Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (7 page)

"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.

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.