Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (17 page)

He hung up, and Joe went back to his meal. He felt uneasy. There
couldn't be any way to make a jet motor explode unless you fed it
explosive fuel. Then there couldn't be any way to stop it. And
then—after the wreck had burned—there couldn't be any way to prove it
was really sabotage. But the feeling of having reported only a guess was
not too satisfying. Joe ate gloomily. He didn't pay much attention to
Talley. He had that dogged, uncomfortable feeling a man has when he
knows he doesn't qualify as an expert, but feels that he's hit on
something the experts have missed.

Half an hour after the evening mess—near sunset—a security officer
wearing a uniform hunted up Joe at the airfield.

"Major Holt sent me over to bring you back to the Shed," he said
politely.

"If you don't mind," said Joe with equal politeness, "I'll check that."

He went to the phone booth in the barracks. He got Major Holt on the
wire. And Major Holt hadn't sent anybody to get him.

So Joe stayed in the telephone booth—on orders—while the Major did
some fast telephoning. It was comforting to know he had a pistol in his
pocket, and it was frustrating not to be allowed to try to capture the
fake security officer himself. The idea of murdering Joe had not been
given up, and he'd have liked to take part personally in protecting
himself. But it was much more important for the fake security man to be
captured than for Joe to have the satisfaction of attempting it himself.

As a matter of fact, the fake officer started his getaway the instant
Joe went to check on his orders. The officer knew they'd be found faked.
It had not been practical for him to shoot Joe down where he was. There
were too many people around for this murderer to have a chance at a
getaway.

But he didn't get away, at that. Twenty minutes later, while Joe still
waited fretfully in the phone booth, the phone bell rang and Major Holt
was again on the wire. And this time Joe was instructed to come back to
the Shed. He had exact orders whom to come with, and they had orders
which identified them to Joe.

Some eight miles from the airfield—it was just dusk—Joe came upon a
wrecked car with motorcycle security guards working on it. They stopped
Joe's escort. Joe's phone call had set off an alarm. A plane had spotted
this car tearing away from the airfield, and motorcyclists were guided
in pursuit by the plane. When it wouldn't stop—when the fake Security
officer in it tried to shoot his way clear—the plane strafed him. So he
was dead and his car was a wreck, and the motorcycle men were trying to
get some useful information from his body and the car.

Joe went to the Major's house in the officers'-quarters area. The Major
looked even more tired than before, but he nodded approvingly at Joe.
Sally was there too, and she regarded Joe with a look which was a good
deal warmer than her father's.

"You did very well," said the Major detachedly. "I don't have too high
an opinion of the brains of anybody your age, Joe. When you are my age,
you won't either. But whether you have brains or simply luck, you are
turning out to be very useful."

Joe said: "I'm getting security conscious, sir. I want to stay alive."

The Major regarded him with irony.

"I was thinking of the fact that when you worked out the matter of the
doctored pushpot fuel, you did not try to be a hero and prove it
yourself. You referred it to me. That was the proper procedure. You
could have been killed, investigating—it's clear that the saboteurs
would be pleased to have a good chance to murder you—and your
suspicions might never have reached me. They were correct, by the way.
One storage tank underground was half-full of doctored fuel. Rather more
important, another
was
full, not yet drawn on."

The Major went on, without apparent cordiality: "It seems probable that
if this particular sabotage trick had not been detected—it seems likely
that on the Platform's take-off, all or most of the pushpots would have
been fueled to explode at some time after the Platform was aloft, and
before it could possibly get out to space."

Joe felt queer. The Major was telling him, in effect, that he might have
kept the Platform from crashing on take-off. It was a good but upsetting
sensation. It was still more important to Joe that the Platform get out
to space than that he be credited with saving it. And it was not
reassuring to hear that it might have been wrecked.

"Your reasoning," added the Major coldly, "was soundly based. It seems
certain that there is not one central authority directing all the
sabotage against the Platform. There are probably several sabotage
organizations, all acting independently and probably hating each other,
but all hating the Platform more."

Joe blinked. He hadn't thought of that. It was disheartening.

"It will really be bad," said the Major, "if they ever co-operate!"

"Yes, sir," said Joe.

"But I called you back from the airfield," the Major told him without
warmth, "to say that you have done a good job. I have talked to
Washington. Naturally, you deserve a reward."

"I'm doing all right, sir," said Joe awkwardly. "I want to see the
Platform go up and stay up!"

The Major nodded impatiently.

"Naturally! But—ah—one of the men selected and trained for the crew of
the Platform has been—ah—taken ill. In strict confidence, because of
sabotage it has been determined to close in the Platform and get it
aloft at the earliest possible instant, even if its interior
arrangements are incomplete. So—ah—in view of your usefulness, I said
to Washington that I believed the greatest reward you could be offered
was—ah—to be trained as an alternate crew member, to take this man's
place if he does not recover in time."

The room seemed to reel around Joe. Then he gulped and said: "Yes, sir!
I mean—that's right. I mean, I'd rather have that, than all the money
in the world!"

"Very well." The Major turned to leave the room. "You'll stay here, be
guarded a good deal more closely than before, and take instructions. But
you understand that you are still only an alternate for a crew member!
The odds are definitely against your going!"

"That's—that's all right, sir," said Joe unsteadily. "That's quite all
right!"

The Major went out. Joe stood still, trying to realize what all this
might mean to him. Then Sally stirred.

"You might say thanks, Joe."

Her eyes were shining, but she looked proud, too.

"I put it in Dad's head that that was what you'd like better than
anything else," she told him. "If I can't go up in the Platform
myself—and I can't—I wanted you to. Because I knew you wanted to."

She smiled at him as he tried incoherently to talk. With a quiet
maternal patience, she led him out on the porch of her father's house
and sat there and listened to him. It was a long time before he realized
that she was humoring him. Then he stopped short and looked at her
suspiciously. He found that in his enthusiastic gesticulations he had
been gesticulating with
her
hand as well as his own.

"I guess I'm pretty crazy," he said ruefully. "Shooting off my mouth
about myself up there in space.... You're pretty decent to stand me the
way I am, Sally."

He paused. Then he said humbly: "I'm plain lucky. But knowing you
and—having you like me reasonably much is pretty lucky too!"

She looked at him noncommittally.

He added painfully: "And not only because you spoke to your father and
told him just the right thing, either. You're—sort of swell, Sally!"

She let out her breath. Then she grinned at him.

"That's the difference between us, Joe," she told him. "To me, what you
just said is the most important thing anybody's said tonight."

The world turned over on its axis with unfailing regularity, and nights
followed mornings and mornings followed nights according to
well-established precedent. One man turned up in Bootstrap with
radiation burns, but he had not offered himself for check over at the
hospital. He was found dead in his lodging. 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.

Trucks carried materials to the Shed, and swing-up doors opened in the
great dome's eastern wall, and the trucks went in and unloaded. Then the
trucks went out of the same doors and trundled back for more materials.
In the Shed, shining plates of metal swung aloft, and welding torches
glittered in the maze of joists and upright pipes that still covered the
monster shape. Each day it was a little more nearly complete. In a
separate, guarded workshop by a sidewall, the Chief and Haney and Mike
the midget labored mightily to accomplish the preposterous. They grew
lean and red-eyed from fatigue, and short of temper and ever more
fanatical—and security men moved about in seeming uselessness but
never-ceasing vigilance.

There were changes, though. The assembly line of pushpots grew shorter,
and the remaining monstrosities around the sidewall were plainly near to
completion. There came a day, indeed, when only five ungainly objects
remained on that line, and even they were completely plated in and
needed only a finishing touch. It was at this time that more crates and
parcels arrived from the Kenmore Precision Tool plant, and Joe dropped
his schoolroomlike instruction course in space flight for work of
greater immediate need. He and his allies worked twice around the clock
to assemble the replaced parts with the repaired elements of the pilot
gyros. They grew groggy from the desperate need both for speed and for
absolute accuracy, but they put the complex device together, and
adjusted it, and surveyed the result through red-rimmed eyes, and were
too weary to rejoice.

Then Joe threw a switch and the reconstituted pilot gyro assembly began
to hum quietly, and the humming rose to a whine, and the whine went
deliberately up the scale until it ceased to be audible at all.
Presently a dial 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 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!

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.