Murdock refused to look back as the boys left the stands. He went across the field, past the school buildings, on toward the main sections of the base—the business part, where the life-line to the space station and the moon was maintained. A job, he told himself, was a job. It was a word he would never have used six ships and fifteen years before.
The storm flag was up on the control tower, he saw. Worse, the guy cables were all tight, anchoring the three-stage ships firmly down in their blast deflection pits. There were no tractors or tankers on the rocket field to service the big ships. He stared through the thickening gloom toward the bay, but there was no activity there, either. The stage recovery boats were all in port, with their handling cranes folded down. Obviously, no flight was scheduled.
It didn't fit with predictions. Hurricane Greta was hustling northward out to sea, and the low ceiling and high winds were supposed to be the tag end of that disturbance, due to clear by mid-day. This didn't look that way; it looked more as if the weather men on the station had goofed for the first time in ten years.
Murdock stared down the line toward his own ship, set apart from the others, swaying slightly as the wind hit it. Getting it up through the weather was going to be hell, even if he got clearance, but he couldn't wait much longer. Greta had already put him four days behind his normal schedule, and he'd been counting on making the trip today.
There was a flash bulletin posted outside the weather shack, surrounded by a group of young majors and colonels from the pilot squad. Murdock stepped around them and into the building. He was glad to see that the man on duty was Collins, one of the few technicians left over from the old days on the Island.
Collins looked up from his scowling study of the maps and saluted casually without rising. "Hi, Tommy. How's the hog business?"
"Lousy," Murdock told him. "I'm going to have a hungry bunch of pigs if I don't get another load down. What gives with the storm signals? I thought Greta blew over."
Collins pawed the last cigarette out of a pack and shook his head as he lighted up. "This is Hulda, they tell me. Our geniuses on the station missed it—claimed Hulda was covered by Greta until she grew bigger. We're just beginning to feel her. No flights for maybe five days more."
"Hell!" It was worse than Murdock had feared. He twisted the weather maps to study them, unbelievingly. Unlike the newer pilots, he'd spent enough time in the weather shack to be able to read a map or a radar screen almost as well as Collins. "The station couldn't have goofed that much, Bill!"