It was true. The jet that had dived into the clouds came up out of the
cloud formation with somehow an air of impassive satisfaction.
"Did they spot the guy?"
"Yeah," said the co-pilot. "He must've picked up my report. He didn't
dump his radar. He stayed in the cloud bank. When the jet came for
him--spotting him with its night-fighter stuff--he tried to ram. Tried
for a collision. So the jet gave him the works. Blew him apart. Couldn't
make him land. Maybe they'll pick up something from the wreckage."
Joe wet his lips.
"I--saw what happened," he said. "He tried to smash us with rockets.
Where'd he get them? How were they smuggled in?"
The co-pilot shrugged. "Maybe smuggled in. Maybe stolen. They coulda
been landed from a sub anywhere on a good many thousand miles of coast.
They coulda been hauled anywhere in a station wagon. The plane was a
private-type ship. Plenty of them flying around. It could've been bought
easily enough. All they'd need would be a farm somewhere where it could
land and they could strap on a rocket rack and put in a radar. And
they'd need information. Probably be a good lead, this business. Only
just so many people could know what was coming on this ship, and what
course it was flying, and so on. Security will have to check back from
that angle."
A shadow fell upon the transport ship. A jet shot past from above it. It
waggled its wings and changed course.
"We've got to land and be checked for damage," said the co-pilot
negligently. "These guys will circle us and lead the way--as if we
needed it!"
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. Overcoming the obstacles to the apparently
commonplace steps is nine-tenths of the difficulty. It had seemed to him
that the most dramatic aspect of building the Space Platform had been
the achievement of a design that would work in space, that could be
gotten up into space, and that could be lived in under circumstances
never before experienced. Now he saw that getting the materials to the
spot where they were needed called for nearly as much brains and effort.
Screening out spies and destructionists--that would be an even greater
achievement!
He began to feel a tremendous respect and solicitude for the people who
were doing ordinary jobs in the building of the Platform. And he worried
about his own share more than ever.
Presently the transport ship sank toward the clouds. It sped through
them, stone-blind from the mist. And then there was a small airfield
below, and the pilot and co-pilot began a pattern of ritualistic
conversation.
"Pitot and wing heaters?" asked the pilot.
The co-pilot put his hand successively on two controls.
"Off."
"Spark advance?"
The co-pilot moved his hands.
"Take-off and climb?" said the co-pilot.
"Blowers?"
"Low."
"Fuel selectors?"
The co-pilot moved his hands again to the appropriate controls,
verifying that they were as he reported them.
"Main on," he said matter-of-factly, "crossfeed off."
The transport plane slanted down steeply for the landing field that had
looked so small at first, but expanded remarkably as they drew near.
Joe found himself frowning. He began to see how really big a job it was
to get a Space Platform even ready to take off for a journey that in
theory should last forever. It was daunting to think that before a space
ship could be built and powered and equipped with machinery there had to
be such wildly irrelevant plans worked out as a proper check of controls
for the piston-engine ships that flew parts to the job. The details were
innumerable!
But the job was still worth doing. Joe was glad he was going to have a
share in it.
2
It was a merely misty day. The transport plane stood by the door of a
hangar on this military field, and mechanics stood well back from it and
looked it over. A man crawled over the tail assembly and found one small
hole in the fabric of the stabilizer. A shell fragment had gone through
when the war rockets exploded nearby. The pilot verified that the
fragment had hit no strengthening member inside. He nodded. The mechanic
made very neat fabric patches over the two holes, upper and lower. He
began to go over the fuselage. The pilot turned away.
"I'll go talk to Bootstrap," he told the co-pilot. "You keep an eye on
things."
"I'll keep two eyes on them," said the co-pilot.
The pilot went toward the control tower of the field. Joe looked around.
The transport ship seemed very large, standing on the concrete apron
with its tricycle landing gear let down. It curiously resembled a
misshapen insect, standing elaborately high on inadequate supporting
legs. Its fuselage, in particular, did not look right for an aircraft.
The top of the cargo section went smoothly back to the stabilizing fins,
but the bottom did not taper. It ended astern in a clumsy-looking bulge
that was closed by a pair of huge clamshell doors, opening straight
astern. It was built that way, of course, so that large objects could be
loaded direct into the cargo hold, but it was neither streamlined nor
graceful.
"Did anything get into the cargo hold?" asked Joe in sudden anxiety.
"Did the cases I'm with get hit?"
After all, four rockets had exploded deplorably near the ship. If one
fragment had struck, others might have.
"Nothing big, anyhow," the co-pilot told him. "We'll know presently."
But examination showed no other sign of the ship's recent nearness to
destruction. It had been overstressed, certainly, but ships are built to
take beatings. A spot check on areas where excessive flexing of the
wings would have shown up--a big ship's wings are not perfectly rigid:
they'd come to pieces in the air if they were--presented no evidence of
damage. The ship was ready to take off again.
The co-pilot watched grimly until the one mechanic went back to the side
lines. The mechanic was not cordial. He and all the others regarded the
ship and Joe and the co-pilot with disfavor. They worked on jets, and to
suggest that men who worked on fighter jets were not worthy of complete
confidence did not set well with them. The co-pilot noticed it.
"They think I'm a suspicious heel," he said sourly to Joe, "but I have
to be. The best spies and saboteurs in the world have been hired to mess
up the Platform. When better saboteurs are made, they'll be sent over
here to get busy!"
The pilot came back from the control tower.
"Special flight orders," he told his companion. "We top off with fuel
and get going."
Mechanics got out the fuel hose, dragging it from the pit. One man
climbed up on the wing. Other men handed up the hose. Joe was moved to
comment, but the co-pilot was reading the new flight instructions. It
was one of those moments of inconsistency to which anybody and everybody
is liable. The two men of the ship's crew had it in mind to be
infinitely suspicious of anybody examining their ship. But fueling it
was so completely standard an operation that they merely stood by
absently while it went on. They had the orders to read and memorize,
anyhow.
One wing tank was full. A big, grinning man with sandy hair dragged the
hose under the nose of the plane to take it to the other wing tank.
Close by the nose wheel he slipped and steadied himself by the shaft
which reaches down to the wheel's hub. His position for a moment was
absurdly ungraceful. When he straightened up, his arm slid into the
wheel well. But he dragged the hose the rest of the way and passed it on
up. Then that tank was full and capped. The refueling crew got down to
the ground and fed the hose back to the pit which devoured it. That was
all. But somehow Joe remembered the sandy-haired man and his arm going
up inside the wheel well for a fraction of a second.
The pilot read one part of the flight orders again and tore them
carefully across. One part he touched his pocket lighter to. It burned.
He nodded yet again to the co-pilot, and they swung up and in the
pilots' doorway. Joe followed.
They settled in their places in the cabin. The pilot threw a switch and
pressed a knob. One motor turned over stiffly, and caught. The second.
Third. Fourth. The pilot listened, was satisfied, and pulled back on the
multiple throttle. The plane trundled away. Minutes later it faced the
long runway, a tinny voice from the control tower spoke out of a
loud-speaker under the instruments, and the plane roared down the field.
In seconds it lifted and swept around in a great half-circle.
"Okay," said the pilot. "Wheels up."
The co-pilot obeyed. The telltale lights that showed the wheels
retracted glowed briefly. The men relaxed.
"You know," said the co-pilot, "there was the devil of a time during the
War with sabotage. Down in Brazil there was a field planes used to take
off from to fly to Africa. But they'd take off, head out to sea, get a
few miles offshore, and then blow up. We must've lost a dozen planes
that way! Then it broke. There was a guy--a sergeant--in the maintenance
crew who was sticking a hand grenade up in the nose wheel wells. German,
he was, and very tidy about it, and nobody suspected him. Everything
looked okay and tested okay. But when the ship was well away and the
crew pulled up the wheels, that tightened a string and it pulled the pin
out of the grenade. It went off.... The master mechanic finally caught
him and nearly killed him before the MPs could stop him. We've got to be
plenty careful, whether the ground crews like it or not."
Joe said drily: "You were, except when they were topping off. You took
that for granted." He told about the sandy-haired man. "He hadn't time
to stick anything in the wheel well, though," he added.
The co-pilot blinked. Then he looked annoyed. "Confound it! I didn't
watch! Did you?"
The pilot shook his head, his lips compressed.
The co-pilot said bitterly: "And I thought I was security-conscious!
Thanks for telling me, fella. No harm done this time, but that was a
slip!"
He scowled at the dials before him. The plane flew on.
This was the last leg of the trip, and now it should be no more than an
hour and a half before they reached their destination. Joe felt a lift
of elation. The Space Platform was a realization--or the beginning of
it--of a dream that had been Joe's since he was a very small boy. It was
also the dream of most other small boys at the time. The Space Platform
would make space travel possible. Of course it wouldn't make journeys to
the moon or planets itself, but it would sail splendidly about the Earth
in an orbit some four thousand miles up, and it would gird the world in
four hours fourteen minutes and twenty-two seconds. It would carry
atom-headed guided missiles, and every city in the world would be
defenseless against it. Nobody could even hope for world domination so
long as it floated on its celestial round. Which, naturally, was why
there were such desperate efforts to destroy it before its completion.
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?"
Joe pulled his thoughts back from satisfied imagining. It hadn't
occurred to him that it was remarkable that he should be allowed to
accompany the gyros from the plant to their destination. His family firm
had built them, so it had seemed natural to him. He wasn't used to the
idea that everybody looked suspicious to a security officer concerned
with the safety of the Platform.
"Connections? I haven't any," said Joe. Then he said, "I do know
somebody on the job. There's a Major Holt out there. He might have
cleared me. Known my family for years."
"Yeah," said the co-pilot drily. "He might. As a matter of fact, he's
the senior security officer for the whole job. He's in charge of
everything, from the security guards to the radar screens and the
jet-plane umbrella and the checking of the men who work in the Shed. If
he says you're all right, you probably are."
Joe hadn't meant to seem impressive. He explained: "I don't know him too
well. He knows my father, and his daughter Sally's been kicking around
underfoot most of my life. I taught her how to shoot, and she's a better
shot than I am. She was a nice kid when she was little. I got to like
her when she fell out of a tree and broke her arm and didn't even
whimper. That shows how long ago it was!" He grinned. "She was trying to
act grown-up last time I saw her."
The co-pilot nodded. There was a brisk chirping sound somewhere. The
pilot reached ahead to the course-correction knob. The plane changed
course. Sunshine shifted as it poured into the cabin. The ship was
running on automatic pilot well above the cloud level, and at an
even-numbered number of thousands of feet altitude, as was suitable for
planes traveling south or west. Now it droned on its new course,
forty-five degrees from the original. Joe found himself guessing that
one of the security provisions for planes approaching the Platform might
be that they should not come too near on a direct line to it, lest they
give information to curious persons on the ground.
Time went on. Joe slipped gradually back to his meditations about the
Platform. There was always, in his mind, the picture of a man-made thing
shining in blinding sunlight between Earth and moon. But he began to
remember things he hadn't paid too much attention to before.
Opposition to the bare idea of a Space Platform, for instance, from the
moment it was first proposed. Every dictator protested bitterly. Even
politicians out of office found it a subject for rabble-rousing
harangues. 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. As a
matter of fact, the United States had first proposed it as a United
Nations enterprise, so that denunciations that politicians found good
politics actually made very poor sense. But it did not get past the
General Assembly. The proposal was so rabidly attacked on every side
that it was not even passed up to the Council--where it would certainly
have been vetoed anyhow.
But it was exactly that furious denunciation which put the Platform
through the United States Congress, which had to find the money for its
construction.
In Joe's eyes and in the eyes of most of those who hoped for it from the
beginning, the Platform's great appeal was that it was the necessary
first step toward interplanetary travel, with star ships yet to come.
But most scientists wanted it, desperately, for their own ends. There
were low-temperature experiments, electronic experiments, weather
observations, star-temperature measurements, astronomical
observations.... Any man in any field of science could name reasons for
it to be built. Even the atom scientists had one, and nearly the best.
Their argument was that there were new developments of nuclear theory
that needed to be tried out, but should not be tried out on Earth. There
were some reactions that ought to yield unlimited power for all the
world from really abundant materials. But there was one chance in fifty
that they wouldn't be safe, just because the materials were so abundant.
No sane man would risk a two-per-cent chance of destroying Earth and all
its people, yet those reactions should be tried. In a space ship some
millions of miles out in emptiness they could be. Either they'd be safe
or they would not. But the only way to get a space ship a safe enough
distance from Earth was to make a Space Platform as a starting point.
Then a ship could shoot away from Earth with effectively zero gravity
and full fuel tanks. The Platform should be built so civilization could
surge ahead to new heights!
But despite these excellent reasons, it was the Platform's enemies who
really got it built. The American Congress would never have appropriated
funds for a Platform for pure scientific research, no matter what
peacetime benefits it promised. It was the vehemence of those who hated
it that sold it to Congress as a measure for national defense. And in a
sense it was.
These were ironic aspects Joe hadn't thought about before, just as he
hadn't thought about the need to defend the Platform while it was being
built. Defending it was Sally's father's job, and he wouldn't have a
popular time. Joe wondered idly how Sally liked living out where the
most important job on Earth was being done. She was a nice kid. He
remembered appreciatively that she'd grown up to be a very good-looking
girl. He tended to remember her mostly as the tomboy who could beat him
swimming, but the last time he'd seen her, come to think of it, he'd
been startled to observe how pretty she'd grown. He didn't know anybody
who ought to be better-looking.... She was a really swell girl....
He came to himself again. There was a change in the look of the sky
ahead. There was no actual horizon, of course. There was a white haze
that blended imperceptibly into the cloud layer so that it was
impossible to tell where the sky ended and the clouds or earth began.
But presently there were holes in the clouds. The ship droned on, and
suddenly it floated over the edge of such a hole, and looking down was
very much like looking over the edge of a cliff at solid earth
illimitably far below.
The holes increased in number. Then there were no holes at all, but only
clouds breaking up the clear view of the ground beneath. And presently
again even the clouds were left behind and the air was clear--but still
there was no horizon--and there was brownish earth with small green
patches and beyond was sere brown range. At seventeen thousand feet
there were simply no details.
Soon the clouds were merely a white-tipped elevation of the white haze
to the sides and behind. And then there came a new sound above the
droning roar of the motors. Joe heard it--and then he saw.
Something had flashed down from nowhere. It flashed on ahead and banked
steeply. It was a fighter jet, and for an instant Joe saw the distant
range seem to ripple and dance in its exhaust blast. It circled
watchfully.
The transport pilot manipulated something. There was a change in the
sound of the motors. Joe followed the co-pilot's eyes. The jet fighter
was coming up astern, dive brakes extended to reduce its speed. It
overhauled the transport very slowly. And then the transport's pilot
touched one of the separate prop-controls gently, and again, and again.
Joe, looking at the jet, saw it through the whirling blades. There was
an extraordinary stroboscopic effect. One of the two starboard
propellers, seen through the other, abruptly took on a look which was
not that of mistiness at all, but of writhing, gyrating solidity. The
peculiar appearance vanished, and came again, and vanished and appeared
yet again before it disappeared completely.
The jet shot on ahead. Its dive brakes retracted. It made a graceful,
wallowing, shallow dive, and then climbed almost vertically. It went out
of sight.
"Visual check," said the co-pilot drily, to Joe. "We had a signal to
give. Individual to this plane. We didn't tell it to you. You couldn't
duplicate it."
Joe worked it out painfully. The visual effect of one propeller seen
through another--that was identification. It was not a type of signaling
an unauthorized or uninformed passenger would expect.
"Also," said the co-pilot, "we have a television camera in the
instrument board yonder. We've turned it on now. The interior of the
cabin is being watched from the ground. No more tricks like the phony
colonel and the atom bomb that didn't 'explode.'"
Joe sat quite still. He noticed that the plane was slanting gradually
downward. His eyes went to the dial that showed descent at somewhere
between two and three hundred feet a minute. That was for his benefit.
The cabin was pressurized, though it did not attempt to simulate
sea-level pressure. It was a good deal better than the outside air,
however, and yet too quick a descent meant discomfort. Two to three
hundred feet per minute is about right.
The ground took on features. Small gulleys. Patches of coloration too
small to be seen from farther up. The feeling of speed increased. After
long minutes the plane was only a few thousand feet up. The pilot took
over manual control from the automatic pilot. He seemed to wait. There
was a plaintive, mechanical _beep-beep_ and he changed course.
"You'll see the Shed in a minute or two," said the co-pilot. He added
vexedly, as if the thing had been bothering him, "I wish I hadn't missed
that sandy-haired guy putting his hand in the wheel well! Nothing
happened, but I shouldn't have missed it!"
Joe watched. Very, very far away there were mountains, but he suddenly
realized the remarkable flatness of the ground over which they were
flying. From the edge of the world, behind, to the very edge of these
far-distant hills, the ground was flat. There were gullies and
depressions here and there, but no hills. It was flat, flat, flat....
The plane flew on. There was a tiny glimmer of sunlight. Joe strained
his eyes. The sunlight glinted from the tiniest possible round pip on
the brown earth. It grew as the plane flew on. It was half a cherry
stone. It was half an orange, with gores. It was the top section of a
sphere that was simply too huge to have been made by men.
There was a thin thread of white that ran across the dun-colored range
and reached that half-ball and then ended. It was a highway. Joe
realized that the half-globe was the Shed, the monstrous building made
for the construction of the Space Platform. It was gigantic. It was
colossal. It was the most stupendous thing that men had ever created.
Joe saw a tiny projection near the base of it. It was an office building
for clerks and timekeepers and other white-collar workers. He strained
his eyes again and saw a motor truck on the highway. It looked
extraordinarily flat. Then he saw that it wasn't a single truck but a
convoy of them. A long way back, the white highway was marked by a tiny
dot. That was a motor bus.
There was no sign of activity anywhere, because the scale was so great.
Movement there was, but the things that moved were too small to be seen
by comparison with the Shed. The huge, round, shining half-sphere of
metal stood tranquilly in the midst of emptiness.
It was bigger than the pyramids.
The plane went on, descending. Joe craned his neck, and then he was
ashamed to gawk. He looked ahead, and far away there were white speckles
that would be buildings: Bootstrap, the town especially built for the
men who built the Space Platform. In it they slept and ate and engaged
in the uproarious festivity that men on a construction job crave on
their time off.
The plane dipped noticeably.
"Airfield off to the right," said the co-pilot. "That's for the town and
the job. The jets--there's an air umbrella overhead all the time--have a
field somewhere else. The pushpots have a field of their own, too, where
they're training pilots."
Joe didn't know what a pushpot was, but he didn't ask. He was thinking
about the Shed, which was the greatest building ever put up, and had
been built merely to shelter the greatest hope for the world's peace
while it was put together. He'd be in the Shed presently. He'd work
there, setting up the contents of the crates back in the cargo space,
and finally installing them in the Platform itself.