"Three hours plus or minus something," said Joe, dry-throated. "We"ll hear from the ground."
Mike said in a cracked voice: "Radar reports we went a little bit too low. They think we weren"t tilted up far enough. We didn"t bounce as soon as we should."
Joe unstrapped himself.
"How about the other ship?"
"It did better than we did," said Mike. "It"s a good 200 miles ahead.
Down at the Shed, they"re recalculating for us. We"ll have to land with six grazes instead of eight. We lost too much speed."
Joe went staggering, again weightless, to look out a port for the other ship. He should have known better. One does not spot an eighty-foot s.p.a.ce ship with the naked eye when it is 200 miles away.
But he saw something, though for seconds he didn"t know what it was.
Now the little ship was 300 miles high and still rising. Joe was dazed and battered by the vibration of the ship in the graze just past. The sister s.p.a.ce ship hadn"t lost speed so fast. It would be traveling faster. It would be leaving him farther behind every second. It was rising more sharply. It would rise higher.
Joe stared numbly out of a port, thinking confusedly that his hull would be dull red on its outer surface, though the heating had been so fast that the inner surfaces of the plating might still be cold. He saw the vast area which was the curve of the edge of the world. He saw the sunlight upon clouds below and glimpses of the surface of the Earth itself.
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. It was a rocket trail. The violence of its writhings proved the fury with which the rocket climbed.
It was on its way to meet the other s.p.a.ce ship.
It did. Joe saw the thread of vapor extend and grow until it was higher than he was. He never saw the other ship, which was too small. But he saw the burst of flame, bright as the sun itself, which was the explosion of a proximity fuse bomb. He knew, then, that nothing but incandescent, radioactive gas remained of the other ship and its crew.
Then he saw the trail of the second rocket. It was rising to meet him.
5
The four of them watched through the ports as the thread of vapor sped upward. They hated the rocket and the people who had built it. Joe said between his teeth, "We could spend our landing-rockets and make it chase us, but it"ll have fuel for that!"
The Chief muttered in Mohawk. The words sounded as if they ought to have blue fire at their edges and smell of sulphur. Mike the midget said crackling things in his small voice. Haney stared, his eyes burning.
Their ship was a little over 400 miles up, now. The rocket was 100 or better. The rendezvous would be probably 200 miles ahead and correspondingly higher. The rocket was accelerating furiously. It had farther to travel, but its rate of climb was already enormous and it increased every second.
The ship could swing to right or left on steering rockets, but the war rocket could swerve also. It was controlled from the ground. It did not need to crash the small ship from s.p.a.ce. Within a limited number of miles the blast of its atomic warhead would vaporize any substance that could exist. And of course the ship could not turn back. Even the expenditure of all its landing-rockets could not bring twenty tons of ship to a halt. They could speed it up, so it would pa.s.s the calculated meeting place ahead of the war rocket. But the bomb would simply follow in a stern chase. In any case, the ship could not stop.
But neither could the rocket.
Joe never knew how he saw the significance of that fact. On land or sea, of course, an automobile or a ship moves in the direction in which it is pointed. Even an airplane needs to make only minor corrections for air currents which affect it. But an object in s.p.a.ce moves on a course which is the sum of all its previous speeds and courses. Joe"s ship was moving eastward above the Earth at so many miles per second. If he drove north--at a right angle to his present course--the ship would not cease to move to the east. It would simply move northward in addition to moving east. If the rocket from Earth turned north or east it would continue to move up and merely add the other motion to its vertical rise.
Joe stared at the uncoiling thread of vapor which was the murder rocket"s trail. He hated it so fiercely that he wanted to escape it even at the cost of destruction, merely to foil its makers. At one moment, he was hardly aware of anything but his own fury and the frantic desire to frustrate the rocket at any cost. The next instant, somehow, he was not angry at all. Because somehow his brain had dredged up the fact that the war rocket could no more turn back than he could--and he saw its meaning.
"Mike!" he snapped sharply. "Get set! Report what we do! Everybody set for acceleration! Steering rockets ready, Chief! Get set to help, Haney!
I don"t know whether we"ll get out of this alive, but we"d better get into our s.p.a.ce suits."
Then he literally dived back to his acceleration chair and strapped in in feverish haste. The ship was then a quarter of the way to the meeting place and the rocket had very much farther to go. But it was rising faster.
The ship"s gyros whined and squealed as Joe jammed on their controls.
The little ship spun in emptiness. Its bow turned and pointed down. The steering rockets made their roarings.
Joe found himself panting. "The--rocket"s rising faster--than we are.
It"s been gaining--alt.i.tude maybe--two minutes. It"s lighter than when--it started but--it can"t stop--less than a minute, anyhow so we duck under it----"
He did not make computations. There was no time. The war rocket might have started at four or five gravities acceleration, but it would speed up as its fuel burned. It might be accelerating at fifteen gravities now, and have an attained velocity of four miles a second and still increasing. If the little ship ducked under it, it could not kill that rate-of-climb in time to follow in a stern chase.
"Haney!" panted Joe. "Watch out the port! Are we going to make it?"
Haney crawled forward. Joe had forgotten the radar because he"d seen the rocket with his own eyes. It seemed to need eyes to watch it. Mike spoke curtly into the microphone broadcasting to ground. He was reporting each action and order as it took place and was given. There was no time to explain anything. But Mike thought of the radar. He watched it.
It showed the vast curve of Earth"s surface, 400 miles down. It showed a moving pip, much too much nearer, which was the war rocket. Mike made a dot on the screen with a grease pencil where the pip showed. It moved.
He made another dot. The pip continued to move. He made other dots.
They formed a curving line--curved because the rocket was accelerating--which moved inexorably toward the center of the radar screen. The curve would cut the screen"s exact center. That meant collision.
"Too close, Joe!" said Mike shrilly. "We may miss it, but not enough!"
"Then hold fast," yelled Joe. "Landing rockets firing, three--two--one!"
The bellowing of the landing-rockets smote their ears. Weight seized upon them, three gravities of acceleration toward the rushing flood of clouds and solidity which was the Earth. The ship plunged downward with all its power. It was intolerable--and ten times worse because they had been weightless so long and were still shaken and sore and bruised from the air-graze only minutes back.
Mike took acceleration better than the others, but his voice was thin when he gasped, "Looks--like this does it, Joe!" Seconds later he gasped again, "Right! The rocket"s above us and still going away!"
The gyros squealed again. The ship plunged into vapor which was the trail of the enemy rocket. For an instant the flowing confusion which was Earth was blotted out. Then it was visible again. The ship was plunging downward, but its sidewise speed was undiminished and much greater than its rate of fall.
"Mike," panted Joe. "Get the news out. What we did--and why. I"m--going to turn the ship"s head back on our--course. We can"t slow enough but--I"d rather crash on Earth than let them blast us----"
The ship turned again. It pointed back in the direction from which it had come. With the brutal sternward pressure produced by the landing-rockets, it felt as if it were speeding madly back where it had come from. It was the sensation they"d felt when the ship took off from Earth, so long before. But then the cloud ma.s.ses and the earth beneath had flowed toward the ship and under it. Now they flowed away. The appearance was that of an unthinkably swift wake left behind by a ship at sea. The Earth"s surface fled away and fled away from them.
"Crazy, this!" Joe muttered thickly. "If the ship were lighter--or we had more power--we could land! I"m sorry, but I"d rather----"
Haney turned his head from where he clung near the bow-ports. His features changed slowly as he talked because of acceleration-driven blood engorging his lips and bloating his cheeks. After one instant he closed his eyes fiercely. They felt as if they would pop out of his head. He gasped, "Yes! Get down to air-resistance. A chance--not good but a chance--ejection seats--with s.p.a.ce suits--might make it...."
He began to let himself back toward his acceleration chair. He could not possibly have climbed forward. It was a horrible task to let himself down, with triple his normal weight pulling at him and after the beating taken a little while ago.
Sweat stood out on his skin as he lowered himself sternward. Once his grip on a hand-line slipped and he had to sustain the drag of nearly six hundred pounds by a single hand and arm. It would not be a good idea to fall at three gravities.
The landing rockets roared and roared, and Joe tilted the bow down a little farther, so that the streaming flood of clouds drew nearer.
Haney got to his acceleration chair. He let himself into it and his eyes closed.
Mike"s sharp voice barked: "What"s the chance, Haney?"
Haney"s mouth opened, and closed, and opened again. "Rocket flames," he gasped, "pushed back--wind--splash on hull--may melt--lighten weight--hundred to one against----"