rocketport n.

At last, on a clear midnight, the Nonpareil stood upon the metal runway of a rocket port.

Grover Whalen, president of the New York World Fair 1939, Inc., announced this week that a feature of the fair will be an intricate working model of an interplanetary rocketport of the future.

In the tube to the rocketport I was accosted by a man, shabby and furtive, who seemed to know by my appearance and possibly by secret, underground ways, that I had been chosen.

They went on up to the subsurface level and took the crosstown slidewalk out to the rocket port.

The rocketport, where they were standing surrounded by their luggage, was a grassy valley where the all too infrequent ships could land and discharge cargo or make repairs.

The Thirty Days’ War would be the immediate result. By that time, the Lunar Base would be completed and ready; the enemy missiles would be aimed primarily at the rocketports from which it was supplied.

None the less it was with a sensation of great satisfaction that I went to collect my baggage and proceed to the rocketport. After last night, naturally, I was extremely tired; long before the steady pull of the rocket’s acceleration sank me into my couch, I was dozing.

The wind that blew from the frontier town smelled of grease. An aluminum-toothed jukebox banged somewhere. A junk yard rusted beside the rocketport. Old newspapers danced on the windy tarmac.

The purity of the atmosphere was strikingly brought to my notice when I debarked at Dallas rocketport and found the Grissims waiting for me outdoors, downwind of the landing area.

The ship backed down to its rocketport and dropped into its harness. The safe-to-debark gong sounded.

The silver craft which would take her to the rocketport smelled disappointingly of sick and engine fumes as she clambered into it with the few other women and aliens who were leaving Habara.