Major Holt wasn’t to be found
when Joe got out to the Shed. And he wasn’t
in the house in the officers’-quarters area behind
it. There was only the housekeeper, who yawned
pointedly as she let Joe in. Sally was presumably
long since asleep. And Joe didn’t know any
way to get hold of the Major. He assured himself
that Braun was a good guy if he weren’t
he wouldn’t have insisted on taking a licking
before he apologized and he hadn’t
said there was any hurry. Tomorrow, he’d
said. So Joe uneasily let himself be led to a
room with a cot, and he was asleep in what seemed
seconds. But just the same he was badly worried.
In fact, next morning Joe woke at
a practically unearthly hour with Braun’s message
pounding on his brain. He was downstairs waiting
when the housekeeper appeared. She looked startled.
“Major Holt?” he asked.
But the Major was gone. He must
have done with no more than three or four hours’
sleep. There was an empty coffee cup whose contents
he’d gulped down before going back to the security
office.
Joe trudged to the barbed-wire enclosure
around the officers’-quarters area and explained
to the sentry where he wanted to go. A sleepy
driver whisked him around the half-mile circle to
the security building and he found his way to Major
Holt’s office.
The plain and gloomy secretary was
already on the job, too. She led him in to face
Major Holt. He blinked at the sight of Joe.
“Hm.... I have some
news,” he observed. “We back-tracked
the parcel that exploded when it was dumped from the
plane.”
Joe had almost forgotten it.
Too many other things had happened since.
“We’ve got two very likely
prisoners out of that affair,” said the Major.
“They may talk. Also, an emergency inspection
of other transport planes has turned up three other
grenades tucked away in front-wheel wells. Ah CO_2
bottles have turned out to have something explosive
in them. A very nice bit of work, that!
The sandy-haired man who fueled your plane ah disappeared.
That is bad!”
Joe said politely: “That’s fine,
sir.”
“All in all, you’ve been
the occasion of our forestalling a good deal of sabotage,”
said the Major. “Bad for you, of course....
Did you find the men you were looking for?”
“I’ve found them, but .”
“I’ll have them transferred
to work under your direction,” said the Major
briskly. “Their names?”
Joe gave the names. The Major wrote them down.
“Very good. I’m busy now
“I’ve a tip for you,”
said Joe. “I think it should be checked
right away. I don’t feel too good about
it.”
The Major waited impatiently.
And Joe explained, very carefully, about the fight
on the Platform the day before, Braun’s insistence
on finishing the fight in Bootstrap, and then the
tip he’d given Joe after everything was over.
He repeated the message exactly, word for word.
The Major, to do him justice, did
not interrupt. He listened with an expression
that varied between grimness and weariness. When
Joe ended he picked up a telephone. He talked
briefly. Joe felt a reluctant sort of approval.
Major Holt was not a man one could ever feel very close
to, and the work he was in charge of was not likely
to make him popular, but he did think straight and
fast. He didn’t think “hot”
meant “significant,” either. When
he’d hung up the phone he said curtly: “When
will your work crew get here?”
“Early but not yet,” said Joe.
“Not for some time yet.”
“Go with the pilot,” said
the Major. “You’d recognize what Braun
meant as soon as anybody. See what you see.”
Joe stood up.
“You think the tip is straight?”
“This isn’t the first
time,” said Major Holt detachedly, “that
a man has been blackmailed into trying sabotage.
If he’s got a family somewhere abroad, and they’re
threatened with death or torture unless he does such-and-such
here, he’s in a bad fix. It’s happened.
Of course he can’t tell me! He’s
watched. But he sometimes finds an out.”
Joe was puzzled. His face showed it.
“He can try to do the sabotage,”
said the Major precisely, “or he can arrange
to be caught trying to do it. If he’s caught he
tried; and the blackmail threat is no threat at all
so long as he keeps his mouth shut. Which he
does. And ah you would be
surprised how often a man who wasn’t born in
the United States would rather go to prison for sabotage
than commit it here.”
Joe blinked.
“If your friend Braun is caught,”
said the Major, “he will be punished. Severely.
Officially. But privately, someone will ah mention
this tip and say ‘thanks.’ And he’ll
be told that he will be released from prison just
as soon as he thinks it’s safe. And he will
be. That’s all.”
He turned to his papers. Joe
went out. On the way to meet the pilot who’d
check on his tip, he thought things over. He began
to feel a sort of formless but very definite pride.
He wasn’t quite sure what he was proud of, but
it had something to do with being part of a country
toward which men of wholly different upbringing could
feel deep loyalty. If a man who was threatened
unless he turned traitor, a man who might not even
be a citizen, arranged to be caught and punished for
an apparent crime against a country rather than commit
it that wasn’t bad. There can
be a lot of things wrong with a nation, but if somebody
from another one entirely can come to feel that kind
of loyalty toward it well it’s
not too bad a country to belong to.
Joe had a security guard with him
this time, instead of Sally, as he went across the
vast, arc-lit interior of the Shed and past the shimmering
growing monster that was the Platform. He went
all the way to the great swinging doors that let in
materials trucks. And there were guards there,
and they checked each driver very carefully before
they admitted his truck. But somehow it wasn’t
irritating. It wasn’t scornful suspicion.
There’d be snide and snappy characters in the
Security force, of course, swaggering and throwing
their weight about. But even they were guarding
something that men some men were
willing to throw away their lives for.
Joe and his guard reached one of the
huge entrances as a ten-wheeler truck came in with
a load of shining metal plates. Joe’s escort
went through the opening with him and they waited
outside. The sun had barely risen. It looked
huge but very far away, and Joe suddenly realized why
just this spot had been chosen for the building of
the Platform.
The ground was flat. All the
way to the eastern horizon there wasn’t even
a minor hillock rising above the plain. It was
bare, arid, sun-scorched desert. It was featureless
save for sage and mesquite and tall thin stalks of
yucca. But it was flat. It could be a runway.
It was a perfect place for the Platform to start from.
The Platform shouldn’t touch ground at all,
after it was out of the Shed, but at least it wouldn’t
run into any obstacles on its way toward the horizon.
A light plane came careening around
the great curved outer surface of the Shed. It
landed and taxied up to the door. It swung smartly
around and its side door opened. A bandaged hand
waved at Joe. He climbed in. The pilot of
this light, flimsy plane was the co-pilot of the transport
of yesterday. He was the man Joe had helped to
dump cargo.
Joe climbed in and settled himself.
The small motor pop-popped valiantly, the plane rushed
forward over hard-packed desert earth, and went swaying
up into the air.
The co-pilot pilot now shouted
cheerfully above the din: “Hiya. You
couldn’t sleep either? Burns hurt?”
Joe shook his head.
“Bothered,” he shouted
in reply. Then he added, “Do I do something
to help, or am I along just for the ride?”
“First we take a look,”
the pilot called over the motor racket. “Two
kilometers due north of the Shed, eh?”
“That’s right.”
“We’ll see what’s there,”
the pilot told him.
The small plane went up and up.
At five hundred feet nearly level with
the roof of the Shed it swung away and began
to make seemingly erratic dartings out over the spotty
desert land, and then back. Actually, it was
a search pattern. Joe looked down from his side
of the small cockpit. This was a very small plane
indeed, and in consequence its motor made much more
noise inside its cabin than much more powerful engines
in bigger ships.
“Those burns I got,” shouted
the pilot, staring down, “kept me awake.
So I got up and was just walking around when the call
came for somebody to drive one of these things.
I took over.”
Back and forth, and back and forth.
From five hundred feet in the early morning the desert
had a curious appearance. The plane was low enough
for each smallest natural feature to be visible, and
it was early enough for every shrub or hummock to
cast a long, slender shadow. The ground looked
streaked, but all the streaks ran the same way, and
all were shadows.
Joe shouted: “What’s that?”
The plane banked at a steep angle
and ran back. It banked again. The pilot
stared carefully. He reached forward and pushed
a button. There was a tiny impact underfoot.
Another steep banking turn, and Joe saw a puff of
smoke in the air.
The pilot shouted: “It’s a man.
He looks dead.”
He swung directly over the small prone
object and there was a second puff of smoke.
“They’ve got range finders
on us from the Shed,” he called across the two-foot
space separating him from Joe. “This marks
the spot. Now we’ll see if there’s
anything to the hot part of that tip.”
He reached over behind his seat and
brought out a stubby pole like a fishpole with a very
large reel. There was also a headset, and something
very much like a large aluminum fish on the end of
the line.
“You know Geiger counters?”
called the pilot. “Stick on these headphones
and listen!”
Joe slipped on the headset. The
pilot threw a switch and Joe heard clickings.
They had no pattern and no fixed frequency. They
were clickings at strictly random intervals, but there
was an average frequency, at that.
“Let the counter out the window,”
called the pilot, “and listen. Tell me
if the noise goes up.”
Joe obeyed. The aluminum fish
dangled. The line slanted astern from the wind.
It made a curve between the pole and the aluminum plummet,
which was hollow in the direction of the plane’s
motion. The pilot squinted down and began to
swing in a wide circle around the spot where an apparently
dead man had been sighted, and above which puffs of
smoke now floated.
Three-quarters of the way around,
the random clickings suddenly became a roar.
Joe said: “Hey!”
The pilot swung the plane about and
flew back. He pointed to the button he’d
pushed.
“Poke that when you hear it again.”
The clickings.... They roared.
Joe pushed the button. He felt the tiny impact.
“Once more,” said the pilot.
He swung in nearer where the dead
man lay. Joe had a sickening idea of who the
dead man might be. A sudden rush of noise in the
headphones and he pushed the button again.
“Reel in now!” shouted the pilot.
“Our job’s done.”
Joe reeled in as the plane winged
steadily back toward the Shed. There were puffs
of smoke floating in the air behind. They had
been ranged on at the instant they appeared.
Somebody back at the Shed knew that something that
needed to be investigated was at a certain spot, and
the two later puffs of smoke had said that radioactivity
was notable in the air along the line the two puffs
made. Not much more information would be needed.
The meaning of Braun’s warning that his tip was
“hot” was definite. It was “hot”
in the sense that it dealt with radioactivity!
The plane dipped down and landed by
the great doors again. It taxied up and the pilot
killed the motor.
“We’ve been using Geigers
for months,” he said pleasedly, “and never
got a sign before. This is one time we were set
for something.”
“What?” asked Joe. But he knew.
“Atomic dust is one good guess,”
the pilot told him. “It was talked of as
a possible weapon away back in the Smyth Report.
Nobody’s ever tried it. We thought it might
be tried against the Platform. If somebody managed
to spread some really hot radioactive dust around the
Shed, all three shifts might get fatally burned before
it was noticed. They’d think so, anyhow!
But the guy who was supposed to dump it opened up the
can for a look. And it killed him.”
He climbed out of the plane and went
to the doorway. He took a telephone from a guard
and talked crisply into it. He hung up.
“Somebody coming for you,”
he said amiably. “Wait here. Be seeing
you.”
He went out, the motor kicked over
and caught, and the tiny plane raced away. Seconds
later it was aloft and winging southward.
Joe waited. Presently a door
opened and something came clanking out. It was
a tractor with surprisingly heavy armor. There
were men in it, also wearing armor of a peculiar sort,
which they were still adjusting. The tractor
towed a half-track platform on which there were a crane
and a very considerable lead-coated bin with a top.
It went briskly off into the distance toward the north.
Joe was amazed, but comprehending.
The vehicle and the men were armored against radioactivity.
They would approach the dead man from upwind, and
they would scoop up his body and put it in the lead-lined
bin, and with it all deadly radioactive material near
him. This was the equipment that must have been
used to handle the dud atom bomb some months back.
It had been ready for that. It was ready for
this emergency. Somebody had tried to think of
every imaginable situation that could arise in connection
with the Platform.
But in a moment a guard came for Joe
and took him to where the Chief and Haney and Mike
waited by the still incompletely-pulled-away crates.
They had some new ideas about the job on hand that
were better than the original ones in some details.
All four of them set to work to make a careful survey
of damage of parts that would have to be
replaced and of those that needed to be repaired.
The discoveries they made would have appalled Joe
earlier. Now he merely made notes of parts necessary
to be replaced by new ones that could be had within
the repair time for rebalancing the rotors.
“This is sure a mess,”
said Haney mournfully, as they worked. “It’s
two days just getting things cleaned up!”
The Chief eyed the rotors. There
were two of them, great four-foot disks with extraordinary
short and stubby shafts that were brought to beautifully
polished conical ends to fit in the bearings.
The bearings were hollowed to fit the shaft ends,
but they were intricately scored to form oil channels.
In operation, a very special silicone oil would be
pumped into the bearings under high pressure.
Distributed by the channels, the oil would form a
film that by its pressure would hold the cone end
of the bearing away from actual contact with the metal.
The rotors, in fact, would be floated in oil just
as the high-speed centrifuge the Chief had mentioned
had floated on compressed air. But they had to
be perfectly balanced, because any imbalance would
make the shaft pierce the oil film and touch the metal
of the bearing and when a shaft is turning
at 40,000 r.p.m. it is not good for it to touch anything.
Shaft and bearing would burn white-hot in fractions
of a second and there would be several devils to pay.
“We’ve got to spin it
in a lathe,” said the Chief profoundly, “to
hold the chucks. The chucks have got to be these
same bearings, because nothing else will stand the
speed. And we got to cut out the bed plate of
any lathe we find. Hm. We got to do
our spinning with the shaft lined up with the earth’s
axis, too.”
Mike nodded wisely, and Joe knew hed pointed that out. It
was true enough. A high-speed gyro could only be run for minutes in one single
direction if its mount were fixed. If a precisely mounted gyro had its shaft
pointed at the sun, for example, while it ran, its axis would try to follow the
sun. It would try not to turn with the earth, and it would wreck itself. They
had to use the cone bearings, but in order to protect the fine channellings for
oil theyd have to use cone-shaped shims at the beginning while running at low
speed. The cone ends of the shaft would need new machining to line them up. The
bearings had to be fixed, yet flexible. The
They had used many paper napkins the
night before, merely envisioning these details.
New problems turned up as the apparatus itself was
being uncovered and cleaned.
They worked for hours, clearing away
soot and charred material. Joe’s list of
small parts to be replaced from the home plant was
as long as his arm. The motors, of course, had
to be scrapped and new ones substituted. Considering
their speed the field strength at operating
rate was almost imperceptible they had to
be built new, which would mean round-the-clock work
at Kenmore.
A messenger came for Joe. The
security office wanted him. Major Holt’s
gloomy secretary did not even glance up as he entered.
Major Holt himself looked tired.
“There was a man out there,”
he said curtly. “I think it is your friend
Braun. I’ll get you to look and identify.”
Joe had suspected as much. He waited.
“He’d opened a container
of cobalt powder. It was in a beryllium case.
There was half a pound of it. It killed him.”
“Radioactive cobalt,” said Joe.
“Definitely,” said the
Major grimly. “Half a pound of it gives
off the radiation of an eighth of a ton of pure radium.
One can guess that he had been instructed to get up
as high as he could in the Shed and dump the powder
into the air. It would diffuse scatter
as it sifted down. It would have contaminated
the whole Shed past all use for years let
alone killing everybody in it.”
Joe swallowed.
“He was burned, then.”
“He had the equivalent of two
hundred and fifty pounds of radium within inches of
his body,” the Major said unbendingly, “and
naturally it was not healthy. For that matter,
the container itself was not adequate protection for
him. Once he’d carried it in his pocket
for a very few minutes, he was a dead man, even though
he was not conscious of the fact.”
Joe knew what was wanted of him.
“You want me to look at him,” he said.
The Major nodded.
“Yes. Afterward, get a
radiation check on yourself. It is hardly likely
that he was ah carrying the stuff
with him last night, in Bootstrap. But if he
was ah you may need some precautionary
treatment you and the men who were with
you.”
Joe realized what that meant.
Braun had been given a relatively small container
of the deadliest available radioactive material on
Earth. Milligrams of it, shipped from Oak Ridge
for scientific use, were encased in thick lead chests.
He’d carried two hundred and fifty grams in
a container he could put in his pocket. He was
not only dead as he walked, under such circumstances.
He was also death to those who walked near him.
“Somebody else may have been
burned in any case,” said the Major detachedly.
“I am going to issue a radioactivity alarm and
check every man in Bootstrap for burns. It is ah very
likely that the man who delivered it to this man is
burned, too. But you will not mention this, of
course.”
He waved his hand in dismissal.
Joe turned to go. The Major added grimly:
“By the way, there is no doubt about the booby-trapping
of planes. We’ve found eight, so far, ready
to be crashed when a string was pulled while they
were serviced. But the men who did the booby-trapping
have vanished. They disappeared suddenly during
last night. They were warned! Have you talked
to anybody?”
“No sir,” said Joe.
“I would like to know,”
said the Major coldly, “how they knew we’d
found out their trick!”
Joe went out. He felt very cold
at the pit of his stomach. He was to identify
Braun. Then he was to get a radiation check on
himself. In that order of events. He was
to identify Braun first, because if Braun had carried
a half-pound of radioactive cobalt on him in Sid’s
Steak Joint the night before, Joe was going to die.
And so were Haney and the Chief and Mike, and anybody
else who’d passed near him. So Joe was to
do the identification before he was disturbed by the
information that he was dead.
He made the identification. Braun
was very decently laid out in a lead-lined box, with
a lead-glass window over his face. There was no
sign of any injury on him except from his fight with
Haney. The radiation burns were deep, but they’d
left no marks of their own. He’d died before
outer symptoms could occur.
Joe signed the identification certificate.
He went to be checked for his own chances of life.
It was a peculiar sensation. The most peculiar
was that he wasn’t afraid. He was neither
confident that he was not burned inside, nor sure
that he was. He simply was not afraid. Nobody
really ever believes that he is going to die in
the sense of ceasing to exist. 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. And that was natural, too.
He went trudging back to the wrecked
gyros. His friends were gone, leaving a scrawled
memo for him. They had gone to pick out the machine
tools for the work at hand.
He continued to check over the wreckage,
thinking with a detached compassion of that poor devil
Braun who was the victim of men who hated the idea
of the Space Platform and what it would mean to humanity.
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. It was backed by everything he believed
in, everything he had ever wanted, and everything
he hoped for. And anger could cool off, but the
way he felt about people who would destroy others
for their own purposes could not cool off. It
was part of him. He thought about it as he worked,
with all the noises of the Shed singing in his ears.
A voice said: “Joe.”
He started and turned. Sally
stood behind him, looking at him very gravely.
She tried to smile.
“Dad told me,” she said,
“about the check-up that says you’re all
right. May I congratulate you on your being with
us for a while? on the cobalt’s not
getting near you? or the rest of us?”
Joe did not know exactly what to say.
“I’m going inside the
Platform,” she told him. “Would you
like to come along?”
He wiped his hands on a piece of waste.
“Naturally! My gang is
off picking out tools. I can’t do much until
they come back.”
He fell into step beside her.
They walked toward the Platform. And it was still
magic, no matter how often Joe looked at it. It
was huge beyond belief, though it was surely not heavy
in proportion to its size. Its bright plating
shone through the gossamer scaffolding all about it.
There was always a faint bluish mist in the air, and
there were the marsh-fire lights of welding torches
playing here and there. The sounds of the Shed
were a steady small tumult in Joe’s ears.
He was getting accustomed to them, though.
“How is it you can go around
so freely?” he asked abruptly. “I
have to be checked and rechecked.”
“You’ll get a full clearance,”
she told him. “It has to go through channels.
Me I have influence. I always come
in through security, and I have the door guards trained.
And I do have business in the Platform.”
He turned his head to look at her.
“Interior decoration,”
she explained. “And don’t laugh!
It isn’t prettifying. It’s psychology.
The Platform was designed by engineers and physicists
and people with slide rules. They made a beautiful
environment for machinery. But there will be men
living in it, and they aren’t machines.”
“I don’t see
“They designed the hydroponic
garden,” said Sally with a certain scorn.
“They calculated very neatly that eleven square
feet of leaf surface of a pumpkin plant will purify
all the air a resting man uses, and so much more will
purify the air a man uses when he’s working hard.
So they designed the gardens for the most efficient
production of the greatest possible leaf surface of
pumpkin plants! They figured food would be brought
up by the tender rockets! But can you imagine
the men in the Platform, floating among the stars,
living on dehydrated food and stuffing themselves
hungrily with pumpkins because that is the only fresh
food they have?”
Joe saw the irony.
“They’re thinking of mechanical
efficiency,” said Sally indignantly. “I
don’t know anything about machinery, but I’ve
wasted an awful lot of time at school and otherwise
if I don’t know something about human beings!
I argued, and the garden now isn’t as mechanically
efficient, but it’ll be a nice place for a man
to go into. He won’t smell pumpkin plants
all the time, either. I’ve even gotten them
to include some flowers!”
They were very near the Platform.
And it was very near to completion. Joe looked
at it hungrily, and he felt a great sense of urgency.
He tried to strip away the scaffolding in his mind
and see it floating proudly free in emptiness, with
white-hot sunshine glinting from it, and only a background
of unwinking stars.
Sally’s voice went on:
“And I’ve really put up an argument about
the living quarters. They had every interior
wall painted aluminum! I argued that in space
or out of it, where people have to live, it’s
housekeeping. This is going to be their home.
And they ought to feel human in it!”
They passed into one of the openings
in the maze of uprights. All about them there
were trucks, and puffing engines, and hoists.
Joe dragged Sally aside as a monstrous truck-and-trailer
came from where it had delivered some gigantic item
of interior use. It rumbled past them, and she
led the way to a flight of temporary wooden stairs
with two security guards at the bottom. Sally
talked severely to them, and they grinned and waved
for Joe to go ahead. He went up the steps which
would be pulled down before the Platform’s launching and
went actually inside the Space Platform for the first
time.
It was a moment of extreme vividness
for him. Within the past hour he’d come
to think detachedly of the possibility of death for
himself, and then had learned that he would live for
a while yet. He knew that Sally had been scared
on his account, and that her matter-of-fact manner
was partly assumed. She was at least as much
wrought up as he was.
And this was the first time he was
going into what would be the first space ship ever
to leave the Earth on a non-return journey.