“Did anything get into the cargo hold?” asked Joe in sudden anxiety. “Did the cases I’m with get hit?”
After all, four rockets had exploded deplorably near the ship. If one fragment had struck, others might have.
“Nothing big, anyhow,” the co-pilot told him. “We’ll know presently.”
But examination showed no other sign of the ship’s recent nearness to destruction. It had been overstressed, certainly, but ships are built to take beatings. A spot check on areas where excessive flexing of the wings would have shown up—a big ship’s wings are not perfectly rigid: they’d come to pieces in the air if they were—presented no evidence of damage. The ship was ready to take off again.
The co-pilot watched grimly until the one mechanic went back to the side lines. The mechanic was not cordial. He and all the others regarded the ship and Joe and the co-pilot with disfavor. They worked on jets, and to suggest that men who worked on fighter jets were not worthy of complete confidence did not set well with them. The co-pilot noticed it.
“They think I’m a suspicious heel,” he said sourly to Joe, “but I have to be. The best spies and saboteurs in the world have been hired to mess up the Platform. When better saboteurs are made, they’ll be sent over here to get busy!”
The pilot came back from the control tower.
“Special flight orders,” he told his companion. “We top off with fuel and get going.”
Mechanics got out the fuel hose, dragging it from the pit. One man climbed up on the wing. Other men handed up the hose. Joe was moved to comment, but the co-pilot was reading the new flight instructions. It was one of those moments of inconsistency to which anybody and everybody is liable. The two men of the ship’s crew had it in mind to be infinitely suspicious of anybody examining their ship. But fueling it was so completely standard an operation that they merely stood by absently while it went on. They had the orders to read and memorize, anyhow.