She vanished. She came back with the uniformed man who'd driven Major
Holt. She put her hand momentarily on Joe's arm.
"If it's really bad, Joe, tell me. You won't let yourself cry, but I'll
cry for you." She searched his eyes. "Really, Joe!"
He grinned feebly and went out to the car.
The feeling on the way to the airfield was not a good one. It was
twenty-odd miles from the Shed, but Joe dreaded what he was going to
see. The black car burned up the road. It turned to the right off the
white highway, onto the curved short cut--and there was the field.
And there was the wreck of the transport plane, still where it had
crashed and burned. There were still armed guards about it, but men were
working on the wreck, cutting it apart with torches. Already some of it
was dissected.
Joe went to the remains of the four crates.
The largest was bent askew by the force of the crash or an explosion,
Joe didn't know which. The smallest was a twisted mass of charcoal. Joe
gulped, and dug into them with borrowed tools.
The pilot gyros of the Space Platform would apply the torque that would
make the main gyros shift it to any desired position, or else hold it
absolutely still. They were to act, in a sense, as a sort of steering
engine on the take-off and keep a useful function out in space. If a
star photograph was to be made, it was essential that the Platform hold
absolutely still while the exposure lasted. If a guided missile was to
be launched, it must be started right, and the pilot gyros were needed.
To turn to receive an arriving rocket from Earth....
The pilot gyros were the steering apparatus of the Space Platform. They
had to be more than adequate. They had to be perfect! On the take-off
alone, they were starkly necessary. The Platform couldn't hope to reach
its orbit without them.
Joe chipped away charred planks. He pulled off flame-eaten timbers. He
peeled off carbonized wrappings--but some did not need to be peeled:
they crumbled at a touch--and in twenty minutes he knew the whole story.
The rotor motors were ruined. The couplers--pilot-to-main-gyro
connections--had been heated red hot and were no longer hardened steel;
their dimensions had changed and they would no longer fit. But these
were not disastrous items. They were serious, but not tragic.
The tragedy was the gyros themselves. On their absolute precision and
utterly perfect balance the whole working of the Platform would depend.
And the rotors were gashed in one place, and the shafts were bent. Being
bent and nicked, the precision of the apparatus was destroyed. Its
precision lost, the whole device was useless. And it had taken four
months' work merely to get it perfectly balanced!
It had been the most accurate piece of machine work ever done on Earth.
It was balanced to a microgram--to a millionth of the combined weight of
three aspirin tablets. It would revolve at 40,000 revolutions per
minute. It had to balance perfectly or it would vibrate intolerably. If
it vibrated at all it would shake itself to pieces, or, failing that,
send aging sound waves through all the Platform's substance. If it
vibrated by the least fraction of a ten-thousandth of an inch, it would
wear, and vibrate more strongly, and destroy itself and possibly the
Platform. It needed the precision of an astronomical telescope's
lenses--multiplied! And it was bent. It was exactly as useless as if it
had never been made at all.
Joe felt as a man might feel if the mirror of the greatest telescope on
earth, in his care, had been smashed. As if the most priceless picture
in the world, in his charge, had been burned. But he felt worse. Whether
it was his fault or not--and it wasn't--it was destroyed.
A truck rolled up and was stopped by a guard. There was talk, and the
guard let it through. A small crane lift came over from the hangars. Its
normal use was the lifting of plane motors in and out of their nacelles.
Now it was to pick up the useless pieces of equipment on which the best
workmen and the best brains of the Kenmore Precision Tool Company had
worked unceasingly for eight calendar months, and which now was junk.
Joe watched, numbed by disaster, while the crane hook went down to
position above the once-precious objects. Men shored up the heavy things
and ran planks under them, and then deftly fitted rope slings for them
to be lifted by. It was late afternoon by now. Long shadows were
slanting as the crane truck's gears whined, and the slack took up, and
the first of the four charred objects lifted and swung, spinning slowly,
to the truck that had come from the Shed.
Joe froze, watching. He watched the second. The third did not spin. It
merely swayed. But the fourth.... The lines up to the crane hook were
twisted. As the largest of the four crates lifted from its bed, it
twisted the lines toward straightness. It spun. It spun more and more
rapidly, and then more and more slowly, and stopped, and began to spin
back.
Then Joe caught his breath. It seemed that he hadn't breathed in
minutes. The big crate wasn't balanced. It was spinning. It wasn't
vibrating. It spun around its own center of gravity, unerringly revealed
by its flexible suspension.
He watched until it was dropped into the truck. Then he went stiffly
over to the driver of the car that had brought him.
"Everything's all right," he said, feeling a queer astonishment at his
own words. "I'm going to ride back to the Shed with the stuff I brought.
It's not hurt too much. I'll be able to fix it with a man or two I can
pick up out here. But I don't want anything else to happen to it!"
So he rode back out to the Shed on the tailboard of the truck that
carried the crates. The sun set as he rode. He was smudged and
disheveled. The reek of charred wood and burnt insulation and scorched
wrappings was strong in his nostrils. But he felt very much inclined to
sing.
It occurred to Joe that he should have sent Sally a message that she
didn't need to cry as a substitute for him. He felt swell! He knew how
to do the job that would let the Space Platform take off! He'd tell her,
first chance.
It was very good to be alive.
5
There was nobody in the world to whom the Space Platform was
meaningless. To Joe and a great many people like him, it was a dream
long and stubbornly held to and now doggedly being made a reality. To
some it was the prospect of peace and the hope of a quiet life: children
and grandchildren and a serene look forward to the future. Some people
prayed yearningly for its success, though they could have no other share
in its making. And of course there were those men who had gotten into
power and could not stay there without ruthlessness. They knew what the
Platform would mean to their kind. For, once world peace was certain,
they would be killed by the people they ruled over. So they sent grubby,
desperate men to wreck it at any cost. They were prepared to pay for or
to commit any crime if the Space Platform could be smashed and turmoil
kept as the norm of life on Earth.
And there were the people who were actually doing the building.
Joe rode a bus into Bootstrap that night with some of them. The middle
shift--two to ten o'clock--was off. Fleets of busses rolled out from the
small town twenty miles away, their headlights making a procession of
paired flames in the darkness. They rolled into the unloading area and
disgorged the late shift--ten to six--to be processed by security and
admitted to the Shed. Then, quite empty, the busses went trundling
around to where Joe waited with the released shift milling around him.
The busses stopped and opened their doors. The waiting men stormed in,
shoving zestfully, calling to each other, scrambling for seats or merely
letting themselves be pushed on board. The bus Joe found himself on was
jammed in seconds. He held on to a strap and didn't notice. He was
absorbed in the rapt contemplation of his idea for the repair of the
pilot gyros. The motors could be replaced easily enough. The foundation
of his first despair had been the belief that everything could be
managed but one thing; that the all-important absolute accuracy was the
only thing that couldn't be achieved. Getting that accuracy, back at the
plant, had consumed four months of time. Each of the gyros was four feet
in diameter and weighed five hundred pounds. Each spun at 40,000 r.p.m.
It had to be machined from a special steel to assure that it would not
fly to pieces from sheer centrifugal force. Each was plated with iridium
lest a speck of rust form and throw it off balance. If the shaft and
bearings were not centered exactly at the center of gravity of the
rotors--five hundred pounds of steel off balance at 40,000 r.p.m. could
raise the devil. They could literally wreck the Platform itself. And
"exactly at the center of gravity" meant exactly. There could be no
error by which the shaft was off center by the thousandth of an inch, or
a ten-thousandth, or even the tenth of a ten-thousandth. The accuracy
had to be absolute.
Gloating over the solution he'd found, Joe could have hugged himself.
Hanging to a strap in the waiting bus, he saw another bus start off with
a grinding of gears and a spouting of exhaust smoke. It trundled to the
highway and rolled away. Another and another followed it. Joe's bus fell
in line. They headed for Bootstrap in a convoy, a long, long string of
lighted vehicles running one behind the other.
It was dark outside. The Shed was alone, for security. It was twenty
miles from the town where its work force slept and ate and made merry.
That was security too. One shift came off, and went through a security
check, and during that time the Shed was empty save for the security
officers who roamed it endlessly, looking for trouble. Sometimes they
found it. The shift coming on also passed through a security check.
Nobody could get into the Shed without being identified past question.
The picture-badge stage was long since passed on the Space Platform job.
Security was tight!
The long procession of busses rolled through the night. Outside was dark
desert. Overhead were many stars. Inside the jammed bus were swaying
figures crowded in the aisle, and every seat was filled. There was the
smell of sweat, and oil, and tobacco. Somebody still had garlic on his
breath from lunch. There was the noise of many voices. There was an
argument two seats up the aisle. There was the rumble of the motor, and
the peculiar whine of spinning tires. Men had to raise their voices to
be heard above the din.
A swaying among the crowded figures more pronounced than that caused by
the motion of the bus caught Joe's eye. Somebody was crowding his way
from the back toward the front. The aisle was narrow. Joe clung to his
strap, thinking hard and happily about the rebalancing of the gyros.
There could be no tolerance. It had to be exact. There had to be no
vibration at all....
Figures swayed away from him. A hand on his shoulder.
"Hiya."
He swung around. It was the lean man, Haney, whom he'd kept from being
knocked off the level place two hundred feet up.