Мюррей Лейнстер - Space Tug

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

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

But Mike and Haney and the Chief did not. They laid for him. And they considered that they got him. When he took over the Moonship, Lieutenant Commander Brown naturally maintained naval discipline and required snappy, official naval salutes on all suitable occasions, even in the Platform. And Joe's gang privately tipped off the noncommissioned personnel of the Moonship. Thereafter, no enlisted man ever saluted Lieutenant Brown without first gently detaching his magnet–soled shoes from the floor. When a man was free, a really snappy salute gave a diverting result. The man's body tilted forward to meet his rising arm, the upward impetus was one–sided, and every man who saluted Brown immediately made a spectacular kowtow which left him rigidly at salute floating somewhere overhead with his back to Lieutenant Brown. With a little practice, it was possible to add a somersault to the other features. On one historic occasion, Brown walked clanking into a storeroom where a dozen men were preparing supplies for transfer to the Moonship. A voice cried, "Shun!" And instantly twelve men went floating splendidly about the storeroom, turning leisurely somersaults, all rigidly 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. It took eight to finish the job. Affixing fresh rockets to the outside of the Moonship's hull alone called for long hours in space suits. During this time Mike floated nearby in a space wagon. One of the Navy men was a trifle overcourageous. He affected to despise safety lines. Completing the hook–on of a landing rocket, he straightened up too abruptly and went 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 thirteen full days, during which the Platform seemed extraordinarily crowded. On the fourteenth day the two ships sealed off and separated. Joe and his crew in the space tug hauled the Moonship a good five miles from the Platform.

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

Then the newly–affixed rockets on the Moonship's hull spurted their fumes. 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 per hour of orbital speed. If the bonds of gravitation could have been snapped at just the proper instant, that speed alone would have carried the Moonship all the way to its destination. But they couldn't. So the Moonship blasted to increase its orbital speed. It would swing out and out, and as the Earth's pull grew weaker with distance the same weight of 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's and the Moon's gravitational fields cancelled each other.

From there, the Moonship would have only to brake its fall against a gravity one–sixth that of Earth, and reaching out a vastly shorter distance.

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

"We should've been in that ship," said Haney heavily when the naked eye could 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 the men who'd guided the Platform to its orbit had been overshadowed by himself and Haney and the Chief and Mike. A later achievement always makes an earlier one look small. Now the four of them would be forgotten. History would remember the commander of the Moonship.

Forgotten? Yes, perhaps. But the names of the four of them, Joe and Haney and the Chief and Mike, would still be remembered in a language Joe couldn't speak, in a small village he couldn't name, on those occasions 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 the first gang ever to land on the Moon!"

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

"I wouldn't say this outside of our gang," said Joe carefully, "but if it 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, or else we'd have been killed. If we had been killed, Mike wouldn't have figured out the metal–concrete business. But for him, that Moonship wouldn't even be a gleam in anybody's eye. And if the Chief hadn't blown up that manned rocket we fought in the space wagons, there wouldn't be any Platform up here to reload and refuel the Moonship. So they left us behind! But just among the four of us I think we can figure that if it hadn't been for us they couldn't have made it!"

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

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

The four of them marched down a steel–floored corridor, their magnetic–soled shoes clanking on the plates. Their progress was uncertain and ungainly and altogether undignified. Suddenly the Chief began to bawl a completely irrelevant song to the effect that the inhabitants of the kingdom of Siam were never known to wash their dishes. Haney chimed in, and Mike. They were all very close together, and they were not at all impressive. But it hit Joe very hard, this sudden knowledge that the others didn't really care. It was the first time it had occurred to him that Haney and Mike and the Chief would rather be left behind with him, as a gang, than go on to individual high achievement 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 news that came back from the Moonship a bare six hours later.

The Moonship was in trouble. The sequence and timing of its rocket blasts were worked out on Earth, and checked by visual and radar observation. The computations were done by electronic brains the Moonship could not possibly have carried. And everything worked out. The ship was on course and its firings were on schedule.

But then the unexpected happened. It was an error which no machine could ever have predicted, for which statistics and computations could never have compensated. It was a human error. At the signal for the final acceleration blast, the pilot of the Moonship had fired the wrong set of rockets.