Part 3

Nobody paid any attention to him. There was nobody left around. In a way it was a relief, because McCauley had experienced much too much attention once upon a time, and he wanted no more of it. He'd done a job in an Aerobee once, and now he was to try something in an X-21 that a lot of people would have liked to try in his place. He preferred not to be reminded of either thing. So quite uncomplainingly he trudged across the sun-baked flat ground toward the base buildings. All around there was astounding flatness. The low hills that rose at the far side of this dry lakebed were conspicuous here, whereas in more rolling country they'd never be noticed. There was a row of hangars. McCauley picked one out with his eyes and guessed that the new ship might be inside it.

He reached the building behind the flagpole and shifted his bag from one hand to the other. He went in, mopping his forehead as the door closed behind him and the sharp chill of air conditioning hit him.

He went to report in. The CO wasn't around. He was over in Laurelton, the town where most of the men went when they got a pass. The OD was off somewhere. But quarters had been assigned to Major McCauley. The noncom in charge of the CO's office obligingly got up to show him the way.

"Any orders for me?" asked McCauley. "I don't suppose I'm supposed to sit and twiddle my thumbs."

The noncom looked at a file and said there weren't any.

"It doesn't look too lively around here," said McCauley, "I'm supposed to have an interest in the X-21. Could I take a look at her?"

The noncom did a double take.

"Oh," he said politely. "You're that Major McCauley! I should have realized it, sir. The X-21, sir, is in the big hangar down that way. Number seven. If you tell the sentry who you are he'll pass you in, sir. Of course. Take-off's tomorrow noon, sir, and everything's ready. But I'd better show you your quarters first, sir."

McCauley blinked. He felt embarrassed, and he felt a distinct sense of shock. He was embarrassed because he'd had to mention the X-21 and who he was, as if he were pushing his weight around. The shock was the take-off for tomorrow. He'd known nothing about it.

He picked up his bag and waited to be shown his quarters. He followed the noncom down silent halls with specklessly polished floors. He entered the room assigned to him. It had tan plasterboard walls and an iron bunk, and Venetian blinds to shut out the desolate outer world. It was exactly like all other bachelor officers' quarters everywhere in the world. McCauley should have felt at home. He didn't.

"Just a minute," he said carefully, as the noncom was about to leave. "You said take-off's tomorrow?"

"Yes, sir," said the noncom. "I believe it was slated for later, sir, but something came up and I understand that Major Furness--he's the general's aide, sir, besides being your observer--Major Furness assured the general that an earlier take-off would be quite all right, so the ship was checked out yesterday for fueling. The general likes things done ahead of time, sir. He says that if you do today all the things you could put off until tomorrow, you can take tomorrow off."

"Major Furness," repeated McCauley, "okayed the earlier take-off time."

"Yes, sir," said the noncom.

When the noncom closed the door behind him, McCauley burned. There can be trivial things about the feel of a ship that nobody can realize but the pilot. Certainly he should decide when an experimental ship is right to take up. He'd been denied this right. Take-off was tomorrow.

But on the other hand, he was vulnerable. He'd had a lot of publicity from that Aerobee ride he'd taken. There were a bunch of people waiting for him to put on a grand air. If he protested anything, they'd say he was putting on an act out of self-importance. So that, short of something glaringly wrong, he had to go along with a decision he hadn't made or subscribed to. He was always in danger of seeming to have a swelled head and an inflated ego and other undesirable symptoms. He needed to avoid them carefully. Right now he smoked a cigarette to kill time lest he seem overanxious to look at the X-21.

He didn't expect to be surprised by the ship. Most of the time she was building he'd been sweating out the details of the job of flying her. In Dayton there'd been a mock-up with instruments and controls in a cabin which exactly matched the ship that was not yet completed. An elaborate simulator-trainer controlled the controls and dials. When he got into the mock-up and worked it, the instrument readings, sounds, vibrations, and sensations were exactly what painstaking calculation foretold for the actual ship. It was an adaptation of the training devices that equip submarine crews to function like well-oiled machines the instant they're transferred from training to active service. It was much, much better than the dual-control planes they used to use for teaching fledgling pilots. The mock-up supplied not only the instrument readings of actual flight, but the feel of it. And not only that, it convincingly presented hair-raising emergencies. A man could experience all the griefs of a lifetime of flying in a few hours in such a mock-up. McCauley'd had them.

In the nature of things, the X-21 couldn't be given a test flight. It couldn't be tucked under a bomber's wing and lifted aloft to see how it behaved. Nothing could be done with it but take off and try to ride it where no other pilot-controlled ship had ever been, and then try to get it back down again.... If possible! If everything went well, it would be a very good job to have done. If anything went wrong, it would be too bad. Period.

McCauley smoked a second cigarette to kill time. Then he went out of his room and found his way outdoors. Squinting in the glaring sunshine, he located Hangar Seven.

Ten minutes later he was inside, taking a look at his ship. He'd hardly seen a soul along the line of hangars. Inside one he'd heard a tapping where some flight mechanic was working at something or other. From another he'd heard voices--tranquil lazy tones indicating that whoever was within had no very urgent work on hand. It appeared that practically all the base had been given a pass on the day before the shoot. Which bespoke a way of running things that meant either absolutely top management or something he'd rather not imagine.

He looked at the ship, the X-21. It was huge. It was sleek. It was impressive. It looked slightly insane, because it was built to accomplish something that most people weren't even thinking about yet. Naturally it looked improbable, like the generality of things designed to achieve the preposterous.

For one thing, the pilot's cabin was in the nose, and it hung down so the pilot could look directly behind him underneath the belly of the ship. That meant an imbalance in the wind resistance when the ship was in flight. But the balance was restored by wings above the fuselage top. Then there were enormous ramjets built into the wings well away from the body; they threw the balance off again until it was restored a second time by the wind resistance of the wheels, which did not retract. And near the tail with its triple fins there were brackets for Mark Twenty jatos, and behind them a very familiar conical bore, the exhaust nozzle of the rocket engine.

McCauley recognized everything from his preparations for flying just this ship. She would take off on jato thrust which would get her off the ground and traveling fast enough for the ramjets in the wings to catch. The ramjets would take her up to the very edge of the atmosphere. When there wasn't enough air left for even ramjets to work with, the rocket should take over. In theory the ship might be called a three-stage design, but in fact it didn't fit into any category. It did, though, have one standard property of a hydrazine-nitric rocket. If it made other than a feather-light landing with any rocket fuel remaining, it would almost certainly blow itself to blazes.

But the point was that if--_if_--everything went all right, McCauley ought to get up into space with a full load of rocket fuel and a few hundred miles an hour eastward velocity. On the way up he'd try to hit the jetstream at thirty thousand feet or so and pick up some speed from that. And when he started his rocket engine he was supposed to put the ship in orbit.

That was the trick. That was what had never been done before. Men had orbited in missiles and gotten down again. There was a man on the moon--or so it was believed--though he was dead before he arrived there. There were satellites circling Earth in all directions, some of them as much as ten years aloft. But nobody had ever yet sent a ship up under its pilot's control, its pilot achieving an orbit and then bringing the ship down to the surface of the earth again. When that was accomplished, it could be said that a spaceship existed. Until then, there were only missiles.

McCauley worked his way thoughtfully around the monster, whistling soundlessly as he looked it over, checking everything he saw with what he knew, and thereby getting more information than was seemingly possible. Presently he went in the cabin and worked the controls. They felt just like the mock-up.

He was back in his quarters, thinking somberly, when there was a knock on the door. When he answered, the door was pushed open and the remarkably personable Major Furness appeared.

"Hi," he said. "They tell me you got here."

"Yes," agreed McCauley. "I did."

"They tell me you looked over the ship," said Furness exuberantly. "Good, eh?"

"It looks good," agreed McCauley.

"Were you surprised when you heard take-off's tomorrow?"

McCauley nodded reservedly.

"That's my doing," said Furness proudly. "I told the general we'd be ready. He was cussing a blue streak. An intelligence report had come through, saying that--um--there's to be an attempt abroad to lift a rocket up and set it down again on its own tail. Lift and land. No rocket's ever landed unsmashed, you know."

"I know," said McCauley.

Furness grinned. Engagingly.

"So it won't look good if us Americans get our eye wiped by somebody else doing something with a rocket that we can't do. The general made the air blue. So I said, 'General, McCauley's been training for our job for months, off there in Dayton. He's all set to do his stuff. The ship's practically ready to go. We could get it ready to take off the day after McCauley gets here. Why not do it?' And the General said, 'Furness, if we could....' And I said, 'General, we can!' So he began to give orders right and left. And that's it. Tomorrow noon. Twelve hundred. Get it over with, eh?"

McCauley opened his mouth. He closed it. Anger swept over him and he opened it a second time.

Then he shut up. For him to protest anything short of plain suicide would be considered pomposity and self-importance. But he should have had a chance to look over the ship before take-off. He'd had a glance at it, hardly more. Yet he couldn't afford to stand on his dignity or his rights because too many people envied him.

Furness looked at him and flushed a little. The cordiality that should exist between two men who are going to risk their necks together was totally missing. Furness felt it. His expression grew almost defiant.

"Look here!" he said. "That was all right, wasn't it?"

"I don't know," said McCauley. "Anyhow it's done."

Furness stared at him.

"What else was there to do?"

"I wouldn't know," said McCauley. "The ship can't be test-flown, of course--not in any ordinary sense of the word. You can't test-fly a hydrazine rocket, and among other things that's what this ship is. You just have to take it up. But--hm--how were the tests on the rocket motor?"

"They gave four per cent over the maximum expected thrust," said Furness, exuberant again. "Nothing wrong there!"

"They were cut in and out frequently?" asked McCauley.

That was one of the tricky items. A rocket motor is cut off, in a ballistic rocket, and cut in again after a pause in its firing. It isn't a sensible thing to do ordinarily, but it would be necessary in flying the X-21. It was a point about which McCauley had certain reservations. A rocket motor is very nearly a device for producing a continuous explosion, the recoil from the explosion constituting the thrust. Rocket motor design is pretty well worked out, but there are occasional failures, as in any high-precision apparatus. And the motor of the X-21 would need to cut in and out, often. It would burn fuel at the rate of more than two thousand gallons per minute. It would have to start instantly, with full pressure and full flow of two dissimilar liquids, and they would have to meet at exactly the proper spot in the rocket motor cavity and burn completely on contact. When the rocket was cut off, the fuel would have to stop flowing instantly, without the fraction of a fraction of one per cent of either liquid left unburned, or there would be trouble when the motor started again. The bare fact that the X-21's motor would have to fire and stop and fire again meant that absolute perfection was needed in all sorts of auxiliary equipment. The pumps. The fuel flow lines. There was the possibility of hydraulic hammer. There could be turbulence in the tanks because of intermittent flow. Decidedly the motor should be tested intensively for flaws in cut-in and cut-out operation, and it should be tested in the ship and not merely in a static-thrust frame.

Furness frowned.

"I don't know what the tests were," he said with a trace of impatience. "They tested everything. They say everything's all right. I'm no reaction motor technician! I'm a pilot! They give me a ship and I fly it! I leave the other stuff to the slide-rule boys!"

"Who are plenty good," agreed McCauley, "and since the take-off's scheduled, that's that. We take off at 1200 hours tomorrow."

He had complete confidence in the adequacy of his training in the mock-up back in Dayton, but it did assume that the ship would function according to its design. He'd have preferred to verify the point he'd raised. The record of rocket shoot failures includes at least one rocket that didn't leave the launching pad because a certain valve closed three one-thousandths of a second late. It took two months to repair the damage so the rocket could be tried again. Then it worked perfectly.

Everything might have been--should have been--almost certainly had been--foreseen. But the chance of trouble was certainly greatest in the cut-in and cut-out feature that was necessary if the X-21 was to make its flight successfully.

"I'm sorry," Furness said elaborately, "that I was more concerned about meeting a situation that bothered the brass than guessing at questions you might raise. I told the general we'd be ready to take off. I'll tell him I was mistaken, that you're not ready."

McCauley grew impatient.

"Confound it, man!" he protested. "There are patrol ships taking position! The monitor stations will be alerted! There've been too many shoots called off or postponed! This one can't be postponed! I asked a question. You can't answer it. The answer would almost certainly be that there were plenty of cut-out trials. I withdraw the question. It's canceled! But it wasn't unreasonable to ask!"

Furness bit his lip.

"Just the same," Furness said sourly, "you're not satisfied that I said we'd be ready to go without asking you first. Look here! Would you rather have somebody else fly observer with you?"

"I didn't suggest such a thing," said McCauley angrily, "and it's ridiculous to think of it. No! Forget the whole business!"

"It looks to me as if you resent my action," Furness said stiffly. "I shouldn't have spoken for you without written authority. I'll try to remember, hereafter, that you're the pilot and I'm only the observer."

McCauley controlled his temper with difficulty.

"This is lunacy!" he said shortly. "The thing's settled. We take off at noon tomorrow. I'm told the ship will fly. I'm ordered to fly it. You're ordered to fly with me. That's that, so far as I'm concerned!"

Furness said as stiffly as before:

"That's quite all right with me too. I should tell you, though, that my wife wanted me to invite you for dinner tonight. The general was to be there too, for a private talk over the prospects and so on. And I've got a son who's been fairly jumping with excitement over the prospect of meeting Major McCauley, the first man ever to take off in a pure rocket and get down to ground again. But you'll hardly accept that invitation, feeling as you do. I'll say you declined because you want to get some extra sleep tonight since you intend to watch the fuel-up tomorrow."

McCauley blinked at him in amazement. Furness went out.

When he'd gone, McCauley swore to himself. This was more of the attitude he disliked, expecting him to feel self-important. It was one of the penalties of having done something that got publicity. But there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

Certainly it had been reasonable to mention the one thing that bothered him! The X-21 would take off on jatos, ride to the limit of the atmosphere on ramjets, and have the rocket motor take over there. To get the exact course and speed he needed, he'd undoubtedly have to use the rocket engine in a series of bursts after the original acceleration run. He'd have to turn it off between times. And while an alcohol-lox rocket motor had been turned off and on in flight, no hydrazine-nitric rocket ever had been. Nobody had ever needed to. McCauley would. And the idea was hair-raising.

Rocket fuel is tricky stuff at best. In the earlier X-series ships, alcohol and lox--liquid oxygen--and in one or two cases ammonia and lox, were used in the engines. They could be jettisoned in case a dead-stick landing was necessary. But nobody in his senses would think of jettisoning nitric and hydrazine as an emergency measure. That was the pair, though, that was being used in the X-21. Their great advantage is that they do not need to be ignited. Their great disadvantage is that they become active when they are combined. McCauley had inspected the fuel delivery system and he was concerned about it. In the static runs of the ship's rocket engine everything had gone well. If all went well in space, everything would be fine. But if something didn't....

McCauley couldn't tell what would happen. His training in the mock-up hadn't included meeting that emergency, because there wasn't any way to meet it.

"If it happens," he muttered, "I'll know it because I'll hear St. Peter say, 'Hello, Ed! Come in!'"

He stirred restlessly. The light on the closed Venetian blinds was ruddy now. He found that he didn't feel hungry, but he ought to. He asked the way to the officer's mess and found that it was nearly empty. Most of the base was on leave until nine o'clock, which might be the base commandant's way of boasting that sending off the first actual spaceship on her test flight was duck soup for a well-run organization.

McCauley sat alone. There were a few other officers at dinner. Some of them nodded to him. None came over. He'd gotten a little too much publicity from that Aerobee job. Nobody would come near him lest he seem to want to shine in the reflected glory of a man who was already famous and was scheduled to become more so in the next twenty-four hours--unless he turned out to be fragments of nothing in particular out in space. He was left alone.

There was nothing to do but go back to his quarters. On the way he stopped at the newsstand and bought stuff to read.

He was very, very lonely. He was acutely conscious that he hadn't acted in the best possible way about Furness' action in speaking for him about the take-off. It was true that he should have been consulted. It was true that he hadn't intended to stand on his dignity. It was even true that he'd asked for reassurance rather than information, because the tests should have been complete. But Furness took it wrongly, and there was no way to mend the matter.

He couldn't read the stuff he'd brought. He smoked and brooded until he noticed the pile of cigarette butts he'd built up. He looked at his watch and dourly went to bed. He couldn't sleep. At long last he managed to doze off by reciting the names, capitals, and principal products of all the fifty states. He made himself so boring he went to sleep.

But when he slept he dreamed, and in the dream the ship was out of its hangar and being fueled. And McCauley dreamed that the fueling was being done all wrong. Horribly wrong. There were two tank trucks beside the ship. One was the hydrazine truck and the other the nitric. And they were pumping the two liquids into the ship at the same time. In his dream, McCauley's hair stood up straight on end. He tried to protest, but words wouldn't come. The hoses were being handled exactly as hoses at a filling station were in fueling a car. A man held each hose negligently, and from time to time squinted down past the nozzle to see how nearly full his tank was. McCauley knew that it was impossible and unthinkable, but in his dream it was both possible and plausible.

He saw bubbling, fuming nitric acid spout out of the filling tube and go splashing down on the ground. The nitric acid man looked at it stupidly as more splashed down after it. And then McCauley managed to cry out--and the dream disaster happened. The hydrazine overflowed too. It poured down....

And in his dream McCauley saw a sheet of purest fire leap up. Both trucks detonated in white-hot flame, and the ship crumpled and blew into atoms....

He found himself sitting up in his bunk, gasping, with the memory of the bubbling sounds he'd made which had waked him.

It was a good dream to wake up from. He sat up and heard small noises outside in what should have been the wholly silent night. He went to the window and tilted a slat of the Venetian blind.

The ship was out of the hangar. Men swarmed about it. Trucks towed it. It was being hauled well away from the buildings on the base. The preparations for take-off had begun. It would be a long time before fueling started, though. The ship would be towed for a couple of miles over the crunching pebbly ground, just in case something went wrong at the take-off. Then there'd have to be a checkover of everything from the tires to the wingtips to the instruments to the communication systems and the igniters for the ramjets, and so on indefinitely. Hours would be consumed in the simple final inspection. The ramjet fuel would go in. The jatos would be mounted and their circuits tested--the jatos would drop off after they'd done their stuff--Then on and on, endlessly. It would be long after sunrise before anybody began to think of the rocket fuel trucks.

He looked at his watch again. He knew he couldn't go back to sleep, but he wouldn't get dressed. He stood by the tilted slat of the Venetian blind, watching the disturbance in the moonlight go farther and farther away until it was lost in the vagueness of the partly lit plain.

He sat down, but didn't turn on the light in his room. He allowed himself one cigarette. He tried to relax, but his mind was tense. He managed a rueful grimace over his dream. That wasn't a good sign. He hadn't been worried before the Aerobee shoot, or so it seemed to him now. But in that shoot he'd had nothing to do but take a ride. Everything connected with the functioning of the rocket was somebody else's worry. Now everything was up to him.

He wondered uncomfortably how Furness felt. Probably like the devil....

With such discomfortable reflections, McCauley did not feel bright and chipper when there came footsteps outside his door and then a knock. He waited for the knock to be repeated, and then said, as if drowsily:

"What's the matter?"

"Time to get up, sir," said a noncom's voice, "if you want to watch the fuel-up of your ship, sir."