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 queer 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.”
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 48