Ten minutes later he was inside, taking a look at his ship. He'd hardly seen a soul along the line of hangars. Inside one he'd heard a tapping where some flight mechanic was working at something or other. From another he'd heard voices—tranquil lazy tones indicating that whoever was within had no very urgent work on hand. It appeared that practically all the base had been given a pass on the day before the shoot. Which bespoke a way of running things that meant either absolutely top management or something he'd rather not imagine.
He looked at the ship, the X-21. It was huge. It was sleek. It was impressive. It looked slightly insane, because it was built to accomplish something that most people weren't even thinking about yet. Naturally it looked improbable, like the generality of things designed to achieve the preposterous.
For one thing, the pilot's cabin was in the nose, and it hung down so the pilot could look directly behind him underneath the belly of the ship. That meant an imbalance in the wind resistance when the ship was in flight. But the balance was restored by wings above the fuselage top. Then there were enormous ramjets built into the wings well away from the body; they threw the balance off again until it was restored a second time by the wind resistance of the wheels, which did not retract. And near the tail with its triple fins there were brackets for Mark Twenty jatos, and behind them a very familiar conical bore, the exhaust nozzle of the rocket engine.
McCauley recognized everything from his preparations for flying just this ship. She would take off on jato thrust which would get her off the ground and traveling fast enough for the ramjets in the wings to catch. The ramjets would take her up to the very edge of the atmosphere. When there wasn't enough air left for even ramjets to work with, the rocket should take over. In theory the ship might be called a three-stage design, but in fact it didn't fit into any category. It did, though, have one standard property of a hydrazine-nitric rocket. If it made other than a feather-light landing with any rocket fuel remaining, it would almost certainly blow itself to blazes.
But the point was that if—if—everything went all right, McCauley ought to get up into space with a full load of rocket fuel and a few hundred miles an hour eastward velocity. On the way up he'd try to hit the jetstream at thirty thousand feet or so and pick up some speed from that. And when he started his rocket engine he was supposed to put the ship in orbit.
That was the trick. That was what had never been done before. Men had orbited in missiles and gotten down again. There was a man on the moon—or so it was believed—though he was dead before he arrived there. There were satellites circling Earth in all directions, some of them as much as ten years aloft. But nobody had ever yet sent a ship up under its pilot's control, its pilot achieving an orbit and then bringing the ship down to the surface of the earth again. When that was accomplished, it could be said that a spaceship existed. Until then, there were only missiles.
McCauley worked his way thoughtfully around the monster, whistling soundlessly as he looked it over, checking everything he saw with what he knew, and thereby getting more information than was seemingly possible. Presently he went in the cabin and worked the controls. They felt just like the mock-up.
He was back in his quarters, thinking somberly, when there was a knock on the door. When he answered, the door was pushed open and the remarkably personable Major Furness appeared.
"Hi," he said. "They tell me you got here."
"Yes," agreed McCauley. "I did."