Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (23 page)

But if there had been anything of that sort tried, it would have
produced bloodshed. The men who'd built the Platform were going to see
it depart this Earth or else. They'd never have a second chance. It
would work the first time or it wouldn't work at all.

So the Platform was made ready for its take-off by the men who had made
it. A gigantic section—two full gores—of the Shed's wall was unbolted
in two pieces, and each piece thrust outward at the top and bottom, so
that they were offset from the rest of the huge half-globe. There were
hundreds of wheels at their bottom which for the first time touched the
sixteen lines of rails laid with unbelievable solidity around the
outside of the Shed. And then the monstrous sections were rolled aside.
A vast opening resulted, and morning sunlight smote for the first time
mankind's very first space craft.

Joe saw the sunlight strike, and his first sensation was of
disappointment. The normal shape of the Platform was ungainly, but now
it was practically hidden by the solid-fuel rockets which would consume
themselves in their firing. Also, the floor of the Shed looked strange.
It was littered with the clumsy shapes of pushpots, trucked to this
place in an unending stream all night long. A very young lieutenant from
the pushpot airfield hunted up Joe and assured him that every drop of
fuel in every pushpot's tanks had been tested twice—once in the storage
tanks, and again in the pushpots. Joe thanked him very politely.

There was no longer any scaffolding. There were no trucks left except
two gigantic cranes, which could handle the pushpots like so many toys.
And the effect of sunlight pouring into the Shed seemed strange indeed.

Outside, there were carpenters hammering professionally upon a hasty
grandstand of timber. Most of the carpenters would have been handier
with rivet guns or welding torches, but it would have been indiscreet to
comment. As fast as a final timber was spiked in place, somebody hastily
wound it with very tawdry bunting. Men were stringing wires to the
grandstand, and other men were setting up television and movie cameras.
Two Security men grimly stood by each camera amid a glittering
miscellany of microphones.

Joe was lucky. Or perhaps Sally pulled wires. Anyhow, the two of them
had a vantage point for which many other people would have paid
astonishing sums. They waited where the circular ramp between the two
skins of the Shed was broken by the removal of the doorway. They were
halfway up the curve of the Shed's roof, at the edge of the great
opening, and they could see everything, from the pushpot pilots as they
were checked into their contraptions, to the sedate arrival of the big
brass at the grandstand below.

There was a reverberant humming from the Shed now. It might have been
the humming of wind blowing across its open section. Joe and Sally saw a
grim knot of Security men escorting four crew members to a flight of
wooden steps that led up to a lower air-lock door—Joe had reason to
remember that door—and watched them enter and close the air lock behind
them. Then the security men pulled away the wooden stairs and hauled
them completely away. There were a very few highly trusted men making
final inspections of the Platform's exterior. One of them was nearly on
a level with Joe and Sally. Other men were already lowering themselves
down on ropes that they later jerked free, but this last man on top did
a very human thing. When he'd finished his check-up to the last least
detail, he pulled something out of his hip pocket. It was a tobacco can
full of black paint. There was a brush with it. He painted his name on
the silvery plates of the Platform, "C. J. Adams, Jr.," and satisfiedly
began his descent to the ground. His name would go up with the Platform
and be visible for uncounted generations—if all went well. He reached
the ground and walked away, contented.

The cranes began their task. Each one reached down deliberately and
picked up a pushpot. They swung the pushpots to vertical positions and
presented them precisely to the Platform's side. They clung there
ridiculously. Magnetic grapples, of course. Joe and Sally, at the end of
the corridor in the wall, could see the heads of the pushpot pilots in
their plastic domes.

Music blared from behind the grandstand. The seats were being filled.
But naturally, the least important personages were arriving first. There
were women in costumes to which they had given infinite thought—and
nobody looked at them except other women. There was khaki. There were
gray business suits—slide-rule men, these, who had done the brain-work
behind the Platform's design. Then black broadcloth. Politicians, past
question. There is nothing less impressive from a height of two hundred
feet than a pot-bellied man in black broadcloth walking on the ground.

There were men in uniforms which were not of the United States armed
forces. They ran heavily to medals, which glittered. There were more
arrivals, and more, and more. The newsreel and TV cameras nosed around.

The cranes worked methodically. They dipped, and deftly picked up a
thing shaped like the top half of a loaf of bread. 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.

The tinny music from below cut off. Somebody began an oration. The men
who had built the Platform were not interested in fine phrases, but this
event was broadcast everywhere, and some people might possibly tune to
the channels that carried the speakers and their orations rather than
the channels that showed the huge, bleak, obscured shape of the monster
that was headed either for empty space or pure disaster.

The speaker stopped, and another took his place. Then another. One man
spoke for less than a minute, and the stands went wild! But the one who
followed made splendid gestures. He talked and talked and talked. The
cranes cleaned up the last of the waiting pushpots, and the Platform
itself was practically invisible.

The cranes backed off and went away, clanking. The orator raised his
voice. It made small echoes in the vast cavern that was the Shed.
Somebody plucked the speaker's arm. He ended abruptly and sat down,
wiping his forehead with a huge blue handkerchief.

There was a roar. A pushpot had started its motor. Another roar.
Another. One by one, the multitude of clustering objects added to the
din. In the open a single jet was appalling. Here, the noise became a
sound which was no longer a sound. It became a tumult which by pure
volume ceased to be anything one's ears could understand. It reached a
peak and held there. Then, abruptly, all the motors slackened in unison,
and then roared more loudly. The group controls within the Platform were
being tested. Three—four—five times the tumult faded to the merely
unbearable and went up to full volume again.

Joe felt Sally plucking at his arm. He turned, and saw a jet plane's
underbelly, very close, and its swept-back wings. It was climbing
straight up. Then he saw another jet plane streaking for the great
dome's open door. It moved with incredible velocity. It jerked upward
and climbed over the Shed's curve and was gone. But there were others
and others and others.

These were the fighter ships of the jet-plane guard. For months on end
they had flown above the Shed, protecting it. Now they were going aloft
to relieve the present watchers. They were rising to spread out as an
interceptor screen for hundreds of miles in every direction, in case
somebody should be so foolish as to try again the exploit of the night
before. They would not see the monster in the Shed again. So in a single
line which reached to the horizon, they made this roaring run for the
one last glimpse which was their right. Joe saw tiny specks come
streaking down out of the sky to queue up for this privileged view of
the Platform before it rose.

Suddenly they were gone, and Joe felt that tingling sense of pride which
never comes from the sensation of sharing in mere power or splendor or
pompous might, but is so certain when the human touch modifies
magnificence.

And then the roaring of the pushpot engines achieved an utterly
impossible volume. The whole interior of the Shed was misty now, but
shining in the morning light.

And the Platform moved.

At first it was a mere stirring. It turned ever so slightly to one side,
pivoting on the ways that had supported it during building. It turned
back and to the other side. The vapor thickened. From each jet motor a
blast of blue-white flame poured down, and the moisture in the earth was
turning into steam and stray wood-blocks into acrid smoke. The Platform
turned precisely and exactly back to its original position, and Joe's
heart pounded in his throat, because he knew that the turning had been
done with the gyros, and they had been handled by the pilot gyros for
which he was responsible.

Then the Platform moved again. It lifted by inches and swayed forward.
It checked, and lurched again, and went staggering toward the great
opening before it. A part of its base gouged a deep furrow in the
earthen floor.

The noise increased from the incredible to the inconceivable. It seemed
as if all the thunders since time began had returned to bellow because
the Platform moved.

And it floated and bumped out of the Shed. It staggered toward the east.
Its keel was perhaps, at this point, as much as three feet above the
ground, but the jet motors cast up blinding clouds of dust and smoke and
even those afoot could not be sure.

There was confusion. The smoke and vapor splashed out in every possible
direction. Joe saw frantic movement, and he realized that the uniforms
and the frock coats were scrambling to escape the fumes. The
khaki-tinted specks which were men seemed to run. The frock coats ran.
The carefully-thought-out brighter specks which were women ran gasping
and choking from the smoke. One stout figure toppled, scrambled up, and
scuttled frantically for safety.

But the Platform was in motion now. It was a hundred yards beyond the
Shed wall. Two hundred. Three.... It slowly gathered speed. A half-mile
from the Shed it was definitely clear of the ground. It left a trail of
scorched, burnt desert behind....

It moved almost swiftly, now. Two miles from the Shed it was fifteen
feet above the earth. Three miles, and a clear strip of sunlight showed
beneath it. And it was still accelerating. At four miles and five and
six....

It was aloft, climbing with seemingly infinite slowness, with all the
hundreds of straining, thrusting, clumsy pushpots clinging to it and
pushing it ever ahead and upward.

It went smoothly toward the east. It continued to gain speed. It did not
seem to dip toward the horizon at all. It went on and on, dwindling from
a giant to a spot and then to a little dark speck in the sky that still
went on and on until even Joe could not pretend to himself that he still
saw it. Even then there was probably a tiny droning noise in the air,
but nobody who had watched the take-off could possibly hear it.

Then Joe looked at Sally and she at him. And Joe was grinning like an
ape with excitement and relief and triumph which was at once his own and
that of all his dreams. Sally's eyes were shining and exultant. She
hugged him in purest exuberance, crying that the Space Platform was up,
was up, was up....

At sundown they were waiting on the porch of the Major's quarters behind
the Shed. The Major was there, and Haney and the Chief and Mike and Joe.
The Major's whole look had changed. He seemed to have shrunk, and he
looked more tired than any man should ever be allowed to get. But his
job was done, and the reaction was enough to explain everything. He sat
in an easy chair with a glass beside him, and he looked as if nothing on
earth could make him move a finger. But nevertheless he was waiting.

Sally came out with a tray. She gravely passed around the glasses and
the cakes that went with them. Then she sat down on the porch steps
beside Joe. She looked at him and nodded in friendly fashion. And Joe
was inordinately approving of Sally, but he felt awkward at showing it
too plainly in her father's presence.

Mike said defiantly: "But still it woulda been easier to get it up there
if it'd been built for guys like me!"

Nobody contradicted him. He was right. Anyhow every one of them felt too
much relaxed and relieved to enter into argument.

Haney said dreamily: "Everything broke right. Everything! They got in a
jet stream like they expected, and it gave 'em three hundred miles extra
east-speed. They were eight miles up when the pushpots fired their
jatos, an' twelve miles up when the pushpots let go—they musta near
broke their pilots' necks when they caught their motors again! And the
Platform's rockets fired just right, makin' flames a mile long, an' they
were goin' then—what were they makin'?"

"Who cares?" asked the Chief peacefully. "Plenty!"

"Six hundred from the pushpots," murmured Haney, frowning, "an' three
hundred from the jet stream, and then there was the jatos that all let
go at once, an' then there was eight hundred from the earth
rotatin'—"

"They had ten per cent of their rockets unfired when they got into their
orbit," said Mike authoritatively. "They were two thousand miles up when
they passed over India and now they're four thousand miles up and the
orbit's stable. This is their third round, isn't it?"

"Will be," said the Chief.

Joe and Sally sat watching the west. The Space Platform went around the
Earth from west to east, like Earth's natural moon, but because of its
speed it would rise in the west and set in the east six times in every
twenty-four hours.