Explore "Thunder in Space" by Lester Del Rey on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The return was a letdown, after the tension they had been building between them. Blane put the ferry away, leaving no traces of the trip in it, and slipped quietly back into the hub. Things looked miserable now, cramped and forced together, after the spaciousness and richness of equipment on the other station. But he forced that bitterness from his mind.
A Congressman had stated the official policy years before. "Sure, they got something bigger and stronger. But we got the old American spirit. Didn't our boys conquer the whole British navy with nothing but little wooden sailing ships once? " And hence, of course, it didn't matter how badly matched the stations might be. Nobody bothered to comment that the American fleet had grown strong by freebooting, that both sides were using little wooden ships, and that there was never more than a small fraction of the British navy along the American coast. Facts merely got in the way of good sentiment. The Congressman had been elected three times since then and still fought hard to keep any money from getting into space, though he yelled loud and often for the need of teaching the enemy a good lesson.