Space Platform

by Murray Leinster

  2

  It was a merely misty day. The transport plane stood by the door of ahangar on this military field, and mechanics stood well back from it andlooked it over. A man crawled over the tail assembly and found one smallhole in the fabric of the stabilizer. A shell fragment had gone throughwhen the war rockets exploded nearby. The pilot verified that thefragment had hit no strengthening member inside. He nodded. The mechanicmade very neat fabric patches over the two holes, upper and lower. Hebegan to go over the fuselage. The pilot turned away.

  "I'll go talk to Bootstrap," he told the co-pilot. "You keep an eye onthings."

  "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 apronwith its tricycle landing gear let down. It curiously resembled amisshapen insect, standing elaborately high on inadequate supportinglegs. 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 bulgethat was closed by a pair of huge clamshell doors, opening straightastern. It was built that way, of course, so that large objects could beloaded direct into the cargo hold, but it was neither streamlined norgraceful.

  "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 onefragment 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 todestruction. It had been overstressed, certainly, but ships are built totake beatings. A spot check on areas where excessive flexing of thewings 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 ofdamage. The ship was ready to take off again.

  The co-pilot watched grimly until the one mechanic went back to the sidelines. The mechanic was not cordial. He and all the others regarded theship and Joe and the co-pilot with disfavor. They worked on jets, and tosuggest that men who worked on fighter jets were not worthy of completeconfidence 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 haveto be. The best spies and saboteurs in the world have been hired to messup the Platform. When better saboteurs are made, they'll be sent overhere to get busy!"

  The pilot came back from the control tower.

  "Special flight orders," he told his companion. "We top off with fueland get going."

  Mechanics got out the fuel hose, dragging it from the pit. One manclimbed up on the wing. Other men handed up the hose. Joe was moved tocomment, but the co-pilot was reading the new flight instructions. Itwas one of those moments of inconsistency to which anybody and everybodyis liable. The two men of the ship's crew had it in mind to beinfinitely suspicious of anybody examining their ship. But fueling itwas so completely standard an operation that they merely stood byabsently 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 thehose 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 shaftwhich reaches down to the wheel's hub. His position for a moment wasabsurdly ungraceful. When he straightened up, his arm slid into thewheel well. But he dragged the hose the rest of the way and passed it onup. Then that tank was full and capped. The refueling crew got down tothe ground and fed the hose back to the pit which devoured it. That wasall. But somehow Joe remembered the sandy-haired man and his arm goingup inside the wheel well for a fraction of a second.

  The pilot read one part of the flight orders again and tore themcarefully 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 thepilots' doorway. Joe followed.

  They settled in their places in the cabin. The pilot threw a switch andpressed a knob. One motor turned over stiffly, and caught. The second.Third. Fourth. The pilot listened, was satisfied, and pulled back on themultiple throttle. The plane trundled away. Minutes later it faced thelong runway, a tinny voice from the control tower spoke out of aloud-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 wheelsretracted glowed briefly. The men relaxed.

  "You know," said the co-pilot, "there was the devil of a time during theWar with sabotage. Down in Brazil there was a field planes used to takeoff from to fly to Africa. But they'd take off, head out to sea, get afew miles offshore, and then blow up. We must've lost a dozen planesthat way! Then it broke. There was a guy--a sergeant--in the maintenancecrew who was sticking a hand grenade up in the nose wheel wells. German,he was, and very tidy about it, and nobody suspected him. Everythinglooked okay and tested okay. But when the ship was well away and thecrew pulled up the wheels, that tightened a string and it pulled the pinout of the grenade. It went off.... The master mechanic finally caughthim and nearly killed him before the MPs could stop him. We've got to beplenty careful, whether the ground crews like it or not."

  Joe said drily: "You were, except when they were topping off. You tookthat for granted." He told about the sandy-haired man. "He hadn't timeto stick anything in the wheel well, though," he added.

  The co-pilot blinked. Then he looked annoyed. "Confound it! I didn'twatch! 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 aslip!"

  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 anhour and a half before they reached their destination. Joe felt a liftof elation. The Space Platform was a realization--or the beginning ofit--of a dream that had been Joe's since he was a very small boy. It wasalso the dream of most other small boys at the time. The Space Platformwould make space travel possible. Of course it wouldn't make journeys tothe moon or planets itself, but it would sail splendidly about the Earthin an orbit some four thousand miles up, and it would gird the world infour hours fourteen minutes and twenty-two seconds. It would carryatom-headed guided missiles, and every city in the world would bedefenseless against it. Nobody could even hope for world domination solong as it floated on its celestial round. Which, naturally, was whythere were such desperate efforts to destroy it before its completion.

  But Joe, thinking about the Platform, did not think about it as aweapon. It was the first rung on the stepladder to the stars. From itthe moon would be reached, certainly. Mars next, most likely. ThenVenus. 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 onthat 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. Yourate plenty. How?"

  Joe pulled his thoughts back from satisfied imagining. It hadn'toccurred to him that it was remarkable that he should be allowed toaccompany the gyros from the plant to their destination. His family firmhad built them, so it had seemed natural to him. He wasn't used to theidea that everybody looked suspicious to a security officer concernedwith the safety of the Platform.

  "Connections? I haven't any," said Joe. Then he said, "I do knowsomebody on the job. There's a Major Holt out there. He might havecleared me. Known my family for years."

  "Yeah," said the co-pilot drily. "He might. As a matter of fact, he'sthe senior security officer for the whole job. He's in charge ofeverything, from the security guards to the radar screens and thejet-pla
ne umbrella and the checking of the men who work in the Shed. Ifhe says you're all right, you probably are."

  Joe hadn't meant to seem impressive. He explained: "I don't know him toowell. He knows my father, and his daughter Sally's been kicking aroundunderfoot most of my life. I taught her how to shoot, and she's a bettershot than I am. She was a nice kid when she was little. I got to likeher when she fell out of a tree and broke her arm and didn't evenwhimper. That shows how long ago it was!" He grinned. "She was trying toact grown-up last time I saw her."

  The co-pilot nodded. There was a brisk chirping sound somewhere. Thepilot reached ahead to the course-correction knob. The plane changedcourse. Sunshine shifted as it poured into the cabin. The ship wasrunning on automatic pilot well above the cloud level, and at aneven-numbered number of thousands of feet altitude, as was suitable forplanes traveling south or west. Now it droned on its new course,forty-five degrees from the original. Joe found himself guessing thatone of the security provisions for planes approaching the Platform mightbe that they should not come too near on a direct line to it, lest theygive information to curious persons on the ground.

  Time went on. Joe slipped gradually back to his meditations about thePlatform. There was always, in his mind, the picture of a man-made thingshining in blinding sunlight between Earth and moon. But he began toremember things he hadn't paid too much attention to before.

  Opposition to the bare idea of a Space Platform, for instance, from themoment it was first proposed. Every dictator protested bitterly. Evenpoliticians out of office found it a subject for rabble-rousingharangues. The nationalistic political parties, the peddlers of hate,the entrepreneurs of discord--every crank in the world had something tosay against the Platform from the first. When they did not roundlydenounce it as impious, they raved that it was a scheme by which theUnited States would put itself in position to rule all the Earth. As amatter of fact, the United States had first proposed it as a UnitedNations enterprise, so that denunciations that politicians found goodpolitics actually made very poor sense. But it did not get past theGeneral Assembly. The proposal was so rabidly attacked on every sidethat it was not even passed up to the Council--where it would certainlyhave been vetoed anyhow.

  But it was exactly that furious denunciation which put the Platformthrough the United States Congress, which had to find the money for itsconstruction.

  In Joe's eyes and in the eyes of most of those who hoped for it from thebeginning, the Platform's great appeal was that it was the necessaryfirst step toward interplanetary travel, with star ships yet to come.But most scientists wanted it, desperately, for their own ends. Therewere low-temperature experiments, electronic experiments, weatherobservations, star-temperature measurements, astronomicalobservations.... Any man in any field of science could name reasons forit to be built. Even the atom scientists had one, and nearly the best.Their argument was that there were new developments of nuclear theorythat needed to be tried out, but should not be tried out on Earth. Therewere some reactions that ought to yield unlimited power for all theworld from really abundant materials. But there was one chance in fiftythat 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 allits people, yet those reactions should be tried. In a space ship somemillions of miles out in emptiness they could be. Either they'd be safeor they would not. But the only way to get a space ship a safe enoughdistance from Earth was to make a Space Platform as a starting point.Then a ship could shoot away from Earth with effectively zero gravityand full fuel tanks. The Platform should be built so civilization couldsurge ahead to new heights!

  But despite these excellent reasons, it was the Platform's enemies whoreally got it built. The American Congress would never have appropriatedfunds for a Platform for pure scientific research, no matter whatpeacetime benefits it promised. It was the vehemence of those who hatedit that sold it to Congress as a measure for national defense. And in asense it was.

  These were ironic aspects Joe hadn't thought about before, just as hehadn't thought about the need to defend the Platform while it was beingbuilt. Defending it was Sally's father's job, and he wouldn't have apopular time. Joe wondered idly how Sally liked living out where themost important job on Earth was being done. She was a nice kid. Heremembered appreciatively that she'd grown up to be a very good-lookinggirl. He tended to remember her mostly as the tomboy who could beat himswimming, but the last time he'd seen her, come to think of it, he'dbeen startled to observe how pretty she'd grown. He didn't know anybodywho 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 skyahead. There was no actual horizon, of course. There was a white hazethat blended imperceptibly into the cloud layer so that it wasimpossible to tell where the sky ended and the clouds or earth began.But presently there were holes in the clouds. The ship droned on, andsuddenly it floated over the edge of such a hole, and looking down wasvery much like looking over the edge of a cliff at solid earthillimitably far below.

  The holes increased in number. Then there were no holes at all, but onlyclouds breaking up the clear view of the ground beneath. And presentlyagain even the clouds were left behind and the air was clear--but stillthere was no horizon--and there was brownish earth with small greenpatches and beyond was sere brown range. At seventeen thousand feetthere were simply no details.

  Soon the clouds were merely a white-tipped elevation of the white hazeto the sides and behind. And then there came a new sound above thedroning roar of the motors. Joe heard it--and then he saw.

  Something had flashed down from nowhere. It flashed on ahead and bankedsteeply. It was a fighter jet, and for an instant Joe saw the distantrange seem to ripple and dance in its exhaust blast. It circledwatchfully.

  The transport pilot manipulated something. There was a change in thesound of the motors. Joe followed the co-pilot's eyes. The jet fighterwas coming up astern, dive brakes extended to reduce its speed. Itoverhauled the transport very slowly. And then the transport's pilottouched one of the separate prop-controls gently, and again, and again.Joe, looking at the jet, saw it through the whirling blades. There wasan extraordinary stroboscopic effect. One of the two starboardpropellers, seen through the other, abruptly took on a look which wasnot that of mistiness at all, but of writhing, gyrating solidity. Thepeculiar appearance vanished, and came again, and vanished and appearedyet 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 outof sight.

  "Visual check," said the co-pilot drily, to Joe. "We had a signal togive. Individual to this plane. We didn't tell it to you. You couldn'tduplicate it."

  Joe worked it out painfully. The visual effect of one propeller seenthrough another--that was identification. It was not a type of signalingan unauthorized or uninformed passenger would expect.

  "Also," said the co-pilot, "we have a television camera in theinstrument board yonder. We've turned it on now. The interior of thecabin is being watched from the ground. No more tricks like the phonycolonel and the atom bomb that didn't 'explode.'"

  Joe sat quite still. He noticed that the plane was slanting graduallydownward. His eyes went to the dial that showed descent at somewherebetween two and three hundred feet a minute. That was for his benefit.The cabin was pressurized, though it did not attempt to simulatesea-level pressure. It was a good deal better than the outside air,however, and yet too quick a descent meant discomfort. Two to threehundred feet per minute is about right.

  The ground took on features. Small gulleys. Patches of coloration toosmall to be seen from farther up. The feeling of speed increased. Afterlong minutes the plane was only a few thousand feet up. The pilot tookover manual control from the automatic pilot. He seemed to wait. Therewas a plaintive, mechanical _beep-beep_ and he changed course.

  "You'll see the Shed in a minute or two," said the c
o-pilot. He addedvexedly, as if the thing had been bothering him, "I wish I hadn't missedthat sandy-haired guy putting his hand in the wheel well! Nothinghappened, but I shouldn't have missed it!"

  Joe watched. Very, very far away there were mountains, but he suddenlyrealized the remarkable flatness of the ground over which they wereflying. From the edge of the world, behind, to the very edge of thesefar-distant hills, the ground was flat. There were gullies anddepressions here and there, but no hills. It was flat, flat, flat....

  The plane flew on. There was a tiny glimmer of sunlight. Joe strainedhis eyes. The sunlight glinted from the tiniest possible round pip onthe brown earth. It grew as the plane flew on. It was half a cherrystone. It was half an orange, with gores. It was the top section of asphere that was simply too huge to have been made by men.

  There was a thin thread of white that ran across the dun-colored rangeand reached that half-ball and then ended. It was a highway. Joerealized that the half-globe was the Shed, the monstrous building madefor the construction of the Space Platform. It was gigantic. It wascolossal. 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 buildingfor clerks and timekeepers and other white-collar workers. He strainedhis eyes again and saw a motor truck on the highway. It lookedextraordinarily flat. Then he saw that it wasn't a single truck but aconvoy of them. A long way back, the white highway was marked by a tinydot. 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 seenby comparison with the Shed. The huge, round, shining half-sphere ofmetal 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 wasashamed to gawk. He looked ahead, and far away there were white specklesthat would be buildings: Bootstrap, the town especially built for themen who built the Space Platform. In it they slept and ate and engagedin the uproarious festivity that men on a construction job crave ontheir time off.

  The plane dipped noticeably.

  "Airfield off to the right," said the co-pilot. "That's for the town andthe job. The jets--there's an air umbrella overhead all the time--have afield somewhere else. The pushpots have a field of their own, too, wherethey're training pilots."

  Joe didn't know what a pushpot was, but he didn't ask. He was thinkingabout the Shed, which was the greatest building ever put up, and hadbeen built merely to shelter the greatest hope for the world's peacewhile it was put together. He'd be in the Shed presently. He'd workthere, 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 withwhite-painted barracks and a business section and an obvious, carefullydesigned recreation area that nobody would ever use. The plane wasmaking a great half-circle. The motor noise dimmed as Joe becameabsorbed in his anticipation of seeing the Space Platform and having ahand in its building.

  The co-pilot said sharply: "Hold everything!"

  Joe jerked his head around. The co-pilot had his hand on the wheelrelease. His face was tense.

  "It don't feel right," he said very, very quietly. "Maybe I'm crazy, butthere was that sandy-haired guy who put his hand up in the wheel wellback at that last field. And this don't feel right!"

  The plane swept on. The airfield passed below it. The co-pilot verycautiously let go of the wheel release, which when pulled should let thewheels fall down from their wells to lock themselves in landingposition. He moved from his seat. His lips were pinched and tight. Hescrabbled at a metal plate in the flooring. He lifted it and lookeddown. 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 bothof them into the wheel well.

  The co-pilot made quite sure. He stood up, leaving the plate off theopening 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 inBrazil. Only--it rolled a little. And this one goes off when the wheelsgo 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 theground about the sandy-haired guy, so they'll get him regardless."

  He picked up the microphone hanging above and behind him and began tospeak coldly into it. The transport plane started to swing in wide,sweeping circles over the desert beyond the airport while the pilotexplained that there was a grenade in the nose wheel well, set toexplode if the wheel were let down or, undoubtedly, if the ship came into a belly landing.

  Joe found himself astonishingly unafraid. But he was filled with apounding rage. He hated the people who wanted to smash the pilot gyrosbecause they were essential to the Space Platform. He hated them morecompletely than he had known he could hate anybody. He was so filledwith fury that it did not occur to him that in any crash or explosivelanding that would ruin the gyros, he would automatically be killed.