Space Platform

by Murray Leinster

  9

  It was not, however, the crack of doom. When Joe stared out the windowby the head of his cot, he saw gray-red dawn breaking over the landingfield. There were low, featureless structures silhouetted against thesunrise. As the crimson light grew brighter, Joe realized that theangular shapes were hangars. Improbable crane poles loomed above them.One was in motion, handling something he could not make out, but thenoise that had awakened him was less, now. It seemed to circle overhead,and it had an angry, droning, buzzing quality that was not natural inany motor he had ever heard before.

  Joe shivered, standing at the window. It was cold and dank in the dawnlight at this altitude, but he wanted to know what that completelyunbelievable roar had been. A crane beam by the hangars tilted down,slowly, and then lifted as if released of a great weight. The light wasgrowing slowly brighter. Joe saw something on the ground. Rather, it wasnot quite on the ground. It rested on something on the ground.

  Suddenly that unholy uproar began again. Something moved. It ran heavilyout from the masking dark of the hangars. It picked up speed. Itacquired a reasonable velocity--forty or fifty miles an hour. As itscuttled over the dimly lighted field, it made a din like all the boilerfactories in the world and all the backfiring motors in creation tryingto drown each other's noise out--and all of them being very successful.

  It was a pushpot. Joe recognized it with incredulity. It was one ofthose utterly ungainly creations that were built around one half of thesidewall of the Shed. In shape, its upper part was like the top half ofa loaf of bread. In motion, here, it rested on some sort of wheeledvehicle, and it was reared up like an indignant caterpillar, and ablue-white flame squirted out of its tail, with coy and frolicsomeflirtings from side to side.

  The pushpot lifted from the vehicle on which it rode, and the vehicleput on speed and got away from under it with frantic agility. Thevehicle swerved to one side, and Joe stared with amazed eyes at thepushpot, some twenty feet aloft. It had a flat underside, and a topsidethat still looked to him like the rounded top half of a loaf of baker'sbread. It hung in the air at an angle of about forty-five degrees, andit howled like a panic-stricken dragon--Joe was getting his metaphorsmixed by this time--and it swung and wobbled and slowly gained altitude,and then suddenly it seemed to get the knack of what it was supposed todo. It started to circle around, and then it began abruptly to climbskyward. Until it began to climb it looked heavy and clumsy and whollyunimpressive. But when it climbed, it really moved!

  Joe found his head out the window, craning up to look at it. Itsunearthly din took on the indignant quality of an irritated beehive. Butit climbed! It went up without grace but with astonishing speed. And itwas huge, but it became lost in the red-flecked dawn sky while Joe stillgaped.

  Joe flung on his clothes. He went out the door through resonant emptycorridors, hunting for somebody to tell him something. He blundered intoa mess hall. There were many tables, but the chairs around them werepushed back as if used and then left behind by people in a hurry to besomewhere else. There were exactly two people still visible over in acorner.

  Another din like the wailing of a baby volcano with a toothache. Itbegan, and moved, and went through the series of changes that ended in aclimbing, droning hum. Another. Another. The launching of pushpots fortheir morning flight was evidently getting well under way.

  Joe hesitated in the nearly empty mess hall. Then he recognized the twoseated figures. They were the pilot and co-pilot, respectively, of thefateful plane that had brought him to Bootstrap.

  He went over to their table. The pilot nodded matter-of-factly. Theco-pilot grinned. Both still wore bandages on their hands, which wouldaccount for their remaining here.

  "Fancy seeing you!" said the co-pilot cheerfully. "Welcome to the Hotelde Gink! But don't tell me you're going to fly a pushpot!"

  "I hadn't figured on it," admitted Joe. "Are you?"

  "Perish forbid," said the co-pilot amiably. "I tried it once, for thedevil of it. Those things fly with the grace of a lady elephant on iceskates! Did you, by any chance, notice that they haven't got any wings?And did you notice where their control surfaces were?"

  Joe shook his head. He saw the remnants of ham and eggs and coffee. Hewas hungry.

  There was the uproar to be expected of a basso-profundo banshee in pain.Another pushpot was taking off.

  "How do I get breakfast?" he asked.

  The co-pilot pointed to a chair. He rapped sharply on a drinking glass.A door opened, he pointed at Joe, and the door closed.

  "Breakfast coming up," said the co-pilot. "Look! I know you're JoeKenmore. I'm Brick Talley and this is Captain--no less thanCaptain!--Thomas J. Walton. Impressed?"

  "Very much," said Joe. He sat down. "What about the control surfaces onpushpots?"

  "They're in the jet blast!" said the co-pilot, now identified as BrickTalley. "Like the V Two rockets when the Germans made 'em. Vanes in theexhaust blast, no kidding! Landing, and skidding in on their tails likethey do, they haven't speed enough to give wing flaps a grip on the air,even if they had wings to put wing flaps on. Those dinkuses are thingsto have bad dreams about!"

  Again, a door opened and a man in uniform with an apron in front camemarching in with a tray. There was tomato juice and ham and eggs andcoffee. He served Joe briskly and marched out again.

  "That's Hotel de Gink service," said Talley. "No wasted motion, nosloppy civilities. He was about to eat that himself, he gave it to you,and now he'll cook himself a double portion of everything. What are youdoing here, anyhow?"

  Joe shrugged. It occurred to him that it would neither be wise norcreditable to say that he'd been sent here to split up a target at whichsaboteurs might shoot.

  "I guess I'm attached for rations," he observed. "There'll be ordersalong about me presently, I suppose. Then I'll know what it's allabout."

  He fell to on his breakfast. The thunderous noises of the pushpotstaking off made the mess hall quiver. Joe said between mouthfuls: "Funnyway for anything to take off, riding on--it looked like a truck."

  "It is a truck," said Talley. "A high-speed truck. Fifty of themspecially made to serve as undercarriages so pushpot pilots canpractice. The pushpots are really only expected to work once, you know."

  Joe nodded.

  "They aren't to take off," Talley explained. "Not in theory. They hangon to the Platform and heave. They go up with it, pushing. When they getit as high as they can, they'll shoot their jatos, let go, and comebumbling back home. So they have to practice getting back home andlanding. For practicing it doesn't matter how they get aloft. When theyget down, a big straddle truck on caterpillar treads picks them up--theyland in the doggonedest places, sometimes!--and brings 'em back. Then acrane heaves them up on a high-speed truck and they do it all overagain."

  Joe considered while he ate. It made sense. The function of the pushpotswas to serve as the first booster stage of a multiple-stage rocket.Together, they would lift the Platform off the ground and get it as highas their jet motors would take it traveling east at the topmost speedthey could manage. Then they'd fire their jatos simultaneously, and indoing that they'd be acting as the second booster stage of amultiple-stage rocket. Then their work would be done, and their onlyremaining purpose would be to get their pilots back to the ground alive,while the Platform on its own third stage shot out to space.

  "So," said Talley, "since their pilots need to practice landings, thetrucks get them off the ground. They go up to fifty thousand feet, justto give their oxygen tanks a chance to conk out on them; then they bargearound up there a while. The advanced trainees shoot off a jato at topspeed. It's gauged to build them up to the speed they'll give thePlatform. And then if they come out of that and get back down to groundsafely, they uncross their fingers. A merry life those guys lead! When aman's made ten complete flights he retires. One flight a week thereafterto keep in practice only, until the big day for the Platform's take-off.Those guys sweat!"

  "Is it that bad?"

  The pilot grunted. The co
-pilot--Talley--spread out his hands.

  "It is that bad! Every so often one of them comes down untidily. There'ssomething the matter with the motors. They've got a little too muchpower, maybe. Sometimes--occasionally--they explode."

  "Jet motors?" asked Joe. "Explode? That's news!"

  "A strictly special feature," said Talley drily. "Exclusive withpushpots for the Platform. They run 'em and run 'em and run 'em, ontest. Nothing happens. But occasionally one blows up in flight. Once ithappened warming up. That was a mess! The field's been losing two pilotsa week. Lately more."

  "It doesn't sound exactly reasonable," said Joe slowly. He put a lastforkful in his mouth.

  "It's also inconvenient," said Talley, "for the pilots."

  The pilot--Walton--opened his mouth.

  "It'd be sabotage," he said curtly, "if there was any way to do it. Fourpilots killed this week."

  He lapsed into silence again.

  Joe considered. He frowned.

  A pushpot, outside the building, hysterically bellowed its way acrossthe runway and its noise changed and it was aloft. It went spiraling upand up. Joe stirred his coffee.

  There were thin shoutings outside. A screaming, whistling noise! Acrash! Something metallic shrieked and died. Then silence.

  Talley, the co-pilot, looked sick. Then he said: "Correction. It's beenfive pushpots exploded and five pilots killed this week. It's getting alittle bit serious." He looked sharply at Joe. "Better drink your coffeebefore you go look. You won't want to, afterward."

  He was right.

  Joe saw the crashed pushpot half an hour later. He found that hisostensible assignment to the airfield for the investigation of sabotagewas quaintly taken at face value there. A young lieutenant solemnlyescorted him to the spot where the pushpot had landed, only ten feetfrom a hangar wall. The impact had carried parts of the pushpot fivefeet into the soil, and the splash effect had caved in the hangarwall-footing. There'd been a fire, which had been put out.

  The ungainly flying thing was twisted and torn. Entrails of steel tubingwere revealed. The plastic cockpit cover was shattered. There were onlygrisly stains where the pilot had been.

  The motor had exploded. The jet motor. And jet motors do not explode.But this one had. It had burst from within, and the turbine vanes of thecompressor section were revealed, twisted intolerably where the barrelof the motor was ripped away. The jagged edges of the tear testified tothe violence of the internal explosion.

  Joe looked wise and felt ill. The young lieutenant very politely lookedaway as Joe's face showed how he felt. But of course there were theorders that said he was a sabotage expert. And Joe felt angrily that hewas sailing under false colors. He didn't know anything about sabotage.He believed that he was probably the least qualified of anybody thatsecurity had ever empowered to look into methods of destruction.

  Yet, in a sense, that very fact was an advantage. A man may be set towork to contrive methods of sabotage. Another man may be trained tocounter him. The training of the second man is essentially a study ofhow the first man's mind works. Then it can be guessed what thissaboteur will think and do. But such a trained security man will oftenbe badly handicapped if he comes upon the sabotage methods of a secondman--an entirely different saboteur who thinks in a new fashion. Thesecurity man may be hampered in dealing with the second man's sabotagejust because he knows too much about the thinking of the first.

  Joe went off and scowled at a wall, while the young lieutenant waitedhopefully nearby.

  He was in a false position. But he could see that there was somethingodd here. There was a sort of pattern in the way the other sabotageincidents had been planned. It was hard to pick out, but it was there.Joe thought of the trick of booby-trapping a plane during its majoroverhaul, and then arming the traps at a later date.... A private planehad been fitted to deliver proximity rockets in mid-air when thetransport ship flew past. There was the explosion of the cargo parcelwhich was supposed to contain requisition forms and stationery. And theattempt to smash the entire Platform by getting an atomic bomb into aplane and having a saboteur shoot the crew and then deliver the bomb atthe Shed in an officially harmless aircraft....

  The common element in all those sabotage tricks was actually clearenough, but Joe wasn't used to thinking in such terms. He did know,though, that there was a pattern in those devices which did not exist inthe blowing up of jet motors from inside.

  He scowled and scowled, racking his brains, while the young lieutenantwatched respectfully, waiting for Joe to have an inspiration. Had Joeknown it, the lieutenant was deeply impressed by his attempt atconcentration on the problem it had not been Major Holt's intention forJoe to consider. When Joe temporarily gave up, the young lieutenanteagerly showed him over the whole field and all its workings.

  In mid-morning another pushpot fell screaming from the skies. That madesix pushpots and six pilots for this week--two today. The things had nowings. They had no gliding angle. Pointed up, they could climbunbelievably. While their engines functioned, they could be controlledafter a fashion. But they were not aircraft in any ordinary meaning ofthe word. They were engines with fuel tanks and controls in theirexhaust blast. When their engines failed, they were so much junk fallingout of the sky.

  Joe happened to see the second crash, and he didn't go to noon mess atall. He hadn't any appetite. Instead, he gloomily let himself be packedfull of irrelevant information by the young lieutenant who consideredthat since Joe had been sent by security to look into sabotage, he mustbe given every possible opportunity to evaluate--that would be the wordthe young lieutenant would use--the situation.

  But all the time that Joe followed him about, his mind fumbled with ahunch. The idea was that there was a pattern of thinking in sabotage,and if you could solve it, you could outguess the saboteur. But thetrouble was to figure out the similarity he felt existed in--say--aprivate plane shooting rockets and overhaul mechanics planting boobytraps and faked shippers getting bombs on planes--and come to think ofit, there was Braun....

  Braun was the key! Braun had been an honest man, with an honest loyaltyto the United States which had given him refuge. But he had beenblackmailed into accepting a container of atomic death to be released inthe Shed. Radioactive cobalt did not belong in the Shed. That was thekey to the pattern of sabotage. Braun was not to use any natural thingthat belonged in the Shed. He was to be only the means by whichsomething extraneous and deadly was to have been introduced.

  That was it! Somebody was devising ingenious ways to get well-knowndestructive devices into places where they did not belong, but wherethey would be effective. Rockets. Bombs. Even radioactive cobalt dust.All were perfectly well-known means of destruction. The minds thatplanned those tricks said, in effect: "These things will destroy. Howcan we get them to where they will destroy something?" It was a strictpattern.

  But the pushpot sabotage--and Joe was sure it was nothing else--was notthat sort of thing. Making motors explode.... Motors don't explode. Onecouldn't put bombs in them. There wasn't room. The explosions Joe hadseen looked as if they'd centered in the fire basket--technically thecombustion area--behind the compressor and before the drive vanes. A jetmotor whirled. Its front vanes compressed air, and a flame burnedfuriously in the compressed air, which swelled enormously and poured outpast other vanes that took power from it to drive the compressor. Theexcess of blast poured out astern in a blue-white flame, driving theship.

  But one couldn't put a bomb in a fire basket. The temperature would meltanything but the refractory alloys of which a jet motor has to be built.A bomb placed there would explode the instant a motor was started. Itcouldn't resist until the pushpot took off. It couldn't....

  This was a different kind of sabotage. There was a different mind atwork.

  In the afternoon Joe watched the landings, while the young lieutenantfollowed him patiently about. A pushpot landing was quite unlike thelanding of any other air-borne thing. It came flying down withincredible clumsiness, making an uproar out of all propor
tion to itslanding speed. Pushpots came in with their tail ends low, crudely andcruelly clumsy in their handling. They had no wings or fins. They had tobe balanced by their jet blasts. They had to be steered the same way.When a jet motor conked out there was no control. The pushpot fell.

  He carefully watched one landing now. It came down low, and swung intoward the field, and seemed to reach its stern down tentatively toslide on the earth, and the flame of its exhaust scorched the field, andit hesitated, pointing up at an ever steeper angle--and it touched andits nose tilted forward--and leaped up as the jet roared more loudly,and then touched again....

  The goal was for pushpots to touch ground finally with the whole weightof the flying monstrosity supported by the vertical thrust of the jet,and while it was moving forward at the lowest possible rate of speed.When that goal was achieved, they flopped solidly flat, slid a few feeton their metal bellies, and lay still. Some hit hard and tried to diginto the earth with their blunt noses. Joe finally saw one touch with noforward speed at all. It seemed to try to settle down vertically, as arocket takes off. That one fell over backward and wallowed with itsbelly plates in the air before it rolled over on its side and rockedthere.

  The last of a flight touched down and flopped, and the memory of thewreckage had been overlaid by these other sights and Joe could think ofhis next meal without aversion. When it was evening-mess time he wentdoggedly back to the mess hall. There was a sort of itchy feeling in hismind. He knew something he didn't know he knew. There was something inhis memory that he couldn't recall.

  Talley and Walton were again at mess. Joe went to their table. Talleylooked at him inquiringly.

  "Yes, I saw both crashes," said Joe gloomily, "and I didn't want anylunch. It was sabotage, though. Only it was different in kind--it wasdifferent in principle--from the other tricks. But I can't figure outwhat it is!"

  "Mmmmmm," said Talley, amiably. "You'd learn something if you could talkto the Resistance fighters and saboteurs in Europe. The Poles werewonderful at it! They had one chap who could get at the tank cars thattook aviation gasoline from the refinery to the various Nazi airfields.He used to dump some chemical compound--just a tiny bit--into eachcarload of gas. It looked all right, smelled all right, and worked allright. But at odd moments Hitler's planes would crash. The valves wouldstick and the engine'd conk out."

  Joe stared at him. And it was just as simple as that. He saw.

  "The Nazis lost a lot of planes that way," said Talley. "Those thatdidn't crash from stuck valves in flight--they had to have their valvesreground. Lost flying time. Wonderful! And when the Nazis did uncoverthe trick, they had to re-refine every drop of aviation gas they had!"

  Joe said: "That's it!"

  "That's it? And _it_ is what?"

  Then Joe said disgustedly: "Surely! It's the trick of loading CO_2bottles with explosive gas, too! Excuse me!"

  He got up from the table and hurried out. He found a phone booth and gotthe Shed, and then the security office, and at long last Major Holt. TheMajor's tone was curt.

  "Yes?... Joe?... The three men from the affair of the lake were trackedthis morning. When they were cornered they tried to fight. I am afraidwe'll get no information from them, if that's what you wanted to know."

  The Major's manner seemed to disapprove of Joe as expressing curiosity.His words meant, of course, that the three would-be murderers had beenfatally shot.

  Joe said carefully: "That wasn't what I called about, sir. I think I'vefound out something about the pushpots. How they're made to crash. Butmy hunch needs to be checked."

  The Major said briefly: "Tell me."

  Joe said: "All the tricks but one, that were used on the plane I cameon, were the same kind of trick. They were all arrangements for gettingregular destructive items--bombs or rockets or whatever--where theycould explode and smash things. The saboteurs were adding destructiveitems to various states of things. But there was one trick that wasdifferent."

  "Yes?" said the Major, on the telephone.

  "Putting explosive gas in the CO_2 bottles," said Joe painstakingly,"wasn't adding a new gadget to a situation. It was changing somethingthat was already there. The saboteurs took something that belonged in aplane and changed it. They did not put something new into a plane--or asituation--that didn't belong there. It was a special kind of thinking.You see, sir?"

  The Major, to do him justice, had the gift of listening. He waited.

  "The pushpots," said Joe, very carefully, "naturally have their fuelstored in different tanks in different places, as airplanes do. Thepilots switch on one tank or another just like plane pilots. In theunderground storage and fueling pits, where all the fuel for thepushpots is kept in bulk, there are different tanks too. Naturally! Atthe fuel pump, the attendant can draw on any of those underground tankshe chooses."

  The Major said curtly: "Obviously! What of it?"

  "The pushpot motors explode," said Joe. "And they shouldn't. No bombcould be gotten into them without going off the instant they started,and they don't blow that way. I make a guess, sir, that one of theunderground storage tanks--just one--contains doctored fuel. I'mguessing that as separate tanks in a pushpot are filled up, one by one,_one_ is filled from a particular underground storage tank that containsdoctored fuel. The rest will have normal fuel. And the pushpot is goingto crash when that tank, and only that tank, is used!"

  Major Holt was very silent.

  "You see, sir?" said Joe uneasily. "The pushpots could be fueled ahundred times over with perfectly good fuel, and then one tank in one ofthem would explode when drawn on. There'd be no pattern in theexplosions...."

  Major Holt said coldly: "Of course I see! It would need only one tank ofdoctored fuel to be delivered to the airfield, and it need not be usedfor weeks. And there would be no trace in the wreckage, after the fire!You are telling me there is one underground storage tank in which thefuel is highly explosive. It is plausible. I will have it checkedimmediately."

  He hung up, and Joe went back to his meal. He felt uneasy. Therecouldn't be any way to make a jet motor explode unless you fed itexplosive fuel. Then there couldn't be any way to stop it. Andthen--after the wreck had burned--there couldn't be any way to prove itwas really sabotage. But the feeling of having reported only a guess wasnot too satisfying. Joe ate gloomily. He didn't pay much attention toTalley. He had that dogged, uncomfortable feeling a man has when heknows he doesn't qualify as an expert, but feels that he's hit onsomething the experts have missed.

  Half an hour after the evening mess--near sunset--a security officerwearing a uniform hunted up Joe at the airfield.

  "Major Holt sent me over to bring you back to the Shed," he saidpolitely.

  "If you don't mind," said Joe with equal politeness, "I'll check that."

  He went to the phone booth in the barracks. He got Major Holt on thewire. And Major Holt hadn't sent anybody to get him.

  So Joe stayed in the telephone booth--on orders--while the Major didsome fast telephoning. It was comforting to know he had a pistol in hispocket, and it was frustrating not to be allowed to try to capture thefake security officer himself. The idea of murdering Joe had not beengiven up, and he'd have liked to take part personally in protectinghimself. But it was much more important for the fake security man to becaptured than for Joe to have the satisfaction of attempting it himself.

  As a matter of fact, the fake officer started his getaway the instantJoe went to check on his orders. The officer knew they'd be found faked.It had not been practical for him to shoot Joe down where he was. Therewere too many people around for this murderer to have a chance at agetaway.

  But he didn't get away, at that. Twenty minutes later, while Joe stillwaited fretfully in the phone booth, the phone bell rang and Major Holtwas again on the wire. And this time Joe was instructed to come back tothe Shed. He had exact orders whom to come with, and they had orderswhich identified them to Joe.

  Some eight miles from the airfield--it was just dusk--Joe came upon awrecked car with motorc
ycle security guards working on it. They stoppedJoe's escort. Joe's phone call had set off an alarm. A plane had spottedthis car tearing away from the airfield, and motorcyclists were guidedin pursuit by the plane. When it wouldn't stop--when the fake Securityofficer in it tried to shoot his way clear--the plane strafed him. So hewas dead and his car was a wreck, and the motorcycle men were trying toget some useful information from his body and the car.

  Joe went to the Major's house in the officers'-quarters area. The Majorlooked even more tired than before, but he nodded approvingly at Joe.Sally was there too, and she regarded Joe with a look which was a gooddeal warmer than her father's.

  "You did very well," said the Major detachedly. "I don't have too highan opinion of the brains of anybody your age, Joe. When you are my age,you won't either. But whether you have brains or simply luck, you areturning out to be very useful."

  Joe said: "I'm getting security conscious, sir. I want to stay alive."

  The Major regarded him with irony.

  "I was thinking of the fact that when you worked out the matter of thedoctored pushpot fuel, you did not try to be a hero and prove ityourself. You referred it to me. That was the proper procedure. Youcould have been killed, investigating--it's clear that the saboteurswould be pleased to have a good chance to murder you--and yoursuspicions might never have reached me. They were correct, by the way.One storage tank underground was half-full of doctored fuel. Rather moreimportant, another _was_ full, not yet drawn on."

  The Major went on, without apparent cordiality: "It seems probable thatif this particular sabotage trick had not been detected--it seems likelythat on the Platform's take-off, all or most of the pushpots would havebeen fueled to explode at some time after the Platform was aloft, andbefore it could possibly get out to space."

  Joe felt queer. The Major was telling him, in effect, that he might havekept the Platform from crashing on take-off. It was a good but upsettingsensation. It was still more important to Joe that the Platform get outto space than that he be credited with saving it. And it was notreassuring to hear that it might have been wrecked.

  "Your reasoning," added the Major coldly, "was soundly based. It seemscertain that there is not one central authority directing all thesabotage against the Platform. There are probably several sabotageorganizations, all acting independently and probably hating each other,but all hating the Platform more."

  Joe blinked. He hadn't thought of that. It was disheartening.

  "It will really be bad," said the Major, "if they ever co-operate!"

  "Yes, sir," said Joe.

  "But I called you back from the airfield," the Major told him withoutwarmth, "to say that you have done a good job. I have talked toWashington. Naturally, you deserve a reward."

  "I'm doing all right, sir," said Joe awkwardly. "I want to see thePlatform go up and stay up!"

  The Major nodded impatiently.

  "Naturally! But--ah--one of the men selected and trained for the crew ofthe Platform has been--ah--taken ill. In strict confidence, because ofsabotage it has been determined to close in the Platform and get italoft at the earliest possible instant, even if its interiorarrangements are incomplete. So--ah--in view of your usefulness, I saidto Washington that I believed the greatest reward you could be offeredwas--ah--to be trained as an alternate crew member, to take this man'splace if he does not recover in time."

  The room seemed to reel around Joe. Then he gulped and said: "Yes, sir!I mean--that's right. I mean, I'd rather have that, than all the moneyin the world!"

  "Very well." The Major turned to leave the room. "You'll stay here, beguarded a good deal more closely than before, and take instructions. Butyou understand that you are still only an alternate for a crew member!The odds are definitely against your going!"

  "That's--that's all right, sir," said Joe unsteadily. "That's quite allright!"

  The Major went out. Joe stood still, trying to realize what all thismight mean to him. Then Sally stirred.

  "You might say thanks, Joe."

  Her eyes were shining, but she looked proud, too.

  "I put it in Dad's head that that was what you'd like better thananything else," she told him. "If I can't go up in the Platformmyself--and I can't--I wanted you to. Because I knew you wanted to."

  She smiled at him as he tried incoherently to talk. With a quietmaternal patience, she led him out on the porch of her father's houseand sat there and listened to him. It was a long time before he realizedthat she was humoring him. Then he stopped short and looked at hersuspiciously. He found that in his enthusiastic gesticulations he hadbeen gesticulating with _her_ hand as well as his own.

  "I guess I'm pretty crazy," he said ruefully. "Shooting off my mouthabout myself up there in space.... You're pretty decent to stand me theway I am, Sally."

  He paused. Then he said humbly: "I'm plain lucky. But knowing youand--having you like me reasonably much is pretty lucky too!"

  She looked at him noncommittally.

  He added painfully: "And not only because you spoke to your father andtold him just the right thing, either. You're--sort of swell, Sally!"

  She let out her breath. Then she grinned at him.

  "That's the difference between us, Joe," she told him. "To me, what youjust said is the most important thing anybody's said tonight."