Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (15 page)

The Major moved impatiently.

"I am looking at this from a security standpoint," he said. "I am trying
to make it plainly useless to attack the gyros again. Duplicates will be
in production at your father's plant. There will be three men repairing
the smashed ones. There will be another man in another place—and this
will be you—who can instruct new workmen in the repair procedure if
anything should happen. Thus there will have to be three separate
successful coups if the pilot gyros are not to be ready when the
Platform needs them. Saboteurs might try one. Possibly two. But I think
they will look for another weak spot to attack."

Joe did not like the idea of being moved away. He wanted to be on the
job repairing the device that was primarily his responsibility. Besides,
he had a feeling about Sally. If she were in danger, he wanted to be on
hand.

"About Sally, sir—"

"Sally," said the Major tiredly, "is going to have to restrict herself
to the point where she'll feel that jail would be preferable. But she
will see the need for it. She will be guarded a good deal more carefully
than before—and you may not know it, but she has been guarded rather
well."

Joe saw Sally smiling ruefully at him. What the Major had said was
unpleasant, but he was right. This was one of those arrangements that
nobody likes, an irritating, uncomfortable, disappointing necessity. But
such necessities are a part of every actual achievement. The difference
between things that get done and things that don't get done is often
merely the difference between patience and impatience with tedious
details. This arrangement would mean that Joe couldn't see Sally very
often. It would mean that the Chief and Haney and Mike would do the
actual work of getting the gyros ready. It would take all the glamour
out of Joe's contribution. These deprivations shouldn't be necessary.
But they were.

"All right, sir," said Joe gloomily. "When do I go over to the field?"

"Right away," said the Major. "Tonight." Then he added detachedly:
"Officially, the excuse for your presence there will be that you have
been useful in uncovering sabotage methods. You have. After all, through
you a number of planes that would have been blown up have now had their
booby traps removed. I know you do not claim credit for the fact, but it
is an excuse for keeping you where I want you to be for another reason
entirely. So it will be assumed that you are at the pushpot field for
counter-sabotage inspection."

The Major nodded dismissal with an indefinable air of irony, and Joe
went unhappily out of his office. He telephoned his father at length.
His father did not share Joe's disappointment at being removed to a
place of safety. He undertook to begin the castings for an entire new
set of pilot gyros at once.

A little later Sally came out of her father's office.

"I'm sorry, Joe!"

He grinned unhappily.

"So am I. I don't feel very heroic, but if this is what has to be done
to get the Platform out of the Shed and on the way up—it's what has to
be done. I suppose I can phone you?"

"You can," said Sally. "And you'd better!"

They had talked a long time that afternoon, very satisfyingly and
without any cares at all. Neither could have remembered much of what had
been said. It probably was not earth-shaking in importance. But now
there seemed to be a very great deal of other similar conversation
urgently needing to be gone through.

"I'll call you!" said Joe.

Then somebody approached to take him to the pushpot airfield. They
separated very formally under the eyes of the impersonal security
officer who would drive Joe to his destination.

It was a tedious journey through the darkness. This particular security
officer was not companionable. He was one of those conscientious people
who think that if they keep their mouths shut it will make up for their
inability to keep their eyes open. Socially he treated Joe as if he were
a highly suspect person. It could be guessed that he treated everybody
that way.

Joe went to sleep in the car.

He was only half-awake when he arrived, and he didn't bother to rouse
himself completely when he was shown to a cubbyhole in the officers'
barracks. He went to bed, making a half-conscious note to buy himself
some clothes—especially fresh linen—in the morning.

Then he knew nothing until he was awaked in the early morning by what
sounded exactly like the crack of doom.

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

Joe shivered, standing at the window. It was cold and dank in the dawn
light at this altitude, but he wanted to know what that completely
unbelievable roar had been. A crane beam by the hangars tilted down,
slowly, and then lifted as if released of a great weight. The light was
growing slowly brighter. Joe saw something on the ground. Rather, it was
not quite on the ground. It rested on something on the ground.

Suddenly that unholy uproar began again. Something moved. It ran heavily
out from the masking dark of the hangars. It picked up speed. It
acquired a reasonable velocity—forty or fifty miles an hour. As it
scuttled over the dimly lighted field, it made a din like all the boiler
factories in the world and all the backfiring motors in creation trying
to 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 of
those utterly ungainly creations that were built around one half of the
sidewall of the Shed. In shape, its upper part was like the top half of
a loaf of bread. In motion, here, it rested on some sort of wheeled
vehicle, and it was reared up like an indignant caterpillar, and a
blue-white flame squirted out of its tail, with coy and frolicsome
flirtings from side to side.

The pushpot lifted from the vehicle on which it rode, and the vehicle
put on speed and got away from under it with frantic agility. The
vehicle swerved to one side, and Joe stared with amazed eyes at the
pushpot, some twenty feet aloft. It had a flat underside, and a topside
that still looked to him like the rounded top half of a loaf of baker's
bread. It hung in the air at an angle of about forty-five degrees, and
it howled like a panic-stricken dragon—Joe was getting his metaphors
mixed 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 to
do. It started to circle around, and then it began abruptly to climb
skyward. Until it began to climb it looked heavy and clumsy and wholly
unimpressive. But when it climbed, it really moved!

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

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

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

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

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

"Fancy seeing you!" said the co-pilot cheerfully. "Welcome to the Hotel
de 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 the
devil of it. Those things fly with the grace of a lady elephant on ice
skates! 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. He
was 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 Joe
Kenmore. I'm Brick Talley and this is Captain—no less than
Captain!—Thomas J. Walton. Impressed?"

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

"They're in the jet blast!" said the co-pilot, now identified as Brick
Talley. "Like the V Two rockets when the Germans made 'em. Vanes in the
exhaust blast, no kidding! Landing, and skidding in on their tails like
they 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 things
to have bad dreams about!"

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

"That's Hotel de Gink service," said Talley. "No wasted motion, no
sloppy 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 you
doing here, anyhow?"

Joe shrugged. It occurred to him that it would neither be wise nor
creditable to say that he'd been sent here to split up a target at which
saboteurs might shoot.

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

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

"It is a truck," said Talley. "A high-speed truck. Fifty of them
specially made to serve as undercarriages so pushpot pilots can
practice. 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 hang
on to the Platform and heave. They go up with it, pushing. When they get
it as high as they can, they'll shoot their jatos, let go, and come
bumbling back home. So they have to practice getting back home and
landing. For practicing it doesn't matter how they get aloft. When they
get down, a big straddle truck on caterpillar treads picks them up—they
land in the doggonedest places, sometimes!—and brings 'em back. Then a
crane heaves them up on a high-speed truck and they do it all over
again."

Joe considered while he ate. It made sense. The function of the pushpots
was 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 high
as their jet motors would take it traveling east at the topmost speed
they could manage. Then they'd fire their jatos simultaneously, and in
doing that they'd be acting as the second booster stage of a
multiple-stage rocket. Then their work would be done, and their only
remaining 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, the
trucks get them off the ground. They go up to fifty thousand feet, just
to give their oxygen tanks a chance to conk out on them; then they barge
around up there a while. The advanced trainees shoot off a jato at top
speed. It's gauged to build them up to the speed they'll give the
Platform. And then if they come out of that and get back down to ground
safely, they uncross their fingers. A merry life those guys lead! When a
man's made ten complete flights he retires. One flight a week thereafter
to 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's
something the matter with the motors. They've got a little too much
power, maybe. Sometimes—occasionally—they explode."

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

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

"It doesn't sound exactly reasonable," said Joe slowly. He put a last
forkful 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. Four
pilots killed this week."