• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

A ferry service of chemically-fuelled rockets linked the station to the planet beneath, for by law no atomic drive unit was allowed to operate within a thousand kilometres of the Earth’s surface. Even this safety margin was felt by many to be inadequate, for the radioactive blast of a nuclear propulsion unit could cover that distance in less than a minute.

(ed note: this implies an exhaust velocity of about 16,000 meters per second. This could be done by a liquid or gas core nuclear thermal rocket with molecular hydrogen propellant, or a solid-core nuclear thermal rocket using atomic hydrogen as propellant.)

---

And the third, of course, was the Ares, almost dazzling in the splendour of her new aluminium paint.

Gibson had never become reconciled to the loss of the sleek, steamlined spaceships which had been the dream of the early twentieth century. The glittering dumb-bell hanging against the stars was not his idea of a space-liner; though the world had accepted it, he had not. Of course, he knew the familiar arguments——there was no need for streamlining in a ship that never entered an atmosphere, and therefore the design was dictated purely by structural and power-plant considerations. Since the violently radioactive drive-unit had to be as far away from the crew quarters as possible, the double-sphere and long connecting tube was the simplest solution.

It was also, Gibson thought, the ugliest; but that hardly mattered since the Ares would spend practically all her life in deep space where the only spectators were the stars. Presumably she was already fuelled and merely waiting for the precisely calculated moment when her motors would burst into life, and she would pull away out of the orbit in which she was circling and had hitherto spent all her existence, to swing into the long hyperbola that led to Mars.

(ed note: the Ares can travel from Terra to Mars in three months flat.)

---

“Five seconds, four, three, two, one”

Very gently, something took hold of Gibson and slid him down the curving side of the porthole-studded wall on to what had suddenly become the floor. It was hard to realise that up and down had returned once more, harder still to connect their reappearance with that distant, attenuated thunder that had broken in upon the silence of the ship. Far away in the second sphere that was the other half of the Ares, in that mysterious, forbidden world of dying atoms and automatic machines which no man could ever enter and live, the forces that powered the stars themselves were being unleashed. Yet there was none of that sense of mounting, pitiless acceleration that always accompanies the take-off of a chemically propelled rocket.

The Ares had unlimited space in which to manoeuvre; she could take as long as she pleased to break free from her present orbit and crawl slowly out into the transfer hyperbola that would lead her to Mars. In any case, the utmost power of the atomic drive could move her two-thousand-ton mass with an acceleration of only a tenth of a gravity; at the moment it was throttled back to less than half of this small value.

(ed note: implies thrust of 1.962×10⁶ Newtons, about 2 megaNewtons)

---

When Space Station One had vanished completely, Gibson went round to the day side of the ship to take some photographs of the receding Earth. It was a huge, thin crescent when he first saw it, far too large for the eye to take in at a single glance. As he watched, he could see that it was slowly waxing, for the Ares must make at least one more circuit before she could break away and spiral out towards Mars.

---

Gibson was still watching at the observation post when, more than an hour later, the Ares finally reached escape velocity and was free from Earth. There was no way of telling that this moment had come and passed, for Earth still dominated the sky and the motors still maintained their muffled, distant thunder. Another ten hours of continuous operation would be needed before they had completed their task and could be closed down for the rest of the voyage.

(ed note: one-half of a tenth of a gravity of acceleration is 0.4905 m/s²
One hour is 3,600 seconds.
0.4905×3,600 = 1,765 m/s, which is about Low Earth Orbit escape velocity of 1,800 m/s.
1+10 hours = 39,600 seconds.
0.4905×39,600 = 19,423 m/s, which is very short of solar escape velocity of 525,000 m/s
but which is impressively larger than the Terra-Mars Hohmann delta V of 5,590 m/s.
Terra-Mars Hohmann takes about 8 months, 26,000 m/s will get you to Mars in 1 month, so I guess 19,423 m/s getting you to Mars in three months sounds reasonable.
Delta V of 19,423 m/s and exhaust velocity of 16,000 m/s implies a mass ratio of 3.4, which is large but not unreasonable.
Keeping in mind that more delta V will be required for Mars capture.)

---

It was impossible to believe that the Ares was now racing out from the Earth’s orbit at a speed so great that even the Sun could never hold her back.

---

As the ship was spherical, it had been divided into zones of latitude like the Earth. The resulting nomenclature was very useful, since it at once gave a mental picture of the liner’s geography. To go “North” meant that one was heading for the control cabin and the crew’s quarters. A trip to the Equator suggested that one was visiting either the great dining-hall occupying most of the central plane of the ship, or the observation gallery which completely encircled the liner. The Southern hemisphere was almost entirely fuel tank, with a few storage holds and miscellaneous machinery. Now that the Ares was no longer using her motors, she had been swung round in space so that the Northern Hemisphere was in perpetual sunlight and the “uninhabited” Southern one in darkness. At the South Pole itself was a small metal door bearing a set of impressive official seals and the notice: “To be Opened only under the Express Orders of the Captain or his Deputy.” Behind it lay the long, narrow tube connecting the main body of the ship with the smaller sphere, a hundred metres away, which held the power plant and drive units. Gibson wondered what was the point of having a door at all if no one could ever go through it; then he remembered that there must be some provision to enable the servicing robots of the Atomic Energy Commission to reach their work.

Strangely enough, Gibson received one of his strongest impressions not from the scientific and technical wonders of the ship, which he had expected to see in any case, but from the empty passenger quarters — a honeycomb of closely packed cells that occupied most of the North Temperate Zone.

• 

The hold was a large hemispherical room with a thick central column which carried the controls and cabling to the other half of the dumb-bell-shaped spaceship a hundred metres away. It was packed with crates and boxes arranged in a surrealistic three-dimensional array that made very few concessions to gravity.

---

Anything more unlike the early-twentieth-century idea of a spaceship than the Star Queen would be hard to imagine. She consisted of two spheres, one fifty and the other twenty metres in diameter, joined by a cylinder about a hundred metres long. The whole structure looked like a matchstick-and-plasticine model of a hydrogen atom. Crew, cargo and controls were in the larger sphere, while the smaller one held the atomic motors and was — to put it mildly — out of bounds to living matter.

The Star Queen had been built in space and could never have lifted herself even from the surface of the Moon. Under full power her ion drive could produce an acceleration of a twentieth of a gravity, which in an hour would give her all the velocity she needed to change from a satellite of the Earth to one of Venus.

Hauling cargo up from the planets was the job of the powerful little chemical rockets. In a month the tugs would be climbing up from Venus to meet her

• 

Space travel had never been inexpensive, but early in the century an economic watershed had been crossed, like a saddle in low hills that nevertheless marks a continental divide. Nuclear technology moved into its most appropriate sphere, outer space; the principles were sufficiently simple and the techniques sufficiently easy to master that private companies could afford to enter the interplanetary shipping market. With the shippers came the yards, the drydocks, the outfitters.

The Falaron shipyards, one of the originals, orbited Earth two hundred and fifty miles up. Presently the only vessel in the yards was an old atomic freighter, getting an overhaul and a face lift—a new reactor core, new main engine nozzles, refurbished life-support systems, new paint inside and out. When all the work was done the ship was to be recommissioned and given a new, rather grand, name: Star Queen.

The huge atomic engines had been mounted and tested. Spacesuited workers wielding plasma torches were fitting new holds, big cylinders that fastened to the thin central shaft of the ship below the spherical crew module.

---

• 

• 

Star Queen, though of a standard freighter design, was a spacecraft quite unlike anything that had been imagined at the dawn of modern rocketry—which is to say it looked nothing like an artillery shell with fins or the hood ornament of a gasoline-burning automobile. The basic configuration was two clusters of spheres and cylinders separated from each other by a cylindrical strut a hundred meters long. The whole thing somewhat resembled a Tinkertoy model of a simple molecule. The forward cluster included the crew module, a sphere over five meters in diameter. A hemispherical cage of superconducting wires looped over the crew module, partially shielding the crew against cosmic rays and other charged particles in the interplanetary medium—which included the exhaust of other atomic ships. Snugged against the crew module's base were the four cylindrical holds, each seven meters across and twenty meters long, grouped around the central strut. Like the sea-land cargo containers of the previous century, the holds were detachable and could be parked in orbit or picked up as needed; each was attached to Star Queen's central shaft by its own airlock and was also accessible through outside pressure hatches. Each hold was divided into compartments which could be pressurized or left in vacuum, depending on the nature of the cargo.

At the other end of the ship's central strut were bulbous tanks of liquid hydrogen, surrounding the bulky cylinder of the atomic motor's reactor core. Despite massive radiation shielding, the aft of the ship was not a place for casual visits by living creatures—robot systems did what work needed to be done there.

For all its ad hoc practicality. Star Queen had an air of elegance, the elegance of form following function. Apart from the occasional horn of a maneuvering rocket or the spike or dish of a communications antenna, the shapes from which she had been assem­bled shared a geometric purity, and all alike shone dazzling white under their fresh coats of electro-bonded paint.

---

Two days later heavy tugs moved Star Queen into launch orbit, beyond the Van Allen belts. The atomic motor erupted in a stream of white light. Under steady acceleration the ship began a five-week hyperbolic dive toward Venus.

---

Still, things might have been worse. Star Queen was fourteen days into her trajectory and had twenty-one days still to go to reach Port Hesperus. Thanks to her upgraded engines she was travelling much faster than the slow freighters, the tramp steamers of the space-ways who were restricted to Hohmann ellipses, those long tangential flight paths that expended minimum energy by just kissing the orbits of Earth and Venus on opposite sides of the sun. Passenger ships equipped with even more powerful gaseous-core reactors, or fast cutters using the still-new fusion drives, could slice across from planet to planet in as little as a fortnight (2 weeks), given favorable planetary alignments—and given a profit margin that allowed them to spend an order of magnitude more on fuel—but Star Queen was stuck in the middle of the equation. Her optimal acceleration and deceleration determined both her launch window and her time of arrival.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

The traveling-public gripes at the lack of direct Earth-to-Moon service, but it takes three types of rocket ships and two space-station changes to make a fiddling quarter-million-mile jump for a good reason: Money.

The Commerce Commission has set the charges for the present three-stage lift from here to the Moon at thirty dollars a pound. Would direct service be cheaper? A ship designed to blast off from Earth, make an airless landing on the Moon, return and make an atmosphere landing, would be so cluttered up with heavy special equipment used only once in the trip that it could not show a profit at a thousand dollars a pound! Imagine combining a ferry boat, a subway train, and an express elevator. 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, cocoon-like acceleration-and-crash hammocks, fractional controls on their enormous jets.

• 

(ed note: When a crazed army of survivors attacks the site where the Space Arks are being built, things look bleak until one of the main characters starts up the almost-complete first Ark, sets the atomic engines to "1 G", and floats over the attacking hordes in blowtorch mode)

     " To the ship! Into the ship!" Tony cried to them. "Everybody into the ship! Spread the word! Jack! . . . Everybody, everybody into the ship!" There was no alternative.
     Three-fourths of the camp was in the hands of the horde; and the laboratories could not possibly beat off another rush. They could not have beaten back this, if it had been more organized.
     Bullets flew through the dark.
     "To the ship! To the ship!"
     Creeping on hands and knees, from wounds or from caution, and dragging the wounded with them, the men started the retreat to the ship. Women were helping them.
     Yells and whistles warned that another rush was gathering; and this would be from all sides; the laboratories and the ship were completely surrounded.
     Tony caught up in his arms a young man who was barely breathing. He had a bullet through him; but he lived. Tony staggered with him into the ship.
     Hendron was there at the portal of the great metal rocket. He was cooler than any one else. "Inside, inside," he was saying confidently...
     ...The second rush was coming. No doubt of it, and it would be utterly overwhelming. There would be no survivors—but the women. None. For the horde would take no prisoners. They were killing the wounded already—their own badly wounded and the camp's wounded that they had captured.
     Eliot James, a bullet through his thigh, but saved by the dark, crawled in with this information. Tony carried him into the ship.
     They were all in the ship—all the survivors. The horde did not suspect it. The horde, as it charged in the dark, yelling and firing, closed in on the laboratories, clambered in the windows, smashing, shooting, screaming. Meeting no resistance, they shot and bayoneted the bodies of their own men and of the camp's which had been left there.

• 

     Then they came on toward the ship. They suddenly seemed to realize that the ship was the last refuge. They surrounded it, firing at it. Their bullets glanced from its metal. Somebody who had grenades bombed it.
     A frightful flame shattered them. Probably they imagined, at first, that the grenade had exploded some sort of a powder magazine within the huge metal tube, and that it was exploding. Few of those near to the ship, and outside it, lived to see what was happening.

     The great metal rocket rose from the earth, the awful blast from its power tubes lifting it. The frightful heat seared and incinerated, killing at its touch. A hundred of the horde were dead before the ship was above the buildings.
     Hendron lifted it five hundred feet farther, and the blast spread in a funnel below it. A thousand died in that instant. Hendron ceased to elevate the ship. Indeed, he lowered it a little, and the power of the atomic blast which was keeping two thousand tons of metal and of human flesh suspended over the earth, played upon the ground—and upon the flesh on the ground—as no force ever released by man before.
     Tony lay on his face on the floor of the ship, gazing down through the protective quartz-glass at the ground lighted by the garish glare of the awful heat.

     In the midst of the blaring, blinding, screaming crisis, a man on horseback appeared. His coming seemed spectral. He rode in full uniform; he had a sword which he brandished to rally his doomed horde. Probably he was drunk; certainly he had no conception of what was occurring; but his courage was splendid. He spurred into the center of the lurid light, into the center of the circle of death and tumult, stiff-legged in stirrups of leather, like one of the horrible horsemen of the Apocalypse.
     He was, for a flaming instant, the apotheosis of valor. He was the crazed commander of the horde.
     But he was more. He was the futility of all the armies on earth. He was man, the soldier.
     Probably he appeared to live after he had died, he and his horse together. For the horse stood there motionless like a statue, and he sat his horse, sword in hand. Then, like all about them, they also crumpled to the ground.

     Half an hour later, Hendron brought the ship down.

• 

(ed note: the inhabitants of the planet are treated to a somewhat close star going nova. Study of the explosion advances science, and also gives the secret of a faster-than-light drive. The project starts to build the first starship.

Then they notice that their own primary star is acting a little peculiarly. With horror they realize it is going to go nova in about nine years. The planetary government embarks on a crash program to make as many space arks as possible. Of course those who will left behind are somewhat unhappy.)

      Even for those barely possible few who did not recognize the man himself, the ceremonial blue and gold robes told the tale: he was the World Consort. His presence could only mean that whatever he had to say was the contribution of the Matriarch herself.
     “I am here essentially to answer the young man’s question,” he said. “There is work that we can do—work for a whole people, for a whole world. One Ertak-drive ship is no longer enough; we want hundreds—even thousands if that is possible. We are transforming the Project into a mass crash program for the survival of the race. We are going to build, man and launch a fleet.”

---

     Being young, Jom was not immediately able to rid himself of his notion—no, it was more than a notion, it was a fact of his brief experience—that five years was a long, long time in the future. He was astonished to see how rapidly Ertak and his staff forced themselves to make huge decisions, which ordinarily should have been weighed for several months at the very least. Now four or five of these might be made on a single typical day.

     For a sufficient example, take ship design. The Project’s ship on the ways, the Javelin, had been planned as a vessel which would return home well within the lifetime of its original crew. Now it had to be thought of, instead, as a colony-in-flight, able to shelter many generations if necessary.
     But spaceships which will also be colonies are not easily designed from nothing ; and an interstellar ship which was specifically designed not to be a colony cannot speedily be torn down and changed over. When presented with the time-budget for such an operation, Ertak decided almost instantly against it. The Javelin was ordered to be modified in as many small ways as possible, but she was not to be rebuilt, nor was she to be nibbled at drastically enough to risk weakening her present structure. This made sense, but Jorn was not prepared for the corollary decision: that all the Javelin's sister ships were to be built to the same design and with only such minor modifications as the Javelin herself could safely withstand. This decision too was eminently reasonable, but not to a man to whom five years seemed like a long time.

     And as with the ships, so with the world. This decision was not Ertak’s to make, but since the principles were the same, so was the outcome. The whole world was not converted overnight, or at any other time, to the production of interstellar ships, as Jorn had fuzzily imagined the World Consort to have implied. Doom or no doom, the fact remained that the original Javelin at completion would have cost half a billion credits, plus four years in construction time. Her sister ships would cost slightly less than that, but not much—mass production is an almost meaningless term for a structure like a bridge or a skyscraper or a ship, the savings involved running narrowly between two and four per cent per structure.
     Jorn had of course supposed that mere financial cost—and in that word “mere” there resounded hollowly a huge hole in his education—would go by the board in so ultimate an emergency. Like all the poor, money to him was an abstraction, a frivolity, a curse ; as a graduate engineer he knew all about oil, but nobody had bothered to tell him that money is even more necessary and valuable. Skyscrapers, battleships, satellite stations or survival fleets all require a high-energy economy, which means that almost all the goods and services in the world—and hence almost all of the money—must continue to be devoted to keeping that economy at the highest possible level. The farmer may not leap from her combine and take up a hammer on the nearest incomplete interstellar ship; the submarine freighter engineer may not abandon the engines which are propelling titanium ore or sponge platinum from one continent to another; the baker may not cease to make bread; the banker may not take her hands away from the guidance of credit, the raw material of political unity and the only enduring testimonial to man’s confidence in man; even the newscaster may not cease from telling all the rest, who in fact do not know how to hold a hammer and cannot feel or see the escapd fleet growing, that grow it does, and any job well done is an investment in the Project.

     All this takes money; nothing else will serve.

     “Of course we’re trading for the moment on the fact that most of the people don’t really believe a word of it,” Ertak remarked. “They’re willing to go along because the government’s buttered on a little inflation that’s how you ease civilians into any war. But that won’t last long enough. By the end of next year the bombs will start falling, and then they’ll want to run the war themselves, for their own personal protection. That’s when the trouble begins...
     “I don’t see the analogy,” Jorn confessed.
     “I mean that by that time they’ll be beginning to feel the heat—all of them, not just the neurotics who think they can feel it now. It’ll occur to them that the Sun really is going to explode. Then they’ll begin to wonder what they’re really working for : in other words, whether or not what they’re doing is going to get them an entrance ticket to one of our ships. And the moment we have to start paying them in hope instead of in credits, we’ll be in trouble—and there won’t be a ship in the fleet that’s much beyond half done at that point, except of course the Javelin.”
     “But we are going to be carrying passengers,” Jom said hesitantly. “Lots of them."
     “My dear Jorn! Never mind, Ailiss O’Kung says you may be a great navigator ... Of course we’ll be carrying passengers—roughly a hundred for every crewman on the Javelin, and even more on the others. But how many people does that come to? We won’t know until we see how many ships we manage to build before we have to leave, but I’ll tell you this: under the best possible circumstances, the total population of the fleet will be less than the differential birthrate of this planet for one single day. Probably a good deal less.”
     “Still, Director, we won’t be taking the old, or the handicapped or . . . certainly not the newborn . . .”
     “Ah,” Ertak said with a frozen smile. “That makes it look much easier. But let’s do a little simple multiplication, by tens. The Javelin will be able to carry about twenty-five hundred people. If the fleet consists of a hundred such ships—which would astonish me—then it will leave carrying a quarter of a million. Correct ?”

     Jorn began to feel sick. The Director saw it, obviously, but he continued his explanation without mercy.
     “Now let’s suppose that you’ve managed to disqualify twenty-five million people, on sure sound principles. This leaves you with 2,476,000,000 eligible candidates from which to pick 250,000. About one from every ten million. Would you like the job?”
     “No,” Jom said. “Great Ghost, no.”

---

• 

     Jorn had no time to puzzle over the sudden inaccessibility of the Director; everything abruptly was going too fast. The five years had in fact almost gone by; and the fleet was, both by definition and a long accumulation of miracles, well more than half done. By now, Jorn was better equipped to understand the awful logic of the simple theory of numbers involved, which ruled that a fleet half finished today may tomorrow have to be dubbed, arbitrarily, all the fleet that there is going to be.
     “And we are very close to term now,” Dr. Chase-Huebner told a meeting in the red room. These days she spoke for the Director; if anybody knew why, nobody had been able to tell Jorn. “We have thirty ships. A thirty-first, the Haggard, is far enough along to be counted in.”
     “What about the Assegai?” someone asked.
     “Out of the question. It would take more than a year to finish her, and we haven't got a year. And I’m not just talking about the heat and the storms, either —though both are awful enough already. Public panic is rising so rapidly now that we won’t be able to keep workers on the Assegai another year without promising them all a berth on her; and as you all know, our complement is filled. Believe me, I hate to leave that ship behind —I hate to leave any ship behind, but particularly the Assegai with alt her refinements. But we have to stop somewhere. It would be nice to wait for the Boomerang, too; on paper she’s far and away the trimmest ship of her class on the ways—but at the moment she’s nothing but a keel and a heap of loose Ibeams. This has got to be the end.”
     “Why not call a halt on the Haggard, too?” Kamblin proposed. “She’ll take another five months, it seems.”
     “Because,” Dr. Chase-Huebner said gently, “we have a crew and passengers for the Haggard, and the Director doesn’t mean to leave anyone behind whom we have promised can go.”

     In mid-air in Ertak’s office a siren groaned briefly, urgently, and on Ertak’s desk, just to the left and directly in front of Dr. Chase-Huebner, the orange light went on.
     It had never been on before. It would never go on again. It meant, very simply, that Dr. Chase-Huebner—and Director Ertak?—had already waited too long, and that even the Haggard would now never be finished.
     The Sun, baleful though it had become, was still decades away from its last agony; but the cataclysm was upon them, all the same.

---

     The truck was covered and there was hardly anything to be seen from it. Jorn and fourteen other crew members of the Javelin clung to the hard benches and craned their necks around each other, trying to peer out the back over the tailgate; but at first the administration building blocked off the view, and then the driver was careening across Salt Flats at a pace which made visibility less important than just hanging on. It was maddening.
     All the same, a general distant roar of human and machine sound, massive and ugly, came rolling clearly over the snarling of the truck’s own engine. If the sputtering of gas guns was a part of that clamor, it could not be distinguished, at this distance, from the boundary fences; but there were louder explosions too—explosive bullets, grenades, even an occasional mortar.
     It was hard to believe that any sort of a mob could have gathered outside that fence, in the middle of one of the most forbidding deserts in this entire hemisphere of the world; but that was what the orange light had been triggered to foretell. And the fact that the mob was already here—and that the truck was already racing for the Javelin—could mean only that it was huge, armed, and at least partially organized.
     And it also meant, Jorn was fervently sure regardless of the evidence, that somebody—a great many somebodies—had badly misjudged Jurg Wester, and the likes of him.

     The flickering night framed over the tailgate of the truck was streaked briefly by the track of a rocket shell. The concussion from the tank-killer hung fire long after the wake of the little missile had vanished, and its residual image after it ; and then, blam, there it came, from somewhere in the middle distance. Obviously it hadn’t been aimed at the truck, which in any event was showing no lights ; but it left behind no doubt that the mob was armed. Of course at this speed a tire blowout would kill Jorn and everyone else almost as instantly—
     The tires screamed and the truck, yawing and lurching, slammed down to a dead stop, piling all fifteen of them up against the back wall of the cab. Accompanying the yell of brakes and tires was the awful grinding, pounding note of gears being stripped: the driver had shifted down into first in order to stop shorter than the brakes could manage alone, trusting to the crew’s field gear to protect them and her own skill to pocket her.

     They were still trying to unscramble themselves from their own swearing black homologous knot when the tailgate clanged down. “Out!" a woman’s voice shouted. “Hit that lift! Lock closes in seven minutes! Move!”
     Jorn recognized the voice. It belonged to the armorer. Well, that explained the drastic driving. She was waiting for them as they unscrambled and struck turf, carrying a hooded torch further hooded by her gauntlet, between two fingers of which she allowed only a razor-edge of red light to shear at the ground. Even in the dim monochrome, however, Jorn could see that she was bleeding a black rill from one nostril.
     For an instant thereafter he was totally confused. Then, against the starlight, he picked out the colossal shaft of the Javelin, sweeping motionlessly into the sky as though she would never end. Beside her, seemingly clinging to one long dully-gleaming curve, was the delicate scaffolding of the elevator, waiting to be extinguished like a flame at the moment of takeoff.

---

• 

     “That way,” the armorer growled, “that way.” She gestured along the sand and salt with the razor-edge of the torch; but Jorn was already running. He could hear others behind him. Far away, something—a bomb?—burst open with a deep, heavy groan, and a minute temblor shook the desert under his pounding feet.
     Then the aluminum deck of the lift car was ringing with the trampling of boots as they charged aboard, shoving each other and grabbing for cables or struts they could only guess were there. “. . . thirteen . . . fourteen ... Now by the Ghost ... All right, get in, dammit, fifteen!" A whistle warbled shrilly, almost in Jorn’s ear. The cab shuddered, and then, without any pause, lurched skyward with a muscle-wrenching jolt.

     After that, it did not seem to be going anywhere at all, despite the piercing, unpredictable screams it sometimes uttered against its guide-rails, and the jittering of the deck beneath their feet. Nevertheless it was rising, and as it rose, Jorn could see more and more of the outskirts of the base. Now they were seething with light and smoke, all along the perimeter. Tracers criss-crossed the hot night air in all directions. The higher the car inched, the more likely it seemed to Jorn that everyone on it would be riddled before they would be able to reach the faraway airlock of the Javelin.
     Then, ages later, they were high enough to begin to see the general shape of the attack. It was huge. Beyond the immediate, writhing lines of fire along the fences, twinkling processions of vehicles were racing in nearly straight lines over the desert toward Salt Flats. Near the horizon there did indeed seem to be some bombs falling, and some of these small “nominal” atomics. Evidently the government still controlled the air—which was good as far as it went, but the planes would be under strict orders to stay well away from the ships, where the main part of the mob obviously was concentrating, and hence the only place where a really comprehensive explosion might be decisive.
     The lift quivered and rose a little faster. It brought them all high enough to test their handholds with a heavy buffeting of wind—though the wind seemed to be just as hot as the air on the desert itself had been. There would be no more cool winds on this planet, not at any altitude at which a man could expect to breathe, not even on the mountains.

     Another rocket shell went searing past in a high hazy arc. Jorn stopped breathing for an instant. That one was close. Didn’t they realize that they might hit the ship itself? For that matter, didn’t they know that they couldn’t pack all of those thousands of people into the Javelin and her sisters ? Didn’t they know that they’d wreck her, just trying? Sure, there were three other ships standing on Salt Flats, but—
     But as he realized the futility of trying to think like a mob, his mind repeated, “thousands of people,” and quailed. That mob was being held off only by the stand-bys and there were very few of those any more, certainly far from a full extra crew for each ship. They had been weeded; and judging by the rocket shells, many of the rejects were now howling on the other side of the fence. Despite the standby training, and the supernal lethality of their gear, the stand they were making was suicidal. They would have to fall back, or—
     But they did not fall back. Not this time.
     They were broken open.

---

     About two miles northwest of the administration building, the line of flame sagged inward. Then it went dark along at least half a mile; the fence was down. Outside, there was a flaming surge of movement toward the hole like surf foaming around a whirlpool.
     The cab came to a bouncing stop in the middle of the sky.
     “All right, inside!” the armorer shouted. “Lock closes in one minute! Inside—shuffle or dust!”
     Had that whole crawling ascent been only six minutes long? But there was no time for postmortems. The sixteen of them were packed into the lock like fish in a jar, and the outer door swung ponderously, unfeelingly shut on the battle and on the whole outside world . . . for good.
     As it sealed, a hairline semicircle of light, intolerably brilliant after the near-blackness of the field, began to widen on the other side of the lock. Jorn was momentarily startled; it had not occurred to him that the interior of the ship might be fully lit—although, since she had no ports, there was no reason why she shouldn’t have been; and besides, her passengers had been living aboard her ever since she was finished. In the first influx of light he was startled to find Ailiss O’Kung standing next to him, white and sweating with strain.

     “Very good,” the armorer said, a little more quietly, but not much. “Posts, ladies and gentlemen. And thank you.”
     Proper enough, Jorn thought deliriously, since the armorer was the only one in the party who was not an officer. Still the speech had all the irrationality of a dream.
     Everything had been rehearsed over and over long before this. Jorn headed for the control barrel almost by instinct, Ailiss trotting by his side. In the big blinking cavern he ran a fast tally of his navigation section and found them there; he did not stop to count Ailiss’ crew, but he had a vague feeling that she was at least one officer short.
     Ertak was there, hunched in the command chair above them. That was his right, since the Javelin was the flagship. But it was the first time that Jorn had seen him in five years; it increased the dream-like feeling.

---

     The Director did not turn around. He did not even seem to hear what was going on behind him. After a moment, however, he spoke into a chest microphone, and all the desk screens came to life, including Jom’s own. Once again he had a view of the scene outside.
     It no longer really looked like a battle, but more like a carnival, confusing, gay with light, without real meaning. Nevertheless, from this height Jom was able to see that a miracle had happened around the breach at the fence. Somehow, whoever had been generalling the defense had managed to pinch off the inflow, clean up the stragglers, and order a retreat. The irregular closed curve of fire, curiously amoeboid, was well inside the fences everywhere, and drawing closer and closer to the ships; but it was still unbroken.

     Beside Jorn’s right hand he heard a razzy muttering, and reached guiltily for his operations helmet. Inside it, Ertak’s voice was saying:
     ". . . and maintain routine identification signal census in a continuous cycle. Field officers, continue to hold ground by the Haggard and the Assegai; they both look finished and we want the rabble to assume that they are. On Signal Red, flatten out toward the Assegai; on Signal Blue, let them have her. Lifts are down on Javelin and Quarrel; repeat, lifts down on Javelin and Quarrel . . . Congratulations, Deep Station. To all hands: Deep Station reports it has secured all five ships. . . . Census? Census, report! . . . Field officers, Signal Red, this is Signal Red, execute. . . To all hands: Deep Station is launching . . , Census? . . . Field officers, supersede previous orders. On blue signal, yield both Assegai and Boomerang and fall back toward Javelin. Fall back toward Javelin, we will be last off. . . Attention Quarrel, cycle airlock and begin countdown; we won't need you for personnel.”

---

• 

     The line of fire bulged inward toward the Javelin, and then toward the incomplete ships. Then there was an even deeper bulge toward the Quarrel.
     “Field officers, blue signal will be on count of zero. At the signal, yield the field and board the Javelin’s lift. One minute allowed for boarding, repeat one minute. Counting toward blue signal: five . . . four . , . three . . . two . . . one . . . zero. Signal Blue! Signal Blue!”
     The line swept inward on all sides—and then suddenly it disappeared utterly. There was noi longer even a part of it to be seen. Instead there were only the torches and vehicle lights of the mob, pouring inward toward the three ships they thought they had gained. In a barely perceptible flickering of smallarms fire, what little there was left of the standby crew funnelled toward the lift shaft of the Javelin, trying to disengage.
     “Census, I have pips for twenty-one survivors and a load estimate of eighteen on the lift. Confirm, please. . . . All right, nineteen now. Time’s up. Lift crew, haul them. . . . Absolutely not. Quarrel will leave in six minutes exactly. If we wait for three stragglers, all twenty-one will die. Haul!”

     A minute went by. The mob continued to concentrate around the bases of the “captured” ships, like phosphorescent ants, until each of them seemed to be standing in a spreading pool of light. The pool around the Boomerang, however, quickly began to seep away toward the others; close up it was self-evident that that ship was radically incomplete.
     “To all hands: Deep Station has launched all five ships. We have garbled reports from other stations indicating at least eighteen more either secured or already launched. There are also still two stations holding radio silence: we are hoping this means that their locations remain unknown and they are undergoing no attack.”

     Three minutes.

     “Passenger census . . . Well, that’s what they get for sightseeing; we warned them. Certainly it could be a lot worse. . . Airlock crew, prepare to admit standbyes.”
     Nobody could call them standbyes after tonight.

     Four minutes. There was turmoil now in the pools of light around the Assegai and the Haggard. Little sparks of light were clambering slowly up the scaffolding of their lift-shafts ; obviously they had discovered that the lifts themselves were inoperable.

     Five minutes. The airlock was open now, gaping for the nineteen seared heroes. The mob was beginning to ooze tentatively toward the Quarrel.
     “. . . seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Cycle airlock. Field officers, welcome aboard. Get that thing closed, you’ve got four seconds—”

     Thoommmm!

     The Quarrel vanished. On Salt Flats the pools of light were still visible, but they looked dimmer, and completely frozen: truck lights left on, torches fallen from hands. . . . The concussion had probably killed many of them. The rest would be likely to be still unconscious when the Javelin left.
     “A clean takeoff,” Ertak’s voice said calmly. “Ship’s officers, begin countdown. We will follow in eight minutes.” He paused and seemed to check some board hidden by his chest. Then he added, “To. all hands: congratulations. The Javelin is the last ship able to leave, and the last of these still on the ground. Twenty-nine others are all already on their way.”
     Thirty ships, Jom thought numbly. Thirty ships.
     “Correction, we are thirty-one in all. We have a signal from the Kestrel. She is damaged but off safely.”

     There was a ragged cheer in the earphones. Jom did not join in it. What difference could one ship make? What difference would ten have made?
     “Census . . . thank you. To all hands : we now have a final population check. We are carrying seventy-five thousand people, give or take about a hundred. We have escaped—and by that token, we know that we will survive. Take-off in thirty seconds.”
     We have escaped ... we will survive. And yet . . . how many died when the Quarrel vanished, and the lights were stilled on Salt Flats? How many more would die to the departure of the Javelin? How many had been killed to keep them out of the ships, all over the world?
     We will survive. But who are we to survive?

• 

(ed note: in the novel they are trying to guard an underground shelter instead of a space ark. But the same principles apply to defense)

As Seaton assumed, the near-collision of suns which had affected so disastrously the planet Valeron did not come unheralded to overwhelm a world unwarned, since for many hundreds of years her civilization had been of a high order indeed. Her astronomers were able, her scientists capable, the governments of her nations strong and just. Years before its occurrence the astronomers had known that the catastrophe was inevitable and had calculated dispassionately its every phase — to the gram, the centimeter, and the second.

With all their resources of knowledge and of power, however, it was pitifully little that the people of Valeron could do; for of what avail are the puny energies of man compared to the practically infinite forces of cosmic phenomena? Any attempt of the humanity of the doomed planet to swerve from their courses the incomprehensible masses of those two hurtling suns was as surely doomed to failure as would be the attempt of an ant to thrust from its rails an onrushing locomotive.

But what little could be done was done; done scientifically and logically; done, if not altogether without fear, at least in as much as was humanly possible without favor. With mathematical certainty were plotted the areas of least strain, and in those areas were constructed shelters. Shelters buried deeply enough to be unaffected by the coming upheavals of the world's crust; shelters of unbreakable metal, so designed, so latticed and braced as to withstand the seismic disturbances to which they were inevitably to be subjected.

Having determined the number of such shelters that could be built, equipped, and supplied with the necessities of life in the time allowed, the board of selection began its cold-blooded and heartless task. Scarcely one in a thousand of Valeron's teeming millions was to be given a chance for continued life, and they were to be chosen only from the children who would be in the prime of young adulthood at the time of the catastrophe.

These children were the pick of the planet: flawless in mind, body, and heredity. They were assembled in special schools near their assigned refuges, where they were instructed intensively in everything that they would have to know in order that civilization should not disappear utterly from the universe.

Such a thing could not be kept a secret long, and it is best to touch as lightly as possible upon the scenes which ensued after the certainty of doom became public knowledge.

Humanity both scaled the heights of self-sacrificing courage and plumbed the very depths of cowardice and depravity.

Characters already strong were strengthened, but those already weak went to pieces entirely in orgies to a normal mind unthinkable. Almost overnight a peaceful and lawabiding world went mad — became an insane hotbed of crime, rapine, and pillage unspeakable. Martial law was declared at once, and after a few thousand maniacs had been ruthlessly shot down, the soberer inhabitants were allowed to choose between two alternatives. They could either die then and there before a firing squad, or they could wait and take whatever slight chance there might be of living through what was to come — but devoting their every effort meanwhile to the end that through those selected few the civilization of Valeron should endure.

Many chose death and were executed summarily and without formality, without regard to wealth or station. The rest worked. Some worked devotedly and with high purpose, some worked hopelessly and with resignation. Some worked stolidly and with thoughts only of the present, some worked slyly and with thoughts only of getting themselves, by hook or by crook, into one of those shelters. All, however, from the highest to the lowest, worked.

Since the human mind cannot be kept indefinitely at high tension, the new condition of things came in time to be regarded almost as normal, and as months lengthened into years the routine was scarcely broken. Now and then, of course, one went mad and was shot; another refused to continue his profitless labor and was shot; still another gave up the fight and shot himself. And always there were the sly the self-seekers, the bribers, the corruptionists — willing to go to any lengths whatever to avoid their doom. Not openly did they carry on their machinations, but like loathsome worms eating at the heart of an outwardly fair fruit. But the scientists, almost to a man, were loyal. Trained to think, they thought clearly and logically, and surrounded themselves with soldiers and guards of the same stripe. Old men or weaklings would have no place in the post-cataclysmic world and there were accommodations for only the exactly predetermined number; therefore only those selected children and no others could be saved or would. And as for bribery, threats, blackmail, or any possible form of racketry or corruption — of what use is wealth or power to a man under sentence of death? And what threat or force could sway him?

Wherefore most of the sly were discovered, exposed, and shot.

Time went on. The shelters were finished. Into them were taken stores, libraries, tools and equipment of every sort necessary for the rebuilding of a fully civilized world. Finally the "children," now in the full prime of young manhood and young womanhood, were carefully checked in. Once inside those massive portals they were of a world apart.

They were completely informed and completely educated; they had for long governed themselves with neither aid nor interference; they knew precisely what they must face; they knew exactly what to do and exactly how to do it. Behind them the mighty, multiply seals were welded into place and broken rock by the cubic mile was blasted down upon their refuges.

Day by day the heat grew more and more intense. Cyclonic storms raged ever fiercer, accompanied by an incessant blaze of lightning and a deafeningly continuous roar of thunder. More and ever more violent became the seismic disturbances as Valeron's very core shook and trembled under the appalling might of the opposing cosmic forces.

Work was at an end and the masses were utterly beyond control. The devoted were butchered by their frantic fellows; the hopeless were stung to madness; the stolid were driven to frenzy by the realization that there was to be no future; the remaining sly ones deftly turned the unorganized fury of the mob into a purposeful attack upon the shelters, their only hope of life.

But at each refuge the rabble met an unyielding wall of guards loyal to the last, and of scientists who, their work now done, were merely waiting for the end. Guards and scientists fought with rifles, ray-guns, swords, and finally with clubs, stones, fists, feet and teeth. Outnumbered by thousands they fell and the howling mob surged over their bodies. To no purpose. Those shelters had been designed and constructed to withstand the attacks of Nature gone berserk, and futile indeed were the attempts of the frenzied hordes to tear a way into their sacred recesses.

Thus died the devoted and high-souled band who had saved their civilization; but in that death each man was granted the boon which, deep in his heart, he craved. They had died quickly and violently, fighting for a cause they knew to be good. They did not die as did the members of the insanely terror-stricken, senseless mob... in agony... lingeringly... but it is best to draw a kindly veil before the horrors attendant upon that riving, that tormenting, that cosmic outraging of a world.

---

The suns passed, each upon his appointed way. The cosmic forces ceased to war and to the tortured and ravaged planet there at last came peace. The surviving children of Valeron emerged from their subterranean retreats and undauntedly took up the task of rebuilding their world. And to such good purpose did they devote themselves to the problems of rehabilitation that in a few hundred years there bloomed upon Valeron a civilization and a culture scarcely to be equaled in the universe.

For the new race had been cradled in adversity. In its ancestry there was no physical or mental taint or weakness, all dross having been burned away by the fires of cosmic catastrophe which had so nearly obliterated all the life of the planet. They were as yet perhaps inferior to the old race in point of numbers, but were immeasurably superior to it in physical, mental, moral, and intellectual worth.

Immediately after the Emergence it had been observed that the two outermost planets of the system had disappeared and that in their stead revolved a new planet. This phenomenon was recognized for what it was, an exchange of planets; something to give concern only to astronomers.

No one except sheerest romancers even gave thought to the possibility of life upon other worlds, it being an almost mathematically demonstrable fact that the Valeronians were the only life in the entire universe. And even if other planets might possibly be inhabited, what of it? The vast reaches of empty ether intervening between Valeron and even her nearest fellow planet formed an insuperable obstacle even to communication, to say nothing of physical passage. Little did anyone dream, as generation followed generation, of what hideously intelligent life that interloping planet bore, nor of how the fair world of Valeron was to suffer from it.

• 

      Most of all he liked to watch the rings. At the left, they emerged from behind Saturn, a tight, bright triple band of orange fight. At the right, their beginnings were hidden in the night shadow, but showed up closer and broader. They widened as they came, like the flare of a horn, growing hazier as they approached, until, while the eye followed them, they seemed to fill the sky and lose themselves.
     From the position of the Scavenger fleet just inside the outer rim of the outermost ring, the rings broke up and assumed their true identity as a phenomenal cluster of solid fragments rather than the tight, solid band of light they seemed.
     Below him, or rather in the direction his feet pointed, some twenty miles away, was one of the ring fragments. It looked like a large, irregular splotch, marring the symmetry of space, three quarters in brightness and the night shadow cutting it like a knife. Other fragments were farther off, sparkling like star dust, dimmer and thicker, until, as you followed them down, they became rings once more.
     The fragments were motionless, but that was only because the ships had taken up an orbit about Saturn equivalent to that of the outer edge of the rings.
     The day before, Rioz reflected, he had been on that nearest fragment, working along with more than a score of others to mold it into the desired shape. Tomorrow he would be at it again.

---

     He strengthened pseudo-grav and lifted the projector a bit. He released pseudo-grav, insuring that the projector would stay in place for minutes even if he withdrew support altogether. He kicked the cable out of the way (it stretched beyond the close “horizon” to a power source that was out of sight) and touched the release.
     The material of which the fragment was composed bubbled and vanished under its touch. A section of the lip of the tremendous cavity he had already carved into its substance melted away and a roughness in its contour had disappeared.
     “Try it now,” called Rioz.
     Swenson was in the ship that was hovering nearly over Rioz's head.
     Swenson called, “All clear?”
     “I told you to go ahead.”
     It was a feeble flicker of steam that issued from one of the ship's forward vents. The ship drifted down toward the ring fragment. Another flicker adjusted a tendency to drift side-wise. It came down straight.
     A third flicker to the rear slowed it to a feather rate.
     Rioz watched tensely. “Keep her coming. You'll make it. You'll make it.”
     The rear of the ship entered the hole, nearly filling it. The bellying walls came closer and closer to its rim. There was a grinding vibration as the ship's motion halted.
     It was Swenson's turn to curse. “It doesn't fit,” he said.
     Rioz threw the projector ground-ward in a passion and went flailing up into space. The projector kicked up a white crystalline dust all about it, and when Rioz came down under pseudo-grav, he did the same.
     He said, “You went in on the bias, you dumb Grounder.”
     “I hit it level, you dirt-eating farmer.”
     Backward-pointing side jets of the ship were blasting more strongly than before, and Rioz hopped to get out of the way.
     The ship scraped up from the pit, then shot into space half a mile before forward jets could bring it to a halt.
     Swenson said tensely, “We'll spring half a dozen plates if we do this once again. Get it right, will you?”
     “I'll get it right. Don't worry about it. Just you come in right.”
     Rioz lumped upward and allowed himself to climb three hundred yards to get an over-all look at the cavity. The gouge marks of the ship were plain enough. They were concentrated at one point halfway down the pit. He would get that.
     It began to melt outward under the blaze of the projector.
     Half an hour later the ship snuggled neatly into its cavity, and Swenson, wearing his space suit, emerged to join Rioz.
     Swenson said, “If you want to step in and climb out of the suit, I'll take care of the icing.”
     “It's all right,” said Rioz. “I'd just as soon sit here and watch Saturn.”
     He sat down at the lip of the pit. There was a six-foot gap between it and the ship. In some places about the circle, it was two feet; in a few places, even merely a matter of inches. You couldn't expect a better fit out of handwork. The final adjustment would be made by steaming ice gently and letting it freeze into the cavity between the lip and the ship.
     Saturn moved visibly across the sky, its vast bulk inching below the horizon.
     Rioz said, “How many ships are left to put in place?”
     Swenson said, “Last I heard, it was eleven. We're in now, so that means only ten. Seven of the ones that are placed are iced in. Two or three are dismantled.” “We're coming alone fine.”
     “There's plenty to do yet. Don't forget the main jets at the other end. And the cables and the power lines."

---

     It had all seemed perfectly logical back on Mars, but that was Mars. He had worked it out carefully in his mind in perfectly reasonable steps. He could still remember exactly how it went. It didn't take a ton of water to move a ton of ship. It was not mass equals mass, but mass times velocity equals mass times velocity. It didn't matter, in other words, whether you shot out a ton of water at a mile a second or a hundred pounds of water at twenty miles a second. You got the same velocity out of the ship.
     That meant the jet nozzles had to be made narrower and the steam hotter. But then drawbacks appeared. The narrower the nozzle, the more energy was lost in friction and turbulence. The hotter the steam, the more refractory the nozzle had to be and the shorter its life. The limit In that direction was quickly reached.
     Then, since a given weight of water could move considerably more than its own weight under the narrow-nozzle conditions, it paid to be big. The bigger the water-storage space, the larger the size of the actual travel-head, even in proportion. So they started to make liners heavier and bigger. But then the larger the shell, the heavier the bracings, the more difficult the weldings, the more exacting the engineering requirements. At the moment, the limit in that direction had been reached also.
     And then he had put his finger on what had seemed to him to be the basic flaw—the original unswervable conception that the fuel had to be placed inside the ship; the metal had to be built to encircle a million tons of water.
     Why? Water did not have to be water. It could be ice, and ice could be shaped. Holes could be melted into it. Travel-heads and jets could be fitted into it. Cables could hold travel-heads and jets stiffly together under the influence of magnetic field-force grips.
     Long felt the trembling of the ground he walked on. He was at the head of the fragment. A dozen ships were blasting in and out of sheaths carved into its substance, and the fragment shuddered under the continuing impact.
     The ice didn't have to be quarried. It existed in proper chunks in the rings of Saturn. That's all the rings were — pieces of nearly pure ice, circling Saturn. So spectroscopy stated and so it had turned out to be. He was standing on one such piece now, over two miles long, nearly one mile thick. It was almost half a billion tons of water, all in one piece, and he was standing on it.
     But now he was face to face with the realities of life. He had never told the men just how quickly he had expected to set up the fragment as a ship, but in his heart, he had imagined it would be two days. It was a week now and he didn't dare to estimate the remaining time. He no longer even had any confidence that the task was a possible one. Would they be able to control jets with enough delicacy through leads slung across two miles of ice to manipulate out of Saturn's dragging gravity?
     Drinking water was low, though they could always distill more out of the ice. Still, the food stores were not in a good way either.
     Some of the men were having trouble with the cables. They had to be laid precisely; their geometry had to be very nearly perfect for the magnetic field to attain maximum strength. In space, or even in air, it wouldn't have mattered. The cables would have lined up automatically once the juice went on.
     Here it was different. A gouge had to be plowed along the planetoid's surface and into it the cable had to be laid. If it were not lined up within a few minutes of arc of the calculated direction, a torque would be applied to the entire planetoid, with consequent loss of energy, none of which could be spared. The gouges then had to be re-driven, the cables shifted and iced into the new positions.
     The men plodded wearily through the routine.

---

• 

     Long had no assurance that it would work. Even if the jets would respond to the distant controls, even if the supply of water, which depended upon a storage chamber opening directly into the icy body of the planetoid, with built-in heat projectors steaming the propulsive fluid directly into the driving cells, were adequate, there was still no certainty that the body of the planetoid without a magnetic cable sheathing would hold together under the enormously disruptive stresses.
     “Ready!” came the signal in Long's receiver.
     Long called, “Ready!” and depressed the contact.
     The vibration grew about him. The star field in the visiplate trembled.
     In the rear-view there was a distant gleaming spume of swiftly moving ice crystals.
     “It's blowing!” was the cry.
     It kept on blowing. Long dared not stop. For six hours, it blew, hissing, bubbling, steaming into space; the body of the planetoid converted to vapor and hurled away.

---

     The flotilla, welded into a single unit, was returning over its mighty course from Saturn to Mars. Each day it flashed over a length of space it had taken nine days outward. Ted Long had put the entire crew on emergency. With twenty-five ships embedded in the planetoid taken out of Saturn's rings and unable to move or maneuver independently, the co-ordination of their power source into unified blasts was a ticklish problem. The jarring that took place on the first day of travel nearly shook them out from under their hair.
     That, at least, smoothed itself out as the velocity raced upward under the steady thrust from behind. They passed the one-hundred-thousand-mile-an-hour mark late on the second day, and climbed steadily toward the million-mile mark and beyond.
     Long's ship, which formed the needle point of the frozen fleet, was the only one which possessed a five-way view of space. It was an uncomfortable position under the circumstances. Long found himself watching tensely, imagining somehow that the stars would slowly begin to slip backward, to whizz past them, under the influence of the multi-ship's tremendous rate of travel.

---

     “You see that?” Sankov, pointing.
     “Hey!” cried a reporter. “It's a ship!”
     A confused shouting came from the adjoining room.
     It wasn't a ship so much as a bright dot obscured by a drifting white cloud. The cloud grew larger and began to have form. It was a double streak against the sky, the lower ends billowing out and upward again. As it dropped still closer, the bright dot at the upper end took on a crudely cylindrical form.
     It was rough and craggy, but where the sunlight hit, brilliant high lights bounced back.
     The cylinder dropped toward the ground with the ponderous slowness characteristic of space vessels. It hung suspended on those blasting jets and settled down upon the recoil of tons of matter hurling downward like a tired man dropping into his easy chair.
     And as it did so, a silence fell upon all within the dome. The women and children in one room, the politicians and reporters in the other remained frozen, heads craned incredulously upward.
     The cylinder's landing flanges, extending far below the two rear jets, touched ground and sank into the pebbly morass. And then the ship was motionless and the jet action ceased.
     But the silence continued in the dome. It continued for a long time.
     Men came clambering down the sides of the immense vessel, inching down, down the two-mile trek to the ground, with spikes on their shoes and ice axes in their hands. They were gnats against the blinding surface.
     One of the reporters croaked, “What is it?”
     “That,” said Sankov calmly, “happens to be a chunk of matter that spent its time scooting around Saturn as part of its rings. Our boys fitted it out with travel-head and jets and ferried it home. It just turns out the fragments in Saturn's rings are made up out of ice.”
     He spoke into a continuing deathlike silence. ”That thing that looks like a spaceship is just a mountain of hard water. If it were standing like that on Earth, it would be melting into a puddle and maybe it would break under its own weight. Mars is colder and has less gravity, so there's no such danger.
     “Of course, once we get this thing really organized, we can have water stations on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter and on the asteroids. We can scale in chunks of Saturn's rings and pick them up and send them on at the various stations. Our Scavengers are good at that sort of thing.
     “We have all the water we need. That one chunk you see is just under a cubic mile-or about what Earth would send us in two hundred years. The boys used quite a bit of it coming back from Saturn. They made it in five weeks, they tell me, and used up about a hundred million tons. But, Lord, that didn’t make any dent at all in that mountain. Are you getting all this, boys?”

• 

• 

      So maybe it was Gallagher and his glacier that changed the times, and not the times that fitted Gallagher.
     A pioneer is a man who goes out into the unknown and solves equations to the best of his ability as he meets them. In that respect, Gallagher was a pioneer, and I knew that in that respect I wasn’t. That hurt the ever-living soul of me, underneath all the degrees and certificates that said I was captain of a ship and he wasn’t. An engineer is a man who gets a job done, and in that respect Gallagher was an engineer. I didn’t know whether I was an engineer or not, for I had the book learning, but the ship was a push-button affair that took some handling but that mostly took automatics; and the Port Inspector was the one who said how the automatics would be structured. Gallagher had as good a piece of paper to prove he was an engineer as I did, but he held that piece of paper in great contempt, except when he needed a job, which was a good part of the time since, though he was an engineer with a spacelanes-long reputation, he never had developed a talent for staying on a company ship. As a pioneer, he never had been able to latch onto a colony, company, or otherwise, and stay, for he had a sociable nature that needed to be out and visiting around the spaceways.
     Gallagher’s name was black in the company books. He’d jump a ship or stow away out of a colony as soon as sign the papers.
     So now he sat, mostly in Joe ’s Bar, and waited for a ship to orbit that was setting a course the way he wanted to go. How he was planning to sign on with his name so black in the books, he wasn’t saying.

     But when my ship orbited, and us heading for Altura, there was a small series of untraceable incidents that left my engineer in the hospital. At the same time, I got the news of the “incidents,” Gallagher presented himself shipside with his piece of paper.
     “Your next port is Altura, Captain Harald Dundee,” he said proud-like. His name was N. N. Gallagher, and they called him “Dublin” as a pun and for courtesy of his origin. He stood six feet tall in my cabin, his red hair nearly brushing the topsides, making me feel small and a little insignificant for all my fine uniform, for I clear that ceiling by a good four inches.
     “And,” he said, “it’s toward Altura I’m headin’. Now, seeing as it’s not rightly your fault you’re minus an engineer for the course, I’ll take on the job without much cost to you. There’s a glacier that’s orbiting towards Altura. You can compute to intersect her within three hours of your port. I’ll take on your engineer’s post that far and charge you naught, if you’ll put me aboard that glacier, me and my equipment. And your assistant engineer can take her in from there.”

     Well, that was that, but when I found out what Gallagher meant by equipment, I nearly reneged again. The holds would take it, but we’dl be shipping heavy.
     “You’ll be heavy only so long as I’m aboard, and I’ll have your drive talking so pretty she’ll use less mass than if you were running light with anybody else to engineer her,” says Gallagher modestly. “Your assistant will have a light ship to take in, and the motors already purring.”
     The equipment included one of the old Antolaric drives that used to power the ships they sent out when man first entered space, and it was as massive as the old ships used to be. Then there were supplies to last a man for months, but those weren’t much; and machinery enough to stock a small shop.

     I didn’t understand Gallagher, but I knew him for a breed that caught at the heart of me, for we were both from the old country and we were both out in the new spaceways. There was a kinship between us I couldn’t deny, though the frictions said we were alien, and me a corporation man.
     I understood the man even less when we matched courses with his glacier and I had him and his equipment drifted over to it. It couldn’t have been more than a mile the long way, and a quarter mile through; an ungainly hunk of ice idling through space. What the man could want with it was more than I could see. There were plenty of steel meteorites that size, if Gallagher wanted to make himself a meteor ship—and I admit that seeing that old drive was the first inkling I’d got of such a use. But ice? Then I realized. A steel meteor wouldn’t have given him reaction mass for his fusion chamber, but that ice was a good part hydrogen, and that would be his mass.

     Well, I’d be a few days planetbound, and I spent the first of them partly wandering the company town, partly in the port bar. By the end of the fourthday, I was so furious with Gallagher that I was making up conversations with him, telling him off. And, if you come right down to it, curious. I couldn’t figure how he was going to manage the job alone. I had to see.
     By midnight I’d rationalized myself into good reasons. The man was daft. He was alone on an iceberg, drifting helplessly in space. By now he’d have realized how helplessly. The least I could do—now that his senses had had a chance to reorganize—was to offer him an oiler’s job to get him out of the mess he’d talked himself into. I wouldn’t leave a dog alone out there, I told myself. I owed him a chance to stow away honorably.
     I rented a small interplanet scout, and I headed back for Gallagher's glacier.

     What I expected to find I’m not sure. What I found was the glacier—lonely and sparkling cold —and I could make out Gallagher’s vac-suited figure working on its surface as I matched orbit two kilometers off.
     Since he was on the surface and in a vac suit, I hailed him over the ship’s suit comm, but he failed to answer, and I maneuvered the scout in closer, seeking a place to tie up. That’s when I got an answer.
     “Sheer off, you lunkhead,” came his voice. “I’ll not have you upsetting my balances here.” I was readying a tart reply when he went on. “Anyhow, this is already claimed."
     “Okay, Dublin,” I said. “If you’re too proud to let your former captain see the mess you’ve got into, I’ll be heading back to port. I was just being sociable anyhow.”
     The figure stood and waved, and Gallagher’s tones, hardly less gruff than before, came back over the suit comm. “Neighborly of you, captain. Take her around on the far side and hitch up to a mooring line. But gently, mind you. I’ll still not have you upsetting my balance.”
     I was blessed if I could see what he might have in mind about balances, but I eased the scout around to the far side, and that’s when I got my first good look at what Gallagher had been doing.

     There was a bubble,dome anchored firmly to one of the smoother parts of the big ice chunk, and a half-dozen standard bourdon mooring tubes—long, snaky pipes of plastic inflated with gas—that extended out from the surface and to which various “dumps” had been attached. The bubble dome was fair enough; normal equipment for airless planetary living. And the bourdon mooring tubes were normal, if they were attached securely enough to the iceberg.
     I hesitated before mooring to a vacant tube. They’d attach to the scout all right; and if they were moored securely at the far end, fine. But if they weren’t? Well, I’d moor, I decided, and keep an eye on the scout. If it pulled the line loose and started to drift, I could catch it in the first few minutes with the rockets on my suit.
     I nudged up to the tube and was rewarded with the hollow clink of a magnalock. The line was a good kilometer long, but I could see a tiny shuttlebug start its whirring way up the mooring line, so I’d have fast travel going in. Fully automatic, that response; keyed to the impulse of the magnalock. Gallagher was doing better than might have been expected.
     While I waited, I looked over the cargo dumps attached to the other tubes. Nothing but the things we had left, of course. And there was the Antolaric drive—not moored to a tube, but carefully stanchioned directly at the far end of the berg itself, lined up with the balance point of the berg as though it were nudging the glacier from behind.
     A pushberger? I asked myself sarcastically. Is he planning to push the damned berg to the nearest planet? It won’t work that way, I assured myself. A drive is internal to the ship. Necessarily, I emphasized warily to myself, but with the haunting feeling that maybe I was missing something, the memory of the Starfire’s tuning fresh upon me.

     The shuttlebug arrived, and I reached out to grasp the awkward thing, flinging my legs over the upside-down crossbar of the T, and grasping the pipe that led to the tiny foot-long motor firmly clamped to a plastic track along the side ofthe mooring tube. I nudged the trigger and got the giddy sensation of being thrown forward at nearly half a gee as the tiny electric motor whined along the semigeared track; but the acceleration was brief, and I seemed more to be floating than actually riding as I descended towards the glacier.
     It’s a funny feeling, watching a glacier come up at you. You’re not actually falling toward it, nor it toward you, but it feels like it. All directions are up from the largest object, when you’re in a vac suit in space—or even when you’re in a small scout. So if you’re “up” from the big object and you’re approaching it, you’re falling—at least in your mind’s eye, and it’s hard to remember that it’s just travel on a straight line.
     The glacier “below” me was a spread-out panorama, nearing rapidly, and as it neared I could make out curious black spots. Huge black spots. Faults? No, they were too regular. Paint? Hardly. Probably radiator surfaces. Very probably, from the looks. But how had the man spread radiators directly on an ice surface? And how the devil had one man handled a standard radiator surface at all?
     I postponed my curiosity. I’d have at least an hour or so to inspect what had been done while Gallagher made his way around the glacier, and I’d not waste the time.

     But as the shuttlebug threw me into deceleration for the landing (and I got the feeling of falling up), I saw a suited figure emerge from the bubble dome near the terminus and wave to me.
     “Welcome aboard, captain.” The voice over the intercom was Gallagher’s. Most voices you can’t recognize over an intercom, but Gallagher’s is different. No intercom can cover that particular tonal quality. How he’d gotten that far that quick I didn’t know; but I did know that he was there. Yet—you couldn’t even have walked that distance on the skin of a metal ship in a suit with electret shoes, much less on the surface of a glacier with whatever crampers or ice-locks he’d dreamed up to keep him from drifting off the berg.
     “Hi,” I said weakly. “About ready to give up this foolishness?” It was too late to change my rationale now, though it did sound a little silly, what with the efficiency with which he’d got his stuff secured and gotten ready to go to work.
     “I rather thought you’d come because you were ready to give up your foolishness,” he replied. “Have they got the Starfire back to its sluggish norm yet? Independent Spaceways, namely me, can use a good navigator. glad you’re volunteering.”
     He’d hit the nail on the head about that retuning, and I could feel myself getting red. I was glad I was in a vac suit and he couldn’t see it. I kept my voice calm and merely said, “You look to be handling the initial stages okay. But maybe you’ve had some second thoughts.”

     I dropped from the shuttlebug. As my feet touched the ice, I was surprised to find that the electret shoes of my own suit gripped it quite satisfactorily. Somehow I hacln’t expected the electrostatic field to work on ice, even though I could see Gallagher standing right there waiting for me with no gripping problem.
     He laughed and led me to the bubble dome, and as we unhelmeted in the airlock, I put my foot in my mouth again. “Who’s working on the far side of your berg?” I asked. “I saw somebody in a vac suit there as I came in. I thought you were alone.”
     He didn’t answer at once, just opened the inner airlock door. And there, leading off from the far side of the dome, was a yawning shaft going straight down into the ice, with a shuttlebug hanging in its mouth as though it were just as logical to use one inside a ship as out.

     “Just me and my bugs, captain,” he said grinning.
     “Bugs?” I glanced sideways at Gallagher and then back at the hold. Then: “Shuttlebugs I understand. But tunnels like that? Why, it would take a man a month to dig a tunnel like that through a berg like this.”
     He nodded solemnly. “Aye, and you’re right, captain. But I didn’t mean just shuttlebugs. Most of the cargo ye landed me here with was bugs of one kind and another.” He pointed to a large, odd-looking circular metallic device lying to one side against a wall of the dome. “There’s one of the bigger ones there.”

• 

     I walked over and looked at the thing. It had a rim which I judged would just fit inside the tunnel; and in the center of the rim a rotating nose with a screw thread on it. About one turn every two centimeters, I decided. I looked more closely at the rim and saw that there were ridges so that if it were passing through ice it could slide easily forward, but could not turn readily. The rim itself seemed to be of two different materials, with a leading edge of metal, and a ten-centimeter-long trailing section of plastic that matched the shape, including the grooves.
     “Quite a fancy gadget,” I said. “But—how can a thing like this drill through ice? That nose with the screw thread on it doesn’t look very sharp, and certainly there aren’t any teeth here.” I pointed to the surface between the protruding screw nose and the rim.
     “Careful. It’s hot,” Gallagher said—and the idea of the machine clicked into my mind as an operating device. The surface was sensibly hot. The screw would be heated, too; and if you turned the thing nose-first against a piece of ice and gave it a shove, it could probably melt its way rapidly in and then get hold and keep on going. A sievelike mesh that formed the metallic surface between the rim and the spinner screw would take in water, I realized.
     “Clever,” I said. “Is it self-programming?”
     “Pretty much so. It’s got maybe the brains of a mouse. That’s what I call it. An ice mouse.”

     “What does it do with the water?” I asked.
     “Just kicks it out the back into the tunnel. I have to pump it from there. But I’ve smaller ones as well, and they make nice little water pipes for wherever I want to program them to go, so the pumping’s not all that much of a problem.”
     “And you pump the water out to those radiator surfaces for refreezing?” I asked. “How did you manage to move radiators like that around anyhow? Or, for that matter, where did you get them? I don’t recall having landed anything as heavy as a radiator here.”
     “Well, now. Which question first? The radiators were part of the equipment you landed, believe it or not. But they’re not heavy. They’re very lightweight plastic, and high-temperature stuff at that. It’s amazing how much more heat you can reject at four or five hundred degrees than you can from a low-temperature surface. And since it ’s the difference you’re working with, it makes good sense to have high-temperature radiators where the only energy dumped is by black-box radiation.
     “To answer the first question last, though,” Gallagher went on, “the water is not pumped directly into the radiators. If it were, that’s where it would freeze up. Actually, the refrigeration system is a little more complicated than that. But you’re right; that water is refrozen after it’s pumped where I want it. I scoop it out here and freeze it there. In a few weeks, I’ll have this berg balanced out and hollowed out and set up just the way I want it.”

     I had to admire the system, but I guess I was jealous enough I had to disparage it, too. So, since it was at least chilly if not downright cold in that dome, I shivered as obviously as possible as I said, “It would seem that you’ve picked a pretty well air-conditioned environment, but aren’t you afraid that the constant cold will get to you?”
     Gallagher grinned and motioned me to the tunnel leading down. “Come on in,” he said. “This dome is sort of chilly. It’s acting as my airlock right now, but I’ll probably replace it with a more conventional airlock sooner or later."
     It was a weird sensation, taking a shuttlebug through a tunnel where I could have reached both walls by simply outstretching my arms. The smooth, glistening ridges that had been left behind by Gallagher’s ice mouse as it formed the tunnel were as regularly milled and precise as the machine that had made them. But it seemed to me that we ’d not gone nearly halfway through when the shuttlebug paused and I swung myself off into a short corridor at right angles.
     This one wasn’t milled. It wasn’t ice, for that matter. And there was proper decking for the soles of my boots to get a better hold. Of course there was no gravity, but I automatically assumed that Gallagher would take care of that— and in the not-too-distant future, at the rate he was going.

     “Your hotheaded ice mice,” I asked. “Can they be suitably programmed for making the necessary spin-and-balance tubing for a zero M-I spin-grav system?”
     “Sure. Ought to have that operating now”— Gallagher glanced at his wrist chronometer— “in another four or five hours. The mice are much busier than I am.”
     “But with water rushing around in ice tubes, won’t you have some tendency for the tubes to melt and distort?”
     “Melt? Sure they will. Except that the water will be brine, and a bit colder than the melting point of ice, so they won’t melt very fast. Distort? Well, maybe. Under some conditions of acceleration, the tubes will probably distort a bit, but mostly, since the fluid in the spin tubes goes in one direction and the ship goes in. the other, the net friction and thrust is radial to the spin. There shouldn’t be much distortion. The tubes will simply gradually work themselves right on out towardithe surface. But long before that happens, I’ll make a new tube inside. Anything a mouse can do once, he can do all over again. Like I said, they?re going to be busier than I am”
     “But won’t each spin tube leave a hollow place behind it?” I asked.
     “Nope. You see right above each spin tube there ’s a much smaller and much colder tube. So the tubes will plate back on the top what they lose on the bottom.”
     I paused for a minute and thought that one out. Up, of course, was toward the center of the ship, since we were talking about spin gravity. And down would be toward the outside of the ship.

     ;“Wait a minute, though. Will that tube on top move out along with the other, larger tube? Or, for that matter, why couldn’t "you put the cold tube underneath the spin tube to prevent the spin tube from wearing out?”
     “One at a time.” Gallagher waved me on through the bulkhead and into a comfortable cabin. “No matter how cold I made the ice, when ice is under pressure, it will melt. Obviously, the spin tubes will be under pressure. Therefore they would gradually melt even if they were kept much colder than would be reasonably efficient. So actually it’s much simpler to allow the tube to melt and move itself out, say, three times the distance of its own diameter. Then simply make a new tube in the part it started from. Actually, it’ll probably be more complicated that that. There’ll be one tube being made and another being filled in while a third, somewhere in between them is operating to keep the spin going.”
     I could follow that much, but I had a feeling that if I let Gallagher go on, there would be more and more complications added. I could even visualize part of it. The necessary static balance tanks in which the level of water could be changed as other weights—like people—moved around inside the ship and tended to shift the spin-center according to their own positions. But it was really a very standard sort of thing operationally, and I could have drawn a blueprint for it from the memory of my own ship.

     “Okay, but just one more point,” I finally decided. “This cabin is nice and warm and insulated no doubt. But it does have mass and it will walk, just like that spin tube. What do you plan to do about that?”
     “Now you’re getting the picture, Harald!” Gallagher broke into a huge grin. “There’s no such thing as static stability in a malleable ship. And ice is one of the most malleable media you could ask to work with. Actually, this cabin is built with a hot head, something like that the mice use. You turn everything off and let it sink, it would sink right on out through the ice and get spun off into space, once we got spin gravity going. But its rate of sinking won’t be very fast, when you consider the square area of floor and the actual mass involved—as a matter of fact, it will float and move toward the inside. But we can do something about it whether it floats or sinks. It’s merely a matter of melting a little bit of the ice around the room and then repositioning it by hydrostatic pressure. If I want to move a cabin to the other side of the ship, I can do it in two or three days and scarcely disturb a thing in the process.”
     I shook my head in awe. The idea of floating cabins around in a ship to make new layouts at will was a bit much for a by-the-book captain and engineer such as myself.
     Then Gallagher capped it by summing the whole thing into a nutshell that spelled not only the difference between our ships, but between ourselves and what we represented.
     “You see,” he said, and his damned voice wasn’t even sarcastic, “you’re used to thinking in terms of static stability—forms that keep their shape by being rigid; forms that can’t change because any major change destroys them.
     “My glacier,” he went on, and his voice was warm and loving, “she can change and adapt and grow and evolve. She has dynamic stability, and that’s quite a different thing.”

(ed note: Gallagher hidden meaning is that the megacorporation that has a stranglehold on interstellar trade also has static stability, and cannot change because a major change would destroy the corporation. Gallagher's free trader company has dynamic stability, so it can change and adapt and grow and evolve.)

---

     That Gallagher. I cursed the day I’d met him, as I orbited back to Altura and my spick-and-span ship with all its properly latest gadgets and technological advances incorporated as they were developed. I’d never own my own ship, but by the gods, I told myself, I captained a good one! And when my time was run, as it runs fast in the spaceways, l’d have the cash to buy a small farm and settle down on any planet that I chose where they were accepting colonists.
     And there was Gallagher, as though he were mocking me, with an old Antolaric drive and probably the finest engineering talent on the starlanes, using it to make an old hunk of ice into a makeshift ship that would be the laughingstock of the spaceways.

     Take those radiator units—made of black plastic which could be turned black side toward the darker portions of space as radiators; or, in event of an emergency, toward the local sun as power collectors. The back surface was a silvery, metalized reflector, air-spaced to insulate the radiators from the icy surface to which they were attached.
     And they were attached, as were the mooring tubes I’d worried about—quite effectively attached with a gadget he called a hothead bug. It was a combination electric motor with a double-acting screw thread and a very hot nose; similar to his ice mice, but designed as an anchor. Place the thing on the ice and start it moving, it would burrow itself in like a tiny animal; and the screw thread with which it drove itself would remain in the tube. behind it, so it could be run in and back out again if you wished. Or it could simply run in pulling a cable behind it and stay there for as long as you liked.
     He had small ones for anchoring and big ones —the ice mice—for corridors; and extensive ones with which he was riddling the surface of the ship, creating small-bore tubing in the ice to be used for such things as circulating the cooling brine to maintain the frozen surfaces, and to carry off the melted water to be refrozen where it was needed.
     And the drive itself, that I’d seen stanchioned back there like a pushberger. Hell, he’d just positioned it so that the hydrostatic force of its driving would melt it right inside the ship to where he wanted it.

     And Gallagher was wasting that engineering genius on a hunk of ice! Why, the man could work up to captain, would he abide the rules!

     But my own ship didn’t look as pretty as she used to look, and though I still saw to it that my men went portside only in threes, I took to going in alone, myself, in full uniform, and be damned to the risk.
     The whole thing worried me, and it worried me more as the months passed and the tales began to be traded from bar to bar.
     At first Gallagher and his glacier were a roar of laughter that swept the spaceways. But it was more than just a roar of laughter. The spaceways had their first independent shipper, and it was a proud thing, there under the stars.

(ed note: this system assumes the presence of propellant depots. Otherwise the the delta-V budgets will have to be more or less doubled)

I imagine 3 types of vehicles for space development.

The yellow vehicles have a nearly 10 km/sec delta-V budget and a thick atmosphere to contend with. It is possible these will always be multi-stage expendable vehicles. (ed note: Space Ferry)

The red vehicles move between locations in different orbits. They need no landing mechanism, no thermal protection or ablation shields, parachutes, etc. They have delta V budgets between 4 and 3 km/sec. It is my belief such vehicles could be single stage, reusable vehicles. (ed note: Orbit-to-Orbit)

The green vehicles (lander/ascent vehicles) move between orbital locations and a surface of a substantial body, but not as substantial as earth. Their delta V budget is around 5 km/sec. I believe these vehicles could also be single stage, reusable vehicles. (ed note: Airless Lander)

It would take some investment to build infrastructure to maintain and supply the propellant depots pictured here. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just send ships directly from Earth to Mars? That depends. If your goal is flags and footprints sortie missions, disposable mega rockets are the way to go. But if you wanted genuine development of Mars, it would take many, many trips. If infrastructure could enable these trips to be done with smaller, reusable vehicles, the infrastructure would return the investment many times over.