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They were bright and distinct, but the feeling of loneliness above that awful appearance of the Pit was appalling. No small child alone at night had ever so desolate a sensation of isolation as the four in the small ship. But Joe painstakingly played the buttons of the steering-rocket control board. The ship surged, and turned, and surged forward again.
About steering-rocket fuel and the launching cage release and the take-off rockets and the reduction valve from the air tanks he'd thought of that on the way over and the short wave and loran and radar. Haney nodded to some questions. Mike said briskly, "I checked" to others. The Chief grunted amiably, "Look, Joe! We checked everything last night. We checked it again this morning.
He hoped that Haney and the Chief and Mike weren't nervous. He also hoped that nobody had gotten at the fuel for the pushpots, and that the slide-rule crew that had calculated everything hadn't made any mistakes. He was also bothered about the steering-rocket fuel, and he was uncomfortable about the business of releasing the spaceship from the launching cage.
Most improbably, after the long three-gravity acceleration, they were still within a fifty-mile globe of space. Number Four loitered behind, but was being brought up by judicious bursts of steering-rocket fire. Number Two was some distance ahead. The others were simply scattered. They went floating on like a group of meteors. Out the ports, two of them were visible.
They joined it. A single man in a space suit, anchored to its outer plates, directed a plastic hose which stretched out impossibly far and clamped to one drone with a magnetic grapple. He maneuvered it to the hull and made it fast. He captured a second, which was worked delicately within reach by coy puffs of steering-rocket vapor. One by one, the drones were made fast.
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."
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