hunderous volume which came even through the little
ship's insulated hull. Then it grew louder, and louder still, and Joe
stirred the controls by ever so tiny a movement.

Suddenly the ship did not feel solid. It stirred a little. Joe held his
breath and cracked the over-all control of the pushpots' speed a tiny
trace further. The ship wobbled a little. Out the quartz-glass windows,
the great door seemed to descend. In reality the clustered pushpots and
the launching cage rose some thirty feet from the Shed floor and hovered
there uncertainly. Joe shifted the lever that governed the vanes in the
jet motor blasts. Ship and cage and pushpots, all together, wavered
toward the doorway. They passed out of it, rocking a little and pitching
a little and wallowing a little. As a flying device, the combination was
a howling tumult and a horror. It was an aviation designer's nightmare.
It was a bad dream by any standard.

But it wasn't meant as a way to fly from one place to another on Earth.
It was the first booster stage of a three-stage rocket aimed at outer
space. It looked rather like--well--if a swarm of bumblebees clung
fiercely to a wire-gauze cage in which lay a silver minnow wrapped in
match-sticks; and if the bees buzzed furiously and lifted it in a
straining, clumsy, and altogether unreasonable manner; and if the
appearance and the noise together were multiplied a good many thousands
of times--why--it would present a great similarity to the take-off of
the spaceship under Joe's command. Nothing like it could be graceful or
neatly controllable or even very speedy in the thick atmosphere near the
ground. But higher, it would be another matter.

It _was_ another matter. Once clear of the Shed, and with flat, sere
desert ahead to the very horizon, Joe threw on full power to the pushpot
motors. The clumsy-seeming aggregation of grotesque objects began to
climb. Ungainly it was, and clumsy it was, but it went upward at a rate
a jet-fighter might have trouble matching. It wobbled, and it swung
around and around, and it tipped crazily, the whole aggregation of jet
motors and cage and burden of spaceship as a unit. But it rose!

The ground dropped so swiftly that even the Shed seemed to shrivel like
a pricked balloon. The horizon retreated as if a carpet were hastily
unrolled by magic. The barometric pressure needles turned.

"Communications says our rate-of-climb is 4,000 feet a minute and going
up fast," Mike announced.