 CHAPTER III. Making actual contact with the Platform was not a matter for instruments and calculations. It had to be done directly, by hand as it were. Joe watched out the ports and played the controls of the steering jets with a nerve-wracked precision. His task was not easy. Before he could return to the point of rendezvous, the blinding sunlight on the Platform took on a tinge of red. It was the twilight zone of the satellite's orbit, when for a time the sunlight that reached it was light which had passed through the Earth's atmosphere and been bent by it and colored crimson by the dust in Earth's air. It glowed a fiery red and the color deepened and then there was darkness. They were in the Earth's shadow. There were stars to be seen, but no sun. The moon was hidden too, and the Earth was a monstrous, incredible, abysmal blackness which at this first experience of its appearance produced an almost superstitious terror. Formerly it had seemed a distant but sunlit world, flecked with white clouds and with sprawling differentiations of color beneath them. Now it did not look like a solid thing at all. It looked like a hole in creation. One could see ten thousand million stars of every imaginable tint and shade, but where the Earth should be there seemed a vast nothingness. It looked like an opening to annihilation. It looked like the veritable pit of darkness which is the greatest horror men have ever imagined. And since those in the ship were without weight it seemed that they were falling into it. Joe knew better, of course, so did the others. But that was the look of things and that was the feeling. One did not feel in danger of death but of extinction, which, in cold fact, is very much worse. Lights glowed on the outside of the platform to guide the supply ship to it. There were red and green and blue and harsh white electric bulbs. They were bright and distinct, but the feeling of loneliness above that awful appearance of the pit was appalling. No small child alone at night had ever so desolate a sensation of isolation as the four in the small ship. But Joe painstakingly played the buttons of the steering-rocket control board. The ship surged and turned and surged forward again. Like at the communicator, said, They say, slow up, Joe. Joe obeyed, but he was tense. Haney and the Chief were at the portholes, looking out. The Chief said, heavily, Fellas, I'm going to admit I never felt so lonesome in my life. I'm glad I've got you, fellas, with me, Haney admitted, guiltily. The job's almost over, said Joe. The ship's own hull, outside the ports, glowed suddenly in a light beam from the platform. The small, brief surges of acceleration which sent the ship on produced tremendous emotional effects. When the platform was only one mile away, Haney switched on the ship's searchlights. They stabbed through the emptiness with absolutely no sign of their existence until they touched the steel hull of the satellite. The Chief said sharply, Slow up some more, Joe. He obeyed again. It would not be a good idea to ram the platform after they had come so far to reach it. They drifted slowly, slowly, slowly toward it. The monstrous pit of darkness which was the night side of earth seemed almost about to engulf the platform. They were a few hundred feet higher than the great metal globe, and the blackness was behind it. They were a quarter of a mile away. The distance diminished. A thin, straight line seemed to grow out toward them. There was a small, bulb-like object at its end. It reached out farther than was at all plausible. Nothing so slender should conceivably reach so far without bending of its own weight. But of course it had no weight here. It was a plastic, flexible hose with air pressure in it. It groped for the spaceship. The fore and the ship held their breaths. There was a loud, metallic clank. Then it was possible to feel the ship being pulled toward the platform by the magnetic grapple. It was a landing-line. It was the means by which the ship would be docked in the giant lock which had been built to receive it. As they drew near, they saw the joints of the plating of the platform. They saw rivets. There was the huge, thirty-foot doorway with its valve swung wide. Their searchlight beam glared into it. They saw the metal floor and the bulging plastic sidewalls restrained by nets. They saw the inner lock door. It seemed that men should be visible to welcome them. There were none. The airlock swallowed them. They touched against something solid. There were more clankings. They seemed to crunch against the metal floor, magnetic flooring grapples. Then in solid contact with the substance of the platform, they heard the sounds of the great outer door slinging shut. They were within the artificial satellite of Earth. It was bright in the lock, and Joe stared out the cabin ports at the quilted sides. There was a hissing of air, and he saw a swirling mist, and then the bulges of the sidewall sagged. The air-pressure gauge was spinning up toward normal sea-level air-pressure. Joe threw the ready lever of the steering-rockets to off. We're landed. There was silence. Joe looked about him. The other three looked queer. It would have seemed natural for them to rejoice on arriving at their destination, but somehow they didn't feel that they had. Joe said, wryly, it seems that we ought to weigh something now that we've got here, so we feel queer that we don't. Shoes, Mike? Mike peeled off the magnetic sole slippers from their place on the cabin wall. He handed them out and opened the door. A biting chill came in. Joe slipped on the shoe soles with their elastic bands to hold them. He stepped out the door. He didn't land. He floated until he reached the sidewall. Then he pulled himself down by the netting. Once he touched the floor, his shoes seemed to be sticky. The net and the plastic sidewalls were, of course, the method by which a really large airlock was made practical. When this ship was about to take off again, pumps would not labor for hours to pump the air out. The sidewalls would inflate and closely enclose the ship's hull, and, so, force the air and the lock back into the ship. Then the ships would work on the air behind the inflated walls, with nets to help them draw the wall stuff back to let the ship go free. The lock would be used with only fifteen minutes for pumping instead of four hours. The door in the back of the lock clanked open. Joe tried to walk toward it. He discovered his astounding clumsiness. To walk in magnetic-soled shoes in weightlessness required a knack. When Joe lifted one foot and tried to swing the other forward, his body tried to pivot. When he lifted his right foot, he had to turn his left slightly inward. His arms tried to float absurdly upward. When he was in motion and essayed to pause, his whole body tended to continue forward with a sedate toppling motion that brought him down flat on his face. He had to put one foot forward to check himself. He seemed to have no sense of balance. When he stood still, his stomach queasy because of weightlessness, he found himself tilting undignifiedly forward or back, or with equal unpredictability sideways. He would have to learn an entirely new method of walking. A man came in the lock and Joe knew who it was, Sanford, the senior scientist of the Platform's crew. Joe had seen him often enough on the television screen in the communications room at the shed. Now Sanford looked nerve-wracked, but his eyes were bright and his expression sardonic. "'My compliments,' he said, his voice tight with irony, for a splendidly feudal job well done. You've got your cargo in voice?' Joe nodded. Sanford held out his hand. Joe fumbled in his pocket and brought out the yellow sheet. "'I'd like to introduce my crew,' said Joe. "'This is Haney and Chief Bender and Mike Scandia.' He waved his hand and his whole body wobbled unexpectedly." "'Well, know each other,' said Sanford sardonically. "'Our first job is more futility, to get the guided missiles you brought us into the launching tubes. A lot of good dail-do.' A huge plate in the roof of the lock, but it was not up or down in any particular direction, withdrew itself. A man floated through the opening and landed on the ship's hull. Another man followed him. "'Chief,' said Joe, and Haney. "'Will you open the cargo doors?' The two swaying figures moved to obey, though with erratic clumsiness. Sanford called sharply, "'Don't touch the hull without gloves. If it isn't nearly red hot from the sunlight, it'll be below zero from shadow.'" Joe realized then the temperature affects the skin on his face noticed. A part of the spaceship's hull gave off heat, like that of a panel heating installation. Another part imparted a chill. Sanford said, unpleasantly, "'You want to report your heroism, eh? Come along!' He clanked to the doorway by which he had entered. Joe followed and Mike after him. He went out of the lock. Sanford suddenly peeled off his metal-soled slippers, put them in his pocket, and dived casually into a four-foot metal tube. He drifted smoothly away along the lighted bore, not touching the sidewalls. He moved in the manner of a dream, when one floats with infinities and precision in any direction one chooses. Joe and Mike did not share his talent. Joe launched himself after Sanford, and for perhaps twenty or thirty feet the lighted aluminum sidewall of the tube sped past him. Then his shoulder rubbed, and he found himself skidding to an undignified stop, choking the bore. Mike thudded into him. "'I haven't got the hang of this yet,' said Joe apologetically. He untangled himself and went on. Mike followed him, his expression that of pure bliss. He was a tiny man, was Mike, but he had the longings and the ambitions of a half a dozen ordinary-sized men in his small body. And he had known frustration. He could prove by mathematics that space exploration could be carried on by midgets at a fraction of the cost and risk of the same job done by normal-sized men. He was, of course, quite right. The cabins and air and food supplies for a spaceship's crew of midgets would cost and weigh a fraction of similar equipment for six-footers. But people simply weren't interested in sending midgets out into space. But Mike had gotten here. He was in the space-platform. There were full-sized men who would joyfully have changed places with him, forty-one inch height and all, so Mike was blissful. The tube ended and Joe bounced off the wall that faced its end. Sanford was waiting. He grinned with more than a hint of spite. "'Here's our communications room,' he said. "'Now you can talk down to Earth. It'll be relayed now, but in half an hour you can reach the shed direct.'" He floated inside. Joe followed cautiously. There was another crew member on duty there. He sat before a group of radar screens, with thigh grips across his legs to hold him in his chair. He turned his head and nodded cheerfully enough. "'Here,' snapped Sanford. Joe clambered awkwardly to the seat the senior crew member pointed out. He made his way to it by hand-holds on the walls. He fumbled into the chair and threw over the curved thigh grips that would hold him in place. Suddenly he was oriented. He had seen this room before, before the platform was launched. True, the man at the radar screens was upside down with reference to himself, and Sanford had hooked a knee negligently around the arm of a firmly anchored chair with his body at right angles to Joe's own, but at least Joe knew where he was and what he was to do. "'Go ahead and report,' said Sanford sardonically. You might tell them that you heroically destroyed the rockets that attacked us, and that your crew behaved splendidly, and that you have landed in the space platform and the situation is well in hand. It isn't, but it will make nice headlines.' Joe said evenly. Our arrival's been reported. "'No,' said Sanford, grinning. Obviously the radar down on Earth, shipboard ones on this hemisphere, of course, have reported that the platform still exists. But we haven't communicated since the bombs went off. They probably think we had so many punctures that we lost all our air and are all wiped out. They'll be glad to hear from you that we aren't.' Joe threw a switch, frowning. This wasn't right. Sanford was the senior scientist on board, and hence in command, since he was the best qualified to direct the scientific observations the platform was making. But there was something specifically wrong. The communicator hummed. A faint voice sounded. It swelled to loudness. "'Calling Space Platform, calling Space Platform, calling Space Platform,' Joe turned down the volume. He said into the microphone, "'Space Platform calling Earth,' Joe Kenmore reporting. "'We have made contact with the platform and completed our landing. Our cargo is now being unloaded. Our landing rockets had to be expended against presumably hostile bombs, and we are now unable to return to Earth. The ship and the platform, however, are unharmed. I am now waiting for orders. Report ends.' He turned away from the microphone. Sanford said sharply, "'Go on, tell them what a hero you are!' "'I'm going to help unload my ship,' Joe said shortly. "'You report what you please.' "'Get back at that transmitter,' shouted Sanford furiously. "'Tell him you're a hero! Tell him you're wonderful! I'll tell him how useless it is!' Joe saw the other man in the room. The man at the radar screen shake his head. He got up and fumbled his way along the wall to the door. The others shouted after him angrily. Joe went out, found the four-foot tunnel, and floated, not down, but along it, back to the unloading dock. Wordlessly, he set to work to get the cargo out of the cargo hold of the spaceship. Handling objects in weightlessness, which on Earth would be heavy, was an art in itself. Two men could move tons. It needed only one man to start a massive crate in motion. However, one had either to lift or push an object in the exact line it was to follow. To thrust hard for a short time produced exactly the same effect as to push gently for a longer period. Anything floated tranquilly in the line along which it was moved. The man who had to stop it, though, needed to use exactly as much energy as the man who sent it floating. He needed to check the floating thing in exactly the same line. If one tried to stop a massive shipment from one side, he would topple into it, and he and the crate together would go floundering helplessly over each other. The chief had gone off to help maneuver two-ton guided missiles into launching tubes. One crew member remained with Haney, unloading things that would have to be handled with cranes on Earth. Joe found himself needed most in the storage chamber. A crate floated from the ship to the crewman. Having head downward, he stopped its original movement, braced himself, and sent it floating to Joe. He braced himself, stopped its flight, and, very slowly, to move fast with anything heavy in his hands would pull his feet from the floor, set it on a stack of similar objects which would presently be fastened in place. Everything had to be done in slow motion, or one would lose his footing. Joe worked pains-takingly. He gradually began to understand the process. But the muscles of his stomach ached because of their continuous, instinctive cramp due to the sensation of unending fall. Mike floated through the hatchway from the lock. He twisted about as he floated, and his magnetized souls clank to a deft contact with the wall. He said calmly, that guy's Sanford has cracked up, he's potty! If this were jail, he'd be stir-crazy! He's yelling into the communicator now that we'll all be dead in a matter of days, and the rocket-missiles we brought up won't help. He's nasty about it, too. Haney called from the cargo space of the ship in the lock. All empty here, we're unloaded. There were sounds as he closed the cargo doors. Haney, followed by the chief, came into view, floating as Mike had done. But he didn't land as skillfully. He touched the wall on his hands and knees and bounced away and tried helplessly to swim to a hand-hold. It would have been funny, except that Joe was in no mood for humor. Mike whipped off his belt and flipped the end of it to Haney. He caught it and was drawn gently to the wall. Haney's shoes clicked to a hold. The chief landed more expertly. We need wings here, he said, ruefully. You reported, Joe? Joe nodded. He turned to Brent, the crew member who'd been unloading. He knew him, too, from their two-way video conversations. Sanford does act oddly, he said uncomfortably. When he met me in the lock, he said our coming was useless. He talked about the futility of everything while I reported. He sounds like he sneers at every possible action as useless. Most likely it is, Brent said mildly. Here, anyhow. It does look as if we're going to be knocked off, but Sanford's taking it badly. The rest of us have let him act as he pleased, because it didn't seem to matter. It probably doesn't, except that he's annoying. Mike said, truculently, We won't be knocked off. We've got rockets of our own up here now. We can fight back if there's another attack. Joe shrugged. His face was young enough, but deeply lined. He said, as mildly as before, Your landing-rockets set off four bombs on the way from Earth. You brought six more rocket-missiles. How many bombs can we knock down with them? Joe blinked. It was a shock to realize the facts of life in an artificial satellite. If it could be reached by bombs from Earth, the bombs could be reached by guided missiles from the satellite. But it would take one guided missile to knock down one bomb with luck. I see, said Joe, slowly. We can handle just six more bombs from Earth. Six in the next month, agreed Brent Riley. It'll be that long before we get more. Somebody sent up four bombs today. Suppose they send eight next time, or simply one a day for a week. Mike made an angry noise. The seventh bomb shot at us knocks us out. We're sitting ducks here, too. Brent nodded. He said mildly, Yes. The platform can't be defended against an indefinite number of bombs from Earth. Of course, the United States could go to war because we've been shot at, but with that do us any good, we'd be shot down in the war. Joe said distastefully. And Sanford's cracked up because he knows he's going to be killed. Brent said earnestly, Oh no, he's a good scientist. But he's always had a brilliant mind. Poor devil, he's never failed at anything in all his life, until now. Now he has failed. He's going to be killed, and he can't think of any way to stop it. His brains are the only things he's ever believed in, and now they're no good. He can't accept the idea that he's stupid, so he has to believe that everything else is. It's a necessity for him. Haven't you known people who've had to think everybody else was stupid to keep from knowing that they were themselves? Joe nodded. He waited. Sanford, said Brent earnestly, simply can't adjust to the discovery that he's no better than anyone else. That's all. He was a nice guy, but he's not used to frustration, and he can't take it. Therefore he scorns everything that frustrates him, and everything else by necessity. He'll be scornful about getting killed when it happens, but waiting for it is becoming intolerable to him. He looked at his watch. He said, apologetically, I'm the crew psychologist. That's why I speak so firmly. In five minutes we're due to come out of the Earth's shadow into sunshine again. I'd suggest that you come to watch. It's good to look at. He did not wait for an answer. He led the way, and the others followed in a strange procession. Now automatically they fell into single file, and they moved on their magnetic-sold slippers toward a passage-tube in one wall. Their slipper-soles clanked and clicked in an erratic rhythm. Brent walked with the mincing steps necessary for movement and weightlessness. The others imitated him. Their hands no longer hung naturally by their sides, but tended to make extravagant gestures with the slightest muscular impulse. They swayed extraordinarily as they walked. Brent was a slender figure, and Joe was more thick-set, and Haney was taller and lean. The burly chief and the forty-one inch figure of Mike the Midget followed after them. They made a queer procession, indeed. Minutes later they were in a blister on the skin of the platform. There were quartz-glass ports in the sidewall. Outside the glass were metal shutters. Brent served out dense goggles, almost black, and touched the buttons that opened the steel port coverings. They looked into space. The dimmer stars were extinguished by the goggles they wore. The brighter ones seemed faint and widely spaced. With their feet, as they held to handrails, lay the featureless darkness of Earth. But before them, and very far away, there was a vast, dim arch of deepest red. It was sunlight filtered through the thickest layers of Earth's air. It barely outlined the curve of that gigantic globe, and as they stared it grew brighter. The artificial satellite required little more than four hours for one revolution about its primary, the Earth. To those aboard it, the Earth would go through all its phases in no longer a time. They saw now the thinnest possible crescent of the new Earth. But in minutes, almost in seconds, the deep red sunshine brightened to gold. The hair-thin line of light widened to a narrow ribbon which described an 8,000-mile half-circle. It brightened markedly at the middle. It remained red at its ends, but in the very center it glowed with splendid flame. Then a golden ball appeared and swam up and attached itself from the Earth. And the onlookers saw the breath-taking spectacle of all of Earth's surface seemingly being born of the night. As if new created before their eyes, seas and lands unfolded in the sunlight. They watched flecks of cloud and the long shadows of mountains, and the strangely different colorings of its fields and forests. As Brent had told them, it was good to watch. It was half an hour later when they gathered in the kitchen of the Platform. The men who had been loading the launching tubes now briskly worked to prepare a meal on the extremely unusual cooking devices of a human outpost in interplanetary space. The food smelled good, but Joe noticed that he could smell growing things, green stuff. It was absurd, until he remembered that there was a hydroponic garden here. Plants grew in it under sunlaps which were turned on for a certain number of hours every day. The plants purified the Platform's air and, of course, provided some fresh and nourishing food for the crew. They ate. The food was served in plastic bowls, with elastic thread covers through which they could see and choose the particular morsels they fancied next. The threads stretched to let through the forks they ate with. But Brent used a rather more practical pair of tongs in a business-like manner. They drank coffee from cups which looked very much like ordinary cups on earth. Joe remembered suddenly that Sally Holt had had much to do with the design of domestic science arrangements here. He regarded his cup with interest. It stayed in its saucer because of magnets in both plastic articles. The saucer stayed on the table because the table was magnetic too, and the coffee did not float out to mid-air in a hot, round, brownish ball because there was a transparent cover over the cup. When one put his lips to the proper edge, a part of the cover yielded as the cup was squeezed. The far side of the cup was flexible. One pressed and the coffee came into one's lips without the spilling of a drop. At that moment Joe really thought of Sally for the first time in a good two hours. She'd been anxious that living in the Platform should be as normal and earth-like as possible. The total absence of weight would be bad enough. She believed it needed to be countered, as a psychological factor in staying sane by the effect of normal-seeming chairs and normal-tasting food, and not too exotic systems for eating. Joe asked Brent about it. Oh yes, said Brent mildly. It's likely we'd all have gone off the deep end, if there weren't some familiar things about, to have to drink from a cup that one squeezes is tolerable. But we'd have felt hysterical at times if we had to drink everything from the equivalent of baby-bottles. Sally Holt, said Joe, is a friend of mine. She helped design this stuff. That girl has every ounce of brains that any woman can be trusted with, Brent said warmly. She thought of things that would never have occurred to me. As a psychologist, I could see how good her ideas were when she brought them up, but as a male I'd never have dreamed of them. Then he grinned. He fell down on just one point. So did everybody else. Nobody happened to think of a garbage disposal system for the Platform. It came into Joe's mind that garbage disposal was hardly a subject one would expect to be discussing in interplanetary space. But the Platform wasn't the same thing as a spaceship. A ship could jettison refuse and leave it behind, or store it during a voyage and dump it at the other end. But the Space Platform would never land. It could roll on forever. And if it heaved out its refuse from airlocks, why, the stuff would still have the Platform's orbital speed and would follow it tirelessly around the earth until the end of time. We'd dry and store it now, said Brent. If we were going to live, we'd figure out some way to turn it into fertilizer for the hydroponic gardens. It's hardly worth while, as things are. Even then, though, the problem of tin cans would be hopeless. The Chief wiped his mouth deliberately. He had helped load four guided missile launching tubes, and he had been brought up to date on the state of things in the Platform. He growled in a preliminary fashion and said, Joe? Joe looked at him. We brought up six two-ton guided missiles, said the Chief, dowrly. We'll have warning of other bombs coming up. We can send these missiles out to intercept them, six of them. They can get close enough to set off their proximity fuses anyhow. But what are we going to do, Joe, if somebody flings seven bombs at us? We can make a man at six, maybe, but what'll we do with the one that's left over? Have you any ideas, asked Joe? The Chief shook his head. Brent said mildly, We've worked on that here in the Platform, I assure you, and, as Sanford puts it quite soundly, about the only thing we can really do is throw our empty tin cans at them. Joe nodded, then he tensed. Brent had meant it as a rather mirthless joke, but Joe was astonished at what his own brain made of it. He thought it over. Then he said, Why not? It ought to be a very good trick. Brent stared at him incredulously. Heany looked solemnly at him. The Chief regarded Joe thoughtfully out of the corner of his eye. Then Mike shouted gleefully. The Chief blinked. And a moment later, grunted, wrathful, unintelligible syllables of Mohawk, and then tried to pound Joe on the back, and because of his one-of-weight, went head over heels into the air between the six walls of the kitchen. Heany said disgustedly, Joe, there are times when a guy wants to murder you. Why didn't I think of that? But Brent was looking at the four of them with a lively, helpless curiosity. Will you guys let me in on this? They told him. Joe began to explain it carefully, but the Chief broke in with a barked and impatient description. And then Mike interrupted to snap a correction. But by that time Brent's expression had changed with astonishing suddenness. I see! I see! He said excitedly. All right! Have you got spacesuits in your ship? We have them, so we'll go out and pelt the stars with garbage. I think we'd better get at it right now, too, and under two hours we'll be a fine target for more bombs, and it would be good to start ahead of time. Mike made a gesture and went floating out of the kitchen, air swimming to go get spacesuits from the ship. The grin on his small face threatened to cut his throat. Joe asked, Sanford's in command, how'll he like this idea? Brent hesitated. I'm afraid, he said regretfully, he won't like it. If you solve a problem he gave up it will tear his present adjustment to bits. He's gone psychotic. I think, though, that he'll allow it to be tried while he swears at us for fools. He's most likely to react that way, if you suggest it. Then, agreed Joe, I suggest it. Chief! The Chief raised a large brown hand. I got the program, Joe, he said. We'll all get set. And Joe went floating unhappily through passage tubes to the control room. He heard Sanford's voice, sardonic and mocking, as he reached the communications room door. What do you expect, Sanford was saying derisively. We're Clay Pidgeons, we're a perfect target. We've just so much ammunition now, you say you may send us more in three weeks instead of a month? I admire your persistence, but it's really no use. This is all a very stupid business. He felt Joe's presence. He turned and then sharply struck the communicator switch with the heel of his hand. The image on the television screen died. The voice cut off. He said, blandly, Well... I want, said Joe, to take a garbage disposal party out on the outside of the platform. I came to ask for authority. Sanford looked at him in mocking surprise. To be sure, it seems as intelligent as anything else the human race has ever done, he observed. But why does it appeal to you as something you want to do? I think, Joe told him, that we can make a defense against bombs from earth with our empty tin cans. Sanford raised his eyebrows. If you happen to have a four-leaf clover with you, he said in fine irony, I'm told they're good, too. His eyes were bright and scornful. His manner was feverishly derisive. Joe would have done well to let it go at that, but he was nettle. We set off the last bombs, he said doggedly, by shooting our landing-rockets at them. They didn't collide with the bombs. They simply touched off the bomb's proximity fuses. If we surround the platform with a cluster of tin cans and such things, they may do as well. Things we throw away won't drop to earth. Ultimately they'll actually circle us, like satellites themselves. But if we can get enough of them between us and earth, any bombs that come up will have their proximity fuses detonated by the floating trash we throw out. Sanford laughed. We might ask for aluminum foil ribbon to come up in the next supply ship, said Joe. We could have masses of that, or maybe metallic dust floating around us. I much prefer used tin cans, said Sanford, humorlessly. I'll take the watch here and let everybody go out with you. By all means, we must defend ourselves. Forward with the garbage! Go ahead. His eyes were almost hysterically scornful as he waited for Joe to leave. Joe did not like it at all, but there was nothing to do but get out. He found the chief with a net-bag filled with emptied tin cans. Haney had another. There were two more, carried by members of the platform's four-man crew. They were donning their spacesuits when Joe came upon them. Joe's take was grotesque in the cut-down outfit built for him. Actually the only difference was in the size of the fabric suit and the length of the arms and legs. He could carry a talky outfit with its batteries and the oxygen tank for breathing as well as anybody. Since out here, weight did not count at all. There were plastic ropes resistant to extremes of temperature. Joe got into his own spacesuit. It was no such self-contained spacecraft in itself as the fantastic storytellers dreamed of. It was not much more than an altitude suit, aluminized to withstand the blazing heat of sunshine and emptiness, and with extravagantly insulated soles in the magnetic boots. In theory, there is simply no temperature in space. In practice, a metal hull heats up in sunshine to very much more than any record-hot day temperature on Earth. In shadow, too, a metal hull will drop very close to a minus 250 degree centigrade, which is something like 400 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. But mainly the spacesuits were insulated against the almost dull red heat temperatures of long-continued sunshine. A crewman named Corey moved into an airlock with one of the bags of empty tin cans. Corey watched in a routine fashion through a glass in the lock door. The pumps began to exhaust the air from the airlock. Corey's spacesuit inflated visibly. Presently, the pumps stopped. Corey opened the outer door. He went out, paying plastic rope behind him. An instant later, he reappeared and removed the rope. He made his line fast outside. He closed the outer lock door. There surged into the lock and Haney crowded in, again the pumping. Then Haney went out and was anchored to the platform not only by his magnetic boots but by a rope fastened to a hand-hold. Brent went out. Mike, Joe came next. They stood on the hull of the space platform, waiting in the incredible harsh sunshine of emptiness. The bright steel plates of the hull swelled and curved away on every hand. There were myriads of stars and the vast round bulk of earth seemed farther away to a man in a spacesuit than to a man looking out a port. Where shadows cut across the platform's irregular surface there was utter blackness. Also there was horrible frigidity. Elsewhere it was blindingly bright. The men were specks of humanity standing on a shining metal hull, and all about them there was the desolation of nothingness. But Joe felt strangely proud. The seventh man came out of the lock door. They tied their plastic ropes together and spread out in a long line which went almost around the platform. The man next to the lock was anchored to a steel hand-hold. The third man of the line was also anchored himself. The fifth, the seventh. They were a straggling line of figures with impossibly elongated shadows held together by ropes. They were peculiarly like a party of weirdly costumed mountaineers on a glacier of gleaming silver. But no mountain climbers ever had a background of ten thousand million stars, peering up from below them as well as from overhead. Nor did any ever have a modelled greenish planet rolling by four thousand miles beneath them. Nor a blazing sun glaring down at them from a sky such as this. In particular perhaps no other explorer's ever set out upon an expedition whose purpose was to throw tin cans and dried refuse at all the shining cosmos. They set to work. The spacesuits were inevitably clumsy. It was not easy to throw hard with only magnetism to hold one to his feet. It was actually more practical to throw straight up with an underhand gesture. But even that would send the tin cans an enormous distance in time that was nowhere to slow them. The tin cans twinkled as they left the platform's steel expanse. They moved away at a speed of possibly twenty to thirty miles an hour. They floated off in all possible directions. They would never reach Earth, of course. They shared the platform's orbital speed, and they would circle the Earth with it forever. But when they were thrown away their orbits were displaced a little. Which can, thrown downward just now, for example, would always be between the platform and the Earth on this side of its orbit. But on the other side of the Earth it would be above the platform. The platform, in fact, became a center of a swarm, a cluster, a cloud of infinitesimal objects which would always accompany it and always be in motion with regard to it. Together they should make up a screen no proximity fuse could pierce without exploding. Joe heard clankings transmitted to his body through his feet. What's that? He demanded sharply. It sounds like the airlock. Voices mingled in his ears. The other walkie-talkies allowed everybody to speak at once. Most of them did. Then Joe heard someone laugh. It was Sanford's voice. Sanford's aluminized, space-suited figure came clanking around the curve of the small metal world. The antenna of his walkie-talkie glittered above his head. He seemed to swagger against the background of many colored stars. Brent spoke quickly before anyone else could question Sanford. His tone was mild in matter of fact, but Joe somehow knew the tension behind it. Hello Sanford, you came out? Was it wise? Shouldn't there be someone inside the platform? Sanford laughed again. It was very wise. We're going to be killed, as you fellows know perfectly well. It's futile to try to avoid it, so, very sensibly, I've decided to spare myself the nuisance of waiting to be killed. I came out. There was silence in the earphones of Joe's space-suit radio. He heard his own heart beating loudly and steadily in the absolute stillness. Incidentally, said Sanford with almost hysterical amusement, I fixed it so that none of us can get back in. It would be useless anyhow. Everything's futility, so I've put an end to our troubles for good. I've locked us all out. He laughed yet again, and Joe knew that in Sanford's madness it was perfectly possible for him to have done exactly what he said. There were eight human beings on the platform. All were now outside it, on its outer skin. They wore space suits with from half an hour to an hour's oxygen supply. They had no tools with which to break back into the satellite, and no help could possibly reach them in less than three weeks. If they couldn't get back inside the platform, Sanford, laughing proudly, had killed them all. End of Chapter 4 of Space Tug. 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. Soon 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 and every difficulty as a challenge. But with the platform 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 would have accepted it grandly, and in doing so had 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 wouldn'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. So he chuckled. The Chief roared wrathfully into his transmitter. Quiet! There's crazy fools trying to commit suicide for all of us. How about it? Why can't we get back in? How many locks? 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. 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. But Sanford laughed once more. He sounded like someone in the highest of high good humor. 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 fashion the door after I came out. One must be intelligent." Joe heard Brent muttering, Yes, he... Somebody check it, snapped Joe. Make sure. It might amuse him to watch us die while he knew we could get back in if we were as smart as he is. There were clankings on the hull. One 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! Sanford's voice again, horribly amused. A voice snapped. This lock's fastened. Another voice, and this. Other voices, with increasing desperation, verify that every airlock was implacably sealed fast by the presence of air-pressure inside the lock itself. 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 had once extracted excess moisture and removed carbon dioxide. The same pump carefully measured a volume of oxygen equal to the removed CO2 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 clikings. Something burned him. He had been standing perfectly still while trying to concentrate on a way out. Sunshine had shown 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. 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. He found one that seemed to suit him. It was a large can. 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. Joe caught his breath at the implication. His 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, Joe made his way clumsily to the spots where Mike now gesticulated to Haney, trying to convey his meaning by gestures since Sanford would overhear any spoken word. 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. He reached the spot where Mike bent over the plating. His hand moved to cast a shadow where the light had played. I need more reflectors, Mike said brusquely, but when Joe beckoned, there were more hurried clankings, space-suited figures gathered about. The platform rolled on through space. Where it was bright it was very, very bright, and where it was dark it was blackness. Often emptiness the many-colored mass of earth shone hugely, rolling past. Several incurious stars looked on. The sun flamed malevolently. The moon floated abstractedly far away. 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 more sunshine. Someone else had a larger disc of tin. 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. Mike moved his hand to cast a shadow. The steel was little more than red hot for the space of an inch. It would not melt, of course. It could not. Haney had no tools to bend or pierce the presumably softened metal. But Mike said fiercely, Keep it hot! He squirmed. His spacesuit was fabric, like the rest, but 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. 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. 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. The 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 streaming 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. There was a rush of vapor. The door was drilled through. They picked Mike up bodily, Joe heaved the door open, and Haney climbed into it, practically carrying Mike by the scruff of the neck. Joe panned it, plugged the hole from the inside, sit on it if you have to, and slammed the door shut. They waited. Sanford's voice came in the earphones. It was higher in pitch than it had been. You fools! He raged. It's useless! It's stupid to do useless things! It's stupid to do anything at all! 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. 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. 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 ride there for a century before the platform's infinitesimal gravity brought him down. Huh! said the Chief, wrathfully. How's Haney and Mike making out? Almost on the instant, twenty yards away, a tiny airlock door thrust out from the surface of the glittering metal, and helmets and antennae appeared. You guys can come in now, said Haney's voice in Joe's headphones. It's all OK. Mike's pumping out the other locks, too, so you can come in at any of them. 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. No, said Joe shortly. Eat fight again. Go inside. That's an order, Chief. The Chief grunted and obeyed. Joe went to the nearest airlock and entered the great steel hull. 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 solved problems he could not solve. Other men were his superiors. He screamed his rage. 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. 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. A rod with a rounded object at its end appeared past the dock's supply-ship. It reached out and touched Sanford's helmet. It was the magnetic grapple which drew spaceships into their dock. It drew Sanford, squirming and screaming into the great lock. The outer doors closed. Before air was admitted to the inside, Sanford went suddenly still. 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. Catatonia, he said distastefully. He spent his life thinking he was smarter than anybody else. Better 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 the smartest. We'll have to do artificial feeding and all that until we can get him down to Earth to a hospital. He shrugged. 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. Just forty-two hours later they found out that it did work. A single rocket came climbing furiously out of 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. It wasn't necessary. The bomb from Earth detonated three hundred 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 three hundred 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. It exploded with a blast of pure brightness like that of the sun. 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. These were images that could not possibly be made with such distinctness from the bottom of Earth's turbulent ocean of air. 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. But sometimes Joe managed to talk to Sally. 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 was. But she told Joe how she felt, and she wanted to read him in 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. "'How's the food?' asked Sally. Are you people getting any fresh vegetables from the hydroponic garden?' They were, and Joe told her so. The huge chamber in which sunlamps 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. "'And the cooking system's really good?' she wanted to know. Sally was partly responsible for that, too. "'And how about the bunks?' "'I sleep now,' Joe admitted. 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 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. He 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.' "'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.' "'We've got a date,' she said, nodding. 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 the 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.' 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 rocket lift. They would try to smash it before such a lift could get started. A week after Joe got to it with the guided missiles, three rockets attacked. They went out from somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. One blew up two hundred fifty miles below the platform, another detonated one hundred ninety miles away. For safety's sake the third was crashed, at the cost of one guided missile, when it had come within fifty miles. 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. 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 four hundred miles from the platform. Only one got as close as two hundred miles. No guided missiles were expended in defense. 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 one hundred eighty and two hundred seventy 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 could be assumed that in a full-scale space war nuts, bolts, rusty nails, and beer-bottle caps would become essential military equipment. 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. Fishpots lifted it, Jados hurled it on, and then the furious, flaming take-off rockets drove it valiantly out toward the stars. Joe's ship had been moved out of the landing dock 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. Those landing rockets and Lieutenant Commander Brown constituted all its payload. It couldn't bring up anything else. 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 allowed. 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. Having read his orders, he cleared his throat and said, 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 the one. 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 because it was unthinkable that he serve under any one 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. But it was too bad that he hadn't brought some long-range guided missiles with him. 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. So, only thirty-six hours after the arrival of the second rocket ship 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. Captain Commander Brown stayed out at the platform to replace him. 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. 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. The returning spaceships also had the orbit and speed of the platform. They wanted to shift the centers of their orbits by nearly four thousand miles so that at one point they would just barely graze the 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. 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 four thousand 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. 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, shown brightly against a background of seemingly sheer nothingness. 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. Nothing happened. The ships drew away from each other for safety. They were fifty, then sixty 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 nightside 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. 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. Going out, naturally, the ships had lost angular speed as they gained in height. Descending, they gained in angular velocity as they lost height. They were not quite thirty miles apart as they sped with increasing headlong speed and rushed toward the edge of the world's disk. When they were only two thousand miles high, the Earth's surface under them moved much faster than it had on the way up. When they were only one thousand miles high, the seas and continents seemed to flow past like a rushing river. At five hundred miles, mountains and plains were just distinguishable as they raced past underneath. At two hundred miles, there was merely a churning, hurtling surface on which one could not focus one's eyes because of the speed of its movement. They missed the solid surface of Earth by barely forty miles. They were moving at a completely impossible speed. The energy of their position four thousand miles high had been transformed into kinetic energy of motion, and at forty 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. 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. The four in the spaceship cabin knew torture. Weight returned to them. Weight more violent than the six gravities they had known for a bare fourteen seconds at takeoff. 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. 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 ground forty 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. 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. The earth was farther away and moving farther still. They were one hundred miles high, they were two hundred miles high. 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. 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. The chief said thickly, Joe, somehow I don't think this is going to work. When do we hit again? Three hours plus or minus something, said Joe, dry-throated. We'll hear from the ground. Mike said in a cracked voice. Radar reports we went a little too low. They think we weren't tilled it up far enough. We didn't bounce as soon as we should. Joe unstrapped himself. How about the other ship? It did better than we did, said Mike. It's a good two hundred 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. 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 spaceship with a naked eye when it is two hundred miles away. But he saw something, though for seconds he didn't know what it was. Now the little ship was three hundred miles high and still rising. Joe was dazed and battered by the vibration of the ship in the graze just past. The sister spaceship 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. 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 areas which was the curve of the edge of the world. He saw the sunlight upon the clouds below and glimpses of the surface of the Earth itself. He saw something rising out of the mists at the far horizon. It was a thread of white vapor. The other rocket ship was a speck, a moat, invisible because of its size and distance. This thread of vapor was already one hundred 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. It was on its way to meet the other spaceship. 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. Then he saw the trail of the second rocket. It was rising to meet him. The four of them watched through the ports as the thread of vapor sped upward. They hated the rocket and the people who had built it. Joe said between his teeth, we could spend our landing rockets and make a chasis, but it'll have fuel for that. The chief muttered in Mohawk. The words sounded as if they ought to have blue fire at their edges and smell of sulfur. Mike the midget said crackling things in his small voice. Haney stared, his eyes burning. Their ship was a little over 400 miles up now. The rocket was a hundred or better. The rendezvous would be probably two hundred miles ahead and correspondingly higher. The rocket was accelerating furiously. It had farther to travel, but its rate of climb was already enormous and it increased every second. The ship could swing to right or left on steering rockets, but the war rocket could swerve also. It was controlled from the ground. It did not need to crash the small ship from space. Within a limited number of miles the blast of its atomic warhead would vaporize any substance that could exist. And of course the ship could not turn back. Even the expenditure of all its landing rockets could not bring twenty tons of ship to a halt. They could speed it up so it would pass the calculated meeting place ahead of the war rocket. But the bomb would simply follow in a stern chase. In any case, the ship could not stop. But neither could the rocket. Joe never knew how he saw the significance of that fact. On land or sea, of course, an automobile or a ship moves in the direction in which it is pointed. Even an airplane needs to make only minor corrections for air currents which affect it. But an object in space moves on a course which is the sum of all its previous speeds and courses. Joe's ship was moving eastward above the earth at so many miles per second. If he drove north, at a right angle to its present course, the ship would not cease to move to the east. It would simply move northward in addition to moving east. If the rocket from earth turned north or east, it would continue to move up and merely add the other direction to its vertical course. Joe stared at the uncoiling thread of vapor which was the murder-rockets trail. He hated it so fiercely that he wanted to escape it even at the cost of destruction, merely to foil its makers. At one moment he was hardly aware of anything but his own fury and the frantic desire to frustrate the rocket at any cost. The next instant, somehow, he was not angry at all. Because somehow his brain had dredged up the fact that the war rocket could no more turn back than he could, and he saw its meaning. Mike, he snapped sharply, get set, report what we do. Everybody set for acceleration. Steering rockets ready, Chief. Get set to help, Amy. I don't know whether we'll get out of this alive, but we'd better get into our spacesuits. Then he literally dived back to his acceleration chair and strapped in in feverish haste. The ship was then a quarter of the way to the meeting-place and the rocket had very much farther to go. But it was rising faster. The ship's gyros wind and squealed as Joe jammed on their controls. The little ship spun in emptiness. Its bow turned and pointed down. The steering rockets made their roaring. Joe found himself panning. The rocket's rising faster than we are. It's been gaining. Altitude, maybe. Two minutes. It's lighter than wind. It started, but it can't stop. Less than a minute anyhow, so we duck under it. He did not make computations. There was no time. The war rocket might have started at four or five gravities acceleration, but it would speed up as its fuel burned. It might be accelerating at fifteen gravities now, and have an attained velocity of four miles a second and still increasing. If the little ship ducked under it, it could not kill that rate of climb in time to follow in a stern chase. Haney, panted Joe. Watch out the port. Are we going to make it? Haney crawled forward. Joe had forgotten the radar because he'd seen the rocket with his own eyes. It seemed neat eyes to watch it. Mike spoke curtly into the microphone broadcasting to the ground. He was reporting each action and order as it took place and was given. There was no time to explain anything, but Mike thought of the radar. He watched it. It showed the vast curve of Earth's surface four hundred miles down. It showed a moving pip, much too nearer, which was the war rocket. Mike made a dot on the screen with the grease pencil where the pip showed. It moved. He made another dot. The pip continued to move. He made other dots. They formed a curving line, curved because the rocket was accelerating, which moved inexorably toward the center of the radar screen. The curve would cut the screen's exact center. That met collision. Too close, Joe, said Mike Shrilly. We may miss it, but not enough. Then hold fast, yell, Joe. Landing rockets firing, three, two, one. The bellowing of the landing rockets smote their ears. Weight seized upon them. Three gravities of acceleration toward the rushing flood of clouds and solidity which was the Earth. The ship plunged downward with all its power. It was intolerable and ten times worse because they had been weightless so long and were still shaken and sore and bruised from the air-graze only minutes back. Mike took acceleration better than the others, but his voice was thin when he gasped. Looks like this does it, Joe. Seconds later he gasped again. Right! The rocket's above us and still going away. The gyro squealed again. The ship plunged into vapor which was the trail of the enemy rocket. For an instant the flowing confusion which was Earth was blotted out. Then it was visible again. The ship was plunging downward but its sideways speed was undiminished and much greater than its rate of fall. Mike, panted Joe, get the news out. What we did. And why? I'm going to turn the ship's head back to our course. We can't slow enough, but I'd rather crash on Earth than let them blast us. The ship turned again. It pointed back in the direction from which it had come. With the brutal sternward pressure produced by the landing-rockets it felt as if it were speeding madly back where it had come from. It was the sensation they'd felt when the ship took off from Earth so long before. But then the cloud masses and the earth beneath had flowed toward the ship and under it. Now they flowed away. The appearance was that of an unthinkably swift wake left behind by a ship at sea. The Earth's surface fled away and fled away from them. Crazy this! Joe muttered thickly. If the ship were lighter, or we had more power, we could land. I'm sorry, but I'd rather... Haney turned his head from where he clung near the bow-ports. His features changed slowly as he talked because of acceleration-driven blood engorging his lips and bloating his cheeks. After one instant he closed his eyes fiercely. They felt as if they would pop out of his head. He gasped, Yes, get down to air resistance. A chance. Not a good, but a chance. Ejection seats. With spacesuits. Might make it. He began to let himself back toward his acceleration chair. But he could not possibly have climbed forward. It was a horrible task to let himself down with triple his normal weight pulling at him and after the beating taken a little while ago. Sweat stood out on his skin as he lowered himself sternward. Once his grip on a hand-line slipped, and he had to sustain the drag of nearly six hundred pounds by a single hand and arm. It would not be a good idea to fall at three gravities. The landing-rockets roared and roared. Joe tilted the bow down a little farther so that the streaming flood of clouds drew nearer. Haney got to his acceleration chair. He let himself into it and his eyes closed. Mike's sharp voice barked. What's the chance, Haney? Mike's mouth opened and closed and opened again. Rocket flames, he gasped. Pushed back. Wind. Splash on hull. May melt. Lighten weight. Hundred to one against. The odds were worse than that. The ship couldn't land because its momentum was too great for the landing-rockets to cancel out. If it had weighed five tons instead of twenty, landing might have been possible. Haney was saying that if the ship were to be lowered into air, while rushing irresistibly sternward, despite its rockets, that the rocket flames might be splashed out by the wind. Instead of streaking a stern in a lance-like shape, they might be pushed out like a rocket blast when it hits the earth in a guided missile take-off. Such a blast spreads out flat in all directions. Here the rocket flames might be spread by wind until they played upon the hull of the ship. If they did, they might melt it as they melted their own steel cases in firing. And three-fourths or more of the hull might be torn loose from the cabin bow section. So much was unlikely, but it was possible. The impossible odds were that the four could survive even if the cabin were detached. They were decelerating at three gravities now. If part of the ship burned or melted or was torn away, the rocket thrust might speed the cabin up to almost any figure. And there is a limit to the number of gravities a man can take, even in an acceleration chair. Nevertheless, that was what Haney proposed. They were due to be killed anyhow. Joe tried it. He dived into atmosphere. At sixty miles altitude a thin wailing seemed to develop without reason. At forty miles the ship had lost more than two miles per second of its speed since the landing rockets were ignited, and there was a shuddering in all its fabric, though because of the loss of speed it was not as bad as the atmosphere grays. At thirty it began to shake and tremble. At twenty-five miles high there was as horrible a vibration and as deadly a deceleration as at the air grays. At twelve miles above the surface of the earth the hull temperature indicators showed the hind part of the hull at red heat. The ship happened to be traveling backward at several times the speed of sound, and air could not move away from before it. It was compressed to white heat at the entering surface, and the metal plating went to bright red heat at that point. But the hull just aft of the rocket mouths was hotter still. There the splashing rocket flames bathed it in intolerable incandescence. Hull plates, braces, and beams glared white. The tip of the tail caved in. The ship's empty cargo space was instantly filled with an air at intolerable pressure and heat. The hull exploded outward where the rocket flames played. There was a monstrous, incredible jerking of the cabin that remained. That fraction of the ship received the full force of the rocket thrust. They could decelerate it at a rate of fifteen gravities or more. They did. Joe lost consciousness as instantly and as peacefully as if he had been hit on the jaw. An unknown but brief time later he found himself listening with a peculiar astonishment. The rockets had burned out. They had lasted only seconds after the separation of the ship into two fragments. Radars on the ground are authority for this. Those few seconds were extremely important. The cabin lost an additional half mile per second of velocity, which was enough to make the difference between the cabin heating up, too, and the cabin being not quite destroyed. The cabin remnant was heavy, of course, but it was an irregular object, some twenty feet across. It was below orbital velocity and wind resistance slowed it. Even so it traveled forty-seven miles to the east in falling the last ten miles to earth. It hit a hillside and dug itself a seventy-foot crater in the ground. But there was nobody in it then. A little over a month before it had seemed to Joe that ejection seats were the most useless of all possible pieces of equipment to have on a spaceship. He'd been as much mistaken as anybody could be. With an ejection seat a jet pilot can be shot out of a plane traveling over Mach One and lived to tell about it. This crumpling cabin fell fast, but Joe stuffed Mike in an ejection seat and shot him out. He and the Chief dragged Haney to a seat and then the Chief shoved Joe off, and the four of them, one by one, were flung out into a screaming stream of air. But the ribbon parachutes did not burst. They nearly broke the necks of their passengers, but they let them down almost gently. It was quite preposterous, but all four landed intact. Mike, being the lightest and first to be ejected, came down by himself in a fury because he'd been treated with special favor. The Chief and Joe landed almost together. After a long time Joe staggered out of his space suit and harness and tried to help the Chief, and they held each other up as they stumbled off together in search of Haney. When they found him, he was sleeping heavily, exhausted, in a cane break. He hadn't even bothered to disengage his parachute harness or take off his suit.