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There were two reasons for the vertical rise, and the high acceleration. If a robot ship went straight up, it wouldn't pass over enemy territory until it was high enough to be protected by the Platform. And it costs fuel to carry fuel to be burned. So if the rocketship could get up speed for coasting to orbit in the first couple of hundred miles, it needn't haul its fuel so far.
The second had done the same. The second pair of spaceships wouldn't be ready for two months or more. The ships that could be used had to be used. So, only thirty-six hours after the arrival of the second rocketship at the Platform, the two of them took off together to return to Earth. Joe's ship left the airlock first. Sanford was loaded in the cabin of the other ship as cargo.
And he saw something rising out of the mists at the far horizon. It was a thread of white vapor. The other rocketship was a speck, a mote, invisible because of its size and distance. This thread of vapor was already 100 miles long, and it expanded to a column of whiteness half a mile across before it seemed to dissipate. It rose and rose, as if following something which sped upward.
There was a warning-bell in the shack, and when a rocketship from Lunar City got above the horizon and could send a tight beam, the gong clanged loudly, and Pop got into a vacuum-suit and went out the air lock. He usually reached the moondozer about the time the ship began to brake for landing, and he watched it come in.
There were motors and projectors and over two thousand vacuum tubes, relays and electronic units. It was a space flight simulator a descendant of the Link trainer which once taught plane pilots how to fly. But this offered the problems and the sensations of rocketship control, and for many hours every day Joe and the three members of his crew had labored in it.
But something flamed very brightly, and the ground thumped under Pop Young's vacuum boots. He turned. The rocketship was still in the act of flying apart. It had been a splendid explosion. Of course cotton sheeting in liquid oxygen is not quite as good an explosive as carbon-black, which they used down in the mine.
The first men to leave the colony had to be knocked cold and shipped out unconscious. They'd been underground and in low gravity long enough to be utterly unable to face the idea of open spaces. Even now there were some who had to be carried, but there were some tougher ones who were able to walk to the rocketship if Pop put a tarpaulin over their heads so they didn't have to see the sky.
He knew only that the ship didn't come from Lunar City, but from Earth. He couldn't imagine why. He did not even wildly connect it with what say Sattell might have written with desperate plausibility about greasy-seeming white crystals out of the mine, knocking about Pop Young's shack in cannisters containing a hundred Earth-pounds weight of richness. Pop reached the rocketship.
It was just barely past lunar sunrise on the far side of the Moon. Incredibly long and utterly black shadows stretched across the plain, and half the rocketship was dazzling white and half was blacker than blackness itself. The sun still hung low indeed in the black, star-speckled sky. Pop waded through moondust, raising a trail of slowly settling powder.
Haney and Joe went into the cargo-section of the rocketship and heaved its contents smoothly through weightlessness to the storage chamber above. The Chief and Mike stowed it there. The speed and precision of their work was out of all reason. Brown stared incredulously.
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