Space Tug | Page 4

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'd fired jato rockets, all at once, and so pushed its speed up to

the preposterous. Then they'd dropped away and the giant steel thing had fired its own
rockets--which made mile-long flames--and swept on out to emptiness. Before its rockets
were consumed it was in an orbit 4,000 miles above the Earth's surface, and it hurtled
through space at something over 12,000 miles an hour. It circled the Earth in exactly four
hours, fourteen minutes, and twenty-two seconds. And it would continue its circling
forever, needing no fuel and never descending. It was a second moon for the planet Earth.
But it could be destroyed.
Joe watched hungrily as it went on to meet the sun. Smoothly, unhurriedly, serenely, the
remote and twinkling speck floated on out of sight. And then Joe went back to the table
and ate his breakfast quickly. He wolfed it. He had an appointment to meet that minute
speck some 4,000 miles out in space. His appointment was for a very few hours hence.
He'd been training for just this morning's effort since before the Platform's launching.
There was a great box swinging in twenty-foot gimbal rings over in the Shed. 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.
The simulator duplicated every sight and sound and feeling--all but heavy
acceleration--to be experienced in the take-off of a rocketship to space. The similitude of
flight was utterly convincing. Sometimes it was appallingly so when emergencies and
catastrophes and calamities were staged in horrifying detail for them to learn to respond
to. In six weeks they'd learned how to handle a spaceship so far as anybody could learn
on solid ground--if the simulator was correctly built. Nobody could be sure about that.
But it was the best training that could be devised.
In minutes Joe had finished the coffee and was out of Major Holt's quarters and headed
for the Shed's nearest entrance. The Shed was a gigantic metal structure rising out of
sheer flat desert. There were hills to the westward, but only arid plain to the east and
south and north. There was but one town in hundreds of miles and that was Bootstrap,
built to house the workmen who'd built the Platform and the still invisible, ferociously
howling pushpots and now the small supply ships, the first of which was to make its first
trip today.
The Shed seemed very near because of its monstrous size. When he was actually at the
base of its wall, it seemed to fill half the firmament and more than half the horizon. He
went in, and felt self-conscious when the guard's eyes fell on his uniform. There was a
tiny vestibule. Then he was in the Shed itself, and it was enormous.
There were acres of wood-block flooring. There was a vast, steel-girdered arching roof
which was fifty stories high in the center. All this size had been needed when the Space
Platform was being built. Men on the far side were merely specks, and the rows of
windows to admit light usually did no more than make a gray twilight inside. But there
was light enough today. To the east the Shed's wall was split from top to bottom. A
colossal triangular gore had been loosened and thrust out and rolled aside, and a doorway

a hundred and fifty feet wide let in the sunshine. Through it, Joe could see the fiery red
ball which was the sun just leaving the horizon.
But there was something more urgent for him to look at. Pelican One had been moved
into its launching cage. Only Joe, perhaps, would really have recognized it. Actually it
was a streamlined hull of steel, eighty feet long by twenty in diameter. There were stubby
metal fins--useless in space, and even on take-off, but essential for the planned method of
landing on its return. There were thick quartz ports in the bow-section. But its form was
completely concealed now by the attached, exterior take-off rockets. It had been shifted
into the huge cradle of steel beams from which it was to be launched. Men swarmed
about it and over it, in and out of the launching cage, checking and rechecking every
possible thing that could make for the success of its flight to space.
The other