Major Holt wasn’t to be found when Joe got out to the Shed. And he wasn’t in the house in the officers’-quarters area behind it. There was only the housekeeper, who yawned pointedly as she let Joe in. Sally was presumably long since asleep. And Joe didn’t know any way to get hold of the Major. He assured himself that Braun was a good guy—if he weren’t he wouldn’t have insisted on taking a licking before he apologized—and he hadn’t said there was any hurry. Tomorrow, he’d said. So Joe uneasily let himself be led to a room with a cot, and he was asleep in what seemed seconds. But just the same he was badly worried.
In fact, next morning Joe woke at a practically unearthly hour with Braun’s message pounding on his brain. He was downstairs waiting when the housekeeper appeared. She looked startled.
“Major Holt?” he asked.
But the Major was gone. He must have done with no more than three or four hours’ sleep. There was an empty coffee cup whose contents he’d gulped down before going back to the security office.
Joe trudged to the barbed-wire enclosure around the officers’-quarters area and explained to the sentry where he wanted to go. A sleepy driver whisked him around the half-mile circle to the security building and he found his way to Major Holt’s office.
The plain and gloomy secretary was already on the job, too. She led him in to face Major Holt. He blinked at the sight of Joe.
“Hm.... I have some news,” he observed. “We back-tracked the parcel that exploded when it was dumped from the plane.”
Joe had almost forgotten it. Too many other things had happened since.
“We’ve got two very likely prisoners out of that affair,” said the Major. “They may talk. Also, an emergency inspection of other transport planes has turned up three other grenades tucked away in front-wheel wells. Ah—CO2bottles have turned out to have something explosive in them. A very nice bit of work, that! The sandy-haired man who fueled your plane—ah—disappeared. That is bad!”
Joe said politely: “That’s fine, sir.”
“All in all, you’ve been the occasion of our forestalling a good deal of sabotage,” said the Major. “Bad for you, of course.... Did you find the men you were looking for?”
“I’ve found them, but—.”
“I’ll have them transferred to work under your direction,” said the Major briskly. “Their names?”
Joe gave the names. The Major wrote them down.
“Very good. I’m busy now——”
“I’ve a tip for you,” said Joe. “I think it should be checked right away. I don’t feel too good about it.”
The Major waited impatiently. And Joe explained, very carefully, about the fight on the Platform the day before, Braun’s insistence on finishing the fight in Bootstrap, and then the tip he’d given Joe after everything was over. He repeated the message exactly, word for word.
The Major, to do him justice, did not interrupt. He listened with an expression that varied between grimness and weariness. When Joe ended he picked up a telephone. He talked briefly. Joe felt a reluctant sort of approval. Major Holt was not a man one could ever feel very close to, and the work he was in charge of was not likely to make him popular, but he did think straight—and fast. He didn’t think “hot” meant “significant,” either. When he’d hung up the phone he said curtly: “When will your work crew get here?”
“Early—but not yet,” said Joe. “Not for some time yet.”
“Go with the pilot,” said the Major. “You’d recognize what Braun meant as soon as anybody. See what you see.”
Joe stood up.
“You—think the tip is straight?”
“This isn’t the first time,” said Major Holt detachedly, “that a man has been blackmailed into trying sabotage. If he’s got a family somewhere abroad, and they’re threatened with death or torture unless he does such-and-such here, he’s in a bad fix. It’s happened. Of course he can’t tell me! He’s watched. But he sometimes finds an out.”
Joe was puzzled. His face showed it.
“He can try to do the sabotage,” said the Major precisely, “or he can arrange to be caught trying to do it. If he’s caught—he tried; and the blackmail threat is no threat at all so long as he keeps his mouth shut. Which he does. And—ah—you would be surprised how often a man who wasn’t born in the United States would rather go to prison for sabotage than commit it—here.”
Joe blinked.
“If your friend Braun is caught,” said the Major, “he will be punished. Severely. Officially. But privately, someone will—ah—mention this tip and say ‘thanks.’ And he’ll be told that he will be released from prison just as soon as he thinks it’s safe. And he will be. That’s all.”
He turned to his papers. Joe went out. On the way to meet the pilot who’d check on his tip, he thought things over. He began to feel a sort of formless but very definite pride. He wasn’t quite sure what he was proud of, but it had something to do with being part of a country toward which men of wholly different upbringing could feel deep loyalty. If a man who was threatened unless he turned traitor, a man who might not even be a citizen, arranged to be caught and punished for an apparent crime against a country rather than commit it—that wasn’t bad. There can be a lot of things wrong with a nation, but if somebody from another one entirely can come to feel that kind of loyalty toward it—well—it’s not too bad a country to belong to.
Joe had a security guard with him this time, instead of Sally, as he went across the vast, arc-lit interior of the Shed and past the shimmering growing monster that was the Platform. He went all the way to the great swinging doors thatlet in materials trucks. And there were guards there, and they checked each driver very carefully before they admitted his truck. But somehow it wasn’t irritating. It wasn’t scornful suspicion. There’d be snide and snappy characters in the Security force, of course, swaggering and throwing their weight about. But even they were guarding something that men—some men—were willing to throw away their lives for.
Joe and his guard reached one of the huge entrances as a ten-wheeler truck came in with a load of shining metal plates. Joe’s escort went through the opening with him and they waited outside. The sun had barely risen. It looked huge but very far away, and Joe suddenly realized why just this spot had been chosen for the building of the Platform.
The ground was flat. All the way to the eastern horizon there wasn’t even a minor hillock rising above the plain. It was bare, arid, sun-scorched desert. It was featureless save for sage and mesquite and tall thin stalks of yucca. But it was flat. It could be a runway. It was a perfect place for the Platform to start from. The Platform shouldn’t touch ground at all, after it was out of the Shed, but at least it wouldn’t run into any obstacles on its way toward the horizon.
A light plane came careening around the great curved outer surface of the Shed. It landed and taxied up to the door. It swung smartly around and its side door opened. A bandaged hand waved at Joe. He climbed in. The pilot of this light, flimsy plane was the co-pilot of the transport of yesterday. He was the man Joe had helped to dump cargo.
Joe climbed in and settled himself. The small motor pop-popped valiantly, the plane rushed forward over hard-packed desert earth, and went swaying up into the air.
The co-pilot—pilot now—shouted cheerfully above the din: “Hiya. You couldn’t sleep either? Burns hurt?”
Joe shook his head.
“Bothered,” he shouted in reply. Then he added, “Do I do something to help, or am I along just for the ride?”
“First we take a look,” the pilot called over the motor racket. “Two kilometers due north of the Shed, eh?”
“That’s right.”
“We’ll see what’s there,” the pilot told him.
The small plane went up and up. At five hundred feet—nearly level with the roof of the Shed—it swung away and began to make seemingly erratic dartings out over the spotty desert land, and then back. Actually, it was a search pattern. Joe looked down from his side of the small cockpit. This was a very small plane indeed, and in consequence its motor made much more noise inside its cabin than much more powerful engines in bigger ships.
“Those burns I got,” shouted the pilot, staring down, “kept me awake. So I got up and was just walking around when the call came for somebody to drive one of these things. I took over.”
Back and forth, and back and forth. From five hundred feet in the early morning the desert had a curious appearance. The plane was low enough for each smallest natural feature to be visible, and it was early enough for every shrub or hummock to cast a long, slender shadow. The ground looked streaked, but all the streaks ran the same way, and all were shadows.
Joe shouted: “What’s that?”
The plane banked at a steep angle and ran back. It banked again. The pilot stared carefully. He reached forward and pushed a button. There was a tiny impact underfoot. Another steep banking turn, and Joe saw a puff of smoke in the air.
The pilot shouted: “It’s a man. He looks dead.”
He swung directly over the small prone object and there was a second puff of smoke.
“They’ve got range finders on us from the Shed,” he called across the two-foot space separating him from Joe. “This marks the spot. Now we’ll see if there’s anything to the hot part of that tip.”
He reached over behind his seat and brought out a stubby pole like a fishpole with a very large reel. There was also a headset, and something very much like a large aluminum fish on the end of the line.
“You know Geiger counters?” called the pilot. “Stick on these headphones and listen!”
Joe slipped on the headset. The pilot threw a switch and Joe heard clickings. They had no pattern and no fixed frequency. They were clickings at strictly random intervals, but there was an average frequency, at that.
“Let the counter out the window,” called the pilot, “and listen. Tell me if the noise goes up.”
Joe obeyed. The aluminum fish dangled. The line slanted astern from the wind. It made a curve between the pole and the aluminum plummet, which was hollow in the direction of the plane’s motion. The pilot squinted down and began to swing in a wide circle around the spot where an apparently dead man had been sighted, and above which puffs of smoke now floated.
Three-quarters of the way around, the random clickings suddenly became a roar.
Joe said: “Hey!”
The pilot swung the plane about and flew back. He pointed to the button he’d pushed.
“Poke that when you hear it again.”
The clickings.... They roared. Joe pushed the button. He felt the tiny impact.
“Once more,” said the pilot.
He swung in nearer where the dead man lay. Joe had a sickening idea of who the dead man might be. A sudden rush of noise in the headphones and he pushed the button again.
“Reel in now!” shouted the pilot. “Our job’s done.”
Joe reeled in as the plane winged steadily back toward the Shed. There were puffs of smoke floating in the air behind. They had been ranged on at the instant they appeared. Somebody back at the Shed knew that something that needed to be investigated was at a certain spot, and the two later puffs of smoke had said that radioactivity was notable in the air along the line the two puffs made. Not much more information would be needed. The meaning of Braun’s warning that his tip was “hot” was definite. Itwas “hot” in the sense that it dealt with radioactivity!
The plane dipped down and landed by the great doors again. It taxied up and the pilot killed the motor.
“We’ve been using Geigers for months,” he said pleasedly, “and never got a sign before. This is one time we were set for something.”
“What?” asked Joe. But he knew.
“Atomic dust is one good guess,” the pilot told him. “It was talked of as a possible weapon away back in the Smyth Report. Nobody’s ever tried it. We thought it might be tried against the Platform. If somebody managed to spread some really hot radioactive dust around the Shed, all three shifts might get fatally burned before it was noticed.They’dthink so, anyhow! But the guy who was supposed to dump it opened up the can for a look. And it killed him.”
He climbed out of the plane and went to the doorway. He took a telephone from a guard and talked crisply into it. He hung up.
“Somebody coming for you,” he said amiably. “Wait here. Be seeing you.”
He went out, the motor kicked over and caught, and the tiny plane raced away. Seconds later it was aloft and winging southward.
Joe waited. Presently a door opened and something came clanking out. It was a tractor with surprisingly heavy armor. There were men in it, also wearing armor of a peculiar sort, which they were still adjusting. The tractor towed a half-track platform on which there were a crane and a very considerable lead-coated bin with a top. It went briskly off into the distance toward the north.
Joe was amazed, but comprehending. The vehicle and the men were armored against radioactivity. They would approach the dead man from upwind, and they would scoop up his body and put it in the lead-lined bin, and with it all deadly radioactive material near him. This was the equipment that must have been used to handle the dud atom bomb some months back. It had been ready for that. It was ready for this emergency. Somebody had tried to think ofevery imaginable situation that could arise in connection with the Platform.
But in a moment a guard came for Joe and took him to where the Chief and Haney and Mike waited by the still incompletely-pulled-away crates. They had some new ideas about the job on hand that were better than the original ones in some details. All four of them set to work to make a careful survey of damage—of parts that would have to be replaced and of those that needed to be repaired. The discoveries they made would have appalled Joe earlier. Now he merely made notes of parts necessary to be replaced by new ones that could be had within the repair time for rebalancing the rotors.
“This is sure a mess,” said Haney mournfully, as they worked. “It’s two days just getting things cleaned up!”
The Chief eyed the rotors. There were two of them, great four-foot disks with extraordinary short and stubby shafts that were brought to beautifully polished conical ends to fit in the bearings. The bearings were hollowed to fit the shaft ends, but they were intricately scored to form oil channels. In operation, a very special silicone oil would be pumped into the bearings under high pressure. Distributed by the channels, the oil would form a film that by its pressure would hold the cone end of the bearing away from actual contact with the metal. The rotors, in fact, would be floated in oil just as the high-speed centrifuge the Chief had mentioned had floated on compressed air. But they had to be perfectly balanced, because any imbalance would make the shaft pierce the oil film and touch the metal of the bearing—and when a shaft is turning at 40,000 r.p.m. it is not good for it to touch anything. Shaft and bearing would burn white-hot in fractions of a second and there would be several devils to pay.
“We’ve got to spin it in a lathe,” said the Chief profoundly, “to hold the chucks. The chucks have got to be these same bearings, because nothing else will stand the speed. And we got to cut out the bed plate of any lathewe find. Hm. We got to do our spinning with the shaft lined up with the earth’s axis, too.”
Mike nodded wisely, and Joe knew he’d pointed that out. It was true enough. A high-speed gyro could only be run for minutes in one single direction if its mount were fixed. If a precisely mounted gyro had its shaft pointed at the sun, for example, while it ran, its axis would try to follow the sun. It would try not to turn with the earth, and it would wreck itself. They had to use the cone bearings, but in order to protect the fine channellings for oil they’d have to use cone-shaped shims at the beginning while running at low speed. The cone ends of the shaft would need new machining to line them up. The bearings had to be fixed, yet flexible. The——
They had used many paper napkins the night before, merely envisioning these details. New problems turned up as the apparatus itself was being uncovered and cleaned.
They worked for hours, clearing away soot and charred material. Joe’s list of small parts to be replaced from the home plant was as long as his arm. The motors, of course, had to be scrapped and new ones substituted. Considering their speed—the field strength at operating rate was almost imperceptible—they had to be built new, which would mean round-the-clock work at Kenmore.
A messenger came for Joe. The security office wanted him. Major Holt’s gloomy secretary did not even glance up as he entered. Major Holt himself looked tired.
“There was a man out there,” he said curtly. “I think it is your friend Braun. I’ll get you to look and identify.”
Joe had suspected as much. He waited.
“He’d opened a container of cobalt powder. It was in a beryllium case. There was half a pound of it. It killed him.”
“Radioactive cobalt,” said Joe.
“Definitely,” said the Major grimly. “Half a pound of it gives off the radiation of an eighth of a ton of pure radium. One can guess that he had been instructed to get up as high as he could in the Shed and dump the powder into the air. It would diffuse—scatter as it sifted down. It wouldhave contaminated the whole Shed past all use for years—let alone killing everybody in it.”
Joe swallowed.
“He was burned, then.”
“He had the equivalent of two hundred and fifty pounds of radium within inches of his body,” the Major said unbendingly, “and naturally it was not healthy. For that matter, the container itself was not adequate protection for him. Once he’d carried it in his pocket for a very few minutes, he was a dead man, even though he was not conscious of the fact.”
Joe knew what was wanted of him.
“You want me to look at him,” he said.
The Major nodded.
“Yes. Afterward, get a radiation check on yourself. It is hardly likely that he was—ah—carrying the stuff with him last night, in Bootstrap. But if he was—ah—you may need some precautionary treatment—you and the men who were with you.”
Joe realized what that meant. Braun had been given a relatively small container of the deadliest available radioactive material on Earth. Milligrams of it, shipped from Oak Ridge for scientific use, were encased in thick lead chests. He’d carried two hundred and fifty grams in a container he could put in his pocket. He was not only dead as he walked, under such circumstances. He was also death to those who walked near him.
“Somebody else may have been burned in any case,” said the Major detachedly. “I am going to issue a radioactivity alarm and check every man in Bootstrap for burns. It is—ah—very likely that the man who delivered it to this man is burned, too. But you will not mention this, of course.”
He waved his hand in dismissal. Joe turned to go. The Major added grimly: “By the way, there is no doubt about the booby-trapping of planes. We’ve found eight, so far, ready to be crashed when a string was pulled while they were serviced. But the men who did the booby-trappinghave vanished. They disappeared suddenly during last night. They were warned! Have you talked to anybody?”
“No sir,” said Joe.
“I would like to know,” said the Major coldly, “how they knew we’d found out their trick!”
Joe went out. He felt very cold at the pit of his stomach. He was to identify Braun. Then he was to get a radiation check on himself. In that order of events. He was to identify Braun first, because if Braun had carried a half-pound of radioactive cobalt on him in Sid’s Steak Joint the night before, Joe was going to die. And so were Haney and the Chief and Mike, and anybody else who’d passed near him. So Joe was to do the identification before he was disturbed by the information that he was dead.
He made the identification. Braun was very decently laid out in a lead-lined box, with a lead-glass window over his face. There was no sign of any injury on him except from his fight with Haney. The radiation burns were deep, but they’d left no marks of their own. He’d died before outer symptoms could occur.
Joe signed the identification certificate. He went to be checked for his own chances of life. It was a peculiar sensation. The most peculiar was that he wasn’t afraid. He was neither confident that he was not burned inside, nor sure that he was. He simply was not afraid. Nobody really ever believes that he is going to die—in the sense of ceasing to exist. The most arrant coward, stood before a wall to be shot, or strapped in an electric chair, finds that astoundingly he does not believe that what happens to his body is going to kill him, the individual. That is why a great many people die with reasonable dignity. They know it is not worth making too much of a fuss over.
But when the Geiger counters had gone over him from head to foot, and his body temperature was normal, and his reflexes sound—when he was assured that he had not been exposed to dangerous radiation—Joe felt distinctly weak in the knees. And that was natural, too.
He went trudging back to the wrecked gyros. His friendswere gone, leaving a scrawled memo for him. They had gone to pick out the machine tools for the work at hand.
He continued to check over the wreckage, thinking with a detached compassion of that poor devil Braun who was the victim of men who hated the idea of the Space Platform and what it would mean to humanity. Men of that kind thought of themselves as superior to humanity, and of human beings as creatures to be enslaved. So they arranged for planes to crash and burn and for men to be murdered, and they practiced blackmail—or rewarded those who practiced it for them. They wanted to prevent the Platform from existing because it would keep them from trying to pull the world down in ruins so they could rule over the wreckage.
Joe—who had so recently thought it likely that he would die—considered these actions with an icy dislike that was much deeper than anger. It was backed by everything he believed in, everything he had ever wanted, and everything he hoped for. And anger could cool off, but the way he felt about people who would destroy others for their own purposes could not cool off. It was part of him. He thought about it as he worked, with all the noises of the Shed singing in his ears.
A voice said: “Joe.”
He started and turned. Sally stood behind him, looking at him very gravely. She tried to smile.
“Dad told me,” she said, “about the check-up that says you’re all right. May I congratulate you on your being with us for a while?—on the cobalt’s not getting near you?—or the rest of us?”
Joe did not know exactly what to say.
“I’m going inside the Platform,” she told him. “Would you like to come along?”
He wiped his hands on a piece of waste.
“Naturally! My gang is off picking out tools. I can’t do much until they come back.”
He fell into step beside her. They walked toward the Platform. And it was still magic, no matter how often Joe looked at it. It was huge beyond belief, though it was surelynot heavy in proportion to its size. Its bright plating shone through the gossamer scaffolding all about it. There was always a faint bluish mist in the air, and there were the marsh-fire lights of welding torches playing here and there. The sounds of the Shed were a steady small tumult in Joe’s ears. He was getting accustomed to them, though.
“How is it you can go around so freely?” he asked abruptly. “I have to be checked and rechecked.”
“You’ll get a full clearance,” she told him. “It has to go through channels. Me—I have influence. I always come in through security, and I have the door guards trained. And I do have business in the Platform.”
He turned his head to look at her.
“Interior decoration,” she explained. “And don’t laugh! It isn’t prettifying. It’s psychology. The Platform was designed by engineers and physicists and people with slide rules. They made a beautiful environment for machinery. But there will be men living in it, and they aren’t machines.”
“I don’t see——”
“They designed the hydroponic garden,” said Sally with a certain scorn. “They calculated very neatly that eleven square feet of leaf surface of a pumpkin plant will purify all the air a resting man uses, and so much more will purify the air a man uses when he’s working hard. So they designed the gardens for the most efficient production of the greatest possible leaf surface—of pumpkin plants! They figured food would be brought up by the tender rockets! But can you imagine the men in the Platform, floating among the stars, living on dehydrated food and stuffing themselves hungrily with pumpkins because that is the only fresh food they have?”
Joe saw the irony.
“They’re thinking of mechanical efficiency,” said Sally indignantly. “I don’t know anything about machinery, but I’ve wasted an awful lot of time at school and otherwise if I don’t know something about human beings! I argued, and the garden now isn’t as mechanically efficient, but it’ll be a nice place for a man to go into. He won’t smell pumpkinplants all the time, either. I’ve even gotten them to include some flowers!”
They were very near the Platform. And it was very near to completion. Joe looked at it hungrily, and he felt a great sense of urgency. He tried to strip away the scaffolding in his mind and see it floating proudly free in emptiness, with white-hot sunshine glinting from it, and only a background of unwinking stars.
Sally’s voice went on: “And I’ve really put up an argument about the living quarters. They had every interior wall painted aluminum! I argued that in space or out of it, where people have to live, it’s housekeeping. This is going to be their home. And they ought to feel human in it!”
They passed into one of the openings in the maze of uprights. All about them there were trucks, and puffing engines, and hoists. Joe dragged Sally aside as a monstrous truck-and-trailer came from where it had delivered some gigantic item of interior use. It rumbled past them, and she led the way to a flight of temporary wooden stairs with two security guards at the bottom. Sally talked severely to them, and they grinned and waved for Joe to go ahead. He went up the steps—which would be pulled down before the Platform’s launching—and went actually inside the Space Platform for the first time.
It was a moment of extreme vividness for him. Within the past hour he’d come to think detachedly of the possibility of death for himself, and then had learned that he would live for a while yet. He knew that Sally had been scared on his account, and that her matter-of-fact manner was partly assumed. She was at least as much wrought up as he was.
And this was the first time he was going into what would be the first space ship ever to leave the Earth on a non-return journey.
Nobody could have gone through the changes of emotion Joe had experienced that morning and remained quite matter-of-fact. Seeing a dead man who had more or less deliberately killed himself so that he wouldn’t have to kill Joe—for one—had its effect. Knowing that it was certainly possible the man hadn’t killed himself in time had another. Being checked over for radiation burns which would mean that he’d die quite comfortably within three or four days, and then learning that no burns existed, was something of an ordeal. And Sally—of course her feelings shouldn’t have been as vivid as his own, but the fact that she’d been scared for him held some significance. When, on top of all the rest, he went into the Space Platform for the first time, Joe was definitely keyed up.
But he talked technology. He examined the inner skin and its lining before going beyond the temporary entrance. The plating of the Platform was actually double. The outer layer was a meteor-bumper against which particles of cosmic dust would strike and explode without damage to the inner skin. They could even penetrate it without causing a leak of air. Inside the inner skin there was a layer of glass wool for heat insulation. Inside the glass wool was a layer of material serving exactly the function of the coating of a bulletproof gasoline tank. No meteor under a quarter-inch size could hope to make a puncture, even at the forty-five-mile-per-second speed that is the theoretical maximum for meteors. And if one did, the selfsealing stuff would stop the leak immediately. Joe could explain the protection of the metal skins. He did.
“When a missile travels fast enough,” he said absorbedly,“it stops acquiring extra puncturing ability. Over a mile a second, impact can’t be transmitted from front to rear. The back end of the thing that hits has arrived at the hit place before the shock of arrival can travel back to it. It’s like a train in a collision which doesn’t stop all at once. A meteor hitting the Platform will telescope on itself like the cars of a railroad train that hits another at full speed.”
Sally listened enigmatically.
“So,” said Joe, “the punching effect isn’t there. A meteor hitting the Platform won’t punch. It’ll explode. Part of it will turn to vapor—metallic vapor if it’s metal, and rocky vapor if it’s stone. It’ll blow a crater in the metal plate. It’ll blow away as much weight of the skin as it weighs itself. Mass for mass. So that weight for weight, pea soup would be just as effective armor against meteors as hardened steel.”
Sally said: “Dear me! You must read the newspapers!”
“The odds figure out, the odds are even that the Platform won’t get an actual meteor puncture in the first twenty thousand years it’s floating round the Earth.”
“Twenty thousand two seventy, Joe,” said Sally. She was trying to tease him, but her face showed a little of the strain. “I read the magazine articles too. In fact I sometimes show the tame article writers around, when they’re cleared to see the Platform.”
Joe winced a little. Then he grinned wryly.
“That cuts me down to size, eh?”
She smiled at him. But they both felt queer. They went on into the interior of the huge space ship.
“Lots of space,” said Joe. “This could’ve been smaller.”
“It’ll be nine-tenths empty when it goes up,” said Sally. “But you know about that, don’t you?”
Joe did know. The reasons for the streamlining of rockets to be fired from the ground didn’t apply to the Platform. Not with the same urgency, anyhow. Rockets had to burn their fuel fast to get up out of the dense air near the ground. They had to be streamlined to pierce the thick, resisting part of the atmosphere. The Platform didn’t. It wouldn’t climb by itself. It would be carried necessarily at slow speedup to the point where jet motors were most efficient, and then it would be carried higher until they ceased to be efficient. Only when it was up where air resistance was a very small fraction of ground-level drag would its own rockets fire. It wouldn’t gain much by being shaped to cut thin air, and it would lose a lot. For one thing, the launching process planned for the Platform allowed it to be built complete so far as its hull was concerned. Once it got out into its orbit there would be no more worries. There wouldn’t be any gamble on the practicability of assembling a great structure in a weightless “world.”
The two of them—and the way they both felt, it seemed natural for Joe to be helping Sally very carefully through the corridors of the Platform—the two of them came to the engine room. This wasn’t the place where the drive of the Platform was centered. It was where the service motors and the air-circulation system and the fluid pumps were powered. Off the engine room the main gyros were already installed. They waited only for the pilot gyros to control them as a steering engine controls an Earth ship’s rudder. Joe looked very thoughtfully at the gyro assembly. That was familiar, from the working drawings. But he let Sally guide him on without trying to stop and look closely.
She showed him the living quarters. They centered in a great open space sixty feet long and twenty wide and high. There were bookshelves, and two balconies, and chairs. Private cabins opened from it on different levels, but there were no steps to them. Yet there were comfortable chairs with straps so that when a man was weightless he could fasten himself in them. There were ash trays, ingeniously designed to look like exactly that and nothing else. But ashes would not fall into them, but would be drawn into them by suction. There was unpatterned carpet on the floorandon the ceiling.
“It’s going to feel queer,” said Sally, oddly quiet, “when all this is out in space, but it will look fairly normal. I think that’s important. This room will look like a big private library more than anything else. One won’t be reminded every second, by everything he sees, that he’s living in a strictlysynthetic environment. He won’t feel cramped. If all the rooms were small, a man would feel as if he were in prison. At least this way he can pretend that things are normal.”
Her mind was not wholly on her words. She’d been frightened for Joe. And he was acutely aware of it, because he felt a peculiar after-effect himself.
“Normal,” he said drily, “except that he doesn’t weigh anything.”
“I’ve worried about that,” said Sally. “Sleeping’s going to be a big problem.”
“It’ll take getting used to,” Joe agreed.
There was a momentary pause. They were simply looking about the great room. Sally stirred uneasily.
“Tell me what you think,” she said. “You’ve been in an elevator that started to drop like a plummet. When the Platform is orbiting it’ll be like that all the time, only worse. No weight. Joe, if you were in an elevator that seemed to be dropping and dropping and dropping for hours on end—do you think you could go to sleep?”
Joe hadn’t thought about it. And he was acutely conscious of Sally, just then, but the idea startled him.
“It might be hard to adjust to,” he admitted.
“It’ll be hard to adjust to, awake,” said Sally. “But getting adjusted to it asleep should be worse. You’ve waked up from a dream that you’re falling?”
“Sure,” said Joe. Then he whistled. “Oh-oh! I see! You’d drop off to sleep, and you’d be falling. So you’d wake up. Everybody in the Platform will be falling around the Earth in the Platform’s orbit! Every time they doze off they’ll be falling and they’ll wake up!”
He managed to think about it. It was true enough. A man awake could remind himself that he only thought and felt that he was falling, and that there was no danger. But what would happen when he tried to sleep? Falling is the first fear a human being ever knows. Everybody in the world has at one time waked up gasping from a dream of precipices down which he plunged. It is an inborn terror. And no matter how thoroughly a man might know in his conscious mind thatweightlessness was normal in emptiness, his conscious mind would go off duty when he went to sleep. A completely primitive subconscious would take over then, and it would not be satisfied. It might wake him frantically at any sign of dozing until he cracked up from sheer insomnia ... or else let him sleep only when exhaustion produced unconsciousness rather than restful slumber.
“That’s a tough one!” he said disturbedly, and noticed that she still showed signs of her recent distress. “There’s not much to be done about it, either!”
“I suggested something,” said Sally, “and they built it in. I hope it works!” she explained uncomfortably. “It’s a sort of blanket with a top that straps down, and an inflatable underside. When a man wants to sleep, he’ll inflate this thing, and it will hold him in his bunk. It won’t touch his head, of course, and he can move, but it will press against him gently.”
Joe thought over what Sally had just explained. He noticed that they were quite close together, but he put his mind on her words.
“It’ll be like a man swimming?” he asked. “One can go to sleep floating. There’s no sensation of weight, but there’s the feeling of pressure all about. A man might be able to sleep if he felt he were floating. Yes, that’s a good idea, Sally! It’ll work! A man will think he’s floating, rather than falling!”
Sally flushed a little.
“I thought of it another way,” she said awkwardly. “When we go to sleep, we go way back. We’re like babies, with all a baby’s fears and needs. Itmightfeel like floating. But—I tried one of those bunks. It feels like—it feels sort of dreamy, as if someone were—holding one quite safe. It feels as if one were a baby and—beautifully secure. But of course I haven’t tried it weightless. I just—hope it works.”
As if embarrassed, she turned abruptly and showed him the kitchen. Every pan was covered. The top of the stove was alnico-magnet strips, arranged rather like the top of a magnetic chuck. Pans would cling to it. And the covers had a curious flexible lining which Joe could not understand.
“It’s a flexible plastic that’s heatproof,” said Sally. “It inflates and holds the food down to the hot bottom of the pan. They expected the crew to eat ready-prepared food. I said that it would be bad enough to have to drink out of plastic bottles instead of glasses. They hung one of these stoves upside down, for me, and I cooked bacon and eggs and pancakes with the cover of the pan pointing to the floor. They said the psychological effect would be worth while.”
Joe was stirred. He followed her out of the kitchen and said warmly—the more warmly because these contributions to the Space Platform came on top of a personal anxiety on his own account: “You must be the first girl in the world who thought about housekeeping in space!”
“Girls will be going into space, won’t they?” she asked, not looking at him. “If there are colonies on the other planets, they’ll have to. And some day—to the stars....”
She stood quite still, and Joe wanted to do something about her and the world and the way he felt. The interior of the Platform was very silent. Somewhere far away where the glass-wool insulation was incomplete, the sound of workmen was audible, but the inner corridors of the Platform were not resonant. They were lined with a material to destroy reminders that this was merely a metal shell, an artificial world that would swim in emptiness. Here and now, Joe and Sally seemed very private and alone, and he felt a sense of urgency.
He looked at her yearningly. Her color was a little higher than usual. She was not just a nice kid, she was swell! And she was good to look at. Joe had noticed that before, but now with the memory of her fright because he’d been in danger, her worry because he might have been killed, he thought of her very absurd but honest offer to cry for him.
Joe found himself twisting at the ring on his finger. He got it off, and there was some soot and grease on it from the work he’d been doing. He knew that she saw what he was about, but she looked away.
“Look, Sally,” he said awkwardly, “we’ve known each other a long time. I’ve—uh—liked you a lot. And I’ve gotsome things to do first, but——” He stopped. He swallowed. She turned and smiled at him. “Look,” he said desperately, “what’s a good way to ask if you’d like to wear this?”
She nodded, her eyes shining a little.
“That was a good way, Joe. I’d like it a lot.”
There was an interlude, then, during which she very ridiculously cried and explained that he must be more careful and not risk his life so much! And then there was a faint, faint sound outside the Platform. It was the yapping sound of a siren, crying out in short and choppy ululations as it warmed up. Finally its note steadied and it wailed and wailed and wailed.
“That’s the alarm,” exclaimed Sally. She was still misty-eyed. “Everybody out of the Shed. Come on, Joe.”
They started back the way they’d come in. And Sally looked up at Joe and grinned suddenly.
“When I have grandchildren,” she told him, “I’m going to brag that I was the very first girl in all the world ever to be kissed in a space ship!”
But before Joe could do anything about the comment, she was out on the stairs, in plain view and going down. So he followed her.
The Shed was emptying. The bare wood-block floor was dotted with figures moving steadily toward the security exit. There was no hurry, because security men were shouting that this was not an alarm but a precautionary measure, and there was no need for haste. Each security man had been informed by the miniature walkie-talkie he wore. By it every guard could be told anything he needed to know, either on the floor of the Shed, or on the catwalks aloft or even in the Platform itself.
Trucks lined up in orderly fashion to go out the swing-up doors. Men came down from the scaffolds after putting their tools in proper between-shifts positions—for counting and inspection—and other men were streaming quietly from the pushpot assembly line. Except for the gigantic object in the middle, and for the fact that every man was in work clothes, the scene was surprisingly like the central waiting room of avery large railroad station, with innumerable people moving briskly here and there.
“No hurry,” said Joe, catching the word from a security man as he passed it on. “I’ll go see what my gang found out.”
The trio—Haney and Mike and the Chief—were just arriving by the piles of charred but now uncovered wreckage. Sally flushed ever so slightly when she saw the Chief eye Joe’s ring on her finger.
“Rest of the day off, huh?” said the Chief. “Look! We found most of the stuff we need. They’re gonna give us a shop to work in. We’ll move this stuff there. We’re gonna have to weld a false frame on the lathe we picked, an’ then cut out the bed plate to let the gyros fit in between the chucks. Mount it so the spinning is in the right line.”
That would be with the axis of the rotors parallel to the axis of the earth. Joe nodded.
“We’ll be able to get set up in the mornin’,” added Haney, “and get started. You got the parts list off to the plant for your folks to get busy on?”
Sally said quickly: “He’s sending that by facsimile now. Then——”
The Chief beamed in benign mockery. “What you goin’ to do after that, Joe? If we got the rest of the day off——?”
Sally said hurriedly: “We were—he was going off on a picnic with me. To Red Canyon Lake. Do you really need to talk business—all afternoon?”
The Chief laughed. He’d known Sally, at least by sight, back at the Kenmore plant.
“No, ma’am!” he told her. “Just askin’. I worked on that Red Canyon dam job, years back. That dam that made the lake. It ought to be right pretty around there now. Okay, Joe. See you as soon as work starts up. In the mornin’, most likely.”
Joe started away with Sally. Mike the midget called hoarsely: “Joe! Just a minute!”
Joe drew back. The midget’s seamed face was very earnest. He said in his odd voice: “Here’s something to think about. Somebody worked mighty hard to keep you from gettingthose gyros here. They might work hard to keep them from getting repaired. That’s why we asked for a special shop to work in. It’s occurred to me that a good way to stop these repairs would be to stop us. Not everybody would’ve figured out how to rebalance this thing. You get me?”
“Sure!” said Joe. “You three had better look out for yourselves.”
Mike stared at him and grimaced.
“You don’t get it,” he said brittlely. “All right. I may be crazy, at that.”
Joe rejoined Sally. The idea of a picnic was brand new to him, but he approved of it completely. They went to the small exit that led to the security building. They were admitted. There was remarkable calm and efficiency here, even though routine had been upset by the need to stop all work. As they went toward Major Holt’s office, Joe heard somebody dictating in a matter-of-fact voice: “... this attempt at atomic sabotage was defeated outside the Shed, but it never had a chance of success. Geiger counters would have instantly shown any attempt to smuggle radioactive material into the Shed....”
Joe glanced sidewise at Sally.
“That’s for a publicity release?” he asked.
She nodded.
“It’s true, too. Nothing goes in or out of the Shed without passing close to a Geiger counter. Even radium-dial watches show up, though they don’t set the sirens to screaming.”
Joe said: “I’ll get my order for new parts off on the facsimile machine.”
But he had to get Major Holt’s secretary to show him where to feed in the list. It would go east to the nearest facsimile receiver, and then be rushed by special messenger to the plant. Miss Ross gloomily set the machine and initialed the delivery requisition which was part of the document. It flashed through the scanning process and came out again.
“You and Sally,” remarked Sally’s father’s secretary with a morose sigh, “can go and relax this afternoon. But there’s no relaxation for Major Holt. Or for me.”
Joe said unhopefully: “I’m sure Sally’d be glad if you came with us.”
Major Holt’s plain, unglamorous assistant shook her head.
“I haven’t had a day off since the work began here,” she said frowning. “The Major depends on me. Nobody else could do what I do! You’re going to Red Canyon Lake?”
“Yes,” agreed Joe. “Sally thought it might be pleasant.”
“It’s terribly dry and arid here,” said Miss Ross sadly. “That’s the only body of water in a hundred miles or more. I hope it’s pretty there. I’ve never seen it.”
She handed Joe back his original memo from the facsimile machine. An exact copy of his written list, in his handwriting, was now in existence more than fifteen hundred miles away, and would arrive at the Kenmore Precision Tool plant within a matter of hours. There could be no question of errors in transmission! It had to be right!
Sally came out, smiled at her father’s secretary, and led Joe down to the entrance.
“I have the car,” she said cheerfully, “and there’ll be a lunch basket waiting for us at the house. I agreed that the lake was too cold for swimming, though. It is. Snow water feeds it. But it’s nice to look at.”
They went out the door, and the workers on the Platform were just beginning to pile into the waiting fleet of busses. But the black car was waiting, too. Joe opened the door and Sally handed him the key. She regarded the men swarming on the busses.
“There’ll be bulletins all over Bootstrap,” she observed, “saying that Braun tried to dust-bomb the Shed. They’ll say that he may have carried the cobalt about with him, and so he may have burned other people—in a restaurant, a movie theater, anywhere—while he was carrying the dust and dying without knowing it. So everybody’s supposed to report to the hospital for a check-up for radiation burns. Some people may really have them. But Dad thinks that since you weren’t burned, Braun didn’t carry it around. If anyone is burned, it’ll be the person who brought the cobalt here to give him. And—well—he’ll turn up because everybody does, and becausehe’s burned he’ll be asked plenty of questions.”
Joe stepped on the starter. Then he pressed the accelerator and the car sped forward.
They stopped at the house in the officers’-quarters area on the other side of the Shed. Sally picked up the lunch basket that her father’s housekeeper had packed on telephoned instructions. They drove away.
Red Canyon was eighty miles from the Shed, and the only way to get there was through Bootstrap, because the only highway away from the Shed led to that small, synthetic town. It was irritating, though they had no schedule, to find that the long line of busses was ahead of them on that twenty-mile stretch. The busses ran nose to tail and filled the road for a half-mile or more. It was not possible to pass so long a string of close-packed vehicles. There was just enough traffic in the opposite direction to make that impracticable.
They had to trail the line of busses as far as Bootstrap and crawl through the crowded streets. Once beyond the town they came to a security stop. Here Sally’s pass was good. Then they went rolling on and on through an empty, arid, sun-baked terrain toward the hills to the west. It looked remarkably lonely. Joe thought for the first time about gas. He looked carefully at the fuel gauge. Sally shook her head.
“Don’t worry. Plenty of gas. Security takes care of that. When I said where we were going and that I wanted the car, Dad had everything checked. If I live through this, I’ll bet I stay a fanatic about cautiousness all my life!”
Joe said distastefully: “I suppose it gets everybody. Mike—the midget, you know—called me back just now to suggest that the people who tried to spoil the gyros might try to harm the four of us to hinder their repair!”
“It’s not just foolishness,” Sally admitted. “The strain is pretty bad, especially when you know things. You’ve noticed that Dad’s getting gray. That’s strain. And Miss Ross is about as tense. Things leak out in the most remarkable way—and Dad can’t find out how. Once there was a case of sabotage and he could have sworn that nobody had the informationthat permitted it but himself and Miss Ross. She had hysterics. She insisted that she wanted to be locked up somewhere so she couldn’t be suspected of telling anybody anything. She’d resign tomorrow if she could. It’s ghastly.” Then she hesitated and smiled faintly: “In fact, so Dad wouldn’t worry about me this afternoon——”
He took his eyes off the road to glance at her.
“What?”
“I promised we wouldn’t go swimming and——” Then she said awkwardly: “There are two pistols in the glove compartment. Dad knows you. So I promised you’d put one in your pocket up at the lake.”
Joe drew a deep breath. She opened the glove compartment and handed him a pistol. He looked at it: .38, hammerless. A good safe weapon. He slipped it in his coat pocket. But he frowned.
“I was looking forward to—not worrying for a while,” he said wryly. “But now I’ll have to remember to keep looking over my shoulder all the time!”
“Maybe,” said Sally, “you can look over my shoulder and I’ll look over yours, and we can glance at each other occasionally.”
She laughed, and he managed to smile. But the trace of a frown remained on his forehead.
Joe drove and drove and drove. Once they came to a very small town. It may have contained a hundred people. There were gas pumps and a restaurant and two or three general stores, which were certainly too many for the permanent residents. But there were cow ponies hitched before the stores, and automobiles were also in view. The ground here was slightly rolling. The mountains had grown to good-sized ramparts against the sky. Joe drove carefully down the single street, turning out widely once to dodge a dog sleeping placidly in an area normally reserved for traffic.
Finally they came to the foothills, and then the road curved and recurved as it wound among them. And two hours from Bootstrap they reached Red Canyon. They first saw the dam from downstream. It was a monstrous structureof masonry, alone in the mountains. From its top a plume of falling water jetted out.
“The dam’s for irrigation,” said Sally professionally, “and the Shed gets all its power from here. One of Dad’s nightmares is that somebody may blow up this dam and leave Bootstrap and the Shed without power.”
Joe said nothing. He drove on up the trail as it climbed the canyon wall in hairpin slants. It was ticklish driving. But then, quite suddenly, they reached the top of the canyon wall and the top of the dam and the level of the lake at once. Here there was a sheet of water that reached back among the barren hillsides for miles and miles. It twisted out of sight. There were small waves on its surface, and grass at its edge. There were young trees. The powerhouse was a small squat structure in the middle of the dam. Not a person was visible anywhere.
“Here we are,” said Sally, when Joe stopped the car.
He got out and went around to open the door for her. But she was already stepping out with the lunch basket in her hand when he arrived. He reached for it, and she held on, and they moved companionably away from the car carrying the basket between them.
“There’s a nice place,” said Sally, pointing.
A small ridge of rock stretched out into the lake, and rose, and spread, and formed what was almost a miniature island some fifty feet across. There were some young trees on it. Sally and Joe climbed down the slope and out the rocky isthmus that connected it with the shore.
Sally let down the lunch box on a stone and laughed for no reason at all as the wind blew her hair. It was a cool wind from over the water. And Joe realized with a shock of surprise that the air felt different and smelled different when it blew over open water like this. Up to now he hadn’t thought of the dryness of the air in Bootstrap and the Shed.
The lunch basket was tilted a little. Joe picked it up and settled it more solidly. Then he said: “Hungry?”
There was literally nothing on his mind at the momentbut the luxurious, satisfied feeling of being off somewhere with grass and a lake and Sally, and a good part of the afternoon to throw away. It felt good. So he lifted the lid of the lunch basket.
There was a revolver there. It was the other one from the glove compartment of the car. Sally hadn’t left it behind. Joe regarded it and said ironically: “Happy, carefree youth—that’s us! Which are the ham sandwiches, Sally?”
Nevertheless, the afternoon began splendidly. Joe dunked the bottled soft drinks in the lake to cool. Then he and Sally ate and talked and laughed. Joe, in particular, had more than the usual capacity for enjoyment today. He’d been through twenty-four hours of turmoil but now things began to look better. And there was the arrangement with Sally, which had a solid satisfactoriness about it. Sally was swell! If she’d been homely, Joe would have liked her just the same—to talk to and to be with. But she was pretty—and she was wearing his ring. She’d wrapped some string around the inside of the band to make it fit.
The only trouble was that Joe was occasionally conscious of the heavy weight in his right-hand coat pocket.
But they spent at least an hour in contented, satisfying, meaningless loafing that nobody can describe but that everybody likes to remember afterward. From time to time Joe looked ashore, when the weight in his pocket reminded him of danger.
But he didn’t look often enough. He was pulling the chilled soft-drink bottles out of the lake when he saw a movement out of the corner of his eye. He whirled, his hand in his pocket....
It was the Chief, with Haney and Mike the midget. They were striding across the rocky small peninsula.
Haney called sharply: “Everything okay?”
“Sure!” said Joe. “Everything’s fine! What’s the matter?”
“Mike had a hunch,” said the Chief. “And—uh—I remembered I worked on the job when this dam was built twelve-fifteen years ago.” He looked about him. “It looked different then.”
Then he caught Joe’s eye and jerked his head almost imperceptibly to one side. Joe caught the signal.
“I’ll see about some more soft drinks,” he said. “Come help me fish up the bottles.”
Sally smiled at the other two. She was already inspecting the lunch basket.
“We still have some sandwiches,” she said hospitably, “and some cake.”
Haney came forward awkwardly. Mike advanced toward her with something of truculence. Joe knew what was in his mind. If Sally treated him like a freak.... But Joe knew with deep satisfaction that she wouldn’t. He went down to the water’s edge.
“What’s up, Chief?” he asked in a low tone.
“Mike hadda hunch,” rumbled the Chief. “Somebody tried to smash the stuff you brought. They did. But we started gettin’ set to mend it. So what would they do? Polish us off. If they were set to atom-dust the whole Shed an’ everybody in it, they wouldn’t stop at four more murders.”
Joe fished for a pop bottle.
“Mike said something like that back at the Shed,” he observed.
“Yeah. But you were the one who figured things out. You’d be first target. Haney and Mike and me—we’d be hard to knock off in a crowd in Bootstrap. But you and her headed off by y’selves. Mike figured you mightn’t be safe. So we checked.”
Joe brought up one bottle and then another.
“We’re all right. Haven’t seen a soul.”
“Don’t mean a soul hasn’t seen you,” growled the Chief. “A car left Bootstrap less than twenty minutes behind you. There were three guys in it. It’s parked down below the dam, outa sight. We saw it. And when we came up, careful, we spotted three guys hidin’ out behind the rocks yonder. They look to me like they’re waiting for somebody to go strolling back from the shoreline, so’s—uh—maybe folks out at the powerhouse can’t see ’em. That’d be you and her, huh?”
Joe went cold. Not for himself. For Sally.
“There’s nobody else around,” said the Chief. “Who’d they be waiting for but you two? Suppose they got a chance to kill you. They’d take the car keys. They’d drop your two bodies somewheres Gawdknowswhere. There’d be considerable of a hunt for you two. Major Holt would be upset plenty. Security might get loosened up. There might be breaks for guys who wanted to do a little extra sabotage—besides maybe hamperin’ the repairin’ of the pilot gyros. Then they could try for Haney and Mike and me.”
Joe said coldly: “I’ve got a pistol and so has Sally. Shall we take those pistols and go ask those three if they want to start something?”
The Chief snorted.
“Use sense! It’s good you got the pistols, though. I snagged a twenty-two rifle from a shooting gallery. It was all I could get in a hurry. But go huntin’ trouble? Fella, I want to see that Platform go up! I’ll take care of things now. Good layout here. They got to come across the open to get near. Don’t say anything to Sally. But we’ll keep our eyes open.”
Joe nodded. He carried the chilled, dripping bottles back to where Haney solemnly ate a sandwich, sitting crosslegged with his back to the lake and regarding the shore. The Chief dragged a .22 repeating rifle from inside his belt, where it had hung alongside his thigh. He casually strolled over to Mike and dropped the rifle.
“You said you felt like target practice,” he remarked blandly. “Here’s your armament. Any more sandwiches, ma’am?”
Sally smilingly passed him the last. She left the top of the basket open. The pistol that had been there was gone. Then Sally’s eyes met Joe’s and she was aware that his three friends had not come here merely to crash a picnic. But she took it in stride. It was an additional reason for Joe to approve of Sally.
“Me,” said the Chief largely, “I’m goin’ to swim. I haven’t had any more water around me than a shower bath for solong that I crave to soak and splash. I’ll go yonder and dunk myself.”
He wandered off, taking bites from the sandwich as he went. He vanished. Haney leaned back against a sapling, his eyes roving about the shoreline and the rocks and brush behind it.
Mike was talking in his crackling, high-pitched voice.
“But just the same it’s crazy! Fighting sabotage when we little guys could take over in a week and make sabotage just plain foolish! We could do the whole job while the saboteurs weren’t looking!”
Sally said with interest: “Have you got the figures? Were they ever passed on?”
“I spent a month’s pay once,” said Mike sardonically, “hiring a math shark to go over them. He found one mistake. It raised the margin of what we could do!”
Sally answered: “Joe! Listen to this! Mike says he has the real answer to sabotage, and, in a way, to space travel! Listen!”
Joe dropped to the ground.
“Shoot it,” he said.
He was grimly alert, just the same. There were men waiting for them to start back to the car. These saboteurs were armed, and they intended to murder Sally and himself. Joe’s jaws clamped tautly shut at the grim ideas that came into his mind.
But Mike was beginning to speak.
“Forget about the Platform a minute,” he said, standing up to gesticulate, because he was only three and a half feet high. “Just figure on a rocket straight to the moon. With old-style rockets they’d a’ had to have a mass ratio of a hundred and twenty to one. You’d have to burn a hundred and twenty tons of old-style fuel to land one ton on the moon. Now it could be done with sixty, and when the Platform’s up, that figure’ll drop again! Okay! You’re gonna land a man on the moon. He weighs two hundred pounds. He uses up twenty pounds of food and drink and oxygen a day. Give him grub and air for two months—twelve hundred pounds. A cabinseven feet high and ten feet across. Sixteen hundred pounds, counting insulation an’ braces for strength. That makes a pay load of a ton an’ a half, and you’d have to burn a hundred an’ eighty tons of fuel—old-style—to take it to the moon, and another hundred an’ twenty for every ton the rocket ship weighed. You might get a man to the moon with a twelve-hundred-ton rocket—maybe. That’s with the old fuels. He’d get there, an’ he’d live two months, an’ then he’d die for lack of air. With the new fuels you’d need ninety tons of fuel to carry the guy there, and sixty more for every ton the ship weighed itself. Call it six hundred tons for the rocket to carry one man to the moon.”
Sally nodded absorbedly.
“I’ve seen figures like that,” she agreed.
“But take a guy like me!” said Mike the midget bitterly. “I weigh forty-five pounds, not two hundred! I use four pounds of food and air a day. A cabin for me to live in would be four feet high an’ five across. Bein’ smaller, it wouldn’t need so much bracing. You could do it for two hundred pounds. Three hundred for grub and air, fifty for me. Me on the moon supplied for two months would come to five-fifty pounds. Sixteen tons of fuel to get me to the moon direct! To carry the weight of the ship—it’s smaller!—fifty tons maximum!”
“I—see...,” said Sally, frowning.
He looked at her suspiciously, but there was no mockery in her face.
“It’d take a six-hundred-ton rocket to get a full-sized man to the moon,” he said with sudden flippancy, “but a guy my size could do the same job of stranglin’ in a fifty-ton job. Counting how much easier it’d be to get back, with atmosphere deceleration, I could make a trip, land, take observations, pick up mineral specimens, and get back—all in a sixty-ton rocket. That’s just ten per cent of what it’d cost to take a full-sized man one way!”
He stamped his foot. Then he said coldly: “Haney, sittin’ still you’re a sittin’ duck!”
The comment was just. Joe knew that Sally was on thelakeward side of this small island, and that there were impenetrable rocks between her and the mainland. But Haney sat crosslegged where he could watch the mainland, and he hadn’t moved in a long while. If someone did intend to commit murder from a distance, Haney was offering a chance for a very fine target. He moved.
“Yeah!” said Mike with fine irony, reverting to his topic. “I could show you plenty of figures! There are other guys like me! We’ve got as much brains as full-sized people! If the big brass had figured on us small guys, they coulda made the Platform the size of a four-family house an’ it’d ha’ been up in the sky right now, with guys like me running it. Guys my size could man the ferry rockets bringin’ up fuel for storage, and four of us could take a six-hundred-ton rocket an’ slide out to Mars an’ be back by springtime—next springtime!—with all the facts and the photographs to prove ’em! By golly——”