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.
7
Nobody could have gone through the changes of emotion Joe had
experienced that morning and remained quite matter-of-fact. Seeing a
dead man who had more or less deliberately killed himself so that he
wouldn't have to kill Joe--for one--had its effect. Knowing that it was
certainly possible the man hadn't killed himself in time had another.
Being checked over for radiation burns which would mean that he'd die
quite comfortably within three or four days, and then learning that no
burns existed, was something of an ordeal. And Sally--of course her
feelings shouldn't have been as vivid as his own, but the fact that
she'd been scared for him held some significance. When, on top of all
the rest, he went into the Space Platform for the first time, Joe was
definitely keyed up.
But he talked technology. He examined the inner skin and its lining
before going beyond the temporary entrance. The plating of the Platform
was actually double. The outer layer was a meteor-bumper against which
particles of cosmic dust would strike and explode without damage to the
inner skin. They could even penetrate it without causing a leak of air.
Inside the inner skin there was a layer of glass wool for heat
insulation. Inside the glass wool was a layer of material serving
exactly the function of the coating of a bulletproof gasoline tank. No
meteor under a quarter-inch size could hope to make a puncture, even at
the forty-five-mile-per-second speed that is the theoretical maximum for
meteors. And if one did, the selfsealing stuff would stop the leak
immediately. Joe could explain the protection of the metal skins. He
did.
"When a missile travels fast enough," he said absorbedly, "it stops
acquiring extra puncturing ability. Over a mile a second, impact can't
be transmitted from front to rear. The back end of the thing that hits
has arrived at the hit place before the shock of arrival can travel back
to it. It's like a train in a collision which doesn't stop all at once.
A meteor hitting the Platform will telescope on itself like the cars of
a railroad train that hits another at full speed."
Sally listened enigmatically.
"So," said Joe, "the punching effect isn't there. A meteor hitting the
Platform won't punch. It'll explode. Part of it will turn to
vapor--metallic vapor if it's metal, and rocky vapor if it's stone.
It'll blow a crater in the metal plate. It'll blow away as much weight
of the skin as it weighs itself. Mass for mass. So that weight for
weight, pea soup would be just as effective armor against meteors as
hardened steel."