quickly. He wolfed it. He had an appointment to meet that minute speck
some 4,000 miles out in space. His appointment was for a very few hours
hence.

He'd been training for just this morning's effort since before the
Platform's launching. There was a great box swinging in twenty-foot
gimbal rings over in the Shed. There were motors and projectors and over
two thousand vacuum tubes, relays and electronic units. It was a space
flight simulator--a descendant of the Link trainer which once taught
plane pilots how to fly. But this offered the problems and the
sensations of rocketship control, and for many hours every day Joe and
the three members of his crew had labored in it. The simulator
duplicated every sight and sound and feeling--all but heavy
acceleration--to be experienced in the take-off of a rocketship to
space. The similitude of flight was utterly convincing. Sometimes it was
appallingly so when emergencies and catastrophes and calamities were
staged in horrifying detail for them to learn to respond to. In six
weeks they'd learned how to handle a spaceship so far as anybody could
learn on solid ground--if the simulator was correctly built. Nobody
could be sure about that. But it was the best training that could be
devised.

In minutes Joe had finished the coffee and was out of Major Holt's
quarters and headed for the Shed's nearest entrance. The Shed was a
gigantic metal structure rising out of sheer flat desert. There were
hills to the westward, but only arid plain to the east and south and
north. There was but one town in hundreds of miles and that was
Bootstrap, built to house the workmen who'd built the Platform and the
still invisible, ferociously howling pushpots and now the small supply
ships, the first of which was to make its first trip today.