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At first they were impersonal and expected parts of the scene, until the numbers, ceramic-enamelled on their striped flanks, were noticed: GO-11 and GO-12. "They're us up the old roller coaster!" Charlie Reynolds shouted. Then everybody was checking his blastoff ticket, as if he didn't remember the number primly typed on it. Frank Nelsen had GO-12. GO Ground-to-Orbit.
Still, the mere fact that a companion could return, after defeat, helped brace their uncertain morale. "I'll order you a blastoff ticket, Les," Frank Nelsen said. "In one of the two GOs ground-to-orbit rockets reserved for us. The space is still there..." David Lester had won a battle. He meant to win through, completely. Perhaps some of this determination was transmitted to the others.
He had been acquainted with Paul ever since, at the age of seven, he had come into the store and had tried to make a down payment on a model building kit for a Y-71 ground-to-orbit freight rocket clearly marked $49.95 in the display window with his fortune of a single dime.
Dehydrated food, flasks of oxygen and water, and blastoff drums to contain our gear, are all relatively simple. Worst, of course, is the blastoff price, from one of the spaceports. Who could be rich enough to have a ground-to-orbit nuclear rocket of his own? Fifteen hundred bucks a subsidized rate at that just to lift a man and a thousand pounds of equipment into orbit.
It's in the rules for prospective ground-to-orbit candidates. We're supposed to be sleeping good. Here goes my pill down, with the last of my beer..." Faces sobered, and became strained and careful, again. The guys on the trucks bedded down as best they could, among their gaunt equipment. Soon there were troubled snores from huddled figures that quivered with the motion of the vehicles.
By late afternoon the Bunch had folded up the bubb again, and were simulating its practice launching from a ground-to-orbit rocket as well as can be done on the ground with a device intended only for use in a state of weightlessness, when the operators are supposed to be weightless, too.
The parabolic antenna mounted on the elbow of Ramos' Archer, swung a tiny bit, holding the beam contact with Paul Hendricks automatically, after it was made. Yet Ramos kept his arm very still, to avoid making the slender beam swing wide. Meanwhile, he was elaborating on his first statement: "... Not like before. No terrestrial ground-to-orbit weight problem to beat, this trip, Paul.
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