Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (2 page)

If the co-pilot was telling the truth, though—.

Joe found a slow burn beginning inside him. He had a picture in his mind
that was practically a dream. It was of something big and bright and
ungainly swimming silently in emptiness with a field of stars behind it.
The stars were tiny pin points of light. They were unwinking and
distinct because there was no air where this thing floated. The
blackness between them was absolute because this was space itself. The
thing that floated was a moon. A man-made moon. It was an artificial
satellite of Earth. Men were now building it. Presently it would float
as Joe dreamed of it, and where the sun struck it, it would be
unbearably bright, and where there were shadows, they would be abysmally
black—except, perhaps, when earthshine from the planet below would
outline it in a ghostly fashion.

There would be men in the thing that floated in space. It swam in a
splendid orbit about the world that had built it. Sometimes there were
small ships that—so Joe imagined—would fight their way up to it,
panting great plumes of rocket smoke, and bringing food and fuel to its
crew. And presently one of those panting small ships would refill its
fuel tanks to the bursting point from the fuel other ships had
brought—and yet the ship would have no weight. So it would drift away
from the greater floating thing in space, and suddenly its rockets would
spout flame and fumes, and it would head triumphantly out and away from
Earth. And it would be the first vessel ever to strike out for the
stars!

That was the picture Joe had of the Space Platform and its meaning.
Maybe it was romantic, but men were working right now to make that
romance come true. This transport plane was flying to a small town
improbably called Bootstrap, carrying one of the most essential devices
for the Platform's equipment. In the desert near Bootstrap there was a
gigantic construction shed. Inside that shed men were building exactly
the monstrous object that Joe pictured to himself. They were trying to
realize a dream men have dreamed for decades—the necessary space
platform that would be the dock, the wharf, the starting point from
which the first of human space explorers could start for infinity. The
idea that anybody could want to halt such an undertaking made Joe
Kenmore burn.

The co-pilot painstakingly crushed out his cigarette. The ship flew with
more steadiness than a railroad car rolls on rails. There was the oddly
cushioned sound of the motors. It was all very matter-of-fact.

But Joe said angrily: "Look! Is any of what you said—well—kidding?"

"I wish it were, fella," said the co-pilot. "I can talk to you about it,
but most of it's hushed up. I tell you—"

"Why can you talk to me?" demanded Joe suspiciously. "What makes it all
right for you to talk to me?"

"You've got passage on this ship. That means something!"

"Does it?" asked Joe.

The pilot turned in his seat to glance at Joe.

"Do you think we carry passengers regularly?" he asked mildly.

"Why not?"

Pilot and co-pilot looked at each other.

"Tell him," said the pilot.

"About five months ago," said the co-pilot, "there was an Army colonel
wangled a ride to Bootstrap on a cargo plane. The plane took off. It
flew all right until twenty miles from Bootstrap. Then it stopped
checking. It dove straight for the Shed the Platform's being built in.
It was shot down. When it hit, there was an explosion." The co-pilot
shrugged. "You won't believe me, maybe. But a week later they found the
colonel's body back east. Somebody'd murdered him."

Joe blinked.

"It wasn't the colonel who rode as a passenger," said the co-pilot. "It
was somebody else. Twenty miles from Bootstrap he'd shot the pilots and
taken the controls. That's what they figure, anyhow. He meant to dive
into the construction Shed. Because—very, very cleverly—they'd managed
to get a bomb in the plane disguised as cargo. They got the men who'd
done that, later, but it was rather late."

Joe said dubiously: "But would one bomb destroy the Shed and the
Platform?"

"This one would," said the co-pilot. "It was an atom bomb. But it wasn't
a good one. It didn't detonate properly. It was a fizz-off."

Joe saw the implications. Cranks and crackpots couldn't get hold of the
materials for atom bombs. It took the resources of a large nation for
that. But a nation that didn't quite dare start an open war might try to
sneak in one atom bomb to destroy the space station. Once the Platform
was launched no other nation could dream of world domination. The United
States wouldn't go to war if the Platform was destroyed. But there could
be a strictly local hot war.

The pilot said sharply: "Something down below!"

The co-pilot fairly leaped into his right-hand seat, his safety belt
buckled in half a heartbeat.

"Check," he said in a new tone. "Where?"

The pilot pointed.

"I saw something dark," he said briefly, "where there was a deep dent in
the cloud."

The co-pilot threw a switch. Within seconds a new sound entered the
cabin.
Beep-beep-beep-beep.
They were thin squeaks, spaced a full
half-second apart, that rose to inaudibility in pitch in the fraction of
a second they lasted. The co-pilot snatched a hand phone from the wall
above his head and held it to his lips.

"Flight two-twenty calling," he said crisply. "Something's got a radar
on us. We saw it. Get a fix on us and come a-running. We're at eighteen
thousand and"—here the floor of the cabin tilted markedly—"now we're
climbing. Get a fix on us and come a-running. Over!"

He took the phone from his lips and said conversationally: "Radar's a
giveaway. This is no fly-way. You wouldn't think he'd take that much of
a chance, would you?"

Joe clenched his hands. The pilot did things to the levers on the column
between the two pilots' seats. He said curtly: "Arm the jatos."

The co-pilot did something mysterious and said: "Check."

All this took place in seconds. The pilot said, "I see something!" and
instantly there was swift, tense teamwork in action. A call by radio,
asking for help. The plane headed up for greater clearance between it
and the clouds. The jatos made ready for firing. They were the
jet-assisted take-off rockets which on a short or rough field would
double the motors' thrust for a matter of seconds. In straightaway
flight they should make the plane leap ahead like a scared rabbit. But
they wouldn't last long.

"I don't like this," said the co-pilot in a flat voice. "I don't see
what he could do—"

Then he stopped. Something zoomed out of a cloud. The action was
completely improbable. The thing that appeared looked absolutely
commonplace. It was a silver-winged private plane, the sort that cruises
at one hundred and seventy-five knots and can hit nearly two-fifty if
pushed. It was expensive, but not large. It came straight up out of the
cloud layer and went lazily over on its back and dived down into the
cloud layer again. It looked like somebody stunting for his own private
lunatic pleasure—the kind of crazy thing some people do, and for which
there is no possible explanation.

But there was an explanation for this.

At the very top of the loop, threads of white smoke appeared. They
should have been unnoticeable against the cloud. But for the fraction of
an instant they were silhouetted against the silver wings. And they were
not misty wisps of vapor. They were dense, sharply defined rocket
trails.

They shot upward, spreading out. They unreeled with incredible,
ever-increasing velocity.

The pilot hit something with the heel of his hand. There was a
heart-stopping delay. Then the transport leaped forward with a force to
stop one's breath. The jatos were firing furiously, and the ship jumped.
There was a bellowing that drowned out the sound of the engines. Joe was
slammed back on the rear wall of the cabin. He struggled against the
force that pushed him tailward. He heard the pilot saying calmly: "That
plane shot rockets at us. If they're guided we're sunk."

Then the threads of smoke became the thickness of cables, of columns!
They should have ringed the transport plane in. But the jatos had jumped
it crazily forward and were still thrusting fiercely to make it go
faster than any prop-plane could. The acceleration made the muscles at
the front of Joe's throat ache as he held his head upright against it.

"They'll be proximity—"

Then the plane bucked. Very probably, at that moment, it was stretched
far past the limit of strain for which even its factor of safety was
designed. One rocket had let go. The others went with it. The rockets
had had proximity fuses. If they had ringed the transport ship and gone
off with it enclosed, it would now be a tumbling mass of wreckage. But
the jatos had thrown the plane out ahead of the target area. Suddenly
they cut off, and it seemed as if the ship had braked. But the pilot
dived steeply, for speed.

The co-pilot was saying coldly into the microphone: "He shot rockets.
Looked like Army issue three point fives with proximities. They missed.
And we're mighty lonely!"

The transport tore on, both pilots grimly watching the cloud bank below.
They moved their bodies as they stared out the windows, so that by no
possibility could any part of the plane mask something that they should
see. As they searched, the co-pilot spoke evenly into the microphone at
his lips: "He wouldn't carry more than four rockets, and he's dumping
his racks and firing equipment now. But he might have a friend with him.
Better get here quick if you want to catch him. He'll be the innocentest
private pilot you ever saw in no time!"

Then the pilot grunted. Something was streaking across the cloud
formation far, far ahead. Three things. They were jet planes, and they
seemed not so much to approach as to swell in size. They were coming at
better than five hundred knots—ten miles a minute—and the transport
was heading for them at its top speed of three hundred knots. The
transport and the flight of jets neared each other at the rate of a mile
in less than four seconds.

The co-pilot said crisply: "Silver Messner with red wing-tips. The
number began—" He gave the letter and first digits of the vanished
plane's official designation, without which it could not take off from
or be serviced at any flying field.

Joe heard an insistent, swift
beep-beep-beep-beep
which would be the
radars of the approaching jets. He could not hear any answers that might
reach the co-pilot as he talked to unseen persons who would relay his
words to the jet fighters.

One of them peeled off and sank into the cloud layer. The others came
on. They set up in great circles about the transport, crossing before
it, above it, around it, which gave the effect of flying around an
object not in motion at all.

The pilot flew on, frowning. The co-pilot said: "Yes. Sure! I'm
listening!" There was a pause. Then he said: "Check. Thanks."

He hung the instrument back where it belonged, above his head and behind
him. He thoughtfully mopped his brow. He looked at Joe.

"Maybe," he said mildly, "you believe me when I tell you there's a sort
of hot war on, to keep the Platform from taking off."

The pilot grunted. "Here's the third jet coming up."

It was true. The jet that had dived into the clouds came up out of the
cloud formation with somehow an air of impassive satisfaction.

"Did they spot the guy?"

"Yeah," said the co-pilot. "He must've picked up my report. He didn't
dump his radar. He stayed in the cloud bank. When the jet came for
him—spotting him with its night-fighter stuff—he tried to ram. Tried
for a collision. So the jet gave him the works. Blew him apart. Couldn't
make him land. Maybe they'll pick up something from the wreckage."

Joe wet his lips.

"I—saw what happened," he said. "He tried to smash us with rockets.
Where'd he get them? How were they smuggled in?"

The co-pilot shrugged. "Maybe smuggled in. Maybe stolen. They coulda
been landed from a sub anywhere on a good many thousand miles of coast.
They coulda been hauled anywhere in a station wagon. The plane was a
private-type ship. Plenty of them flying around. It could've been bought
easily enough. All they'd need would be a farm somewhere where it could
land and they could strap on a rocket rack and put in a radar. And
they'd need information. Probably be a good lead, this business. Only
just so many people could know what was coming on this ship, and what
course it was flying, and so on. Security will have to check back from
that angle."

A shadow fell upon the transport ship. A jet shot past from above it. It
waggled its wings and changed course.

"We've got to land and be checked for damage," said the co-pilot
negligently. "These guys will circle us and lead the way—as if we
needed it!"

Joe subsided. He still had in his mind the glamorous and infinitely
alluring picture of the Space Platform floating grandly in its orbit,
with white-hot sunshine on it and a multitude of stars beyond. He had
been completely absorbed in that aspect of the job that dealt with the
method of construction and the technical details by which the Platform
could be made to work.

Now he had a side light on the sort of thing that has to be done when
anything important is achieved. Figuring out how a thing can be done is
only part of the job. Overcoming the obstacles to the apparently
commonplace steps is nine-tenths of the difficulty. It had seemed to him
that the most dramatic aspect of building the Space Platform had been
the achievement of a design that would work in space, that could be
gotten up into space, and that could be lived in under circumstances
never before experienced. Now he saw that getting the materials to the
spot where they were needed called for nearly as much brains and effort.
Screening out spies and destructionists—that would be an even greater
achievement!