Explore "Thunder in Space" by Lester Del Rey on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
A month later, a thousand miles above Earth and exactly 180° behind the _Tsiolkovsky_, the _Goddard_ swung steadily around the globe in a two-hour circumpolar orbit. Outwardly, it looked like the great metal doughnut that space artists had pictured for decades. On the inside, however, the evidence of hasty, crash-planned work was everywhere. The air fans whined and vibrated, the halls creaked and groaned, and the water needed to maintain balance gurgled and banged through ill-conceived piping. It was cramped and totally inadequate for the needs of the nation that had put it into space eight years before in a rush attempt to match the Russian "Sulky".
Jerry Blane should have been used to such conditions. He'd been one of the original space-struck men who'd helped to build it and then had been lucky enough to get a permanent assignment. Now he drifted in the weightless hub, watching the loading of a ship bound back for the home planet, wondering what hell's brew the boxes contained. The project that had usurped the cryogenic labs had involved its own crew of scientists, who were already on board the ship, taking their secret with them.