In effect, as the rocket fuel was exhausted, the tubes that contained it dissolved into their own blast and added to the accelerating thrust, even as they diminished the amount of mass to be accelerated. Then the quantity of fuel burnedcould diminish—the tubes could grow smaller—so the rate of speed gain would remain constant. Under the highly special conditions of this particular occasion, there was a notable gain in efficiency over a liquid-fuel rocket design. For one item, the Platform would certainly have no use for fuel pumps and fuel tanks once it was in its orbit. In this way, it wouldn’t have them. Their equivalent in mass would have been used to gain velocity. And when the Platform finally rode in space, it would have expended every ounce of the driving apparatus used to get it there.
Now the rocket tubes were being lined and loaded. The time to take-off was growing short indeed.
Joe watched a while and turned away. He felt very good because he’d finished his job and lived up to the responsibility he’d had. But he felt very bad because he’d had an outside chance to be one of the first men ever to make a real space journey—and now it was gone. He couldn’t resent the decision against him. If it had been put up to him, he’d probably have made the same hard decision himself. But it hurt to have had even a crazy hope taken away.
Sally said, trying hard to interest him, “These rockets hold an awful lot of fuel, Joe! And it’s better than scientists thought a chemical fuel could ever be!”
“Yes,” said Joe.
“Fluorine-beryllium,” said Sally urgently. “It fits in with the pushpots’ having pressurized cockpits. Rockets like that couldn’t be used 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 Sally was 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 you do!”
“I’m all right,” he repeated.
“I’d like to go outside somewhere,” she said abruptly, “butafter what happened up at the lake, I mustn’t. Would you like to go up to the top of the Shed?”
“If you want to,” he agreed without enthusiasm.
He followed when she went to a doorway—with a security guard beside it—in the sidewall. She flashed her pass and the guard let them through. They began to walk up an inclined, endless, curving ramp. It was between the inner and outer skins of the Shed. There had to be two skins because the Shed was too big to be ventilated properly, and the hot desert sunshine on one side would have made “weather” inside. There’d have been a convection-current motion of the air in the enclosed space, and minor whirlwinds, and there could even be miniature thunderclouds and lightning. Joe remembered reading that such things had happened in a shed built for Zeppelins before he was born.
They came upon an open gallery, and there was a security man looking down at the floor and the Platform. He had a very good view of all that went on.
They went around another long circuit of the slanting gallery, dimly lighted with small electric bulbs. They came to a second gallery, and saw the Platform again. There was another guard here.
They were halfway up the globular wall now, and were visibly suspended over emptiness. The view of the Platform was impressive. There were an astonishing number of rocket tubes being fastened to the outside of that huge object. Three giant cranes, working together, hoisted a tube to the last remaining level of scaffolding, and men swarmed on it and fastened it to the swelling hull. As soon as it was fast, other men hurried into it with the white pasty stuff to line it from end to end. The tubes would nearly hide the structure they were designed to propel. But they’d all 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 that anybody ever even tried to do.”
Which was true enough, but the zest of it had unreasonablydeparted for Joe for the time being. His disappointment was new.
Halfway around again, Sally opened a door, and Joe was almost surprised out of his lethargy. Here was a watching post on the outside of the monstrous half-globe. There were two guards here, with fifty-caliber machine guns under canvas hoods. Their duties were tedious but necessary. They watched the desert. From this height it stretched out for miles, and Bootstrap could be seen as a series of white specks far away with hills behind it.
Ultimately Sally and Joe came to the very top of the Shed into the open air. From here the steep plating curved down and away in every direction. The sunshine was savagely bright and shining, but there was a breeze. And here there was a considerable expanse fenced in—almost an acre, it seemed. There were metal-walled small buildings with innumerable antennae of every possible shape for the reception of every conceivable wave length. There were three radar bowl reflectors turning restlessly to scan the horizon, and a fourth which went back and forth, revolving, to scan the sky itself. Sally told Joe that in the very middle—where there was a shed with a domelike roof which wasn’t metal—there was a wave-guide radar that could spot a plane within three feet vertically, and horizontally at a distance of thirty miles, with greater distances in proportion.
There were guns down in pits so their muzzles wouldn’t interfere with the radar. There were enough non-recoil anti-aircraft guns to defend the Shed against anything one could imagine.
“And there are jet planes overhead too,” said Sally. “Dad asked to have them reinforced, and two new wings of jet fighters landed yesterday at a field somewhere over yonder. There are plenty of guards!”
The Platform was guarded as no object in all history had ever been guarded. It was ironic that it had to be protected so, because it was actually the only hope of escape from atomic war. But that was why some people hated the Platform, and their hatred had made it seem obviously an itemof national defense. Ironically that was the reason the money had been provided for its construction. But the greatest irony of all was that its most probable immediate usefulness would be the help it would give in making nuclear experiments that weren’t safe enough to make on Earth.
That was pure irony. Because if those experiments were successful, they should mean that everybody in the world would in time become rich beyond envy.
But Joe couldn’t react to the fact. He was drained and empty of emotion because his job was done and he’d lost a very flimsy hope to be one of the Platform’s first crew.
He didn’t really feel better until late that night, when suddenly he realized that life was real and life was earnest, because a panting man was trying to strangle Joe with his bare hands. Joe was hampered in his self-defense because a large number of battling figures trampled over him and his antagonist together. They were underneath the Platform, and Joe expected to be blown to bits any second.
Joe sat on the porch of Major Holt’s quarters in the area next to the Shed. It was about eight-thirty, and dark, but there was a moon. And Joe had come to realize that his personal disappointment was only his personal disappointment, and that he hadn’t any right to make a nuisance of himself about it. Therefore he didn’t talk about the thing nearest in his mind, but something else that was next nearest or farther away still. Yet, with the Shed filling up a full quarter of the sky, and a gibbous moon new-risen from the horizon, it was not natural for a young man like Joe to speak purely of earthly things.
“It’ll come,” he said yearningly, staring at the moon. “If the Platform gets up day after tomorrow, it’s going to take time to ferry up the equipment it ought to have. But still, somebody ought to land on the moon before too long.”
He added absorbedly: “Once the Platform is fully equipped, it won’t take many rocket pay loads to refill a ship’s tanks at the Platform, before it can head on out.”
Mathematically, a rocket ship that could leave the Platform with full fuel tanks should have fuel to reach the moon and land on it, and take off again and return to the Platform. The mathematical fact had a peculiar nagging flavor. When a dream is subjected to statistical analysis and the report is in its favor, a dreamer’s satisfaction is always diluted by a subconscious feeling that the report is only part of the dream. Everybody worries a little when a cherished dream shows a likelihood of coming true. Some people take firm steps to stop things right there, so a romantic daydream won’t be spoiled by transmutation into prosaic fact. But Joe said doggedly: “Twenty ferry trips to pile up fuel, and the twenty-firstship should be able to refuel and go on out. And then somebody will step out on the moon!”
He was disappointed now. He wouldn’t be the one to do it. But somebody would.
“You might try for the ferry service,” said Sally uneasily.
“I will,” said Joe grimly, “but I won’t be hoping too much. After all, there are astronomers and physics sharks and such things, who’ll be glad to learn to run rockets in order to practice their specialties out of atmosphere.”
Sally said mournfully: “I can’t seem to say anything to make you feel better!”
“But you do,” said Joe. He added grandiloquently, “But for your unflagging faith in me, I would not have the courage to bear the burdens of everyday life.”
She stamped her foot.
“Stop it!”
“All right.” But he said quietly, “You are a good kid, Sally. You know, it’s not too bright of me to mourn.”
She drew a deep breath.
“That’s better! Now, I want——”
There was a gangling figure walking down the concrete path between the trim, monotonous cottages that were officers’ quarters at the Shed.
Joe said sharply: “That’s Haney! What’s he doing here?” He called, “Haney!”
Haney’s manner took on purpose. He came across the grass—the lawns around the officers’ quarters contained the only grass in twenty miles.
“Hiya,” said Haney uncomfortably. He spoke politely to Sally. “Hiya. Uh—you want to get in on the party, Joe?”
“What kind?”
“The party Mike was talkin’ about,” said Haney. “He’s set it up. He wants me to get you and a kinda—uh—undercover tip-off to Major Holt.”
Joe stirred. Sally said hospitably: “Sit down. You’ve noticed that my father gave you full security clearance, so you can go anywhere?”
Haney perched awkwardly on the edge of the porch.
“Yeah. That’s helped with the party. It’s how I got here, as far as that goes. Mike’s on top of the world.”
“Shoot it,” said Joe.
“Y’know he’s been pretty bitter about things,” said Haney carefully. “He’s been sayin’ that little guys like him ought to be the spacemen. There’s half a dozen other little guys been working on the Platform too. They can get in cracks an’ buck rivets an’ so on. Useful. He’s had ’em all hopped up on the fact that the Platform coulda been finished months ago if it’d been built for them, an’ they could get to the moon an’ back while full-sized guys couldn’t an’ so on. Remember?”
“I remember,” said Sally.
“They’ve all been beefin’ about it,” explained Haney. “People know how they feel. So today Mike went and talked to one or two of ’em. An’ they started actin’ mysterious, passin’ messages back an’ forth an’ so on. Little guys, actin’ important. Security guys wouldn’t notice ’em much. Y’don’t take a guy Mike’s size serious, unless you know him. Then he’s the same as anybody else. So the security guys didn’t pay any attention to him. But some other guys did. Some special other guys. They saw those little fellas actin’ like they were cookin’ up somethin’ fancy. An’ they bit.”
“Bit?” asked Sally.
“They got curious. So Mike an’ his gang got confidential. An’ they’re going to have help sabotagin’ the Platform when the next shift changes. The midgets gettin’ even for bein’ laughed at, see? They’re pretending their plan is that when the Platform’s sabotaged—not smashed, but just messed up so it can’t take off—the big brass will let ’em take a ferry rocket up in a hurry, an’ get it in orbit, an’ use it for a Platform until the big Platform can be mended an’ sent up. Once they’re up there, there’s no use tryin’ to stop the big Platform. So it can go ahead.”
Joe said dubiously: “I think I see....”
“Mike and his gang of little guys are bein’ saps—on purpose. If anybody’s goin’ to pull some fast stuff, next shift change—that’s the time everybody’s got to! Last chance! Mike and his gang don’t know what’s gonna happen, butthey sure know when! They’re invitin’ the real saboteurs to make fools of ’em. And what’ll happen?”
Joe said drily: “The logical thing would be to feel sorry for the big guys who think they’re smarter than Mike.”
“Uh-huh,” said Haney, deadly serious. “Mike’s story is there’s half a dozen rocket tubes already loaded. They’re goin’ to fire those rockets between shifts. The Platform gets shoved off its base an’ maybe dented, and so on. Mike’s gang say they got the figures to prove they can go up in a ferry rocket an’ be a Platform, and the big brass won’t have any choice but to let ’em.”
Sally said: “I don’t think they know how the big brass thinks.”
Haney and Joe said together, “No!” and Joe added: “Mike’s not crazy! He knows better! But it’s a good story for somebody who doesn’t know Mike.”
Haney said in indignation: “I came out here to ask the Major to help us. The Chief’s gettin’ a gang together, too. There’s some Indians of his tribe that work here. We can count on them for plenty of rough stuff. And there’s Joe and me. The point is that Mike’s stunt makes it certain that everything busts loose at a time we can know in advance. If the Major gives us a free hand, and then in the last five minutes takes his own measures—so they can’t leak out ahead of time and tip off the gangs we want to get—we oughta knock off all the expert saboteurs who know the weak spots in the Platform. For instance those who know that thermite in the gyros would mess everything up all over again.”
Joe said quietly: “But Major Holt has to be told well in advance about all this! That’s absolute!”
“Yeah,” agreed Haney. “But also he has got to keep quiet—not tell anybody else! There’ve been too many leaks already about too many things. You know that!”
Joe said: “Sally, see if you can get your father to come here and talk. Haney’s right. Not in his office. Right here.”
Sally got up and went inside the house. She came back with an uneasy expression on her face.
“He’s coming. But I couldn’t very well tell him what waswanted, and—I’m not sure he’s going to be in a mood to listen.”
When the Major arrived he was definitely not in a mood to listen. He was a harried man, and he was keyed up to the limit by the multiplied strain due to the imminence of the Platform’s take-off. He came back to his house from a grim conference on exactly the subject of how to make preparations against any possible sabotage incidents—and ran into a proposal to stimulate them! He practically exploded. Even if provocation should be given to saboteurs to lure them into showing their hands, this was no time for it! And if it were, it would be security business. It should not be meddled in by amateurs!
Joe said grimly: “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, sir, but there’s a point you’ve missed. It isn’t thinkable that you’ll be able to prevent something from being tried at a time the saboteurs pick. They’ve got just so much time left, and they’ll use it! But Mike’s plan would offer them a diversion under cover of which they could pull their own stuff! And besides that, you know your office leaks! You couldn’t set up a trick like this through security methods. And for a third fact, this is the one sort of thing no saboteur would expect from your security organization! We caught the saboteurs at the pushpot field by guessing at a new sort of thinking for sabotage. Here’s a chance to catch the saboteurs who’ll work their heads off in the next twenty-four hours or so, by using a new sort of thinking for security!”
Major Holt was not an easy man to get along with at any time, and this was the worst of all times to differ with him. But he did think straight. He stared furiously at Joe, growing crimson with anger at being argued with. But after he had stared a full minute, the angry flush went slowly away. Then he nodded abruptly.
“There you have a point,” he said curtly. “I don’t like it. But it is a point. It would be completely the reverse of anything my antagonists could possibly expect. So I accept the suggestion. Now—let us make the arrangements.”
He settled down for a quick, comprehensive, detailed plan.In careful consultation with Haney, Joe worked it out. The all-important point was that the Major’s part was to be done in completely unorthodox fashion. He would take measures to mesh his actions with those of Mike, the Chief, Haney, and Joe. Each action the Major took and each order he gave he would attend to personally. His actions would be restricted to the last five minutes or less before shift-change time. His orders would be given individually to individuals, and under no circumstances would he transmit any order through anybody else. In every instance, his order would be devised to mean nothing intelligible to its recipient until the time came for obedience.
It was not an easy scheme for the Major to bind himself to. It ran counter to every principle of military thinking save one, which was that it was a good idea to outguess the enemy. At the end he said detachedly: “This is distinctly irregular. It is as irregular as anything could possibly be! But that is why I have agreed to it. It will be at least—unexpected—coming from me!”
Then he smiled without mirth and nodded to Joe and to Haney, and went striding away down the concrete walk to where his car waited.
Haney left a moment later to carry the list of arrangements to the Chief and to Mike. And Joe went into the Shed to do his part.
There was little difference in the appearance of the Shed by night. In the daytime there were long rows of windows in the roof, which let in a vague, dusky, inadequate twilight. At night those windows were shuttered. This meant that the shadows were a little sharper and the contrasts of light and shade a trifle more abrupt. All other changes that Joe could see were the normal ones due to the taking down of scaffolding and the fastening up of rocket tubes. It was clear that the shape of the Platform proper would be obscure when all its rocket tubes were fast in place.
Joe went to look at the last pushpots, and they were ready to be taken over to their own field for their flight test before use. There were extras, anyhow, beyond the number neededto lift the Platform. He found himself considering the obvious fact that after the Platform was aloft, they would be used to launch the ferry rockets, too.
Then he moved toward the center of the Shed. A whole level of scaffolding came apart and its separate elements were bundled together as he watched. Slings lowered the bundles down to waiting trucks which would carry them elsewhere. There were mixing trucks still pouring out their white paste for the lining of the rocket tubes, and their product went up and vanished into the gaping mouths of the giant wire-wound pipes.
Presently Joe went into the maze of piers under the Space Platform itself. He came to the temporary stairs he had reason to remember. He nodded to the two guards there.
“I want to take another look at that gadget we installed,” he said.
One of the guards said good-naturedly: “Major Holt said to pass you any time.”
He ascended and went along the curious corridor—it had handgrips on the walls so a man could pull himself along it when there was no weight—and went to the engine room. He heard voices. They were speaking a completely unintelligible language. He tensed.
Then the Chief grinned at him amiably. He was in the engine room and with him were no fewer than eight men of his own coppery complexion.
“Here’s some friends of mine,” he explained, and Joe shook hands with black-haired, dark-skinned men who were named Charley Spotted Dog and Sam Fatbelly and Luther Red Cow and other exotic things. The Chief said exuberantly, “Major Holt told the guards to let me pass in some Indian friends, so I took my gang on a guided tour of the Platform. None of ’em had ever been inside before. And——”
“I heard you talking Indian,” said Joe.
“You’re gonna hear some more,” said the Chief. “We’re the first war party of my tribe in longer’n my grandpa woulda thought respectable!”
Joe found it difficult to restrain a smile. The Chief took him off to one side.
“Fella,” he said kindly, “it bothers you, this business, because it ain’t organized. That’s what this world needs, Joe. Everything figured out by slide rules an’ such—it’s civilized, but it ain’t human! What everybody oughta be is a connoisseur of chaos, like me. Quit worryin’ an’ get outside and pick up that security guy the Major was gonna send to meet you!”
He gave Joe an amiable shove and rejoined his fellow Mohawks, each of whom, Joe noticed suddenly, had somewhere on his person a twelve-inch Stillson wrench or a reasonable facsimile to serve as a substitute tomahawk. They grinned at him as he departed.
At the bottom of the flight of narrow wooden steps there was a third security man. He greeted Joe.
“Major Holt told me to pick you up,” he observed.
Joe walked to one side with him. Major Holt had promised to send a first-class man to meet Joe at this place, with orders to take instructions from Joe. Joe said curtly: “You’re to snag as many Security men as you can, place them more or less out of sight under the Platform here, and tell them to turn off their walkie-talkies and wait. No matter what happens, they’re to wait right here until they’re needed, right here!”
He looked harassedly around him. The Security man nodded and moved casually away. This was close timing. Something made Joe look up. He saw the catwalk gallery nearly overhead. The expected guard was there. Haney, though, was with him. There was nothing else in sight. Not yet. But Haney was on the job. Joe saw a Security man step out of sight in the scaffolding. He saw his own assigned security man speak to another, who wandered casually toward the Platform’s base.
Minutes passed. Only Joe could have noticed, because he was watching for it. There were eight or nine Security men posted within call. They had their walkie-talkies turned off and would be subject only to his orders if an emergency arose.
Gongs began to ring all around the edge of the Shed. They set up a horrendous clanging. This was not an alarm, but simply the notice of change-of-shift time.
There was a marked change in the noises overhead. A crane pulled back. Hammerings dwindled and stopped. There were the sounds of pipes, combined to form the scaffolds, being taken apart for removal. A sling-load of pipe touched the floor and stayed there. The crane’s internal-combustion motor stopped. Its operator stepped down to the floor and headed for the exit. Hoists descended and men moved across the floor. Other men scrambled down ladders. The floor became dotted with figures moving toward the doors through which men went out to get on the busses for Bootstrap.
Nothing happened. More long minutes passed. The shift brought out by the busses was going through the check-over process in the incoming screen room. Joe knew that Major Holt had, within the past five minutes, gathered together a tight-knit bunch of armed security men to be available for anything that might turn up. The men doing the normal shift-change screening were shorthanded in consequence.
The floor next to the exits became crowded, but the central area of the floor was cleared. One truck was stalled at the swing-up truck doors. Its driver ground the starter insistently.
Suddenly there was a high-pitched yell away up on the Platform. Then there was a shot. Its echoes rang horribly in the resonant interior of the Shed. Joe’s own special security man hurried to him, his face tense.
“What about that?”
“Hold everything,” said Joe grimly. “That’s taken care of.”
It was. That was Mike’s gang—miniature humans popping out of hiding to offer battle with missiles carefully prepared beforehand against their alleged associates in sabotage. One of the associates had drawn a gun and fired. But Mike’s gang had help. Out of small air locks devised to make the Platform’s skin accessible to its crew on every side—provided they wore space suits—dark-skinned men appeared.
The security man’s walkie-talkie under his shoulder made a buzzing sound. He reached for it.
“Forget it!” snapped Joe. “That’s not for you! You’ve got your orders! Stay here!”
There was a sudden growling uproar where men were crowding to get out of the Shed. Thick, billowing smoke appeared. There was a crashing explosion. The men eddied and milled crazily.
The motor of the stalled truck caught. It moved toward the door, which opened, swinging up and high. Two trucks came roaring in. They raced for the Platform. And as they raced inside, their camouflaged loads clattered off and men showed instead. The guards by the doorway began to shoot.
“That’s what we’ve got to stop!” snapped Joe.
He began to run, his pistol out. There was suddenly a small army—gathered by his orders—which materialized in the dim space under the Platform. It raced to guard against this evidently well-planned invasion.
The harsh, tearing rattle of a machine gun sounded from somewhere high up. Joe knew what it was. Mike’s whole scheme had been intended to force all sabotage efforts to take place at a single instant. Part of the preparation was authority for Haney to drag in two machine guns from an outer watching-post and mount them to cover the interior of the Shed when the general attack began.
Those machine guns were shooting at the trucks. Splinters sprang up from the wood-block floor. Then, abruptly, one of the trucks vanished in a monstrous, actinic flash of blue-white flame and a roar so horrible that it was not sound but pure concussion. The other truck keeled over and crashed from the blast, but did not explode. Men jumped from it. There must have been screamed orders, but Joe could hear nothing at all. He only saw men waving their arms, and others seized things from the toppled load and rushed toward him, and he began to shoot as he ran to meet them.
Now, belatedly, the sirens of the Shed screamed their alarm, and choppy yappings set up as the siren wails rose in pitch. Over by the exit pistols cracked. Something fellwith a ghastly crash not ten feet from where Joe ran. It was a man’s body, toppled from somewhere high up on the structure that was the most important man-made thing in all the world. A barbaric war whoop sounded among the echoes of other tumult.
A Security man shot, and one of the running figures toppled and slid, his burden—which must certainly be a bomb—rolling ridiculously. There had been two trucks that plunged through the swing-up door. They had raced for the spaces under the Platform at the exact time when the floor would be clear, because all work had stopped. Under the Platform, the trucks were to have been detonated. At the very least, they would have rent and torn it horribly. They might have broken its back. And surely one truck should have made it. But there should not have been machine guns ready trained to shoot. Now the load of desperate men from the overturned survivor scurried for the Platform with parts of its cargo. If they could fight their way inside the Platform, they could blast its hull open, or demolish its controls or shatter its air pumps and its gyros and turn its air tanks into sieves. Anything that could be damaged would delay the take-off and so expose the Platform to further and perhaps more successful attack.
There were more pistol shots. A group of men fought their way out of the incoming screening rooms and raced for the center of the Shed. (Later, it would be found they had slabs of explosive inside their garments, and detonation caps to set them off.) Somewhere another door opened, and Security men came out with flickering pistols, Major Holt leading them. He had started out to fight off the truck-borne attack, but he was bound to be too late. Joe’s followers were trying to take care of that. The scuttling men from the incoming rooms were Major Holt’s first prey. They were shot as they ran.
Joe stumbled and fell and he heard guns crackling. As he scrambled up he pitched into a running figure that snarled as Joe hit him. And then he was fighting for his life.
This was under the Platform and in the middle of confusionmany times confounded. Joe caught a wrist that held a gun. He knew his assailant had a bomb slung over one shoulder and right now had one hand free for combat. Joe instinctively tried to batter his enemy with his own pistol, instead of pushing the muzzle against the man’s body and pulling the trigger. He struck a flailing blow, and his hand and the weapon struck a metal brace. The blow cut his knuckles and paralyzed his fingers. Despairingly he felt the pistol slipping from his grasp. Then his assailant brought up his knee viciously, but it hit Joe’s thigh instead of his groin, and Joe flung his weight furiously forward and they toppled to the ground together.
There was fighting all around him. The machine guns rasped again—there was a burst of tracer-bullet fire. The panicked men by the exit tried to surge out through the swinging doors. But the tracers marked a line they must not cross. They checked. Once a gun flashed so close by Joe’s eyes that it blinded him. And once somebody fell over both himself and his antagonist, who writhed like an eel possessed of desperate strength past belief.
Joe could really know only his private part in the struggle down in the murky tangle of the scaffold base. But there was fighting up on the Platform itself. A savagely grinning Mohawk wrestled furiously with a man on one of the rocket tubes. An incendiary device in the saboteur’s pocket ignited, and it flamed red-hot and he screamed as it burned its way out of his garments. The Mohawk flung the man fiercely clear, to crash horribly on the far-distant floor, and then kicked the incendiary off. It fell after the man and hit and burst, and it was thermite which surrounded itself with a column of acrid smoke from seared wood blocks.
There was fighting by the exit doors. There was an ululating uproar in the incoming screening room, and a war whoop from the top of the Platform. A saboteur tried to crawl into an air-lock entrance, and he got his head and shoulders in, but a copper-skinned Indian held his forehead still and chopped down with the side of his hand on that man’s neck. Underneath the Platform was panting chaos, with pistolshots and hand-to-hand struggles everywhere. The force Joe had gathered fought valiantly, but four invaders got to the foot of the wooden steps, where there were two guards. Then there were only two saboteurs left to scramble desperately up the steps over the dead guards’ bodies and head toward the Platform door, but the Chief appeared swinging a twelve-inch Stillson. He let it go, precisely like a skillfully flung tomahawk, and leaped down sixteen steps squarely onto the body of the other man. A gun flashed, but then there was only squirming struggle on the floor.
Mike the midget, inside the Platform, found one bloodied, panting, sobbing man who somehow had gotten inside. And Mike brought down a spanner from a ladder step, and swarmed upon his half-conscious victim, and hit him again, and then stayed on guard until somebody arrived who was big enough to carry the saboteur away.
And all this while, Joe struggled with only one man. It was a horrible struggle, because the man had a bomb and he might manage to set it off or it might go off of itself. It was a ghastly struggle, because the man had the strength and desperation of a maniac—and practiced the tactics. Joe pounded the hand that held the gun upon the floor, and it hit something and exploded smokily and fell clear. But that made things worse. While struggling to kill Joe with the revolver, his antagonist had had only five fingers with which to gouge out Joe’s eyes or tear away his ears or rend his flesh. But with no pistol he had ten, and he fought like a wild beast. He even breathed like an animal. He began to pant—thick, guttural pantings that had the quality of hellish hate. And then there was a surging of bodies—Major Holt’s reserve was arriving very late in the center of the Shed—and then a struggling group trampled all over the pair who squirmed and fought on the ground, and a heavy boot jammed down Joe’s head and he felt teeth sink in his throat. They dug into his flesh, worrying and tearing....
Joe used his knee in a frenzy of revulsion—used his knee as the other man had tried to use his in the first instant of battle. The man beneath him screamed as an animal wouldscream, and Joe jerked his bleeding throat free. In hysterical horror he pounded his antagonist’s head on the floor until the man went limp....
And then he heard a grim voice saying: “Quit it or you get your head blown off! Quit it——” And Joe panted: “It’s about time you guys got here! This man came in on that truck. Watch out for that bomb he’s got slung on him....”
The incoming shift had a messy clean-up job to do. It was accomplished only because security men abruptly took over the work of gang bosses, and all ordinary labor on the Platform was put aside until normal operations were again possible. Even that would not have been feasible but for the walkie-talkies the security men wore. As the situation was sorted out, it was explained to them, and they relayed the news for the satisfaction of the curiosity of those who worked under them. No work—no explanation. It produced immediate and satisfactory co-operation all around.
There had been four separate and independent attempts to wreck the Platform at the same time. One was, of course, the plan of those sympathetic characters who had volunteered to help Mike and his gang win the status of spacemen by firing the Platform’s rockets. There were not many of them, and they had lost heavily. They’d had thermite bombs to destroy the Platform’s vitals. Ultimately the survivors talked freely, if morosely, and that was that.
There had been a particularly ungifted attempt to cause panic in the incoming shift in the rooms where its members were screened before admission to work. Somebody had tried to establish complete confusion there by firing revolver shots in the crowd, expecting the workers to break through to the floor and assigned gentlemen with slabs of explosive to get to the Platform with them. The gentlemen with the explosives had run into Major Holt’s security reserve, and they got nowhere. The creators of panic with revolver shots were finally rescued from their shift-mates and more or less scraped up from the screening-room floor—they were in very bad shape—and carted off to be patched up for questioning. The members of this group had been impractical idealists, andbesides, some of them had lost their nerve, as was evidenced by the discovery of abandoned explosives and detonators in the locker room and men’s room of the Shed.
The most dangerous attempt was, of course, that perfectly planned and co-ordinated assault which had been merely carried out at its original time, without either being hastened or delayed by Mike’s activities. That plan had been beautifully contrived, and it would certainly have been successful but for the machine-gun bullets from the gallery and the fight Joe’s followers put up underneath the Platform.
The exact instant when the whole Shed would be most nearly empty had been fixed upon, and three separate units had worked in perfect timing. There’d been the man in the stalled truck. He’d delayed his exit from the Shed to the precise fraction of a second to get the doors open at the perfect instant. The explosive-laden trucks had raced in at the exact second when they were most certain to get underneath the Platform and detonate their cargoes. There’d been a perfect diversion planned for that, too. Smoke bombs and explosions in the outgoing screening rooms had created real panic, and but for Joe’s order for his group’s walkie-talkies to be turned off would have drawn every security man on duty to that spot.
Mike’s trick, then, had brought some saboteurs into the open, but had merely happened to coincide with the most dangerous and well-organized coup of all. However, it was due to his trick that the Platform was not now a wreck.
There was also another break that was sheer coincidence. It was a discovery that could not possibly have turned up save in a situation of pure chaos artificially induced. Joe had had to react in a personal and vengeful way to the manner in which his especial antagonist had fought him. One expects a man to fight fair by instinct, and to turn to fouls—if he does—in desperation only. But Joe’s personal opponent hadn’t tried a single fair trick. It was as if he’d never heard of a fist blow, but only of murder and mayhem. Joe felt an individual enmity toward him.
Joe didn’t consider himself the most urgent of the injured,when doctors and nurses took up the work of patching, but Sally was there to help, and she went deathly pale when she saw his bloodstained throat. She dragged him quickly to a doctor. And the doctor looked at Joe and dropped everything else.
But it wasn’t too serious. The antiseptics hurt, and the stitching was unpleasant, but Joe was more worried by the knowledge that Sally was standing there and suffering for him. When he got up from the emergency operating table, the doctor nodded grimly to him.
“That was close!” said the doctor. “Whoever chewed you was working for your jugular vein, and he was halfway through the wall when he stopped. A fraction of an inch more, and he’d have had you!”
“Thanks,” said Joe. His neck felt clumsy with bandages, and when he tried to turn his head the stitches hurt.
Sally’s hand trembled in his when she led him away.
“I didn’t think I’d ever dislike anybody so much,” said Joe angrily, “as I did that man while he was chewing my throat. We were trying to kill each other, of course, but—confound it, people don’t bite!”
“Did you—kill him?” asked Sally in a shaky voice. “Not that I’ll mind! I would have hated the thought ordinarily, but——”
Joe halted. There was a row of stretchers—not too long, at that—in the emergency-hospital space. He looked down at the unconscious man who’d fought him.
“There he is!” he said irritably. “I banged him pretty hard. I don’t like to hate anybody, but the way he fought——”
Sally’s teeth chattered suddenly. She called to one of the security men standing guard by the stretchers.
“I—think my—father is going to want to talk to him,” she said unsteadily. “Don’t—let him be taken away to the hospital until Dad knows, please.”
She started away, her face dead-white and her hand stone-cold.
“What’s the matter?” demanded Joe.
“S-sabotage,” said Sally in an indescribable tone that had a suggestion of heartbreak.
She went into her father’s office alone. She came out again with him, and her father looked completely stricken. Miss Ross, his secretary, was with him, too. Her face was like a mask of marble. She had always been a plain woman, a gloomy one, a morbid one. But at the new and horrible look on her face Joe turned his eyes away.
Then Sally was crying beside him, and he put his arm clumsily around her and let her sob on his shoulder, completely puzzled.
He didn’t find out until later what the trouble was. The man who’d tried so earnestly to kill him was Miss Ross’s fiancé. She had met this man during a vacation, as a government secretary, and he was a refugee with an exotic charm that would have fascinated a much more personable and beautiful woman than Miss Ross. They had a whirlwind romance. He confided to her his terror of emissaries from his native country who might kill him. And of course she was more fascinated still. When he asked her to marry him she accepted his proposal. Then, just two weeks before her assignment to the Space Platform project, he vanished. Miss Ross was desperate and lovesick.
One day her telephone rang and his anguished voice told her he’d been abducted, and if she told the police he would be tortured to death. He begged her not to do anything to cause him more torment than was already his.
She’d been trying to keep him alive ever since. Once, when she couldn’t bring herself to carry out an order she’d been given—with threats of torment to him if she failed—she’d received a human finger in the mail, and a scrawled and blood-stained note which cried out of unspeakable torment and begged her not to doom him to more.
So Miss Ross, who was Major Holt’s secretary and one of his most trusted assistants, had been giving information to one group of saboteurs all the while. She was the most dangerous security leak in the whole Platform project.
But her fiancé wasn’t a captive. He was the head of that group of saboteurs. He’d made love to her and proposed to her merely to prepare her to supply the information hewanted. He needed only to write a sufficiently agonized note, or gasp tormented pleas on a telephone, to get what he wanted.
Incidentally, he still had all his fingers when Joe knocked him cold.
Sally had recognized him as the subject of a snapshot she’d once seen Miss Ross crying over. Miss Ross had hidden it hastily and told her it was someone she had once loved, now dead. And this inadvertent disclosure that Miss Ross was the security leak the Major had never had a clue to could only have come about through such confusion as Mike had instigated and Haney and the Chief and Joe had organized. But Joe learned those facts only later.
At the moment, there was still the Platform to be gotten aloft. And there was plenty of work to do. There were two small rips in the plating, caused by fragments of the exploded truck. There were some bullet holes. The Platform could resist small meteorites at forty-five miles a second, but a high-velocity small-arm projectile could puncture it. Those scars of battle had to be welded shut. The rest of the scaffolding had to come down and the rest of the rocket tubes had to be affixed. And there was cleaning up to be done.
These things occupied the shift that came on at the time of the multiple sabotage assaults. At first the work was ragged. But the policy of turning the Security men into news broadcasters worked well. After all, the Platform was a construction job and the men who worked on it were not softies. Most of them had seen men killed before. Before the shift was half over, a definite work rhythm was evident. Men had begun to take an even greater pride in the thing they had built, because it had been assailed and not destroyed. And the job was almost over.
Sally went back to her father’s quarters, to try to sleep. Joe stayed in the Shed. His throat was painful enough so that he didn’t want to go to bed until he was genuinely tired, and he was thoroughly wrought up.
Mike the midget had gone peacefully to sleep again, curled up in a corner of the outgoing screening room. His fellowmidgets talked satisfiedly among themselves. Presently, to show their superiority to mere pitched battles, two of them brought out a miniature pack of cards and started a card game while they waited for a bus to take them back to Bootstrap.
The Chief’s Indian associates loafed comfortably while waiting for the same busses. Later they would put in for overtime—and get it. Haney mourned that he had been remote from the scene of action, and was merely responsible for the presence and placing and firing of the machine guns that had certainly kept the Platform from being blown up from below.
It seemed that nothing else would happen to bother anybody. But there was one thing more.
That thing happened just two hours before it was time for the shift to change once again, and when normal work was back in progress in the Shed. Everything seemed fully organized and serene. Everything in the Shed had settled down, and nothing had happened outside.
There was ample exterior protection, of course, but the outside-guard system hadn’t had anything to do for a very long time. Men at radar screens were bored and sleepy from sheer inactivity and silence. Pilots in jet planes two miles and five miles and eight miles high had long since grown weary of the splendid view below them. After all, one can get very used to late, slanting moonlight on cloud masses far underneath, and bright and hostile-seeming stars overhead.
So the thing was well timed.
A Canadian station noticed the pip on its radar screen first. The radar observer was puzzled by it. It could have been a meteor, and the Canadian observer at first thought it was. But it wasn’t going quite fast enough, and it lasted too long. It was traveling six hundred seventy-two miles an hour, and it was headed due south at sixty thousand feet. The speed could have been within reason—provided it didn’t stay constant. But it did. There was something traveling south at eleven miles a minute or better. A mile in five-plus seconds. It didn’t slow. It didn’t drop.
The Canadian radarman debated painfully. He stopped his companion from the reading of a magazine article about chinchilla breeding in the home. He showed him the pip, still headed south and almost at the limit of this radar instrument’s range. They discussed the thing dubiously. They decided to report it.
They had a little trouble getting the call through. The night long-distance operators were sleepy. Because of the difficulty of making the call, the radarmen became obstinate and insisted on putting it through. They reported to Ottawa that some object flying at sixty thousand feet and six hundred seventy-two miles an hour was crossing Canada headed for the United States.
There was a further time loss. Somebody in authority had to be awakened, and somebody had to decide that a further report was justified. Then the trick had to be accomplished, and a sleepy man in a bathrobe and slippers listened and said sleepily, “Oh, of course you’ll tell the Americans. It’s only neighborly!” and padded back to his bed to go to sleep again. Then he waked up suddenly and began to sweat. He’d realized that this might be the beginning of atomic war. So he set phone bells to jangling furiously all over Canada, and jet planes began to boom in the darkness.
But there was only one object in the sky. Over the Dakotas it went higher. It went to seventy thousand feet, and then eighty. How this was managed is not completely known, because there are still some details of that flight that have never been completely explained. But certainly jatos flared briefly at some point, and the object reached ninety thousand feet where a jet motor would certainly be useless. And then, almost certainly, rockets flared once more and well south of the Dakotas it started down in a trajectory like that of an artillery shell, but with considerably higher speed than most artillery shells achieve.
It was at about this time that the siren in the Shed began its choppy, hiccoughing series of warm-up notes. The news from Canada arrived, as a matter of fact, some thirty seconds after the outer-perimeter radar screen around the Platformgave its warning. Then there was no hesitation or delay at all. Men were already tumbling out of bed at three airfields, buckling helmets and hoping their oxygen tanks would function properly. Then the radars atop the Shed itself picked up the moving speck. And small blue-white flames began to rise from the ground and go streaking away in the darkness in astonishing numbers.
The covers of the guns at the top of the Shed slid aside. Miles away, jet planes shot skyward, and newly wakened pilots looked at their night-fighting instruments and swore unbelievingly at the speed they were told the plunging object was making. The jet pilots gave their motors everything they could take, but it didn’t look good.
The planes of the jet umbrella over the Shed stopped cruising and sprinted. And they were the only ones likely to get in front of the object in time.
Inside the Shed, the siren howled dismally and all the Security men were snapping: “Radar alarm! All out! Radar alarm! All out!”
And men were moving fast, too. Some came down from the Platform on hoists, dropping with reckless speed to the floor level. Some didn’t wait for a turn at that. They slid down one upright, swung around the crosspiece on the level below, and slid down another vertical pipe. For a minute or more it looked as if the scaffolds oozed black droplets which slid down its pipes. But the drops were men. The floor became speckled and spotted with dots running for its exits.
The siren ceased its wailing and its noise went down and down in pitch until it was a baritone moan that dropped to bass and ceased. Then there was no sound but the men moving to get out of the Shed. There were trucks, too. Those that had been loading with dismantled scaffolding roared for the doors to get out and away. Some men jumped on board as they passed. The exit doors swung up to let them go.
But it was very quiet in the Shed, at that. There was no noise but a few fleeing trucks, and the murmur which was the voices of the Security men hurrying the work crew out.There was less to hear than went on ordinarily. And it was a long distance across the floor of the Shed.
Joe stood with his fists clenched absurdly. This could only be an air attack. An air attack could only mean an atom-bomb attack. And if there was an atom bomb dropped on the Shed, there’d be no use getting outside. It wouldn’t be merely a fission bomb. It would be a hell bomb—a bomb which used the kind of bomb that shattered Hiroshima only as a primer for the real explosive. Nobody could hope to get beyond the radius of its destruction before it hit!
Joe heard himself raging. He’d thought of Sally. She’d be in the range of annihilation, too. And Joe knew such fury and hatred—because of Sally—that he forgot everything else.
He didn’t run. He couldn’t escape. He couldn’t fight back. But because he hated, he had to do something to defy.
He found himself moving toward the Platform, his jaws clenched. It was pure, blind, instinctive defiance.
He was not the only one to have that reaction. Men running toward the sidewall exits began to get out of breath from their running. They slowed. Presently they stopped. They scowled and raged, like Joe. Some of them looked with burning eyes up at the roof of the Shed, though their thoughts went on beyond it. The security guards repeated, “Radar alarm! All out! Radar alarm! All out!”
Someone snarled, “Nuts to that!”
Joe saw a man walking in the same direction as himself. He was walking deliberately back to the Platform. Somebody else was headed back too....
Very peculiarly, almost all the men on the floor had ceased to run. They began to gather in little groups. They knew flight was useless. They talked briefly. Profanely. Here and there men started disgustedly back toward the Platform. Their lips moved in expressions of furious scorn. Their scorn was of themselves.
There was a gathering of men about the base of the framework that still partly veiled the Platform. They tended to face outward, angrily, and to clench their fists.
Then somebody started an engine. A man began to climbfuriously back to where he had been at work. Quite unreasonably, other men followed him.
Hammers began defiantly and enragedly to sound.
The work crew in the Shed went defiantly and furiously back to work. A clamor was set up that was almost the normal working noise. It was the only possible way in which those men could express the raging contempt they felt for those who would destroy the thing they worked on.
But there were some other men who could do more. There were three levels of jet planes above the Shed, and they could dive. The highest one got first to the line along which the missile from an unknown place was plunging toward the Shed. That plane steadied on a collision course and let go its wing load of rockets. It peeled off and got out of the way. Seconds later the others from the jet umbrella were arriving. A tiny spray of proximity-fused rockets blazed furiously toward the invisible thing from the heights.
Other planes and yet others came hurtling to the line their radars briskly computed for them. There were more rockets....
The black-painted thing with more than the speed of an artillery shell plunged into a miniature hail of rockets. They flamed viciously. Half a dozen—a dozen—explosions that were pure futility.
Then there was an explosion that was not. Nobody saw it, because its puny detonation was instantly wiped out in a blaze of such incredible incandescence that the aluminum paint on jet planes still miles away was scorched and blistered instantly. The light of that flare was seen for hundreds of miles. The sound—later on—was heard farther still. And the desert vegetation miles below the hell bomb showed signs of searing when the morning came.
But the thing from the north was vaporized, utterly, some forty-five miles from its target. The damage it did was negligible.
The work on the preparation for the Platform’s take-off went on. When the all-clear signal sounded inside the Shed, nobody paid any attention. They were too busy.
On the day of the take-off there were a number of curious side-effects from the completion of the Space Platform. There was a very small country on the other side of the world which determined desperately to risk its existence on the success of the Platform’s flight. It had to choose between abject submission to a powerful neighbor, or the possibility of a revolution in which its neighbor’s troops would take on the semblance of citizens for street-fighting purposes. If the Platform got aloft, it could defy its neighbor. And in a grim gamble, it did.
There was also a last-ditch fight in the United Nations, wherein the Platform was denounced and a certain block of associated countries issued an ultimatum, threatening to bolt the international organization if the Platform went aloft. And again there had to be a grim gamble. If the Platform did not take to space and so furnish ultimately a guarantee of peace, the United Nations would face the alternatives of becoming a military alliance for atomic war, or something less than an international debating society.
Of course there were less significant results. There were already fourteen popular songs ready for broadcast, orchestrated and rehearsed with singers ready to saturate the ears of the listening public. They ranged fromWe’ve Got a Warship in the Sky, which was more or less jingoistic, to a boy-and-girl melody entitledWe’ll Have a Moon Just for Us Two. The latter tune had been stolen from a hit of four years before, which in turn had been stolen from a hit of six years before that, and it had been stolen from a still earlier bit of Bach, so it was a rather pretty melody.
And of course there was a super-colossal motion pictureepic in color and with musical numbers, champing in its film cans for simultaneous first-run showings in eight different key cities. It was titledTo the Stars, and three separate endings had been filmed, of which the appropriate one would of course be used in the eight separate worldpremières. One ending had the Platform fail due to sabotage, and the hero—played by an actor who had interrupted his seventh honeymoon to play the part—splendidly prepared to build it all over again. The second ending closed with the Platform headed for Alpha Centaurus—which was hardly the intention of anybody outside of filmdom. The third ending was secret, but it was said that hard-boiled motion-picture executives had cried like babies when it was thrown on preview screens.
These, of course, were merely sidelights. They were not very important in the Shed. There, work went on at a feverish rate although there was no longer any construction work to be done. In theory, therefore, the members of welders and pipe-fitters and steel-construction and electrical and other unions should have retired gracefully to Bootstrap. Members of building-maintenance and rigging and wrecking and other assorted unions should have been gathered together in far cities, screened by security, and brought to Bootstrap and paid overtime to pull up wood-block flooring and unbolt and jack out the proper sections of the Shed’s eastern wall.
But if there had been anything of that sort tried, it would have produced bloodshed. The men who’d built the Platform were going to see it depart this Earth or else. They’d never have a second chance. It would work the first time or it wouldn’t work at all.
So the Platform was made ready for its take-off by the men who had made it. A gigantic section—two full gores—of the Shed’s wall was unbolted in two pieces, and each piece thrust outward at the top and bottom, so that they were offset from the rest of the huge half-globe. There were hundreds of wheels at their bottom which for the first time touched the sixteen lines of rails laid with unbelievable solidity around the outside of the Shed. And then the monstrous sections were rolled aside. A vast opening resulted, and morningsunlight smote for the first time mankind’s very first space craft.
Joe saw the sunlight strike, and his first sensation was of disappointment. The normal shape of the Platform was ungainly, but now it was practically hidden by the solid-fuel rockets which would consume themselves in their firing. Also, the floor of the Shed looked strange. It was littered with the clumsy shapes of pushpots, trucked to this place in an unending stream all night long. A very young lieutenant from the pushpot airfield hunted up Joe and assured him that every drop of fuel in every pushpot’s tanks had been tested twice—once in the storage tanks, and again in the pushpots. Joe thanked him very politely.
There was no longer any scaffolding. There were no trucks left except two gigantic cranes, which could handle the pushpots like so many toys. And the effect of sunlight pouring into the Shed seemed strange indeed.
Outside, there were carpenters hammering professionally upon a hasty grandstand of timber. Most of the carpenters would have been handier with rivet guns or welding torches, but it would have been indiscreet to comment. As fast as a final timber was spiked in place, somebody hastily wound it with very tawdry bunting. Men were stringing wires to the grandstand, and other men were setting up television and movie cameras. Two Security men grimly stood by each camera amid a glittering miscellany of microphones.
Joe was lucky. Or perhaps Sally pulled wires. Anyhow, the two of them had a vantage point for which many other people would have paid astonishing sums. They waited where the circular ramp between the two skins of the Shed was broken by the removal of the doorway. They were halfway up the curve of the Shed’s roof, at the edge of the great opening, and they could see everything, from the pushpot pilots as they were checked into their contraptions, to the sedate arrival of the big brass at the grandstand below.
There was a reverberant humming from the Shed now. It might have been the humming of wind blowing across its open section. Joe and Sally saw a grim knot of Security menescorting four crew members to a flight of wooden steps that led up to a lower air-lock door—Joe had reason to remember that door—and watched them enter and close the air lock behind them. Then the security men pulled away the wooden stairs and hauled them completely away. There were a very few highly trusted men making final inspections of the Platform’s exterior. One of them was nearly on a level with Joe and Sally. Other men were already lowering themselves down on ropes that they later jerked free, but this last man on top did a very human thing. When he’d finished his check-up to the last least detail, he pulled something out of his hip pocket. It was a tobacco can full of black paint. There was a brush with it. He painted his name on the silvery plates of the Platform, “C. J. Adams, Jr.,” and satisfiedly began his descent to the ground. His name would go up with the Platform and be visible for uncounted generations—if all went well. He reached the ground and walked away, contented.
The cranes began their task. Each one reached down deliberately and picked up a pushpot. They swung the pushpots to vertical positions and presented them precisely to the Platform’s side. They clung there ridiculously. Magnetic grapples, of course. Joe and Sally, at the end of the corridor in the wall, could see the heads of the pushpot pilots in their plastic domes.
Music blared from behind the grandstand. The seats were being filled. But naturally, the least important personages were arriving first. There were women in costumes to which they had given infinite thought—and nobody looked at them except other women. There was khaki. There were gray business suits—slide-rule men, these, who had done the brain-work behind the Platform’s design. Then black broadcloth. Politicians, past question. There is nothing less impressive from a height of two hundred feet than a pot-bellied man in black broadcloth walking on the ground.
There were men in uniforms which were not of the United States armed forces. They ran heavily to medals, which glittered. There were more arrivals, and more, and more. The newsreel and TV cameras nosed around.
The cranes worked methodically. They dipped, and deftly picked up a thing shaped like the top half of a loaf of bread. They swung that metal thing to the Platform’s side. Each time it clung fast, like a snail or slug to the surface on which it crawls. Many pushpots clung even to the rocket tubes—the same tubes that would presently burn away and vanish. So Joe and Sally saw the pushpots in a new aspect: blunt metal slugs with gaping mouths which were their air scoops.
The tinny music from below cut off. Somebody began an oration. The men who had built the Platform were not interested in fine phrases, but this event was broadcast everywhere, and some people might possibly tune to the channels that carried the speakers and their orations rather than the channels that showed the huge, bleak, obscured shape of the monster that was headed either for empty space or pure disaster.
The speaker stopped, and another took his place. Then another. One man spoke for less than a minute, and the stands went wild! But the one who followed made splendid gestures. He talked and talked and talked. The cranes cleaned up the last of the waiting pushpots, and the Platform itself was practically invisible.
The cranes backed off and went away, clanking. The orator raised his voice. It made small echoes in the vast cavern that was the Shed. Somebody plucked the speaker’s arm. He ended abruptly and sat down, wiping his forehead with a huge blue handkerchief.
There was a roar. A pushpot had started its motor. Another roar. Another. One by one, the multitude of clustering objects added to the din. In the open a single jet was appalling. Here, the noise became a sound which was no longer a sound. It became a tumult which by pure volume ceased to be anything one’s ears could understand. It reached a peak and held there. Then, abruptly, all the motors slackened in unison, and then roared more loudly. The group controls within the Platform were being tested. Three—four—five times the tumult faded to the merely unbearable and went up to full volume again.
Joe felt Sally plucking at his arm. He turned, and saw a jet plane’s underbelly, very close, and its swept-back wings. It was climbing straight up. Then he saw another jet plane streaking for the great dome’s open door. It moved with incredible velocity. It jerked upward and climbed over the Shed’s curve and was gone. But there were others and others and others.
These were the fighter ships of the jet-plane guard. For months on end they had flown above the Shed, protecting it. Now they were going aloft to relieve the present watchers. They were rising to spread out as an interceptor screen for hundreds of miles in every direction, in case somebody should be so foolish as to try again the exploit of the night before. They would not see the monster in the Shed again. So in a single line which reached to the horizon, they made this roaring run for the one last glimpse which was their right. Joe saw tiny specks come streaking down out of the sky to queue up for this privileged view of the Platform before it rose.
Suddenly they were gone, and Joe felt that tingling sense of pride which never comes from the sensation of sharing in mere power or splendor or pompous might, but is so certain when the human touch modifies magnificence.
And then the roaring of the pushpot engines achieved an utterly impossible volume. The whole interior of the Shed was misty now, but shining in the morning light.
And the Platform moved.
At first it was a mere stirring. It turned ever so slightly to one side, pivoting on the ways that had supported it during building. It turned back and to the other side. The vapor thickened. From each jet motor a blast of blue-white flame poured down, and the moisture in the earth was turning into steam and stray wood-blocks into acrid smoke. The Platform turned precisely and exactly back to its original position, and Joe’s heart pounded in his throat, because he knew that the turning had been done with the gyros, and they had been handled by the pilot gyros for which he was responsible.
Then the Platform moved again. It lifted by inches andswayed forward. It checked, and lurched again, and went staggering toward the great opening before it. A part of its base gouged a deep furrow in the earthen floor.