«Yeah. He’s got two. One’s a little two-place job—that’ll be best for you if it’s in. If it isn’t you’ll have to take the big one, the one we made that trip I told you about in. Guess they’ll both be there, come to think of it. Read in the paper he’s under fire from a congressional committee, so he’ll stick to Earth for a while. He makes rajiks.»
«Oh,» said Keith.
«One more moonjuice and we’ll go.»
«If it’s on me,» Keith said.
He sipped it slowly, lingeringly. He was getting a little scared again in spite of the moonjuice. Thus far he’d been lucky—but he was still in Manhattan and Saturn was a long way off. Saturn and the space fleet and Mekky.
Then again they were in the almost impenetrable blackness of the mist-out. Again they went single-file, with Keith keeping his hand on the shoulder of the man walking ahead of him and Joe guiding them along the buildings with an outstretched arm.
At the first corner he stopped. «Wait here. I can get a car better by myself. I know where. Stick right here till you hear me coming.»
And he was off again into the blackness, walking so silently that Keith couldn’t hear a sound except, once, the faint sniffle that had enabled him to catch Joe in the first place. That slight cold of Joe’s had been a break, for Joe was turning out to be a Godsend.
He couldn’t keep much track of time, standing there, for he didn’t want to light matches to see his watch. But it seemed like less than a half hour before he heard a car coming, inching along the curb, the occasional scrape of rubber against the curbstone.
Keith waited until it stopped and then felt his way toward where the sound had last come from. He felt the side of a sedan, said Joe’s name and got an answering, «Yeah.» He got in.
Joe said, «Here’s the trick. You got to use the flashlight.» He pressed one into Keith’s hand. «Turn it on and keep it aimed at the floorboards of the car. Now take this chalk and draw a line parallel with the wheelbase of the car, front to back, as straight as you can.»
The flashlight, held within a foot of the floor, let Keith do that all right. «Good,» Joe said. «Now here’s the compass. Put it down by the line. Now wait till I turn the car south when we get a block over, to Sixth Avenue. I can go that far by the seat of my pants.»
The car inched forward and Keith turned off the flashlight. A few minutes later Joe stopped the car. «Get out and catch a house number,» he said. «We ought to be close to Sixth.»
Keith got out and fell over the curb. He got up and groped his way to the line of building fronts. A minute later he was back in the car. «Just overshot it,» he said. «Back up the width of one building and then head south.»
Joe did, then drove ahead a little till they were out of the intersection.
«Now the flashlight again,» he said. «From here on we can make ten miles an hour. Look, that’s the line of direction of the car, see? Here’s the compass. Now Sixth Avenue runs about southeast by south—all the straight streets do. Turns just a trifle more east at Minetta Place and then goes straight again till we get to Spring Street.
«There we take that right into the tunnel. Now you keep the flashlight on that line and the compass and keep me going straight. I’ll watch the speedometer and check distances. We can go ten miles an hour.»
«What if we hit something?»
«Won’t kill us at ten an hour. If we ruin the car we’ll have to swipe another. We’ll waver from one side of the street to the other, but if you keep close watch on that compass, we shouldn’t scrape curbing oftener than every few blocks—and whenever we do, we realign ourselves. Ready? Here we go.»
Joe was a skillful pilot, it turned out, and knew the streets and directions beautifully. They scraped rubber against the curb only twice before they reached Spring Street and only twice, on the Sixth Avenue leg of the trip, did he have Keith get out and check house numbers.
Once, in the Holland Tunnel Keith heard another car go by them, heading in from Jersey but they were lucky and didn’t even scrape fenders.
Joe knew the Jersey side too and kept them on straight streets where they could navigate with the compass. After a mile or so he turned the headlights on and Keith could see that they penetrated ten or twelve feet into the blackness.
Joe said, «Okay, pal. It tapers off from here. You can lay off the compass now,»
The headlights shot their beams farther and farther and before long it was an ordinary night they were driving through—an ordinary night with stars and a moon. Keith looked at the Moon and took a deep breath.
He thought, «This is a dream. I’m not really going there.»
At one-fifteen by Keith’s watch, Joe pulled the car to the side of the road. He said, «We’re here, pal.» He turned off the headlights and took the flashlight from Keith. «Across these fields. It’s pretty isolated back there. We won’t even have to be careful. Hope they don’t swipe the car on me before I get back to it.»
They started across the fields. The moonlight was so bright that they didn’t need the flashlight. Keith said, «How’ll you get back into town in the car alone? Can you manage the car and the compass both?»
«I won’t go back to New York tonight, I’ll drive the car into Trenton or somewhere and spend the night there. They might be watching for that car in the morning if it’s reported early. So I go in by train and let them find it in Jersey. It’s just past these trees.»
He used the flashlight, going through the grove, and on the far side of it were a big landing field and a big all-glass building like a monster greenhouse. Through the glass, Keith could see the two space-ships Joe had told him about. They looked more like airplanes than space-ships. The big one was about the size of a transport plane and the little one not much bigger than a Piper Cub.
Joe said, «Wait here. I’ll walk once around and be sure the coast’s clear.»
When he came back, he nodded. Keith held the flashlight while Joe opened the door with a picklock. «Good thing the little job will do. It’s foolproof. I can show you how to run it in ten or twenty minutes. Know anything at all about space navigation?»
«Not a thing.»
«Well, then it’s good you won’t want the Ehrling. It’d take me a while to teach you that one.»
Keith was walking around the smaller space-ship. Now, at closer range, he could see it was less like an airplane than he had thought. The wings were shorter and stubbier. What had looked like canvas felt more like asbestos. And there wasn’t any propeller.
«Here’s the airlock,» Joe said. «Just turn this handle. If you open it in space for any reason—and you’d better put on a space-suit first. There’s two inside the ship. You got to open this valve first and let the air out of the ship first. Then, after you’re back in, you start the airmaker and it builds up. I’ll show you that. Get on in.»
Keith sat at the pilot’s seat and Joe, beside him, explained the controls. They were simple, Keith thought, much simpler than those on a light plane.
«Here’s the sighter,» Joe was saying. «Just aim that where you want to go. And these dials set the distance. Big one’s in hundred-thou-mile units, next one in thousand, and on down to the little vernier in feet. That’s for hangaring of course. Now for the Moon—you landing on this side or the far side?»
«This side.»
«Then just sight on where you want to go, set this dial—the repulsor—for ten miles.
When you’re ready, push this button and you dematerialize here and materialize ten miles above the moon. That’s safe for the Moon. Better allow twenty miles for Earth, thirty for Venus, about fifteen for Mars.
«Minute you materialize there, you start falling. Put the nose in a steep glide and let yourself fall and the wings begin to take hold as you get down into the atmosphere. Glide in and land her like a glider. That’s all.