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But don't tell me you're going to fly a pushpot!" "I hadn't figured on it," admitted Joe. "Are you?" "Perish forbid," said the co-pilot amiably. "I tried it once, for the devil of it. Those things fly with the grace of a lady elephant on ice skates! Did you, by any chance, notice that they haven't got any wings? And did you notice where their control surfaces were?" Joe shook his head.
"Airfield off to the right," said the co-pilot. "That's for the town and the job. The jets there's an air umbrella overhead all the time have a field somewhere else. The pushpots have a field of their own, too, where they're training pilots." Joe didn't know what a pushpot was, but he didn't ask.
A pushpot, outside the building, hysterically bellowed its way across the runway and its noise changed and it was aloft. It went spiraling up and up. Joe stirred his coffee. There were thin shoutings outside. A screaming, whistling noise! A crash! Something metallic shrieked and died. Then silence. Talley, the co-pilot, looked sick. Then he said: "Correction.
Holding it aloft, they would start it eastward, lifting effortfully. They would carry it as far and as high and as fast as their straining engines could work. Then there would be one last surge of fierce thrusting with oversize jato rockets, built separately into each pushpot, all firing at once.
The minds that planned those tricks said, in effect: "These things will destroy. How can we get them to where they will destroy something?" It was a strict pattern. But the pushpot sabotage and Joe was sure it was nothing else was not that sort of thing. Making motors explode.... Motors don't explode. One couldn't put bombs in them. There wasn't room.
It made small echoes in the vast cavern that was the Shed. Somebody plucked the speaker's arm. He ended abruptly and sat down, wiping his forehead with a huge blue handkerchief. There was a roar. A pushpot had started its motor. Another roar. Another. One by one, the multitude of clustering objects added to the din. In the open a single jet was appalling.
Joe said between mouthfuls: "Funny way for anything to take off, riding on it looked like a truck." "It is a truck," said Talley. "A high-speed truck. Fifty of them specially made to serve as undercarriages so pushpot pilots can practice. The pushpots are really only expected to work once, you know." Joe nodded. "They aren't to take off," Talley explained. "Not in theory.
We caught the saboteurs at the pushpot field by guessing at a new sort of thinking for sabotage. Here's a chance to catch the saboteurs who'll work their heads off in the next twenty-four hours or so, by using a new sort of thinking for security!" Major Holt was not an easy man to get along with at any time, and this was the worst of all times to differ with him. But he did think straight.
And then the roaring of the pushpot engines achieved an utterly impossible volume. The whole interior of the Shed was misty now, but shining in the morning light. And the Platform moved. At first it was a mere stirring. It turned ever so slightly to one side, pivoting on the ways that had supported it during building. It turned back and to the other side. The vapor thickened.
Nothing like it could be graceful or neatly controllable or even very speedy in the thick atmosphere near the ground. But higher, it would be another matter. It was another matter. Once clear of the Shed, and with flat, sere desert ahead to the very horizon, Joe threw on full power to the pushpot motors. The clumsy-seeming aggregation of grotesque objects began to climb.
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