Murray Leinster

“ 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. ”

“ Joe subsided. He still had in his mind the glamorous and infinitely alluring picture of the Space Platform floating grandly in its orbit, with white-hot sunshine on it and a multitude of stars beyond. He had been completely absorbed in that aspect of the job that dealt with the method of construction and the technical details by which the Platform could be made to work.
Now he had a side light on the sort of thing that has to be done when anything important is achieved. Figuring out how a thing can be done is only part of the job. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But there was fighting up on the Platform itself. A savagely grinning Mohawk wrestled furiously with a man on one of the rocket tubes. An incendiary device in the saboteur’s pocket ignited, and it flamed red-hot and he screamed as it burned its way out of his garments. The Mohawk flung the man fiercely clear, to crash horribly on the far-distant floor, and then kicked the incendiary off. It fell after the man and hit and burst, and it was thermite which surrounded itself with a column of acrid smoke from seared wood blocks. ”

“ Men of that kind thought of themselves as superior to humanity, and of human beings as creatures to be enslaved. So they arranged for planes to crash and burn and for men to be murdered, and they practiced blackmail—or rewarded those who practiced it for them. They wanted to prevent the Platform from existing because it would keep them from trying to pull the world down in ruins so they could rule over the wreckage.
Joe—who had so recently thought it likely that he would die—considered these actions with an icy dislike that was much deeper than anger. ”

“ Joe hadn’t thought about it. And he was acutely conscious of Sally, just then, but the idea startled him.
“It might be hard to adjust to,” he admitted.
“It’ll be hard to adjust to, awake,” said Sally. “But getting adjusted to it asleep should be worse. You’ve waked up from a dream that you’re falling?”
“Sure,” said Joe. Then he whistled. “Oh-oh! I see! You’d drop off to sleep, and you’d be falling. So you’d wake up. Everybody in the Platform will be falling around the Earth in the Platform’s orbit! Every time they doze off they’ll be falling and they’ll wake up!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ When that goal was achieved, they flopped solidly flat, slid a few feet on their metal bellies, and lay still. Some hit hard and tried to dig into the earth with their blunt noses. Joe finally saw one touch with no forward speed at all. It seemed to try to settle down vertically, as a rocket takes off. ”

“ There would be men in the thing that floated in space. It swam in a splendid orbit about the world that had built it. Sometimes there were small ships that—so Joe imagined—would fight their way up to it, panting great plumes of rocket smoke, and bringing food and fuel to its crew. And presently one of those panting small ships would refill its fuel tanks to the bursting point from the fuel other ships had brought—and yet the ship would have no weight. ”

“ Joe thought over what Sally had just explained. He noticed that they were quite close together, but he put his mind on her words.
“It’ll be like a man swimming?” he asked. “One can go to sleep floating. There’s no sensation of weight, but there’s the feeling of pressure all about. A man might be able to sleep if he felt he were floating. Yes, that’s a good idea, Sally! It’ll work! A man will think he’s floating, rather than falling!” ”

“ That column contained a fraction of the innumerable dials and controls the pilots of a modern multi-engine plane have to watch and handle. The co-pilot went to the coffeepot and flipped a switch. Joe fidgeted again on his improvised seat. Again he wished that he could be riding in back with the crates. But it would be silly to insist on perching somewhere in the freight compartment.
There was a steady roaring in the cabin—the motors. One’s ears got accustomed to it, and by now the noise sounded as if it were heard through cushions. Presently the coffeepot bubbled, unheard. ”

“ The nationalistic political parties, the peddlers of hate, the entrepreneurs of discord—every crank in the world had something to say against the Platform from the first. When they did not roundly denounce it as impious, they raved that it was a scheme by which the United States would put itself in position to rule all the Earth. ”

“ They swung that metal thing to the Platform’s side. Each time it clung fast, like a snail or slug to the surface on which it crawls. Many pushpots clung even to the rocket tubes—the same tubes that would presently burn away and vanish. So Joe and Sally saw the pushpots in a new aspect: blunt metal slugs with gaping mouths which were their air scoops. ”

“ This transport plane was flying to a small town improbably called Bootstrap, carrying one of the most essential devices for the Platform’s equipment. In the desert near Bootstrap there was a gigantic construction shed. Inside that shed men were building exactly the monstrous object that Joe pictured to himself. They were trying to realize a dream men have dreamed for decades—the necessary space platform that would be the dock, the wharf, the starting point from which the first of human space explorers could start for infinity. ”

“ The most arrant coward, stood before a wall to be shot, or strapped in an electric chair, finds that astoundingly he does not believe that what happens to his body is going to kill him, the individual. That is why a great many people die with reasonable dignity. They know it is not worth making too much of a fuss over.
But when the Geiger counters had gone over him from head to foot, and his body temperature was normal, and his reflexes sound—when he was assured that he had not been exposed to dangerous radiation—Joe felt distinctly weak in the knees. ”

“ Getting a rocket fuel with enough power per pound?”
The co-pilot sipped his coffee and made a face. It was too hot.
“Fella,” he said drily, “that stuff was easy! The slide-rule boys did that. The big job in making a new moon for the Earth is keeping it from being blown up before it can get out to space! There are a few gentlemen who thrive on power politics. They know that once the Platform’s floating serenely around the Earth, with a nice stock of atom-headed guided missiles on board, power politics is finished. ”

“ Another man may be trained to counter him. The training of the second man is essentially a study of how the first man’s mind works. Then it can be guessed what this saboteur will think and do. But such a trained security man will often be badly handicapped if he comes upon the sabotage methods of a second man—an entirely different saboteur who thinks in a new fashion. The security man may be hampered in dealing with the second man’s sabotage just because he knows too much about the thinking of the first.
Joe went off and scowled at a wall, while the young lieutenant waited hopefully nearby. ”

“ It’s a hundred times worse where the whole Platform’s being built.”
“Security?” said Joe. He shrugged. “We know everybody who works at the plant. We’ve known them all their lives. They’d get mad if we started to get stuffy. We don’t bother.”
“That I’d like to see,” said the co-pilot skeptically. “No barbed wire around the plant? No identity badges you wear when you go in? No security officer screaming blue murder every five minutes? What do you think all that’s for? You built these pilot gyros! You had to have that security stuff!” ”

“ Fighting sabotage when we little guys could take over in a week and make sabotage just plain foolish! We could do the whole job while the saboteurs weren’t looking!”
Sally said with interest: “Have you got the figures? Were they ever passed on?”
“I spent a month’s pay once,” said Mike sardonically, “hiring a math shark to go over them. He found one mistake. It raised the margin of what we could do!”
Sally answered: “Joe! Listen to this! Mike says he has the real answer to sabotage, and, in a way, to space travel! Listen!” ”

“ One attempt at actual violence, defeated, would create a rigidity of defense that would make others impossible. If a successful attempt at violent sabotage was to be made, the efforts of all groups would have to be timed to the first, or abandoned.
“I could—uh—set up a sort of smoke screen,” said Mike. “We’ll fake we’re going to smash something—and let those saboteurs find it out. They’ll see it as a chance to do their stuff with us to run interference for them.—Sally, does your father sure-enough trust us?” ”

“ But Joe, thinking about the Platform, did not think about it as a weapon. It was the first rung on the stepladder to the stars. From it the moon would be reached, certainly. Mars next, most likely. Then Venus. In time the moons of Saturn, and the twilight zone of Mercury, and some day the moons of Jupiter. Possibly a landing could be dared on that giant planet itself, despite its gravity.
The co-pilot spoke suddenly. “How do you rate this trip by cargo plane?” he asked curiously. “Mostly even generals have to go on the ground. You rate plenty. How?” ”

“ 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! ”

“ It isn’t thinkable that you’ll be able to prevent something from being tried at a time the saboteurs pick. They’ve got just so much time left, and they’ll use it! But Mike’s plan would offer them a diversion under cover of which they could pull their own stuff! And besides that, you know your office leaks! You couldn’t set up a trick like this through security methods. And for a third fact, this is the one sort of thing no saboteur would expect from your security organization! We caught the saboteurs at the pushpot field by guessing at a new sort of thinking for sabotage. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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!” ”

“ 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 well timed.
A Canadian station noticed the pip on its radar screen first. The radar observer was puzzled by it. It could have been a meteor, and the Canadian observer at first thought it was. ”

“ There are other guys like me! We’ve got as much brains as full-sized people! If the big brass had figured on us small guys, they coulda made the Platform the size of a four-family house an’ it’d ha’ been up in the sky right now, with guys like me running it. Guys my size could man the ferry rockets bringin’ up fuel for storage, and four of us could take a six-hundred-ton rocket an’ slide out to Mars an’ be back by springtime—next springtime!—with all the facts and the photographs to prove ’em! ”

“ They were halfway up the globular wall now, and were visibly suspended over emptiness. The view of the Platform was impressive. There were an astonishing number of rocket tubes being fastened to the outside of that huge object. Three giant cranes, working together, hoisted a tube to the last remaining level of scaffolding, and men swarmed on it and fastened it to the swelling hull. As soon as it was fast, other men hurried into it with the white pasty stuff to line it from end to end. ”

“ He didn’t quite know how to take the co-pilot’s talk. The Kenmore Precision Tool plant was owned by his family, but it wasn’t so much a family as a civic enterprise. The young men of the village grew up to regard fanatically fine workmanship with the casual matter-of-factness elsewhere reserved for plowing or deep-sea fishing. Joe’s father owned it, and some day Joe might head it, but he couldn’t hope to keep the respect of the men in the plant unless he could handle every tool on the place and split a thousandth at least five ways. ”

“ It’s like a train in a collision which doesn’t stop all at once. A meteor hitting the Platform will telescope on itself like the cars of a railroad train that hits another at full speed.”
Sally listened enigmatically.
“So,” said Joe, “the punching effect isn’t there. A meteor hitting the Platform won’t punch. It’ll explode. Part of it will turn to vapor—metallic vapor if it’s metal, and rocky vapor if it’s stone. It’ll blow a crater in the metal plate. It’ll blow away as much weight of the skin as it weighs itself. Mass for mass. ”

“ Presently Joe went into the maze of piers under the Space Platform itself. He came to the temporary stairs he had reason to remember. He nodded to the two guards there.
“I want to take another look at that gadget we installed,” he said.
One of the guards said good-naturedly: “Major Holt said to pass you any time.”
He ascended and went along the curious corridor—it had handgrips on the walls so a man could pull himself along it when there was no weight—and went to the engine room. He heard voices. They were speaking a completely unintelligible language. He tensed. ”

“ But the pushpot sabotage—and Joe was sure it was nothing else—was not that sort of thing. Making motors explode.... Motors don’t explode. One couldn’t put bombs in them. There wasn’t room. The explosions Joe had seen looked as if they’d centered in the fire basket—technically the combustion area—behind the compressor and before the drive vanes. A jet motor whirled. Its front vanes compressed air, and a flame burned furiously in the compressed air, which swelled enormously and poured out past other vanes that took power from it to drive the compressor. ”

“ We can count on them for plenty of rough stuff. And there’s Joe and me. The point is that Mike’s stunt makes it certain that everything busts loose at a time we can know in advance. If the Major gives us a free hand, and then in the last five minutes takes his own measures—so they can’t leak out ahead of time and tip off the gangs we want to get—we oughta knock off all the expert saboteurs who know the weak spots in the Platform. For instance those who know that thermite in the gyros would mess everything up all over again. ”

“ Since nobody else appeared to have suffered any burns at all, it was assumed that he was the messenger who had brought the radioactive cobalt to Braun, who also had been doomed by possession of the deadly stuff, but who had broken the chain of fatality by not dumping it free into the air of the Shed. Under the circumstances, then, three-shift work on the Platform was resumed, and three times in each twenty-four hours fleets of busses rolled out of Bootstrap carrying men to work in the Shed, and rolled back again loaded with men who had just stopped working there. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”