So Trans-Lunar uses rockets braced for catapulting, and winged for landing on return to Earth to make the terrific lift from Earth to our satellite station Supra-New York. The long middle lap, from there to where Space Terminal circles the Moon, calls for comfort – but no landing gear. The Flying Dutchman and the Philip Nolan never land; they were even assembled in space, and they resemble winged rockets like the Skysprite and the Firefly as little as a Pullman train resembles a parachute.
The Moonbat and the Gremlin are good only for the jump from Space Terminal down to Luna ... no wings, cocoonlike acceleration-and-crash hammocks, fractional controls on their enormous jets.
The change-over points would not have to be more than air-conditioned tanks. Of course Space Terminal is quite a city, what with the Mars and Venus traffic, but even today Supra-New York is still rather primitive, hardly more than a fueling point and a restaurant-waiting room. It has only been the past five years that it has even been equipped to offer the comfort of one-gravity centrifuge service to passengers with queasy stomachs.
Pemberton weighed in at the spaceport office, then hurried over to where the Skysprite stood cradled in the catapult. He shucked off his coverall, shivered as he handed it to the gateman, and ducked inside. He went to his acceleration hammock and went to sleep; the lift to Supra-New York was not his worry – his job was deep space.
He woke at the surge of the catapult and the nerve-tingling rush up the face of Pikes Peak. When the Skysprite went into free flight, flung straight up above the Peak, Pemberton held his breath; if the rocket jets failed to fire, the ground-to-space pilot must try to wrestle her into a glide and bring her down, on her wings.
The rockets roared on time; Jake went back to sleep.
When the Skysprite locked in with Supra-New York, Pemberton went to the station's stellar navigation room. He was pleased to find Shorty Weinstein, the computer, on duty. Jake trusted Shorty's computations – a good thing when your ship, your passengers, and your own skin depend thereon. Pemberton had to be a better than average mathematician himself in order to be a pilot; his own limited talent made him appreciate the genius of those who computed the orbits.
«Hot Pilot Pemberton, the Scourge of the Spaceways – Hi!» Weinstein handed him a sheet of paper.
Jake looked at it, then looked amazed. «Hey, Shorty – you've made a mistake.»
«Huh? Impossible. Mabel can't make mistakes.» Weinstein gestured at the giant astrogation computer filling the far wall.
»You made a mistake. You gave me an easy fix – 'Vega, Antares, Regulus.' You make things easy for the pilot and your guild'll chuck you out.» Weinstein looked sheepish but pleased. «I see I don't blast off for seventeen hours. I could have taken the morning freight.» Jake's thoughts went back to Phyllis.
«UN canceled the morning trip.»
«Oh – « Jake shut up, for he knew Weinstein knew as little as he did. Perhaps the flight would have passed too close to an A-bomb rocket, circling the globe like a policeman. The General Staff of the Security Council did not give out information about the top secrets guarding the peace of the planet.
Pemberton shrugged. «Well, if I'm asleep, call me three hours minus.»
«Right. Your tape will be ready.»
While he slept, the Flying Dutchman nosed gently into her slip, sealed her airlocks to the Station, discharged passengers and freight from Luna City. When he woke, her holds were filling, her fuel replenished, and passengers boarding. He stopped by the post office radio desk, looking for a letter from Phyllis. Finding none, he told himself that she would have sent it to Terminal. He went on into the restaurant, bought the facsimile Herald-Tribune, and settled down grimly to enjoy the comics and his breakfast.
A man sat down opposite him and proceeded to plague him with silly questions about rocketry, topping it by misinterpreting the insignia embroidered on Pemberton's singlet and miscalling him «Captain.» Jake hurried through breakfast to escape him, then picked up the tape from his automatic pilot, and went aboard the Flying Dutchman.
After reporting to the Captain he went to the control room, floating and pulling himself along by the handgrips. He buckled himself into the pilot's chair and started his check off.
Captain Kelly drifted in and took the other chair as Pemberton was finishing his checking runs on the ballistic tracker. «Have a Camel, Jake.»
«I'll take a rain check.» He continued; Kelly watched him with a slight frown. Like captains and pilots on Mark Twain's Mississippi – and for the same reasons – a spaceship captain bosses his ship, his crew, his cargo, and his passengers, but the pilot is the final, legal, and unquestioned boss of how the ship is handled from blast-off to the end of the trip. A captain may turn down a given pilot – nothing more. Kelly fingered a slip of paper tucked in his pouch and turned over in his mind the words with which the Company psychiatrist on duty had handed it to him.
«I'm giving this pilot clearance, Captain, but you need not accept it.»
«Pemberton's a good man. What's wrong?»
The psychiatrist thought over what he had observed while posing as a silly tourist bothering a stranger at breakfast. «He's a little more anti-social than his past record shows. Something on his mind. Whatever it is, he can tolerate it for the present. We'll keep an eye on him.»
Kelly had answered, «Will you come along with him as pilot?»
«If you wish.»
«Don't bother – I'll take him. No need to lift a deadhead.»
Pemberton fed Weinstein's tape into the robot-pilot, then turned to Kelly. «Control ready, sir.»
«Blast when ready, Pilot.» Kelly felt relieved when he heard himself make the irrevocable decision.
Pemberton signaled the Station to cast loose. The great ship was nudged out by an expanding pneumatic ram until she swam in space a thousand feet away, secured by a single line. He then turned the ship to its blast-off direction by causing a flywheel, mounted on gymbals at the ship's center of gravity, to spin rapidly. The ship spun slowly in the opposite direction, by grace of Newton's Third Law of Motion.
Guided by the tape, the robot-pilot tilted prisms of the pilot's periscope so that Vega, Antares, and Regulus would shine as one image when the ship was headed right; Pemberton nursed the ship to that heading ... fussily; a mistake of one minute of arc here meant two hundred miles at destination.
When the three images made a pinpoint, he stopped the flywheels and locked in the gyros. He then checked the heading of his ship by direct observation of each of the stars, just as a salt-water skipper uses a sextant, but with incomparably more accurate instruments. This told him nothing about the correctness of the course Weinstein had ordered – he had to take that as Gospel – but it assured him that the robot and its tape were behaving as planned. Satisfied, he cast off the last line.
Seven minutes to go – Pemberton flipped the switch permitting the robot-pilot to blast away when its clock told it to. He waited, hands poised over the manual controls, ready to take over if the robot failed, and felt the old, inescapable sick excitement building up inside him.
Even as adrenalin poured into him, stretching his time sense, throbbing in his ears, his mind kept turning back to Phyllis.
He admitted she had a kick coming – spacemen shouldn't marry. Not that she'd starve if he messed up a landing, but a gal doesn't want insurance; she wants a husband – minus six minutes.
If he got a regular run she could live in Space Terminal.
No good – idle women at Space Terminal went bad. Oh, Phyllis wouldn't become a tramp or a rum bum; she'd just go bats.