"She checks," Morrow affirmed. "Now let's get to work on those shorted gravitors!"
The first night's tests were preliminary. They lifted the ship a few feet off the ground and flew it across the sawmill yard and back. They switched the gravitors from main to auxiliary systems. They loaded the cargo deck amidships with sandbags and flew a weight-test. They took the ship up to fifty feet and held it there until the wind, blowing them toward the trees, forced them to come down.
The ship checked out in every test. They decided to make the first trial flight the next night.
Morrow sat up in the co-pilot's seat beside Smitty as they drove steadily through the darkness. Above, the stars twinkled coldly in the black heavens and the white sickle of a quarter-moon threw its milky glow into the control pit. Below, rolling gray stretches of meadow spread out between dark, timber-clad shoulders and humps of the Sierras. To the East, the timber gave way to rocky, cloud-wreathed peaks. They were headed toward them, and climbing.
"Five thousand on the altimeter," Smitty remarked flatly. "That's ten thousand, five hundred above sea-level. She isn't levelling out yet." His face was grim in the green glow of the instrument dials.
Behind them, the black, glinting hull was crammed with sandbags. They were lifting a full load.
Morrow kept his gaze fixed on the air-speed indicator. A deep, whooming sound came from the tail-jets. The needle on the indicator dial flickered restlessly, back and forth, over a single point.
They were doing forty miles an hour, indicated air-speed. They hadn't been able to increase that speed. A brisk twenty-five-mile-an-hour wind was blowing them steadily southward off their course.
Smitty shook his head. "Those jets don't even sound right, Bill—"