Space Tug

by Murray Leinster

  10

  There was bright sunshine at the Shed, not a single cloud in all thesky. The radar bowls atop the roof--they seemed almost invisibly smallcompared with its vastness--wavered and shifted and quivered. Completelyinvisible beams of microwaves lanced upward. Atop the Shed, in thecommunication room, there was the busy quiet of absolute intentness.Signals came down and were translated into visible records which fedinstantly into computers. Then the computers clicked and hummed andperformed incomprehensible integrations, and out of their slot-mouthspoured billowing ribbons of printed tape. Men read those tapes andtalked crisply into microphones, and their words went swiftly aloftagain.

  Down by the open eastern door of the Shed at the desert's edge, SallyHolt and Joe's father waited together, watching the sky. Sally was whiteand scared. Joe's father patted her shoulder reassuringly.

  "He'll make it, all right," said Sally, dry-throated.

  Joe's father nodded. "Of course he will!" But his voice was not steady.

  "Nothing could happen to him now!" said Sally fiercely.

  "Of course not," said Joe's father.

  A loudspeaker close to them said abruptly: "_Nineteen miles._"

  There was a tiny, straggling thread of white visible in the now. Itthinned out to nothingness, but its nearest part flared out and flaredout and flared out. It grew larger, came closer with a terrifying speed.

  "_Twelve miles_," said the speaker harshly. "_Rockets firing._"

  The downward-hurtling trail of smoke was like a crippled plane fallingflaming from the sky, except that no plane ever fell so fast.

  At seven miles the white-hot glare of the rocket flames was visible evenin broad daylight. At three miles the light was unbearably bright. Attwo, the light winked out. Sally saw something which glittered comeplummeting toward the ground, unsupported.

  It fell almost half a mile before rocket fumes flung furiously outagain. Then it checked. Visibly, its descent was slowed. It dropped moreslowly, and more slowly, and more slowly still....

  It hung in mid-air a quarter-mile up. Then there was a fresh burst ofrocket fumes, more monstrous than ever, and it went steadily downward,touched the ground, and stayed there spurting terrible incandescentflames for seconds. Then the bottom flame went out. An instant laterthere were no more flames at all.

  Sally began to run toward the ship. She stopped. A procession ofrumbling, clanking, earth-moving machinery moved out of the Shed andtoward the upright space tug. Prosaically, a bulldozer lowered its wideblade some fifty yards from the ship. It pushed a huge mass of earthbefore it, covering over the scorched and impossibly hot sand about therocket's landing place. Other bulldozers began to circle methodicallyaround and around, overturning the earth and burying the hot surfacestuff. Water trucks sprayed, and thin steam arose.

  But also an exit-port opened and Joe stood in the opening.

  Then Sally began to run again.

  * * * * *

  Joe sat at dinner in the major's quarters. Major Holt was there, andJoe's father, and Sally.

  "It feels good," said Joe warmly, "to use a knife and fork again, and topick food up from a plate where it stays until it's picked up!"

  "The crew of the Platform----" Major Holt began.

  "They're all right," said Joe, with his mouth full. "They're wearinggravity simulator harness. Brent's got his up to three-quarters gravity.They get tired, wearing the harness. They sleep better. Everything'sfine! They can handle the space wagons we left and they've got guidedmissiles to spare! They're all right!"

  Joe's father said unsteadily, "You'll stay on Earth a while now, son?"

  Sally moved quickly. She looked up, tense. But Joe said, "They're goingto get the Moonship up, sir. We came back--my gang and me--to help trainthe crew. We only have a week to do it in, but we've got some combattactics to show them on the training gadget in the Shed." He addedanxiously, "And, sir--they'll have to take the Moonship off in a spiralorbit. She can't go straight up! That means she's got to pass over enemyterritory, and--we've got to have a real escort for her. A fightingescort. It's planned for the space tug to take off a few minutes afterthe Moonship and blast along underneath. We'll dump guided missilesout--like drones--and if anything comes along we can start their rocketsand fight our way through. And we four have had more experience thananybody else. We're needed!"

  "You've done enough, surely!" Sally cried.

  "The United States," said Joe awkwardly, "is going to take over theMoon. I--can't miss having a hand in that! Not if it's at all possible!"

  "I'm afraid you will miss it, Joe," Major Holt said detachedly. "Theoccupation of the Moon will be a Navy enterprise. Space ExplorationProject facilities are being used to prepare for it, but the Navy wonthe latest battle of the Pentagon. The Navy takes over the Moon."

  Joe looked startled. "But----"

  "You're Space Exploration personnel," said the major with the samecoolness. "You will be used to instruct naval personnel, and your spacetug will be asked to go along to the Platform as an auxiliary vessel.For purposes of assisting in the landing of the Moonship at thePlatform, you understand. You'll haul her away from the Platform whenshe's refueled and supplied, so she can start off for the Moon. But theoccupation of the Moon will be strictly Navy."

  Joe's expression became carefully unreadable. "I think," he said evenly,"I'd better not comment."

  Major Holt nodded. "Very wise--not that we'd repeat anything you didsay. But the point is, Joe, that just one day before the Moonship doestake off, the United Nations will be informed that it is a United Statesnaval vessel. The doctrine of the freedom of space--like the freedom ofthe seas--will be promulgated. And the United States will say that aUnited States naval task force is starting off into space on an officialmission. To attack a Space Exploration ship is one thing. That's like ascientific expedition. But to fire on an American warship on officialbusiness is a declaration of war. Especially since that ship can shootback--and will."

  Joe listened. He said, "It's daring somebody to try another PearlHarbor?"

  "Exactly," said the major. "It's time for us to be firm--now that we canback it up. I don't think the Moonship will be fired on."

  "But they'll need me and my gang just the same," said Joe slowly, "fortugboat work at the Platform?"

  "Exactly," said the major.

  "Then," Joe said doggedly, "they get us. My gang will gripe about beingedged out of the trip. They won't like it. But they'd like backing outstill less. We'll play it the way it's dealt--but we won't pretend tolike it."

  Major Holt's expression did not change at all, but Joe had an oddfeeling that the major approved of him.

  "Yes. That's right, Joe," his father added. "You--you'll have to goaloft once more, son. After that, we'll talk it over."

  Sally hadn't said a word during the discussion, but she'd watched Joeevery second. Later, out on the porch of the major's quarters, she had agreat deal to say. But that couldn't affect the facts.

  The world at large, of course, received no inkling of the events inpreparation. The Shed and the town of Bootstrap and all the desert fora hundred-mile circle round about, were absolutely barred to allvisitors. Anybody who came into that circle stayed in. Most people werekept out. All that anyone outside could discover was that enormousquantities of cryptic material had poured and still were pouring intothe Shed. But this time security was genuinely tight. Educated guessescould be made, and they were made; but nobody outside the closed-in areasave a very few top-ranking officials had any real knowledge. The worldonly knew that something drastic and remarkable was in prospect.

  Mike, though, was able to write a letter to the girl who'd written him.Major Holt arranged it. Mike wrote his letter on paper supplied bySecurity, with ink supplied by Security, and while watched by Securityofficers. His letter was censored by Major Holt himself, and it did notreveal that Mike was back on Earth. But it did invite a reply--and Mikesweated as he waited for one.

  The others had plenty to sweat
about. Joe and Haney and the Chief wereacting as instructors to the Moonship's crew. They taught practicalspace navigation. At first they thought they hadn't much to pass on, butthey found out otherwise. They had to pass on data on everything fromhow to walk to how to drink coffee, how to eat, sleep, why one shouldwear gravity harness, and the manners and customs of ships in space.They had to show why in space fighting a ship might send missiles onbefore it, but would really expect to do damage with those it leftbehind. They had to warn of the dangers of unshielded sunshine, and theequal danger of standing in shadow for more than five minutes, and----

  They had material for six months of instruction courses, but there wasbarely a week to pass it on. Joe was run ragged, but in spite ofeverything he managed to talk at some length with Sally. He foundhimself curiously anxious to discuss any number of things with hisfather, too, who suddenly appeared to be much more intelligent than Joehad ever noticed before.

  He was almost unhappy when it was certain that the Moonship would takeoff for space on the following day. He talked about it with Sally thenight before take-off.

  "Look," he said awkwardly. "As far as I'm concerned this has turned outa pretty sickly business. But when we have got a base on the Moon, it'llbe a good job done. There will be one thing that nobody can stop!Everybody's been living in terror of war. If we hold the Moon the coldwar will be ended. You can't kick on my wanting to help end that!"

  Sally smiled at him in the moonlight.

  "And--meanwhile," said Joe clumsily, "well--when I come back we can dosome serious talking about--well--careers and such things. Untilthen--no use. Right?"

  Sally's smile wavered. "Very sensible," she agreed wrily. "And awfullysilly, Joe. I know what kind of a career I want! What other fascinatingtopic do you know to talk about, Joe?"

  "I don't know of any. Oh, yes! Mike got a letter from his girl. I don'tknow what she said, but he's walking on air."

  "But it isn't funny!" said Sally indignantly. "Mike's a person! A fineperson! If he'll let me, I'll write to his girl myself and--try to makefriends with her so when you come back I--maybe I can be a sort ofmatch-maker."

  "That, I like!" Joe said warmly. "You're swell sometimes, Sally!"

  Sally looked at him enigmatically in the moonlight.

  "There are times when it seems to escape your attention," she observed.

  * * * * *

  The next morning she cried a little when he left her, to climb in thespace tug which was so small a part of today's activity. Joe and hiscrew were the only living men who had ever made a round trip to thePlatform and back. But now there was the Moonship to go farther thanthey'd been allowed. It was even clumsier in design than the Platform,though it was smaller. But it wasn't designed to stay in space. It wasto rest on the powdery floor of a ring-mountain's central plain.

  Let it get off into space, and somehow get to the Platform to reload.Then let it replace the rockets it would burn in this take-off and itcould go on out to emptiness. It would make history as the firstserious attempt by human beings to reach the Moon.

  Joe and his followers would go along simply to handle guided missiles ifit came to a fight, and to tow the Moonship to its wharf--thePlatform--and out into midstream again when it resumed its journey. Andthat was all.

  The Moonship lifted from the floor of the Shed to the sound of hundredsof pushpot engines.

  Then the space tug roared skyward. Her take-off rockets here substitutedfor the pushpots. Her second-stage rockets were also of the nonpoisonousvariety, because she fired them at a bare 60,000 feet. They weresubstitutes for the jatos the pushpots carried.

  She was out in space when the third-stage rockets roared dully outsideher hull.

  When the Moonship crossed the west coast of Africa, the space tug was400 miles below and 500 miles behind. When the Moonship crossed Arabia,the difference was 200 miles vertically and less than 100 in line.

  Then the Moonship released small objects, steadied by gyroscopes andflung away by puffs of compressed air. The small objects spread out.Haney and Mike and the Chief had reloaded the firing racks from insidethe ship, and now were intent upon control boards and radar. Theypressed buttons. One by one, little puffs of smoke appeared in space.They had armed the little space missiles, setting off tiny flares whichhad no function except to prove that each missile was ready for use.

  By the time the two space craft floated toward India, above an area fromwhich war rockets had been known to rise, there were more little weaponsfloating with them. One screen of missiles hurtled on before the spacetug, and another behind. Anything that came up from Earth wouldinstantly be attacked by dozens of midget ships bent upon suicide.

  Radar probed the space formation, but enemies of the fleet and thePlatform very wisely did no more than probe. The Moonship and itsattendants went across the Pacific, still rising. Above the longitude ofWashington, the space tug left its former post and climbed, nudging theMoonship this way and that. And from behind, the Platform came floatingsplendidly.

  Tiny figures in space suits extended the incredibly straight lines whichwere plastic hoses filled with air. Very, very gently indeed, the great,bulbous Platform and the squat, flat Moonship came together and touched.They moored in contact.

  And then the inert small missiles that had floated below, all the wayup, flared simultaneously. Their rockets emitted smoke. In finealignment, they plunged forward through emptiness, swerved with aremarkable precision, and headed out for emptiness beyond the Platform'sorbit. Their function had been to protect the Moonship on its way out.That function was performed. There were too many of them to recover, sothey went out toward the stars.

  When their rockets burned out they vanished. But a good hour later, whenit was considered that they were as far out as they were likely to go,they began to blow up. Specks of flame, like the tiniest of new stars,flickered against the background of space.

  But Joe and the others were in the Platform by then. They'd brought upmail for the crew. And they were back on duty.

  The Platform seemed strange with the Moonship's crew aboard. It had beena gigantic artificial world with very few inhabitants. With twenty-fivenaval ratings about, plus the four of its regular crew, plus the spacetug's complement, it seemed excessively crowded.

  And it was busy. There were twenty-five new men to be guided as theyapplied what they'd been taught aground about life in space. It wasthree full Earthdays before the stores intended for the journey to theMoon and the maintenance of a base there really began to move. The tugand the space wagons had to be moored outside and reached only by spacesuits through small personnel airlocks.

  And there was the matter of discipline. Lieutenant Commander Brown hadbeen put in command of the Platform for experience in space. He wasconsidered to be prepared for command of the Moonship by thatexperience. So now he turned over command of the Platform to Brent--hemade a neat ceremony of it--and took over the ship that would go out tothe Moon. He made another ceremony out of that.

  In command of the Moonship, his manner to Joe was absolutely correct. Hefollowed regulations to the letter--to a degree that left Joe blanklyuncomprehending. But he wouldn't have gotten along in the Navy if hehadn't. He'd tried to do the same thing in the Platform, and it wasn'tpractical. But he ignored all differences between Joe and himself. Hemade no overtures of friendship, but that was natural. Unintentionally,Joe had defied him. He now deliberately overlooked all that, and Joeapproved of him--within limits.

  But Mike and Haney and the Chief did not. They laid for him. And theyconsidered that they got him. When he took over the Moonship, LieutenantCommander Brown naturally maintained naval discipline and requiredsnappy, official naval salutes on all suitable occasions, even in thePlatform. And Joe's gang privately tipped off the noncommissionedpersonnel of the Moonship. Thereafter, no enlisted man ever salutedLieutenant Brown without first gently detaching his magnet-soled shoesfrom the floor. When a man was free, a really snappy salute gave adiverting result. The man
's body tilted forward to meet his rising arm,the upward impetus was one-sided, and every man who saluted Brownimmediately made a spectacular kowtow which left him rigidly at salutefloating somewhere overhead with his back to Lieutenant Brown. With alittle practice, it was possible to add a somersault to the otherfeatures. On one historic occasion, Brown walked clanking into astoreroom where a dozen men were preparing supplies for transfer to theMoonship. A voice cried, "Shun!" And instantly twelve men went floatingsplendidly about the storeroom, turning leisurely somersaults, allrigidly at salute, and all wearing regulation poker faces.

  An order abolishing salutes in weightlessness followed shortly after.

  It took four days to get the transfer of supplies properly started. Ittook eight to finish the job. Affixing fresh rockets to the outside ofthe Moonship's hull alone called for long hours in space suits. Duringthis time Mike floated nearby in a space wagon. One of the Navy men wasa trifle overcourageous. He affected to despise safety lines. Completingthe hook-on of a landing rocket, he straightened up too abruptly andwent floating off toward the Milky Way.

  Mike brought him back. After that there was less trouble.

  Even so, the Moonship and the Platform were linked together for thirteenfull days, during which the Platform seemed extraordinarily crowded. Onthe fourteenth day the two ships sealed off and separated. Joe and hiscrew in the space tug hauled the Moonship a good five miles from thePlatform.

  The space tug returned to the Platform. A blinker signal came across thefive-mile interval. It was a very crisp, formal, Navy-like message.

  Then the newly-affixed rockets on the Moonship's hull spurted theirfumes. The big ship began to move. Not outward from Earth, of course.That was where it was going. But it had the Platform's 12,000 miles perhour of orbital speed. If the bonds of gravitation could have beensnapped at just the proper instant, that speed alone would have carriedthe Moonship all the way to its destination. But they couldn't. So theMoonship blasted to increase its orbital speed. It would swing out andout, and as the Earth's pull grew weaker with distance the same weightof rockets would move the same mass farther and farther toward the Moon.The Moonship's course would be a sort of slowly flattening curve,receding from Earth and becoming almost a straight line where Earth'sand the Moon's gravitational fields cancelled each other.

  From there, the Moonship would have only to brake its fall against agravity one-sixth that of Earth, and reaching out a vastly shorterdistance.

  Joe and the others watched the roiling masses of rocket fumes as theship seemed to grow infinitely small.

  "We should've been in that ship," said Haney heavily when the naked eyecould no longer pick it out. "We could've beat her to the Moon!"

  Joe said nothing. He ached a little inside. But he reflected that themen who'd guided the Platform to its orbit had been overshadowed byhimself and Haney and the Chief and Mike. A later achievement alwaysmakes an earlier one look small. Now the four of them would beforgotten. History would remember the commander of the Moonship.

  Forgotten? Yes, perhaps. But the names of the four of them, Joe andHaney and the Chief and Mike, would still be remembered in a languageJoe couldn't speak, in a small village he couldn't name, on thoseoccasions when the Mohawk tribe met in formal council.

  The Chief grumbled. Mike stared out the port with bitter envy.

  "It was a dirty trick," growled the Chief. "We shoulda been part of thefirst gang ever to land on the Moon!"

  Joe grimaced. His crew needed to be cured of feeling the same way hedid.

  "I wouldn't say this outside of our gang," said Joe carefully, "but ifit hadn't been for us four that ship wouldn't be on the way at all.Haney figured the trick that got us back to Earth the first time, orelse we'd have been killed. If we had been killed, Mike wouldn't havefigured out the metal-concrete business. But for him, that Moonshipwouldn't even be a gleam in anybody's eye. And if the Chief hadn't blownup that manned rocket we fought in the space wagons, there wouldn't beany Platform up here to reload and refuel the Moonship. So they left usbehind! But just among the four of us I think we can figure that if ithadn't been for us they couldn't have made it!"

  Haney grinned slowly at Joe. The Chief regarded him with irony. Mikesaid, "Yeah. Haney, and me, and the Chief. We did it all."

  "Uh-huh," said the Chief sardonically. "Us three. Just us three. Joedidn't do anything. Just a bum, he is. We oughta tell Sally he's no goodand she oughta pick herself out a guy that'll amount to something someday." He hit Joe between the shoulders. "Sure! Just a bum, Joe! That'sall! But we got a weakness for you. We'll let you hang around with usjust the same! Come on, guys! Let's get something to eat!"

  The four of them marched down a steel-floored corridor, theirmagnetic-soled shoes clanking on the plates. Their progress wasuncertain and ungainly and altogether undignified. Suddenly the Chiefbegan to bawl a completely irrelevant song to the effect that theinhabitants of the kingdom of Siam were never known to wash theirdishes. Haney chimed in, and Mike. They were all very close together,and they were not at all impressive. But it hit Joe very hard, thissudden knowledge that the others didn't really care. It was the firsttime it had occurred to him that Haney and Mike and the Chief wouldrather be left behind with him, as a gang, than go on to individual highachievement in a first landing on the Moon.

  It felt good. It felt _real_ good.

  * * * * *

  But that, and all other sources of satisfaction, was wiped out by newsthat came back from the Moonship a bare six hours later.

  The Moonship was in trouble. The sequence and timing of its rocketblasts were worked out on Earth, and checked by visual and radarobservation. The computations were done by electronic brains theMoonship could not possibly have carried. And everything worked out. Theship was on course and its firings were on schedule.

  But then the unexpected happened. It was an error which no machine couldever have predicted, for which statistics and computations could neverhave compensated. It was a _human_ error. At the signal for the finalacceleration blast, the pilot of the Moonship had fired the wrong set ofrockets.

  Inexperience, stupidity, negligence, excitement--the reason didn'tmatter. After years of planning and working and dreaming, one humanfinger had made a mistake. And the mistake was fatal!

  When the mistake was realized, they'd had sense enough to cut loose thestill-firing rockets. But the damage had been done. The ship was stillplunging on. It would reach the Moon. But it wouldn't land inAristarchus crater as planned. It would crash. If every rocket remainingmounted on the hull were to be fired at the best possible instant, theMoonship would hit near Copernicus, and it would land with a terminalvelocity of 800 feet per second--540 miles an hour.

  It could even be calculated that when the Moonship landed, the explosionought to be visible from Earth with a fairly good telescope. It was dueto take place in thirty-two hours plus or minus a few minutes.