Then he made a raging, helpless gesture.
“But that’s just the big picture,” he said bitterly. “Right now, right at this minute, we could make it easy to finish the Platform the way it’s building in the Shed! There are ferry rockets building somewhere else. You know about them?”
Sally said apologetically: “Yes. I know there’ll be smaller rocket ships going up to the Platform. They’ll carry fuel and stores and exchanges for the crew. Yes, I know there are ferry rockets building.”
“Those ferry rockets,” said Mike sardonically, “carry four men, plus two replacements for the crew. They’ll carry air for ten days. But put four of us small guys in a ferry rocket!We’dhave air and grub for two months, almost! Pull out the pay load and put in a hydroponic garden and communicators and we’dbea Platform, right then! Send up another ferry rocket to join us, and it could bring guided missiles! The ferry rockets could be finished quicker than the Platform! Send up three ferry rockets with midgets as crews, an’ we could weld ’em together and have a Space Platform in orbit and working—and what’d be the use of sabotaging the bigPlatform then? The job would be done! There’d be no sense sabotaging the big Platform because the little one could do anything the big one could! It’d be up there and working! But,” he demanded bitterly, “do you think anybody’ll do anything as sensible as that?”
His small features were twisted in angry rebellion. And he was quite right in all his reasoning. Mankind could have made the journey to the planets in a hurry, and it could have had its Space Platform in the sky much more quickly, if only it could have consented to be represented by people like Mike—who would have represented mankind very valiantly.
Sally said distressedly: “Oh, Mike, it’s all true and I’m so sorry!”
And she meant it. Joe liked Sally especially right then, because she didn’t patronize Mike, or try to reason him out of his heartbreak.
Then Haney said abruptly: “Somebody’s spotted the Chief.”
Joe mentally kicked himself. The Chief had said he was going to swim. Now—but only now—Joe looked to see what he was doing.
He was far out from shore, swimming unhurriedly to the powerhouse at the middle of the dam. He would reach it, and swing up the ladder that could just be seen going down the lake side of the dam’s top, and he would explain the situation on shore. A telephone call to Bootstrap would bring security men rushing at eighty miles an hour, and parachute troopers a good deal faster. But even before they arrived the Chief would lead the powerhouse crew ashore armed with the shotguns they kept for shooting waterfowl in and out of season.
The men on shore might or might not consider the Chief’s swim to be proof that he knew their intentions. They were probably discussing the matter in some agitation right now. But they couldn’t know that the party on the semi-island was armed.
Suddenly Mike said crisply: “We’re goin’ to have visitors.”
He lay down carefully on the ground, fifteen feet uphill from Sally, where he could look over the ridge. He snuggled the .22 target rifle professionally to his shoulder. He drew a bead.
Three men very casually strolled out of the brushwood on the shore. They moved nonchalantly toward the strand of rocks that led out to the picnic spot. They looked like anybody else from Bootstrap. Casual, rough work clothing.... Haney bent down and picked up four good throwing stones. His expression was pained.
Joe said: “We’ve got pistols, Haney, and Sally’s a good shot.”
The men came on. Their manner was elaborately casual. Joe stepped up into view.
“No visitors!” he called. “We don’t want company!”
One of the men held his hand to his ear, as if not understanding. They came on. They made no threatening gestures.
Then Joe took his hand out of his pocket, the pistol Sally’d given him gripped tightly.
“I mean that!” he said harshly. “Stand back!”
One of the three spoke sharply. On that instant three snub-nosed pistols appeared. Bullets whined as the men hurtled forward. The purpose was not so much murder at this moment as the demoralizing effect of bullets flying overhead while the three assassins got close enough to do their bloody job with precision.
A stone whizzed by Joe—Haney had thrown it—and the small target rifle in Mike’s hands coughed twice. Joe held his fire. He had only six bullets and three targets to hit. With a familiar revolver he’d have started shooting now, but thirty yards is a long range with a strange pistol at a moving target.
One of the three killers stumbled and crashed to the ground. A second seemed suddenly to be grinning widely on one side of his face. A .22 bullet had slashed his cheek. The third ran head on into a rock thrown by Haney. It knocked the breath out of him and his pistol fell from his hand.
Joe fired deliberately at the widely grinning man and sawhim spin around. Mike’s target rifle spat again and the man Joe had hit wheeled and ran heavily, making incoherent yells. The one who’d tumbled scrambled to his feet and fled, hopping crazily, favoring one leg. Deserted, the third man turned and ran too, still doubled over and still gasping.
Mike’s voice crackled. He was in a towering rage because of the way the target rifle shot. It threw high and to the right. The shooting gallery paid off in cigarettes for high scores—so the guns didn’t shoot straight.
Until this moment Joe had been relatively calm, because he had something to do. But just then he heard Sally say “Oh!” in a queer voice. He whirled. Unknown to him, she had not been waiting under cover, but standing with her pistol out and ready. And her face was very white, and she was plucking at her hair. A strand came away in her fingers. A bullet had clipped it just above her shoulder.
Then Joe went sick ... weak ... trembling, and he disgraced himself by half-hysterically grabbing Sally and demanding to know if she was hurt, and raging at her for exposing herself to fire, while his throat tried to close and shut off his breath from horror.
There came loud pop-pop-popping noises. With the peculiar reverberation of sound over water, two motorcycles started from the powerhouse along the crest of the dam. They streaked for the shore carrying five men, one of whom was the Chief, with a red-checked tablecloth about his middle, brandishing a fire axe in default of other weapons.
The danger was over.
But the assassins couldn’t be followed immediately. They still had at least two pistols. Eight men and a girl, counting Mike, with an armament of only two pistols, a .22 rifle, two shotguns and a fire axe were not a properly equipped posse to hunt down killers. Also by now it was close to sunset.
So the victors did the sensible thing. Joe and Sally and Haney and the Chief—his clothes retrieved—plus Mike headed back for Bootstrap. Joe and Sally rode in the Major’s black car, and the other three in the jalopy they’d rented for the afternoon. On the way into the canyon below the dam, theystopped at the parked car their would-be assassins had come in. They removed its distributor and fan belt. The other men returned to the powerhouse with their shotguns and the fire axe, and telephoned to Bootstrap. The three gunmen who had planned murder became fugitives, with no means of transportation but their legs. They had a good many thousand square miles of territory to hide in, but it wasn’t likely that they had food or any competence to find it in the wilds. Two were certainly hurt. With dogs and planes and organization, it should be possible to catch them handily, come morning.
So Joe and Sally drove back to Bootstrap with the other car following closely through all the miles that had to be covered in the dark. Halfway back, they met a grim search party in cars, heading for the dam to begin their man hunt in the morning. After that, Joe felt better. But his teeth still tended to chatter every time he thought of Sally’s startled, scared expression as she pulled away a lock of her hair that had been severed by a bullet.
When they got back to the Shed, Major Holt looked tired and old. Sally explained breathlessly that her danger was her own fault. Joe’d thought she was safely under cover....
“It was my fault,” said the Major detachedly. “I let you go away from the Shed. I do not blame Joe at all.”
But he did not look kindly. Joe wet his lips, ready to agree that any disgrace he might be subjected to was justified, since he had caused Sally to be shot at.
“I blame myself a great deal, sir,” he said grimly. “But I can promise I’ll never take Sally away from safety again. Not until the Platform’s up and there’s no more reason for her to be in danger.”
The Major said remotely: “I shall have to arrange for more than that. I shall put you in touch with your father by telephone. You will explain to him, in detail, exactly how the repair of your apparatus is planned. I understand that the gyros can be duplicated more quickly by the method you have worked out?”
Joe said: “Yes, sir. The balancing of the gyros can, which was the longest single job. But anything can be made quickerthe second time. The patterns for the castings are all made, and the bugs worked out of the production process.”
“You will explain that to your father,” said the Major heavily. “Your father’s plant will begin to duplicate these—ah—pilot gyros at once. Meanwhile your—ah—work crew will start to repair the one that is here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And,” said the Major, “I am sending you to the pushpot airfield. I intend to scatter the targets the saboteurs might aim at. You are one of them. Your crew is another. From time to time you will confer with them and verify their work. If any of them should be—disposed of, you will be able to instruct others.”
“It’s really the other way about, sir,” objected Joe. “The Chief and Haney are pretty good, and Mike’s got brains——”
The Major moved impatiently.
“I am looking at this from a security standpoint,” he said. “I am trying to make it plainly useless to attack the gyros again. Duplicates will be in production at your father’s plant. There will be three men repairing the smashed ones. There will be another man in another place—and this will be you—who can instruct new workmen in the repair procedure if anything should happen. Thus there will have to be three separate successful coups if the pilot gyros are not to be ready when the Platform needs them. Saboteurs might try one. Possibly two. But I think they will look for another weak spot to attack.”
Joe did not like the idea of being moved away. He wanted to be on the job repairing the device that was primarily his responsibility. Besides, he had a feeling about Sally. If she were in danger, he wanted to be on hand.
“About Sally, sir——”
“Sally,” said the Major tiredly, “is going to have to restrict herself to the point where she’ll feel that jail would be preferable. But she will see the need for it. She will be guarded a good deal more carefully than before—and you may not know it, but she has been guarded rather well.”
Joe saw Sally smiling ruefully at him. What the Major hadsaid was unpleasant, but he was right. This was one of those arrangements that nobody likes, an irritating, uncomfortable, disappointing necessity. But such necessities are a part of every actual achievement. The difference between things that get done and things that don’t get done is often merely the difference between patience and impatience with tedious details. This arrangement would mean that Joe couldn’t see Sally very often. It would mean that the Chief and Haney and Mike would do the actual work of getting the gyros ready. It would take all the glamour out of Joe’s contribution. These deprivations shouldn’t be necessary. But they were.
“All right, sir,” said Joe gloomily. “When do I go over to the field?”
“Right away,” said the Major. “Tonight.” Then he added detachedly: “Officially, the excuse for your presence there will be that you have been useful in uncovering sabotage methods. You have. After all, through you a number of planes that would have been blown up have now had their booby traps removed. I know you do not claim credit for the fact, but it is an excuse for keeping you where I want you to be for another reason entirely. So it will be assumed that you are at the pushpot field for counter-sabotage inspection.”
The Major nodded dismissal with an indefinable air of irony, and Joe went unhappily out of his office. He telephoned his father at length. His father did not share Joe’s disappointment at being removed to a place of safety. He undertook to begin the castings for an entire new set of pilot gyros at once.
A little later Sally came out of her father’s office.
“I’m sorry, Joe!”
He grinned unhappily.
“So am I. I don’t feel very heroic, but if this is what has to be done to get the Platform out of the Shed and on the way up—it’s what has to be done. I suppose I can phone you?”
“You can,” said Sally. “And you’d better!”
They had talked a long time that afternoon, very satisfyinglyand without any cares at all. Neither could have remembered much of what had been said. It probably was not earth-shaking in importance. But now there seemed to be a very great deal of other similar conversation urgently needing to be gone through.
“I’ll call you!” said Joe.
Then somebody approached to take him to the pushpot airfield. They separated very formally under the eyes of the impersonal security officer who would drive Joe to his destination.
It was a tedious journey through the darkness. This particular security officer was not companionable. He was one of those conscientious people who think that if they keep their mouths shut it will make up for their inability to keep their eyes open. Socially he treated Joe as if he were a highly suspect person. It could be guessed that he treated everybody that way.
Joe went to sleep in the car.
He was only half-awake when he arrived, and he didn’t bother to rouse himself completely when he was shown to a cubbyhole in the officers’ barracks. He went to bed, making a half-conscious note to buy himself some clothes—especially fresh linen—in the morning.
Then he knew nothing until he was awaked in the early morning by what sounded exactly like the crack of doom.
It was not, however, the crack of doom. When Joe stared out the window by the head of his cot, he saw gray-red dawn breaking over the landing field. There were low, featureless structures silhouetted against the sunrise. As the crimson light grew brighter, Joe realized that the angular shapes were hangars. Improbable crane poles loomed above them. One was in motion, handling something he could not make out, but the noise that had awakened him was less, now. It seemed to circle overhead, and it had an angry, droning, buzzing quality that was not natural in any motor he had ever heard before.
Joe shivered, standing at the window. It was cold and dank in the dawn light at this altitude, but he wanted to know what that completely unbelievable roar had been. A crane beam by the hangars tilted down, slowly, and then lifted as if released of a great weight. The light was growing slowly brighter. Joe saw something on the ground. Rather, it was not quite on the ground. It rested on something on the ground.
Suddenly that unholy uproar began again. Something moved. It ran heavily out from the masking dark of the hangars. It picked up speed. It acquired a reasonable velocity—forty or fifty miles an hour. As it scuttled over the dimly lighted field, it made a din like all the boiler factories in the world and all the backfiring motors in creation trying to drown each other’s noise out—and all of them being very successful.
It was a pushpot. Joe recognized it with incredulity. It was one of those utterly ungainly creations that were built around one half of the sidewall of the Shed. In shape, itsupper part was like the top half of a loaf of bread. In motion, here, it rested on some sort of wheeled vehicle, and it was reared up like an indignant caterpillar, and a blue-white flame squirted out of its tail, with coy and frolicsome flirtings from side to side.
The pushpot lifted from the vehicle on which it rode, and the vehicle put on speed and got away from under it with frantic agility. The vehicle swerved to one side, and Joe stared with amazed eyes at the pushpot, some twenty feet aloft. It had a flat underside, and a topside that still looked to him like the rounded top half of a loaf of baker’s bread. It hung in the air at an angle of about forty-five degrees, and it howled like a panic-stricken dragon—Joe was getting his metaphors mixed by this time—and it swung and wobbled and slowly gained altitude, and then suddenly it seemed to get the knack of what it was supposed to do. It started to circle around, and then it began abruptly to climb skyward. Until it began to climb it looked heavy and clumsy and wholly unimpressive. But when it climbed, it really moved!
Joe found his head out the window, craning up to look at it. Its unearthly din took on the indignant quality of an irritated beehive. But it climbed! It went up without grace but with astonishing speed. And it was huge, but it became lost in the red-flecked dawn sky while Joe still gaped.
Joe flung on his clothes. He went out the door through resonant empty corridors, hunting for somebody to tell him something. He blundered into a mess hall. There were many tables, but the chairs around them were pushed back as if used and then left behind by people in a hurry to be somewhere else. There were exactly two people still visible over in a corner.
Another din like the wailing of a baby volcano with a toothache. It began, and moved, and went through the series of changes that ended in a climbing, droning hum. Another. Another. The launching of pushpots for their morning flight was evidently getting well under way.
Joe hesitated in the nearly empty mess hall. Then he recognized the two seated figures. They were the pilot and co-pilot,respectively, of the fateful plane that had brought him to Bootstrap.
He went over to their table. The pilot nodded matter-of-factly. The co-pilot grinned. Both still wore bandages on their hands, which would account for their remaining here.
“Fancy seeing you!” said the co-pilot cheerfully. “Welcome to the Hotel de Gink! But don’t tell me you’re going to fly a pushpot!”
“I hadn’t figured on it,” admitted Joe. “Are you?”
“Perish forbid,” said the co-pilot amiably. “I tried it once, for the devil of it. Those things fly with the grace of a lady elephant on ice skates! Did you, by any chance, notice that they haven’t got any wings? And did you notice where their control surfaces were?”
Joe shook his head. He saw the remnants of ham and eggs and coffee. He was hungry.
There was the uproar to be expected of a basso-profundo banshee in pain. Another pushpot was taking off.
“How do I get breakfast?” he asked.
The co-pilot pointed to a chair. He rapped sharply on a drinking glass. A door opened, he pointed at Joe, and the door closed.
“Breakfast coming up,” said the co-pilot. “Look! I know you’re Joe Kenmore. I’m Brick Talley and this is Captain—no less than Captain!—Thomas J. Walton. Impressed?”
“Very much,” said Joe. He sat down. “What about the control surfaces on pushpots?”
“They’re in the jet blast!” said the co-pilot, now identified as Brick Talley. “Like the V Two rockets when the Germans made ’em. Vanes in the exhaust blast, no kidding! Landing, and skidding in on their tails like they do, they haven’t speed enough to give wing flaps a grip on the air, even if they had wings to put wing flaps on. Those dinkuses are things to have bad dreams about!”
Again, a door opened and a man in uniform with an apron in front came marching in with a tray. There was tomato juice and ham and eggs and coffee. He served Joe briskly and marched out again.
“That’s Hotel de Gink service,” said Talley. “No wasted motion, no sloppy civilities. He was about to eat that himself, he gave it to you, and now he’ll cook himself a double portion of everything. What are you doing here, anyhow?”
Joe shrugged. It occurred to him that it would neither be wise nor creditable to say that he’d been sent here to split up a target at which saboteurs might shoot.
“I guess I’m attached for rations,” he observed. “There’ll be orders along about me presently, I suppose. Then I’ll know what it’s all about.”
He fell to on his breakfast. The thunderous noises of the pushpots taking off made the mess hall quiver. Joe said between mouthfuls: “Funny way for anything to take off, riding on—it looked like a truck.”
“It is a truck,” said Talley. “A high-speed truck. Fifty of them specially made to serve as undercarriages so pushpot pilots can practice. The pushpots are really only expected to work once, you know.”
Joe nodded.
“They aren’t to take off,” Talley explained. “Not in theory. They hang on to the Platform and heave. They go up with it, pushing. When they get it as high as they can, they’ll shoot their jatos, let go, and come bumbling back home. So they have to practice getting back home and landing. For practicing it doesn’t matter how they get aloft. When they get down, a big straddle truck on caterpillar treads picks them up—they land in the doggonedest places, sometimes!—and brings ’em back. Then a crane heaves them up on a high-speed truck and they do it all over again.”
Joe considered while he ate. It made sense. The function of the pushpots was to serve as the first booster stage of a multiple-stage rocket. Together, they would lift the Platform off the ground and get it as high as their jet motors would take it traveling east at the topmost speed they could manage. Then they’d fire their jatos simultaneously, and in doing that they’d be acting as the second booster stage of a multiple-stage rocket. Then their work would be done, and their only remaining purpose would be to get their pilots back tothe ground alive, while the Platform on its own third stage shot out to space.
“So,” said Talley, “since their pilots need to practice landings, the trucks get them off the ground. They go up to fifty thousand feet, just to give their oxygen tanks a chance to conk out on them; then they barge around up there a while. The advanced trainees shoot off a jato at top speed. It’s gauged to build them up to the speed they’ll give the Platform. And then if they come out of that and get back down to ground safely, they uncross their fingers. A merry life those guys lead! When a man’s made ten complete flights he retires. One flight a week thereafter to keep in practice only, until the big day for the Platform’s take-off. Those guys sweat!”
“Is it that bad?”
The pilot grunted. The co-pilot—Talley—spread out his hands.
“It is that bad! Every so often one of them comes down untidily. There’s something the matter with the motors. They’ve got a little too much power, maybe. Sometimes—occasionally—they explode.”
“Jet motors?” asked Joe. “Explode? That’s news!”
“A strictly special feature,” said Talley drily. “Exclusive with pushpots for the Platform. They run ’em and run ’em and run ’em, on test. Nothing happens. But occasionally one blows up in flight. Once it happened warming up. That was a mess! The field’s been losing two pilots a week. Lately more.”
“It doesn’t sound exactly reasonable,” said Joe slowly. He put a last forkful in his mouth.
“It’s also inconvenient,” said Talley, “for the pilots.”
The pilot—Walton—opened his mouth.
“It’d be sabotage,” he said curtly, “if there was any way to do it. Four pilots killed this week.”
He lapsed into silence again.
Joe considered. He frowned.
A pushpot, outside the building, hysterically bellowed itsway across the runway and its noise changed and it was aloft. It went spiraling up and up. Joe stirred his coffee.
There were thin shoutings outside. A screaming, whistling noise! A crash! Something metallic shrieked and died. Then silence.
Talley, the co-pilot, looked sick. Then he said: “Correction. It’s been five pushpots exploded and five pilots killed this week. It’s getting a little bit serious.” He looked sharply at Joe. “Better drink your coffee before you go look. You won’t want to, afterward.”
He was right.
Joe saw the crashed pushpot half an hour later. He found that his ostensible assignment to the airfield for the investigation of sabotage was quaintly taken at face value there. A young lieutenant solemnly escorted him to the spot where the pushpot had landed, only ten feet from a hangar wall. The impact had carried parts of the pushpot five feet into the soil, and the splash effect had caved in the hangar wall-footing. There’d been a fire, which had been put out.
The ungainly flying thing was twisted and torn. Entrails of steel tubing were revealed. The plastic cockpit cover was shattered. There were only grisly stains where the pilot had been.
The motor had exploded. The jet motor. And jet motors do not explode. But this one had. It had burst from within, and the turbine vanes of the compressor section were revealed, twisted intolerably where the barrel of the motor was ripped away. The jagged edges of the tear testified to the violence of the internal explosion.
Joe looked wise and felt ill. The young lieutenant very politely looked away as Joe’s face showed how he felt. But of course there were the orders that said he was a sabotage expert. And Joe felt angrily that he was sailing under false colors. He didn’t know anything about sabotage. He believed that he was probably the least qualified of anybody that security had ever empowered to look into methods of destruction.
Yet, in a sense, that very fact was an advantage. A manmay be set to work to contrive methods of sabotage. Another man may be trained to counter him. The training of the second man is essentially a study of how the first man’s mind works. Then it can be guessed what this saboteur will think and do. But such a trained security man will often be badly handicapped if he comes upon the sabotage methods of a second man—an entirely different saboteur who thinks in a new fashion. The security man may be hampered in dealing with the second man’s sabotage just because he knows too much about the thinking of the first.
Joe went off and scowled at a wall, while the young lieutenant waited hopefully nearby.
He was in a false position. But he could see that there was something odd here. There was a sort of pattern in the way the other sabotage incidents had been planned. It was hard to pick out, but it was there. Joe thought of the trick of booby-trapping a plane during its major overhaul, and then arming the traps at a later date.... A private plane had been fitted to deliver proximity rockets in mid-air when the transport ship flew past. There was the explosion of the cargo parcel which was supposed to contain requisition forms and stationery. And the attempt to smash the entire Platform by getting an atomic bomb into a plane and having a saboteur shoot the crew and then deliver the bomb at the Shed in an officially harmless aircraft....
The common element in all those sabotage tricks was actually clear enough, but Joe wasn’t used to thinking in such terms. He did know, though, that there was a pattern in those devices which did not exist in the blowing up of jet motors from inside.
He scowled and scowled, racking his brains, while the young lieutenant watched respectfully, waiting for Joe to have an inspiration. Had Joe known it, the lieutenant was deeply impressed by his attempt at concentration on the problem it had not been Major Holt’s intention for Joe to consider. When Joe temporarily gave up, the young lieutenant eagerly showed him over the whole field and all its workings.
In mid-morning another pushpot fell screaming from the skies. That made six pushpots and six pilots for this week—two today. The things had no wings. They had no gliding angle. Pointed up, they could climb unbelievably. While their engines functioned, they could be controlled after a fashion. But they were not aircraft in any ordinary meaning of the word. They were engines with fuel tanks and controls in their exhaust blast. When their engines failed, they were so much junk falling out of the sky.
Joe happened to see the second crash, and he didn’t go to noon mess at all. He hadn’t any appetite. Instead, he gloomily let himself be packed full of irrelevant information by the young lieutenant who considered that since Joe had been sent by security to look into sabotage, he must be given every possible opportunity to evaluate—that would be the word the young lieutenant would use—the situation.
But all the time that Joe followed him about, his mind fumbled with a hunch. The idea was that there was a pattern of thinking in sabotage, and if you could solve it, you could outguess the saboteur. But the trouble was to figure out the similarity he felt existed in—say—a private plane shooting rockets and overhaul mechanics planting booby traps and faked shippers getting bombs on planes—and come to think of it, there was Braun....
Braun was the key! Braun had been an honest man, with an honest loyalty to the United States which had given him refuge. But he had been blackmailed into accepting a container of atomic death to be released in the Shed. Radioactive cobalt did not belong in the Shed. That was the key to the pattern of sabotage. Braun was not to use any natural thing that belonged in the Shed. He was to be only the means by which something extraneous and deadly was to have been introduced.
That was it! Somebody was devising ingenious ways to get well-known destructive devices into places where they did not belong, but where they would be effective. Rockets. Bombs. Even radioactive cobalt dust. All were perfectly well-known means of destruction. The minds that planned thosetricks said, in effect: “These things will destroy. How can we get them to where they will destroy something?” It was a strict pattern.
But the pushpot sabotage—and Joe was sure it was nothing else—was not that sort of thing. Making motors explode.... Motors don’t explode. One couldn’t put bombs in them. There wasn’t room. The explosions Joe had seen looked as if they’d centered in the fire basket—technically the combustion area—behind the compressor and before the drive vanes. A jet motor whirled. Its front vanes compressed air, and a flame burned furiously in the compressed air, which swelled enormously and poured out past other vanes that took power from it to drive the compressor. The excess of blast poured out astern in a blue-white flame, driving the ship.
But one couldn’t put a bomb in a fire basket. The temperature would melt anything but the refractory alloys of which a jet motor has to be built. A bomb placed there would explode the instant a motor was started. It couldn’t resist until the pushpot took off. It couldn’t....
This was a different kind of sabotage. There was a different mind at work.
In the afternoon Joe watched the landings, while the young lieutenant followed him patiently about. A pushpot landing was quite unlike the landing of any other air-borne thing. It came flying down with incredible clumsiness, making an uproar out of all proportion to its landing speed. Pushpots came in with their tail ends low, crudely and cruelly clumsy in their handling. They had no wings or fins. They had to be balanced by their jet blasts. They had to be steered the same way. When a jet motor conked out there was no control. The pushpot fell.
He carefully watched one landing now. It came down low, and swung in toward the field, and seemed to reach its stern down tentatively to slide on the earth, and the flame of its exhaust scorched the field, and it hesitated, pointing up at an ever steeper angle—and it touched and its nose tilted forward—and leaped up as the jet roared more loudly, and then touched again....
The goal was for pushpots to touch ground finally with the whole weight of the flying monstrosity supported by the vertical thrust of the jet, and while it was moving forward at the lowest possible rate of speed. When that goal was achieved, they flopped solidly flat, slid a few feet on their metal bellies, and lay still. Some hit hard and tried to dig into the earth with their blunt noses. Joe finally saw one touch with no forward speed at all. It seemed to try to settle down vertically, as a rocket takes off. That one fell over backward and wallowed with its belly plates in the air before it rolled over on its side and rocked there.
The last of a flight touched down and flopped, and the memory of the wreckage had been overlaid by these other sights and Joe could think of his next meal without aversion. When it was evening-mess time he went doggedly back to the mess hall. There was a sort of itchy feeling in his mind. He knew something he didn’t know he knew. There was something in his memory that he couldn’t recall.
Talley and Walton were again at mess. Joe went to their table. Talley looked at him inquiringly.
“Yes, I saw both crashes,” said Joe gloomily, “and I didn’t want any lunch. It was sabotage, though. Only it was different in kind—it was different in principle—from the other tricks. But I can’t figure out what it is!”
“Mmmmmm,” said Talley, amiably. “You’d learn something if you could talk to the Resistance fighters and saboteurs in Europe. The Poles were wonderful at it! They had one chap who could get at the tank cars that took aviation gasoline from the refinery to the various Nazi airfields. He used to dump some chemical compound—just a tiny bit—into each carload of gas. It looked all right, smelled all right, and worked all right. But at odd moments Hitler’s planes would crash. The valves would stick and the engine’d conk out.”
Joe stared at him. And it was just as simple as that. He saw.
“The Nazis lost a lot of planes that way,” said Talley. “Those that didn’t crash from stuck valves in flight—they had to have their valves reground. Lost flying time. Wonderful!And when the Nazis did uncover the trick, they had to re-refine every drop of aviation gas they had!”
Joe said: “That’s it!”
“That’s it? Anditis what?”
Then Joe said disgustedly: “Surely! It’s the trick of loading CO2bottles with explosive gas, too! Excuse me!”
He got up from the table and hurried out. He found a phone booth and got the Shed, and then the security office, and at long last Major Holt. The Major’s tone was curt.
“Yes?... Joe?... The three men from the affair of the lake were tracked this morning. When they were cornered they tried to fight. I am afraid we’ll get no information from them, if that’s what you wanted to know.”
The Major’s manner seemed to disapprove of Joe as expressing curiosity. His words meant, of course, that the three would-be murderers had been fatally shot.
Joe said carefully: “That wasn’t what I called about, sir. I think I’ve found out something about the pushpots. How they’re made to crash. But my hunch needs to be checked.”
The Major said briefly: “Tell me.”
Joe said: “All the tricks but one, that were used on the plane I came on, were the same kind of trick. They were all arrangements for getting regular destructive items—bombs or rockets or whatever—where they could explode and smash things. The saboteurs were adding destructive items to various states of things. But there was one trick that was different.”
“Yes?” said the Major, on the telephone.
“Putting explosive gas in the CO2bottles,” said Joe painstakingly, “wasn’t adding a new gadget to a situation. It was changing something that was already there. The saboteurs took something that belonged in a plane and changed it. They did not put something new into a plane—or a situation—that didn’t belong there. It was a special kind of thinking. You see, sir?”
The Major, to do him justice, had the gift of listening. He waited.
“The pushpots,” said Joe, very carefully, “naturally havetheir fuel stored in different tanks in different places, as airplanes do. The pilots switch on one tank or another just like plane pilots. In the underground storage and fueling pits, where all the fuel for the pushpots is kept in bulk, there are different tanks too. Naturally! At the fuel pump, the attendant can draw on any of those underground tanks he chooses.”
The Major said curtly: “Obviously! What of it?”
“The pushpot motors explode,” said Joe. “And they shouldn’t. No bomb could be gotten into them without going off the instant they started, and they don’t blow that way. I make a guess, sir, that one of the underground storage tanks—just one—contains doctored fuel. I’m guessing that as separate tanks in a pushpot are filled up, one by one,oneis filled from a particular underground storage tank that contains doctored fuel. The rest will have normal fuel. And the pushpot is going to crash when that tank, and only that tank, is used!”
Major Holt was very silent.
“You see, sir?” said Joe uneasily. “The pushpots could be fueled a hundred times over with perfectly good fuel, and then one tank in one of them would explode when drawn on. There’d be no pattern in the explosions....”
Major Holt said coldly: “Of course I see! It would need only one tank of doctored fuel to be delivered to the airfield, and it need not be used for weeks. And there would be no trace in the wreckage, after the fire! You are telling me there is one underground storage tank in which the fuel is highly explosive. It is plausible. I will have it checked immediately.”
He hung up, and Joe went back to his meal. He felt uneasy. There couldn’t be any way to make a jet motor explode unless you fed it explosive fuel. Then there couldn’t be any way to stop it. And then—after the wreck had burned—there couldn’t be any way to prove it was really sabotage. But the feeling of having reported only a guess was not too satisfying. Joe ate gloomily. He didn’t pay much attention to Talley. He had that dogged, uncomfortable feeling a man has when he knows he doesn’t qualify as an expert,but feels that he’s hit on something the experts have missed.
Half an hour after the evening mess—near sunset—a security officer wearing a uniform hunted up Joe at the airfield.
“Major Holt sent me over to bring you back to the Shed,” he said politely.
“If you don’t mind,” said Joe with equal politeness, “I’ll check that.”
He went to the phone booth in the barracks. He got Major Holt on the wire. And Major Holt hadn’t sent anybody to get him.
So Joe stayed in the telephone booth—on orders—while the Major did some fast telephoning. It was comforting to know he had a pistol in his pocket, and it was frustrating not to be allowed to try to capture the fake security officer himself. The idea of murdering Joe had not been given up, and he’d have liked to take part personally in protecting himself. But it was much more important for the fake security man to be captured than for Joe to have the satisfaction of attempting it himself.
As a matter of fact, the fake officer started his getaway the instant Joe went to check on his orders. The officer knew they’d be found faked. It had not been practical for him to shoot Joe down where he was. There were too many people around for this murderer to have a chance at a getaway.
But he didn’t get away, at that. Twenty minutes later, while Joe still waited fretfully in the phone booth, the phone bell rang and Major Holt was again on the wire. And this time Joe was instructed to come back to the Shed. He had exact orders whom to come with, and they had orders which identified them to Joe.
Some eight miles from the airfield—it was just dusk—Joe came upon a wrecked car with motorcycle security guards working on it. They stopped Joe’s escort. Joe’s phone call had set off an alarm. A plane had spotted this car tearing away from the airfield, and motorcyclists were guided in pursuit by the plane. When it wouldn’t stop—when the fake Security officer in it tried to shoot his way clear—the planestrafed him. So he was dead and his car was a wreck, and the motorcycle men were trying to get some useful information from his body and the car.
Joe went to the Major’s house in the officers’-quarters area. The Major looked even more tired than before, but he nodded approvingly at Joe. Sally was there too, and she regarded Joe with a look which was a good deal warmer than her father’s.
“You did very well,” said the Major detachedly. “I don’t have too high an opinion of the brains of anybody your age, Joe. When you are my age, you won’t either. But whether you have brains or simply luck, you are turning out to be very useful.”
Joe said: “I’m getting security conscious, sir. I want to stay alive.”
The Major regarded him with irony.
“I was thinking of the fact that when you worked out the matter of the doctored pushpot fuel, you did not try to be a hero and prove it yourself. You referred it to me. That was the proper procedure. You could have been killed, investigating—it’s clear that the saboteurs would be pleased to have a good chance to murder you—and your suspicions might never have reached me. They were correct, by the way. One storage tank underground was half-full of doctored fuel. Rather more important, anotherwasfull, not yet drawn on.”
The Major went on, without apparent cordiality: “It seems probable that if this particular sabotage trick had not been detected—it seems likely that on the Platform’s take-off, all or most of the pushpots would have been fueled to explode at some time after the Platform was aloft, and before it could possibly get out to space.”
Joe felt queer. The Major was telling him, in effect, that he might have kept the Platform from crashing on take-off. It was a good but upsetting sensation. It was still more important to Joe that the Platform get out to space than that he be credited with saving it. And it was not reassuring to hear that it might have been wrecked.
“Your reasoning,” added the Major coldly, “was soundlybased. It seems certain that there is not one central authority directing all the sabotage against the Platform. There are probably several sabotage organizations, all acting independently and probably hating each other, but all hating the Platform more.”
Joe blinked. He hadn’t thought of that. It was disheartening.
“It will really be bad,” said the Major, “if they ever co-operate!”
“Yes, sir,” said Joe.
“But I called you back from the airfield,” the Major told him without warmth, “to say that you have done a good job. I have talked to Washington. Naturally, you deserve a reward.”
“I’m doing all right, sir,” said Joe awkwardly. “I want to see the Platform go up and stay up!”
The Major nodded impatiently.
“Naturally! But—ah—one of the men selected and trained for the crew of the Platform has been—ah—taken ill. In strict confidence, because of sabotage it has been determined to close in the Platform and get it aloft at the earliest possible instant, even if its interior arrangements are incomplete. So—ah—in view of your usefulness, I said to Washington that I believed the greatest reward you could be offered was—ah—to be trained as an alternate crew member, to take this man’s place if he does not recover in time.”
The room seemed to reel around Joe. Then he gulped and said: “Yes, sir! I mean—that’s right. I mean, I’d rather have that, than all the money in the world!”
“Very well.” The Major turned to leave the room. “You’ll stay here, be guarded a good deal more closely than before, and take instructions. But you understand that you are still only an alternate for a crew member! The odds are definitely against your going!”
“That’s—that’s all right, sir,” said Joe unsteadily. “That’s quite all right!”
The Major went out. Joe stood still, trying to realize what all this might mean to him. Then Sally stirred.
“You might say thanks, Joe.”
Her eyes were shining, but she looked proud, too.
“I put it in Dad’s head that that was what you’d like better than anything else,” she told him. “If I can’t go up in the Platform myself—and I can’t—I wanted you to. Because I knew you wanted to.”
She smiled at him as he tried incoherently to talk. With a quiet maternal patience, she led him out on the porch of her father’s house and sat there and listened to him. It was a long time before he realized that she was humoring him. Then he stopped short and looked at her suspiciously. He found that in his enthusiastic gesticulations he had been gesticulating withherhand as well as his own.
“I guess I’m pretty crazy,” he said ruefully. “Shooting off my mouth about myself up there in space.... You’re pretty decent to stand me the way I am, Sally.”
He paused. Then he said humbly: “I’m plain lucky. But knowing you and—having you like me reasonably much is pretty lucky too!”
She looked at him noncommittally.
He added painfully: “And not only because you spoke to your father and told him just the right thing, either. You’re—sort of swell, Sally!”
She let out her breath. Then she grinned at him.
“That’s the difference between us, Joe,” she told him. “To me, what you just said is the most important thing anybody’s said tonight.”
The world turned over on its axis with unfailing regularity, and nights followed mornings and mornings followed nights according to well-established precedent. One man turned up in Bootstrap with radiation burns, but he had not offered himself for check over at the hospital. He was found dead in his lodging. Since nobody else appeared to have suffered any burns at all, it was assumed that he was the messenger who had brought the radioactive cobalt to Braun, who also had been doomed by possession of the deadly stuff, but who had broken the chain of fatality by not dumping it free into the air of the Shed. Under the circumstances, then, three-shift work on the Platform was resumed, and three times in each twenty-four hours fleets of busses rolled out of Bootstrap carrying men to work in the Shed, and rolled back again loaded with men who had just stopped working there.
Trucks carried materials to the Shed, and swing-up doors opened in the great dome’s eastern wall, and the trucks went in and unloaded. Then the trucks went out of the same doors and trundled back for more materials. In the Shed, shining plates of metal swung aloft, and welding torches glittered in the maze of joists and upright pipes that still covered the monster shape. Each day it was a little more nearly complete. In a separate, guarded workshop by a sidewall, the Chief and Haney and Mike the midget labored mightily to accomplish the preposterous. They grew lean and red-eyed from fatigue, and short of temper and ever more fanatical—and security men moved about in seeming uselessness but never-ceasing vigilance.
There were changes, though. The assembly line of pushpots grew shorter, and the remaining monstrosities aroundthe sidewall were plainly near to completion. There came a day, indeed, when only five ungainly objects remained on that line, and even they were completely plated in and needed only a finishing touch. It was at this time that more crates and parcels arrived from the Kenmore Precision Tool plant, and Joe dropped his schoolroomlike instruction course in space flight for work of greater immediate need. He and his allies worked twice around the clock to assemble the replaced parts with the repaired elements of the pilot gyros. They grew groggy from the desperate need both for speed and for absolute accuracy, but they put the complex device together, and adjusted it, and surveyed the result through red-rimmed eyes, and were too weary to rejoice.
Then Joe threw a switch and the reconstituted pilot gyro assembly began to hum quietly, and the humming rose to a whine, and the whine went deliberately up the scale until it ceased to be audible at all. Presently a dial announced the impossible, and they gazed at a device that seemed to be doing nothing whatever. The gyros appeared quite motionless. They spun with such incredible precision that it was not possible to detect that they moved a hairbreadth. And the whole complex device looked very simple and useless.
But the four of them gazed at it—now that it worked—with a sudden passionate satisfaction. Joe moved a control, and the axis of the device moved smoothly to a new place and stayed there. He moved the control again, and it moved to another position and stayed there. And to another and another and another.
Then the Chief took Joe’s place, and under his hand the seemingly static disks—which were actually spinning at forty thousand revolutions per minute—turned obediently and without any appearance of the spectacular. Then Haney worked the controls. And Mike put the device through its paces.
Mike left the gyros spinning so that the main axis pointed at the sun, invisible beyond the Shed’s roof. And then all four of them watched. It took minutes for this last small test to show its results. But visibly and inexorably the pilot gyrosfollowed the unseen sun, and they would have resisted with a force of very many tons any attempt to move them aside by so little as one-tenth of a second of arc, which would mean something like one three-hundred-thousandth of a right angle. And these pilot gyros would control the main gyros with just this precision, and after the Platform was out in space could hold the Platform itself with the steadiness needed for astronomical observation past achievement from the surface of the Earth.
The pilot gyros, in a word, were ready for installation.
Joe and Haney and the Chief and Mike were not beautiful to look at. They were begrimed from head to toe, and their eyes were bloodshot, and they were exhausted to the point where they did not even notice any longer that they were weary. And their mental processes were not at all normal, so that they were quarrelsome and arbitrary and arrogant to the men with the flat-bed trailer who came almost reverently to move their work. They went jealously with the thing they had rebuilt, and they were rude to engineers and construction workers and supervisors, and they shouted angrily at each other as it was hoisted up a shaft that had been left in the Platform for its entrance, and they were very far from tactful as they watched with hot, anxious eyes as it was bolted into place.
It would be welded later, but first it was tried out. And it moved the main gyros! They weighed many times what the pilot gyros did, but even when they were spinning the pilot gyros stirred them. Of course the main-gyro linkage to the fabric of the Shed had to be broken for this test, or the gyros would have twisted the giant upon its support and all the scaffolding around it would have been broken and the men on it killed.
But the gyros worked! They visibly and unquestionably worked! They controlled the gigantic wheels that would steer the Platform in its take-off, and later would swing it to receive the cargo rockets coming up from Earth. The pilot instrument worked! There was no vibration. In its steering apparatus the Platform was ready for space!
Then the Chief yawned, and his eyes glazed as he stood in the huge gyro room. And Haney’s knees wobbled, and he sat down and was instantly asleep. Then Joe vaguely saw somebody—it was Major Holt—holding Mike in his arms as if Mike were a baby. Mike would have resented it furiously if he had been awake. And then suddenly Joe didn’t know what was going on around him, either.
There was a definite hiatus in his consciousness. He came back to awareness very slowly. He was half-awake and half-asleep for a long time. He only knew contentedly that his job was finished. Then, slowly, he realized that he was in a bunk in one of the Platform sleeping cabins, and the inflated cover that was Sally’s contribution to the Platform held him very gently in place. Somehow it was infinitely soothing, and he had an extraordinary sensation of peacefulness and relaxation and fulfillment. The pilot gyros were finished and in position. His responsibility to them was ended. And he had slept the clock around three times. He’d slept for thirty-six hours. He was starving.
Sally had evidently constituted herself a watch over Joe as he slept, because she faced him immediately when he went groggily out of the cabin to look for a place to wash. He was still covered with the grime of past labor, and he had been allowed to sleep with only his shoes removed. He was not an attractive sight. But Sally regarded him with an approval that her tone belied.
“You can get a shower,” she told him firmly, “and then I’ll have some breakfast for you. Fresh clothes are waiting, too.”
Joe said peacefully: “The gyros are finished and they work!”
“Don’t I know?” demanded Sally. “Go get washed and come back for breakfast. The Chief and Haney and Mike are already awake. And because of the four of you, they’ve been able to advance the Platform’s take-off time—to just two days off! It leaked out, and now it’s official. And you made it possible!”
This was a slight exaggeration, but it was pardonable becauseof Sally’s partiality for Joe. He went groggily into the special shower arrangement in the Platform. In orbit, there would be no gravity, so a tub bath was unthinkable. The shower cabinet was a cubbyhole with handgrips on all four sides and straps into which one could slip his feet. When Joe turned handles, needle sprays sprang at him from all sides, and simultaneously a ventilator fan began to run. When in space that fan could draw out what would otherwise become an inchoate mixture of air and quite weightless water-drops. In space a man might drown in his own shower bath without the fan. The apparatus for collecting the water again was complex, but Joe didn’t think about that at the moment. He considered ruefully that however convenient this system might be out in the Platform’s orbit, it left something to be desired on Earth.
But there were clean clothes waiting when he came out. He dressed and felt brand new and utterly peaceful and rested, and it seemed to him very much like the way he had often felt on a new spring morning. It was very, very good!
Then he smelled coffee and became ravenous.
There were the others in the Platform’s kitchen, sitting in the chairs that had straps on them so the crew needn’t float about because of weightlessness. There was an argument in progress. The Chief grinned at Joe. Mike the midget looked absorbed. Haney was thinking something out, rather painfully. Sally was busy at the Platform’s very special stove. She had ham and eggs and pancakes ready for Joe to eat.
“Gentlemen,” she said, “you are about to eat the first meal ever cooked in a space ship—and like it!”
She served them and sat companionably down with them all. But her eyes were very warm when she looked at Joe.
“Leavin’ aside what we were arguin’ about,” said the Chief blissfully, “Sally here—mind if I call you Sally, ma’am?—she says the slide-rule guys have given our job the works and they say it’s a better job than they designed. Take a bow, Joe.”
Sally said firmly: “When the technical journals are through talking about the job you did, you’ll all four be famous forprecision-machining technique and improvements on standard practices.”
“Which,” said the Chief sarcastically, “is gonna make us feel fine when we’re back to welding and stuff!”
“No more welding,” Sally told him. “Not on this job. The Platform’s closed in. They’ve started to take down the scaffolding.”
The Chief looked startled. Haney asked: “Laying off men yet?”
“Not you,” Sally assured him. “Definitely not you. You four have the very top super-special security rating there is! I think you’re the only four people in the world my father is sure can’t be reached, somehow, to make you harm the Platform.”
Mike said abruptly: “Yeah. The Major thought he had headaches before. Now he’s really got ’em!”
Mike hadn’t seemed to be listening. He’d acted as if he were feverishly absorbing the feel of being inside the Platform—not as a workman building it, but as a man whose proper habitat it would become. But Joe suddenly realized that his comment was exact. There’d been plenty of sabotage to prevent the Platform from reaching completion. But now it was ready to take off in two days. If it was to be stopped, it would have to be stopped within forty-eight hours by people with plenty of resources, who for their own evil ends needed it to be stopped. These last two days would contain the last-ditch, most desperate, most completely ruthless stepped-up attempts at destruction that could possibly be made. And Major Holt had to handle them.
But the four at table—five, with Sally—were peculiarly relaxed. The matter they’d handled had been conspicuous, perhaps, but it was still only one of thousands that had to be accomplished before the Platform could take off. But they had the infinitely restful feeling of a job well done.
“No more welding,” said Haney meditatively, “and our job on the gyros finished. What are we gonna do?”
The Chief said forcefully: “Me, I’m gonna sweep floors orsomething, but I’m sure gonna stick around and watch the take-off!”
Joe said nothing. He looked at Sally. She became very busy, making certain the others did not want more to eat. After a long time Joe said, with very careful casualness, “Come to think of it, I was getting loaded up with astrogation theory when I had to stop and pitch in on the gyros. How’s that sick crew member, Sally?”
“I—wouldn’t know,” answered Sally unconvincingly. “Have some more coffee?”
Joe made his face go completely expressionless. There was nothing else to do. Sally hadn’t said that his chances looked bad for making the crew of the Platform when it went out to space. But Sally had ways of knowing things. She would be sure to keep informed on a matter like that, because she was wearing Joe’s ring and it would have taken a great deal of discouragement to keep her from finding out good news to tell him. She didn’t have any good news. So it must be bad.
Joe drank his coffee, trying to make himself believe that he’d known all along he wasn’t going to make the crew. He’d started late to learn the things a crew member ought to know. He’d stopped at the most crucial part of his training to work on the gyros, which were more crucial still. He’d slept a day and a half. The platform would take off in forty-eight hours. He tried to reason carefully that it was common sense to use a man who was fully trained from the beginning for a place in the crew, rather than a latecomer like himself. But it wasn’t easy to take.
Mike the midget said suddenly: “I got a hunch.”
“Shoot it,” said the Chief, amiably.
“I got a hunch I know what kind of sabotage will be tried next—and when,” said Mike.
The others looked at him—all but Joe, who stared at the wall.
“There hasn’t been one set of guys trying to smash the Platform,” said Mike excitedly. “There’s been four or five. Joe found a gang sabotaging the pushpots that didn’t think like the gang that blackmailed Braun. And the gang thattried to kill us up at Red Canyon may be another. There could be others: fascists and commies and nationalists and crackpots of all kinds. And they all know they’ve got to work fast, even if they have to help each other. Get it?”
Haney growled.
“I’ll buy what you’ve said so far,” said the Chief. “Sure! Those so-and-sos will all pile in everything they got at the last minute. They’ll even pull together to smash the Platform—and then double-cross each other afterward. But what’ll they do, an’ when?”
“This time they’ll try outright violence,” said Mike coldly, “instead of sneaking. They’ll try something really rough. For sneaking, one time’s as good as another, but for really rough stuff, there’s just one time when the Platform hasn’t got plenty of guys around ready to fight for it.”
The Chief whistled softly.
“You mean change-shift time! Which one?”
“The first one possible,” said Mike briefly. “After every shift, things will get tighter. So my guess is the next shift, if they can. And if one gang starts something, the others will have to jump right in. You see?”
That made sense. One attempt at actual violence, defeated, would create a rigidity of defense that would make others impossible. If a successful attempt at violent sabotage was to be made, the efforts of all groups would have to be timed to the first, or abandoned.
“I could—uh—set up a sort of smoke screen,” said Mike. “We’ll fake we’re going to smash something—and let those saboteurs find it out. They’ll see it as a chance to do their stuff with us to run interference for them.—Sally, does your father sure-enough trust us?”
Sally nodded.
“He doesn’t talk very cordially, but he trusts you.”
“Okay,” said Mike. “You tell him, private, that I’m setting up something tricky. He can laugh off anything his security guys report that I’m mixed up in. Joe’ll see that he gets the whole picture beforehand. But he ain’t to tell anybody—notanybody—that something is getting framed up. Right?”
“I’ll ask him,” said Sally. “He is pretty desperate. He’s sure some last-minute frantic assault on the Platform will be made. But——”
“We’ll tip him in plenty of time,” said Mike with authority. “In time for him to play along, but not for a leak to spoil things. Okay?”
“I’ll make the bargain,” Sally assured him, “if it can be made.”
Mike nodded. He drained his coffee cup and slipped down from his chair.
“Come on, Chief! C’mon, Haney!”
He led them out of the room.
Joe fiddled with his spoon a moment, and then said: “The crewman I was to have subbed for if he didn’t get well—he did, didn’t he?”
Sally answered reluctantly: “Y-yes.”
Joe said measuredly: “Well, then—that’s that! I guess it will be all right for me to stick around and watch the take-off?”
Sally’s eyes were misty.
“Of course it will, Joe! I’m so sorry!”
Joe grinned, but even to himself his face seemed like a mask.
“Into each life some rain must fall. Let’s go out and see what’s been accomplished since I went to sleep. All right?”
They went out of the Platform together. And as soon as they reached the floor of the Shed it was plain that the stage had been set for stirring events.
The top five or six levels of scaffolding had already been removed, and more of the girders and pipes were coming down in bundles on lines from giraffelike cranes. There were some new-type trucks in view, too, giants of the kind that carry ready-mixed concrete through city streets. They were pouring a doughy white paste into huge buckets that carried it aloft, where it vanished into the mouths of tubes that seemed to replace the scaffolding along the Platform’s sides.
“Lining the rockets,” said Sally in a subdued voice.
Joe watched. He knew about this, too. It had been controversial for a time. After the pushpots and their jatos had served as the first two stages of a multiple-rocket aggregation, the Platform carried rocket fuel as the third stage. But the Platform was a highly special ballistic problem. It would take off almost horizontally—a great advantage in fueling matters. This was practical simply because the Platform could be lifted far beyond effective air resistance, and already have considerable speed before its own rockets flared.
Moreover, it was not a space ship in the sense of needing rockets for landing purposes. It wouldn’t land. Not ever. And again there was the fact that men would be riding in it. That ruled out the use of eight- and ten- and fifteen-gravity acceleration. It had to make use of a long period of relatively slow acceleration rather than a brief terrific surge of power. So its very special rockets had been designed as the answer.
They were solid-fuel rockets, though solid fuels had been long abandoned for long-range missiles. But they were entirely unlike other solid-fuel drives. The pasty white compound being hauled aloft was a self-setting refractory compound with which the rocket tubes would be lined, with the solid fuel filling the center. The tubes themselves were thin steel—absurdly thin—but wound with wire under tension to provide strength against bursting, like old-fashioned rifle cannon.
When the fuel was fired, it would be at the muzzle end of the rocket tube, and the fuel would burn forward at so many inches per second. The refractory lining would resist the rocket blast for a certain time and then crumble away. Crumbling, the refractory particles would be hurled astern and so serve as reaction mass. When the steel outer tubes were exposed, they would melt and be additional reaction mass.