With long practice, a man might learn marksmanship in space. But all a man's judgment of speeds is learned on Earth, where things always, always, always move steadily. Nobody making his first space-flight could possibly hit such targets as Joe and the Chief made of themselves. The man in the enemy rocket was making his first flight. Also, Joe and the Chief had an initial velocity of 200 miles a minute toward him. The marksman in the rising rocket hadn't a chance. He fired four more missiles and tried desperately to home them in. But——
They flashed past his rising course. And then they were quite safe from his fire, because it would take a very long time indeed for anything he shot after them to catch up. But their missiles had still to pass him—and Joe and the Chief could steer them without any concern about their own safety or anything else but a hit.
They made a hit.
Two of the eight little missiles flashed luridly, almost together, where the radar-pips showed the rocket to be. Then there were two parts to the rocket, separating. One was small and one was fairly large. Another demolition-missile hit the larger section. Still another exploded as that was going to pieces. The smaller fragment ceased to be important. The explosions weren't atomic bombs, of course. They were only demolition-charges. But they demolished the manned rocket admirably.
Brown's voice came in the headphones, still tense. "You got it! How about the others?"
Joe felt a remarkable exhilaration. Later he might think about the poor devil—there could have been only one—who had been destroyed some 3,700 miles above the surface of the Earth. He might think unhappily of that man as a victim of hatred rather than as a hater. He might become extremely uncomfortable about this, but at the moment he felt merely that he and the Chief had won a startling victory.
"I think," he said, "that you can treat them with silent contempt. They won't have proximity fuses. Those friends of ours who want so badly to kill us have found that proximity fuses don't work. Unless one is on a collision course I don't think you need to do anything about them."
The Chief was muttering to himself in Mohawk, twenty miles away. Joe said:
"Chief, how about getting back to the Platform?"
The Chief growled. "My great-grandfather would disown me! Winning a fight and no scalp to show! Not even counting coup! He'd disown me!"