"But ships are bigger these days, Pop. When you were shoving them they couldn't have weighed over half a million tons. The one that's due this afternoon tops two million. That's a lot of ship."
Pop Gillette shook his head derisively at such ignorance, which was, after all, to be expected from a ground crew man.
"They're all the same. Once you have the feel of it," he rippled his fingers as though working a bank of firing keys, "it works anyplace. I run the Lorelei just like I used to run my liners. I can cut it a bit finer than I could a big ship, but elsewise it doesn't make any difference how big they come. I could stand that liner on her butt and write my name clean across that field." He jerked his head at the four-mile-wide Venusport, and glared at Joe and the radar man. "And cross the 't's' and dot the 'i's'!"
It was an hour later, while they were sitting around drinking Venusian wine, that the call came through. You always expect a distress call to be weak and difficult to understand, but this one wasn't. It was as clear as though the transmitter were in the next room.
"Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! All-Planetary Liner Twelve calling Venusport! Over!"
At the first sound of the universal distress call, Joe and the radar man went into action. Joe hit a red stud that alerted all the units at the Port, and cut in the speakers in the other control sections, while the radar man got a rough bearing on the liner, and switched up the amplification until he had the ship located within a foot, and its speed and course plotted to five decimal places.
All this in the time it took the first call to come through. Joe flipped the transmitting stud.
"Venusport to All-Planetary Twelve. All other units clear the air immediately. Come in."
The voice cut in sharply through the space static again, sounding a little frightened and tense.