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 he'd 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 they'd 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.