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

It was more than three hundred feet high, itself, and there were men working on the bare bright beams of its uppermost parts—and the men were specks. The far side of the Shed’s floor had other men on it, and they were merely jerkily moving motes. You couldn’t see their legs as they walked. The Shed and the Platform were monstrous!

Joe felt Sally’s eyes upon him. Somehow, they looked proud. He took a deep breath.

She said: “Come on.”

They walked across acres of floor neatly paved with shining wooden blocks. They moved toward the thing that was to take mankind’s first step toward the stars. As they walked centerward, a big sixteen-wheel truck-and-trailer outfit backed out of an opening under the lacy haze of scaffolds. It turned clumsily, and carefully circled the scaffolding, and moved toward a sidewall of the Shed. A section of the wall—it seemed as small as a rabbit hole—lifted inward like a flap, and the sixteen-wheeler trundled out into the blazing sunlight. Four other trucks scurried out after it. Other trucks came in. The sidewall section closed.

There was the smell of engine fumes and hot metal and of ozone from electric sparks. There was that indescribable smell a man can get homesick for, of metal being worked by men. Joe walked like someone in a dream, with Sally satisfiedly silent beside him, until the scaffolds—which had looked like veiling—became latticework and he saw openings.

They walked into one such tunnel. The bulk of the Platform above them loomed overhead with a crushing menace. There were trucks rumbling all around underneath, here in this maze of scaffold columns. Some carried ready-loaded cages waiting to be snatched up by hoists. Crane grips came down, and snapped fast on the cages, and lifted them up and up and out of sight. There was a Diesel running somewhere, and a man stood and stared skyward and made motions with his hands, and the Diesel adjusted its running to his signals. [Pg 38]Then some empty cages came down and landed in a waiting truck body with loud clanking noises. Somebody cast off the hooks, and the truck grumbled and drove away.

Sally spoke to a preoccupied man in shirt sleeves with a badge on an arm band near his shoulder. He looked carefully at the passes she carried, using a flashlight to make sure. Then he led them to a shaft up which a hoist ran. It was very noisy here. A rivet gun banged away overhead, and the plates of the Platform rang with the sound, and the echoes screeched, and to Joe the bedlam was infinitely good to hear. The man with the arm band shouted into a telephone transmitter, and a hoist cage came down. Joe and Sally stepped on it. Joe took a firm grip on her shoulder, and the hoist shot upward.

The hugeness of the Shed and the Platform grew even more apparent as the hoist accelerated toward the roof. The flooring seemed to expand. Spidery scaffold beams dropped past them. There were things being built over by the sidewall. Joe saw a crawling in-plant tow truck moving past those enigmatic objects. It was a tiny truck, no more than four feet high and with twelve-inch wheels. It dragged behind it flat plates of metal with upturned forward edges. They slid over the floor like sledges. Cryptic loads were carried on those plates, and the tow truck stopped by a mass of steel piping being put together, and began to unload the plates.

Then the hoist slowed abruptly and Sally winced a little. The hoist stopped.

Here—two hundred feet up—a welding crew worked on the skin of the Platform itself. The plating curved in and there was a wide flat space parallel to the ground. There was also a great gaping hole beyond. Though girders rose roofward even yet, this was as high as the plating had gone. That opening—Joe guessed—would ultimately be the door of an air lock, and this flat surface was designed for a tender rocket to anchor to by magnets. When a rocket came up from Earth with supplies or reliefs for the Platform’s crew, or with fuel to be stored for an exploring ship’s later [Pg 39]use, it would anchor here and then inch toward that doorway....

There were half a dozen men in the welding crew. They should have been working. But two men battered savagely at each other, their tools thrown down. One was tall and lean, with a wrinkled face and an expression of intolerable fury. The other was squat and dark with a look of desperation. A third man was in the act of putting down his welding torch—he’d carefully turned it off first—to try to interfere. Another man gaped. Still another was climbing up by a ladder from the scaffold level below.

Joe put Sally’s hand on the hoist upright, instinctively freeing himself for action.

The lanky man lashed out a terrific roundhouse blow. It landed, but the stocky man bored in. Joe had an instant’s clear sight of his face. It was not the face of a man enraged. It had the look of a man both desperate and despairing.

Then the lanky man’s foot slipped. He lost balance, and the stocky man’s fist landed. The thin man reeled backward. Sally cried out, choking. The lanky man teetered on the edge of the flat place. Behind him, the plating curved down. Below him there were two hundred feet of fall through the steel-pipe maze of scaffolds. If he took one step back he was gone inexorably down a slope on which he could never stop.

He took that step. The stocky man’s face abruptly froze in horror. The lanky man stiffened convulsively. He couldn’t stop. He knew it. He’d go back and on over the rounded edge, and fall. He might touch the scaffolding. It would not stop him. It would merely set his body spinning crazily as it dropped and crashed again and again before it landed two hundred feet below.

It was horror in slow motion, watching the lean man stagger backward to his death.

Then Joe leaped.

[Pg 40]

4

For an instant, in mid-air, Joe was incongruously aware of all the noises in the Shed. The murky, girdered ceiling still three hundred feet above him. The swelling, curving, glittering surface of steel underneath. Then he struck. He landed beside the lean man, with his left arm outstretched to share his impetus with him. Alone, he would have had momentum enough to carry himself up the slope down which the man had begun to descend. But now he shared it. The two of them toppled forward together. Their arms were upon the flat surface, while their bodies dangled. The feel of gravity pulling them slantwise and downward was purest nightmare.

But then, as Joe’s innards crawled, the same stocky man who had knocked the lean man back was dragging frantically at both of them to pull them to safety.

Then there were two men pulling. The stocky man’s face was gray. His horror was proof that he hadn’t intended murder. The man who’d put down his welding torch pulled. The man who’d been climbing the ladder put his weight to the task of getting them back to usable footing. They reached safety. Joe scrambled to his feet, but he felt sick at the pit of his stomach. The stocky man began to shake horribly. The lanky one advanced furiously upon him.

“I didn’ mean to keel you, Haney!” the dark one panted.

The lanky one snapped: “Okay. You didn’t. But come on, now! We finish this——”

He advanced toward the workman who had so nearly [Pg 41]caused his death. But the other man dropped his arms to his sides.

“I don’ fight no more,” he said thickly. “Not here. You keel me is okay. I don’ fight.”

The lanky man—Haney—growled at him.

“Tonight, then, in Bootstrap. Now get back to work!”

The stocky man picked up his tools. He was trembling.

Haney turned to Joe and said ungraciously: “Much obliged. What’s up?”

Joe still felt queasy. There is rarely any high elation after one has risked his life for somebody else. He’d nearly plunged two hundred feet to the floor of the Shed with Haney. But he swallowed.

“I’m looking for Chief Bender. You’re Haney? Foreman?”

“Gang boss,” said Haney. He looked at Joe and then at Sally who was holding convulsively to the upright Joe had put her hand on. Her eyes were closed. “Yeah,” said Haney. “The Chief took off today. Some kind of Injun stuff. Funeral, maybe. Want me to tell him something? I’ll see him when I go off shift.”

There was an obscure movement somewhere on this part of the Platform. A tiny figure came out of a crevice that would someday be an air lock. Joe didn’t move his eyes toward it. He said awkwardly: “Just tell him Joe Kenmore’s in town and needs him. He’ll remember me, I think. I’ll hunt him up tonight.”

“Okay,” said Haney.

Joe’s eyes went to the tiny figure that had come out from behind the plating. It was a midget in baggy, stained work garments like the rest of the men up here. He wore a miniature welding shield pushed back on his head. Joe could guess his function, of course. There’d be corners a normal-sized man couldn’t get into, to buck a rivet or weld a joint. There’d be places only a tiny man could properly inspect. The midget regarded Joe without expression.

Joe turned to the hoist to go down to the floor again. Haney waved his hand. The midget lifted his, in grave salutation.

[Pg 42]

The hoist dropped down the shaft. Sally opened her eyes.

“You—saved that man’s life, Joe,” she said unsteadily. “But you scared me to death!”

Joe tried to ignore the remark, but he still seemed to feel slanting metal under him and a drop of two hundred feet below. It had been a nightmarish sensation.

“I didn’t think,” he said uncomfortably. “It was a crazy thing to do. Lucky it worked out.”

Sally glanced at him. The hoist still dropped swiftly. Levels of scaffolding shot upward past them. If Joe had slipped down that rolling curve of metal, he’d have dropped past all these. It was not good to think about. He swallowed again. Then the hoist checked in its descent. It stopped. Joe somewhat absurdly helped Sally off to solid ground.

“It—looks to me,” said Sally, “as if you’re bound to make me see somebody killed. Joe, would you mind leading a little bit less adventurous life for a while? While I’m around?”

He managed to grin. But he still did not feel right.

“Nothing I can do until I can look at the plane,” he said, changing the subject, “and I can’t find the Chief until tonight. Could we sightsee a little?”

She nodded. They went out from under the intricate framework that upheld the Platform. They went, in fact, completely under that colossal incomplete object. Sally indicated the sidewall.

“Let’s go look at the pushpots. They’re fascinating!”

She led the way. The enormous spaciousness of the Shed again became evident. There was a catwalk part way up the inward curving wall. Someone leaned on its railing and surveyed the interior of the Shed. He would probably be a security man. Maybe the fist fight up on the Platform had been seen, or maybe not. The man on the catwalk was hardly more than a speck, and it occurred to Joe that there must be other watchers’ posts high up on the outer shell where men could search the sunlit desert outside for signs of danger.

But he turned and looked yearningly back at the monstrous thing under the mist of scaffolding. For the first time he could make out its shape. It was something like an egg, but [Pg 43]a great deal more like something he couldn’t put a name to. Actually it was exactly like nothing in the world but itself, and when it was out in space there would be nothing left on Earth like it.

It would be in a fashion a world in itself, independent of the Earth that made it. There would be hydroponic tanks in which plants would grow to purify its air and feed its crew. There would be telescopes with which men would be able to study the stars as they had never been able to do from the bottom of Earth’s ocean of turbulent air. But it would serve Earth.

There would be communicators. They would pick up microwave messages and retransmit them to destinations far around the curve of the planet, or else store them and retransmit them to the other side of the world an hour or two hours later.

It would store fuel with which men could presently set out for the stars—and out to emptiness for nuclear experiments that must not be made on Earth. And finally it would be armed with squat, deadly atomic missiles that no