United States or Timor-Leste ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Assuming solid-fuel rockets like we used and you used, they are on a collision course." "Are you doing anything about them?" asked Joe absurdly. The voice said caustically: "Unfortunately, we've nothing to do anything with." It paused. "You, of course, can use the landing-rockets you still possess.
He had no idea how to do it. So he said rather sickishly: "The Platform told me we could fire our landing-rockets as additional take-off rockets and get out of the way. Of course we've got missiles of our own on board, but we can't launch or control them. Absolutely the only thing we can choose to do or not do is fire those rockets.
The little ship surged momentarily toward the racing monsters. And then The rockets which were supposed to let the ship down to Earth flew free flung themselves unburdened at the rockets which came with deadly intent to the meeting of the two Earth spacecraft. The landing-rockets plunged down at forty gravities or better.
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.
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.
At 40 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-graze. At 30 it began to shake and tremble. At 25 miles high there was as horrible a vibration and as deadly a deceleration as at the air-graze.
Joe said between his teeth, "We could spend our landing-rockets and make it chase us, 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 sulphur. 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.
So the war rockets had to be devised to explode when near anything which reflected their probing radar waves. They had to be designed to be triggered by anything in space. And the loosed landing-rockets plunged among them. They did not detonate all at once. That was mathematically impossible. But no human eye could detect the delay.
The rockets were now glinting missiles leaping ahead of the fumes that propelled them. The ship and the Platform were two miles apart. The rockets rushed upward.... There were minute corrections in their courses. They converged.... Flames leaped from the tiny ship. Its landing-rockets spouted white-hot flame and fumes more thick and coiling than even the smoke of the bombs.
The take-off rockets had been built to drive the ship with all its contents until it attained that needed orbital velocity. There were landing rockets fastened to the hull now to slow it so that it could land. But just as the take-off rockets had been designed to lift a loaded ship, the landing-rockets had been designed to land an empty one.
Word Of The Day