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Updated: June 25, 2025
Joe shifted the lever that governed the vanes in the jet motor blasts. Ship and cage and pushpots, all together, wavered toward the doorway. They passed out of it, rocking a little and pitching a little and wallowing a little. As a flying device, the combination was a howling tumult and a horror. It was an aviation designer's nightmare. It was a bad dream by any standard.
Overhead he could see the dark, girder-lined roof of the Shed. On either side, though, he could see only the scratched, dented, flat undersides of the pushpots ready to lift the ship upward. "You can start on the pushpot motors, Haney," he said curtly. Joe moved to his own, the pilot's seat. Haney pushed a button. Through the fabric of the ship came the muted uproar of a pushpot engine starting.
The Major went on, without apparent cordiality: "It seems probable that if this particular sabotage trick had not been detected it seems likely that on the Platform's take-off, all or most of the pushpots would have been fueled to explode at some time after the Platform was aloft, and before it could possibly get out to space." Joe felt queer.
It occurred to him that it would neither be wise nor creditable to say that he'd been sent here to split up a target at which saboteurs might shoot. "I guess I'm attached for rations," he observed. "There'll be orders along about me presently, I suppose. Then I'll know what it's all about." He fell to on his breakfast. The thunderous noises of the pushpots taking off made the mess hall quiver.
Finally the clumsy things would drop off and come bumbling back home, while the Platform's own rockets flared out their mile-long flames and it headed up for emptiness. But the making of these pushpots and all the other multitudinous activities of the Shed would have no meaning if the contents of four crates in the wreckage of a burned-out plane could not be salvaged and put to use again.
Then another. One man spoke for less than a minute, and the stands went wild! But the one who followed made splendid gestures. He talked and talked and talked. The cranes cleaned up the last of the waiting pushpots, and the Platform itself was practically invisible. The cranes backed off and went away, clanking. The orator raised his voice.
But it hurt to have had even a crazy hope taken away. Sally said, trying hard to interest him, "These rockets hold an awful lot of fuel, Joe! And it's better than scientists thought a chemical fuel could ever be!" "Yes," said Joe. "Fluorine-beryllium," said Sally urgently. "It fits in with the pushpots' having pressurized cockpits. Rockets like that couldn't be used on the ground!
A jet-motor cannot be rated except indirectly, but there was over 200,000 horsepower at work to raise the spacecraft and build up the highest possible forward speed. It couldn't be kept up, of course. The pushpots couldn't carry enough fuel. But they reached 55,000 feet, which is where space begins for humankind.
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.
Two others rolled over on their sides after touching ground. One ended up on its back like a tumble-bug, wriggling. They seemed to land by hundreds, but their number was actually in dozens. It was not until the last one was down that Joe could make himself heard. The pushpots were jet motors in frames and metal skin, with built-in jato rocket tubes besides their engines.
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