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

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 gyros [Pg 121]followed 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!

[Pg 122]

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 because [Pg 123]of 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 for [Pg 124]precision-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 or [Pg 125]something, 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 that [Pg 126]tried 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