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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.
"About five months ago," said the co-pilot, "there was an Army colonel wangled a ride to Bootstrap on a cargo plane. The plane took off. It flew all right until twenty miles from Bootstrap. Then it stopped checking. It dove straight for the Shed the Platform's being built in. It was shot down. When it hit, there was an explosion." The co-pilot shrugged. "You won't believe me, maybe.
They dipped, and deftly picked up a thing shaped like the top half of a loaf of bread. They swung that metal thing to the Platform's side. Each time it clung fast, like a snail or slug to the surface on which it crawls. Many pushpots clung even to the rocket tubes the same tubes that would presently burn away and vanish.
He alone was worthy of the background. Came a whistle from the distance. The breast of an engine was descried, and a long train curving after it, under a flight of smoke. It grew and grew. Louder and louder, its noise foreran it. It became a furious, enormous monster, and, with an instinct for safety, all men receded from the platform's margin.
Then a ship could shoot away from Earth with effectively zero gravity and full fuel tanks. The Platform should be built so civilization could surge ahead to new heights! But despite these excellent reasons, it was the Platform's enemies who really got it built.
He was a harried man, and he was keyed up to the limit by the multiplied strain due to the imminence of the Platform's take-off. He came back to his house from a grim conference on exactly the subject of how to make preparations against any possible sabotage incidents and ran into a proposal to stimulate them! He practically exploded.
But Central Intelligence has definite information that more than ten days ago the ah enemies of our Space Exploration Project " even on a tight beam to the small spaceship, Major Holt did not name the nation everybody knew was most desperately resolved to smash space exploration by anybody but itself "completed at least one rocket capable of reaching the Platform's orbit with a pay-load that could be an atomic bomb.
He turned back to the contemplation of the instruments before him and the view out the transparent plastic of the cabin windows. "He does?" The co-pilot said to Joe, "You've got security checks around your plant. They weren't put there for fun. It's a hundred times worse where the whole Platform's being built." "Security?" said Joe. He shrugged. "We know everybody who works at the plant.
It was a short walk, and a silent one; but when they came in sight of the platform, Dab exclaimed, "There they are, all of them!" "The whole party?" "Why, the platform's as crowded as our house was last night." Mrs.
In fine alignment, they plunged forward through emptiness, swerved with a remarkable precision, and headed out for emptiness beyond the Platform's orbit. Their function had been to protect the Moonship on its way out. That function was performed. There were too many of them to recover, so they went out toward the stars. When their rockets burned out they vanished.
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