"Murray Leinster - Space Tug" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

"You can start the pushpot motors, Haney," he said curtly.
He moved to his own, the pilot's seat. Haney pushed a button. Through the fabric of the ship came the
muted uproar of a pushpot engine starting. Haney pressed another button. Another. Another. More engines
bellowed. The tumult in the Shed would be past endurance, now.
Joe strapped himself in his seat. He made sure that the chief at the steering rocket controls was fastened
properly, and Mike at the radio panel was firmly belted past the chance of injury.
Haney said with a tremendous calm: "All pushpot motors running, Joe."
"Steering rockets ready," the chief reported.
"Radio operating," came from Mike. "Communications all set."
Joe reached to the maneuver controls. He should have been sweating. His hands, perhaps, should have
quivered with tension. But he was too much worried about too many things. Nobody can strike an attitude
or go into a blue funk while they are worrying about things to be done. Joe heard the small gyro motors as
their speed went up. A hum and a whine and then a shrill whistle which went up in pitch until it wasn't
anything at all. He frowned and said to Haney, "I'm taking over the pushpots."
Haney nodded. Joe took the overall control. The roar of engines outside grew loud on the right-hand side
and then died down. It grew thunderous to the left, and dwindled.
Joe nodded and wetted his lips. "Here we go!"
There was no more ceremony than that. The noise of the jet engines rose to a thunderous volume. Then it
grew louder, and louder still. Joe stirred the controls by ever so tiny a movement.
Suddenly the ship did not feel solidly placed. It shifted position. Joe held his breath and cracked the
overall control of the pushpots' speed a tiny trace further. The ship wobbled a little. Out the ports, the great
Shed door seemed to descend. In reality, the clustered pushpots and the launching cage rose some thirty
feet from the Shed floor and hovered there uncertainly. Joe shifted the lever that governed the vanes in the
jet motor flames. Ship and cage and pushpots, all together, wavered toward the doorway. They passed out
of it, rocking a little and pitching a little and wallowing a little more. As a flying device, the combination
was a howling tumult and a disgrace. It was an aviation designer's nightmare. It was a bad dream.
But it wasn't intended as a way to fly from one place to another on Earth. It was the first booster stage of a
three-stage rocket system, aimed at outer space. It looked like—Well, if a swarm of bees clung fiercely to
a wire gauze cage in which lay a silver minnow wrapped in match-sticks; and if the bees buzzed furiously
and lifted it in a straining, clumsy, and altogether unreasonable manner, and if the appearance and the
noise together were multiplied a good many thousand times, it would present some likeness to this takeoff.
Nothing like this could be graceful or neatly controllable or even very fast in the thick air near the ground.
Higher, it would be another matter.
It was another matter. Once clear of the Shed, Joe threw on full power to the pushpot power plants. The
clumsy aggregation of grotesque objects began to climb. Ungainly it was, and clumsy it was, but the
assembly of strange objects went upward at a rate a jet fighter plane might envy. It wobbled, and it
swayed, and it tipped crazily. But it climbed!
The ground dropped so swiftly that even the Shed seemed to shrivel like a pricked balloon. The horizon
retreated as if a carpet were being hastily and magically unrolled. The barometer needles moved.
"Communications says," reported Mike, "our rate of climb is four thousand feet a minute and still going
up ... We're at seventeen thousand feet... Eighteen ... Everything's go. Our height is now twenty-one
thousand feet..."
There was no change in the feel of things inside the ship. Sealed as they were against the vacuum of space,
barometric changes took place only in the instruments.
At twenty-five thousand feet the chief said suddenly, "We're pointed right, Joe. Freeze it?"
"Right," said Joe. "Freeze it."
The chief threw a lever. The gyros were running at full operating speed. By engaging them the chief had
all their stored up kinetic energy to resist any change of direction the pushpots might create by minor
variations in their thrusts. Haney brooded over the individual engines outside. He made minute
adjustments to keep them balanced. Mike uttered curt comments into the communicator from time to time.