Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (3 page)

He began to feel a tremendous respect and solicitude for the people who
were doing ordinary jobs in the building of the Platform. And he worried
about his own share more than ever.

Presently the transport ship sank toward the clouds. It sped through
them, stone-blind from the mist. And then there was a small airfield
below, and the pilot and co-pilot began a pattern of ritualistic
conversation.

"Pitot and wing heaters?" asked the pilot.

The co-pilot put his hand successively on two controls.

"Off."

"Spark advance?"

The co-pilot moved his hands.

"Take-off and climb?" said the co-pilot.

"Blowers?"

"Low."

"Fuel selectors?"

The co-pilot moved his hands again to the appropriate controls,
verifying that they were as he reported them.

"Main on," he said matter-of-factly, "crossfeed off."

The transport plane slanted down steeply for the landing field that had
looked so small at first, but expanded remarkably as they drew near.

Joe found himself frowning. He began to see how really big a job it was
to get a Space Platform even ready to take off for a journey that in
theory should last forever. It was daunting to think that before a space
ship could be built and powered and equipped with machinery there had to
be such wildly irrelevant plans worked out as a proper check of controls
for the piston-engine ships that flew parts to the job. The details were
innumerable!

But the job was still worth doing. Joe was glad he was going to have a
share in it.

It was a merely misty day. The transport plane stood by the door of a
hangar on this military field, and mechanics stood well back from it and
looked it over. A man crawled over the tail assembly and found one small
hole in the fabric of the stabilizer. A shell fragment had gone through
when the war rockets exploded nearby. The pilot verified that the
fragment had hit no strengthening member inside. He nodded. The mechanic
made very neat fabric patches over the two holes, upper and lower. He
began to go over the fuselage. The pilot turned away.

"I'll go talk to Bootstrap," he told the co-pilot. "You keep an eye on
things."

"I'll keep two eyes on them," said the co-pilot.

The pilot went toward the control tower of the field. Joe looked around.
The transport ship seemed very large, standing on the concrete apron
with its tricycle landing gear let down. It curiously resembled a
misshapen insect, standing elaborately high on inadequate supporting
legs. Its fuselage, in particular, did not look right for an aircraft.
The top of the cargo section went smoothly back to the stabilizing fins,
but the bottom did not taper. It ended astern in a clumsy-looking bulge
that was closed by a pair of huge clamshell doors, opening straight
astern. It was built that way, of course, so that large objects could be
loaded direct into the cargo hold, but it was neither streamlined nor
graceful.

"Did anything get into the cargo hold?" asked Joe in sudden anxiety.
"Did the cases I'm with get hit?"

After all, four rockets had exploded deplorably near the ship. If one
fragment had struck, others might have.

"Nothing big, anyhow," the co-pilot told him. "We'll know presently."

But examination showed no other sign of the ship's recent nearness to
destruction. It had been overstressed, certainly, but ships are built to
take beatings. A spot check on areas where excessive flexing of the
wings would have shown up—a big ship's wings are not perfectly rigid:
they'd come to pieces in the air if they were—presented no evidence of
damage. The ship was ready to take off again.

The co-pilot watched grimly until the one mechanic went back to the side
lines. The mechanic was not cordial. He and all the others regarded the
ship and Joe and the co-pilot with disfavor. They worked on jets, and to
suggest that men who worked on fighter jets were not worthy of complete
confidence did not set well with them. The co-pilot noticed it.

"They think I'm a suspicious heel," he said sourly to Joe, "but I have
to be. The best spies and saboteurs in the world have been hired to mess
up the Platform. When better saboteurs are made, they'll be sent over
here to get busy!"

The pilot came back from the control tower.

"Special flight orders," he told his companion. "We top off with fuel
and get going."

Mechanics got out the fuel hose, dragging it from the pit. One man
climbed up on the wing. Other men handed up the hose. Joe was moved to
comment, but the co-pilot was reading the new flight instructions. It
was one of those moments of inconsistency to which anybody and everybody
is liable. The two men of the ship's crew had it in mind to be
infinitely suspicious of anybody examining their ship. But fueling it
was so completely standard an operation that they merely stood by
absently while it went on. They had the orders to read and memorize,
anyhow.

One wing tank was full. A big, grinning man with sandy hair dragged the
hose under the nose of the plane to take it to the other wing tank.
Close by the nose wheel he slipped and steadied himself by the shaft
which reaches down to the wheel's hub. His position for a moment was
absurdly ungraceful. When he straightened up, his arm slid into the
wheel well. But he dragged the hose the rest of the way and passed it on
up. Then that tank was full and capped. The refueling crew got down to
the ground and fed the hose back to the pit which devoured it. That was
all. But somehow Joe remembered the sandy-haired man and his arm going
up inside the wheel well for a fraction of a second.

The pilot read one part of the flight orders again and tore them
carefully across. One part he touched his pocket lighter to. It burned.
He nodded yet again to the co-pilot, and they swung up and in the
pilots' doorway. Joe followed.

They settled in their places in the cabin. The pilot threw a switch and
pressed a knob. One motor turned over stiffly, and caught. The second.
Third. Fourth. The pilot listened, was satisfied, and pulled back on the
multiple throttle. The plane trundled away. Minutes later it faced the
long runway, a tinny voice from the control tower spoke out of a
loud-speaker under the instruments, and the plane roared down the field.
In seconds it lifted and swept around in a great half-circle.

"Okay," said the pilot. "Wheels up."

The co-pilot obeyed. The telltale lights that showed the wheels
retracted glowed briefly. The men relaxed.

"You know," said the co-pilot, "there was the devil of a time during the
War with sabotage. Down in Brazil there was a field planes used to take
off from to fly to Africa. But they'd take off, head out to sea, get a
few miles offshore, and then blow up. We must've lost a dozen planes
that way! Then it broke. There was a guy—a sergeant—in the maintenance
crew who was sticking a hand grenade up in the nose wheel wells. German,
he was, and very tidy about it, and nobody suspected him. Everything
looked okay and tested okay. But when the ship was well away and the
crew pulled up the wheels, that tightened a string and it pulled the pin
out of the grenade. It went off.... The master mechanic finally caught
him and nearly killed him before the MPs could stop him. We've got to be
plenty careful, whether the ground crews like it or not."

Joe said drily: "You were, except when they were topping off. You took
that for granted." He told about the sandy-haired man. "He hadn't time
to stick anything in the wheel well, though," he added.

The co-pilot blinked. Then he looked annoyed. "Confound it! I didn't
watch! Did you?"

The pilot shook his head, his lips compressed.

The co-pilot said bitterly: "And I thought I was security-conscious!
Thanks for telling me, fella. No harm done this time, but that was a
slip!"

He scowled at the dials before him. The plane flew on.

This was the last leg of the trip, and now it should be no more than an
hour and a half before they reached their destination. Joe felt a lift
of elation. The Space Platform was a realization—or the beginning of
it—of a dream that had been Joe's since he was a very small boy. It was
also the dream of most other small boys at the time. The Space Platform
would make space travel possible. Of course it wouldn't make journeys to
the moon or planets itself, but it would sail splendidly about the Earth
in an orbit some four thousand miles up, and it would gird the world in
four hours fourteen minutes and twenty-two seconds. It would carry
atom-headed guided missiles, and every city in the world would be
defenseless against it. Nobody could even hope for world domination so
long as it floated on its celestial round. Which, naturally, was why
there were such desperate efforts to destroy it before its completion.

But Joe, thinking about the Platform, did not think about it as a
weapon. It was the first rung on the stepladder to the stars. From it
the moon would be reached, certainly. Mars next, most likely. Then
Venus. In time the moons of Saturn, and the twilight zone of Mercury,
and some day the moons of Jupiter. Possibly a landing could be dared on
that giant planet itself, despite its gravity.

The co-pilot spoke suddenly. "How do you rate this trip by cargo plane?"
he asked curiously. "Mostly even generals have to go on the ground. You
rate plenty. How?"

Joe pulled his thoughts back from satisfied imagining. It hadn't
occurred to him that it was remarkable that he should be allowed to
accompany the gyros from the plant to their destination. His family firm
had built them, so it had seemed natural to him. He wasn't used to the
idea that everybody looked suspicious to a security officer concerned
with the safety of the Platform.

"Connections? I haven't any," said Joe. Then he said, "I do know
somebody on the job. There's a Major Holt out there. He might have
cleared me. Known my family for years."

"Yeah," said the co-pilot drily. "He might. As a matter of fact, he's
the senior security officer for the whole job. He's in charge of
everything, from the security guards to the radar screens and the
jet-plane umbrella and the checking of the men who work in the Shed. If
he says you're all right, you probably are."

Joe hadn't meant to seem impressive. He explained: "I don't know him too
well. He knows my father, and his daughter Sally's been kicking around
underfoot most of my life. I taught her how to shoot, and she's a better
shot than I am. She was a nice kid when she was little. I got to like
her when she fell out of a tree and broke her arm and didn't even
whimper. That shows how long ago it was!" He grinned. "She was trying to
act grown-up last time I saw her."

The co-pilot nodded. There was a brisk chirping sound somewhere. The
pilot reached ahead to the course-correction knob. The plane changed
course. Sunshine shifted as it poured into the cabin. The ship was
running on automatic pilot well above the cloud level, and at an
even-numbered number of thousands of feet altitude, as was suitable for
planes traveling south or west. Now it droned on its new course,
forty-five degrees from the original. Joe found himself guessing that
one of the security provisions for planes approaching the Platform might
be that they should not come too near on a direct line to it, lest they
give information to curious persons on the ground.

Time went on. Joe slipped gradually back to his meditations about the
Platform. There was always, in his mind, the picture of a man-made thing
shining in blinding sunlight between Earth and moon. But he began to
remember things he hadn't paid too much attention to before.

Opposition to the bare idea of a Space Platform, for instance, from the
moment it was first proposed. Every dictator protested bitterly. Even
politicians out of office found it a subject for rabble-rousing
harangues. The nationalistic political parties, the peddlers of hate,
the entrepreneurs of discord—every crank in the world had something to
say against the Platform from the first. When they did not roundly
denounce it as impious, they raved that it was a scheme by which the
United States would put itself in position to rule all the Earth. As a
matter of fact, the United States had first proposed it as a United
Nations enterprise, so that denunciations that politicians found good
politics actually made very poor sense. But it did not get past the
General Assembly. The proposal was so rabidly attacked on every side
that it was not even passed up to the Council—where it would certainly
have been vetoed anyhow.

But it was exactly that furious denunciation which put the Platform
through the United States Congress, which had to find the money for its
construction.

In Joe's eyes and in the eyes of most of those who hoped for it from the
beginning, the Platform's great appeal was that it was the necessary
first step toward interplanetary travel, with star ships yet to come.
But most scientists wanted it, desperately, for their own ends. There
were low-temperature experiments, electronic experiments, weather
observations, star-temperature measurements, astronomical
observations.... Any man in any field of science could name reasons for
it to be built. Even the atom scientists had one, and nearly the best.
Their argument was that there were new developments of nuclear theory
that needed to be tried out, but should not be tried out on Earth. There
were some reactions that ought to yield unlimited power for all the
world from really abundant materials. But there was one chance in fifty
that they wouldn't be safe, just because the materials were so abundant.
No sane man would risk a two-per-cent chance of destroying Earth and all
its people, yet those reactions should be tried. In a space ship some
millions of miles out in emptiness they could be. Either they'd be safe
or they would not. But the only way to get a space ship a safe enough
distance from Earth was to make a Space Platform as a starting point.
Then a ship could shoot away from Earth with effectively zero gravity
and full fuel tanks. The Platform should be built so civilization could
surge ahead to new heights!