Then he knew nothing until he was awaked in the early morning by what sounded exactly like the crack of doom.
9
It was not, however, the crack of doom. When Joe stared out the window by the head of his cot, he saw gray-red dawn breaking over the landing field. There were low, featureless structures silhouetted against the sunrise. As the crimson light grew brighter, Joe realized that the angular shapes were hangars. Improbable crane poles loomed above them.
One was in motion, handling something he could not make out, but the noise that had awakened him was less, now. It seemed to circle overhead, and it had an angry, droning, buzzing quality that was not natural in any motor he had ever heard before.
Joe shivered, standing at the window. It was cold and dank in the dawn light at this alt.i.tude, but he wanted to know what that completely unbelievable roar had been. A crane beam by the hangars tilted down, slowly, and then lifted as if released of a great weight. The light was growing slowly brighter. Joe saw something on the ground. Rather, it was not quite on the ground. It rested on something on the ground.
Suddenly that unholy uproar began again. Something moved. It ran heavily out from the masking dark of the hangars. It picked up speed. It acquired a reasonable velocity--forty or fifty miles an hour. As it scuttled over the dimly lighted field, it made a din like all the boiler factories in the world and all the backfiring motors in creation trying to drown each other"s noise out--and all of them being very successful.
It was a pushpot. Joe recognized it with incredulity. It was one of those utterly ungainly creations that were built around one half of the sidewall of the Shed. In shape, its upper part was like the top half of a loaf of bread. In motion, here, it rested on some sort of wheeled vehicle, and it was reared up like an indignant caterpillar, and a blue-white flame squirted out of its tail, with coy and frolicsome flirtings from side to side.
The pushpot lifted from the vehicle on which it rode, and the vehicle put on speed and got away from under it with frantic agility. The vehicle swerved to one side, and Joe stared with amazed eyes at the pushpot, some twenty feet aloft. It had a flat underside, and a topside that still looked to him like the rounded top half of a loaf of baker"s bread. It hung in the air at an angle of about forty-five degrees, and it howled like a panic-stricken dragon--Joe was getting his metaphors mixed by this time--and it swung and wobbled and slowly gained alt.i.tude, and then suddenly it seemed to get the knack of what it was supposed to do. It started to circle around, and then it began abruptly to climb skyward. Until it began to climb it looked heavy and clumsy and wholly unimpressive. But when it climbed, it really moved!
Joe found his head out the window, craning up to look at it. Its unearthly din took on the indignant quality of an irritated beehive. But it climbed! It went up without grace but with astonishing speed. And it was huge, but it became lost in the red-flecked dawn sky while Joe still gaped.
Joe flung on his clothes. He went out the door through resonant empty corridors, hunting for somebody to tell him something. He blundered into a mess hall. There were many tables, but the chairs around them were pushed back as if used and then left behind by people in a hurry to be somewhere else. There were exactly two people still visible over in a corner.
Another din like the wailing of a baby volcano with a toothache. It began, and moved, and went through the series of changes that ended in a climbing, droning hum. Another. Another. The launching of pushpots for their morning flight was evidently getting well under way.
Joe hesitated in the nearly empty mess hall. Then he recognized the two seated figures. They were the pilot and co-pilot, respectively, of the fateful plane that had brought him to Bootstrap.
He went over to their table. The pilot nodded matter-of-factly. The co-pilot grinned. Both still wore bandages on their hands, which would account for their remaining here.
"Fancy seeing you!" said the co-pilot cheerfully. "Welcome to the Hotel de Gink! But don"t tell me you"re going to fly a pushpot!"
"I hadn"t figured on it," admitted Joe. "Are you?"
"Perish forbid," said the co-pilot amiably. "I tried it once, for the devil of it. Those things fly with the grace of a lady elephant on ice skates! Did you, by any chance, notice that they haven"t got any wings?
And did you notice where their control surfaces were?"
Joe shook his head. He saw the remnants of ham and eggs and coffee. He was hungry.
There was the uproar to be expected of a ba.s.so-profundo banshee in pain.
Another pushpot was taking off.
"How do I get breakfast?" he asked.
The co-pilot pointed to a chair. He rapped sharply on a drinking gla.s.s.
A door opened, he pointed at Joe, and the door closed.
"Breakfast coming up," said the co-pilot. "Look! I know you"re Joe Kenmore. I"m Brick Talley and this is Captain--no less than Captain!--Thomas J. Walton. Impressed?"
"Very much," said Joe. He sat down. "What about the control surfaces on pushpots?"
"They"re in the jet blast!" said the co-pilot, now identified as Brick Talley. "Like the V Two rockets when the Germans made "em. Vanes in the exhaust blast, no kidding! Landing, and skidding in on their tails like they do, they haven"t speed enough to give wing flaps a grip on the air, even if they had wings to put wing flaps on. Those d.i.n.kuses are things to have bad dreams about!"
Again, a door opened and a man in uniform with an ap.r.o.n in front came marching in with a tray. There was tomato juice and ham and eggs and coffee. He served Joe briskly and marched out again.
"That"s Hotel de Gink service," said Talley. "No wasted motion, no sloppy civilities. He was about to eat that himself, he gave it to you, and now he"ll cook himself a double portion of everything. What are you doing here, anyhow?"
Joe shrugged. 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. Joe said between mouthfuls: "Funny way for anything to take off, riding on--it looked like a truck."
"It is a truck," said Talley. "A high-speed truck. Fifty of them specially made to serve as undercarriages so pushpot pilots can practice. The pushpots are really only expected to work once, you know."
Joe nodded.
"They aren"t to take off," Talley explained. "Not in theory. They hang on to the Platform and heave. They go up with it, pushing. When they get it as high as they can, they"ll shoot their jatos, let go, and come b.u.mbling back home. So they have to practice getting back home and landing. For practicing it doesn"t matter how they get aloft. When they get down, a big straddle truck on caterpillar treads picks them up--they land in the doggonedest places, sometimes!--and brings "em back. Then a crane heaves them up on a high-speed truck and they do it all over again."
Joe considered while he ate. It made sense. The function of the pushpots was to serve as the first booster stage of a multiple-stage rocket.
Together, they would lift the Platform off the ground and get it as high as their jet motors would take it traveling east at the topmost speed they could manage. Then they"d fire their jatos simultaneously, and in doing that they"d be acting as the second booster stage of a multiple-stage rocket. Then their work would be done, and their only remaining purpose would be to get their pilots back to the ground alive, while the Platform on its own third stage shot out to s.p.a.ce.
"So," said Talley, "since their pilots need to practice landings, the trucks get them off the ground. They go up to fifty thousand feet, just to give their oxygen tanks a chance to conk out on them; then they barge around up there a while. The advanced trainees shoot off a jato at top speed. It"s gauged to build them up to the speed they"ll give the Platform. And then if they come out of that and get back down to ground safely, they uncross their fingers. A merry life those guys lead! When a man"s made ten complete flights he retires. One flight a week thereafter to keep in practice only, until the big day for the Platform"s take-off.
Those guys sweat!"
"Is it that bad?"
The pilot grunted. The co-pilot--Talley--spread out his hands.
"It is that bad! Every so often one of them comes down untidily. There"s something the matter with the motors. They"ve got a little too much power, maybe. Sometimes--occasionally--they explode."
"Jet motors?" asked Joe. "Explode? That"s news!"
"A strictly special feature," said Talley drily. "Exclusive with pushpots for the Platform. They run "em and run "em and run "em, on test. Nothing happens. But occasionally one blows up in flight. Once it happened warming up. That was a mess! The field"s been losing two pilots a week. Lately more."
"It doesn"t sound exactly reasonable," said Joe slowly. He put a last forkful in his mouth.
"It"s also inconvenient," said Talley, "for the pilots."
The pilot--Walton--opened his mouth.
"It"d be sabotage," he said curtly, "if there was any way to do it. Four pilots killed this week."
He lapsed into silence again.
Joe considered. He frowned.
A pushpot, outside the building, hysterically bellowed its way across the runway and its noise changed and it was aloft. It went spiraling up and up. Joe stirred his coffee.
There were thin shoutings outside. A screaming, whistling noise! A crash! Something metallic shrieked and died. Then silence.