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Updated: June 20, 2025
There were now seven cages in all to be hoisted toward the sky. A great double triangular gore had been jacked out and rolled aside to make an exit in the side of the Shed. Nearly as many pushpots, it seemed, were involved in this launching as in the take-off of the Platform itself. The routine test before take-off set the pushpot motors to roaring inside the Shed.
I make a guess, sir, that one of the underground storage tanks just one contains doctored fuel. I'm guessing that as separate tanks in a pushpot are filled up, one by one, one is filled from a particular underground storage tank that contains doctored fuel. The rest will have normal fuel. And the pushpot is going to crash when that tank, and only that tank, is used!" Major Holt was very silent.
It rolled over to the launching cage in which the spaceship lay and set the unwieldy metal object against that cage. There was a clank as the pushpot caught hold of the magnetic grapples. The crane went out again, passing a second crane carrying a second pushpot. The second beetle-like thing was presented to the cage. It stuck fast. The crane went out for more.
Pushpots came in with their tail ends low, crudely and cruelly clumsy in their handling. They had no wings or fins. They had to be balanced by their jet blasts. They had to be steered the same way. When a jet motor conked out there was no control. The pushpot fell. He carefully watched one landing now.
As it scuttled over the dimly lighted field, it made a din like all the boiler factories in the world and all the backfiring motors in creation trying to drown each other's noise out and all of them being very successful. It was a pushpot. Joe recognized it with incredulity. It was one of those utterly ungainly creations that were built around one half of the sidewall of the Shed.
Haney pushed another button. Another. Another. More jet engines bellowed. The tumult in the Shed would be past endurance, now. Joe strapped himself into his seat. He made sure that the Chief at the steering-rocket manual controls was fastened properly, and Mike at the radio panel was firmly belted past the chance of injury. Haney said with enormous calm, "All pushpot motors running, Joe."
Trucks lined up in orderly fashion to go out the swing-up doors. Men came down from the scaffolds after putting their tools in proper between-shifts positions for counting and inspection and other men were streaming quietly from the pushpot assembly line.
It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did. It settled down on its flame-spouting tail, and the sparse vegetation burst into smoky flame and shriveled, and the thing still shrieking like a fog-horn in a tunnel flopped flat forward with a resounding clank! It was abruptly silent. But the total noise was not lessened.
The excess of blast poured out astern in a blue-white flame, driving the ship. But one couldn't put a bomb in a fire basket. The temperature would melt anything but the refractory alloys of which a jet motor has to be built. A bomb placed there would explode the instant a motor was started. It couldn't resist until the pushpot took off. It couldn't.... This was a different kind of sabotage.
It's been five pushpots exploded and five pilots killed this week. It's getting a little bit serious." He looked sharply at Joe. "Better drink your coffee before you go look. You won't want to, afterward." He was right. Joe saw the crashed pushpot half an hour later. He found that his ostensible assignment to the airfield for the investigation of sabotage was quaintly taken at face value there.
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