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But gradually they seemed to arrive at an uncertain unanimity. Joe pushed the firing-button again as his own ship touched the due-east mark. Again nothing happened. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Haney pressing down both buttons. The Chief's finger lifted. Mike pushed down one button and held off the other. Roarings and howlings of pushpots.
"You see, sir?" said Joe uneasily. "The pushpots could be fueled a hundred times over with perfectly good fuel, and then one tank in one of them would explode when drawn on. There'd be no pattern in the explosions...." Major Holt said coldly: "Of course I see! It would need only one tank of doctored fuel to be delivered to the airfield, and it need not be used for weeks.
"Airfield off to the right," said the co-pilot. "That's for the town and the job. The jets there's an air umbrella overhead all the time have a field somewhere else. The pushpots have a field of their own, too, where they're training pilots." Joe didn't know what a pushpot was, but he didn't ask.
There was no longer any scaffolding. There were no trucks left except two gigantic cranes, which could handle the pushpots like so many toys. And the effect of sunlight pouring into the Shed seemed strange indeed. Outside, there were carpenters hammering professionally upon a hasty grandstand of timber.
Then the space tug roared skyward. Her take-off rockets here substituted 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 substitutes for the jatos the pushpots carried. She was out in space when the third-stage rockets roared dully outside her hull.
So Joe and Sally saw the pushpots in a new aspect: blunt metal slugs with gaping mouths which were their air scoops. The tinny music from below cut off. Somebody began an oration.
Its start was just like the one Joe's ship had made. Pushpots lifted it, jatos hurled it on, and then the furious, flaming take-off rockets drove it valiantly out toward the stars. Joe's ship had been moved out of the landing lock and was moored against the Platform's hull. The second ship made contact in two hours and seventeen minutes from take-off.
He hoped that Haney and the Chief and Mike weren't nervous. He also hoped that nobody had gotten at the fuel for the pushpots, and that the slide-rule crew that had calculated everything hadn't made any mistakes. He was also bothered about the steering-rocket fuel, and he was uncomfortable about the business of releasing the spaceship from the launching cage.
The purpose of the pushpots and the jatos and the ship's own take-off rockets had been to give it a speed at which it would inevitably rise to a height of 4,000 miles the orbit of the Space Platform and stay there. It would need no power to remain 4,000 miles out from Earth. But it would take power to come down.
He stabbed the master jato switch. And a monstrous jato rocket, built into each and every one of the pushpots outside, flared chemical fumes in a simultaneous, gigantic thrust. A small wire-wound jato for jet-assisted-take-off will weigh a hundred and forty pounds and deliver a thousand pounds of thrust for fourteen seconds. And that is for rockets using nonpoisonous compounds.
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