Joe said measuredly: "Well, then--that's that! I guess it will be all
right for me to stick around and watch the take-off?"
Sally's eyes were misty.
"Of course it will, Joe! I'm so sorry!"
Joe grinned, but even to himself his face seemed like a mask.
"Into each life some rain must fall. Let's go out and see what's been
accomplished since I went to sleep. All right?"
They went out of the Platform together. And as soon as they reached the
floor of the Shed it was plain that the stage had been set for stirring
events.
The top five or six levels of scaffolding had already been removed, and
more of the girders and pipes were coming down in bundles on lines from
giraffelike cranes. There were some new-type trucks in view, too, giants
of the kind that carry ready-mixed concrete through city streets. They
were pouring a doughy white paste into huge buckets that carried it
aloft, where it vanished into the mouths of tubes that seemed to replace
the scaffolding along the Platform's sides.
"Lining the rockets," said Sally in a subdued voice.
Joe watched. He knew about this, too. It had been controversial for a
time. After the pushpots and their jatos had served as the first two
stages of a multiple-rocket aggregation, the Platform carried rocket
fuel as the third stage. But the Platform was a highly special ballistic
problem. It would take off almost horizontally--a great advantage in
fueling matters. This was practical simply because the Platform could be
lifted far beyond effective air resistance, and already have
considerable speed before its own rockets flared.
Moreover, it was not a space ship in the sense of needing rockets for
landing purposes. It wouldn't land. Not ever. And again there was the
fact that men would be riding in it. That ruled out the use of eight- and
ten- and fifteen-gravity acceleration. It had to make use of a long
period of relatively slow acceleration rather than a brief terrific
surge of power. So its very special rockets had been designed as the
answer.
They were solid-fuel rockets, though solid fuels had been long abandoned
for long-range missiles. But they were entirely unlike other solid-fuel
drives. The pasty white compound being hauled aloft was a self-setting
refractory compound with which the rocket tubes would be lined, with the
solid fuel filling the center. The tubes themselves were thin
steel--absurdly thin--but wound with wire under tension to provide
strength against bursting, like old-fashioned rifle cannon.
When the fuel was fired, it would be at the muzzle end of the rocket
tube, and the fuel would burn forward at so many inches per second. The
refractory lining would resist the rocket blast for a certain time and
then crumble away. Crumbling, the refractory particles would be hurled
astern and so serve as reaction mass. When the steel outer tubes were
exposed, they would melt and be additional reaction mass.
In effect, as the rocket fuel was exhausted, the tubes that contained it
dissolved into their own blast and added to the accelerating thrust,
even as they diminished the amount of mass to be accelerated. Then the
quantity of fuel burned could diminish--the tubes could grow smaller--so
the rate of speed gain would remain constant. Under the highly special
conditions of this particular occasion, there was a notable gain in
efficiency over a liquid-fuel rocket design. For one item, the Platform
would certainly have no use for fuel pumps and fuel tanks once it was in
its orbit. In this way, it wouldn't have them. Their equivalent in mass
would have been used to gain velocity. And when the Platform finally
rode in space, it would have expended every ounce of the driving
apparatus used to get it there.
Now the rocket tubes were being lined and loaded. The time to take-off
was growing short indeed.
Joe watched a while and turned away. He felt very good because he'd
finished his job and lived up to the responsibility he'd had. But he
felt very bad because he'd had an outside chance to be one of the first
men ever to make a real space journey--and now it was gone. He couldn't
resent the decision against him. If it had been put up to him, he'd
probably have made the same hard decision himself. But it hurt to have
had even a crazy hope taken away.
Sally said, trying hard to interest him, "These rockets hold an awful
lot of fuel, Joe! And it's better than scientists thought a chemical
fuel could ever be!"
"Yes," said Joe.
"Fluorine-beryllium," said Sally urgently. "It fits in with the
pushpots' having pressurized cockpits. Rockets like that couldn't be
used on the ground! The fumes would be poisonous!"
But Joe only nodded in agreement. He was apathetic. He was uninterested.
He was still thinking of that lost trip in space. He realized that Sally
was watching his face.
"Joe," she said unhappily, "I wish you wouldn't look like that!"
"I'm all right," he told her.
"You act as if you didn't care about anything," she protested, "and you
do!"
"I'm all right," he repeated.
"I'd like to go outside somewhere," she said abruptly, "but after what
happened up at the lake, I mustn't. Would you like to go up to the top
of the Shed?"
"If you want to," he agreed without enthusiasm.
He followed when she went to a doorway--with a security guard beside
it--in the sidewall. She flashed her pass and the guard let them
through. They began to walk up an inclined, endless, curving ramp. It
was between the inner and outer skins of the Shed. There had to be two
skins because the Shed was too big to be ventilated properly, and the
hot desert sunshine on one side would have made "weather" inside.
There'd have been a convection-current motion of the air in the enclosed
space, and minor whirlwinds, and there could even be miniature
thunderclouds and lightning. Joe remembered reading that such things had
happened in a shed built for Zeppelins before he was born.
They came upon an open gallery, and there was a security man looking
down at the floor and the Platform. He had a very good view of all that
went on.
They went around another long circuit of the slanting gallery, dimly
lighted with small electric bulbs. They came to a second gallery, and
saw the Platform again. There was another guard here.
They were halfway up the globular wall now, and were visibly suspended
over emptiness. The view of the Platform was impressive. There were an
astonishing number of rocket tubes being fastened to the outside of that
huge object. Three giant cranes, working together, hoisted a tube to the
last remaining level of scaffolding, and men swarmed on it and fastened
it to the swelling hull. As soon as it was fast, other men hurried into
it with the white pasty stuff to line it from end to end. The tubes
would nearly hide the structure they were designed to propel. But they'd
all be burned away when it reached its destination.
"Wonderful, isn't it?" asked Sally hopefully.
Joe looked, and said without warmth, "It's the most wonderful thing that
anybody ever even tried to do."
Which was true enough, but the zest of it had unreasonably departed for
Joe for the time being. His disappointment was new.
Halfway around again, Sally opened a door, and Joe was almost surprised
out of his lethargy. Here was a watching post on the outside of the
monstrous half-globe. There were two guards here, with fifty-caliber
machine guns under canvas hoods. Their duties were tedious but
necessary. They watched the desert. From this height it stretched out
for miles, and Bootstrap could be seen as a series of white specks far
away with hills behind it.
Ultimately Sally and Joe came to the very top of the Shed into the open
air. From here the steep plating curved down and away in every
direction. The sunshine was savagely bright and shining, but there was a
breeze. And here there was a considerable expanse fenced in--almost an
acre, it seemed. There were metal-walled small buildings with
innumerable antennae of every possible shape for the reception of every
conceivable wave length. There were three radar bowl reflectors turning
restlessly to scan the horizon, and a fourth which went back and forth,
revolving, to scan the sky itself. Sally told Joe that in the very
middle--where there was a shed with a domelike roof which wasn't
metal--there was a wave-guide radar that could spot a plane within three
feet vertically, and horizontally at a distance of thirty miles, with
greater distances in proportion.
There were guns down in pits so their muzzles wouldn't interfere with
the radar. There were enough non-recoil anti-aircraft guns to defend the
Shed against anything one could imagine.
"And there are jet planes overhead too," said Sally. "Dad asked to have
them reinforced, and two new wings of jet fighters landed yesterday at a
field somewhere over yonder. There are plenty of guards!"
The Platform was guarded as no object in all history had ever been
guarded. It was ironic that it had to be protected so, because it was
actually the only hope of escape from atomic war. But that was why some
people hated the Platform, and their hatred had made it seem obviously
an item of national defense. Ironically that was the reason the money
had been provided for its construction. But the greatest irony of all
was that its most probable immediate usefulness would be the help it
would give in making nuclear experiments that weren't safe enough to
make on Earth.
That was pure irony. Because if those experiments were successful, they
should mean that everybody in the world would in time become rich beyond
envy.
But Joe couldn't react to the fact. He was drained and empty of emotion
because his job was done and he'd lost a very flimsy hope to be one of
the Platform's first crew.
He didn't really feel better until late that night, when suddenly he
realized that life was real and life was earnest, because a panting man
was trying to strangle Joe with his bare hands. Joe was hampered in his
self-defense because a large number of battling figures trampled over
him and his antagonist together. They were underneath the Platform, and
Joe expected to be blown to bits any second.
11
Joe sat on the porch of Major Holt's quarters in the area next to the
Shed. It was about eight-thirty, and dark, but there was a moon. And Joe
had come to realize that his personal disappointment was only his
personal disappointment, and that he hadn't any right to make a nuisance
of himself about it. Therefore he didn't talk about the thing nearest in
his mind, but something else that was next nearest or farther away
still. Yet, with the Shed filling up a full quarter of the sky, and a
gibbous moon new-risen from the horizon, it was not natural for a young
man like Joe to speak purely of earthly things.
"It'll come," he said yearningly, staring at the moon. "If the Platform
gets up day after tomorrow, it's going to take time to ferry up the
equipment it ought to have. But still, somebody ought to land on the
moon before too long."
He added absorbedly: "Once the Platform is fully equipped, it won't take
many rocket pay loads to refill a ship's tanks at the Platform, before
it can head on out."
Mathematically, a rocket ship that could leave the Platform with full
fuel tanks should have fuel to reach the moon and land on it, and take
off again and return to the Platform. The mathematical fact had a
peculiar nagging flavor. When a dream is subjected to statistical
analysis and the report is in its favor, a dreamer's satisfaction is
always diluted by a subconscious feeling that the report is only part of
the dream. Everybody worries a little when a cherished dream shows a
likelihood of coming true. Some people take firm steps to stop things
right there, so a romantic daydream won't be spoiled by transmutation
into prosaic fact. But Joe said doggedly: "Twenty ferry trips to pile up
fuel, and the twenty-first ship should be able to refuel and go on out.
And then somebody will step out on the moon!"
He was disappointed now. He wouldn't be the one to do it. But somebody
would.
"You might try for the ferry service," said Sally uneasily.
"I will," said Joe grimly, "but I won't be hoping too much. After all,
there are astronomers and physics sharks and such things, who'll be glad
to learn to run rockets in order to practice their specialties out of
atmosphere."
Sally said mournfully: "I can't seem to say anything to make you feel
better!"
"But you do," said Joe. He added grandiloquently, "But for your
unflagging faith in me, I would not have the courage to bear the burdens
of everyday life."
She stamped her foot.
"Stop it!"
"All right." But he said quietly, "You are a good kid, Sally. You know,
it's not too bright of me to mourn."
She drew a deep breath.
"That's better! Now, I want----"
There was a gangling figure walking down the concrete path between the
trim, monotonous cottages that were officers' quarters at the Shed.
Joe said sharply: "That's Haney! What's he doing here?" He called,
"Haney!"
Haney's manner took on purpose. He came across the grass--the lawns
around the officers' quarters contained the only grass in twenty miles.
"Hiya," said Haney uncomfortably. He spoke politely to Sally. "Hiya.
Uh--you want to get in on the party, Joe?"
"What kind?"
"The party Mike was talkin' about," said Haney. "He's set it up. He
wants me to get you and a kinda--uh--undercover tip-off to Major Holt."
Joe stirred. Sally said hospitably: "Sit down. You've noticed that my
father gave you full security clearance, so you can go anywhere?"
Haney perched awkwardly on the edge of the porch.
"Yeah. That's helped with the party. It's how I got here, as far as that
goes. Mike's on top of the world."
"Shoot it," said Joe.
"Y'know he's been pretty bitter about things," said Haney carefully.
"He's been sayin' that little guys like him ought to be the spacemen.
There's half a dozen other little guys been working on the Platform too.
They can get in cracks an' buck rivets an' so on. Useful. He's had 'em
all hopped up on the fact that the Platform coulda been finished months
ago if it'd been built for them, an' they could get to the moon an' back
while full-sized guys couldn't an' so on. Remember?"
"I remember," said Sally.
"They've all been beefin' about it," explained Haney. "People know how
they feel. So today Mike went and talked to one or two of 'em. An' they
started actin' mysterious, passin' messages back an' forth an' so on.
Little guys, actin' important. Security guys wouldn't notice 'em much.
Y'don't take a guy Mike's size serious, unless you know him. Then he's
the same as anybody else. So the security guys didn't pay any attention
to him. But some other guys did. Some special other guys. They saw those
little fellas actin' like they were cookin' up somethin' fancy. An' they
bit."
"Bit?" asked Sally.
"They got curious. So Mike an' his gang got confidential. An' they're
going to have help sabotagin' the Platform when the next shift changes.
The midgets gettin' even for bein' laughed at, see? They're pretending
their plan is that when the Platform's sabotaged--not smashed, but just
messed up so it can't take off--the big brass will let 'em take a ferry
rocket up in a hurry, an' get it in orbit, an' use it for a Platform
until the big Platform can be mended an' sent up. Once they're up there,
there's no use tryin' to stop the big Platform. So it can go ahead."