Space Platform by Murray Leinster (miss read books .txt) 📗

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 had [Pg 101]said 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 satisfyingly [Pg 102]and 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.

[Pg 103]

9

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, its [Pg 104]upper 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, [Pg 105]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.

[Pg 106]

“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 to [Pg 107]the 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,”