By Saturday the tools had been hooked up and tested, and Art had rewound one of the motors. The small mountain of gear had been stowed and the cabin was clean and reasonably orderly. They discovered in unpacking cases that several had been broken open, but nothing seemed to have been hurt. Ross was inclined to dismiss the matter, but Art was worried. His precious radio and electronic equipment had been gotten at.
“Quit fretting,” Ross advised him. “Tell Doc about it when he comes. The stuff was insured.”
“It was insured in transit,” Art pointed out. “By the way, when do you think they will get here?”
“I can’t say,” Ross answered. “If they come by train, it might be Tuesday or later. If they fly to Albuquerque and take the bus, it might be tomorrow — what was that?” He glanced up.
“Where?” asked Art.
“There. Over there, to your left. Rocket.”
“So it is! It must be a military job; we’re off the commercial routes. Hey, he’s turned on his nose jets!”
“He’s going to land. He’s going to land here!”
“You don’t suppose?”
“I don’t know. I thought — there he comes! It can’t-” His words were smothered when the thunderous, express-train roar reached them, as the rocket decelerated. Before the braking jets had been applied, it was traveling ahead of its own din, and had been, for them, as silent as thought. The pilot put it down smoothly not more than five hundred yards from them, with a last blast of the nose and belly jets which killed it neatly.
They began to run.
As they panted up to the sleek, gray sides of the craft, the door forward of the stub wings opened and a tall figure jumped down, followed at once by a smaller man.
“Doc! Morrie!”
“Hi, sports!” Cargraves yelled. “Well, we made it. Is lunch ready?”
Morrie was holding himself straight, almost popping with repressed emotion.
“I made the landing,” he announced.
“You did?” Art seemed incredulous.
“Sure. Why not? I got my license. Want to see it?”
“`Hot Pilot Abrams,’ it says here,” Ross alleged, as they examined the document. “But why didn’t you put some glide on it? You practically set her down on her jets.”
“Oh, I was practicing for the moon landing.”
“You were, huh? Well, Doc makes the moon landing or I guarantee I don’t go.”
Cargraves interrupted the kidding. “Take it easy. Neither one of us will try an airless landing.”
Morrie looked startled. Ross said, “Then who-”
“Art will make the moon landing.”
Art gulped and said, “Who? Me?”
“In a way. It will have to be a radar landing; we can’t risk a crack-up on anything as hard as an all jet landing when there is no way to walk home. Art will have to modify the circuits to let the robot-pilot do it. But Morrie will be the stand-by,” he went on, seeing the look on Morrie’s face. “Morrie’s reaction time is better than mine. I’m getting old. Now how about lunch? I want to change clothes and get to work.”
Morrie was dressed in a pilot’s coverall, but Cargraves was wearing his best business suit. Art looked him over. “How come the zoot suit, Uncle? You don’t look like you expected to come by rocket. For that matter, I thought the ship was going to be ferried out?”
“Change in plans. I came straight from Washington to the field and Morrie took off as soon as I arrived. The ship was ready, so we brought it out ourselves, and saved about five hundred bucks in ferry pilot charges.” “Everything on the beam in Washington?” Ross asked anxiously.
“Yes, with the help of the association’s legal department. Got some papers for each of you to sign. Let’s not stand here beating our gums. Ross, you and I start on the shield right away. After we eat.”
“Good enough.”
Ross and the doctor spent three days on the hard, dirty task of tearing out the fuel system to the tail jets. The nose and belly jets, used only in maneuvering and landing, were left unchanged. These operated on aniline and nitric fuel; Cargraves wanted them left as they were, to get around one disadvantage of atomic propulsion-the relative difficulty in turning the power off and on when needed.