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Space platform By Murray Leinster
1
There wasn't anything underneath but clouds, and there wasn't anything
overhead but sky. Joe Kenmore looked out the plane window past the
co-pilot's shoulder. He stared ahead to where the sky and cloud bank
joined--it was many miles away--and tried to picture the job before him.
Back in the cargo space of the plane there were four big crates. They
contained the pilot gyros for the most important object then being built
on Earth, and it wouldn't work properly without them. It was Joe's job
to take that highly specialized, magnificently precise machinery to its
destination, help to install it, and see to its checking after it was
installed.
He felt uneasy. Of course the pilot and co-pilot--the only two other
people on the transport plane--knew their stuff. Every imaginable
precaution would be taken to make sure that a critically essential
device like the pilot gyro assembly would get safely where it belonged.
It would be--it was being--treated as if it were a crate of eggs instead
of massive metal, smoothed and polished and lapped to a precision
practically unheard of. But just the same Joe was worried. He'd seen the
pilot gyro assembly made. He'd helped on it. He knew how many times a
thousandth of an inch had been split in machining its bearings, and the
breath-weight balance of its moving parts. He'd have liked to be back in
the cargo compartment with it, but only the pilot's cabin was
pressurized, and the ship was at eighteen thousand feet, flying west by
south.
He tried to get his mind off that impulse by remembering that at
eighteen thousand feet a good half of the air on Earth was underneath
him, and by hoping that the other half would be as easy to rise above
when the gyros were finally in place and starting out for space. The
gyros, of course, were now on their way to be installed in the
artificial satellite to be blasted up and set in an orbit around the
Earth as the initial stage of that figurative stepladder by which men
would make their first attempt to reach the stars. Until that Space
Platform left the ground, the gyros were Joe's responsibility.
The plane's co-pilot leaned back in his chair and stretched luxuriously.
He loosened his safety belt and got up. He stepped carefully past the
column between the right- and left-hand pilot seats. That column
contained a fraction of the innumerable dials and controls the pilots of
a modern multi-engine plane have to watch and handle. The co-pilot went
to the coffeepot and flipped a switch. Joe fidgeted again on his
improvised seat. Again he wished that he could be riding in back with
the crates. But it would be silly to insist on perching somewhere in the
freight compartment.
There was a steady roaring in the cabin--the motors. One's ears got
accustomed to it, and by now the noise sounded as if it were heard
through cushions. Presently the coffeepot bubbled, unheard. The co-pilot
lighted a cigarette. Then he drew a paper cup of coffee and handed it to
the pilot. The pilot seemed negligently to contemplate some dozens of
dials, all of which were duly duplicated on the right-hand, co-pilot's
side. The co-pilot glanced at Joe.
"Coffee?"
"Thanks," said Joe. He took the paper cup.
The co-pilot said: "Everything okay with you?"
"I'm all right," said Joe. He realized that the co-pilot felt talkative.
He explained: "Those crates I'm traveling with----. The family firm's
been working on that machinery for months. It was finished with the
final grinding done practically with feather dusters. I can't help
worrying about it. There was four months' work in just lapping the
shafts and balancing rotors. We made a telescope mounting once, for an
observatory in South Africa, but compared to this gadget we worked on
that one blindfolded!"
"Pilot gyros, eh?" said the co-pilot. "That's what the waybill said. But
if they were all right when they left the plant, they'll be all right
when they are delivered."
Joe said ruefully: "Still I'd feel better riding back there with them."
"Sabotage bad at the plant?" asked the co-pilot. "Tough!"
"Sabotage? No. Why should there be sabotage?" demanded Joe.
The co-pilot said mildly: "Not quite everybody is anxious to see the
Space Platform take off. Not everybody! What on earth do you think is
the biggest problem out where they're building it?"
"I wouldn't know," admitted Joe. "Keeping the weight down? But there is
a new rocket fuel that's supposed to be all right for sending the
Platform up. Wasn't that the worst problem? Getting a rocket fuel with
enough power per pound?"
The co-pilot sipped his coffee and made a face. It was too hot.
"Fella," he said drily, "that stuff was easy! The slide-rule boys did
that. The big job in making a new moon for the Earth is keeping it from
being blown up before it can get out to space! There are a few gentlemen
who thrive on power politics. They know that once the Platform's
floating serenely around the Earth, with a nice stock of atom-headed
guided missiles on board, power politics is finished. So they're doing
what they can to keep the world as it's always been--equipped with just
one moon and many armies. And they're doing plenty, if you ask me!"
"I've heard----" began Joe.
"You haven't heard the half of it," said the co-pilot. "The Air
Transport has lost nearly as many planes and more men on this particular
airlift than it did in Korea while that was the big job. I don't know
how many other men have been killed. But there's a strictly local hot
war going on out where we're headed. No holds barred! Hadn't you heard?"
It sounded exaggerated. Joe said politely: "I heard there was
cloak-and-dagger stuff going on."
The pilot drained his cup and handed it to the co-pilot. He said: "He
thinks you're kidding him." He turned back to the contemplation of the
instruments before him and the view out the transparent plastic of the
cabin windows.
"He does?" The co-pilot said to Joe, "You've got security checks around
your plant. They weren't put there for fun. It's a hundred times worse
where the whole Platform's being built."
"Security?" said Joe. He shrugged. "We know everybody who works at the
plant. We've known them all their lives. They'd get mad if we started to
get stuffy. We don't bother."
"That I'd like to see," said the co-pilot skeptically. "No barbed wire
around the plant? No identity badges you wear when you go in? No
security officer screaming blue *** every five minutes? What do you
think all that's for? You built these pilot gyros! You had to have that
security stuff!"
"But we didn't," insisted Joe. "Not any of it. The plant's been in the
same village for eighty years. It started building wagons and plows, and
now it turns out machine tools and precision machinery. It's the only
factory around, and everybody who works there went to school with
everybody else, and so did our fathers, and we know one another!"
The co-pilot was unconvinced. "No kidding?"
"No kidding," Joe assured him. "In World War Two the only spy scare in
the village was an FBI man who came around looking for spies. The
village cop locked him up and wouldn't believe in his credentials. They
had to send somebody from Washington to get him out of jail."
The co-pilot grinned reluctantly. "I guess there are such places," he
said enviously. "You should've built the Platform! It's plenty different
on this job! We can't even talk to a girl without security clearance for
an interview beforehand, and we can't speak to strange men or go out
alone after dark--."
The pilot grunted. The co-pilot's tone changed. "Not quite that bad," he
admitted, "but it's bad! It's really bad! We lost three planes last
week. I guess you'd call it in action against saboteurs. One flew to
pieces in mid-air. Sabotage. Carrying critical stuff. One crashed on
take-off, carrying irreplaceable instruments. Somebody'd put a detonator
in a servo-motor. And one froze in its landing glide and flew smack-dab
into its landing field. They had to scrape it up. When this ship got a
major overhaul two weeks ago, we flew it with our fingers crossed for
four trips running. Seems to be all right, though. We gave it the works.
But I won't look forward to a serene old age until the Platform's out of
atmosphere! Not me!"
He went to put the pilot's empty cup in the disposal slot.
The plane went on. There wasn't anything underneath but clouds, and
there wasn't anything overhead but sky. The clouds were a long way down,
and the sky was simply up. Joe looked down and saw a faint spot of
racing brightness with a hint of colors around it. It was the sort of
nimbus that substitutes for a shadow when a plane is high enough above
the clouds. It raced madly over the irregular upper surface of the cloud
layer. The plane flew and flew. Nothing happened at all. This was two
hours from the field from which it had taken off with the pilot gyro
cases as its last item of collected cargo. Joe remembered how grimly the
two crew members had prevented anybody from even approaching it on the
ground, except those who actually loaded the cases, and how one of the
two had watched them every second.
Joe fidgeted. He didn't quite know how to take the co-pilot's talk. The
Kenmore Precision Tool plant was owned by his family, but it wasn't so
much a family as a civic enterprise. The young men of the village grew
up to regard fanatically fine workmanship with the casual
matter-of-factness elsewhere reserved for plowing or deep-sea fishing.
Joe's father owned it, and some day Joe might head it, but he couldn't
hope to keep the respect of the men in the plant unless he could handle
every tool on the place and split a thousandth at least five ways. Ten
would be better! But as long as the feeling at the plant stayed as it
was now, there'd never be a security problem there.
If the co-pilot was telling the truth, though--.
Joe found a slow burn beginning inside him. He had a picture in his mind
that was practically a dream. It was of something big and bright and
ungainly swimming silently in emptiness with a field of stars behind it.
The stars were tiny pin points of light. They were unwinking and
distinct because there was no air where this thing floated. The
blackness between them was absolute because this was space itself. The
thing that floated was a moon. A man-made moon. It was an artificial
satellite of Earth. Men were now building it. Presently it would float
as Joe dreamed of it, and where the sun struck it, it would be
unbearably bright, and where there were shadows, they would be abysmally
black--except, perhaps, when earthshine from the planet below would
outline it in a ghostly fashion.
There would be men in the thing that floated in space. It swam in a
splendid orbit about the world that had built it. Sometimes there were
small ships that--so Joe imagined--would fight their way up to it,
panting great plumes of rocket smoke, and bringing food and fuel to its
crew. And presently one of those panting small ships would refill its
fuel tanks to the bursting point from the fuel other ships had
brought--and yet the ship would have no weight. So it would drift away
from the greater floating thing in space, and suddenly its rockets would
spout flame and fumes, and it would head triumphantly out and away from
Earth. And it would be the first vessel ever to strike out for the
stars!
That was the picture Joe had of the Space Platform and its meaning.
Maybe it was romantic, but men were working right now to make that
romance come true. This transport plane was flying to a small town
improbably called Bootstrap, carrying one of the most essential devices
for the Platform's equipment. In the desert near Bootstrap there was a
gigantic construction shed. Inside that shed men were building exactly
the monstrous object that Joe pictured to himself. They were trying to
realize a dream men have dreamed for decades--the necessary space
platform that would be the dock, the wharf, the starting point from
which the first of human space explorers could start for infinity. The
idea that anybody could want to halt such an undertaking made Joe
Kenmore burn.
The co-pilot painstakingly crushed out his cigarette. The ship flew with
more steadiness than a railroad car rolls on rails. There was the oddly
cushioned sound of the motors. It was all very matter-of-fact.
But Joe said angrily: "Look! Is any of what you said--well--kidding?"
"I wish it were, fella," said the co-pilot. "I can talk to you about it,
but most of it's hushed up. I tell you----"
"Why can you talk to me?" demanded Joe suspiciously. "What makes it all
right for you to talk to me?"
"You've got passage on this ship. That means something!"
"Does it?" asked Joe.
The pilot turned in his seat to glance at Joe.
"Do you think we carry passengers regularly?" he asked mildly.
"Why not?"
Pilot and co-pilot looked at each other.
"Tell him," said the pilot.
"About five months ago," said the co-pilot, "there was an Army colonel
wangled a ride to Bootstrap on a cargo plane. The plane took off. It
flew all right until twenty miles from Bootstrap. Then it stopped
checking. It dove straight for the Shed the Platform's being built in.
It was shot down. When it hit, there was an explosion." The co-pilot
shrugged. "You won't believe me, maybe. But a week later they found the
colonel's body back east. Somebody'd murdered him."
Joe blinked.
"It wasn't the colonel who rode as a passenger," said the co-pilot. "It
was somebody else. Twenty miles from Bootstrap he'd shot the pilots and
taken the controls. That's what they figure, anyhow. He meant to dive
into the construction Shed. Because--very, very cleverly--they'd managed
to get a bomb in the plane disguised as cargo. They got the men who'd
done that, later, but it was rather late."
Joe said dubiously: "But would one bomb destroy the Shed and the
Platform?"
"This one would," said the co-pilot. "It was an atom bomb. But it wasn't
a good one. It didn't detonate properly. It was a fizz-off."
Joe saw the implications. Cranks and crackpots couldn't get hold of the
materials for atom bombs. It took the resources of a large nation for
that. But a nation that didn't quite dare start an open war might try to
sneak in one atom bomb to destroy the space station. Once the Platform
was launched no other nation could dream of world domination. The United
States wouldn't go to war if the Platform was destroyed. But there could
be a strictly local hot war.
The pilot said sharply: "Something down below!"
The co-pilot fairly leaped into his right-hand seat, his safety belt
buckled in half a heartbeat.
"Check," he said in a new tone. "Where?"
The pilot pointed.
"I saw something dark," he said briefly, "where there was a deep dent in
the cloud."
The co-pilot threw a switch. Within seconds a new sound entered the
cabin. _Beep-beep-beep-beep._ They were thin squeaks, spaced a full
half-second apart, that rose to inaudibility in pitch in the fraction of
a second they lasted. The co-pilot snatched a hand phone from the wall
above his head and held it to his lips.
"Flight two-twenty calling," he said crisply. "Something's got a radar
on us. We saw it. Get a fix on us and come a-running. We're at eighteen
thousand and"--here the floor of the cabin tilted markedly--"now we're
climbing. Get a fix on us and come a-running. Over!"
He took the phone from his lips and said conversationally: "Radar's a
giveaway. This is no fly-way. You wouldn't think he'd take that much of
a chance, would you?"
Joe clenched his hands. The pilot did things to the levers on the column
between the two pilots' seats. He said curtly: "Arm the jatos."
The co-pilot did something mysterious and said: "Check."
All this took place in seconds. The pilot said, "I see something!" and
instantly there was swift, tense teamwork in action. A call by radio,
asking for help. The plane headed up for greater clearance between it
and the clouds. The jatos made ready for firing. They were the
jet-assisted take-off rockets which on a short or rough field would
double the motors' thrust for a matter of seconds. In straightaway
flight they should make the plane leap ahead like a scared rabbit. But
they wouldn't last long.
"I don't like this," said the co-pilot in a flat voice. "I don't see
what he could do----"
Then he stopped. Something zoomed out of a cloud. The action was
completely improbable. The thing that appeared looked absolutely
commonplace. It was a silver-winged private plane, the sort that cruises
at one hundred and seventy-five knots and can hit nearly two-fifty if
pushed. It was expensive, but not large. It came straight up out of the
cloud layer and went lazily over on its back and dived down into the
cloud layer again. It looked like somebody stunting for his own private
lunatic pleasure--the kind of crazy thing some people do, and for which
there is no possible explanation.
But there was an explanation for this.
At the very top of the loop, threads of white smoke appeared. They
should have been unnoticeable against the cloud. But for the fraction of
an instant they were silhouetted against the silver wings. And they were
not misty wisps of vapor. They were dense, sharply defined rocket
trails.
They shot upward, spreading out. They unreeled with incredible,
ever-increasing velocity.
The pilot hit something with the heel of his hand. There was a
heart-stopping delay. Then the transport leaped forward with a force to
stop one's breath. The jatos were firing furiously, and the ship jumped.
There was a bellowing that drowned out the sound of the engines. Joe was
slammed back on the rear wall of the cabin. He struggled against the
force that pushed him tailward. He heard the pilot saying calmly: "That
plane shot rockets at us. If they're guided we're sunk."
Then the threads of smoke became the thickness of cables, of columns!
They should have ringed the transport plane in. But the jatos had jumped
it crazily forward and were still thrusting fiercely to make it go
faster than any prop-plane could. The acceleration made the muscles at
the front of Joe's throat ache as he held his head upright against it.
"They'll be proximity----"
Then the plane bucked. Very probably, at that moment, it was stretched
far past the limit of strain for which even its factor of safety was
designed. One rocket had let go. The others went with it. The rockets
had had proximity fuses. If they had ringed the transport ship and gone
off with it enclosed, it would now be a tumbling mass of wreckage. But
the jatos had thrown the plane out ahead of the target area. Suddenly
they cut off, and it seemed as if the ship had braked. But the pilot
dived steeply, for speed.
The co-pilot was saying coldly into the microphone: "He shot rockets.
Looked like Army issue three point fives with proximities. They missed.
And we're mighty lonely!"
The transport tore on, both pilots grimly watching the cloud bank below.
They moved their bodies as they stared out the windows, so that by no
possibility could any part of the plane mask something that they should
see. As they searched, the co-pilot spoke evenly into the microphone at
his lips: "He wouldn't carry more than four rockets, and he's dumping
his racks and firing equipment now. But he might have a friend with him.
Better get here quick if you want to catch him. He'll be the innocentest
private pilot you ever saw in no time!"
Then the pilot grunted. Something was streaking across the cloud
formation far, far ahead. Three things. They were jet planes, and they
seemed not so much to approach as to swell in size. They were coming at
better than five hundred knots--ten miles a minute--and the transport
was heading for them at its top speed of three hundred knots. The
transport and the flight of jets neared each other at the rate of a mile
in less than four seconds.
The co-pilot said crisply: "Silver Messner with red wing-tips. The
number began----" He gave the letter and first digits of the vanished
plane's official designation, without which it could not take off from
or be serviced at any flying field.
Joe heard an insistent, swift _beep-beep-beep-beep_ which would be the
radars of the approaching jets. He could not hear any answers that might
reach the co-pilot as he talked to unseen persons who would relay his
words to the jet fighters.
One of them peeled off and sank into the cloud layer. The others came
on. They set up in great circles about the transport, crossing before
it, above it, around it, which gave the effect of flying around an
object not in motion at all.
The pilot flew on, frowning. The co-pilot said: "Yes. Sure! I'm
listening!" There was a pause. Then he said: "Check. Thanks."
He hung the instrument back where it belonged, above his head and behind
him. He thoughtfully mopped his brow. He looked at Joe.
"Maybe," he said mildly, "you believe me when I tell you there's a sort
of hot war on, to keep the Platform from taking off."
The pilot grunted. "Here's the third jet coming up."
It was true. The jet that had dived into the clouds came up out of the
cloud formation with somehow an air of impassive satisfaction.
"Did they spot the guy?"
"Yeah," said the co-pilot. "He must've picked up my report. He didn't
dump his radar. He stayed in the cloud bank. When the jet came for
him--spotting him with its night-fighter stuff--he tried to ram. Tried
for a collision. So the jet gave him the works. Blew him apart. Couldn't
make him land. Maybe they'll pick up something from the wreckage."
Joe wet his lips.
"I--saw what happened," he said. "He tried to smash us with rockets.
Where'd he get them? How were they smuggled in?"
The co-pilot shrugged. "Maybe smuggled in. Maybe stolen. They coulda
been landed from a sub anywhere on a good many thousand miles of coast.
They coulda been hauled anywhere in a station wagon. The plane was a
private-type ship. Plenty of them flying around. It could've been bought
easily enough. All they'd need would be a farm somewhere where it could
land and they could strap on a rocket rack and put in a radar. And
they'd need information. Probably be a good lead, this business. Only
just so many people could know what was coming on this ship, and what
course it was flying, and so on. Security will have to check back from
that angle."
A shadow fell upon the transport ship. A jet shot past from above it. It
waggled its wings and changed course.
"We've got to land and be checked for damage," said the co-pilot
negligently. "These guys will circle us and lead the way--as if we
needed it!"
Joe subsided. He still had in his mind the glamorous and infinitely
alluring picture of the Space Platform floating grandly in its orbit,
with white-hot sunshine on it and a multitude of stars beyond. He had
been completely absorbed in that aspect of the job that dealt with the
method of construction and the technical details by which the Platform
could be made to work.
Now he had a side light on the sort of thing that has to be done when
anything important is achieved. Figuring out how a thing can be done is
only part of the job. Overcoming the obstacles to the apparently
commonplace steps is nine-tenths of the difficulty. It had seemed to him
that the most dramatic aspect of building the Space Platform had been
the achievement of a design that would work in space, that could be
gotten up into space, and that could be lived in under circumstances
never before experienced. Now he saw that getting the materials to the
spot where they were needed called for nearly as much brains and effort.
Screening out spies and destructionists--that would be an even greater
achievement!
He began to feel a tremendous respect and solicitude for the people who
were doing ordinary jobs in the building of the Platform. And he worried
about his own share more than ever.
Presently the transport ship sank toward the clouds. It sped through
them, stone-blind from the mist. And then there was a small airfield
below, and the pilot and co-pilot began a pattern of ritualistic
conversation.
"Pitot and wing heaters?" asked the pilot.
The co-pilot put his hand successively on two controls.
"Off."
"Spark advance?"
The co-pilot moved his hands.
"Take-off and climb?" said the co-pilot.
"Blowers?"
"Low."
"Fuel selectors?"
The co-pilot moved his hands again to the appropriate controls,
verifying that they were as he reported them.
"Main on," he said matter-of-factly, "crossfeed off."
The transport plane slanted down steeply for the landing field that had
looked so small at first, but expanded remarkably as they drew near.
Joe found himself frowning. He began to see how really big a job it was
to get a Space Platform even ready to take off for a journey that in
theory should last forever. It was daunting to think that before a space
ship could be built and powered and equipped with machinery there had to
be such wildly irrelevant plans worked out as a proper check of controls
for the piston-engine ships that flew parts to the job. The details were
innumerable!
But the job was still worth doing. Joe was glad he was going to have a
share in it.
It was a merely misty day. The transport plane stood by the door of a
hangar on this military field, and mechanics stood well back from it and
looked it over. A man crawled over the tail assembly and found one small
hole in the fabric of the stabilizer. A shell fragment had gone through
when the war rockets exploded nearby. The pilot verified that the
fragment had hit no strengthening member inside. He nodded. The mechanic
made very neat fabric patches over the two holes, upper and lower. He
began to go over the fuselage. The pilot turned away.
"I'll go talk to Bootstrap," he told the co-pilot. "You keep an eye on
things."
"I'll keep two eyes on them," said the co-pilot.
The pilot went toward the control tower of the field. Joe looked around.
The transport ship seemed very large, standing on the concrete apron
with its tricycle landing gear let down. It curiously resembled a
misshapen insect, standing elaborately high on inadequate supporting
legs. Its fuselage, in particular, did not look right for an aircraft.
The top of the cargo section went smoothly back to the stabilizing fins,
but the bottom did not taper. It ended astern in a clumsy-looking bulge
that was closed by a pair of huge clamshell doors, opening straight
astern. It was built that way, of course, so that large objects could be
loaded direct into the cargo hold, but it was neither streamlined nor
graceful.
"Did anything get into the cargo hold?" asked Joe in sudden anxiety.
"Did the cases I'm with get hit?"
After all, four rockets had exploded deplorably near the ship. If one
fragment had struck, others might have.
"Nothing big, anyhow," the co-pilot told him. "We'll know presently."
But examination showed no other sign of the ship's recent nearness to
destruction. It had been overstressed, certainly, but ships are built to
take beatings. A spot check on areas where excessive flexing of the
wings would have shown up--a big ship's wings are not perfectly rigid:
they'd come to pieces in the air if they were--presented no evidence of
damage. The ship was ready to take off again.
The co-pilot watched grimly until the one mechanic went back to the side
lines. The mechanic was not cordial. He and all the others regarded the
ship and Joe and the co-pilot with disfavor. They worked on jets, and to
suggest that men who worked on fighter jets were not worthy of complete
confidence did not set well with them. The co-pilot noticed it.
"They think I'm a suspicious heel," he said sourly to Joe, "but I have
to be. The best spies and saboteurs in the world have been hired to mess
up the Platform. When better saboteurs are made, they'll be sent over
here to get busy!"
The pilot came back from the control tower.
"Special flight orders," he told his companion. "We top off with fuel
and get going."
Mechanics got out the fuel hose, dragging it from the pit. One man
climbed up on the wing. Other men handed up the hose. Joe was moved to
comment, but the co-pilot was reading the new flight instructions. It
was one of those moments of inconsistency to which anybody and everybody
is liable. The two men of the ship's crew had it in mind to be
infinitely suspicious of anybody examining their ship. But fueling it
was so completely standard an operation that they merely stood by
absently while it went on. They had the orders to read and memorize,
anyhow.
One wing tank was full. A big, grinning man with sandy hair dragged the
hose under the nose of the plane to take it to the other wing tank.
Close by the nose wheel he slipped and steadied himself by the shaft
which reaches down to the wheel's hub. His position for a moment was
absurdly ungraceful. When he straightened up, his arm slid into the
wheel well. But he dragged the hose the rest of the way and passed it on
up. Then that tank was full and capped. The refueling crew got down to
the ground and fed the hose back to the pit which devoured it. That was
all. But somehow Joe remembered the sandy-haired man and his arm going
up inside the wheel well for a fraction of a second.
The pilot read one part of the flight orders again and tore them
carefully across. One part he touched his pocket lighter to. It burned.
He nodded yet again to the co-pilot, and they swung up and in the
pilots' doorway. Joe followed.
They settled in their places in the cabin. The pilot threw a switch and
pressed a ***. One motor turned over stiffly, and caught. The second.
Third. Fourth. The pilot listened, was satisfied, and pulled back on the
multiple throttle. The plane trundled away. Minutes later it faced the
long runway, a tinny voice from the control tower spoke out of a
loud-speaker under the instruments, and the plane roared down the field.
In seconds it lifted and swept around in a great half-circle.
"Okay," said the pilot. "Wheels up."
The co-pilot obeyed. The telltale lights that showed the wheels
retracted glowed briefly. The men relaxed.
"You know," said the co-pilot, "there was the devil of a time during the
War with sabotage. Down in Brazil there was a field planes used to take
off from to fly to Africa. But they'd take off, head out to sea, get a
few miles offshore, and then blow up. We must've lost a dozen planes
that way! Then it broke. There was a guy--a sergeant--in the maintenance
crew who was sticking a hand grenade up in the nose wheel wells. German,
he was, and very tidy about it, and nobody suspected him. Everything
looked okay and tested okay. But when the ship was well away and the
crew pulled up the wheels, that tightened a string and it pulled the pin
out of the grenade. It went off.... The master mechanic finally caught
him and nearly killed him before the MPs could stop him. We've got to be
plenty careful, whether the ground crews like it or not."
Joe said drily: "You were, except when they were topping off. You took
that for granted." He told about the sandy-haired man. "He hadn't time
to stick anything in the wheel well, though," he added.
The co-pilot blinked. Then he looked annoyed. "Confound it! I didn't
watch! Did you?"
The pilot shook his head, his lips compressed.
The co-pilot said bitterly: "And I thought I was security-conscious!
Thanks for telling me, fella. No harm done this time, but that was a
slip!"
He scowled at the dials before him. The plane flew on.
This was the last leg of the trip, and now it should be no more than an
hour and a half before they reached their destination. Joe felt a lift
of elation. The Space Platform was a realization--or the beginning of
it--of a dream that had been Joe's since he was a very small boy. It was
also the dream of most other small boys at the time. The Space Platform
would make space travel possible. Of course it wouldn't make journeys to
the moon or planets itself, but it would sail splendidly about the Earth
in an orbit some four thousand miles up, and it would gird the world in
four hours fourteen minutes and twenty-two seconds. It would carry
atom-headed guided missiles, and every city in the world would be
defenseless against it. Nobody could even hope for world domination so
long as it floated on its celestial round. Which, naturally, was why
there were such desperate efforts to destroy it before its completion.
But Joe, thinking about the Platform, did not think about it as a
weapon. It was the first rung on the stepladder to the stars. From it
the moon would be reached, certainly. Mars next, most likely. Then
Venus. In time the moons of Saturn, and the twilight zone of Mercury,
and some day the moons of Jupiter. Possibly a landing could be dared on
that giant planet itself, despite its gravity.
The co-pilot spoke suddenly. "How do you rate this trip by cargo plane?"
he asked curiously. "Mostly even generals have to go on the ground. You
rate plenty. How?"
Joe pulled his thoughts back from satisfied imagining. It hadn't
occurred to him that it was remarkable that he should be allowed to
accompany the gyros from the plant to their destination. His family firm
had built them, so it had seemed natural to him. He wasn't used to the
idea that everybody looked suspicious to a security officer concerned
with the safety of the Platform.
"Connections? I haven't any," said Joe. Then he said, "I do know
somebody on the job. There's a Major Holt out there. He might have
cleared me. Known my family for years."
"Yeah," said the co-pilot drily. "He might. As a matter of fact, he's
the senior security officer for the whole job. He's in charge of
everything, from the security guards to the radar screens and the
jet-plane umbrella and the checking of the men who work in the Shed. If
he says you're all right, you probably are."
Joe hadn't meant to seem impressive. He explained: "I don't know him too
well. He knows my father, and his daughter Sally's been kicking around
underfoot most of my life. I taught her how to shoot, and she's a better
shot than I am. She was a nice kid when she was little. I got to like
her when she fell out of a tree and broke her arm and didn't even
whimper. That shows how long ago it was!" He grinned. "She was trying to
act grown-up last time I saw her."
The co-pilot nodded. There was a brisk chirping sound somewhere. The
pilot reached ahead to the course-correction ***. The plane changed
course. Sunshine shifted as it poured into the cabin. The ship was
running on automatic pilot well above the cloud level, and at an
even-numbered number of thousands of feet altitude, as was suitable for
planes traveling south or west. Now it droned on its new course,
forty-five degrees from the original. Joe found himself guessing that
one of the security provisions for planes approaching the Platform might
be that they should not come too near on a direct line to it, lest they
give information to curious persons on the ground.
Time went on. Joe slipped gradually back to his meditations about the
Platform. There was always, in his mind, the picture of a man-made thing
shining in blinding sunlight between Earth and moon. But he began to
remember things he hadn't paid too much attention to before.
Opposition to the bare idea of a Space Platform, for instance, from the
moment it was first proposed. Every dictator protested bitterly. Even
politicians out of office found it a subject for rabble-rousing
harangues. The nationalistic political parties, the peddlers of hate,
the entrepreneurs of discord--every crank in the world had something to
say against the Platform from the first. When they did not roundly
denounce it as impious, they raved that it was a scheme by which the
United States would put itself in position to rule all the Earth. As a
matter of fact, the United States had first proposed it as a United
Nations enterprise, so that denunciations that politicians found good
politics actually made very poor sense. But it did not get past the
General Assembly. The proposal was so rabidly attacked on every side
that it was not even passed up to the Council--where it would certainly
have been vetoed anyhow.
But it was exactly that furious denunciation which put the Platform
through the United States Congress, which had to find the money for its
construction.
In Joe's eyes and in the eyes of most of those who hoped for it from the
beginning, the Platform's great appeal was that it was the necessary
first step toward interplanetary travel, with star ships yet to come.
But most scientists wanted it, desperately, for their own ends. There
were low-temperature experiments, electronic experiments, weather
observations, star-temperature measurements, astronomical
observations.... Any man in any field of science could name reasons for
it to be built. Even the atom scientists had one, and nearly the best.
Their argument was that there were new developments of nuclear theory
that needed to be tried out, but should not be tried out on Earth. There
were some reactions that ought to yield unlimited power for all the
world from really abundant materials. But there was one chance in fifty
that they wouldn't be safe, just because the materials were so abundant.
No sane man would risk a two-per-cent chance of destroying Earth and all
its people, yet those reactions should be tried. In a space ship some
millions of miles out in emptiness they could be. Either they'd be safe
or they would not. But the only way to get a space ship a safe enough
distance from Earth was to make a Space Platform as a starting point.
Then a ship could shoot away from Earth with effectively zero gravity
and full fuel tanks. The Platform should be built so civilization could
surge ahead to new heights!
But despite these excellent reasons, it was the Platform's enemies who
really got it built. The American Congress would never have appropriated
funds for a Platform for pure scientific research, no matter what
peacetime benefits it promised. It was the vehemence of those who hated
it that sold it to Congress as a measure for national defense. And in a
sense it was.
These were ironic aspects Joe hadn't thought about before, just as he
hadn't thought about the need to defend the Platform while it was being
built. Defending it was Sally's father's job, and he wouldn't have a
popular time. Joe wondered idly how Sally liked living out where the
most important job on Earth was being done. She was a nice kid. He
remembered appreciatively that she'd grown up to be a very good-looking
girl. He tended to remember her mostly as the tomboy who could beat him
swimming, but the last time he'd seen her, come to think of it, he'd
been startled to observe how pretty she'd grown. He didn't know anybody
who ought to be better-looking.... She was a really swell girl....
He came to himself again. There was a change in the look of the sky
ahead. There was no actual horizon, of course. There was a white haze
that blended imperceptibly into the cloud layer so that it was
impossible to tell where the sky ended and the clouds or earth began.
But presently there were holes in the clouds. The ship droned on, and
suddenly it floated over the edge of such a hole, and looking down was
very much like looking over the edge of a cliff at solid earth
illimitably far below.
The holes increased in number. Then there were no holes at all, but only
clouds breaking up the clear view of the ground beneath. And presently
again even the clouds were left behind and the air was clear--but still
there was no horizon--and there was brownish earth with small green
patches and beyond was sere brown range. At seventeen thousand feet
there were simply no details.
Soon the clouds were merely a white-tipped elevation of the white haze
to the sides and behind. And then there came a new sound above the
droning roar of the motors. Joe heard it--and then he saw.
Something had flashed down from nowhere. It flashed on ahead and banked
steeply. It was a fighter jet, and for an instant Joe saw the distant
range seem to ripple and dance in its exhaust blast. It circled
watchfully.
The transport pilot manipulated something. There was a change in the
sound of the motors. Joe followed the co-pilot's eyes. The jet fighter
was coming up astern, dive brakes extended to reduce its speed. It
overhauled the transport very slowly. And then the transport's pilot
touched one of the separate prop-controls gently, and again, and again.
Joe, looking at the jet, saw it through the whirling blades. There was
an extraordinary stroboscopic effect. One of the two starboard
propellers, seen through the other, abruptly took on a look which was
not that of mistiness at all, but of writhing, gyrating solidity. The
peculiar appearance vanished, and came again, and vanished and appeared
yet again before it disappeared completely.
The jet shot on ahead. Its dive brakes retracted. It made a graceful,
wallowing, shallow dive, and then climbed almost vertically. It went out
of sight.
"Visual check," said the co-pilot drily, to Joe. "We had a signal to
give. Individual to this plane. We didn't tell it to you. You couldn't
duplicate it."
Joe worked it out painfully. The visual effect of one propeller seen
through another--that was identification. It was not a type of signaling
an unauthorized or uninformed passenger would expect.
"Also," said the co-pilot, "we have a television camera in the
instrument board yonder. We've turned it on now. The interior of the
cabin is being watched from the ground. No more tricks like the phony
colonel and the atom bomb that didn't 'explode.'"
Joe sat quite still. He noticed that the plane was slanting gradually
downward. His eyes went to the dial that showed descent at somewhere
between two and three hundred feet a minute. That was for his benefit.
The cabin was pressurized, though it did not attempt to simulate
sea-level pressure. It was a good deal better than the outside air,
however, and yet too quick a descent meant discomfort. Two to three
hundred feet per minute is about right.
The ground took on features. Small gulleys. Patches of coloration too
small to be seen from farther up. The feeling of speed increased. After
long minutes the plane was only a few thousand feet up. The pilot took
over manual control from the automatic pilot. He seemed to wait. There
was a plaintive, mechanical _beep-beep_ and he changed course.
"You'll see the Shed in a minute or two," said the co-pilot. He added
vexedly, as if the thing had been bothering him, "I wish I hadn't missed
that sandy-haired guy putting his hand in the wheel well! Nothing
happened, but I shouldn't have missed it!"
Joe watched. Very, very far away there were mountains, but he suddenly
realized the remarkable flatness of the ground over which they were
flying. From the edge of the world, behind, to the very edge of these
far-distant hills, the ground was flat. There were gullies and
depressions here and there, but no hills. It was flat, flat, flat....
The plane flew on. There was a tiny glimmer of sunlight. Joe strained
his eyes. The sunlight glinted from the tiniest possible round pip on
the brown earth. It grew as the plane flew on. It was half a cherry
stone. It was half an orange, with gores. It was the top section of a
sphere that was simply too huge to have been made by men.
There was a thin thread of white that ran across the dun-colored range
and reached that half-ball and then ended. It was a highway. Joe
realized that the half-globe was the Shed, the monstrous building made
for the construction of the Space Platform. It was gigantic. It was
colossal. It was the most stupendous thing that men had ever created.
Joe saw a tiny projection near the base of it. It was an office building
for clerks and timekeepers and other white-collar workers. He strained
his eyes again and saw a motor truck on the highway. It looked
extraordinarily flat. Then he saw that it wasn't a single truck but a
convoy of them. A long way back, the white highway was marked by a tiny
dot. That was a motor bus.
There was no sign of activity anywhere, because the scale was so great.
Movement there was, but the things that moved were too small to be seen
by comparison with the Shed. The huge, round, shining half-sphere of
metal stood tranquilly in the midst of emptiness.
It was bigger than the pyramids.
The plane went on, descending. Joe craned his neck, and then he was
ashamed to gawk. He looked ahead, and far away there were white speckles
that would be buildings: Bootstrap, the town especially built for the
men who built the Space Platform. In it they slept and ate and engaged
in the uproarious festivity that men on a construction job crave on
their time off.
The plane dipped noticeably.
"Airfield off to the right," said the co-pilot. "That's for the town and
the job. The jets--there's an air umbrella overhead all the time--have a
field somewhere else. The pushpots have a field of their own, too, where
they're training pilots."
Joe didn't know what a pushpot was, but he didn't ask. He was thinking
about the Shed, which was the greatest building ever put up, and had
been built merely to shelter the greatest hope for the world's peace
while it was put together. He'd be in the Shed presently. He'd work
there, setting up the contents of the crates back in the cargo space,
and finally installing them in the Platform itself.
The pilot said: "Pitot and wing heaters?"
"Off," said the co-pilot.
"Spark and advance----"
Joe didn't listen. He looked down at the sprawling small town with
white-painted barracks and a business section and an obvious, carefully
designed recreation area that nobody would ever use. The plane was
making a great half-circle. The motor noise dimmed as Joe became
absorbed in his anticipation of seeing the Space Platform and having a
hand in its building.
The co-pilot said sharply: "Hold everything!"
Joe *** his head around. The co-pilot had his hand on the wheel
release. His face was tense.
"It don't feel right," he said very, very quietly. "Maybe I'm crazy, but
there was that sandy-haired guy who put his hand up in the wheel well
back at that last field. And this don't feel right!"
The plane swept on. The airfield passed below it. The co-pilot very
cautiously let go of the wheel release, which when pulled should let the
wheels fall down from their wells to lock themselves in landing
position. He moved from his seat. His lips were pinched and tight. He
scrabbled at a metal plate in the flooring. He lifted it and looked
down. A moment later he had a flashlight. Joe saw the edge of a mirror.
There were two mirrors down there, in fact. One could look through both
of them into the wheel well.
The co-pilot made quite sure. He stood up, leaving the plate off the
opening in the floor.
"There's something down in the wheel well," he said in a brittle tone.
"It looks to me like a grenade. There's a string tied to it. At a guess,
that sandy-haired guy set it up like that saboteur sergeant down in
Brazil. Only--it rolled a little. And this one goes off when the wheels
go down. I think, too, if we belly-land----Better go around again, huh?"
The pilot nodded. "First," he said evenly, "we get word down to the
ground about the sandy-haired guy, so they'll get him regardless."
He picked up the microphone hanging above and behind him and began to
speak coldly into it. The transport plane started to swing in wide,
sweeping circles over the desert beyond the airport while the pilot
explained that there was a grenade in the nose wheel well, set to
explode if the wheel were let down or, undoubtedly, if the ship came in
to a belly landing.
Joe found himself astonishingly unafraid. But he was filled with a
pounding rage. He hated the people who wanted to smash the pilot gyros
because they were essential to the Space Platform. He hated them more
completely than he had known he could hate anybody. He was so filled
with fury that it did not occur to him that in any crash or explosive
landing that would ruin the gyros, he would automatically be killed.
3
The pilot made an examination down the floor-plate hole, with a
flashlight to see by and two mirrors to show him the contents of a spot
he could not possibly reach with any instrument. Joe heard his report,
made to the ground by radio.
"It's a grenade," he said coldly. "It took time to fix it the way it is.
At a guess, the ship was ***-trapped at the time of its last overhaul.
But it was arranged that the *** trap had to be set, the trigger
cocked, by somebody doing something very simple at a different place and
later on. We've been flying with that grenade in the wheel well for two
weeks. But it was out of sight. Today, back at the airfield, a
sandy-haired man reached up and pulled a string he knew how to find.
That loosened a slipknot. The grenade rolled down to a new position. Now
when the wheel goes down the pin is pulled. You can figure things out
from that."
It was an excellent sabotage device. If a ship blew up two weeks after
overhaul, it would not be guessed that the bomb had been placed so long
before. Every search would be made for a recent opportunity for the
bomb's placing. A man who merely reached in and pulled a string that
armed the bomb and made it ready for firing would never be suspected.
There might be dozens of planes, now carrying their own destruction
about with them.
The pilot said into the microphone: "Probably...." He listened. "Very
well, sir."
He turned away and nodded to the co-pilot, now savagely keeping the ship
in wide, sweeping circles, the rims of which barely touched the
farthermost corner of the airport on the ground below.
"We've authority to jump," he said briefly. "You know where the chutes
are. But there _is_ a chance I can belly-land without that grenade
blowing. I'm going to try that."
The co-pilot said angrily: "I'll get him a chute." He indicated Joe, and
said furiously, "They've been known to try two or three tricks, just to
make sure. Ask if we should dump cargo before we crash-land!"
The pilot held up the microphone again. He spoke. He listened.
"Okay to dump stuff to lighten ship."
"You won't dump my crates," snapped Joe. "And I'm staying to see you
don't! If you can ride this ship down, so can I!"
The co-pilot got up and scowled at him.
"Anything I can move out, goes. Will you help?"
Joe followed him through the door into the cargo compartment.
The space there was very considerable, and bitterly cold. The crates
from the Kenmore plant were the heaviest items of cargo. Other objects
were smaller. The co-pilot made his way to the rear and pulled a lever.
Great, curved doors opened at the back of the plane. Instantly there was
such a bellowing of motors that all speech was impossible. The co-pilot
pulled out a clip of colored-paper slips and checked one with the
nearest movable parcel. He painstakingly made a check mark and began to
push the box toward the doors.
It was not a conspicuously sane operation. So near the ground, the plane
tended to waver. The air was distinctly bumpy. To push a massive box out
a doorway, so it would tumble down a thousand feet to desert sands, was
not so safe a matter as would let it become tedious. But Joe helped.
They got the box to the door and shoved it out. It went spinning down.
The co-pilot hung onto the doorframe and watched it land. He chose
another box. He checked it. And another. Joe helped. They got them out
of the door and dropping dizzily through emptiness. The plane soared on
in circles. The desert, as seen through the opened clamshell doors,
reeled away astern, and then seemed to tilt, and reeled away again. Joe
and the co-pilot labored furiously. But the co-pilot checked each item
before he jettisoned it.
It was a singularly deliberate way to dump cargo to destruction. A
metal-bound box. Over the edge of the cargo space floor. A piece of
machinery, visible through its crate. A box marked _Instruments_.
_Fragile_. Each one checked off. Each one dumped to drop a thousand feet
or more. A small crated dynamo. This item and that. A crate marked
_Stationery_. It would be printed forms for the timekeepers, perhaps.
But it wasn't.
It dropped out. The plane bellowed on. And suddenly there was a burst of
blue-white flame on the desert below. The box that should have contained
timecards had contained something very much more explosive. As the plane
roared on--rocking from the shock wave of the explosion--Joe saw a
crater and a boiling cloud of smoke and flying sand.
The co-pilot spoke explosively and furiously, in the blasting uproar of
the motors. He vengefully marked the waybill of the parcel that had
exploded. But then they went back to the job of dumping cargo. They
worked well as a team now. In no more than minutes everything was out
except the four crates that were the gyros. The co-pilot regarded them
dourly, and Joe clenched his fists. The co-pilot closed the clamshell
doors, and it became possible to hear oneself think again.
"Ship's lighter, anyhow," reported the co-pilot, back in the cabin.
"Tell 'em this is what exploded."
The pilot took the slip. He plucked down the microphone--exactly like
somebody picking up an interoffice telephone--and reported the waybill
number and description of the case that had been an extra bomb. The ship
carrying the pilot gyros had been ***-trapped--probably with a number
of other ships--and a bomb had been shipped on it, and a special
saboteur with a private plane had shot at it with rockets. The pilot
gyros were critical devices. They had to be on board the Platform when
it took off, and they took months to make and balance. There had been
extra pains taken to prevent their arrival!
"I'm dumping gas now," said the pilot into the microphone, "and then
coming in for a belly landing."
The ship flew straightaway. It flew more lightly, and it bounced a
little. When gas is dumped one has to slow to not more than one hundred
and seventy-five knots and fly level. Then one is supposed to fly five
minutes after dumping with the chutes in the drain position--and even
then there is forty-five minutes of flying fuel still in the tanks.
The ship swept around and headed back for the now far-distant field. It
went slowly lower and lower and lower until it seemed barely to skim the
minor irregularities in the ground. And low like this, the effect of
speed was terrific.
The co-pilot thought of something. Quickly he went back into the cargo
space. He returned with an armful of blankets. He dumped them on the
floor.
"If that grenade does go!" he said sourly.
Joe helped. In the few minutes before Bootstrap loomed near, they filled
the bottom of the cabin with blankets. Especially around the pilots'
chairs. And there was a mound of blanketing above the actual place where
the grenade might be. It made sense. Soft stuff like blankets would
absorb an explosion better than anything else. But the pilot thought the
grenade might not blow.
"Hold fast!" snapped the pilot.
The wing flaps were down. That slowed the ship a little. It had been
lightened. That helped. They went in over the edge of the field less
than man-height high. Joe found his hands closing convulsively on a
handgrip. He saw a crash wagon starting out from the side of the runway.
A fire truck started for the line the plane followed.
Four feet above the rushing sand. Three. The pilot eased back the stick.
His face was craggy and very grim and very hard. The ship's tail went
down and dragged. It bumped. Then the plane careened and slid and
half-whirled crazily, and then the world seemed to come to an end.
Crashes. Bangs. Shrieks of torn metal. Bumps, thumps and grindings. Then
a roaring.
Joe pulled himself loose from where he had been flung--it seemed to him
that he peeled himself loose--and found the pilot struggling up, and he
grabbed him to help, and the co-pilot hauled at them both, and abruptly
all three of them were in the open air and running at full speed away
from the ship.
The roar abruptly became a bellowing. There was an explosion. Flames
sprouted everywhere. The three men ran stumblingly. But even as they
ran, the co-pilot swore.
"We left something!" he panted.
Joe heard a crescendo of booming, crackling noises behind. Something
else exploded dully. But he should be far enough away by now.
He turned to look, and he saw blackening wreckage immersed in roaring
flames. The flames were monstrous. They rose sky-high, it seemed--more
flames than forty-five minutes of gasoline should have produced. As he
looked, something blew up shatteringly, and fire raged even more
furiously. Of course in such heat the delicately adjusted gyros would be
warped and ruined even if the crash hadn't wrecked them beforehand. Joe
made thick, incoherent sounds of rage.
The plane was now an incomplete, twisted skeleton, licked through by
flames. The crash wagon roared to a stop beside them.
"Anybody hurt? Anybody left inside?"
Joe shook his head, unable to speak for despairing rage. The fog wagon
roared up, already spouting mist from its nozzles. Its tanks contained
water treated with detergent so that it broke into the finest of
droplets when sprayed at four hundred pounds pressure. It drenched the
burning wreck with that heavy mist, in which a man would drown. No fire
could possibly sustain itself. In seconds, it seemed, there were only
steam and white vapor and fumes of smoldering substances that gradually
lessened.
But then there was a roaring of motorcycles racing across the field with
a black car trailing them. The car pulled up beside the fog wagon, then
sped swiftly to where Joe was coming out of wild rage and sinking into
sick, black depression. He'd been responsible for the pilot gyros and
their safe arrival. What had happened wasn't his fault, but it was not
his job merely to remain blameless. It was his job to get the gyros
delivered and set up in the Space Platform. He had failed.
The black car braked to a stop. There was Major Holt. Joe had seen him
six months before. He'd aged a good deal. He looked grimly at the two
pilots.
"What happened?" he demanded. "You dumped your fuel! What burned like
this?"
Joe said thickly: "Everything was dumped but the pilot gyros. They
didn't burn! They were packed at the plant!"
The co-pilot suddenly made an incoherent sound of rage. "I've got it!"
he said hoarsely. "I know----"
"What?" snapped Major Holt.
"They--planted that grenade at the--major overhaul!" panted the
co-pilot, too enraged even to swear. "They--fixed it so--any trouble
would mean a wreck! And I--pulled the fire-extinguisher releases just as
we hit! For all compartments! To flood everything with CO_2! But it
wasn't CO_2! That's what burned!"
Major Holt stared sharply at him. He held up his hand. Somebody
materialized beside him. He said harshly: "Get the extinguisher bottles
sealed and take them to the laboratory."
"Yes, sir!"
A man went running toward the wreck. Major Holt said coldly: "That's a
new one. We should have thought of it. You men get yourselves attended
to and report to Security at the Shed."
The pilot and co-pilot turned away. Joe turned to go with them. Then he
heard Sally's voice, a little bit wobbly: "Joe! Come with us, please!"
Joe hadn't seen her, but she was in the car. She was pale. Her eyes were
wide and frightened.
Joe said stiffly: "I'll be all right. I want to look at those
crates----"
Major Holt said curtly: "They're already under guard. There'll have to
be photographs made before anything can be touched. And I want a report
from you, anyhow. Come along!"
Joe looked. The motorcycles were abandoned, and there were already armed
guards around the still-steaming wreck, grimly watching the men of the
fog wagon as they hunted for remaining sparks or flame. It was
noticeable that now nobody moved toward the wreck. There were figures
walking back toward the edge of the field. What civilians were about,
even to the mechanics on duty, had started out to look at the debris at
close range. But the guards were on the job. Nobody could approach. The
onlookers went back to their proper places.
"Please, Joe!" said Sally shakily.
Joe got drearily into the car. The instant he seated himself, it was in
motion again. It went plunging back across the field and out the
entrance. Its horn blared and it went streaking toward the town and
abruptly turned to the left. In seconds it was on a broad white highway
that left the town behind and led toward the emptiness of the desert.
But not quite emptiness. Far, far away there was a great half-globe
rising against the horizon. The car hummed toward it, tires singing. And
Joe looked at it and felt ashamed, because this was the home of the
Space Platform, and he hadn't brought to it the part for which he alone
was responsible.
Sally moistened her lips. She brought out a small box. She opened it.
There were bandages and bottles.
"I've a first-aid kit, Joe," she said shakily. "You're burned. Let me
fix the worst ones, anyhow!"
Joe looked at himself. One coat sleeve was burned to charcoal. His hair
was singed on one side. A trouser leg was burned off around the ankle.
When he noticed, his burns hurt.
Major Holt watched her spread a salve on scorched skin. He showed no
emotion whatever.
"Tell me what happened," he commanded. "All of it!"
Somehow, there seemed very little to tell, but Joe told it baldly as the
car sped on. The great half-ball of metal loomed larger and larger but
did not appear to grow nearer as Sally practiced first aid. They came to
a convoy of trucks, and the horn blared, and they turned out and passed
it. Once they met a convoy of empty vehicles on the way back to
Bootstrap. They passed a bus. They went on.
Joe finished drearily: "The pilots did everything anybody could. Even
checked off the packages as they were dumped. We reported the one that
blew up."
Major Holt said uncompromisingly: "Those were orders. In a sense we've
gained something even by this disaster. The pilots are probably right
about the plane's having been ***-trapped after its last overhaul, and
the traps armed later. I'll have an inspection made immediately, and
we'll see if we can find how it was done.
"There's the man you think armed the trap on this plane. An order for
his arrest is on the way now. I told my secretary. And--hm.... That
CO_2----"
"I didn't understand that," said Joe drearily.
"Planes have CO_2 bottles to put fires out," said the Major impatiently.
"A fire in flight lights a red warning light on the instrument panel,
telling where it is. The pilot pulls a handle, and CO_2 floods the
compartment, putting it out. And this ship was coming in for a crash
landing so the pilot--according to orders--flooded all compartments with
CO_2. Only it wasn't."
Sally said in horror: "Oh, no!"
"The CO_2 bottles were filled with an inflammable or an explosive gas,"
said her father, unbending. "Instead of making a fire impossible, they
made it certain. We'll have to watch out for that trick now, too."
Joe was too disheartened for any emotion except a bitter depression and
a much more bitter hatred of those who were ready to commit any
crime--and had committed most--in the attempt to destroy the Platform.
The Shed that housed it rose and rose against the skyline. It became
huge. It became monstrous. It became unbelievable. But Joe could have
wept when the car pulled up at an angular, three-story building built
out from the Shed's base. From the air, this substantial building had
looked like a mere chip. The car stopped. They got out. A sentry saluted
as Major Holt led the way inside. Joe and Sally followed.
The Major said curtly to a uniformed man at a desk: "Get some clothes
for this man. Get him a long-distance telephone connection to the
Kenmore Precision Tool Company. Let him talk. Then bring him to me
again."
He disappeared. Sally tried to smile at Joe. She was still quite pale.
"That's Dad, Joe. He means well, but he's not cordial. I was in his
office when the report of sabotage to your plane came through. We
started for Bootstrap. We were on the way when we saw the first
explosion. I--thought it was your ship." She winced a little at the
memory. "I knew you were on board. It was--not nice, Joe."
She'd been badly scared. Joe wanted to thump her encouragingly on the
back, but he suddenly realized that that would no longer be appropriate.
So he said gruffly: "I'm all right."
He followed the uniformed man. He began to get out of his scorched and
tattered garments. The sergeant brought him more clothes, and he put
them on. He was just changing his personal possessions to the new
pockets when the sergeant came back again.
"Kenmore plant on the line, sir."
Joe went to the phone. On the way he discovered that the banging around
he'd had when the plane landed had made a number of places on his body
hurt.
He talked to his father.
Afterward, he realized that it was a *** conversation. He felt guilty
because something had happened to a job that had taken eight months to
do and that he alone was escorting to its destination. He told his
father about that. But his father didn't seem concerned. Not nearly so
much concerned as he should have been. He asked urgent questions about
Joe himself. If he was hurt. How much? Where? Joe was astonished that
his father seemed to think such matters more important than the pilot
gyros. But he answered the questions and explained the exact situation
and also a certain desperate hope he was trying to cherish that the
gyros might still be repairable. His father gave him advice.
Sally was waiting again when he came out. She took him into her father's
office, and introduced him to her father's secretary. Compared to Sally
she was an extraordinarily plain woman. She wore a sorrowful expression.
But she looked very efficient.
Joe explained carefully that his father said for him to hunt up Chief
Bender--working on the job out here--because he was one of the few men
who'd left the Kenmore plant to work elsewhere, and he was good. He and
the Chief, between them, would estimate the damage and the possibility
of repair.
Major Holt listened. He was military and official and harassed and curt
and tired. Joe'd known Sally and therefore her father all his life, but
the Major wasn't an easy man to be relaxed with. He spoke into thin air,
and immediately his sad-seeming secretary wrote out a pass for Joe. Then
Major Holt gave crisp orders on a telephone and asked questions, and
Sally said: "I know. I'll take him there. I know my way around."
Her father's expression did not change. He simply included Sally in his
orders on the phone.
He hung up and said briefly: "The plane will be surveyed and taken apart
as soon as possible. By the time you find your man you can probably
examine the crates. I'll have you cleared for it."
His secretary reached in a drawer for order forms to fill out and hand
him to sign. Sally tugged at Joe's arm. They left.
Outside, she said: "There's no use arguing with my father, Joe. He has a
terrible job, and it's on his mind all the time. He hates being a
Security officer, too. It's a thankless job--and no Security officer
ever gets to be more than a major. His ability never shows. What he does
is never noticed unless it fails. So he's frustrated. He's got poor Miss
Ross--his secretary, you know--so she just listens to what he says must
be done and she writes it out. Sometimes he goes days without speaking
to her directly. But really it's pretty bad! It's like a war with no
enemy to fight except spies! And the things they do! They've been known
even to ***-trap a truck after an accident, so anybody who tries to
help will be blown up! So everything has to be done in a certain way or
everything will be ruined!"
She led him to an office with a door that opened directly into the Shed.
In spite of his bitterness, Joe was morosely impatient to see inside.
But Sally had to identify him formally as the Joe Kenmore who was the
subject of her father's order, and his fingerprints had to be taken, and
somebody had him stand for a moment before an X-ray screen. Then she led
him through the door, and he was in the Shed where the Space Platform
was under construction.
It was a vast cavern of metal sheathing and spidery girders, filled with
sound and detail. It took him seconds to begin to absorb what he saw and
heard. The Shed was five hundred feet high in the middle, and it was all
clear space without a single column or interruption. There were arc
lamps burning about its edges, and high up somewhere there were strips
of glass which let in a pale light. All of it resounded with many noises
and clanging echoes of them.
There were rivet guns at work, and there were the grumblings of motor
trucks moving about, and the oddly harsh roar of welding torches. But
the torch flames looked only like marsh fires, blue-white and eerie
against the mass of the thing that was being built.
It was not too clear to the eye, this incomplete Space Platform. There
seemed to be a sort of mist, a glamour about it, which was partly a
veiling mass of scaffolding. But Joe gazed at it with an emotion that
blotted out even his aching disappointment and feeling of shame.
It was gigantic. It had the dimensions of an ocean liner. It was
strangely shaped. Partly obscured by the fragile-seeming framework about
it, there was bright plating in swelling curves, and the plating reached
up irregularly and followed a peculiar pattern, and above the plating
there were girders--themselves shining brightly in the light of many arc
lamps--and they rose up and up toward the roof of the Shed itself. The
Platform was ungainly and it was huge, and it rested under a hollow
metal half-globe that could have doubled for a sky. It was more than
three hundred feet high, itself, and there were men working on the bare
bright beams of its uppermost parts--and the men were specks. The far
side of the Shed's floor had other men on it, and they were merely
jerkily moving motes. You couldn't see their legs as they walked. The
Shed and the Platform were monstrous!
Joe felt Sally's eyes upon him. Somehow, they looked proud. He took a
deep breath.
She said: "Come on."
They walked across acres of floor neatly paved with shining wooden
blocks. They moved toward the thing that was to take mankind's first
step toward the stars. As they walked centerward, a big sixteen-wheel
truck-and-trailer outfit backed out of an opening under the lacy haze of
scaffolds. It turned clumsily, and carefully circled the scaffolding,
and moved toward a sidewall of the Shed. A section of the wall--it
seemed as small as a rabbit hole--lifted inward like a flap, and the
sixteen-wheeler trundled out into the blazing sunlight. Four other
trucks scurried out after it. Other trucks came in. The sidewall section
closed.
There was the smell of engine fumes and hot metal and of ozone from
electric sparks. There was that indescribable smell a man can get
homesick for, of metal being worked by men. Joe walked like someone in a
dream, with Sally satisfiedly silent beside him, until the
scaffolds--which had looked like veiling--became latticework and he saw
openings.
They walked into one such tunnel. The bulk of the Platform above them
loomed overhead with a crushing menace. There were trucks rumbling all
around underneath, here in this maze of scaffold columns. Some carried
ready-loaded cages waiting to be snatched up by hoists. Crane grips came
down, and snapped fast on the cages, and lifted them up and up and out
of sight. There was a Diesel running somewhere, and a man stood and
stared skyward and made motions with his hands, and the Diesel adjusted
its running to his signals. Then some empty cages came down and landed
in a waiting truck body with loud clanking noises. Somebody cast off the
hooks, and the truck grumbled and drove away.
Sally spoke to a preoccupied man in shirt sleeves with a badge on an arm
band near his shoulder. He looked carefully at the passes she carried,
using a flashlight to make sure. Then he led them to a shaft up which a
hoist ran. It was very noisy here. A rivet gun banged away overhead, and
the plates of the Platform rang with the sound, and the echoes
screeched, and to Joe the bedlam was infinitely good to hear. The man
with the arm band shouted into a telephone transmitter, and a hoist cage
came down. Joe and Sally stepped on it. Joe took a firm grip on her
shoulder, and the hoist shot upward.
The hugeness of the Shed and the Platform grew even more apparent as the
hoist accelerated toward the roof. The flooring seemed to expand.
Spidery scaffold beams dropped past them. There were things being built
over by the sidewall. Joe saw a crawling in-plant tow truck moving past
those enigmatic objects. It was a tiny truck, no more than four feet
high and with twelve-inch wheels. It dragged behind it flat plates of
metal with upturned forward edges. They slid over the floor like
sledges. Cryptic loads were carried on those plates, and the tow truck
stopped by a mass of steel piping being put together, and began to
unload the plates.
Then the hoist slowed abruptly and Sally winced a little. The hoist
stopped.
Here--two hundred feet up--a welding crew worked on the skin of the
Platform itself. The plating curved in and there was a wide flat space
parallel to the ground. There was also a great gaping hole beyond.
Though girders rose roofward even yet, this was as high as the plating
had gone. That opening--Joe guessed--would ultimately be the door of an
air lock, and this flat surface was designed for a tender rocket to
anchor to by magnets. When a rocket came up from Earth with supplies or
reliefs for the Platform's crew, or with fuel to be stored for an
exploring ship's later use, it would anchor here and then inch toward
that doorway....
There were half a dozen men in the welding crew. They should have been
working. But two men battered savagely at each other, their tools thrown
down. One was tall and lean, with a wrinkled face and an expression of
intolerable fury. The other was squat and dark with a look of
desperation. A third man was in the act of putting down his welding
torch--he'd carefully turned it off first--to try to interfere. Another
man gaped. Still another was climbing up by a ladder from the scaffold
level below.
Joe put Sally's hand on the hoist upright, instinctively freeing himself
for action.
The lanky man lashed out a terrific roundhouse blow. It landed, but the
stocky man bored in. Joe had an instant's clear sight of his face. It
was not the face of a man enraged. It had the look of a man both
desperate and despairing.
Then the lanky man's foot slipped. He lost balance, and the stocky man's
fist landed. The thin man reeled backward. Sally cried out, choking. The
lanky man teetered on the edge of the flat place. Behind him, the
plating curved down. Below him there were two hundred feet of fall
through the steel-pipe maze of scaffolds. If he took one step back he
was gone inexorably down a slope on which he could never stop.
He took that step. The stocky man's face abruptly froze in horror. The
lanky man stiffened convulsively. He couldn't stop. He knew it. He'd go
back and on over the rounded edge, and fall. He might touch the
scaffolding. It would not stop him. It would merely set his body
spinning crazily as it dropped and crashed again and again before it
landed two hundred feet below.
It was horror in slow motion, watching the lean man stagger backward to
his death.
Then Joe leaped.
4
For an instant, in mid-air, Joe was incongruously aware of all the
noises in the Shed. The murky, girdered ceiling still three hundred feet
above him. The swelling, curving, glittering surface of steel
underneath. Then he struck. He landed beside the lean man, with his left
arm outstretched to share his impetus with him. Alone, he would have had
momentum enough to carry himself up the slope down which the man had
begun to descend. But now he shared it. The two of them toppled forward
together. Their arms were upon the flat surface, while their bodies
dangled. The feel of gravity pulling them slantwise and downward was
purest nightmare.
But then, as Joe's innards crawled, the same stocky man who had knocked
the lean man back was dragging frantically at both of them to pull them
to safety.
Then there were two men pulling. The stocky man's face was gray. His
horror was proof that he hadn't intended ***. The man who'd put down
his welding torch pulled. The man who'd been climbing the ladder put his
weight to the task of getting them back to usable footing. They reached
safety. Joe scrambled to his feet, but he felt sick at the pit of his
stomach. The stocky man began to shake horribly. The lanky one advanced
furiously upon him.
"I didn' mean to keel you, Haney!" the dark one panted.
The lanky one snapped: "Okay. You didn't. But come on, now! We finish
this----"
He advanced toward the workman who had so nearly caused his death. But
the other man dropped his arms to his sides.
"I don' fight no more," he said thickly. "Not here. You keel me is okay.
I don' fight."
The lanky man--Haney--growled at him.
"Tonight, then, in Bootstrap. Now get back to work!"
The stocky man picked up his tools. He was trembling.
Haney turned to Joe and said ungraciously: "Much obliged. What's up?"
Joe still felt queasy. There is rarely any high elation after one has
risked his life for somebody else. He'd nearly plunged two hundred feet
to the floor of the Shed with Haney. But he swallowed.
"I'm looking for Chief Bender. You're Haney? Foreman?"
"Gang boss," said Haney. He looked at Joe and then at Sally who was
holding convulsively to the upright Joe had put her hand on. Her eyes
were closed. "Yeah," said Haney. "The Chief took off today. Some kind of
*** stuff. Funeral, maybe. Want me to tell him something? I'll see him
when I go off shift."
There was an obscure movement somewhere on this part of the Platform. A
tiny figure came out of a crevice that would someday be an air lock. Joe
didn't move his eyes toward it. He said awkwardly: "Just tell him Joe
Kenmore's in town and needs him. He'll remember me, I think. I'll hunt
him up tonight."
"Okay," said Haney.
Joe's eyes went to the tiny figure that had come out from behind the
plating. It was a midget in baggy, stained work garments like the rest
of the men up here. He wore a miniature welding shield pushed back on
his head. Joe could guess his function, of course. There'd be corners a
normal-sized man couldn't get into, to buck a rivet or weld a joint.
There'd be places only a tiny man could properly inspect. The midget
regarded Joe without expression.
Joe turned to the hoist to go down to the floor again. Haney waved his
hand. The midget lifted his, in grave salutation.
The hoist dropped down the shaft. Sally opened her eyes.
"You--saved that man's life, Joe," she said unsteadily. "But you scared
me to death!"
Joe tried to ignore the remark, but he still seemed to feel slanting
metal under him and a drop of two hundred feet below. It had been a
nightmarish sensation.
"I didn't think," he said uncomfortably. "It was a crazy thing to do.
Lucky it worked out."
Sally glanced at him. The hoist still dropped swiftly. Levels of
scaffolding shot upward past them. If Joe had slipped down that rolling
curve of metal, he'd have dropped past all these. It was not good to
think about. He swallowed again. Then the hoist checked in its descent.
It stopped. Joe somewhat absurdly helped Sally off to solid ground.
"It--looks to me," said Sally, "as if you're bound to make me see
somebody killed. Joe, would you mind leading a little bit less
adventurous life for a while? While I'm around?"
He managed to grin. But he still did not feel right.
"Nothing I can do until I can look at the plane," he said, changing the
subject, "and I can't find the Chief until tonight. Could we sightsee a
little?"
She nodded. They went out from under the intricate framework that upheld
the Platform. They went, in fact, completely under that colossal
incomplete object. Sally indicated the sidewall.
"Let's go look at the pushpots. They're fascinating!"
She led the way. The enormous spaciousness of the Shed again became
evident. There was a catwalk part way up the inward curving wall.
Someone leaned on its railing and surveyed the interior of the Shed. He
would probably be a security man. Maybe the fist fight up on the
Platform had been seen, or maybe not. The man on the catwalk was hardly
more than a speck, and it occurred to Joe that there must be other
watchers' posts high up on the outer shell where men could search the
sunlit desert outside for signs of danger.
But he turned and looked yearningly back at the monstrous thing under
the mist of scaffolding. For the first time he could make out its shape.
It was something like an egg, but a great deal more like something he
couldn't put a name to. Actually it was exactly like nothing in the
world but itself, and when it was out in space there would be nothing
left on Earth like it.
It would be in a fashion a world in itself, independent of the Earth
that made it. There would be hydroponic tanks in which plants would grow
to purify its air and feed its crew. There would be telescopes with
which men would be able to study the stars as they had never been able
to do from the bottom of Earth's ocean of turbulent air. But it would
serve Earth.
There would be communicators. They would pick up microwave messages and
retransmit them to destinations far around the curve of the planet, or
else store them and retransmit them to the other side of the world an
hour or two hours later.
It would store fuel with which men could presently set out for the
stars--and out to emptiness for nuclear experiments that must not be
made on Earth. And finally it would be armed with squat, deadly atomic
missiles that no nation could possibly defy. And so this Space Platform
would keep peace on Earth.
But it could not make good will among men.
Sally walked on. They reached the mysterious objects being manufactured
in a row around half the sidewall of the Shed. They were of simple
design and, by comparison, not unduly large. The first objects were
merely frameworks of metal pipe, which men were welding together
unbreakably. They were no bigger than--say--half of a six-room house. A
little way on, these were filled with intricate arrays of tanks and
piping, and still farther--there was a truck and hoist unloading a
massive object into place right now--there were huge engines fitting
precisely into openings designed to hold them. Others were being plated
in with metallic skins.
At the very end of this assembly line a crane was loading a finished
object onto a flat-bed trailer. As it swung in the air, Joe realized
what it was. It might be called a jet plane, but it was not of any type
ever before used. More than anything else, it looked like a beetle. It
would not be really useful for anything but its function at the end of
Operation Stepladder. Then hundreds of these ungainly objects would
cluster upon the Platform's sides, like swarming bees. They would thrust
savagely up with their separate jet engines. They would lift the
Platform from the foundation on which it had been built. Tugging,
straining, panting, they would get it out of the Shed. But their work
would not end there. Holding it aloft, they would start it eastward,
lifting effortfully. They would carry it as far and as high and as fast
as their straining engines could work. Then there would be one last
surge of fierce thrusting with oversize jato rockets, built separately
into each pushpot, all firing at once.
Finally the clumsy things would drop off and come bumbling back home,
while the Platform's own rockets flared out their mile-long flames--and
it headed up for emptiness.
But the making of these pushpots and all the other multitudinous
activities of the Shed would have no meaning if the contents of four
crates in the wreckage of a burned-out plane could not be salvaged and
put to use again.
Joe said restlessly: "I want to see all this, Sally, and maybe anything
else I do is useless, but I've got to find out what happened to the
gyros I was bringing here!"
Sally said nothing. She turned, and they moved across the long, long
space of wood-block flooring toward the doorway by which they had
entered. And now that he had seen the Space Platform, all of Joe's
feeling of guilt and despondency came back. It seemed unbearable. They
went out through the guarded door, Sally surrendered the pass, and Joe
was again checked carefully before he was free to go.
Then Sally said: "You don't want me tagging around, do you?"
Joe said honestly: "It isn't exactly that, Sally, but if the stuff is
really smashed, I'd--rather not have anybody see me. Please don't be
angry, but--"
Sally said quietly: "I know. I'll get somebody to drive you over."
She vanished. She came back with the uniformed man who'd driven Major
Holt. She put her hand momentarily on Joe's arm.
"If it's really bad, Joe, tell me. You won't let yourself cry, but I'll
cry for you." She searched his eyes. "Really, Joe!"
He grinned feebly and went out to the car.
The feeling on the way to the airfield was not a good one. It was
twenty-odd miles from the Shed, but Joe dreaded what he was going to
see. The black car burned up the road. It turned to the right off the
white highway, onto the curved short cut--and there was the field.
And there was the wreck of the transport plane, still where it had
crashed and burned. There were still armed guards about it, but men were
working on the wreck, cutting it apart with torches. Already some of it
was dissected.
Joe went to the remains of the four crates.
The largest was bent askew by the force of the crash or an explosion,
Joe didn't know which. The smallest was a twisted mass of charcoal. Joe
gulped, and dug into them with borrowed tools.
The pilot gyros of the Space Platform would apply the torque that would
make the main gyros shift it to any desired position, or else hold it
absolutely still. They were to act, in a sense, as a sort of steering
engine on the take-off and keep a useful function out in space. If a
star photograph was to be made, it was essential that the Platform hold
absolutely still while the exposure lasted. If a guided missile was to
be launched, it must be started right, and the pilot gyros were needed.
To turn to receive an arriving rocket from Earth....
The pilot gyros were the steering apparatus of the Space Platform. They
had to be more than adequate. They had to be perfect! On the take-off
alone, they were starkly necessary. The Platform couldn't hope to reach
its orbit without them.
Joe chipped away charred planks. He pulled off flame-eaten timbers. He
peeled off carbonized wrappings--but some did not need to be peeled:
they crumbled at a touch--and in twenty minutes he knew the whole story.
The rotor motors were ruined. The couplers--pilot-to-main-gyro connections--had been heated red hot and were
no longer hardened steel; their dimensions had changed and they would
no longer fit. But these were not disastrous items. They were serious,
but not tragic.
The tragedy was the gyros themselves. On their absolute precision and
utterly perfect balance the whole working of the Platform would depend.
And the rotors were gashed in one place, and the shafts were bent. Being
bent and nicked, the precision of the apparatus was destroyed. Its
precision lost, the whole device was useless. And it had taken four
months' work merely to get it perfectly balanced!
It had been the most accurate piece of machine work ever done on Earth.
It was balanced to a microgram--to a millionth of the combined weight of
three aspirin tablets. It would revolve at 40,000 revolutions per
minute. It had to balance perfectly or it would vibrate intolerably. If
it vibrated at all it would shake itself to pieces, or, failing that,
send aging sound waves through all the Platform's substance. If it
vibrated by the least fraction of a ten-thousandth of an inch, it would
wear, and vibrate more strongly, and destroy itself and possibly the
Platform. It needed the precision of an astronomical telescope's
lenses--multiplied! And it was bent. It was exactly as useless as if it
had never been made at all.
Joe felt as a man might feel if the mirror of the greatest telescope on
earth, in his care, had been smashed. As if the most priceless picture
in the world, in his charge, had been burned. But he felt worse. Whether
it was his fault or not--and it wasn't--it was destroyed.
A truck rolled up and was stopped by a guard. There was talk, and the
guard let it through. A small crane lift came over from the hangars. Its
normal use was the lifting of plane motors in and out of their nacelles.
Now it was to pick up the useless pieces of equipment on which the best
workmen and the best brains of the Kenmore Precision Tool Company had
worked unceasingly for eight calendar months, and which now was junk.
Joe watched, numbed by disaster, while the crane hook went down to
position above the once-precious objects. Men shored up the heavy things
and ran planks under them, and then deftly fitted rope slings for them
to be lifted by. It was late afternoon by now. Long shadows were
slanting as the crane truck's gears whined, and the slack took up, and
the first of the four charred objects lifted and swung, spinning slowly,
to the truck that had come from the Shed.
Joe froze, watching. He watched the second. The third did not spin. It
merely swayed. But the fourth.... The lines up to the crane hook were
twisted. As the largest of the four crates lifted from its bed, it
twisted the lines toward straightness. It spun. It spun more and more
rapidly, and then more and more slowly, and stopped, and began to spin
back.
Then Joe caught his breath. It seemed that he hadn't breathed in
minutes. The big crate wasn't balanced. It was spinning. It wasn't
vibrating. It spun around its own center of gravity, unerringly revealed
by its flexible suspension.
He watched until it was dropped into the truck. Then he went stiffly
over to the driver of the car that had brought him.
"Everything's all right," he said, feeling a *** astonishment at his
own words. "I'm going to ride back to the Shed with the stuff I brought.
It's not hurt too much. I'll be able to fix it with a man or two I can
pick up out here. But I don't want anything else to happen to it!"
So he rode back out to the Shed on the tailboard of the truck that
carried the crates. The sun set as he rode. He was smudged and
disheveled. The reek of charred wood and burnt insulation and scorched
wrappings was strong in his nostrils. But he felt very much inclined to
sing.
It occurred to Joe that he should have sent Sally a message that she
didn't need to cry as a substitute for him. He felt swell! He knew how
to do the job that would let the Space Platform take off! He'd tell her,
first chance.
It was very good to be alive.
5
There was nobody in the world to whom the Space Platform was
meaningless. To Joe and a great many people like him, it was a dream
long and stubbornly held to and now doggedly being made a reality. To
some it was the prospect of peace and the hope of a quiet life: children
and grandchildren and a serene look forward to the future. Some people
prayed yearningly for its success, though they could have no other share
in its making. And of course there were those men who had gotten into
power and could not stay there without ruthlessness. They knew what the
Platform would mean to their kind. For, once world peace was certain,
they would be killed by the people they ruled over. So they sent grubby,
desperate men to wreck it at any cost. They were prepared to pay for or
to commit any crime if the Space Platform could be smashed and turmoil
kept as the norm of life on Earth.
And there were the people who were actually doing the building.
Joe rode a bus into Bootstrap that night with some of them. The middle
shift--two to ten o'clock--was off. Fleets of busses rolled out from the
small town twenty miles away, their headlights making a procession of
paired flames in the darkness. They rolled into the unloading area and
disgorged the late shift--ten to six--to be processed by security and
admitted to the Shed. Then, quite empty, the busses went trundling
around to where Joe waited with the released shift milling around him.
The busses stopped and opened their doors. The waiting men stormed in,
shoving zestfully, calling to each other, scrambling for seats or merely
letting themselves be pushed on board. The bus Joe found himself on was
jammed in seconds. He held on to a strap and didn't notice. He was
absorbed in the rapt contemplation of his idea for the repair of the
pilot gyros. The motors could be replaced easily enough. The foundation
of his first despair had been the belief that everything could be
managed but one thing; that the all-important absolute accuracy was the
only thing that couldn't be achieved. Getting that accuracy, back at the
plant, had consumed four months of time. Each of the gyros was four feet
in diameter and weighed five hundred pounds. Each spun at 40,000 r.p.m.
It had to be machined from a special steel to assure that it would not
fly to pieces from sheer centrifugal force. Each was plated with iridium
lest a speck of rust form and throw it off balance. If the shaft and
bearings were not centered exactly at the center of gravity of the
rotors--five hundred pounds of steel off balance at 40,000 r.p.m. could
raise the devil. They could literally wreck the Platform itself. And
"exactly at the center of gravity" meant exactly. There could be no
error by which the shaft was off center by the thousandth of an inch, or
a ten-thousandth, or even the tenth of a ten-thousandth. The accuracy
had to be absolute.
Gloating over the solution he'd found, Joe could have hugged himself.
Hanging to a strap in the waiting bus, he saw another bus start off with
a grinding of gears and a spouting of exhaust smoke. It trundled to the
highway and rolled away. Another and another followed it. Joe's bus fell
in line. They headed for Bootstrap in a convoy, a long, long string of
lighted vehicles running one behind the other.
It was dark outside. The Shed was alone, for security. It was twenty
miles from the town where its work force slept and ate and made merry.
That was security too. One shift came off, and went through a security
check, and during that time the Shed was empty save for the security
officers who roamed it endlessly, looking for trouble. Sometimes they
found it. The shift coming on also passed through a security check.
Nobody could get into the Shed without being identified past question.
The picture-badge stage was long since passed on the Space Platform job.
Security was tight!
The long procession of busses rolled through the night. Outside was dark
desert. Overhead were many stars. Inside the jammed bus were swaying
figures crowded in the aisle, and every seat was filled. There was the
smell of sweat, and oil, and tobacco. Somebody still had garlic on his
breath from lunch. There was the noise of many voices. There was an
argument two seats up the aisle. There was the rumble of the motor, and
the peculiar whine of spinning tires. Men had to raise their voices to
be heard above the din.
A swaying among the crowded figures more pronounced than that caused by
the motion of the bus caught Joe's eye. Somebody was crowding his way
from the back toward the front. The aisle was narrow. Joe clung to his
strap, thinking hard and happily about the rebalancing of the gyros.
There could be no tolerance. It had to be exact. There had to be no
vibration at all....
Figures swayed away from him. A hand on his shoulder.
"Hiya."
He swung around. It was the lean man, Haney, whom he'd kept from being
knocked off the level place two hundred feet up.
Joe said: "Hello."
"I thought you were big brass," said Haney, rumbling in his ear. "But
big brass don't ride the busses."
"I'm going in to try to hunt up the Chief," said Joe.
Haney grunted. He looked estimatingly at Joe. His glance fell to Joe's
hands. Joe had been digging further into the crates, and afterward he'd
washed up, but packing grease is hard to get off. When mixed with soot
and charcoal it leaves signs. Haney relaxed.
"We mostly eat together," he observed, satisfied that Joe was regular
because his hands weren't soft and because mechanic's soap had done an
incomplete job on them. "The Chief's a good guy. Join us?"
"Sure!" said Joe. "And thanks."
A brittle voice sounded somewhere around Haney's knees. Joe looked down,
startled. The midget he'd seen up on the Platform nodded up at him. He'd
squirmed through the press in Haney's wake. He seemed to bristle a
little out of pure habit. Joe made room for him.
"I'm okay," said the midget pugnaciously.
Haney made a formal introduction.
"Mike Scandia." He thumbed at Joe. "Joe Kenmore. He's eating with us.
Wants to find the Chief."
There had been no reference to the risk Joe had run in keeping Haney
from a two-hundred-foot fall. But now Haney said approvingly: "I wanted
to say thanks anyhow for keeping your mouth shut. New here?"
Joe nodded. The noise in the bus made any sort of talk difficult. Haney
appeared used to it.
"Saw you with--uh--Major Holt's daughter," he observed again. "That's
why I thought you were brass. Figured one or the other'd tell on Braun.
You didn't, or somebody'd've raised Cain. But I'll handle it."
Braun would be the man Haney had been fighting. If Haney wanted to
handle it his way, it was naturally none of Joe's business. He said
nothing.
"Braun's a good guy," said Haney. "Crazy, that's all. He picked that
fight. Picked it! Up there! Coulda been him knocked off--and I'd ha'
been in a mess! I'll see him tonight."
The midget said something biting in his peculiarly cracked and brittle
voice.
The bus rolled and rolled and rolled. It was a long twenty miles to
Bootstrap. The desert outside the bus windows was utterly black and
featureless, but once a convoy of trucks passed, going to the Shed.
Presently, though, lights twinkled in the night. Again the bus slowed,
in column with the others. Then there were barrackslike buildings,
succeeding each other, and then there was a corner and suddenly the
outside was ablaze with light. The busses drew up to the curb and
stopped, and everybody was immediately in a great hurry to get out,
shoving unnecessarily, and Joe let himself be carried along by the
crowd.
He found himself on the sidewalk with bright neon signs up and down the
street. He was in the midst of the crowd which was the middle shift
released. It eddied and dispersed without seeming to lessen. Most of the
figures in sight were men. There were very, very few women. The neon
signs proclaimed that here one could buy beer, and that this was Fred's
Place, and that was Sid's Steak Joint. Bowling. Pool. A store--still
open for this shift's trade--sold fancy shirts and strictly practical
work clothes and highly eccentric items of personal adornment. A movie
house. A second. A third. Somewhere a record shop fed repetitious music
to the night air. There was movement and crowding and jostling, but the
middle of the street was almost empty save for the busses. There were
some bicycles, but practically no other wheeled traffic. After all,
Bootstrap was strictly a security town. A man could leave whenever he
chose, but there were formalities, and personal cars weren't practical.
"Chief'll be yonder," said Haney in Joe's ear. "Come along."
They shouldered their way along the sidewalk. The passers-by were of a
type--construction men. Somebody here had taken part in the building of
every skyscraper and bridge and dam put up in Joe's lifetime. They could
have been kept away from the Space Platform job only by a flat refusal
by security to let them be hired.
Haney and Joe moved toward Sid's Steak Joint, with Mike the midget
marching truculently between them. Men nodded to them as they passed.
Joe marshaled in his mind what he was going to tell the Chief. He had a
trick for fixing the pilot gyros. A speck of rust would spoil them, and
they had been through a plane crash and a fire and explosions, but his
trick would do, in ten days or less, what the plant back home had needed
four months to accomplish. The trick was something to gloat over.
Into Sid's Steak Joint. A juke box was playing. Over in a booth, four
men ate hungrily, with a slot TV machine in the wall beside them showing
wrestling matches out in San Francisco. A waiter carried a huge tray
from which steam and fragrant odors arose.
There was the Chief, dark and saturnine to look at, with his straight
black hair gleaming in the light. He was a Mohawk, and he and his tribe
had taken to steel construction work a long time back. They were good.
There were not many big construction jobs on which the Chief's tribesmen
were not to be found working. Forty of them had died together in the
worst construction accident in history, when a bridge on its way to
completion collapsed in the making, but there were a dozen or more at
work on the Space Platform now. The Chief had essayed machine-tool work
at the Kenmore plant, and he'd been good. He'd pitched on the plant
baseball team, and he'd sung bass in the church choir, but there had
been nobody else around who talked Indian, and he'd gotten lonely. At
that, though, he'd left because the Space Platform began and wild horses
couldn't have kept him away from a job like that!
He'd held a table for Haney and Mike, but his eyes widened when he saw
Joe. Then he grinned and almost upset the table to stand up and greet
him.
"Son-of-a-gun!" he said warmly. "What you doin' here?"
"Right now," said Joe. "I'm looking for you. I've got a job for you."
The Chief, still grinning, shook his head.
"Not me, I'm here till the Platform's done."
"It's on the job," said Joe. "I've got to get a crew together to repair
something I brought out here today and that got smashed in the landing."
The four of them sat down. Mike's chin was barely above the table top.
The Chief waved to a waiter. "Steaks all around!" he bellowed. Then he
bent toward Joe. "Shoot it!"
Joe told his story. Concisely. The pilot gyros, which had to be perfect,
had been especially gunned at by saboteurs. An attack with possibly
stolen proximity-fused rockets. The plane was ***-trapped, and
somebody at an airfield had had a chance to spring the trap. So it was
wreckage. Crashed and burned on landing.
The Chief growled. Haney pressed his lips together. The eyes of Mike
were burning.
"Plenty of that sabotage stuff," growled the Chief. "Hard to catch the
so-and-sos. Smash the gyros and the take-off'd have to wait till new
ones got made--and that's more time for more sabotage."
Joe said carefully: "I think it can be licked. Listen a minute, will
you?"
The Chief fixed his eyes upon him.
"The gyros have to be rebalanced," said Joe. "They have to spin on their
own center of gravity. At the plant, they set them up, spun them, and
found which side was heavy. They took metal off till it ran smoothly at
five hundred r.p.m. Then they spun it at a thousand. It vibrated. They
found imbalance that was too small to show up before. They fixed that.
They speeded it up. And so on. They tried to make the center of gravity
the center of the shaft by trimming off the weight that put the center
of gravity somewhere else. Right?"
The Chief said irritably: "No other way to do it! No other way!"
"I saw one," said Joe. "When they cleaned up the wreck at the airfield,
they heaved up the crates with a crane. The slings were twisted. Every
crate spun as it rose. But not one wobbled! They found their own centers
of gravity and spun around them!"
The Chief scowled, deep in thought. Then his face went blank.
"By the holy mud turtle!" he grunted. "I get it!"
Joe said, with very great pains not to seem triumphant, "Instead of
spinning the shaft and trimming the rotor, we'll spin the rotor and trim
the shaft. We'll form the shaft around the center of gravity, instead of
trying to move the center of gravity to the middle of the shaft. We'll
spin the rotors on a flexible bearing base. I think it'll work."
Surprisingly, it was Mike the midget who said warmly, "You got it! Yes,
sir, you got it!"
The Chief took a deep breath. "Yeah! And d'you know how I know? The
Plant built a high-speed centrifuge once. Remember?" He grinned with the
triumph Joe concealed. "It was just a plate with a shaft in the middle.
There were vanes on the plate. It fitted in a shaft hole that was much
too big. They blew compressed air up the shaft hole. It floated the
plate up, the air hit the vanes and spun the plate--and it ran as sweet
as honey! Balanced itself and didn't wobble a bit! We'll do something
like that! Sure!"
"Will you work on it with me?" asked Joe. "We'll need a sort of
crew--three or four altogether. Have to figure out the stuff we need. I
can ask for anybody I want. I'm asking for you. You pick the others."
The Chief grinned broadly. "Any objections, Haney? You and Mike and me
and Joe here? Look!"
He pulled a pencil out of his pocket. He started to draw on the plastic
table top, and then took a paper napkin instead.
"Something like this----"
The steaks came, sizzling on the platters they'd been cooked in. The
outside was seared, and the inside was hot and deliciously rare.
Intellectual exercises like the designing of a machine-tool operation
could not compete with such aromas and sights and sounds. The four of
them fell to.
But they talked as they ate. Absorbed and often with their mouths full,
frequently with imperfect articulation, but with deepening satisfaction
as the steaks vanished and the method they'd use took form in their
minds. It wouldn't be wholly simple, of course. When the rotors were
spinning about their centers of gravity, trimming off the shaft would
change the center of gravity. But the change would be infinitely less
than trimming off the rotors' rims. If they spun the rotors and used an
abrasive on the high side of the shaft as it turned....
"Going to have precession!" warned Mike. "Have to have a polishing
surface. Quarter turn behind the cutter. That'll hold it."
Joe only remembered afterward to be astonished that Mike would know gyro
theory. At the moment he merely swallowed quickly to get the words out.
"Right! And if we cut too far down we can plate the bearing up to
thickness and cut it down again----"
"Plate it up with iridium," said the Chief. He waved a steak knife.
"Man! This is gonna be fun! No tolerance you say, Joe?"
"No tolerance," agreed Joe. "Accurate within the limits of measurement."
The Chief beamed. The Platform was a challenge to all of humanity. The
pilot gyro was essential to the functioning of the Platform. To provide
that necessity against impossible obstacles was a challenge to the four
who were undertaking it.
"Some fun!" repeated the Chief, blissfully.
They ate their steaks, talking. They consumed huge slabs of apple pie
with preposterous mounds of ice cream on top, still talking urgently.
They drank coffee, interrupting each other to draw diagrams. They used
up all the paper napkins, and were still at it when someone came heavily
toward the table. It was the stocky man who had fought with Haney on the
Platform that day. Braun.
He tapped Haney on the shoulder. The four at the table looked up.
"We hadda fight today," said Braun in a *** voice. He was oddly pale.
"We didn't finish. You wanna finish?"
Haney growled.
"That was a fool business," he said angrily. "That ain't any place to
fight, up on the job! You know it!"
"Yeah," said Braun in the same odd voice. "You wanna finish it now?"
Haney said formidably: "I'm not dodgin' any fight. I didn't dodge it
then. I'm not dodgin' it now. You picked it. It was crazy! But if you
got over the craziness----"
Braun smiled a remarkably peculiar smile. "I'm still crazy. We finish,
huh?"
Haney pushed back his chair and stood up grimly. "Okay, we finish it!
You coulda killed me. I coulda killed you too, with that fall ready for
either of us."
"Sure! Too bad nobody got killed," said Braun.
"You fellas wait," said Haney angrily to Joe and the rest. "There's a
storeroom out back. Sid'll let us use it."
But the Chief pushed back his chair.
"Uh-uh," he said, shaking his head. "We're watchin' this."
Haney spoke with elaborate courtesy: "You mind, Braun? Want to get some
friends of yours, too?"
"I got no friends," said Braun. "Let's go."
The Chief went authoritatively to the owner of Sid's Steak Joint. He
paid the bill, talking. The owner of the place negligently *** his
thumb toward the rear. This was not an unparalleled request--for the use
of a storeroom so that two men could batter each other undisturbed.
Bootstrap was a law-abiding town, because to get fired from work on the
Platform was to lose a place in the most important job in history. So it
was inevitable that the settlement of quarrels in private should become
commonplace.
The Chief leading, they filed through the kitchen and out of doors. The
storeroom lay beyond. The Chief went in and switched on the light. He
looked about and was satisfied. It was almost empty, save for stacked
cartons in one corner. Braun was already taking off his coat.
"You want rounds and stuff?" demanded the Chief.
"I want fight," said Braun thickly.
"Okay, then," snapped the Chief. "No kickin' or gougin'. A man's down,
he has a chance to get up. That's all the rules. Right?"
Haney, stripping off his coat in turn, grunted an assent. He handed his
coat to Joe. He faced his antagonist.
It was a curious atmosphere for a fight. There were merely the plank
walls of the storeroom with a single dangling light in the middle and an
unswept floor beneath. The Chief stood in the doorway, scowling. This
didn't feel right. There was not enough hatred in evidence to justify
it. There was doggedness and resolution enough, but Braun was deathly
white and if his face was contorted--and it was--it was not with the
*** to batter and injure and maim. It was something else.
The two men faced each other. And then the stocky, swarthy Braun swung
at Haney. The blow had sting in it but nothing more. It almost looked as
if Braun were trying to work himself up to the fight he'd insisted on
finishing. Haney countered with a roundhouse blow that glanced off
Braun's cheek. And then they bore in at each other, slugging without
science or skill.
Joe watched. Braun launched a blow that hurt, but Haney sent him reeling
back. He came in doggedly again, and swung and swung, but he had no idea
of boxing. His only idea was to slug. He did slug. Haney had been
peevish rather than angry. Now he began to glower. He began to take the
fight to Braun.
He knocked Braun down. Braun staggered up and rushed. A wildly flailing
fist landed on Haney's ear. He doubled Braun up with a wallop to the
midsection. Braun came back, fists swinging.
Haney closed one eye for him. He came back. Haney shook him from head to
foot with a chest blow. He came back. Haney split his lip and loosened a
tooth. He came back.
The Chief said sourly: "This ain't a fight. Quit it, Haney! He don't
know how!"
Haney tried to draw away, but Braun swarmed on him, striking fiercely
until Haney had to floor him again. He dragged himself up and rushed at
Haney--and was knocked down again. Haney stood over him, panting
furiously.
"Quit it, y'fool! What's the matter with you?"
Braun started to get up again. The Chief interfered and held him, while
Haney glared.
"He ain't going to fight any more, Braun," pronounced the Chief firmly.
"You ain't got a chance. This fight's over. You had enough."
Braun was bloody and horribly battered, but he panted: "He's got
enough?"
"Are you out o' your head?" demanded the Chief. "He ain't got a mark on
him!"
"I ain't--got enough," panted Braun, "till he's got--enough!"
His breath was coming in soblike gasps, the result of body blows. It
hadn't been a fight but a beating, administered by Haney. But Braun
struggled to get up.
Mike the midget said brittlely: "You got enough, Haney. You're
satisfied. Tell him so."
"Sure I'm satisfied," snorted Haney. "I don't want to hit him any more.
I got enough of that!"
Braun panted: "Okay! Okay!"
The Chief let him get to his feet. He went groggily to his coat. He
tried to put himself into it. Mike caught Joe's eye and nodded
meaningfully. Joe helped Braun into the coat. There was silence, save
for Braun's heavy, labored breathing.
He moved unsteadily toward the door. Then he stopped.
"Haney," he said effortfully, "I don't say I'm sorry for fighting you
today. I fight first. But now I say I am sorry. You are good guy, Haney.
I was crazy. I--got reason."
He stumbled out of the door and was gone. The four who were left behind
stared at each other.
"What's the matter with him?" demanded Haney blankly.
"He's nuts," said the Chief. "If he was gonna apologize----"
Mike shook his head.
"He wouldn't apologize," he said brittlely, "because he thought you
might think he was scared. But when he'd proved he wasn't scared of a
beating--then he could say he was sorry." He paused. "I've seen guys I
liked a lot less than him."
Haney put on his coat, frowning.
"I don't get it," he rumbled. "Next time I see him----"
"You won't," snapped Mike. "None of us will. I'll bet on it."
But he was wrong. The others went out of the storeroom and back into
Sid's Steak Joint, and the Chief politely thanked the proprietor for the
loan of his storeroom for a private fight. Then they went out into the
neon-lighted business street of Bootstrap.
"What do we do now?" asked Joe.
"Where you sleeping?" asked the Chief hospitably. "I can get you a room
at my place."
"I'm staying out at the Shed," Joe told him awkwardly. "My family's
known Major Holt a long time. I'm staying at his house behind the Shed."
Haney raised his eyebrows but said nothing.
"Better get out there then," said the Chief. "It's midnight, and they
might want to lock up. There's your bus."
A lighted bus was waiting by the curb. Its doors were open, but it was
empty of passengers. Single busses ran out to the Shed now and then, but
they ran in fleets at shift-change time. Joe went over and climbed
aboard the bus.
"We'll turn up early," said the Chief. "This won't be a shift job. We'll
look things over and lay out what we want and then get to work, eh?"
"Right," said Joe. "And thanks."
"We'll be there with our hair in braids," said Mike, in his cracked
voice. "Now a glass of beer and so to bed. 'Night."
Haney waved his hand. The three of them marched off, the two huge
figures of Haney and the Chief, with Mike trotting truculently between
them, hardly taller than their knees. They were curiously colorful with
all the many-tinted neon signs upon them. They turned into a diner.
Joe sat in the bus, alone. The driver was off somewhere. The sounds of
Bootstrap were distinctive by night. Footsteps, and the jangling of
bicycle bells, and voices, and a radio blaring somewhere and a
record-shop loud-speaker somewhere else, and a sort of underriding noise
of festivity.
There was a sharp rap on the glass by Joe's window. He started and
looked out. Braun--battered, and bleeding from the corner of his
mouth--motioned urgently for him to come to the door of the bus. Joe
went.
Braun stared up at him in a new fashion. Now he was neither dogged nor
fierce nor desperate to look at. Despite the beating he'd taken, he
seemed completely and somehow frighteningly tranquil. He looked like
somebody who has come to the end of torment and is past any feeling but
that of relief from suffering.
"You--" said Braun. "That girl you were with today. Her pop is Major
Holt, eh?"
Joe frowned, and reservedly said that he was.
"You tell her pop," said Braun detachedly, "this is hot tip. Hot tip.
Look two kilometers north of Shed tomorrow. He find something bad. Hot!
You tell him. Two kilometers."
"Y-yes," said Joe, his frown increasing. "But look here----"
"Be sure say hot," repeated Braun.
Rather incredibly, he smiled. Then he turned and walked quickly away.
Joe went back to his seat in the empty bus, and sat there and waited for
it to start, and tried to figure out what the message meant. Since it
was for Major Holt, it had something to do with security. And security
meant defense against sabotage. And "hot" might mean merely
_significant_, or--in these days--it might mean _something else_. In
fact, it might mean something to make your hair stand on end when
thought of in connection with the Space Platform.
Joe waited for the bus to take off. He became convinced that Braun's use
of the word "hot" did not mean merely "significant." The other meaning
was what he had in mind.
Joe's teeth tried to chatter.
He didn't let them.
6
Major Holt wasn't to be found when Joe got out to the Shed. And he
wasn't in the house in the officers'-quarters area behind it. There was
only the housekeeper, who yawned pointedly as she let Joe in. Sally was
presumably long since asleep. And Joe didn't know any way to get hold of
the Major. He assured himself that Braun was a good guy--if he weren't
he wouldn't have insisted on taking a licking before he apologized--and
he hadn't said there was any hurry. Tomorrow, he'd said. So Joe uneasily
let himself be led to a room with a cot, and he was asleep in what
seemed seconds. But just the same he was badly worried.
In fact, next morning Joe woke at a practically unearthly hour with
Braun's message pounding on his brain. He was downstairs waiting when
the housekeeper appeared. She looked startled.
"Major Holt?" he asked.
But the Major was gone. He must have done with no more than three or
four hours' sleep. There was an empty coffee cup whose contents he'd
gulped down before going back to the security office.
Joe trudged to the barbed-wire enclosure around the officers'-quarters
area and explained to the sentry where he wanted to go. A sleepy driver
whisked him around the half-mile circle to the security building and he
found his way to Major Holt's office.
The plain and gloomy secretary was already on the job, too. She led him
in to face Major Holt. He blinked at the sight of Joe.
"Hm.... I have some news," he observed. "We back-tracked the parcel that
exploded when it was dumped from the plane."
Joe had almost forgotten it. Too many other things had happened since.
"We've got two very likely prisoners out of that affair," said the
Major. "They may talk. Also, an emergency inspection of other transport
planes has turned up three other grenades tucked away in front-wheel
wells. Ah--CO_2 bottles have turned out to have something explosive in
them. A very nice bit of work, that! The sandy-haired man who fueled
your plane--ah--disappeared. That is bad!"
Joe said politely: "That's fine, sir."
"All in all, you've been the occasion of our forestalling a good deal of
sabotage," said the Major. "Bad for you, of course.... Did you find the
men you were looking for?"
"I've found them, but--."
"I'll have them transferred to work under your direction," said the
Major briskly. "Their names?"
Joe gave the names. The Major wrote them down.
"Very good. I'm busy now----"
"I've a tip for you," said Joe. "I think it should be checked right
away. I don't feel too good about it."
The Major waited impatiently. And Joe explained, very carefully, about
the fight on the Platform the day before, Braun's insistence on
finishing the fight in Bootstrap, and then the tip he'd given Joe after
everything was over. He repeated the message exactly, word for word.
The Major, to do him justice, did not interrupt. He listened with an
expression that varied between grimness and weariness. When Joe ended he
picked up a telephone. He talked briefly. Joe felt a reluctant sort of
approval. Major Holt was not a man one could ever feel very close to,
and the work he was in charge of was not likely to make him popular, but
he did think straight--and fast. He didn't think "hot" meant
"significant," either. When he'd hung up the phone he said curtly: "When
will your work crew get here?"
"Early--but not yet," said Joe. "Not for some time yet."
"Go with the pilot," said the Major. "You'd recognize what Braun meant
as soon as anybody. See what you see."
Joe stood up.
"You--think the tip is straight?"
"This isn't the first time," said Major Holt detachedly, "that a man has
been blackmailed into trying sabotage. If he's got a family somewhere
abroad, and they're threatened with death or torture unless he does
such-and-such here, he's in a bad fix. It's happened. Of course he can't
tell me! He's watched. But he sometimes finds an out."
Joe was puzzled. His face showed it.
"He can try to do the sabotage," said the Major precisely, "or he can
arrange to be caught trying to do it. If he's caught--he tried; and the
blackmail threat is no threat at all so long as he keeps his mouth shut.
Which he does. And--ah--you would be surprised how often a man who
wasn't born in the United States would rather go to prison for sabotage
than commit it--here."
Joe blinked.
"If your friend Braun is caught," said the Major, "he will be punished.
Severely. Officially. But privately, someone will--ah--mention this tip
and say 'thanks.' And he'll be told that he will be released from prison
just as soon as he thinks it's safe. And he will be. That's all."
He turned to his papers. Joe went out. On the way to meet the pilot
who'd check on his tip, he thought things over. He began to feel a sort
of formless but very definite pride. He wasn't quite sure what he was
proud of, but it had something to do with being part of a country toward
which men of wholly different upbringing could feel deep loyalty. If a
man who was threatened unless he turned traitor, a man who might not
even be a citizen, arranged to be caught and punished for an apparent
crime against a country rather than commit it--that wasn't bad. There
can be a lot of things wrong with a nation, but if somebody from another
one entirely can come to feel that kind of loyalty toward it--well--it's
not too bad a country to belong to.
Joe had a security guard with him this time, instead of Sally, as he
went across the vast, arc-lit interior of the Shed and past the
shimmering growing monster that was the Platform. He went all the way to
the great swinging doors that let in materials trucks. And there were
guards there, and they checked each driver very carefully before they
admitted his truck. But somehow it wasn't irritating. It wasn't scornful
suspicion. There'd be snide and snappy characters in the Security force,
of course, swaggering and throwing their weight about. But even they
were guarding something that men--some men--were willing to throw away
their lives for.
Joe and his guard reached one of the huge entrances as a ten-wheeler
truck came in with a load of shining metal plates. Joe's escort went
through the opening with him and they waited outside. The sun had barely
risen. It looked huge but very far away, and Joe suddenly realized why
just this spot had been chosen for the building of the Platform.
The ground was flat. All the way to the eastern horizon there wasn't
even a minor hillock rising above the plain. It was bare, arid,
sun-scorched desert. It was featureless save for sage and mesquite and
tall thin stalks of yucca. But it was flat. It could be a runway. It was
a perfect place for the Platform to start from. The Platform shouldn't
touch ground at all, after it was out of the Shed, but at least it
wouldn't run into any obstacles on its way toward the horizon.
A light plane came careening around the great curved outer surface of
the Shed. It landed and taxied up to the door. It swung smartly around
and its side door opened. A bandaged hand waved at Joe. He climbed in.
The pilot of this light, flimsy plane was the co-pilot of the transport
of yesterday. He was the man Joe had helped to dump cargo.
Joe climbed in and settled himself. The small motor pop-popped
valiantly, the plane rushed forward over hard-packed desert earth, and
went swaying up into the air.
The co-pilot--pilot now--shouted cheerfully above the din: "Hiya. You
couldn't sleep either? Burns hurt?"
Joe shook his head.
"Bothered," he shouted in reply. Then he added, "Do I do something to
help, or am I along just for the ride?"
"First we take a look," the pilot called over the motor racket. "Two
kilometers due north of the Shed, eh?"
"That's right."
"We'll see what's there," the pilot told him.
The small plane went up and up. At five hundred feet--nearly level with
the roof of the Shed--it swung away and began to make seemingly erratic
dartings out over the spotty desert land, and then back. Actually, it
was a search pattern. Joe looked down from his side of the small
cockpit. This was a very small plane indeed, and in consequence its
motor made much more noise inside its cabin than much more powerful
engines in bigger ships.
"Those burns I got," shouted the pilot, staring down, "kept me awake. So
I got up and was just walking around when the call came for somebody to
drive one of these things. I took over."
Back and forth, and back and forth. From five hundred feet in the early
morning the desert had a curious appearance. The plane was low enough
for each smallest natural feature to be visible, and it was early enough
for every shrub or hummock to cast a long, slender shadow. The ground
looked streaked, but all the streaks ran the same way, and all were
shadows.
Joe shouted: "What's that?"
The plane banked at a steep angle and ran back. It banked again. The
pilot stared carefully. He reached forward and pushed a button. There
was a tiny impact underfoot. Another steep banking turn, and Joe saw a
puff of smoke in the air.
The pilot shouted: "It's a man. He looks dead."
He swung directly over the small prone object and there was a second
puff of smoke.
"They've got range finders on us from the Shed," he called across the
two-foot space separating him from Joe. "This marks the spot. Now we'll
see if there's anything to the hot part of that tip."
He reached over behind his seat and brought out a stubby pole like a
fishpole with a very large reel. There was also a headset, and something
very much like a large aluminum fish on the end of the line.
"You know Geiger counters?" called the pilot. "Stick on these headphones
and listen!"
Joe slipped on the headset. The pilot threw a switch and Joe heard
clickings. They had no pattern and no fixed frequency. They were
clickings at strictly random intervals, but there was an average
frequency, at that.
"Let the counter out the window," called the pilot, "and listen. Tell me
if the noise goes up."
Joe obeyed. The aluminum fish dangled. The line slanted astern from the
wind. It made a curve between the pole and the aluminum plummet, which
was hollow in the direction of the plane's motion. The pilot squinted
down and began to swing in a wide circle around the spot where an
apparently dead man had been sighted, and above which puffs of smoke now
floated.
Three-quarters of the way around, the random clickings suddenly became a
roar.
Joe said: "Hey!"
The pilot swung the plane about and flew back. He pointed to the button
he'd pushed.
"Poke that when you hear it again."
The clickings.... They roared. Joe pushed the button. He felt the tiny
impact.
"Once more," said the pilot.
He swung in nearer where the dead man lay. Joe had a sickening idea of
who the dead man might be. A sudden rush of noise in the headphones and
he pushed the button again.
"Reel in now!" shouted the pilot. "Our job's done."
Joe reeled in as the plane winged steadily back toward the Shed. There
were puffs of smoke floating in the air behind. They had been ranged on
at the instant they appeared. Somebody back at the Shed knew that
something that needed to be investigated was at a certain spot, and the
two later puffs of smoke had said that radioactivity was notable in the
air along the line the two puffs made. Not much more information would
be needed. The meaning of Braun's warning that his tip was "hot" was
definite. It was "hot" in the sense that it dealt with radioactivity!
The plane dipped down and landed by the great doors again. It taxied up
and the pilot killed the motor.
"We've been using Geigers for months," he said pleasedly, "and never got
a sign before. This is one time we were set for something."
"What?" asked Joe. But he knew.
"Atomic dust is one good guess," the pilot told him. "It was talked of
as a possible weapon away back in the Smyth Report. Nobody's ever tried
it. We thought it might be tried against the Platform. If somebody
managed to spread some really hot radioactive dust around the Shed, all
three shifts might get fatally burned before it was noticed. _They'd_
think so, anyhow! But the guy who was supposed to dump it opened up the
can for a look. And it killed him."
He climbed out of the plane and went to the doorway. He took a telephone
from a guard and talked crisply into it. He hung up.
"Somebody coming for you," he said amiably. "Wait here. Be seeing you."
He went out, the motor kicked over and caught, and the tiny plane raced
away. Seconds later it was aloft and winging southward.
Joe waited. Presently a door opened and something came clanking out. It
was a tractor with surprisingly heavy armor. There were men in it, also
wearing armor of a peculiar sort, which they were still adjusting. The
tractor towed a half-track platform on which there were a crane and a
very considerable lead-coated bin with a top. It went briskly off into
the distance toward the north.
Joe was amazed, but comprehending. The vehicle and the men were armored
against radioactivity. They would approach the dead man from upwind, and
they would scoop up his body and put it in the lead-lined bin, and with
it all deadly radioactive material near him. This was the equipment that
must have been used to handle the dud atom bomb some months back. It had
been ready for that. It was ready for this emergency. Somebody had tried
to think of every imaginable situation that could arise in connection
with the Platform.
But in a moment a guard came for Joe and took him to where the Chief and
Haney and Mike waited by the still incompletely-pulled-away crates. They
had some new ideas about the job on hand that were better than the
original ones in some details. All four of them set to work to make a
careful survey of damage--of parts that would have to be replaced and of
those that needed to be repaired. The discoveries they made would have
appalled Joe earlier. Now he merely made notes of parts necessary to be
replaced by new ones that could be had within the repair time for
rebalancing the rotors.
"This is sure a mess," said Haney mournfully, as they worked. "It's two
days just getting things cleaned up!"
The Chief eyed the rotors. There were two of them, great four-foot disks
with extraordinary short and stubby shafts that were brought to
beautifully polished conical ends to fit in the bearings. The bearings
were hollowed to fit the shaft ends, but they were intricately scored to
form oil channels. In operation, a very special silicone oil would be
pumped into the bearings under high pressure. Distributed by the
channels, the oil would form a film that by its pressure would hold the
cone end of the bearing away from actual contact with the metal. The
rotors, in fact, would be floated in oil just as the high-speed
centrifuge the Chief had mentioned had floated on compressed air. But
they had to be perfectly balanced, because any imbalance would make the
shaft pierce the oil film and touch the metal of the bearing--and when a
shaft is turning at 40,000 r.p.m. it is not good for it to touch
anything. Shaft and bearing would burn white-hot in fractions of a
second and there would be several devils to pay.
"We've got to spin it in a lathe," said the Chief profoundly, "to hold
the chucks. The chucks have got to be these same bearings, because
nothing else will stand the speed. And we got to cut out the bed plate
of any lathe we find. Hm. We got to do our spinning with the shaft lined
up with the earth's axis, too."
Mike nodded wisely, and Joe knew he'd pointed that out. It was true
enough. A high-speed gyro could only be run for minutes in one single
direction if its mount were fixed. If a precisely mounted gyro had its
shaft pointed at the sun, for example, while it ran, its axis would try
to follow the sun. It would try not to turn with the earth, and it would
wreck itself. They had to use the cone bearings, but in order to protect
the fine channellings for oil they'd have to use cone-shaped shims at
the beginning while running at low speed. The cone ends of the shaft
would need new machining to line them up. The bearings had to be fixed,
yet flexible. The----
They had used many paper napkins the night before, merely envisioning
these details. New problems turned up as the apparatus itself was being
uncovered and cleaned.
They worked for hours, clearing away soot and charred material. Joe's
list of small parts to be replaced from the home plant was as long as
his arm. The motors, of course, had to be scrapped and new ones
substituted. Considering their speed--the field strength at operating
rate was almost imperceptible--they had to be built new, which would
mean round-the-clock work at Kenmore.
A messenger came for Joe. The security office wanted him. Major Holt's
gloomy secretary did not even glance up as he entered. Major Holt
himself looked tired.
"There was a man out there," he said curtly. "I think it is your friend
Braun. I'll get you to look and identify."
Joe had suspected as much. He waited.
"He'd opened a container of cobalt powder. It was in a beryllium case.
There was half a pound of it. It killed him."
"Radioactive cobalt," said Joe.
"Definitely," said the Major grimly. "Half a pound of it gives off the
radiation of an eighth of a ton of pure radium. One can guess that he
had been instructed to get up as high as he could in the Shed and dump
the powder into the air. It would diffuse--scatter as it sifted down. It
would have contaminated the whole Shed past all use for years--let alone
killing everybody in it."
Joe swallowed.
"He was burned, then."
"He had the equivalent of two hundred and fifty pounds of radium within
inches of his body," the Major said unbendingly, "and naturally it was
not healthy. For that matter, the container itself was not adequate
protection for him. Once he'd carried it in his pocket for a very few
minutes, he was a dead man, even though he was not conscious of the
fact."
Joe knew what was wanted of him.
"You want me to look at him," he said.
The Major nodded.
"Yes. Afterward, get a radiation check on yourself. It is hardly likely
that he was--ah--carrying the stuff with him last night, in Bootstrap.
But if he was--ah--you may need some precautionary treatment--you and
the men who were with you."
Joe realized what that meant. Braun had been given a relatively small
container of the deadliest available radioactive material on Earth.
Milligrams of it, shipped from Oak Ridge for scientific use, were
encased in thick lead chests. He'd carried two hundred and fifty grams
in a container he could put in his pocket. He was not only dead as he
walked, under such circumstances. He was also death to those who walked
near him.
"Somebody else may have been burned in any case," said the Major
detachedly. "I am going to issue a radioactivity alarm and check every
man in Bootstrap for burns. It is--ah--very likely that the man who
delivered it to this man is burned, too. But you will not mention this,
of course."
He waved his hand in dismissal. Joe turned to go. The Major added
grimly: "By the way, there is no doubt about the ***-trapping of
planes. We've found eight, so far, ready to be crashed when a string was
pulled while they were serviced. But the men who did the ***-trapping
have vanished. They disappeared suddenly during last night. They were
warned! Have you talked to anybody?"
"No sir," said Joe.
"I would like to know," said the Major coldly, "how they knew we'd found
out their trick!"
Joe went out. He felt very cold at the pit of his stomach. He was to
identify Braun. Then he was to get a radiation check on himself. In that
order of events. He was to identify Braun first, because if Braun had
carried a half-pound of radioactive cobalt on him in Sid's Steak Joint
the night before, Joe was going to die. And so were Haney and the Chief
and Mike, and anybody else who'd passed near him. So Joe was to do the
identification before he was disturbed by the information that he was
dead.
He made the identification. Braun was very decently laid out in a
lead-lined box, with a lead-glass window over his face. There was no
sign of any injury on him except from his fight with Haney. The
radiation burns were deep, but they'd left no marks of their own. He'd
died before outer symptoms could occur.
Joe signed the identification certificate. He went to be checked for his
own chances of life. It was a peculiar sensation. The most peculiar was
that he wasn't afraid. He was neither confident that he was not burned
inside, nor sure that he was. He simply was not afraid. Nobody really
ever believes that he is going to die--in the sense of ceasing to exist.
The most arrant coward, stood before a wall to be shot, or strapped in
an electric chair, finds that astoundingly he does not believe that what
happens to his body is going to kill him, the individual. That is why a
great many people die with reasonable dignity. They know it is not worth
making too much of a fuss over.
But when the Geiger counters had gone over him from head to foot, and
his body temperature was normal, and his reflexes sound--when he was
assured that he had not been exposed to dangerous radiation--Joe felt
distinctly weak in the knees. And that was natural, too.
He went trudging back to the wrecked gyros. His friends were gone,
leaving a scrawled memo for him. They had gone to pick out the machine
tools for the work at hand.
He continued to check over the wreckage, thinking with a detached
compassion of that poor devil Braun who was the victim of men who hated
the idea of the Space Platform and what it would mean to humanity. Men
of that kind thought of themselves as superior to humanity, and of human
beings as creatures to be enslaved. So they arranged for planes to crash
and burn and for men to be murdered, and they practiced blackmail--or
rewarded those who practiced it for them. They wanted to prevent the
Platform from existing because it would keep them from trying to pull
the world down in ruins so they could rule over the wreckage.
Joe--who had so recently thought it likely that he would die--considered
these actions with an icy dislike that was much deeper than anger. It
was backed by everything he believed in, everything he had ever wanted,
and everything he hoped for. And anger could cool off, but the way he
felt about people who would destroy others for their own purposes could
not cool off. It was part of him. He thought about it as he worked, with
all the noises of the Shed singing in his ears.
A voice said: "Joe."
He started and turned. Sally stood behind him, looking at him very
gravely. She tried to smile.
"Dad told me," she said, "about the check-up that says you're all right.
May I congratulate you on your being with us for a while?--on the
cobalt's not getting near you?--or the rest of us?"
Joe did not know exactly what to say.
"I'm going inside the Platform," she told him. "Would you like to come
along?"
He wiped his hands on a piece of waste.
"Naturally! My gang is off picking out tools. I can't do much until they
come back."
He fell into step beside her. They walked toward the Platform. And it
was still magic, no matter how often Joe looked at it. It was huge
beyond belief, though it was surely not heavy in proportion to its size.
Toward the night.