osions Joe had
seen looked as if they'd centered in the fire basket--technically the
combustion area--behind the compressor and before the drive vanes. A jet
motor whirled. Its front vanes compressed air, and a flame burned
furiously in the compressed air, which swelled enormously and poured out
past other vanes that took power from it to drive the compressor. The
excess of blast poured out astern in a blue-white flame, driving the
ship.

But one couldn't put a bomb in a fire basket. The temperature would melt
anything but the refractory alloys of which a jet motor has to be built.
A bomb placed there would explode the instant a motor was started. It
couldn't resist until the pushpot took off. It couldn't....

This was a different kind of sabotage. There was a different mind at
work.

In the afternoon Joe watched the landings, while the young lieutenant
followed him patiently about. A pushpot landing was quite unlike the
landing of any other air-borne thing. It came flying down with
incredible clumsiness, making an uproar out of all proportion to its
landing speed. Pushpots came in with their tail ends low, crudely and
cruelly clumsy in their handling. They had no wings or fins. They had to
be balanced by their jet blasts. They had to be steered the same way.
When a jet motor conked out there was no control. The pushpot fell.

He carefully watched one landing now. It came down low, and swung in
toward the field, and seemed to reach its stern down tentatively to
slide on the earth, and the flame of its exhaust scorched the field, and
it hesitated, pointing up at an ever steeper angle--and it touched and
its nose tilted forward--and leaped up as the jet roared more loudly,
and then touched again....

The goal was for pushpots to touch ground finally with the whole weight
of the flying monstrosity supported by the vertical thrust of the jet,
and while it was moving forward at the lowest possible rate of speed.
When that goal was achieved, they flopped solidly flat, slid a few feet
on their metal bellies, and lay still. Some hit hard and tried to dig
into the earth with their blunt noses. Joe finally saw one touch with no
forward speed at all. It seemed to try to settle down vertically, as a
rocket takes off. That one fell over backward and wallowed with its
belly plates in the air before it rolled over on its side and rocked
there.

The last of a flight touched down and flopped, and the memory of the
wreckage had b