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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 Moonship to its wharf the Platform and out into midstream again when it resumed its journey. And that was all. The Moonship lifted from the floor of the Shed to the sound of hundreds of pushpot engines.
But it wouldn't land in Aristarchus crater as planned. It would crash. If every rocket remaining mounted on the hull were to be fired at the best possible instant, the Moonship would hit near Copernicus, and it would land with a terminal velocity of 800 feet per second 540 miles an hour.
So I think we're going to get the Moonship down all right." Mike said sharply: "You mean you think this is all worked out in advance. That we'd be here, we'd get here " The Chief said impatiently, "It's figured out so we can do it if we got the innards. We got the chance. We can duck it. But if we duck it, it's bad, and somebody else has to have the chance later. I know what Joe's saying.
And there was the space flight simulator with men practicing in it, although for the time being only robots were taking off from Earth. And there was the Moonship. It didn't look like the Platform, but rather like something a child might have put together out of building blocks. It was built up out of welded-together cells with strengthening members added.
And Joe's gang privately tipped off the noncommissioned personnel of the Moonship. 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.
He shifted a control, and the space tug swayed. It swayed over to the limit of the tow-chain it had fastened to the Moonship. Joe shifted his controls again. There was a peculiar, gritty contact somewhere. Joe cut the steering rockets and it was possible to look out. There were more gritty noises. The space tug settled a little and leaned a little. It was still. Then there was no noise at all.
The production of space ship hulls went up to four a day, while the molds for the Moonship were being worked even faster. The Moonship, actually, was assembled from precast individual cells which then were welded together. It would have features the Platform lacked, because it was designed to be a base for exploration and military activities in addition to research.
When the Moonship crossed the west coast of Africa, the space tug was 400 miles below and 500 miles behind. When the Moonship crossed Arabia, the difference was 200 miles vertically and less than 100 in line. Then the Moonship released small objects, steadied by gyroscopes and flung away by puffs of compressed air. The small objects spread out.
Joe and his crew in the space tug hauled the Moonship a good five miles from the Platform. The space 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 Moonship's hull spurted their fumes. The big ship began to move. Not outward from Earth, of course. That was where it was going.
"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 space 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 Moonship to go farther than they'd been allowed.
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