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Updated: June 25, 2025
Joe heard the small gyro motors as their speed went up. A hum and a whine and then a shrill whistle which went up in pitch until it wasn't anything at all. He frowned anxiously and said to Haney, "I'm taking over the pushpots." Haney nodded. Joe took the over-all control. The roar of engines outside grew loud on the right-hand side, and died down. It grew thunderous to the left, and dwindled.
Before, he'd had Mike at communications and the Chief at the steering rockets while Haney kept the pushpots balanced for thrust. Now Joe flew the manned ship alone. Headphones and a mike gave him communications with the Shed direct, and the pushpots were balanced in groups, which cost efficiency but helped on control.
After the pushpots and their jatos had served as the first two stages of a multiple-rocket aggregation, the Platform carried rocket fuel as the third stage. But the Platform was a highly special ballistic problem. It would take off almost horizontally a great advantage in fueling matters.
They've got a little too much power, maybe. Sometimes occasionally they explode." "Jet motors?" asked Joe. "Explode? That's news!" "A strictly special feature," said Talley drily. "Exclusive with pushpots for the Platform. They run 'em and run 'em and run 'em, on test. Nothing happens. But occasionally one blows up in flight. Once it happened warming up. That was a mess!
Then she looked up again and was crying unashamedly. "I will," she repeated. Then she said fiercely, "I don't care if somebody's looking, Joe. It's time for you to go in the ship." He kissed her, and turned and went quickly to the peculiar mass of clustered pushpots, touching and almost overlapping each other. He ducked under and looked back. Sally waved. He waved back.
Some were Air Force supplies and some were Ordnance, and some were strictly Quartermaster. These were not component parts of space ships. They were freight for the Platform. And, just forty-eight hours after Joe and Sally looked dispiritedly down upon the floor of the Shed, there were seven gleaming hulls in launching cages and the unholy din of landing pushpots outside the Shed.
There was a 300-mile-an-hour wind behind them. A tail-wind, west to east. The pushpots struggled now to get the maximum possible forward thrust before they rose out of that east-bound hurricane. They added a fierce push to eastward to their upward thrust. Mike's cracked voice reported 500 miles an hour. Presently it was 600. At 40,000 feet they were moving eastward at 680 miles an hour.
It was aloft, climbing with seemingly infinite slowness, with all the hundreds of straining, thrusting, clumsy pushpots clinging to it and pushing it ever ahead and upward. It went smoothly toward the east. It continued to gain speed. It did not seem to dip toward the horizon at all.
The jatos of the pushpots used the beryllium-fluorine fuel that had lifted the Platform and that filled the take-off rockets of Joe's ship. These jatos gave the pushpots themselves an acceleration of ten gravities, but it had to be shared with the cage and the ship. Still.... Joe felt himself slammed back into his seat with irresistible, overwhelming force.
Wobblings and heart-breaking clumsinesses of the drone-ships. They hung in the sky while the pushpots used up their fuel. "We've got to make it soon," said Joe grimly. "We've got forty seconds. Or we'll have to go down and try again." There was a clock dial with a red sweep-hand which moved steadily and ominously toward a deadline time for firing.
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