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

had the quality of hellish hate. And then there was a surging of bodies—Major Holt’s reserve was arriving very late in the center of the Shed—and then a struggling group trampled all over the pair who squirmed and fought on the ground, and a heavy boot jammed down Joe’s head and he felt teeth sink in his throat. They dug into his flesh, worrying and tearing....

Joe used his knee in a frenzy of revulsion—used his knee as the other man had tried to use his in the first instant of battle. The man beneath him screamed as an animal would [Pg 146]scream, and Joe jerked his bleeding throat free. In hysterical horror he pounded his antagonist’s head on the floor until the man went limp....

And then he heard a grim voice saying: “Quit it or you get your head blown off! Quit it——” And Joe panted: “It’s about time you guys got here! This man came in on that truck. Watch out for that bomb he’s got slung on him....”

[Pg 147]

12

The incoming shift had a messy clean-up job to do. It was accomplished only because security men abruptly took over the work of gang bosses, and all ordinary labor on the Platform was put aside until normal operations were again possible. Even that would not have been feasible but for the walkie-talkies the security men wore. As the situation was sorted out, it was explained to them, and they relayed the news for the satisfaction of the curiosity of those who worked under them. No work—no explanation. It produced immediate and satisfactory co-operation all around.

There had been four separate and independent attempts to wreck the Platform at the same time. One was, of course, the plan of those sympathetic characters who had volunteered to help Mike and his gang win the status of spacemen by firing the Platform’s rockets. There were not many of them, and they had lost heavily. They’d had thermite bombs to destroy the Platform’s vitals. Ultimately the survivors talked freely, if morosely, and that was that.

There had been a particularly ungifted attempt to cause panic in the incoming shift in the rooms where its members were screened before admission to work. Somebody had tried to establish complete confusion there by firing revolver shots in the crowd, expecting the workers to break through to the floor and assigned gentlemen with slabs of explosive to get to the Platform with them. The gentlemen with the explosives had run into Major Holt’s security reserve, and they got nowhere. The creators of panic with revolver shots were finally rescued from their shift-mates and more or less scraped up from the screening-room floor—they were in very bad shape—and carted off to be patched up for questioning. The members of this group had been impractical idealists, and [Pg 148]besides, some of them had lost their nerve, as was evidenced by the discovery of abandoned explosives and detonators in the locker room and men’s room of the Shed.

The most dangerous attempt was, of course, that perfectly planned and co-ordinated assault which had been merely carried out at its original time, without either being hastened or delayed by Mike’s activities. That plan had been beautifully contrived, and it would certainly have been successful but for the machine-gun bullets from the gallery and the fight Joe’s followers put up underneath the Platform.

The exact instant when the whole Shed would be most nearly empty had been fixed upon, and three separate units had worked in perfect timing. There’d been the man in the stalled truck. He’d delayed his exit from the Shed to the precise fraction of a second to get the doors open at the perfect instant. The explosive-laden trucks had raced in at the exact second when they were most certain to get underneath the Platform and detonate their cargoes. There’d been a perfect diversion planned for that, too. Smoke bombs and explosions in the outgoing screening rooms had created real panic, and but for Joe’s order for his group’s walkie-talkies to be turned off would have drawn every security man on duty to that spot.

Mike’s trick, then, had brought some saboteurs into the open, but had merely happened to coincide with the most dangerous and well-organized coup of all. However, it was due to his trick that the Platform was not now a wreck.

There was also another break that was sheer coincidence. It was a discovery that could not possibly have turned up save in a situation of pure chaos artificially induced. Joe had had to react in a personal and vengeful way to the manner in which his especial antagonist had fought him. One expects a man to fight fair by instinct, and to turn to fouls—if he does—in desperation only. But Joe’s personal opponent hadn’t tried a single fair trick. It was as if he’d never heard of a fist blow, but only of murder and mayhem. Joe felt an individual enmity toward him.

Joe didn’t consider himself the most urgent of the injured, [Pg 149]when doctors and nurses took up the work of patching, but Sally was there to help, and she went deathly pale when she saw his bloodstained throat. She dragged him quickly to a doctor. And the doctor looked at Joe and dropped everything else.

But it wasn’t too serious. The antiseptics hurt, and the stitching was unpleasant, but Joe was more worried by the knowledge that Sally was standing there and suffering for him. When he got up from the emergency operating table, the doctor nodded grimly to him.

“That was close!” said the doctor. “Whoever chewed you was working for your jugular vein, and he was halfway through the wall when he stopped. A fraction of an inch more, and he’d have had you!”

“Thanks,” said Joe. His neck felt clumsy with bandages, and when he tried to turn his head the stitches hurt.

Sally’s hand trembled in his when she led him away.

“I didn’t think I’d ever dislike anybody so much,” said Joe angrily, “as I did that man while he was chewing my throat. We were trying to kill each other, of course, but—confound it, people don’t bite!”

“Did you—kill him?” asked Sally in a shaky voice. “Not that I’ll mind! I would have hated the thought ordinarily, but——”

Joe halted. There was a row of stretchers—not too long, at that—in the emergency-hospital space. He looked down at the unconscious man who’d fought him.

“There he is!” he said irritably. “I banged him pretty hard. I don’t like to hate anybody, but the way he fought——”

Sally’s teeth chattered suddenly. She called to one of the security men standing guard by the stretchers.

“I—think my—father is going to want to talk to him,” she said unsteadily. “Don’t—let him be taken away to the hospital until Dad knows, please.”

She started away, her face dead-white and her hand stone-cold.

“What’s the matter?” demanded Joe.

“S-sabotage,” said Sally in an indescribable tone that had a suggestion of heartbreak.

[Pg 150]

She went into her father’s office alone. She came out again with him, and her father looked completely stricken. Miss Ross, his secretary, was with him, too. Her face was like a mask of marble. She had always been a plain woman, a gloomy one, a morbid one. But at the new and horrible look on her face Joe turned his eyes away.

Then Sally was crying beside him, and he put his arm clumsily around her and let her sob on his shoulder, completely puzzled.

He didn’t find out until later what the trouble was. The man who’d tried so earnestly to kill him was Miss Ross’s fiancé. She had met this man during a vacation, as a government secretary, and he was a refugee with an exotic charm that would have fascinated a much more personable and beautiful woman than Miss Ross. They had a whirlwind romance. He confided to her his terror of emissaries from his native country who might kill him. And of course she was more fascinated still. When he asked her to marry him she accepted his proposal. Then, just two weeks before her assignment to the Space Platform project, he vanished. Miss Ross was desperate and lovesick.

One day her telephone rang and his anguished voice told her he’d been abducted, and if she told the police he would be tortured to death. He begged her not to do anything to cause him more torment than was already his.

She’d been trying to keep him alive ever since. Once, when she couldn’t bring herself to carry out an order she’d been given—with threats of torment to him if she failed—she’d received a human finger in the mail, and a scrawled and blood-stained note which cried out of unspeakable torment and begged her not to doom him to more.

So Miss Ross, who was Major Holt’s secretary and one of his most trusted assistants, had been giving information to one group of saboteurs all the while. She was the most dangerous security leak in the whole Platform project.

But her fiancé wasn’t a captive. He was the head of that group of saboteurs. He’d made love to her and proposed to her merely to prepare her to supply the information he [Pg 151]wanted. He needed only to write a sufficiently agonized note, or gasp tormented pleas on a telephone, to get what he wanted.

Incidentally, he still had all his fingers when Joe knocked him cold.

Sally had recognized him as the subject of a snapshot she’d once seen Miss Ross crying over. Miss Ross had hidden it hastily and told her it was someone she had once loved, now dead. And this inadvertent disclosure that Miss Ross was the security leak the Major had never had a clue to could only have come about through such confusion as Mike had instigated and Haney and the Chief and Joe had organized. But Joe learned those facts only later.

At the moment, there was still the Platform to be gotten aloft. And there was plenty of work to do. There were two small rips in the plating, caused by fragments of the exploded truck. There were some bullet holes. The Platform could resist small meteorites at forty-five miles a second, but a high-velocity small-arm projectile could puncture it. Those scars of battle had to be welded shut. The rest of the scaffolding had to come down and the rest of the rocket tubes had to be affixed. And there was cleaning up to be done.

These things occupied the shift that came on at the time of the multiple sabotage assaults. At first the work was ragged. But the policy of turning the Security men into news broadcasters worked well. After all, the Platform was a construction job and the men who worked on it were not softies. Most of them had seen men killed before. Before the shift was half over, a definite work rhythm was evident. Men had begun to take an even greater pride in the thing they had built, because it had been assailed and not destroyed. And the job was almost over.

Sally went back to her father’s quarters, to try to sleep. Joe stayed in the Shed. His throat was painful enough so that he didn’t want to go to bed until he was genuinely tired, and he was thoroughly wrought up.

Mike the midget had gone peacefully to sleep again, curled up in a corner of the outgoing screening room. His fellow [Pg 152]midgets talked satisfiedly among themselves. Presently, to show their superiority to mere pitched battles, two of them brought out a miniature pack of cards and started a card game while they waited for a bus to take them back to Bootstrap.

The Chief’s Indian associates loafed comfortably while waiting for the same busses. Later they would put in for overtime—and get it. Haney mourned that he had been remote from the scene of action, and was merely responsible for the presence and placing and firing of the machine guns that had certainly kept the Platform from being blown up from below.

It seemed that nothing else would happen to bother anybody. But there was one thing more.

That thing happened just two hours before it was time for the shift to change once again, and when normal work was back in progress in the Shed. Everything seemed fully organized and serene. Everything in the Shed had settled down, and nothing had happened outside.

There was ample exterior protection, of course, but the outside-guard system hadn’t had anything to do for a very long time. Men at radar screens were bored and sleepy from sheer inactivity and silence. Pilots in jet planes two miles and five miles and eight miles high had long since grown weary of the splendid view below them. After all, one can get very used to late, slanting moonlight on cloud masses far underneath, and bright and hostile-seeming stars overhead.

So the thing was