gulation poker faces.

An order abolishing salutes in weightlessness followed shortly after.

It took four days to get the transfer of supplies properly started. It
took eight to finish the job. Affixing fresh rockets to the outside of
the Moonship's hull alone called for long hours in space suits. During
this time Mike floated nearby in a space wagon. One of the Navy men was
a trifle overcourageous. He affected to despise safety lines. Completing
the hook-on of a landing rocket, he straightened up too abruptly and
went floating off toward the Milky Way.

Mike brought him back. After that there was less trouble.

Even so, the Moonship and the Platform were linked together for thirteen
full days, during which the Platform seemed extraordinarily crowded. On
the fourteenth day the two ships sealed off and separated. Joe and his
crew in the space tug hauled the Moonship a good five miles from the
Platform.

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

Then the newly-affixed rockets on the Moonship's hull spurted their
fumes. The big ship began to move. Not outward from Earth, of course.
That was where it was going. But it had the Platform's 12,000 miles per
hour of orbital speed. If the bonds of gravitation could have been
snapped at just the proper instant, that speed alone would have carried
the Moonship all the way to its destination. But they couldn't. So the
Moonship blasted to increase its orbital speed. It would swing out and
out, and as the Earth's pull grew weaker with distance the same weight
of rockets would move the same mass farther and farther toward the Moon.
The Moonship's course would be a sort of slowly flattening curve,
receding from Earth and becoming almost a straight line where Earth's
and the Moon's gravitational fields cancelled each other.

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

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

"We should've been in that ship," said Haney heavily when the naked eye
could no longer pick it out. "We could've beat her to the Moon!"

Joe said nothing. He ached a little inside. But he reflected that the
men who'd guided the Platform to its orbit had been overshadowed by
himself and Haney and the Chief