiness, swerved with a remarkable precision, and headed out for emptiness beyond the Platform's...o...b..t. Their function had been to protect the Moons.h.i.+p on its way out.

That function was performed. There were too many of them to recover, so they went out toward the stars.

When their rockets burned out they vanished. But a good hour later, when it was considered that they were as far out as they were likely to go, they began to blow up. Specks of flame, like the tiniest of new stars, flickered against the background of s.p.a.ce.

But Joe and the others were in the Platform by then. They'd brought up mail for the crew. And they were back on duty.

The Platform seemed strange with the Moons.h.i.+p's crew aboard. It had been a gigantic artificial world with very few inhabitants. With twenty-five naval ratings about, plus the four of its regular crew, plus the s.p.a.ce tug's complement, it seemed excessively crowded.

And it was busy. There were twenty-five new men to be guided as they applied what they'd been taught aground about life in s.p.a.ce. It was three full Earthdays before the stores intended for the journey to the Moon and the maintenance of a base there really began to move. The tug and the s.p.a.ce wagons had to be moored outside and reached only by s.p.a.ce suits through small personnel airlocks.

And there was the matter of discipline. Lieutenant Commander Brown had been put in command of the Platform for experience in s.p.a.ce. He was considered to be prepared for command of the Moons.h.i.+p by that experience. So now he turned over command of the Platform to Brent--he made a neat ceremony of it--and took over the s.h.i.+p that would go out to the Moon. He made another ceremony out of that.

In command of the Moons.h.i.+p, his manner to Joe was absolutely correct. He followed regulations to the letter--to a degree that left Joe blankly uncomprehending. But he wouldn't have gotten along in the Navy if he hadn't. He'd tried to do the same thing in the Platform, and it wasn't practical. But he ignored all differences between Joe and himself. He made no overtures of friends.h.i.+p, but that was natural. Unintentionally, Joe had defied him. He now deliberately overlooked all that, and Joe approved of him--within limits.

But Mike and Haney and the Chief did not. They laid for him. And they considered that they got him. When he took over the Moons.h.i.+p, Lieutenant Commander Brown naturally maintained naval discipline and required snappy, official naval salutes on all suitable occasions, even in the Platform. And Joe's gang privately tipped off the noncommissioned personnel of the Moons.h.i.+p. Thereafter, no enlisted man ever saluted Lieutenant Brown without first gently detaching his magnet-soled shoes from the floor. When a man was free, a really snappy salute gave a diverting result. The man's body tilted forward to meet his rising arm, the upward impetus was one-sided, and every man who saluted Brown immediately made a spectacular kowtow which left him rigidly at salute floating somewhere overhead with his back to Lieutenant Brown. With a little practice, it was possible to add a somersault to the other features. On one historic occasion, Brown walked clanking into a storeroom where a dozen men were preparing supplies for transfer to the Moons.h.i.+p. A voice cried, "Shun!" And instantly twelve men went floating splendidly about the storeroom, turning leisurely somersaults, all rigidly at salute, and all wearing regulation poker faces.

An order abolis.h.i.+ng salutes in weightlessness followed shortly after.

It took four days to get the transfer of supplies properly started. It took eight to finish the job. Affixing fresh rockets to the outside of the Moons.h.i.+p's hull alone called for long hours in s.p.a.ce suits. During this time Mike floated nearby in a s.p.a.ce wagon. One of the Navy men was a trifle overcourageous. He affected to despise safety lines. Completing the hook-on of a landing rocket, he straightened up too abruptly and went floating off toward the Milky Way.

Mike brought him back. After that there was less trouble.

Even so, the Moons.h.i.+p and the Platform were linked together for thirteen full days, during which the Platform seemed extraordinarily crowded. On the fourteenth day the two s.h.i.+ps sealed off and separated. Joe and his crew in the s.p.a.ce tug hauled the Moons.h.i.+p a good five miles from the Platform.

The s.p.a.ce tug returned to the Platform. A blinker signal came across the five-mile interval. It was a very crisp, formal, Navy-like message.

Then the newly-affixed rockets on the Moons.h.i.+p's hull spurted their fumes. The big s.h.i.+p began to move. Not outward from Earth, of course.

That was where it was going. But it had the Platform's 12,000 miles per hour of orbital speed. If the bonds of gravitation could have been snapped at just the proper instant, that speed alone would have carried the Moons.h.i.+p all the way to its destination. But they couldn't. So the Moons.h.i.+p blasted to increase its...o...b..tal speed. It would swing out and out, and as the Earth's pull grew weaker with distance the same weight of rockets would move the same ma.s.s farther and farther toward the Moon.

The Moons.h.i.+p's course would be a sort of slowly flattening curve, receding from Earth and becoming almost a straight line where Earth's and the Moon's gravitational fields cancelled each other.

From there, the Moons.h.i.+p would have only to brake its fall against a gravity one-sixth that of Earth, and reaching out a vastly shorter distance.

Joe and the others watched the roiling ma.s.ses of rocket fumes as the s.h.i.+p seemed to grow infinitely small.

"We should've been in that s.h.i.+p," said Haney heavily when the naked eye could no longer pick it out. "We could've beat her to the Moon!"

Joe said nothing. He ached a little inside. But he reflected that the men who'd guided the Platform to its...o...b..t had been overshadowed by himself and Haney and the Chief and Mike. A later achievement always makes an earlier one look small. Now the four of them would be forgotten. History would remember the commander of the Moons.h.i.+p.

Forgotten? Yes, perhaps. But the names of the four of them, Joe and Haney and the Chief and Mike, would still be remembered in a language Joe couldn't speak, in a small village he couldn't name, on those occasions when the Mohawk tribe met in formal council.

The Chief grumbled. Mike stared out the port with bitter envy.

"It was a dirty trick," growled the Chief. "We shoulda been part of the first gang ever to land on the Moon!"

Joe grimaced. His crew needed to be cured of feeling the same way he did.

"I wouldn't say this outside of our gang," said Joe carefully, "but if it hadn't been for us four that s.h.i.+p wouldn't be on the way at all.

Haney figured the trick that got us back to Earth the first time, or else we'd have been killed. If we had been killed, Mike wouldn't have figured out the metal-concrete business. But for him, that Moons.h.i.+p wouldn't even be a gleam in anybody's eye. And if the Chief hadn't blown up that manned rocket we fought in the s.p.a.ce wagons, there wouldn't be any Platform up here to reload and refuel the Moons.h.i.+p. So they left us behind! But just among the four of us I think we can figure that if it hadn't been for us they couldn't have made it!"

Haney grinned slowly at Joe. The Chief regarded him with irony. Mike said, "Yeah. Haney, and me, and the Chief. We did it all."

"Uh-huh," said the Chief sardonically. "Us three. Just us three. Joe didn't do anything. Just a b.u.m, he is. We oughta tell Sally he's no good and she oughta pick herself out a guy that'll amount to something some day." He hit Joe between the shoulders. "Sure! Just a b.u.m, Joe! That's all! But we got a weakness for you. We'll let you hang around with us just the same! Come on, guys! Let's get something to eat!"

The four of them marched down a steel-floored corridor, their magnetic-soled shoes clanking on the plates. Their progress was uncertain and ungainly and altogether undignified. Suddenly the Chief began to bawl a completely irrelevant song to the effect that the inhabitants of the kingdom of Siam were never known to wash their dishes. Haney chimed in, and Mike. They were all very close together, and they were not at all impressive. But it hit Joe very hard, this sudden knowledge that the others didn't really care. It was the first time it had occurred to him that Haney and Mike and the Chief would rather be left behind with him, as a gang, than go on to individual high achievement in a first landing on the Moon.

It felt good. It felt _real_ good.

But that, and all other sources of satisfaction, was wiped out by news that came back from the Moons.h.i.+p a bare six hours later.