Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (4 page)

But despite these excellent reasons, it was the Platform's enemies who
really got it built. The American Congress would never have appropriated
funds for a Platform for pure scientific research, no matter what
peacetime benefits it promised. It was the vehemence of those who hated
it that sold it to Congress as a measure for national defense. And in a
sense it was.

These were ironic aspects Joe hadn't thought about before, just as he
hadn't thought about the need to defend the Platform while it was being
built. Defending it was Sally's father's job, and he wouldn't have a
popular time. Joe wondered idly how Sally liked living out where the
most important job on Earth was being done. She was a nice kid. He
remembered appreciatively that she'd grown up to be a very good-looking
girl. He tended to remember her mostly as the tomboy who could beat him
swimming, but the last time he'd seen her, come to think of it, he'd
been startled to observe how pretty she'd grown. He didn't know anybody
who ought to be better-looking.... She was a really swell girl....

He came to himself again. There was a change in the look of the sky
ahead. There was no actual horizon, of course. There was a white haze
that blended imperceptibly into the cloud layer so that it was
impossible to tell where the sky ended and the clouds or earth began.
But presently there were holes in the clouds. The ship droned on, and
suddenly it floated over the edge of such a hole, and looking down was
very much like looking over the edge of a cliff at solid earth
illimitably far below.

The holes increased in number. Then there were no holes at all, but only
clouds breaking up the clear view of the ground beneath. And presently
again even the clouds were left behind and the air was clear—but still
there was no horizon—and there was brownish earth with small green
patches and beyond was sere brown range. At seventeen thousand feet
there were simply no details.

Soon the clouds were merely a white-tipped elevation of the white haze
to the sides and behind. And then there came a new sound above the
droning roar of the motors. Joe heard it—and then he saw.

Something had flashed down from nowhere. It flashed on ahead and banked
steeply. It was a fighter jet, and for an instant Joe saw the distant
range seem to ripple and dance in its exhaust blast. It circled
watchfully.

The transport pilot manipulated something. There was a change in the
sound of the motors. Joe followed the co-pilot's eyes. The jet fighter
was coming up astern, dive brakes extended to reduce its speed. It
overhauled the transport very slowly. And then the transport's pilot
touched one of the separate prop-controls gently, and again, and again.
Joe, looking at the jet, saw it through the whirling blades. There was
an extraordinary stroboscopic effect. One of the two starboard
propellers, seen through the other, abruptly took on a look which was
not that of mistiness at all, but of writhing, gyrating solidity. The
peculiar appearance vanished, and came again, and vanished and appeared
yet again before it disappeared completely.

The jet shot on ahead. Its dive brakes retracted. It made a graceful,
wallowing, shallow dive, and then climbed almost vertically. It went out
of sight.

"Visual check," said the co-pilot drily, to Joe. "We had a signal to
give. Individual to this plane. We didn't tell it to you. You couldn't
duplicate it."

Joe worked it out painfully. The visual effect of one propeller seen
through another—that was identification. It was not a type of signaling
an unauthorized or uninformed passenger would expect.

"Also," said the co-pilot, "we have a television camera in the
instrument board yonder. We've turned it on now. The interior of the
cabin is being watched from the ground. No more tricks like the phony
colonel and the atom bomb that didn't 'explode.'"

Joe sat quite still. He noticed that the plane was slanting gradually
downward. His eyes went to the dial that showed descent at somewhere
between two and three hundred feet a minute. That was for his benefit.
The cabin was pressurized, though it did not attempt to simulate
sea-level pressure. It was a good deal better than the outside air,
however, and yet too quick a descent meant discomfort. Two to three
hundred feet per minute is about right.

The ground took on features. Small gulleys. Patches of coloration too
small to be seen from farther up. The feeling of speed increased. After
long minutes the plane was only a few thousand feet up. The pilot took
over manual control from the automatic pilot. He seemed to wait. There
was a plaintive, mechanical
beep-beep
and he changed course.

"You'll see the Shed in a minute or two," said the co-pilot. He added
vexedly, as if the thing had been bothering him, "I wish I hadn't missed
that sandy-haired guy putting his hand in the wheel well! Nothing
happened, but I shouldn't have missed it!"

Joe watched. Very, very far away there were mountains, but he suddenly
realized the remarkable flatness of the ground over which they were
flying. From the edge of the world, behind, to the very edge of these
far-distant hills, the ground was flat. There were gullies and
depressions here and there, but no hills. It was flat, flat, flat....

The plane flew on. There was a tiny glimmer of sunlight. Joe strained
his eyes. The sunlight glinted from the tiniest possible round pip on
the brown earth. It grew as the plane flew on. It was half a cherry
stone. It was half an orange, with gores. It was the top section of a
sphere that was simply too huge to have been made by men.

There was a thin thread of white that ran across the dun-colored range
and reached that half-ball and then ended. It was a highway. Joe
realized that the half-globe was the Shed, the monstrous building made
for the construction of the Space Platform. It was gigantic. It was
colossal. It was the most stupendous thing that men had ever created.

Joe saw a tiny projection near the base of it. It was an office building
for clerks and timekeepers and other white-collar workers. He strained
his eyes again and saw a motor truck on the highway. It looked
extraordinarily flat. Then he saw that it wasn't a single truck but a
convoy of them. A long way back, the white highway was marked by a tiny
dot. That was a motor bus.

There was no sign of activity anywhere, because the scale was so great.
Movement there was, but the things that moved were too small to be seen
by comparison with the Shed. The huge, round, shining half-sphere of
metal stood tranquilly in the midst of emptiness.

It was bigger than the pyramids.

The plane went on, descending. Joe craned his neck, and then he was
ashamed to gawk. He looked ahead, and far away there were white speckles
that would be buildings: Bootstrap, the town especially built for the
men who built the Space Platform. In it they slept and ate and engaged
in the uproarious festivity that men on a construction job crave on
their time off.

The plane dipped noticeably.

"Airfield off to the right," said the co-pilot. "That's for the town and
the job. The jets—there's an air umbrella overhead all the time—have a
field somewhere else. The pushpots have a field of their own, too, where
they're training pilots."

Joe didn't know what a pushpot was, but he didn't ask. He was thinking
about the Shed, which was the greatest building ever put up, and had
been built merely to shelter the greatest hope for the world's peace
while it was put together. He'd be in the Shed presently. He'd work
there, setting up the contents of the crates back in the cargo space,
and finally installing them in the Platform itself.

The pilot said: "Pitot and wing heaters?"

"Off," said the co-pilot.

"Spark and advance—"

Joe didn't listen. He looked down at the sprawling small town with
white-painted barracks and a business section and an obvious, carefully
designed recreation area that nobody would ever use. The plane was
making a great half-circle. The motor noise dimmed as Joe became
absorbed in his anticipation of seeing the Space Platform and having a
hand in its building.

The co-pilot said sharply: "Hold everything!"

Joe jerked his head around. The co-pilot had his hand on the wheel
release. His face was tense.

"It don't feel right," he said very, very quietly. "Maybe I'm crazy, but
there was that sandy-haired guy who put his hand up in the wheel well
back at that last field. And this don't feel right!"

The plane swept on. The airfield passed below it. The co-pilot very
cautiously let go of the wheel release, which when pulled should let the
wheels fall down from their wells to lock themselves in landing
position. He moved from his seat. His lips were pinched and tight. He
scrabbled at a metal plate in the flooring. He lifted it and looked
down. A moment later he had a flashlight. Joe saw the edge of a mirror.
There were two mirrors down there, in fact. One could look through both
of them into the wheel well.

The co-pilot made quite sure. He stood up, leaving the plate off the
opening in the floor.

"There's something down in the wheel well," he said in a brittle tone.
"It looks to me like a grenade. There's a string tied to it. At a guess,
that sandy-haired guy set it up like that saboteur sergeant down in
Brazil. Only—it rolled a little. And this one goes off when the wheels
go down. I think, too, if we belly-land—Better go around again, huh?"

The pilot nodded. "First," he said evenly, "we get word down to the
ground about the sandy-haired guy, so they'll get him regardless."

He picked up the microphone hanging above and behind him and began to
speak coldly into it. The transport plane started to swing in wide,
sweeping circles over the desert beyond the airport while the pilot
explained that there was a grenade in the nose wheel well, set to
explode if the wheel were let down or, undoubtedly, if the ship came in
to a belly landing.

Joe found himself astonishingly unafraid. But he was filled with a
pounding rage. He hated the people who wanted to smash the pilot gyros
because they were essential to the Space Platform. He hated them more
completely than he had known he could hate anybody. He was so filled
with fury that it did not occur to him that in any crash or explosive
landing that would ruin the gyros, he would automatically be killed.

The pilot made an examination down the floor-plate hole, with a
flashlight to see by and two mirrors to show him the contents of a spot
he could not possibly reach with any instrument. Joe heard his report,
made to the ground by radio.

"It's a grenade," he said coldly. "It took time to fix it the way it is.
At a guess, the ship was booby-trapped at the time of its last overhaul.
But it was arranged that the booby trap had to be set, the trigger
cocked, by somebody doing something very simple at a different place and
later on. We've been flying with that grenade in the wheel well for two
weeks. But it was out of sight. Today, back at the airfield, a
sandy-haired man reached up and pulled a string he knew how to find.
That loosened a slipknot. The grenade rolled down to a new position. Now
when the wheel goes down the pin is pulled. You can figure things out
from that."

It was an excellent sabotage device. If a ship blew up two weeks after
overhaul, it would not be guessed that the bomb had been placed so long
before. Every search would be made for a recent opportunity for the
bomb's placing. A man who merely reached in and pulled a string that
armed the bomb and made it ready for firing would never be suspected.
There might be dozens of planes, now carrying their own destruction
about with them.

The pilot said into the microphone: "Probably...." He listened. "Very
well, sir."

He turned away and nodded to the co-pilot, now savagely keeping the ship
in wide, sweeping circles, the rims of which barely touched the
farthermost corner of the airport on the ground below.

"We've authority to jump," he said briefly. "You know where the chutes
are. But there
is
a chance I can belly-land without that grenade
blowing. I'm going to try that."

The co-pilot said angrily: "I'll get him a chute." He indicated Joe, and
said furiously, "They've been known to try two or three tricks, just to
make sure. Ask if we should dump cargo before we crash-land!"

The pilot held up the microphone again. He spoke. He listened.

"Okay to dump stuff to lighten ship."

"You won't dump my crates," snapped Joe. "And I'm staying to see you
don't! If you can ride this ship down, so can I!"

The co-pilot got up and scowled at him.

"Anything I can move out, goes. Will you help?"

Joe followed him through the door into the cargo compartment.

The space there was very considerable, and bitterly cold. The crates
from the Kenmore plant were the heaviest items of cargo. Other objects
were smaller. The co-pilot made his way to the rear and pulled a lever.
Great, curved doors opened at the back of the plane. Instantly there was
such a bellowing of motors that all speech was impossible. The co-pilot
pulled out a clip of colored-paper slips and checked one with the
nearest movable parcel. He painstakingly made a check mark and began to
push the box toward the doors.

It was not a conspicuously sane operation. So near the ground, the plane
tended to waver. The air was distinctly bumpy. To push a massive box out
a doorway, so it would tumble down a thousand feet to desert sands, was
not so safe a matter as would let it become tedious. But Joe helped.
They got the box to the door and shoved it out. It went spinning down.
The co-pilot hung onto the doorframe and watched it land. He chose
another box. He checked it. And another. Joe helped. They got them out
of the door and dropping dizzily through emptiness. The plane soared on
in circles. The desert, as seen through the opened clamshell doors,
reeled away astern, and then seemed to tilt, and reeled away again. Joe
and the co-pilot labored furiously. But the co-pilot checked each item
before he jettisoned it.