"No kidding," Joe assured him. "In World War Two the only spy scare in
the village was an FBI man who came around looking for spies. The
village cop locked him up and wouldn't believe in his credentials. They
had to send somebody from Washington to get him out of jail."
The co-pilot grinned reluctantly. "I guess there are such places," he
said enviously. "You should've built the Platform! It's plenty different
on this job! We can't even talk to a girl without security clearance for
an interview beforehand, and we can't speak to strange men or go out
alone after dark--."
The pilot grunted. The co-pilot's tone changed. "Not quite that bad," he
admitted, "but it's bad! It's really bad! We lost three planes last
week. I guess you'd call it in action against saboteurs. One flew to
pieces in mid-air. Sabotage. Carrying critical stuff. One crashed on
take-off, carrying irreplaceable instruments. Somebody'd put a detonator
in a servo-motor. And one froze in its landing glide and flew smack-dab
into its landing field. They had to scrape it up. When this ship got a
major overhaul two weeks ago, we flew it with our fingers crossed for
four trips running. Seems to be all right, though. We gave it the works.
But I won't look forward to a serene old age until the Platform's out of
atmosphere! Not me!"
He went to put the pilot's empty cup in the disposal slot.
The plane went on. There wasn't anything underneath but clouds, and
there wasn't anything overhead but sky. The clouds were a long way down,
and the sky was simply up. Joe looked down and saw a faint spot of
racing brightness with a hint of colors around it. It was the sort of
nimbus that substitutes for a shadow when a plane is high enough above
the clouds. It raced madly over the irregular upper surface of the cloud
layer. The plane flew and flew. Nothing happened at all. This was two
hours from the field from which it had taken off with the pilot gyro
cases as its last item of collected cargo. Joe remembered how grimly the
two crew members had prevented anybody from even approaching it on the
ground, except those who actually loaded the cases, and how one of the
two had watched them every second.
Joe fidgeted. 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. Ten
would be better! But as long as the feeling at the plant stayed as it
was now, there'd never be a security problem there.
If the co-pilot was telling the truth, though--.
Joe found a slow burn beginning inside him. He had a picture in his mind
that was practically a dream. It was of something big and bright and
ungainly swimming silently in emptiness with a field of stars behind it.
The stars were tiny pin points of light. They were unwinking and
distinct because there was no air where this thing floated. The
blackness between them was absolute because this was space itself. The
thing that floated was a moon. A man-made moon. It was an artificial
satellite of Earth. Men were now building it. Presently it would float
as Joe dreamed of it, and where the sun struck it, it would be
unbearably bright, and where there were shadows, they would be abysmally
black--except, perhaps, when earthshine from the planet below would
outline it in a ghostly fashion.
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. So it would drift away
from the greater floating thing in space, and suddenly its rockets would
spout flame and fumes, and it would head triumphantly out and away from
Earth. And it would be the first vessel ever to strike out for the
stars!
That was the picture Joe had of the Space Platform and its meaning.
Maybe it was romantic, but men were working right now to make that
romance come true. 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
idea that anybody could want to halt such an undertaking made Joe
Kenmore burn.
The co-pilot painstakingly crushed out his cigarette. The ship flew with
more steadiness than a railroad car rolls on rails. There was the oddly
cushioned sound of the motors. It was all very matter-of-fact.