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Updated: June 3, 2025
He found himself curiously anxious to discuss any number of things with his father, too, who suddenly appeared to be much more intelligent than Joe had ever noticed before. He was almost unhappy when it was certain that the Moonship would take off for space on the following day. He talked about it with Sally the night before take-off. "Look," he said awkwardly.
Radar probed the space formation, but enemies of the fleet and the Platform very wisely did no more than probe. The Moonship and its attendants went across the Pacific, still rising. Above the longitude of Washington, the space tug left its former post and climbed, nudging the Moonship this way and that. And from behind, the Platform came floating splendidly.
I don't think the Moonship will be fired on." "But they'll need me and my gang just the same," said Joe slowly, "for tugboat work at the Platform?" "Exactly," said the major. "Then," Joe said doggedly, "they get us. My gang will gripe about being edged out of the trip. They won't like it. But they'd like backing out still less. We'll play it the way it's dealt but we won't pretend to like it."
He did not want to give her any excuse to tell him anything for his own good. So he spoke pleasantly and kept company only with his own thoughts. But he did notice that she looked rapt and starry-eyed even through the long and dreary hours of free flight. She was mentally tracking the moonship through the void.
It could even be calculated that when the Moonship landed, the explosion ought to be visible from Earth with a fairly good telescope. It was due to take place in thirty-two hours plus or minus a few minutes. The others got the space tug into the platform's lock and did things to it, in the way of loading, that its designers never intended, while Joe was calling Earth for calculations.
Now they loaded them into the curious locks which conveyed them outside the hull into firing position. The ring-mountains were gigantic when they blasted again! They were only 20 miles up, then, and some of the peaks rose four miles from their inner crater floors. The ships were still descending fast. Joe spoke into his microphone. "Calling Moonship!
If we had been killed, Mike wouldn't have figured out the metal-concrete business. But for him, that Moonship wouldn't even be a gleam in anybody's eye. And if the Chief hadn't blown up that manned rocket we fought in the space wagons, there wouldn't be any Platform up here to reload and refuel the Moonship. So they left us behind!
Forty miles above the lunar surface such-and-such rockets were to be fired. At twenty miles, such-and-such others. At five miles the Moonship itself must fire its remaining fuel-store. With luck, it was a toss-up. Safety or a smash. But there was a long time to wait. Joe and his crew relaxed in the space tug. The Chief looked out a port and observed: "I can see the ring-mountains now.
The ship was on course and its firings were on schedule. But then the unexpected happened. It was an error which no machine could ever have predicted, for which statistics and computations could never have compensated. It was a human error. At the signal for the final acceleration blast, the pilot of the Moonship had fired the wrong set of rockets.
Completing the hook-on of a landing rocket, he straightened up too abruptly and went floating off toward the Milky Way. Mike brought him back. After that there was less trouble. Even so, the Moonship and the Platform were linked together for thirteen full days, during which the Platform seemed extraordinarily crowded. On the fourteenth day the two ships sealed off and separated.
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