He turned to look, and he saw blackening wreckage immersed in roaring flames. The flames were monstrous. They rose sky-high, it seemed—more flames than forty-five minutes of gasoline should have produced. As he looked, something blew up shatteringly, and fire raged even more furiously. Of course in such heat the delicately adjusted gyros would be warped and ruined even if the crash hadn’t wrecked them beforehand. Joe made thick, incoherent sounds of rage.
The plane was now an incomplete, twisted skeleton, licked through by flames. The crash wagon roared to a stop beside them.
“Anybody hurt? Anybody left inside?”
Joe shook his head, unable to speak for despairing rage. The fog wagon roared up, already spouting mist from its nozzles. Its tanks contained water treated with detergent so that it broke into the finest of droplets when sprayed at four hundred pounds pressure. It drenched the burning wreck with that heavy mist, in which a man would drown. No fire could possibly sustain itself. In seconds, it seemed, there were only steam and white vapor and fumes of smoldering substances that gradually lessened.
But then there was a roaring of motorcycles racing across the field with a black car trailing them. The car pulled up beside the fog wagon, then sped swiftly to where Joe was coming out of wild rage and sinking into sick, black depression. He’d been responsible for the pilot gyros and their safearrival. What had happened wasn’t his fault, but it was not his job merely to remain blameless. It was his job to get the gyros delivered and set up in the Space Platform. He had failed.
The black car braked to a stop. There was Major Holt. Joe had seen him six months before. He’d aged a good deal. He looked grimly at the two pilots.
“What happened?” he demanded. “You dumped your fuel! What burned like this?”
Joe said thickly: “Everything was dumped but the pilot gyros. They didn’t burn! They were packed at the plant!”
The co-pilot suddenly made an incoherent sound of rage. “I’ve got it!” he said hoarsely. “I know——”
“What?” snapped Major Holt.
“They—planted that grenade at the—major overhaul!” panted the co-pilot, too enraged even to swear. “They—fixed it so—any trouble would mean a wreck! And I—pulled the fire-extinguisher releases just as we hit! For all compartments! To flood everything with CO2! But it wasn’t CO2! That’s what burned!”
Major Holt stared sharply at him. He held up his hand. Somebody materialized beside him. He said harshly: “Get the extinguisher bottles sealed and take them to the laboratory.”
“Yes, sir!”
A man went running toward the wreck. Major Holt said coldly: “That’s a new one. We should have thought of it. You men get yourselves attended to and report to Security at the Shed.”
The pilot and co-pilot turned away. Joe turned to go with them. Then he heard Sally’s voice, a little bit wobbly: “Joe! Come with us, please!”
Joe hadn’t seen her, but she was in the car. She was pale. Her eyes were wide and frightened.
Joe said stiffly: “I’ll be all right. I want to look at those crates——”
Major Holt said curtly: “They’re already under guard. There’ll have to be photographs made before anything canbe touched. And I want a report from you, anyhow. Come along!”
Joe looked. The motorcycles were abandoned, and there were already armed guards around the still-steaming wreck, grimly watching the men of the fog wagon as they hunted for remaining sparks or flame. It was noticeable that now nobody moved toward the wreck. There were figures walking back toward the edge of the field. What civilians were about, even to the mechanics on duty, had started out to look at the debris at close range. But the guards were on the job. Nobody could approach. The onlookers went back to their proper places.
“Please, Joe!” said Sally shakily.
Joe got drearily into the car. The instant he seated himself, it was in motion again. It went plunging back across the field and out the entrance. Its horn blared and it went streaking toward the town and abruptly turned to the left. In seconds it was on a broad white highway that left the town behind and led toward the emptiness of the desert.
But not quite emptiness. Far, far away there was a great half-globe rising against the horizon. The car hummed toward it, tires singing. And Joe looked at it and felt ashamed, because this was the home of the Space Platform, and he hadn’t brought to it the part for which he alone was responsible.
Sally moistened her lips. She brought out a small box. She opened it. There were bandages and bottles.
“I’ve a first-aid kit, Joe,” she said shakily. “You’re burned. Let me fix the worst ones, anyhow!”
Joe looked at himself. One coat sleeve was burned to charcoal. His hair was singed on one side. A trouser leg was burned off around the ankle. When he noticed, his burns hurt.
Major Holt watched her spread a salve on scorched skin. He showed no emotion whatever.
“Tell me what happened,” he commanded. “All of it!”
Somehow, there seemed very little to tell, but Joe told it baldly as the car sped on. The great half-ball of metal loomed larger and larger but did not appear to grow nearer as Sallypracticed first aid. They came to a convoy of trucks, and the horn blared, and they turned out and passed it. Once they met a convoy of empty vehicles on the way back to Bootstrap. They passed a bus. They went on.
Joe finished drearily: “The pilots did everything anybody could. Even checked off the packages as they were dumped. We reported the one that blew up.”
Major Holt said uncompromisingly: “Those were orders. In a sense we’ve gained something even by this disaster. The pilots are probably right about the plane’s having been booby-trapped after its last overhaul, and the traps armed later. I’ll have an inspection made immediately, and we’ll see if we can find how it was done.
“There’s the man you think armed the trap on this plane. An order for his arrest is on the way now. I told my secretary. And—hm.... That CO2——”
“I didn’t understand that,” said Joe drearily.
“Planes have CO2bottles to put fires out,” said the Major impatiently. “A fire in flight lights a red warning light on the instrument panel, telling where it is. The pilot pulls a handle, and CO2floods the compartment, putting it out. And this ship was coming in for a crash landing so the pilot—according to orders—flooded all compartments with CO2. Only it wasn’t.”
Sally said in horror: “Oh, no!”
“The CO2bottles were filled with an inflammable or an explosive gas,” said her father, unbending. “Instead of making a fire impossible, they made it certain. We’ll have to watch out for that trick now, too.”
Joe was too disheartened for any emotion except a bitter depression and a much more bitter hatred of those who were ready to commit any crime—and had committed most—in the attempt to destroy the Platform.
The Shed that housed it rose and rose against the skyline. It became huge. It became monstrous. It became unbelievable. But Joe could have wept when the car pulled up at an angular, three-story building built out from the Shed’s base. From the air, this substantial building had looked likea mere chip. The car stopped. They got out. A sentry saluted as Major Holt led the way inside. Joe and Sally followed.
The Major said curtly to a uniformed man at a desk: “Get some clothes for this man. Get him a long-distance telephone connection to the Kenmore Precision Tool Company. Let him talk. Then bring him to me again.”
He disappeared. Sally tried to smile at Joe. She was still quite pale.
“That’s Dad, Joe. He means well, but he’s not cordial. I was in his office when the report of sabotage to your plane came through. We started for Bootstrap. We were on the way when we saw the first explosion. I—thought it was your ship.” She winced a little at the memory. “I knew you were on board. It was—not nice, Joe.”
She’d been badly scared. Joe wanted to thump her encouragingly on the back, but he suddenly realized that that would no longer be appropriate. So he said gruffly: “I’m all right.”
He followed the uniformed man. He began to get out of his scorched and tattered garments. The sergeant brought him more clothes, and he put them on. He was just changing his personal possessions to the new pockets when the sergeant came back again.
“Kenmore plant on the line, sir.”
Joe went to the phone. On the way he discovered that the banging around he’d had when the plane landed had made a number of places on his body hurt.
He talked to his father.
Afterward, he realized that it was a queer conversation. He felt guilty because something had happened to a job that had taken eight months to do and that he alone was escorting to its destination. He told his father about that. But his father didn’t seem concerned. Not nearly so much concerned as he should have been. He asked urgent questions about Joe himself. If he was hurt. How much? Where? Joe was astonished that his father seemed to think such matters more important than the pilot gyros. But he answered the questions and explained the exact situation and also a certain desperatehope he was trying to cherish that the gyros might still be repairable. His father gave him advice.
Sally was waiting again when he came out. She took him into her father’s office, and introduced him to her father’s secretary. Compared to Sally she was an extraordinarily plain woman. She wore a sorrowful expression. But she looked very efficient.
Joe explained carefully that his father said for him to hunt up Chief Bender—working on the job out here—because he was one of the few men who’d left the Kenmore plant to work elsewhere, and he was good. He and the Chief, between them, would estimate the damage and the possibility of repair.
Major Holt listened. He was military and official and harassed and curt and tired. Joe’d known Sally and therefore her father all his life, but the Major wasn’t an easy man to be relaxed with. He spoke into thin air, and immediately his sad-seeming secretary wrote out a pass for Joe. Then Major Holt gave crisp orders on a telephone and asked questions, and Sally said: “I know. I’ll take him there. I know my way around.”
Her father’s expression did not change. He simply included Sally in his orders on the phone.
He hung up and said briefly: “The plane will be surveyed and taken apart as soon as possible. By the time you find your man you can probably examine the crates. I’ll have you cleared for it.”
His secretary reached in a drawer for order forms to fill out and hand him to sign. Sally tugged at Joe’s arm. They left.
Outside, she said: “There’s no use arguing with my father, Joe. He has a terrible job, and it’s on his mind all the time. He hates being a Security officer, too. It’s a thankless job—and no Security officer ever gets to be more than a major. His ability never shows. What he does is never noticed unless it fails. So he’s frustrated. He’s got poor Miss Ross—his secretary, you know—so she just listens to what he says must be done and she writes it out. Sometimes he goesdays without speaking to her directly. But really it’s pretty bad! It’s like a war with no enemy to fight except spies! And the things they do! They’ve been known even to booby-trap a truck after an accident, so anybody who tries to help will be blown up! So everything has to be done in a certain way or everything will be ruined!”
She led him to an office with a door that opened directly into the Shed. In spite of his bitterness, Joe was morosely impatient to see inside. But Sally had to identify him formally as the Joe Kenmore who was the subject of her father’s order, and his fingerprints had to be taken, and somebody had him stand for a moment before an X-ray screen. Then she led him through the door, and he was in the Shed where the Space Platform was under construction.
It was a vast cavern of metal sheathing and spidery girders, filled with sound and detail. It took him seconds to begin to absorb what he saw and heard. The Shed was five hundred feet high in the middle, and it was all clear space without a single column or interruption. There were arc lamps burning about its edges, and high up somewhere there were strips of glass which let in a pale light. All of it resounded with many noises and clanging echoes of them.
There were rivet guns at work, and there were the grumblings of motor trucks moving about, and the oddly harsh roar of welding torches. But the torch flames looked only like marsh fires, blue-white and eerie against the mass of the thing that was being built.
It was not too clear to the eye, this incomplete Space Platform. There seemed to be a sort of mist, a glamour about it, which was partly a veiling mass of scaffolding. But Joe gazed at it with an emotion that blotted out even his aching disappointment and feeling of shame.
It was gigantic. It had the dimensions of an ocean liner. It was strangely shaped. Partly obscured by the fragile-seeming framework about it, there was bright plating in swelling curves, and the plating reached up irregularly and followed a peculiar pattern, and above the plating there were girders—themselves shining brightly in the light of many arclamps—and they rose up and up toward the roof of the Shed itself. The Platform was ungainly and it was huge, and it rested under a hollow metal half-globe that could have doubled for a sky. It was more than three hundred feet high, itself, and there were men working on the bare bright beams of its uppermost parts—and the men were specks. The far side of the Shed’s floor had other men on it, and they were merely jerkily moving motes. You couldn’t see their legs as they walked. The Shed and the Platform were monstrous!
Joe felt Sally’s eyes upon him. Somehow, they looked proud. He took a deep breath.
She said: “Come on.”
They walked across acres of floor neatly paved with shining wooden blocks. They moved toward the thing that was to take mankind’s first step toward the stars. As they walked centerward, a big sixteen-wheel truck-and-trailer outfit backed out of an opening under the lacy haze of scaffolds. It turned clumsily, and carefully circled the scaffolding, and moved toward a sidewall of the Shed. A section of the wall—it seemed as small as a rabbit hole—lifted inward like a flap, and the sixteen-wheeler trundled out into the blazing sunlight. Four other trucks scurried out after it. Other trucks came in. The sidewall section closed.
There was the smell of engine fumes and hot metal and of ozone from electric sparks. There was that indescribable smell a man can get homesick for, of metal being worked by men. Joe walked like someone in a dream, with Sally satisfiedly silent beside him, until the scaffolds—which had looked like veiling—became latticework and he saw openings.
They walked into one such tunnel. The bulk of the Platform above them loomed overhead with a crushing menace. There were trucks rumbling all around underneath, here in this maze of scaffold columns. Some carried ready-loaded cages waiting to be snatched up by hoists. Crane grips came down, and snapped fast on the cages, and lifted them up and up and out of sight. There was a Diesel running somewhere, and a man stood and stared skyward and made motions with his hands, and the Diesel adjusted its running to his signals.Then some empty cages came down and landed in a waiting truck body with loud clanking noises. Somebody cast off the hooks, and the truck grumbled and drove away.
Sally spoke to a preoccupied man in shirt sleeves with a badge on an arm band near his shoulder. He looked carefully at the passes she carried, using a flashlight to make sure. Then he led them to a shaft up which a hoist ran. It was very noisy here. A rivet gun banged away overhead, and the plates of the Platform rang with the sound, and the echoes screeched, and to Joe the bedlam was infinitely good to hear. The man with the arm band shouted into a telephone transmitter, and a hoist cage came down. Joe and Sally stepped on it. Joe took a firm grip on her shoulder, and the hoist shot upward.
The hugeness of the Shed and the Platform grew even more apparent as the hoist accelerated toward the roof. The flooring seemed to expand. Spidery scaffold beams dropped past them. There were things being built over by the sidewall. Joe saw a crawling in-plant tow truck moving past those enigmatic objects. It was a tiny truck, no more than four feet high and with twelve-inch wheels. It dragged behind it flat plates of metal with upturned forward edges. They slid over the floor like sledges. Cryptic loads were carried on those plates, and the tow truck stopped by a mass of steel piping being put together, and began to unload the plates.
Then the hoist slowed abruptly and Sally winced a little. The hoist stopped.
Here—two hundred feet up—a welding crew worked on the skin of the Platform itself. The plating curved in and there was a wide flat space parallel to the ground. There was also a great gaping hole beyond. Though girders rose roofward even yet, this was as high as the plating had gone. That opening—Joe guessed—would ultimately be the door of an air lock, and this flat surface was designed for a tender rocket to anchor to by magnets. When a rocket came up from Earth with supplies or reliefs for the Platform’s crew, or with fuel to be stored for an exploring ship’s lateruse, it would anchor here and then inch toward that doorway....
There were half a dozen men in the welding crew. They should have been working. But two men battered savagely at each other, their tools thrown down. One was tall and lean, with a wrinkled face and an expression of intolerable fury. The other was squat and dark with a look of desperation. A third man was in the act of putting down his welding torch—he’d carefully turned it off first—to try to interfere. Another man gaped. Still another was climbing up by a ladder from the scaffold level below.
Joe put Sally’s hand on the hoist upright, instinctively freeing himself for action.
The lanky man lashed out a terrific roundhouse blow. It landed, but the stocky man bored in. Joe had an instant’s clear sight of his face. It was not the face of a man enraged. It had the look of a man both desperate and despairing.
Then the lanky man’s foot slipped. He lost balance, and the stocky man’s fist landed. The thin man reeled backward. Sally cried out, choking. The lanky man teetered on the edge of the flat place. Behind him, the plating curved down. Below him there were two hundred feet of fall through the steel-pipe maze of scaffolds. If he took one step back he was gone inexorably down a slope on which he could never stop.
He took that step. The stocky man’s face abruptly froze in horror. The lanky man stiffened convulsively. He couldn’t stop. He knew it. He’d go back and on over the rounded edge, and fall. He might touch the scaffolding. It would not stop him. It would merely set his body spinning crazily as it dropped and crashed again and again before it landed two hundred feet below.
It was horror in slow motion, watching the lean man stagger backward to his death.
Then Joe leaped.
For an instant, in mid-air, Joe was incongruously aware of all the noises in the Shed. The murky, girdered ceiling still three hundred feet above him. The swelling, curving, glittering surface of steel underneath. Then he struck. He landed beside the lean man, with his left arm outstretched to share his impetus with him. Alone, he would have had momentum enough to carry himself up the slope down which the man had begun to descend. But now he shared it. The two of them toppled forward together. Their arms were upon the flat surface, while their bodies dangled. The feel of gravity pulling them slantwise and downward was purest nightmare.
But then, as Joe’s innards crawled, the same stocky man who had knocked the lean man back was dragging frantically at both of them to pull them to safety.
Then there were two men pulling. The stocky man’s face was gray. His horror was proof that he hadn’t intended murder. The man who’d put down his welding torch pulled. The man who’d been climbing the ladder put his weight to the task of getting them back to usable footing. They reached safety. Joe scrambled to his feet, but he felt sick at the pit of his stomach. The stocky man began to shake horribly. The lanky one advanced furiously upon him.
“I didn’ mean to keel you, Haney!” the dark one panted.
The lanky one snapped: “Okay. You didn’t. But come on, now! We finish this——”
He advanced toward the workman who had so nearlycaused his death. But the other man dropped his arms to his sides.
“I don’ fight no more,” he said thickly. “Not here. You keel me is okay. I don’ fight.”
The lanky man—Haney—growled at him.
“Tonight, then, in Bootstrap. Now get back to work!”
The stocky man picked up his tools. He was trembling.
Haney turned to Joe and said ungraciously: “Much obliged. What’s up?”
Joe still felt queasy. There is rarely any high elation after one has risked his life for somebody else. He’d nearly plunged two hundred feet to the floor of the Shed with Haney. But he swallowed.
“I’m looking for Chief Bender. You’re Haney? Foreman?”
“Gang boss,” said Haney. He looked at Joe and then at Sally who was holding convulsively to the upright Joe had put her hand on. Her eyes were closed. “Yeah,” said Haney. “The Chief took off today. Some kind of Injun stuff. Funeral, maybe. Want me to tell him something? I’ll see him when I go off shift.”
There was an obscure movement somewhere on this part of the Platform. A tiny figure came out of a crevice that would someday be an air lock. Joe didn’t move his eyes toward it. He said awkwardly: “Just tell him Joe Kenmore’s in town and needs him. He’ll remember me, I think. I’ll hunt him up tonight.”
“Okay,” said Haney.
Joe’s eyes went to the tiny figure that had come out from behind the plating. It was a midget in baggy, stained work garments like the rest of the men up here. He wore a miniature welding shield pushed back on his head. Joe could guess his function, of course. There’d be corners a normal-sized man couldn’t get into, to buck a rivet or weld a joint. There’d be places only a tiny man could properly inspect. The midget regarded Joe without expression.
Joe turned to the hoist to go down to the floor again. Haney waved his hand. The midget lifted his, in grave salutation.
The hoist dropped down the shaft. Sally opened her eyes.
“You—saved that man’s life, Joe,” she said unsteadily. “But you scared me to death!”
Joe tried to ignore the remark, but he still seemed to feel slanting metal under him and a drop of two hundred feet below. It had been a nightmarish sensation.
“I didn’t think,” he said uncomfortably. “It was a crazy thing to do. Lucky it worked out.”
Sally glanced at him. The hoist still dropped swiftly. Levels of scaffolding shot upward past them. If Joe had slipped down that rolling curve of metal, he’d have dropped past all these. It was not good to think about. He swallowed again. Then the hoist checked in its descent. It stopped. Joe somewhat absurdly helped Sally off to solid ground.
“It—looks to me,” said Sally, “as if you’re bound to make me see somebody killed. Joe, would you mind leading a little bit less adventurous life for a while? While I’m around?”
He managed to grin. But he still did not feel right.
“Nothing I can do until I can look at the plane,” he said, changing the subject, “and I can’t find the Chief until tonight. Could we sightsee a little?”
She nodded. They went out from under the intricate framework that upheld the Platform. They went, in fact, completely under that colossal incomplete object. Sally indicated the sidewall.
“Let’s go look at the pushpots. They’re fascinating!”
She led the way. The enormous spaciousness of the Shed again became evident. There was a catwalk part way up the inward curving wall. Someone leaned on its railing and surveyed the interior of the Shed. He would probably be a security man. Maybe the fist fight up on the Platform had been seen, or maybe not. The man on the catwalk was hardly more than a speck, and it occurred to Joe that there must be other watchers’ posts high up on the outer shell where men could search the sunlit desert outside for signs of danger.
But he turned and looked yearningly back at the monstrous thing under the mist of scaffolding. For the first time he could make out its shape. It was something like an egg, buta great deal more like something he couldn’t put a name to. Actually it was exactly like nothing in the world but itself, and when it was out in space there would be nothing left on Earth like it.
It would be in a fashion a world in itself, independent of the Earth that made it. There would be hydroponic tanks in which plants would grow to purify its air and feed its crew. There would be telescopes with which men would be able to study the stars as they had never been able to do from the bottom of Earth’s ocean of turbulent air. But it would serve Earth.
There would be communicators. They would pick up microwave messages and retransmit them to destinations far around the curve of the planet, or else store them and retransmit them to the other side of the world an hour or two hours later.
It would store fuel with which men could presently set out for the stars—and out to emptiness for nuclear experiments that must not be made on Earth. And finally it would be armed with squat, deadly atomic missiles that no nation could possibly defy. And so this Space Platform would keep peace on Earth.
But it could not make good will among men.
Sally walked on. They reached the mysterious objects being manufactured in a row around half the sidewall of the Shed. They were of simple design and, by comparison, not unduly large. The first objects were merely frameworks of metal pipe, which men were welding together unbreakably. They were no bigger than—say—half of a six-room house. A little way on, these were filled with intricate arrays of tanks and piping, and still farther—there was a truck and hoist unloading a massive object into place right now—there were huge engines fitting precisely into openings designed to hold them. Others were being plated in with metallic skins.
At the very end of this assembly line a crane was loading a finished object onto a flat-bed trailer. As it swung in the air, Joe realized what it was. It might be called a jet plane,but it was not of any type ever before used. More than anything else, it looked like a beetle. It would not be really useful for anything but its function at the end of Operation Stepladder. Then hundreds of these ungainly objects would cluster upon the Platform’s sides, like swarming bees. They would thrust savagely up with their separate jet engines. They would lift the Platform from the foundation on which it had been built. Tugging, straining, panting, they would get it out of the Shed. But their work would not end there. Holding it aloft, they would start it eastward, lifting effortfully. They would carry it as far and as high and as fast as their straining engines could work. Then there would be one last surge of fierce thrusting with oversize jato rockets, built separately into each pushpot, all firing at once.
Finally the clumsy things would drop off and come bumbling back home, while the Platform’s own rockets flared out their mile-long flames—and it headed up for emptiness.
But the making of these pushpots and all the other multitudinous activities of the Shed would have no meaning if the contents of four crates in the wreckage of a burned-out plane could not be salvaged and put to use again.
Joe said restlessly: “I want to see all this, Sally, and maybe anything else I do is useless, but I’ve got to find out what happened to the gyros I was bringing here!”
Sally said nothing. She turned, and they moved across the long, long space of wood-block flooring toward the doorway by which they had entered. And now that he had seen the Space Platform, all of Joe’s feeling of guilt and despondency came back. It seemed unbearable. They went out through the guarded door, Sally surrendered the pass, and Joe was again checked carefully before he was free to go.
Then Sally said: “You don’t want me tagging around, do you?”
Joe said honestly: “It isn’t exactly that, Sally, but if the stuff is really smashed, I’d—rather not have anybody see me. Please don’t be angry, but—”
Sally said quietly: “I know. I’ll get somebody to drive you over.”
She vanished. She came back with the uniformed manwho’d driven Major Holt. She put her hand momentarily on Joe’s arm.
“If it’s really bad, Joe, tell me. You won’t let yourself cry, but I’ll cry for you.” She searched his eyes. “Really, Joe!”
He grinned feebly and went out to the car.
The feeling on the way to the airfield was not a good one. It was twenty-odd miles from the Shed, but Joe dreaded what he was going to see. The black car burned up the road. It turned to the right off the white highway, onto the curved short cut—and there was the field.
And there was the wreck of the transport plane, still where it had crashed and burned. There were still armed guards about it, but men were working on the wreck, cutting it apart with torches. Already some of it was dissected.
Joe went to the remains of the four crates.
The largest was bent askew by the force of the crash or an explosion, Joe didn’t know which. The smallest was a twisted mass of charcoal. Joe gulped, and dug into them with borrowed tools.
The pilot gyros of the Space Platform would apply the torque that would make the main gyros shift it to any desired position, or else hold it absolutely still. They were to act, in a sense, as a sort of steering engine on the take-off and keep a useful function out in space. If a star photograph was to be made, it was essential that the Platform hold absolutely still while the exposure lasted. If a guided missile was to be launched, it must be started right, and the pilot gyros were needed. To turn to receive an arriving rocket from Earth....
The pilot gyros were the steering apparatus of the Space Platform. They had to be more than adequate. They had to be perfect! On the take-off alone, they were starkly necessary. The Platform couldn’t hope to reach its orbit without them.
Joe chipped away charred planks. He pulled off flame-eaten timbers. He peeled off carbonized wrappings—but some did not need to be peeled: they crumbled at a touch—and in twenty minutes he knew the whole story. The rotor motors were ruined. The couplers—pilot-to-main-gyro connections—hadbeen heated red hot and were no longer hardened steel; their dimensions had changed and they would no longer fit. But these were not disastrous items. They were serious, but not tragic.
The tragedy was the gyros themselves. On their absolute precision and utterly perfect balance the whole working of the Platform would depend. And the rotors were gashed in one place, and the shafts were bent. Being bent and nicked, the precision of the apparatus was destroyed. Its precision lost, the whole device was useless. And it had taken four months’ work merely to get it perfectly balanced!
It had been the most accurate piece of machine work ever done on Earth. It was balanced to a microgram—to a millionth of the combined weight of three aspirin tablets. It would revolve at 40,000 revolutions per minute. It had to balance perfectly or it would vibrate intolerably. If it vibrated at all it would shake itself to pieces, or, failing that, send aging sound waves through all the Platform’s substance. If it vibrated by the least fraction of a ten-thousandth of an inch, it would wear, and vibrate more strongly, and destroy itself and possibly the Platform. It needed the precision of an astronomical telescope’s lenses—multiplied! And it was bent. It was exactly as useless as if it had never been made at all.
Joe felt as a man might feel if the mirror of the greatest telescope on earth, in his care, had been smashed. As if the most priceless picture in the world, in his charge, had been burned. But he felt worse. Whether it was his fault or not—and it wasn’t—it was destroyed.
A truck rolled up and was stopped by a guard. There was talk, and the guard let it through. A small crane lift came over from the hangars. Its normal use was the lifting of plane motors in and out of their nacelles. Now it was to pick up the useless pieces of equipment on which the best workmen and the best brains of the Kenmore Precision Tool Company had worked unceasingly for eight calendar months, and which now was junk.
Joe watched, numbed by disaster, while the crane hookwent down to position above the once-precious objects. Men shored up the heavy things and ran planks under them, and then deftly fitted rope slings for them to be lifted by. It was late afternoon by now. Long shadows were slanting as the crane truck’s gears whined, and the slack took up, and the first of the four charred objects lifted and swung, spinning slowly, to the truck that had come from the Shed.
Joe froze, watching. He watched the second. The third did not spin. It merely swayed. But the fourth.... The lines up to the crane hook were twisted. As the largest of the four crates lifted from its bed, it twisted the lines toward straightness. It spun. It spun more and more rapidly, and then more and more slowly, and stopped, and began to spin back.
Then Joe caught his breath. It seemed that he hadn’t breathed in minutes. The big crate wasn’t balanced. It was spinning. It wasn’t vibrating. It spun around its own center of gravity, unerringly revealed by its flexible suspension.
He watched until it was dropped into the truck. Then he went stiffly over to the driver of the car that had brought him.
“Everything’s all right,” he said, feeling a queer astonishment at his own words. “I’m going to ride back to the Shed with the stuff I brought. It’s not hurt too much. I’ll be able to fix it with a man or two I can pick up out here. But I don’t want anything else to happen to it!”
So he rode back out to the Shed on the tailboard of the truck that carried the crates. The sun set as he rode. He was smudged and disheveled. The reek of charred wood and burnt insulation and scorched wrappings was strong in his nostrils. But he felt very much inclined to sing.
It occurred to Joe that he should have sent Sally a message that she didn’t need to cry as a substitute for him. He felt swell! He knew how to do the job that would let the Space Platform take off! He’d tell her, first chance.
It was very good to be alive.
There was nobody in the world to whom the Space Platform was meaningless. To Joe and a great many people like him, it was a dream long and stubbornly held to and now doggedly being made a reality. To some it was the prospect of peace and the hope of a quiet life: children and grandchildren and a serene look forward to the future. Some people prayed yearningly for its success, though they could have no other share in its making. And of course there were those men who had gotten into power and could not stay there without ruthlessness. They knew what the Platform would mean to their kind. For, once world peace was certain, they would be killed by the people they ruled over. So they sent grubby, desperate men to wreck it at any cost. They were prepared to pay for or to commit any crime if the Space Platform could be smashed and turmoil kept as the norm of life on Earth.
And there were the people who were actually doing the building.
Joe rode a bus into Bootstrap that night with some of them. The middle shift—two to ten o’clock—was off. Fleets of busses rolled out from the small town twenty miles away, their headlights making a procession of paired flames in the darkness. They rolled into the unloading area and disgorged the late shift—ten to six—to be processed by security and admitted to the Shed. Then, quite empty, the busses went trundling around to where Joe waited with the released shift milling around him.
The busses stopped and opened their doors. The waiting men stormed in, shoving zestfully, calling to each other, scrambling for seats or merely letting themselves be pushed on board. The bus Joe found himself on was jammed in seconds.He held on to a strap and didn’t notice. He was absorbed in the rapt contemplation of his idea for the repair of the pilot gyros. The motors could be replaced easily enough. The foundation of his first despair had been the belief that everything could be managed but one thing; that the all-important absolute accuracy was the only thing that couldn’t be achieved. Getting that accuracy, back at the plant, had consumed four months of time. Each of the gyros was four feet in diameter and weighed five hundred pounds. Each spun at 40,000 r.p.m. It had to be machined from a special steel to assure that it would not fly to pieces from sheer centrifugal force. Each was plated with iridium lest a speck of rust form and throw it off balance. If the shaft and bearings were not centered exactly at the center of gravity of the rotors—five hundred pounds of steel off balance at 40,000 r.p.m. could raise the devil. They could literally wreck the Platform itself. And “exactly at the center of gravity” meant exactly. There could be no error by which the shaft was off center by the thousandth of an inch, or a ten-thousandth, or even the tenth of a ten-thousandth. The accuracy had to be absolute.
Gloating over the solution he’d found, Joe could have hugged himself. Hanging to a strap in the waiting bus, he saw another bus start off with a grinding of gears and a spouting of exhaust smoke. It trundled to the highway and rolled away. Another and another followed it. Joe’s bus fell in line. They headed for Bootstrap in a convoy, a long, long string of lighted vehicles running one behind the other.
It was dark outside. The Shed was alone, for security. It was twenty miles from the town where its work force slept and ate and made merry. That was security too. One shift came off, and went through a security check, and during that time the Shed was empty save for the security officers who roamed it endlessly, looking for trouble. Sometimes they found it. The shift coming on also passed through a security check. Nobody could get into the Shed without being identified past question. The picture-badge stage was long since passed on the Space Platform job. Security was tight!
The long procession of busses rolled through the night. Outside was dark desert. Overhead were many stars. Inside the jammed bus were swaying figures crowded in the aisle, and every seat was filled. There was the smell of sweat, and oil, and tobacco. Somebody still had garlic on his breath from lunch. There was the noise of many voices. There was an argument two seats up the aisle. There was the rumble of the motor, and the peculiar whine of spinning tires. Men had to raise their voices to be heard above the din.
A swaying among the crowded figures more pronounced than that caused by the motion of the bus caught Joe’s eye. Somebody was crowding his way from the back toward the front. The aisle was narrow. Joe clung to his strap, thinking hard and happily about the rebalancing of the gyros. There could be no tolerance. It had to be exact. There had to be no vibration at all....
Figures swayed away from him. A hand on his shoulder.
“Hiya.”
He swung around. It was the lean man, Haney, whom he’d kept from being knocked off the level place two hundred feet up.
Joe said: “Hello.”
“I thought you were big brass,” said Haney, rumbling in his ear. “But big brass don’t ride the busses.”
“I’m going in to try to hunt up the Chief,” said Joe.
Haney grunted. He looked estimatingly at Joe. His glance fell to Joe’s hands. Joe had been digging further into the crates, and afterward he’d washed up, but packing grease is hard to get off. When mixed with soot and charcoal it leaves signs. Haney relaxed.
“We mostly eat together,” he observed, satisfied that Joe was regular because his hands weren’t soft and because mechanic’s soap had done an incomplete job on them. “The Chief’s a good guy. Join us?”
“Sure!” said Joe. “And thanks.”
A brittle voice sounded somewhere around Haney’s knees. Joe looked down, startled. The midget he’d seen up on the Platform nodded up at him. He’d squirmed through the pressin Haney’s wake. He seemed to bristle a little out of pure habit. Joe made room for him.
“I’m okay,” said the midget pugnaciously.
Haney made a formal introduction.
“Mike Scandia.” He thumbed at Joe. “Joe Kenmore. He’s eating with us. Wants to find the Chief.”
There had been no reference to the risk Joe had run in keeping Haney from a two-hundred-foot fall. But now Haney said approvingly: “I wanted to say thanks anyhow for keeping your mouth shut. New here?”
Joe nodded. The noise in the bus made any sort of talk difficult. Haney appeared used to it.
“Saw you with—uh—Major Holt’s daughter,” he observed again. “That’s why I thought you were brass. Figured one or the other’d tell on Braun. You didn’t, or somebody’d’ve raised Cain. But I’ll handle it.”
Braun would be the man Haney had been fighting. If Haney wanted to handle it his way, it was naturally none of Joe’s business. He said nothing.
“Braun’s a good guy,” said Haney. “Crazy, that’s all. He picked that fight. Picked it! Up there! Coulda been him knocked off—and I’d ha’ been in a mess! I’ll see him tonight.”
The midget said something biting in his peculiarly cracked and brittle voice.
The bus rolled and rolled and rolled. It was a long twenty miles to Bootstrap. The desert outside the bus windows was utterly black and featureless, but once a convoy of trucks passed, going to the Shed.
Presently, though, lights twinkled in the night. Again the bus slowed, in column with the others. Then there were barrackslike buildings, succeeding each other, and then there was a corner and suddenly the outside was ablaze with light. The busses drew up to the curb and stopped, and everybody was immediately in a great hurry to get out, shoving unnecessarily, and Joe let himself be carried along by the crowd.
He found himself on the sidewalk with bright neon signsup and down the street. He was in the midst of the crowd which was the middle shift released. It eddied and dispersed without seeming to lessen. Most of the figures in sight were men. There were very, very few women. The neon signs proclaimed that here one could buy beer, and that this was Fred’s Place, and that was Sid’s Steak Joint. Bowling. Pool. A store—still open for this shift’s trade—sold fancy shirts and strictly practical work clothes and highly eccentric items of personal adornment. A movie house. A second. A third. Somewhere a record shop fed repetitious music to the night air. There was movement and crowding and jostling, but the middle of the street was almost empty save for the busses. There were some bicycles, but practically no other wheeled traffic. After all, Bootstrap was strictly a security town. A man could leave whenever he chose, but there were formalities, and personal cars weren’t practical.
“Chief’ll be yonder,” said Haney in Joe’s ear. “Come along.”
They shouldered their way along the sidewalk. The passers-by were of a type—construction men. Somebody here had taken part in the building of every skyscraper and bridge and dam put up in Joe’s lifetime. They could have been kept away from the Space Platform job only by a flat refusal by security to let them be hired.
Haney and Joe moved toward Sid’s Steak Joint, with Mike the midget marching truculently between them. Men nodded to them as they passed. Joe marshaled in his mind what he was going to tell the Chief. He had a trick for fixing the pilot gyros. A speck of rust would spoil them, and they had been through a plane crash and a fire and explosions, but his trick would do, in ten days or less, what the plant back home had needed four months to accomplish. The trick was something to gloat over.
Into Sid’s Steak Joint. A juke box was playing. Over in a booth, four men ate hungrily, with a slot TV machine in the wall beside them showing wrestling matches out in San Francisco. A waiter carried a huge tray from which steam and fragrant odors arose.
There was the Chief, dark and saturnine to look at, with his straight black hair gleaming in the light. He was a Mohawk, and he and his tribe had taken to steel construction work a long time back. They were good. There were not many big construction jobs on which the Chief’s tribesmen were not to be found working. Forty of them had died together in the worst construction accident in history, when a bridge on its way to completion collapsed in the making, but there were a dozen or more at work on the Space Platform now. The Chief had essayed machine-tool work at the Kenmore plant, and he’d been good. He’d pitched on the plant baseball team, and he’d sung bass in the church choir, but there had been nobody else around who talked Indian, and he’d gotten lonely. At that, though, he’d left because the Space Platform began and wild horses couldn’t have kept him away from a job like that!
He’d held a table for Haney and Mike, but his eyes widened when he saw Joe. Then he grinned and almost upset the table to stand up and greet him.
“Son-of-a-gun!” he said warmly. “What you doin’ here?”
“Right now,” said Joe. “I’m looking for you. I’ve got a job for you.”
The Chief, still grinning, shook his head.
“Not me, I’m here till the Platform’s done.”
“It’s on the job,” said Joe. “I’ve got to get a crew together to repair something I brought out here today and that got smashed in the landing.”
The four of them sat down. Mike’s chin was barely above the table top. The Chief waved to a waiter. “Steaks all around!” he bellowed. Then he bent toward Joe. “Shoot it!”
Joe told his story. Concisely. The pilot gyros, which had to be perfect, had been especially gunned at by saboteurs. An attack with possibly stolen proximity-fused rockets. The plane was booby-trapped, and somebody at an airfield had had a chance to spring the trap. So it was wreckage. Crashed and burned on landing.
The Chief growled. Haney pressed his lips together. The eyes of Mike were burning.
“Plenty of that sabotage stuff,” growled the Chief. “Hard to catch the so-and-sos. Smash the gyros and the take-off’d have to wait till new ones got made—and that’s more time for more sabotage.”
Joe said carefully: “I think it can be licked. Listen a minute, will you?”
The Chief fixed his eyes upon him.
“The gyros have to be rebalanced,” said Joe. “They have to spin on their own center of gravity. At the plant, they set them up, spun them, and found which side was heavy. They took metal off till it ran smoothly at five hundred r.p.m. Then they spun it at a thousand. It vibrated. They found imbalance that was too small to show up before. They fixed that. They speeded it up. And so on. They tried to make the center of gravity the center of the shaft by trimming off the weight that put the center of gravity somewhere else. Right?”
The Chief said irritably: “No other way to do it! No other way!”
“I saw one,” said Joe. “When they cleaned up the wreck at the airfield, they heaved up the crates with a crane. The slings were twisted. Every crate spun as it rose. But not one wobbled! They found their own centers of gravity and spun around them!”
The Chief scowled, deep in thought. Then his face went blank.
“By the holy mud turtle!” he grunted. “I get it!”
Joe said, with very great pains not to seem triumphant, “Instead of spinning the shaft and trimming the rotor, we’ll spin the rotor and trim the shaft. We’ll form the shaft around the center of gravity, instead of trying to move the center of gravity to the middle of the shaft. We’ll spin the rotors on a flexible bearing base. I think it’ll work.”
Surprisingly, it was Mike the midget who said warmly, “You got it! Yes, sir, you got it!”
The Chief took a deep breath. “Yeah! And d’you know how I know? The Plant built a high-speed centrifuge once. Remember?” He grinned with the triumph Joe concealed. “Itwas just a plate with a shaft in the middle. There were vanes on the plate. It fitted in a shaft hole that was much too big. They blew compressed air up the shaft hole. It floated the plate up, the air hit the vanes and spun the plate—and it ran as sweet as honey! Balanced itself and didn’t wobble a bit! We’ll do something like that! Sure!”
“Will you work on it with me?” asked Joe. “We’ll need a sort of crew—three or four altogether. Have to figure out the stuff we need. I can ask for anybody I want. I’m asking for you. You pick the others.”
The Chief grinned broadly. “Any objections, Haney? You and Mike and me and Joe here? Look!”
He pulled a pencil out of his pocket. He started to draw on the plastic table top, and then took a paper napkin instead.
“Something like this——”
The steaks came, sizzling on the platters they’d been cooked in. The outside was seared, and the inside was hot and deliciously rare. Intellectual exercises like the designing of a machine-tool operation could not compete with such aromas and sights and sounds. The four of them fell to.
But they talked as they ate. Absorbed and often with their mouths full, frequently with imperfect articulation, but with deepening satisfaction as the steaks vanished and the method they’d use took form in their minds. It wouldn’t be wholly simple, of course. When the rotors were spinning about their centers of gravity, trimming off the shaft would change the center of gravity. But the change would be infinitely less than trimming off the rotors’ rims. If they spun the rotors and used an abrasive on the high side of the shaft as it turned....
“Going to have precession!” warned Mike. “Have to have a polishing surface. Quarter turn behind the cutter. That’ll hold it.”
Joe only remembered afterward to be astonished that Mike would know gyro theory. At the moment he merely swallowed quickly to get the words out.
“Right! And if we cut too far down we can plate the bearing up to thickness and cut it down again——”
“Plate it up with iridium,” said the Chief. He waved a steak knife. “Man! This is gonna be fun! No tolerance you say, Joe?”
“No tolerance,” agreed Joe. “Accurate within the limits of measurement.”
The Chief beamed. The Platform was a challenge to all of humanity. The pilot gyro was essential to the functioning of the Platform. To provide that necessity against impossible obstacles was a challenge to the four who were undertaking it.
“Some fun!” repeated the Chief, blissfully.
They ate their steaks, talking. They consumed huge slabs of apple pie with preposterous mounds of ice cream on top, still talking urgently. They drank coffee, interrupting each other to draw diagrams. They used up all the paper napkins, and were still at it when someone came heavily toward the table. It was the stocky man who had fought with Haney on the Platform that day. Braun.
He tapped Haney on the shoulder. The four at the table looked up.
“We hadda fight today,” said Braun in a queer voice. He was oddly pale. “We didn’t finish. You wanna finish?”
Haney growled.
“That was a fool business,” he said angrily. “That ain’t any place to fight, up on the job! You know it!”
“Yeah,” said Braun in the same odd voice. “You wanna finish it now?”
Haney said formidably: “I’m not dodgin’ any fight. I didn’t dodge it then. I’m not dodgin’ it now. You picked it. It was crazy! But if you got over the craziness——”
Braun smiled a remarkably peculiar smile. “I’m still crazy. We finish, huh?”
Haney pushed back his chair and stood up grimly. “Okay, we finish it! You coulda killed me. I coulda killed you too, with that fall ready for either of us.”
“Sure! Too bad nobody got killed,” said Braun.
“You fellas wait,” said Haney angrily to Joe and the rest. “There’s a storeroom out back. Sid’ll let us use it.”
But the Chief pushed back his chair.
“Uh-uh,” he said, shaking his head. “We’re watchin’ this.”
Haney spoke with elaborate courtesy: “You mind, Braun? Want to get some friends of yours, too?”
“I got no friends,” said Braun. “Let’s go.”
The Chief went authoritatively to the owner of Sid’s Steak Joint. He paid the bill, talking. The owner of the place negligently jerked his thumb toward the rear. This was not an unparalleled request—for the use of a storeroom so that two men could batter each other undisturbed. Bootstrap was a law-abiding town, because to get fired from work on the Platform was to lose a place in the most important job in history. So it was inevitable that the settlement of quarrels in private should become commonplace.
The Chief leading, they filed through the kitchen and out of doors. The storeroom lay beyond. The Chief went in and switched on the light. He looked about and was satisfied. It was almost empty, save for stacked cartons in one corner. Braun was already taking off his coat.
“You want rounds and stuff?” demanded the Chief.
“I want fight,” said Braun thickly.
“Okay, then,” snapped the Chief. “No kickin’ or gougin’. A man’s down, he has a chance to get up. That’s all the rules. Right?”
Haney, stripping off his coat in turn, grunted an assent. He handed his coat to Joe. He faced his antagonist.
It was a curious atmosphere for a fight. There were merely the plank walls of the storeroom with a single dangling light in the middle and an unswept floor beneath. The Chief stood in the doorway, scowling. This didn’t feel right. There was not enough hatred in evidence to justify it. There was doggedness and resolution enough, but Braun was deathly white and if his face was contorted—and it was—it was not with the lust to batter and injure and maim. It was something else.
The two men faced each other. And then the stocky,swarthy Braun swung at Haney. The blow had sting in it but nothing more. It almost looked as if Braun were trying to work himself up to the fight he’d insisted on finishing. Haney countered with a roundhouse blow that glanced off Braun’s cheek. And then they bore in at each other, slugging without science or skill.
Joe watched. Braun launched a blow that hurt, but Haney sent him reeling back. He came in doggedly again, and swung and swung, but he had no idea of boxing. His only idea was to slug. He did slug. Haney had been peevish rather than angry. Now he began to glower. He began to take the fight to Braun.
He knocked Braun down. Braun staggered up and rushed. A wildly flailing fist landed on Haney’s ear. He doubled Braun up with a wallop to the midsection. Braun came back, fists swinging.
Haney closed one eye for him. He came back. Haney shook him from head to foot with a chest blow. He came back. Haney split his lip and loosened a tooth. He came back.
The Chief said sourly: “This ain’t a fight. Quit it, Haney! He don’t know how!”
Haney tried to draw away, but Braun swarmed on him, striking fiercely until Haney had to floor him again. He dragged himself up and rushed at Haney—and was knocked down again. Haney stood over him, panting furiously.
“Quit it, y’fool! What’s the matter with you?”
Braun started to get up again. The Chief interfered and held him, while Haney glared.
“He ain’t going to fight any more, Braun,” pronounced the Chief firmly. “You ain’t got a chance. This fight’s over. You had enough.”
Braun was bloody and horribly battered, but he panted: “He’s got enough?”
“Are you out o’ your head?” demanded the Chief. “He ain’t got a mark on him!”
“I ain’t—got enough,” panted Braun, “till he’s got—enough!”
His breath was coming in soblike gasps, the result ofbody blows. It hadn’t been a fight but a beating, administered by Haney. But Braun struggled to get up.
Mike the midget said brittlely: “You got enough, Haney. You’re satisfied. Tell him so.”
“Sure I’m satisfied,” snorted Haney. “I don’t want to hit him any more. I got enough of that!”
Braun panted: “Okay! Okay!”
The Chief let him get to his feet. He went groggily to his coat. He tried to put himself into it. Mike caught Joe’s eye and nodded meaningfully. Joe helped Braun into the coat. There was silence, save for Braun’s heavy, labored breathing.
He moved unsteadily toward the door. Then he stopped.
“Haney,” he said effortfully, “I don’t say I’m sorry for fighting you today. I fight first. But now I say I am sorry. You are good guy, Haney. I was crazy. I—got reason.”
He stumbled out of the door and was gone. The four who were left behind stared at each other.
“What’s the matter with him?” demanded Haney blankly.
“He’s nuts,” said the Chief. “If he was gonna apologize——”
Mike shook his head.
“He wouldn’t apologize,” he said brittlely, “because he thought you might think he was scared. But when he’d proved he wasn’t scared of a beating—then he could say he was sorry.” He paused. “I’ve seen guys I liked a lot less than him.”
Haney put on his coat, frowning.
“I don’t get it,” he rumbled. “Next time I see him——”
“You won’t,” snapped Mike. “None of us will. I’ll bet on it.”
But he was wrong. The others went out of the storeroom and back into Sid’s Steak Joint, and the Chief politely thanked the proprietor for the loan of his storeroom for a private fight. Then they went out into the neon-lighted business street of Bootstrap.
“What do we do now?” asked Joe.
“Where you sleeping?” asked the Chief hospitably. “I can get you a room at my place.”
“I’m staying out at the Shed,” Joe told him awkwardly.“My family’s known Major Holt a long time. I’m staying at his house behind the Shed.”
Haney raised his eyebrows but said nothing.
“Better get out there then,” said the Chief. “It’s midnight, and they might want to lock up. There’s your bus.”
A lighted bus was waiting by the curb. Its doors were open, but it was empty of passengers. Single busses ran out to the Shed now and then, but they ran in fleets at shift-change time. Joe went over and climbed aboard the bus.
“We’ll turn up early,” said the Chief. “This won’t be a shift job. We’ll look things over and lay out what we want and then get to work, eh?”
“Right,” said Joe. “And thanks.”
“We’ll be there with our hair in braids,” said Mike, in his cracked voice. “Now a glass of beer and so to bed. ’Night.”
Haney waved his hand. The three of them marched off, the two huge figures of Haney and the Chief, with Mike trotting truculently between them, hardly taller than their knees. They were curiously colorful with all the many-tinted neon signs upon them. They turned into a diner.
Joe sat in the bus, alone. The driver was off somewhere. The sounds of Bootstrap were distinctive by night. Footsteps, and the jangling of bicycle bells, and voices, and a radio blaring somewhere and a record-shop loud-speaker somewhere else, and a sort of underriding noise of festivity.
There was a sharp rap on the glass by Joe’s window. He started and looked out. Braun—battered, and bleeding from the corner of his mouth—motioned urgently for him to come to the door of the bus. Joe went.
Braun stared up at him in a new fashion. Now he was neither dogged nor fierce nor desperate to look at. Despite the beating he’d taken, he seemed completely and somehow frighteningly tranquil. He looked like somebody who has come to the end of torment and is past any feeling but that of relief from suffering.
“You—” said Braun. “That girl you were with today. Her pop is Major Holt, eh?”
Joe frowned, and reservedly said that he was.
“You tell her pop,” said Braun detachedly, “this is hot tip. Hot tip. Look two kilometers north of Shed tomorrow. He find something bad. Hot! You tell him. Two kilometers.”
“Y-yes,” said Joe, his frown increasing. “But look here——”
“Be sure say hot,” repeated Braun.
Rather incredibly, he smiled. Then he turned and walked quickly away.
Joe went back to his seat in the empty bus, and sat there and waited for it to start, and tried to figure out what the message meant. Since it was for Major Holt, it had something to do with security. And security meant defense against sabotage. And “hot” might mean merelysignificant, or—in these days—it might meansomething else. In fact, it might mean something to make your hair stand on end when thought of in connection with the Space Platform.
Joe waited for the bus to take off. He became convinced that Braun’s use of the word “hot” did not mean merely “significant.” The other meaning was what he had in mind.
Joe’s teeth tried to chatter.
He didn’t let them.