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

trailing them. The car pulled up beside the fog wagon, then sped swiftly to where Joe was coming out of wild rage and sinking into sick, black depression. He’d been responsible for the pilot gyros and their safe [Pg 31]arrival. What had happened wasn’t his fault, but it was not his job merely to remain blameless. It was his job to get the gyros delivered and set up in the Space Platform. He had failed.

The black car braked to a stop. There was Major Holt. Joe had seen him six months before. He’d aged a good deal. He looked grimly at the two pilots.

“What happened?” he demanded. “You dumped your fuel! What burned like this?”

Joe said thickly: “Everything was dumped but the pilot gyros. They didn’t burn! They were packed at the plant!”

The co-pilot suddenly made an incoherent sound of rage. “I’ve got it!” he said hoarsely. “I know——”

“What?” snapped Major Holt.

“They—planted that grenade at the—major overhaul!” panted the co-pilot, too enraged even to swear. “They—fixed it so—any trouble would mean a wreck! And I—pulled the fire-extinguisher releases just as we hit! For all compartments! To flood everything with CO2! But it wasn’t CO2! That’s what burned!”

Major Holt stared sharply at him. He held up his hand. Somebody materialized beside him. He said harshly: “Get the extinguisher bottles sealed and take them to the laboratory.”

“Yes, sir!”

A man went running toward the wreck. Major Holt said coldly: “That’s a new one. We should have thought of it. You men get yourselves attended to and report to Security at the Shed.”

The pilot and co-pilot turned away. Joe turned to go with them. Then he heard Sally’s voice, a little bit wobbly: “Joe! Come with us, please!”

Joe hadn’t seen her, but she was in the car. She was pale. Her eyes were wide and frightened.

Joe said stiffly: “I’ll be all right. I want to look at those crates——”

Major Holt said curtly: “They’re already under guard. There’ll have to be photographs made before anything can [Pg 32]be touched. And I want a report from you, anyhow. Come along!”

Joe looked. The motorcycles were abandoned, and there were already armed guards around the still-steaming wreck, grimly watching the men of the fog wagon as they hunted for remaining sparks or flame. It was noticeable that now nobody moved toward the wreck. There were figures walking back toward the edge of the field. What civilians were about, even to the mechanics on duty, had started out to look at the debris at close range. But the guards were on the job. Nobody could approach. The onlookers went back to their proper places.

“Please, Joe!” said Sally shakily.

Joe got drearily into the car. The instant he seated himself, it was in motion again. It went plunging back across the field and out the entrance. Its horn blared and it went streaking toward the town and abruptly turned to the left. In seconds it was on a broad white highway that left the town behind and led toward the emptiness of the desert.

But not quite emptiness. Far, far away there was a great half-globe rising against the horizon. The car hummed toward it, tires singing. And Joe looked at it and felt ashamed, because this was the home of the Space Platform, and he hadn’t brought to it the part for which he alone was responsible.

Sally moistened her lips. She brought out a small box. She opened it. There were bandages and bottles.

“I’ve a first-aid kit, Joe,” she said shakily. “You’re burned. Let me fix the worst ones, anyhow!”

Joe looked at himself. One coat sleeve was burned to charcoal. His hair was singed on one side. A trouser leg was burned off around the ankle. When he noticed, his burns hurt.

Major Holt watched her spread a salve on scorched skin. He showed no emotion whatever.

“Tell me what happened,” he commanded. “All of it!”

Somehow, there seemed very little to tell, but Joe told it baldly as the car sped on. The great half-ball of metal loomed larger and larger but did not appear to grow nearer as Sally [Pg 33]practiced first aid. They came to a convoy of trucks, and the horn blared, and they turned out and passed it. Once they met a convoy of empty vehicles on the way back to Bootstrap. They passed a bus. They went on.

Joe finished drearily: “The pilots did everything anybody could. Even checked off the packages as they were dumped. We reported the one that blew up.”

Major Holt said uncompromisingly: “Those were orders. In a sense we’ve gained something even by this disaster. The pilots are probably right about the plane’s having been booby-trapped after its last overhaul, and the traps armed later. I’ll have an inspection made immediately, and we’ll see if we can find how it was done.

“There’s the man you think armed the trap on this plane. An order for his arrest is on the way now. I told my secretary. And—hm.... That CO2——”

“I didn’t understand that,” said Joe drearily.

“Planes have CO2 bottles to put fires out,” said the Major impatiently. “A fire in flight lights a red warning light on the instrument panel, telling where it is. The pilot pulls a handle, and CO2 floods the compartment, putting it out. And this ship was coming in for a crash landing so the pilot—according to orders—flooded all compartments with CO2. Only it wasn’t.”

Sally said in horror: “Oh, no!”

“The CO2 bottles were filled with an inflammable or an explosive gas,” said her father, unbending. “Instead of making a fire impossible, they made it certain. We’ll have to watch out for that trick now, too.”

Joe was too disheartened for any emotion except a bitter depression and a much more bitter hatred of those who were ready to commit any crime—and had committed most—in the attempt to destroy the Platform.

The Shed that housed it rose and rose against the skyline. It became huge. It became monstrous. It became unbelievable. But Joe could have wept when the car pulled up at an angular, three-story building built out from the Shed’s base. From the air, this substantial building had looked like [Pg 34]a mere chip. The car stopped. They got out. A sentry saluted as Major Holt led the way inside. Joe and Sally followed.

The Major said curtly to a uniformed man at a desk: “Get some clothes for this man. Get him a long-distance telephone connection to the Kenmore Precision Tool Company. Let him talk. Then bring him to me again.”

He disappeared. Sally tried to smile at Joe. She was still quite pale.

“That’s Dad, Joe. He means well, but he’s not cordial. I was in his office when the report of sabotage to your plane came through. We started for Bootstrap. We were on the way when we saw the first explosion. I—thought it was your ship.” She winced a little at the memory. “I knew you were on board. It was—not nice, Joe.”

She’d been badly scared. Joe wanted to thump her encouragingly on the back, but he suddenly realized that that would no longer be appropriate. So he said gruffly: “I’m all right.”

He followed the uniformed man. He began to get out of his scorched and tattered garments. The sergeant brought him more clothes, and he put them on. He was just changing his personal possessions to the new pockets when the sergeant came back again.

“Kenmore plant on the line, sir.”

Joe went to the phone. On the way he discovered that the banging around he’d had when the plane landed had made a number of places on his body hurt.

He talked to his father.

Afterward, he realized that it was a queer conversation. He felt guilty because something had happened to a job that had taken eight months to do and that he alone was escorting to its destination. He told his father about that. But his father didn’t seem concerned. Not nearly so much concerned as he should have been. He asked urgent questions about Joe himself. If he was hurt. How much? Where? Joe was astonished that his father seemed to think such matters more important than the pilot gyros. But he answered the questions and explained the exact situation and also a certain desperate [Pg 35]hope he was trying to cherish that the gyros might still be repairable. His father gave him advice.

Sally was waiting again when he came out. She took him into her father’s office, and introduced him to her father’s secretary. Compared to Sally she was an extraordinarily plain woman. She wore a sorrowful expression. But she looked very efficient.

Joe explained carefully that his father said for him to hunt up Chief Bender—working on the job out here—because he was one of the few men who’d left the Kenmore plant to work elsewhere, and he was good. He and the Chief, between them, would estimate the damage and the possibility of repair.

Major Holt listened. He was military and official and harassed and curt and tired. Joe’d known Sally and therefore her father all his life, but the Major wasn’t an easy man to be relaxed with. He spoke into thin air, and immediately his sad-seeming secretary wrote out a pass for Joe. Then Major Holt gave crisp orders on a telephone and asked questions, and Sally said: “I know. I’ll take him there. I know my way around.”

Her father’s expression did not change. He simply included Sally in his orders on the phone.

He hung up and said briefly: “The plane will be surveyed and taken apart as soon as possible. By the time you find your man you can probably examine the crates. I’ll have you cleared for it.”

His secretary reached in a drawer for order forms to fill out and hand him to sign. Sally tugged at Joe’s arm. They left.

Outside, she said: “There’s no use arguing with my father, Joe. He has a terrible job, and it’s on his mind all the time. He hates being a Security officer, too. It’s a thankless job—and no Security officer ever gets to be more than a major. His ability never shows. What he does is never noticed unless it fails. So he’s frustrated. He’s got poor Miss Ross—his secretary, you know—so she just listens to what he says must be done and she writes it out. Sometimes he goes [Pg 36]days without speaking to her directly. But really it’s pretty bad! It’s like a war with no enemy to fight except spies! And the things they do! They’ve been known even to booby-trap a truck after an accident, so anybody who tries to help will be blown up! So everything has to be done in a certain way or everything will be ruined!”

She led him to an office with a door that opened directly into the Shed. In spite of his bitterness, Joe was morosely impatient to see inside. But Sally had to identify him formally as the Joe Kenmore who was the subject of her father’s order, and his fingerprints had to be taken, and somebody had him stand for a moment before an X-ray screen. Then she led him through the door, and he was in the Shed where the Space Platform was under construction.

It was a vast cavern of metal sheathing and spidery girders, filled with sound and detail. It took him seconds to begin to absorb what he saw and heard. The Shed was five hundred feet high in the middle, and it was all clear space without a single column or interruption. There were arc lamps burning about its edges, and high up somewhere there were strips of glass which let in a pale light. All of it resounded with many noises and clanging echoes of them.

There were rivet guns at work, and there were the grumblings of motor trucks moving about, and the oddly harsh roar of welding torches. But the torch flames looked only like marsh fires, blue-white and eerie against the mass of the thing that was being built.

It was not too clear to the eye, this incomplete Space Platform. There seemed to be a sort of mist, a glamour about it, which was partly a veiling mass of scaffolding. But Joe gazed at it with an emotion that blotted out even his aching disappointment and feeling of shame.

It was gigantic. It had the dimensions of an ocean liner. It was strangely shaped. Partly obscured by the fragile-seeming framework about it, there was bright plating in swelling curves, and the plating reached up irregularly and followed a peculiar pattern, and above the plating there were girders—themselves shining brightly in the light of many arc [Pg 37]lamps—and they rose up and up toward the roof of the Shed itself. The Platform was ungainly and it was huge, and it rested under a hollow metal half-globe that could have doubled for a sky.