Space Platform

by Murray Leinster

  5

  There was nobody in the world to whom the Space Platform wasmeaningless. To Joe and a great many people like him, it was a dreamlong and stubbornly held to and now doggedly being made a reality. Tosome it was the prospect of peace and the hope of a quiet life: childrenand grandchildren and a serene look forward to the future. Some peopleprayed yearningly for its success, though they could have no other sharein its making. And of course there were those men who had gotten intopower and could not stay there without ruthlessness. They knew what thePlatform 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 orto commit any crime if the Space Platform could be smashed and turmoilkept 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 middleshift--two to ten o'clock--was off. Fleets of busses rolled out from thesmall town twenty miles away, their headlights making a procession ofpaired flames in the darkness. They rolled into the unloading area anddisgorged the late shift--ten to six--to be processed by security andadmitted to the Shed. Then, quite empty, the busses went trundlingaround 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 merelyletting themselves be pushed on board. The bus Joe found himself on wasjammed in seconds. He held on to a strap and didn't notice. He wasabsorbed in the rapt contemplation of his idea for the repair of thepilot gyros. The motors could be replaced easily enough. The foundationof his first despair had been the belief that everything could bemanaged but one thing; that the all-important absolute accuracy was theonly thing that couldn't be achieved. Getting that accuracy, back at theplant, had consumed four months of time. Each of the gyros was four feetin 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 notfly to pieces from sheer centrifugal force. Each was plated with iridiumlest a speck of rust form and throw it off balance. If the shaft andbearings were not centered exactly at the center of gravity of therotors--five hundred pounds of steel off balance at 40,000 r.p.m. couldraise the devil. They could literally wreck the Platform itself. And"exactly at the center of gravity" meant exactly. There could be noerror by which the shaft was off center by the thousandth of an inch, ora ten-thousandth, or even the tenth of a ten-thousandth. The accuracyhad 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 witha grinding of gears and a spouting of exhaust smoke. It trundled to thehighway and rolled away. Another and another followed it. Joe's bus fellin line. They headed for Bootstrap in a convoy, a long, long string oflighted vehicles running one behind the other.

  It was dark outside. The Shed was alone, for security. It was twentymiles 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 securitycheck, and during that time the Shed was empty save for the securityofficers who roamed it endlessly, looking for trouble. Sometimes theyfound 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 darkdesert. Overhead were many stars. Inside the jammed bus were swayingfigures crowded in the aisle, and every seat was filled. There was thesmell of sweat, and oil, and tobacco. Somebody still had garlic on hisbreath from lunch. There was the noise of many voices. There was anargument two seats up the aisle. There was the rumble of the motor, andthe peculiar whine of spinning tires. Men had to raise their voices tobe heard above the din.

  A swaying among the crowded figures more pronounced than that caused bythe motion of the bus caught Joe's eye. Somebody was crowding his wayfrom the back toward the front. The aisle was narrow. Joe clung to hisstrap, thinking hard and happily about the rebalancing of the gyros.There could be no tolerance. It had to be exact. There had to be novibration 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 beingknocked off the level place two hundred feet up.

  Joe said: "Hello."

  "I thought you were big brass," said Haney, rumbling in his ear. "Butbig 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'shands. Joe had been digging further into the crates, and afterward he'dwashed up, but packing grease is hard to get off. When mixed with sootand charcoal it leaves signs. Haney relaxed.

  "We mostly eat together," he observed, satisfied that Joe was regularbecause his hands weren't soft and because mechanic's soap had done anincomplete 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'dsquirmed through the press in Haney's wake. He seemed to bristle alittle 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 Haneyfrom a two-hundred-foot fall. But now Haney said approvingly: "I wantedto say thanks anyhow for keeping your mouth shut. New here?"

  Joe nodded. The noise in the bus made any sort of talk difficult. Haneyappeared used to it.

  "Saw you with--uh--Major Holt's daughter," he observed again. "That'swhy 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 tohandle it his way, it was naturally none of Joe's business. He saidnothing.

  "Braun's a good guy," said Haney. "Crazy, that's all. He picked thatfight. 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 brittlevoice.

  The bus rolled and rolled and rolled. It was a long twenty miles toBootstrap. The desert outside the bus windows was utterly black andfeatureless, 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 theoutside was ablaze with light. The busses drew up to the curb andstopped, and everybody was immediately in a great hurry to get out,shoving unnecessarily, and Joe let himself be carried along by thecrowd.

  He found himself on the sidewalk with bright neon signs up and down thestreet. He was in the midst of the crowd which was the middle shiftreleased. It eddied and dispersed without seeming to lessen. Most of thefigures in sight were men. There were very, very few women. The neonsigns proclaimed that here one could buy beer, and that this was Fred'sPlace, and that was Sid's Steak Joint. Bowling. Pool. A store--stillopen for this shift's trade--sold fancy shirts and strictly practicalwork clothes and highly eccentric items of personal adornment. A moviehouse. A second. A third. Somewhere a record shop fed repetitious musicto the night air. There was movement and crowding and jostling, but themiddle of the street was almost empty save for the busses. There weresome bicycles, but practically no other wheeled traffic. After all,Bootstrap was strictly a security town. A man could leave whenever hechose, but there were formalities, and personal c
ars 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 atype--construction men. Somebody here had taken part in the building ofevery skyscraper and bridge and dam put up in Joe's lifetime. They couldhave been kept away from the Space Platform job only by a flat refusalby security to let them be hired.

  Haney and Joe moved toward Sid's Steak Joint, with Mike the midgetmarching 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 atrick for fixing the pilot gyros. A speck of rust would spoil them, andthey had been through a plane crash and a fire and explosions, but histrick would do, in ten days or less, what the plant back home had neededfour months to accomplish. The trick was something to gloat over.

  Into Sid's Steak Joint. A juke box was playing. Over in a booth, fourmen ate hungrily, with a slot TV machine in the wall beside them showingwrestling matches out in San Francisco. A waiter carried a huge trayfrom which steam and fragrant odors arose.

  There was the Chief, dark and saturnine to look at, with his straightblack hair gleaming in the light. He was a Mohawk, and he and his tribehad taken to steel construction work a long time back. They were good.There were not many big construction jobs on which the Chief's tribesmenwere not to be found working. Forty of them had died together in theworst construction accident in history, when a bridge on its way tocompletion collapsed in the making, but there were a dozen or more atwork on the Space Platform now. The Chief had essayed machine-tool workat the Kenmore plant, and he'd been good. He'd pitched on the plantbaseball team, and he'd sung bass in the church choir, but there hadbeen nobody else around who talked Indian, and he'd gotten lonely. Atthat, though, he'd left because the Space Platform began and wild horsescouldn'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 sawJoe. Then he grinned and almost upset the table to stand up and greethim.

  "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 repairsomething 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 hebent 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 possiblystolen proximity-fused rockets. The plane was booby-trapped, andsomebody at an airfield had had a chance to spring the trap. So it waswreckage. Crashed and burned on landing.

  The Chief growled. Haney pressed his lips together. The eyes of Mikewere burning.

  "Plenty of that sabotage stuff," growled the Chief. "Hard to catch theso-and-sos. Smash the gyros and the take-off'd have to wait till newones got made--and that's more time for more sabotage."

  Joe said carefully: "I think it can be licked. Listen a minute, willyou?"

  The Chief fixed his eyes upon him.

  "The gyros have to be rebalanced," said Joe. "They have to spin on theirown center of gravity. At the plant, they set them up, spun them, andfound which side was heavy. They took metal off till it ran smoothly atfive hundred r.p.m. Then they spun it at a thousand. It vibrated. Theyfound 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 gravitythe center of the shaft by trimming off the weight that put the centerof 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. Everycrate spun as it rose. But not one wobbled! They found their own centersof 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 ofspinning the shaft and trimming the rotor, we'll spin the rotor and trimthe shaft. We'll form the shaft around the center of gravity, instead oftrying to move the center of gravity to the middle of the shaft. We'llspin 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? ThePlant built a high-speed centrifuge once. Remember?" He grinned with thetriumph 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 muchtoo big. They blew compressed air up the shaft hole. It floated theplate up, the air hit the vanes and spun the plate--and it ran as sweetas honey! Balanced itself and didn't wobble a bit! We'll do somethinglike that! Sure!"

  "Will you work on it with me?" asked Joe. "We'll need a sort ofcrew--three or four altogether. Have to figure out the stuff we need. Ican 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 meand Joe here? Look!"

  He pulled a pencil out of his pocket. He started to draw on the plastictable top, and then took a paper napkin instead.

  "Something like this----"

  The steaks came, sizzling on the platters they'd been cooked in. Theoutside was seared, and the inside was hot and deliciously rare.Intellectual exercises like the designing of a machine-tool operationcould not compete with such aromas and sights and sounds. The four ofthem fell to.

  But they talked as they ate. Absorbed and often with their mouths full,frequently with imperfect articulation, but with deepening satisfactionas the steaks vanished and the method they'd use took form in theirminds. It wouldn't be wholly simple, of course. When the rotors werespinning about their centers of gravity, trimming off the shaft wouldchange the center of gravity. But the change would be infinitely lessthan trimming off the rotors' rims. If they spun the rotors and used anabrasive on the high side of the shaft as it turned....

  "Going to have precession!" warned Mike. "Have to have a polishingsurface. Quarter turn behind the cutter. That'll hold it."

  Joe only remembered afterward to be astonished that Mike would know gyrotheory. 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 tothickness 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. Thepilot gyro was essential to the functioning of the Platform. To providethat necessity against impossible obstacles was a challenge to the fourwho were undertaking it.

  "Some fun!" repeated the Chief, blissfully.

  They ate their steaks, talking. They consumed huge slabs of apple piewith preposterous mounds of ice cream on top, still talking urgently.They drank coffee, interrupting each other to draw diagrams. They usedup all the paper napkins, and were still at it when someone came heavilytoward the table. It was the stocky man who had fought with Haney on thePlatform that day. Braun.

  He tapped Haney on the shoulder. The four at the table looked up.

  "We hadda fight today," said Braun in a queer 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 tofight, 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 itthen. I'm not dodgin' it now. You picked it. It was crazy! But if yougot 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 foreither of us."

  "Sure! Too bad nobody got killed," said Braun.

  "You fellas wait," said Haney angrily to Joe and the rest. "There's astoreroom 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 somefriends of yours, too?"

  "I got no friends," said Braun. "Let's go."

  The Chief went authoritatively to the owner of Sid's Steak Joint. Hepaid the bill, talking. The owner of the place negligently jerked histhumb toward the rear. This was not an unparalleled request--for the useof a storeroom so that two men could batter each other undisturbed.Bootstrap was a law-abiding town, because to get fired from work on thePlatform was to lose a place in the most important job in history. So itwas inevitable that the settlement of quarrels in private should becomecommonplace.

  The Chief leading, they filed through the kitchen and out of doors. Thestoreroom lay beyond. The Chief went in and switched on the light. Helooked about and was satisfied. It was almost empty, save for stackedcartons 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 hiscoat to Joe. He faced his antagonist.

  It was a curious atmosphere for a fight. There were merely the plankwalls of the storeroom with a single dangling light in the middle and anunswept floor beneath. The Chief stood in the doorway, scowling. Thisdidn't feel right. There was not enough hatred in evidence to justifyit. There was doggedness and resolution enough, but Braun was deathlywhite and if his face was contorted--and it was--it was not with thelust to batter and injure and maim. It was something else.

  The two men faced each other. And then the stocky, swarthy Braun swungat Haney. The blow had sting in it but nothing more. It almost looked asif Braun were trying to work himself up to the fight he'd insisted onfinishing. Haney countered with a roundhouse blow that glanced offBraun's cheek. And then they bore in at each other, slugging withoutscience or skill.

  Joe watched. Braun launched a blow that hurt, but Haney sent him reelingback. He came in doggedly again, and swung and swung, but he had no ideaof boxing. His only idea was to slug. He did slug. Haney had beenpeevish rather than angry. Now he began to glower. He began to take thefight to Braun.

  He knocked Braun down. Braun staggered up and rushed. A wildly flailingfist landed on Haney's ear. He doubled Braun up with a wallop to themidsection. Braun came back, fists swinging.

  Haney closed one eye for him. He came back. Haney shook him from head tofoot with a chest blow. He came back. Haney split his lip and loosened atooth. He came back.

  The Chief said sourly: "This ain't a fight. Quit it, Haney! He don'tknow how!"

  Haney tried to draw away, but Braun swarmed on him, striking fiercelyuntil Haney had to floor him again. He dragged himself up and rushed atHaney--and was knocked down again. Haney stood over him, pantingfuriously.

  "Quit it, y'fool! What's the matter with you?"

  Braun started to get up again. The Chief interfered and held him, whileHaney 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 gotenough?"

  "Are you out o' your head?" demanded the Chief. "He ain't got a mark onhim!"

  "I ain't--got enough," panted Braun, "till he's got--enough!"

  His breath was coming in soblike gasps, the result of body blows. Ithadn't been a fight but a beating, administered by Haney. But Braunstruggled to get up.

  Mike the midget said brittlely: "You got enough, Haney. You'resatisfied. 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. Hetried to put himself into it. Mike caught Joe's eye and noddedmeaningfully. Joe helped Braun into the coat. There was silence, savefor 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 youtoday. 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 behindstared 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 youmight think he was scared. But when he'd proved he wasn't scared of abeating--then he could say he was sorry." He paused. "I've seen guys Iliked 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 intoSid's Steak Joint, and the Chief politely thanked the proprietor for theloan of his storeroom for a private fight. Then they went out into theneon-lighted business street of Bootstrap.

  "What do we do now?" asked Joe.

  "Where you sleeping?" asked the Chief hospitably. "I can get you a roomat my place."

  "I'm staying out at the Shed," Joe told him awkwardly. "My family'sknown 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 theymight want to lock up. There's your bus."

  A lighted bus was waiting by the curb. Its doors were open, but it wasempty of passengers. Single busses ran out to the Shed now and then, butthey ran in fleets at shift-change time. Joe went over and climbedaboard the bus.

  "We'll turn up early," said the Chief. "This won't be a shift job. We'lllook 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 crackedvoice. "Now a glass of beer and so to bed. 'Night."

  Haney waved his hand. The three of them marched off, the two hugefigures of Haney and the Chief, with Mike trotting truculently betweenthem, hardly taller than their knees. They were curiously colorful withall 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 ofBootstrap were distinctive by night. Footsteps, and the jangling ofbicycle bells, and voices, and a radio blaring somewhere and arecord-shop loud-speaker somewhere else, and a sort of underriding noiseof festivity.

  There was a sharp rap on the glass by Joe's window. He started andlooked out. Braun--battered, and bleeding from the corner of hismouth--motioned urgently for him to come to the door of the bus. Joewent.

  Braun stared up at him in a new fashion. Now he was neither dogged norfierce nor desperate to look at. Despite the beating he'd taken, heseemed completely and somehow frighteningly tranquil. He looked likesomebody who has come to the end of torment and is past any feeling butthat of relief from suffering.

  "You--" said Braun. "That girl you were with today. Her pop is MajorHolt, eh?"

&nbs
p; 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 forit to start, and tried to figure out what the message meant. Since itwas for Major Holt, it had something to do with security. And securitymeant defense against sabotage. And "hot" might mean merely_significant_, or--in these days--it might mean _something else_. Infact, it might mean something to make your hair stand on end whenthought of in connection with the Space Platform.

  Joe waited for the bus to take off. He became convinced that Braun's useof the word "hot" did not mean merely "significant." The other meaningwas what he had in mind.

  Joe's teeth tried to chatter.

  He didn't let them.