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Updated: June 25, 2025
Also, the floor of the Shed looked strange. It was littered with the clumsy shapes of pushpots, trucked to this place in an unending stream all night long. A very young lieutenant from the pushpot airfield hunted up Joe and assured him that every drop of fuel in every pushpot's tanks had been tested twice once in the storage tanks, and again in the pushpots. Joe thanked him very politely.
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.
The Major's manner seemed to disapprove of Joe as expressing curiosity. His words meant, of course, that the three would-be murderers had been fatally shot. Joe said carefully: "That wasn't what I called about, sir. I think I've found out something about the pushpots. How they're made to crash. But my hunch needs to be checked." The Major said briefly: "Tell me."
The goal was for pushpots to touch ground finally with the whole weight of the flying monstrosity supported by the vertical thrust of the jet, and while it was moving forward at the lowest possible rate of speed. When that goal was achieved, they flopped solidly flat, slid a few feet on their metal bellies, and lay still. Some hit hard and tried to dig into the earth with their blunt noses.
Each one reached down deliberately and picked up a pushpot. They swung the pushpots to vertical positions and presented them precisely to the Platform's side. They clung there ridiculously. Magnetic grapples, of course. Joe and Sally, at the end of the corridor in the wall, could see the heads of the pushpot pilots in their plastic domes. Music blared from behind the grandstand.
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.
It was the artificial satellite a huge steel hull which had been built in the gigantic Shed from whose shadow Joe looked upward. It was the size of an ocean liner, and six weeks since some hundreds of pushpots, all straining at once, had gotten it out of the Shed and panted toward the sky with it. They'd gotten it twelve miles high and speeding eastward at the ultimate speed they could manage.
They were eight miles up when the pushpots fired their jatos, an' twelve miles up when the pushpots let go they musta near broke their pilots' necks when they caught their motors again! And the Platform's rockets fired just right, makin' flames a mile long, an' they were goin' then what were they makin'?" "Who cares?" asked the Chief peacefully. "Plenty!"
It was no longer upheld by pushpots. It was free, with its take-off rockets flaming. It plunged on up and out. But the acceleration was less. Nobody can stand six gravities for long. Anybody can take three for a while. Joe's body resisted movement with a weight of four hundred and fifty pounds, instead of a third as much for normal.
The assembly line of pushpots grew shorter, and the remaining monstrosities around the sidewall were plainly near to completion. There came a day, indeed, when only five ungainly objects remained on that line, and even they were completely plated in and needed only a finishing touch.
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