10
The world turned over on its axis with unfailing regularity, and nightsfollowed mornings and mornings followed nights according towell-established precedent. One man turned up in Bootstrap withradiation burns, but he had not offered himself for check over at thehospital. He was found dead in his lodging. Since nobody else appearedto have suffered any burns at all, it was assumed that he was themessenger who had brought the radioactive cobalt to Braun, who also hadbeen doomed by possession of the deadly stuff, but who had broken thechain of fatality by not dumping it free into the air of the Shed. Underthe circumstances, then, three-shift work on the Platform was resumed,and three times in each twenty-four hours fleets of busses rolled out ofBootstrap carrying men to work in the Shed, and rolled back again loadedwith men who had just stopped working there.
Trucks carried materials to the Shed, and swing-up doors opened in thegreat dome's eastern wall, and the trucks went in and unloaded. Then thetrucks went out of the same doors and trundled back for more materials.In the Shed, shining plates of metal swung aloft, and welding torchesglittered in the maze of joists and upright pipes that still covered themonster shape. Each day it was a little more nearly complete. In aseparate, guarded workshop by a sidewall, the Chief and Haney and Mikethe midget labored mightily to accomplish the preposterous. They grewlean and red-eyed from fatigue, and short of temper and ever morefanatical--and security men moved about in seeming uselessness butnever-ceasing vigilance.
There were changes, though. The assembly line of pushpots grew shorter,and the remaining monstrosities around the sidewall were plainly near tocompletion. There came a day, indeed, when only five ungainly objectsremained on that line, and even they were completely plated in andneeded only a finishing touch. It was at this time that more crates andparcels arrived from the Kenmore Precision Tool plant, and Joe droppedhis schoolroomlike instruction course in space flight for work ofgreater immediate need. He and his allies worked twice around the clockto assemble the replaced parts with the repaired elements of the pilotgyros. They grew groggy from the desperate need both for speed and forabsolute accuracy, but they put the complex device together, andadjusted it, and surveyed the result through red-rimmed eyes, and weretoo weary to rejoice.
Then Joe threw a switch and the reconstituted pilot gyro assembly beganto hum quietly, and the humming rose to a whine, and the whine wentdeliberately up the scale until it ceased to be audible at all.Presently a dial announced the impossible, and they gazed at a devicethat seemed to be doing nothing whatever. The gyros appeared quitemotionless. They spun with such incredible precision that it was notpossible to detect that they moved a hairbreadth. And the whole complexdevice looked very simple and useless.
But the four of them gazed at it--now that it worked--with a suddenpassionate satisfaction. Joe moved a control, and the axis of the devicemoved smoothly to a new place and stayed there. He moved the controlagain, and it moved to another position and stayed there. And to anotherand another and another.
Then the Chief took Joe's place, and under his hand the seemingly staticdisks--which were actually spinning at forty thousand revolutions perminute--turned obediently and without any appearance of the spectacular.Then Haney worked the controls. And Mike put the device through itspaces.
Mike left the gyros spinning so that the main axis pointed at the sun,invisible beyond the Shed's roof. And then all four of them watched. Ittook minutes for this last small test to show its results. But visiblyand inexorably the pilot gyros followed the unseen sun, and they wouldhave resisted with a force of very many tons any attempt to move themaside by so little as one-tenth of a second of arc, which would meansomething like one three-hundred-thousandth of a right angle. And thesepilot gyros would control the main gyros with just this precision, andafter the Platform was out in space could hold the Platform itself withthe steadiness needed for astronomical observation past achievement fromthe surface of the Earth.
The pilot gyros, in a word, were ready for installation.
Joe and Haney and the Chief and Mike were not beautiful to look at. Theywere begrimed from head to toe, and their eyes were bloodshot, and theywere exhausted to the point where they did not even notice any longerthat they were weary. And their mental processes were not at all normal,so that they were quarrelsome and arbitrary and arrogant to the men withthe flat-bed trailer who came almost reverently to move their work. Theywent jealously with the thing they had rebuilt, and they were rude toengineers and construction workers and supervisors, and they shoutedangrily at each other as it was hoisted up a shaft that had been left inthe Platform for its entrance, and they were very far from tactful asthey watched with hot, anxious eyes as it was bolted into place.
It would be welded later, but first it was tried out. And it moved themain gyros! They weighed many times what the pilot gyros did, but evenwhen they were spinning the pilot gyros stirred them. Of course themain-gyro linkage to the fabric of the Shed had to be broken for thistest, or the gyros would have twisted the giant upon its support and allthe scaffolding around it would have been broken and the men on itkilled.
But the gyros worked! They visibly and unquestionably worked! Theycontrolled the gigantic wheels that would steer the Platform in itstake-off, and later would swing it to receive the cargo rockets comingup from Earth. The pilot instrument worked! There was no vibration. Inits steering apparatus the Platform was ready for space!
Then the Chief yawned, and his eyes glazed as he stood in the huge gyroroom. And Haney's knees wobbled, and he sat down and was instantlyasleep. Then Joe vaguely saw somebody--it was Major Holt--holding Mikein his arms as if Mike were a baby. Mike would have resented itfuriously if he had been awake. And then suddenly Joe didn't know whatwas going on around him, either.
There was a definite hiatus in his consciousness. He came back toawareness very slowly. He was half-awake and half-asleep for a longtime. He only knew contentedly that his job was finished. Then, slowly,he realized that he was in a bunk in one of the Platform sleepingcabins, and the inflated cover that was Sally's contribution to thePlatform held him very gently in place. Somehow it was infinitelysoothing, and he had an extraordinary sensation of peacefulness andrelaxation and fulfillment. The pilot gyros were finished and inposition. His responsibility to them was ended. And he had slept theclock around three times. He'd slept for thirty-six hours. He wasstarving.
Sally had evidently constituted herself a watch over Joe as he slept,because she faced him immediately when he went groggily out of the cabinto look for a place to wash. He was still covered with the grime of pastlabor, and he had been allowed to sleep with only his shoes removed. Hewas not an attractive sight. But Sally regarded him with an approvalthat her tone belied.
"You can get a shower," she told him firmly, "and then I'll have somebreakfast for you. Fresh clothes are waiting, too."
Joe said peacefully: "The gyros are finished and they work!"
"Don't I know?" demanded Sally. "Go get washed and come back forbreakfast. The Chief and Haney and Mike are already awake. And becauseof the four of you, they've been able to advance the Platform's take-offtime--to just two days off! It leaked out, and now it's official. Andyou made it possible!"
This was a slight exaggeration, but it was pardonable because of Sally'spartiality for Joe. He went groggily into the special shower arrangementin the Platform. In orbit, there would be no gravity, so a tub bath wasunthinkable. The shower cabinet was a cubbyhole with handgrips on allfour sides and straps into which one could slip his feet. When Joeturned handles, needle sprays sprang at him from all sides, andsimultaneously a ventilator fan began to run. When in space that fancould draw out what would otherwise become an inchoate mixture of airand quite weightless water-drops. In space a man might drown in his ownshower bath without the fan. The apparatus for collecting the wateragain was complex, but Joe didn't think about that at the moment. Heconsidered ruefully that however convenient this system might be out inthe Platform's orbit, it left something to be desired on Ear
th.
But there were clean clothes waiting when he came out. He dressed andfelt brand new and utterly peaceful and rested, and it seemed to himvery much like the way he had often felt on a new spring morning. It wasvery, very good!
Then he smelled coffee and became ravenous.
There were the others in the Platform's kitchen, sitting in the chairsthat had straps on them so the crew needn't float about because ofweightlessness. There was an argument in progress. The Chief grinned atJoe. Mike the midget looked absorbed. Haney was thinking something out,rather painfully. Sally was busy at the Platform's very special stove.She had ham and eggs and pancakes ready for Joe to eat.
"Gentlemen," she said, "you are about to eat the first meal ever cookedin a space ship--and like it!"
She served them and sat companionably down with them all. But her eyeswere very warm when she looked at Joe.
"Leavin' aside what we were arguin' about," said the Chief blissfully,"Sally here--mind if I call you Sally, ma'am?--she says the slide-ruleguys have given our job the works and they say it's a better job thanthey designed. Take a bow, Joe."
Sally said firmly: "When the technical journals are through talkingabout the job you did, you'll all four be famous for precision-machiningtechnique and improvements on standard practices."
"Which," said the Chief sarcastically, "is gonna make us feel fine whenwe're back to welding and stuff!"
"No more welding," Sally told him. "Not on this job. The Platform'sclosed in. They've started to take down the scaffolding."
The Chief looked startled. Haney asked: "Laying off men yet?"
"Not you," Sally assured him. "Definitely not you. You four have thevery top super-special security rating there is! I think you're the onlyfour people in the world my father is sure can't be reached, somehow, tomake you harm the Platform."
Mike said abruptly: "Yeah. The Major thought he had headaches before.Now he's really got 'em!"
Mike hadn't seemed to be listening. He'd acted as if he were feverishlyabsorbing the feel of being inside the Platform--not as a workmanbuilding it, but as a man whose proper habitat it would become. But Joesuddenly realized that his comment was exact. There'd been plenty ofsabotage to prevent the Platform from reaching completion. But now itwas ready to take off in two days. If it was to be stopped, it wouldhave to be stopped within forty-eight hours by people with plenty ofresources, who for their own evil ends needed it to be stopped. Theselast two days would contain the last-ditch, most desperate, mostcompletely ruthless stepped-up attempts at destruction that couldpossibly be made. And Major Holt had to handle them.
But the four at table--five, with Sally--were peculiarly relaxed. Thematter they'd handled had been conspicuous, perhaps, but it was stillonly one of thousands that had to be accomplished before the Platformcould take off. But they had the infinitely restful feeling of a jobwell done.
"No more welding," said Haney meditatively, "and our job on the gyrosfinished. What are we gonna do?"
The Chief said forcefully: "Me, I'm gonna sweep floors or something, butI'm sure gonna stick around and watch the take-off!"
Joe said nothing. He looked at Sally. She became very busy, makingcertain the others did not want more to eat. After a long time Joe said,with very careful casualness, "Come to think of it, I was getting loadedup with astrogation theory when I had to stop and pitch in on the gyros.How's that sick crew member, Sally?"
"I--wouldn't know," answered Sally unconvincingly. "Have some morecoffee?"
Joe made his face go completely expressionless. There was nothing elseto do. Sally hadn't said that his chances looked bad for making the crewof the Platform when it went out to space. But Sally had ways of knowingthings. She would be sure to keep informed on a matter like that,because she was wearing Joe's ring and it would have taken a great dealof discouragement to keep her from finding out good news to tell him.She didn't have any good news. So it must be bad.
Joe drank his coffee, trying to make himself believe that he'd known allalong he wasn't going to make the crew. He'd started late to learn thethings a crew member ought to know. He'd stopped at the most crucialpart of his training to work on the gyros, which were more crucialstill. He'd slept a day and a half. The platform would take off inforty-eight hours. He tried to reason carefully that it was common senseto use a man who was fully trained from the beginning for a place in thecrew, rather than a latecomer like himself. But it wasn't easy to take.
Mike the midget said suddenly: "I got a hunch."
"Shoot it," said the Chief, amiably.
"I got a hunch I know what kind of sabotage will be tried next--andwhen," said Mike.
The others looked at him--all but Joe, who stared at the wall.
"There hasn't been one set of guys trying to smash the Platform," saidMike excitedly. "There's been four or five. Joe found a gang sabotagingthe pushpots that didn't think like the gang that blackmailed Braun. Andthe gang that tried to kill us up at Red Canyon may be another. Therecould be others: fascists and commies and nationalists and crackpots ofall kinds. And they all know they've got to work fast, even if they haveto help each other. Get it?"
Haney growled.
"I'll buy what you've said so far," said the Chief. "Sure! Thoseso-and-sos will all pile in everything they got at the last minute.They'll even pull together to smash the Platform--and then double-crosseach other afterward. But what'll they do, an' when?"
"This time they'll try outright violence," said Mike coldly, "instead ofsneaking. They'll try something really rough. For sneaking, one time'sas good as another, but for really rough stuff, there's just one timewhen the Platform hasn't got plenty of guys around ready to fight forit."
The Chief whistled softly.
"You mean change-shift time! Which one?"
"The first one possible," said Mike briefly. "After every shift, thingswill get tighter. So my guess is the next shift, if they can. And if onegang starts something, the others will have to jump right in. You see?"
That made sense. One attempt at actual violence, defeated, would createa rigidity of defense that would make others impossible. If a successfulattempt at violent sabotage was to be made, the efforts of all groupswould have to be timed to the first, or abandoned.
"I could--uh--set up a sort of smoke screen," said Mike. "We'll fakewe're going to smash something--and let those saboteurs find it out.They'll see it as a chance to do their stuff with us to run interferencefor them.--Sally, does your father sure-enough trust us?"
Sally nodded.
"He doesn't talk very cordially, but he trusts you."
"Okay," said Mike. "You tell him, private, that I'm setting up somethingtricky. He can laugh off anything his security guys report that I'mmixed up in. Joe'll see that he gets the whole picture beforehand. Buthe ain't to tell anybody--not _any_body--that something is gettingframed up. Right?"
"I'll ask him," said Sally. "He is pretty desperate. He's sure somelast-minute frantic assault on the Platform will be made. But----"
"We'll tip him in plenty of time," said Mike with authority. "In timefor him to play along, but not for a leak to spoil things. Okay?"
"I'll make the bargain," Sally assured him, "if it can be made."
Mike nodded. He drained his coffee cup and slipped down from his chair.
"Come on, Chief! C'mon, Haney!"
He led them out of the room.
Joe fiddled with his spoon a moment, and then said: "The crewman I wasto have subbed for if he didn't get well--he did, didn't he?"
Sally answered reluctantly: "Y-yes."
Joe said measuredly: "Well, then--that's that! I guess it will be allright for me to stick around and watch the take-off?"
Sally's eyes were misty.
"Of course it will, Joe! I'm so sorry!"
Joe grinned, but even to himself his face seemed like a mask.
"Into each life some rain must fall. Let's go out and see what's beenaccomplished since I went to sleep. All right?"
They went out of
the Platform together. And as soon as they reached thefloor of the Shed it was plain that the stage had been set for stirringevents.
The top five or six levels of scaffolding had already been removed, andmore of the girders and pipes were coming down in bundles on lines fromgiraffelike cranes. There were some new-type trucks in view, too, giantsof the kind that carry ready-mixed concrete through city streets. Theywere pouring a doughy white paste into huge buckets that carried italoft, where it vanished into the mouths of tubes that seemed to replacethe scaffolding along the Platform's sides.
"Lining the rockets," said Sally in a subdued voice.
Joe watched. He knew about this, too. It had been controversial for atime. After the pushpots and their jatos had served as the first twostages of a multiple-rocket aggregation, the Platform carried rocketfuel as the third stage. But the Platform was a highly special ballisticproblem. It would take off almost horizontally--a great advantage infueling matters. This was practical simply because the Platform could belifted far beyond effective air resistance, and already haveconsiderable speed before its own rockets flared.
Moreover, it was not a space ship in the sense of needing rockets forlanding purposes. It wouldn't land. Not ever. And again there was thefact that men would be riding in it. That ruled out the use of eight- andten- and fifteen-gravity acceleration. It had to make use of a longperiod of relatively slow acceleration rather than a brief terrificsurge of power. So its very special rockets had been designed as theanswer.
They were solid-fuel rockets, though solid fuels had been long abandonedfor long-range missiles. But they were entirely unlike other solid-fueldrives. The pasty white compound being hauled aloft was a self-settingrefractory compound with which the rocket tubes would be lined, with thesolid fuel filling the center. The tubes themselves were thinsteel--absurdly thin--but wound with wire under tension to providestrength against bursting, like old-fashioned rifle cannon.
When the fuel was fired, it would be at the muzzle end of the rockettube, and the fuel would burn forward at so many inches per second. Therefractory lining would resist the rocket blast for a certain time andthen crumble away. Crumbling, the refractory particles would be hurledastern and so serve as reaction mass. When the steel outer tubes wereexposed, they would melt and be additional reaction mass.
In effect, as the rocket fuel was exhausted, the tubes that contained itdissolved into their own blast and added to the accelerating thrust,even as they diminished the amount of mass to be accelerated. Then thequantity of fuel burned could diminish--the tubes could grow smaller--sothe rate of speed gain would remain constant. Under the highly specialconditions of this particular occasion, there was a notable gain inefficiency over a liquid-fuel rocket design. For one item, the Platformwould certainly have no use for fuel pumps and fuel tanks once it was inits orbit. In this way, it wouldn't have them. Their equivalent in masswould have been used to gain velocity. And when the Platform finallyrode in space, it would have expended every ounce of the drivingapparatus used to get it there.
Now the rocket tubes were being lined and loaded. The time to take-offwas growing short indeed.
Joe watched a while and turned away. He felt very good because he'dfinished his job and lived up to the responsibility he'd had. But hefelt very bad because he'd had an outside chance to be one of the firstmen ever to make a real space journey--and now it was gone. He couldn'tresent the decision against him. If it had been put up to him, he'dprobably have made the same hard decision himself. But it hurt to havehad even a crazy hope taken away.
Sally said, trying hard to interest him, "These rockets hold an awfullot of fuel, Joe! And it's better than scientists thought a chemicalfuel could ever be!"
"Yes," said Joe.
"Fluorine-beryllium," said Sally urgently. "It fits in with thepushpots' having pressurized cockpits. Rockets like that couldn't beused on the ground! The fumes would be poisonous!"
But Joe only nodded in agreement. He was apathetic. He was uninterested.He was still thinking of that lost trip in space. He realized that Sallywas watching his face.
"Joe," she said unhappily, "I wish you wouldn't look like that!"
"I'm all right," he told her.
"You act as if you didn't care about anything," she protested, "and youdo!"
"I'm all right," he repeated.
"I'd like to go outside somewhere," she said abruptly, "but after whathappened up at the lake, I mustn't. Would you like to go up to the topof the Shed?"
"If you want to," he agreed without enthusiasm.
He followed when she went to a doorway--with a security guard besideit--in the sidewall. She flashed her pass and the guard let themthrough. They began to walk up an inclined, endless, curving ramp. Itwas between the inner and outer skins of the Shed. There had to be twoskins because the Shed was too big to be ventilated properly, and thehot desert sunshine on one side would have made "weather" inside.There'd have been a convection-current motion of the air in the enclosedspace, and minor whirlwinds, and there could even be miniaturethunderclouds and lightning. Joe remembered reading that such things hadhappened in a shed built for Zeppelins before he was born.
They came upon an open gallery, and there was a security man lookingdown at the floor and the Platform. He had a very good view of all thatwent on.
They went around another long circuit of the slanting gallery, dimlylighted with small electric bulbs. They came to a second gallery, andsaw the Platform again. There was another guard here.
They were halfway up the globular wall now, and were visibly suspendedover emptiness. The view of the Platform was impressive. There were anastonishing number of rocket tubes being fastened to the outside of thathuge object. Three giant cranes, working together, hoisted a tube to thelast remaining level of scaffolding, and men swarmed on it and fastenedit to the swelling hull. As soon as it was fast, other men hurried intoit with the white pasty stuff to line it from end to end. The tubeswould nearly hide the structure they were designed to propel. But they'dall be burned away when it reached its destination.
"Wonderful, isn't it?" asked Sally hopefully.
Joe looked, and said without warmth, "It's the most wonderful thing thatanybody ever even tried to do."
Which was true enough, but the zest of it had unreasonably departed forJoe for the time being. His disappointment was new.
Halfway around again, Sally opened a door, and Joe was almost surprisedout of his lethargy. Here was a watching post on the outside of themonstrous half-globe. There were two guards here, with fifty-calibermachine guns under canvas hoods. Their duties were tedious butnecessary. They watched the desert. From this height it stretched outfor miles, and Bootstrap could be seen as a series of white specks faraway with hills behind it.
Ultimately Sally and Joe came to the very top of the Shed into the openair. From here the steep plating curved down and away in everydirection. The sunshine was savagely bright and shining, but there was abreeze. And here there was a considerable expanse fenced in--almost anacre, it seemed. There were metal-walled small buildings withinnumerable antennae of every possible shape for the reception of everyconceivable wave length. There were three radar bowl reflectors turningrestlessly to scan the horizon, and a fourth which went back and forth,revolving, to scan the sky itself. Sally told Joe that in the verymiddle--where there was a shed with a domelike roof which wasn'tmetal--there was a wave-guide radar that could spot a plane within threefeet vertically, and horizontally at a distance of thirty miles, withgreater distances in proportion.
There were guns down in pits so their muzzles wouldn't interfere withthe radar. There were enough non-recoil anti-aircraft guns to defend theShed against anything one could imagine.
"And there are jet planes overhead too," said Sally. "Dad asked to havethem reinforced, and two new wings of jet fighters landed yesterday at afield somewhere over yonder. There are plenty of guards!"
The Platform was guarded as no object in all history had ever beenguarded. It was ironic that i
t had to be protected so, because it wasactually the only hope of escape from atomic war. But that was why somepeople hated the Platform, and their hatred had made it seem obviouslyan item of national defense. Ironically that was the reason the moneyhad been provided for its construction. But the greatest irony of allwas that its most probable immediate usefulness would be the help itwould give in making nuclear experiments that weren't safe enough tomake on Earth.
That was pure irony. Because if those experiments were successful, theyshould mean that everybody in the world would in time become rich beyondenvy.
But Joe couldn't react to the fact. He was drained and empty of emotionbecause his job was done and he'd lost a very flimsy hope to be one ofthe Platform's first crew.
He didn't really feel better until late that night, when suddenly herealized that life was real and life was earnest, because a panting manwas trying to strangle Joe with his bare hands. Joe was hampered in hisself-defense because a large number of battling figures trampled overhim and his antagonist together. They were underneath the Platform, andJoe expected to be blown to bits any second.