Chapter III: Part 3

The bus rolled and rolled and rolled. It was a long twenty miles to Bootstrap. The desert outside the bus windows was utterly black and featureless, but once a convoy of trucks passed, going to the Shed.

Presently, though, lights twinkled in the night. Again the bus slowed, in column with the others. Then there were barrackslike buildings, succeeding each other, and then there was a corner and suddenly the outside was ablaze with light. The busses drew up to the curb and stopped, and everybody was immediately in a great hurry to get out, shoving unnecessarily, and Joe let himself be carried along by the crowd.

He found himself on the sidewalk with bright neon signs up and down the street. He was in the midst of the crowd which was the middle shift released. It eddied and dispersed without seeming to lessen. Most of the figures in sight were men. There were very, very few women. The neon signs proclaimed that here one could buy beer, and that this was Fred's Place, and that was Sid's Steak Joint. Bowling. Pool. A store--still open for this shift's trade--sold fancy shirts and strictly practical work clothes and highly eccentric items of personal adornment. A movie house. A second. A third. Somewhere a record shop fed repetitious music to the night air. There was movement and crowding and jostling, but the middle of the street was almost empty save for the busses. There were some bicycles, but practically no other wheeled traffic. After all, Bootstrap was strictly a security town. A man could leave whenever he chose, but there were formalities, and personal cars weren't practical.

"Chief'll be yonder," said Haney in Joe's ear. "Come along."

They shouldered their way along the sidewalk. The passers-by were of a type--construction men. Somebody here had taken part in the building of every skyscraper and bridge and dam put up in Joe's lifetime. They could have been kept away from the Space Platform job only by a flat refusal by security to let them be hired.

Haney and Joe moved toward Sid's Steak Joint, with Mike the midget marching truculently between them. Men nodded to them as they passed. Joe marshaled in his mind what he was going to tell the Chief. He had a trick for fixing the pilot gyros. A speck of rust would spoil them, and they had been through a plane crash and a fire and explosions, but his trick would do, in ten days or less, what the plant back home had needed four months to accomplish. The trick was something to gloat over.

Into Sid's Steak Joint. A juke box was playing. Over in a booth, four men ate hungrily, with a slot TV machine in the wall beside them showing wrestling matches out in San Francisco. A waiter carried a huge tray from which steam and fragrant odors arose.

There was the Chief, dark and saturnine to look at, with his straight black hair gleaming in the light. He was a Mohawk, and he and his tribe had taken to steel construction work a long time back. They were good. There were not many big construction jobs on which the Chief's tribesmen were not to be found working. Forty of them had died together in the worst construction accident in history, when a bridge on its way to completion collapsed in the making, but there were a dozen or more at work on the Space Platform now. The Chief had essayed machine-tool work at the Kenmore plant, and he'd been good. He'd pitched on the plant baseball team, and he'd sung bass in the church choir, but there had been nobody else around who talked Indian, and he'd gotten lonely. At that, though, he'd left because the Space Platform began and wild horses couldn't have kept him away from a job like that!

He'd held a table for Haney and Mike, but his eyes widened when he saw Joe. Then he grinned and almost upset the table to stand up and greet him.

"Son-of-a-gun!" he said warmly. "What you doin' here?"

"Right now," said Joe. "I'm looking for you. I've got a job for you."

The Chief, still grinning, shook his head.

"Not me, I'm here till the Platform's done."

"It's on the job," said Joe. "I've got to get a crew together to repair something I brought out here today and that got smashed in the landing."

The four of them sat down. Mike's chin was barely above the table top. The Chief waved to a waiter. "Steaks all around!" he bellowed. Then he bent toward Joe. "Shoot it!"

Joe told his story. Concisely. The pilot gyros, which had to be perfect, had been especially gunned at by saboteurs. An attack with possibly stolen proximity-fused rockets. The plane was booby-trapped, and somebody at an airfield had had a chance to spring the trap. So it was wreckage. Crashed and burned on landing.

The Chief growled. Haney pressed his lips together. The eyes of Mike were burning.

"Plenty of that sabotage stuff," growled the Chief. "Hard to catch the so-and-sos. Smash the gyros and the take-off'd have to wait till new ones got made--and that's more time for more sabotage."

Joe said carefully: "I think it can be licked. Listen a minute, will you?"

The Chief fixed his eyes upon him.

"The gyros have to be rebalanced," said Joe. "They have to spin on their own center of gravity. At the plant, they set them up, spun them, and found which side was heavy. They took metal off till it ran smoothly at five hundred r.p.m. Then they spun it at a thousand. It vibrated. They found imbalance that was too small to show up before. They fixed that. They speeded it up. And so on. They tried to make the center of gravity the center of the shaft by trimming off the weight that put the center of gravity somewhere else. Right?"

The Chief said irritably: "No other way to do it! No other way!"

"I saw one," said Joe. "When they cleaned up the wreck at the airfield, they heaved up the crates with a crane. The slings were twisted. Every crate spun as it rose. But not one wobbled! They found their own centers of gravity and spun around them!"

The Chief scowled, deep in thought. Then his face went blank.

"By the holy mud turtle!" he grunted. "I get it!"

Joe said, with very great pains not to seem triumphant, "Instead of spinning the shaft and trimming the rotor, we'll spin the rotor and trim the shaft. We'll form the shaft around the center of gravity, instead of trying to move the center of gravity to the middle of the shaft. We'll spin the rotors on a flexible bearing base. I think it'll work."

Surprisingly, it was Mike the midget who said warmly, "You got it! Yes, sir, you got it!"

The Chief took a deep breath. "Yeah! And d'you know how I know? The Plant built a high-speed centrifuge once. Remember?" He grinned with the triumph Joe concealed. "It was just a plate with a shaft in the middle. There were vanes on the plate. It fitted in a shaft hole that was much too big. They blew compressed air up the shaft hole. It floated the plate up, the air hit the vanes and spun the plate--and it ran as sweet as honey! Balanced itself and didn't wobble a bit! We'll do something like that! Sure!"

"Will you work on it with me?" asked Joe. "We'll need a sort of crew--three or four altogether. Have to figure out the stuff we need. I can ask for anybody I want. I'm asking for you. You pick the others."

The Chief grinned broadly. "Any objections, Haney? You and Mike and me and Joe here? Look!"

He pulled a pencil out of his pocket. He started to draw on the plastic table top, and then took a paper napkin instead.

"Something like this----"

The steaks came, sizzling on the platters they'd been cooked in. The outside was seared, and the inside was hot and deliciously rare. Intellectual exercises like the designing of a machine-tool operation could not compete with such aromas and sights and sounds. The four of them fell to.

But they talked as they ate. Absorbed and often with their mouths full, frequently with imperfect articulation, but with deepening satisfaction as the steaks vanished and the method they'd use took form in their minds. It wouldn't be wholly simple, of course. When the rotors were spinning about their centers of gravity, trimming off the shaft would change the center of gravity. But the change would be infinitely less than trimming off the rotors' rims. If they spun the rotors and used an abrasive on the high side of the shaft as it turned....

"Going to have precession!" warned Mike. "Have to have a polishing surface. Quarter turn behind the cutter. That'll hold it."

Joe only remembered afterward to be astonished that Mike would know gyro theory. At the moment he merely swallowed quickly to get the words out.

"Right! And if we cut too far down we can plate the bearing up to thickness and cut it down again----"

"Plate it up with iridium," said the Chief. He waved a steak knife. "Man! This is gonna be fun! No tolerance you say, Joe?"

"No tolerance," agreed Joe. "Accurate within the limits of measurement."

The Chief beamed. The Platform was a challenge to all of humanity. The pilot gyro was essential to the functioning of the Platform. To provide that necessity against impossible obstacles was a challenge to the four who were undertaking it.

"Some fun!" repeated the Chief, blissfully.

They ate their steaks, talking. They consumed huge slabs of apple pie with preposterous mounds of ice cream on top, still talking urgently. They drank coffee, interrupting each other to draw diagrams. They used up all the paper napkins, and were still at it when someone came heavily toward the table. It was the stocky man who had fought with Haney on the Platform that day. Braun.

He tapped Haney on the shoulder. The four at the table looked up.

"We hadda fight today," said Braun in a queer voice. He was oddly pale. "We didn't finish. You wanna finish?"

Haney growled.

"That was a fool business," he said angrily. "That ain't any place to fight, up on the job! You know it!"

"Yeah," said Braun in the same odd voice. "You wanna finish it now?"

Haney said formidably: "I'm not dodgin' any fight. I didn't dodge it then. I'm not dodgin' it now. You picked it. It was crazy! But if you got over the craziness----"

Braun smiled a remarkably peculiar smile. "I'm still crazy. We finish, huh?"

Haney pushed back his chair and stood up grimly. "Okay, we finish it! You coulda killed me. I coulda killed you too, with that fall ready for either of us."

"Sure! Too bad nobody got killed," said Braun.

"You fellas wait," said Haney angrily to Joe and the rest. "There's a storeroom out back. Sid'll let us use it."

But the Chief pushed back his chair.

"Uh-uh," he said, shaking his head. "We're watchin' this."

Haney spoke with elaborate courtesy: "You mind, Braun? Want to get some friends of yours, too?"

"I got no friends," said Braun. "Let's go."

The Chief went authoritatively to the owner of Sid's Steak Joint. He paid the bill, talking. The owner of the place negligently jerked his thumb toward the rear. This was not an unparalleled request--for the use of a storeroom so that two men could batter each other undisturbed. Bootstrap was a law-abiding town, because to get fired from work on the Platform was to lose a place in the most important job in history. So it was inevitable that the settlement of quarrels in private should become commonplace.

The Chief leading, they filed through the kitchen and out of doors. The storeroom lay beyond. The Chief went in and switched on the light. He looked about and was satisfied. It was almost empty, save for stacked cartons in one corner. Braun was already taking off his coat.

"You want rounds and stuff?" demanded the Chief.

"I want fight," said Braun thickly.

"Okay, then," snapped the Chief. "No kickin' or gougin'. A man's down, he has a chance to get up. That's all the rules. Right?"

Haney, stripping off his coat in turn, grunted an assent. He handed his coat to Joe. He faced his antagonist.

It was a curious atmosphere for a fight. There were merely the plank walls of the storeroom with a single dangling light in the middle and an unswept floor beneath. The Chief stood in the doorway, scowling. This didn't feel right. There was not enough hatred in evidence to justify it. There was doggedness and resolution enough, but Braun was deathly white and if his face was contorted--and it was--it was not with the lust to batter and injure and maim. It was something else.

The two men faced each other. And then the stocky, swarthy Braun swung at Haney. The blow had sting in it but nothing more. It almost looked as if Braun were trying to work himself up to the fight he'd insisted on finishing. Haney countered with a roundhouse blow that glanced off Braun's cheek. And then they bore in at each other, slugging without science or skill.

Joe watched. Braun launched a blow that hurt, but Haney sent him reeling back. He came in doggedly again, and swung and swung, but he had no idea of boxing. His only idea was to slug. He did slug. Haney had been peevish rather than angry. Now he began to glower. He began to take the fight to Braun.

He knocked Braun down. Braun staggered up and rushed. A wildly flailing fist landed on Haney's ear. He doubled Braun up with a wallop to the midsection. Braun came back, fists swinging.

Haney closed one eye for him. He came back. Haney shook him from head to foot with a chest blow. He came back. Haney split his lip and loosened a tooth. He came back.

The Chief said sourly: "This ain't a fight. Quit it, Haney! He don't know how!"

Haney tried to draw away, but Braun swarmed on him, striking fiercely until Haney had to floor him again. He dragged himself up and rushed at Haney--and was knocked down again. Haney stood over him, panting furiously.

"Quit it, y'fool! What's the matter with you?"

Braun started to get up again. The Chief interfered and held him, while Haney glared.

"He ain't going to fight any more, Braun," pronounced the Chief firmly. "You ain't got a chance. This fight's over. You had enough."

Braun was bloody and horribly battered, but he panted: "He's got enough?"

"Are you out o' your head?" demanded the Chief. "He ain't got a mark on him!"

"I ain't--got enough," panted Braun, "till he's got--enough!"

His breath was coming in soblike gasps, the result of body blows. It hadn't been a fight but a beating, administered by Haney. But Braun struggled to get up.

Mike the midget said brittlely: "You got enough, Haney. You're satisfied. Tell him so."

"Sure I'm satisfied," snorted Haney. "I don't want to hit him any more. I got enough of that!"

Braun panted: "Okay! Okay!"

The Chief let him get to his feet. He went groggily to his coat. He tried to put himself into it. Mike caught Joe's eye and nodded meaningfully. Joe helped Braun into the coat. There was silence, save for Braun's heavy, labored breathing.

He moved unsteadily toward the door. Then he stopped.

"Haney," he said effortfully, "I don't say I'm sorry for fighting you today. I fight first. But now I say I am sorry. You are good guy, Haney. I was crazy. I--got reason."

He stumbled out of the door and was gone. The four who were left behind stared at each other.

"What's the matter with him?" demanded Haney blankly.

"He's nuts," said the Chief. "If he was gonna apologize----"

Mike shook his head.

"He wouldn't apologize," he said brittlely, "because he thought you might think he was scared. But when he'd proved he wasn't scared of a beating--then he could say he was sorry." He paused. "I've seen guys I liked a lot less than him."

Haney put on his coat, frowning.

"I don't get it," he rumbled. "Next time I see him----"

"You won't," snapped Mike. "None of us will. I'll bet on it."

But he was wrong. The others went out of the storeroom and back into Sid's Steak Joint, and the Chief politely thanked the proprietor for the loan of his storeroom for a private fight. Then they went out into the neon-lighted business street of Bootstrap.

"What do we do now?" asked Joe.

"Where you sleeping?" asked the Chief hospitably. "I can get you a room at my place."

"I'm staying out at the Shed," Joe told him awkwardly. "My family's known Major Holt a long time. I'm staying at his house behind the Shed."

Haney raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

"Better get out there then," said the Chief. "It's midnight, and they might want to lock up. There's your bus."

A lighted bus was waiting by the curb. Its doors were open, but it was empty of passengers. Single busses ran out to the Shed now and then, but they ran in fleets at shift-change time. Joe went over and climbed aboard the bus.

"We'll turn up early," said the Chief. "This won't be a shift job. We'll look things over and lay out what we want and then get to work, eh?"

"Right," said Joe. "And thanks."

"We'll be there with our hair in braids," said Mike, in his cracked voice. "Now a glass of beer and so to bed. 'Night."

Haney waved his hand. The three of them marched off, the two huge figures of Haney and the Chief, with Mike trotting truculently between them, hardly taller than their knees. They were curiously colorful with all the many-tinted neon signs upon them. They turned into a diner.

Joe sat in the bus, alone. The driver was off somewhere. The sounds of Bootstrap were distinctive by night. Footsteps, and the jangling of bicycle bells, and voices, and a radio blaring somewhere and a record-shop loud-speaker somewhere else, and a sort of underriding noise of festivity.

There was a sharp rap on the glass by Joe's window. He started and looked out. Braun--battered, and bleeding from the corner of his mouth--motioned urgently for him to come to the door of the bus. Joe went.

Braun stared up at him in a new fashion. Now he was neither dogged nor fierce nor desperate to look at. Despite the beating he'd taken, he seemed completely and somehow frighteningly tranquil. He looked like somebody who has come to the end of torment and is past any feeling but that of relief from suffering.

"You--" said Braun. "That girl you were with today. Her pop is Major Holt, eh?"

Joe frowned, and reservedly said that he was.

"You tell her pop," said Braun detachedly, "this is hot tip. Hot tip. Look two kilometers north of Shed tomorrow. He find something bad. Hot! You tell him. Two kilometers."

"Y-yes," said Joe, his frown increasing. "But look here----"

"Be sure say hot," repeated Braun.

Rather incredibly, he smiled. Then he turned and walked quickly away.

Joe went back to his seat in the empty bus, and sat there and waited for it to start, and tried to figure out what the message meant. Since it was for Major Holt, it had something to do with security. And security meant defense against sabotage. And "hot" might mean merely _significant_, or--in these days--it might mean _something else_. In fact, it might mean something to make your hair stand on end when thought of in connection with the Space Platform.

Joe waited for the bus to take off. He became convinced that Braun's use of the word "hot" did not mean merely "significant." The other meaning was what he had in mind.

Joe's teeth tried to chatter.

He didn't let them.

6

Major Holt wasn't to be found when Joe got out to the Shed. And he wasn't in the house in the officers'-quarters area behind it. There was only the housekeeper, who yawned pointedly as she let Joe in. Sally was presumably long since asleep. And Joe didn't know any way to get hold of the Major. He assured himself that Braun was a good guy--if he weren't he wouldn't have insisted on taking a licking before he apologized--and he hadn't said there was any hurry. Tomorrow, he'd said. So Joe uneasily let himself be led to a room with a cot, and he was asleep in what seemed seconds. But just the same he was badly worried.

In fact, next morning Joe woke at a practically unearthly hour with Braun's message pounding on his brain. He was downstairs waiting when the housekeeper appeared. She looked startled.

"Major Holt?" he asked.

But the Major was gone. He must have done with no more than three or four hours' sleep. There was an empty coffee cup whose contents he'd gulped down before going back to the security office.

Joe trudged to the barbed-wire enclosure around the officers'-quarters area and explained to the sentry where he wanted to go. A sleepy driver whisked him around the half-mile circle to the security building and he found his way to Major Holt's office.

The plain and gloomy secretary was already on the job, too. She led him in to face Major Holt. He blinked at the sight of Joe.

"Hm.... I have some news," he observed. "We back-tracked the parcel that exploded when it was dumped from the plane."

Joe had almost forgotten it. Too many other things had happened since.

"We've got two very likely prisoners out of that affair," said the Major. "They may talk. Also, an emergency inspection of other transport planes has turned up three other grenades tucked away in front-wheel wells. Ah--CO_2 bottles have turned out to have something explosive in them. A very nice bit of work, that! The sandy-haired man who fueled your plane--ah--disappeared. That is bad!"

Joe said politely: "That's fine, sir."

"All in all, you've been the occasion of our forestalling a good deal of sabotage," said the Major. "Bad for you, of course.... Did you find the men you were looking for?"

"I've found them, but--."

"I'll have them transferred to work under your direction," said the Major briskly. "Their names?"

Joe gave the names. The Major wrote them down.

"Very good. I'm busy now----"

"I've a tip for you," said Joe. "I think it should be checked right away. I don't feel too good about it."

The Major waited impatiently. And Joe explained, very carefully, about the fight on the Platform the day before, Braun's insistence on finishing the fight in Bootstrap, and then the tip he'd given Joe after everything was over. He repeated the message exactly, word for word.

The Major, to do him justice, did not interrupt. He listened with an expression that varied between grimness and weariness. When Joe ended he picked up a telephone. He talked briefly. Joe felt a reluctant sort of approval. Major Holt was not a man one could ever feel very close to, and the work he was in charge of was not likely to make him popular, but he did think straight--and fast. He didn't think "hot" meant "significant," either. When he'd hung up the phone he said curtly: "When will your work crew get here?"

"Early--but not yet," said Joe. "Not for some time yet."

"Go with the pilot," said the Major. "You'd recognize what Braun meant as soon as anybody. See what you see."

Joe stood up.

"You--think the tip is straight?"

"This isn't the first time," said Major Holt detachedly, "that a man has been blackmailed into trying sabotage. If he's got a family somewhere abroad, and they're threatened with death or torture unless he does such-and-such here, he's in a bad fix. It's happened. Of course he can't tell me! He's watched. But he sometimes finds an out."

Joe was puzzled. His face showed it.

"He can try to do the sabotage," said the Major precisely, "or he can arrange to be caught trying to do it. If he's caught--he tried; and the blackmail threat is no threat at all so long as he keeps his mouth shut. Which he does. And--ah--you would be surprised how often a man who wasn't born in the United States would rather go to prison for sabotage than commit it--here."

Joe blinked.

"If your friend Braun is caught," said the Major, "he will be punished. Severely. Officially. But privately, someone will--ah--mention this tip and say 'thanks.' And he'll be told that he will be released from prison just as soon as he thinks it's safe. And he will be. That's all."

He turned to his papers. Joe went out. On the way to meet the pilot who'd check on his tip, he thought things over. He began to feel a sort of formless but very definite pride. He wasn't quite sure what he was proud of, but it had something to do with being part of a country toward which men of wholly different upbringing could feel deep loyalty. If a man who was threatened unless he turned traitor, a man who might not even be a citizen, arranged to be caught and punished for an apparent crime against a country rather than commit it--that wasn't bad. There can be a lot of things wrong with a nation, but if somebody from another one entirely can come to feel that kind of loyalty toward it--well--it's not too bad a country to belong to.

Joe had a security guard with him this time, instead of Sally, as he went across the vast, arc-lit interior of the Shed and past the shimmering growing monster that was the Platform. He went all the way to the great swinging doors that let in materials trucks. And there were guards there, and they checked each driver very carefully before they admitted his truck. But somehow it wasn't irritating. It wasn't scornful suspicion. There'd be snide and snappy characters in the Security force, of course, swaggering and throwing their weight about. But even they were guarding something that men--some men--were willing to throw away their lives for.

Joe and his guard reached one of the huge entrances as a ten-wheeler truck came in with a load of shining metal plates. Joe's escort went through the opening with him and they waited outside. The sun had barely risen. It looked huge but very far away, and Joe suddenly realized why just this spot had been chosen for the building of the Platform.

The ground was flat. All the way to the eastern horizon there wasn't even a minor hillock rising above the plain. It was bare, arid, sun-scorched desert. It was featureless save for sage and mesquite and tall thin stalks of yucca. But it was flat. It could be a runway. It was a perfect place for the Platform to start from. The Platform shouldn't touch ground at all, after it was out of the Shed, but at least it wouldn't run into any obstacles on its way toward the horizon.

A light plane came careening around the great curved outer surface of the Shed. It landed and taxied up to the door. It swung smartly around and its side door opened. A bandaged hand waved at Joe. He climbed in. The pilot of this light, flimsy plane was the co-pilot of the transport of yesterday. He was the man Joe had helped to dump cargo.

Joe climbed in and settled himself. The small motor pop-popped valiantly, the plane rushed forward over hard-packed desert earth, and went swaying up into the air.

The co-pilot--pilot now--shouted cheerfully above the din: "Hiya. You couldn't sleep either? Burns hurt?"

Joe shook his head.

"Bothered," he shouted in reply. Then he added, "Do I do something to help, or am I along just for the ride?"

"First we take a look," the pilot called over the motor racket. "Two kilometers due north of the Shed, eh?"

"That's right."

"We'll see what's there," the pilot told him.

The small plane went up and up. At five hundred feet--nearly level with the roof of the Shed--it swung away and began to make seemingly erratic dartings out over the spotty desert land, and then back. Actually, it was a search pattern. Joe looked down from his side of the small cockpit. This was a very small plane indeed, and in consequence its motor made much more noise inside its cabin than much more powerful engines in bigger ships.

"Those burns I got," shouted the pilot, staring down, "kept me awake. So I got up and was just walking around when the call came for somebody to drive one of these things. I took over."

Back and forth, and back and forth. From five hundred feet in the early morning the desert had a curious appearance. The plane was low enough for each smallest natural feature to be visible, and it was early enough for every shrub or hummock to cast a long, slender shadow. The ground looked streaked, but all the streaks ran the same way, and all were shadows.

Joe shouted: "What's that?"

The plane banked at a steep angle and ran back. It banked again. The pilot stared carefully. He reached forward and pushed a button. There was a tiny impact underfoot. Another steep banking turn, and Joe saw a puff of smoke in the air.

The pilot shouted: "It's a man. He looks dead."

He swung directly over the small prone object and there was a second puff of smoke.

"They've got range finders on us from the Shed," he called across the two-foot space separating him from Joe. "This marks the spot. Now we'll see if there's anything to the hot part of that tip."

He reached over behind his seat and brought out a stubby pole like a fishpole with a very large reel. There was also a headset, and something very much like a large aluminum fish on the end of the line.

"You know Geiger counters?" called the pilot. "Stick on these headphones and listen!"

Joe slipped on the headset. The pilot threw a switch and Joe heard clickings. They had no pattern and no fixed frequency. They were clickings at strictly random intervals, but there was an average frequency, at that.

"Let the counter out the window," called the pilot, "and listen. Tell me if the noise goes up."

Joe obeyed. The aluminum fish dangled. The line slanted astern from the wind. It made a curve between the pole and the aluminum plummet, which was hollow in the direction of the plane's motion. The pilot squinted down and began to swing in a wide circle around the spot where an apparently dead man had been sighted, and above which puffs of smoke now floated.

Three-quarters of the way around, the random clickings suddenly became a roar.

Joe said: "Hey!"

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.

A voice said: "Joe."

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."

Sally said: "Dear me! You must read the newspapers!"

"The odds figure out, the odds are even that the Platform won't get an actual meteor puncture in the first twenty thousand years it's floating round the Earth."

"Twenty thousand two seventy, Joe," said Sally. She was trying to tease him, but her face showed a little of the strain. "I read the magazine articles too. In fact I sometimes show the tame article writers around, when they're cleared to see the Platform."

Joe winced a little. Then he grinned wryly.

"That cuts me down to size, eh?"

She smiled at him. But they both felt queer. They went on into the interior of the huge space ship.

"Lots of space," said Joe. "This could've been smaller."

"It'll be nine-tenths empty when it goes up," said Sally. "But you know about that, don't you?"