Space Platform, Murray Leinster [primary phonics books .TXT] 📗

drink and oxygen a day. Give him grub and air for two months—twelve hundred pounds. A cabin seven feet high and ten feet across. Sixteen hundred pounds, counting insulation an’ braces for strength. That makes a pay load of a ton an’ a half, and you’d have to burn a hundred an’ eighty tons of fuel—old-style—to take it to the moon, and another hundred an’ twenty for every ton the rocket ship weighed. You might get a man to the moon with a twelve-hundred-ton rocket—maybe. That’s with the old fuels. He’d get there, an’ he’d live two months, an’ then he’d die for lack of air. With the new fuels you’d need ninety tons of fuel to carry the guy there, and sixty more for every ton the ship weighed itself. Call it six hundred tons for the rocket to carry one man to the moon.”

Sally nodded absorbedly.

“I’ve seen figures like that,” she agreed.

“But take a guy like me!” said Mike the midget bitterly. “I weigh forty-five pounds, not two hundred! I use four pounds of food and air a day. A cabin for me to live in would be four feet high an’ five across. Bein’ smaller, it wouldn’t need so much bracing. You could do it for two hundred pounds. Three hundred for grub and air, fifty for me. Me on the moon supplied for two months would come to five-fifty pounds. Sixteen tons of fuel to get me to the moon direct! To carry the weight of the ship—it’s smaller!—fifty tons maximum!”

“I—see...,” said Sally, frowning.

He looked at her suspiciously, but there was no mockery in her face.

“It’d take a six-hundred-ton rocket to get a full-sized man to the moon,” he said with sudden flippancy, “but a guy my size could do the same job of stranglin’ in a fifty-ton job. Counting how much easier it’d be to get back, with atmosphere deceleration, I could make a trip, land, take observations, pick up mineral specimens, and get back—all in a sixty-ton rocket. That’s just ten per cent of what it’d cost to take a full-sized man one way!”

He stamped his foot. Then he said coldly: “Haney, sittin’ still you’re a sittin’ duck!”

The comment was just. Joe knew that Sally was on the lakeward side of this small island, and that there were impenetrable rocks between her and the mainland. But Haney sat crosslegged where he could watch the mainland, and he hadn’t moved in a long while. If someone did intend to commit murder from a distance, Haney was offering a chance for a very fine target. He moved.

“Yeah!” said Mike with fine irony, reverting to his topic. “I could show you plenty of figures! There are other guys like me! We’ve got as much brains as full-sized people! If the big brass had figured on us small guys, they coulda made the Platform the size of a four-family house an’ it’d ha’ been up in the sky right now, with guys like me running it. Guys my size could man the ferry rockets bringin’ up fuel for storage, and four of us could take a six-hundred-ton rocket an’ slide out to Mars an’ be back by springtime—next springtime!—with all the facts and the photographs to prove ’em! By golly——”

Then he made a raging, helpless gesture.

“But that’s just the big picture,” he said bitterly. “Right now, right at this minute, we could make it easy to finish the Platform the way it’s building in the Shed! There are ferry rockets building somewhere else. You know about them?”

Sally said apologetically: “Yes. I know there’ll be smaller rocket ships going up to the Platform. They’ll carry fuel and stores and exchanges for the crew. Yes, I know there are ferry rockets building.”

“Those ferry rockets,” said Mike sardonically, “carry four men, plus two replacements for the crew. They’ll carry air for ten days. But put four of us small guys in a ferry rocket! We’d have air and grub for two months, almost! Pull out the pay load and put in a hydroponic garden and communicators and we’d be a Platform, right then! Send up another ferry rocket to join us, and it could bring guided missiles! The ferry rockets could be finished quicker than the Platform! Send up three ferry rockets with midgets as crews, an’ we could weld ’em together and have a Space Platform in orbit and working—and what’d be the use of sabotaging the big Platform then? The job would be done! There’d be no sense sabotaging the big Platform because the little one could do anything the big one could! It’d be up there and working! But,” he demanded bitterly, “do you think anybody’ll do anything as sensible as that?”

His small features were twisted in angry rebellion. And he was quite right in all his reasoning. Mankind could have made the journey to the planets in a hurry, and it could have had its Space Platform in the sky much more quickly, if only it could have consented to be represented by people like Mike—who would have represented mankind very valiantly.

Sally said distressedly: “Oh, Mike, it’s all true and I’m so sorry!”

And she meant it. Joe liked Sally especially right then, because she didn’t patronize Mike, or try to reason him out of his heartbreak.

Then Haney said abruptly: “Somebody’s spotted the Chief.”

Joe mentally kicked himself. The Chief had said he was going to swim. Now—but only now—Joe looked to see what he was doing.

He was far out from shore, swimming unhurriedly to the powerhouse at the middle of the dam. He would reach it, and swing up the ladder that could just be seen going down the lake side of the dam’s top, and he would explain the situation on shore. A telephone call to Bootstrap would bring security men rushing at eighty miles an hour, and parachute troopers a good deal faster. But even before they arrived the Chief would lead the powerhouse crew ashore armed with the shotguns they kept for shooting waterfowl in and out of season.

The men on shore might or might not consider the Chief’s swim to be proof that he knew their intentions. They were probably discussing the matter in some agitation right now. But they couldn’t know that the party on the semi-island was armed.

Suddenly Mike said crisply: “We’re goin’ to have visitors.”

He lay down carefully on the ground, fifteen feet uphill from Sally, where he could look over the ridge. He snuggled the .22 target rifle professionally to his shoulder. He drew a bead.

Three men very casually strolled out of the brushwood on the shore. They moved nonchalantly toward the strand of rocks that led out to the picnic spot. They looked like anybody else from Bootstrap. Casual, rough work clothing.... Haney bent down and picked up four good throwing stones. His expression was pained.

Joe said: “We’ve got pistols, Haney, and Sally’s a good shot.”

The men came on. Their manner was elaborately casual. Joe stepped up into view.

“No visitors!” he called. “We don’t want company!”

One of the men held his hand to his ear, as if not understanding. They came on. They made no threatening gestures.

Then Joe took his hand out of his pocket, the pistol Sally’d given him gripped tightly.

“I mean that!” he said harshly. “Stand back!”

One of the three spoke sharply. On that instant three snub-nosed pistols appeared. Bullets whined as the men hurtled forward. The purpose was not so much murder at this moment as the demoralizing effect of bullets flying overhead while the three assassins got close enough to do their bloody job with precision.

A stone whizzed by Joe—Haney had thrown it—and the small target rifle in Mike’s hands coughed twice. Joe held his fire. He had only six bullets and three targets to hit. With a familiar revolver he’d have started shooting now, but thirty yards is a long range with a strange pistol at a moving target.

One of the three killers stumbled and crashed to the ground. A second seemed suddenly to be grinning widely on one side of his face. A .22 bullet had slashed his cheek. The third ran head on into a rock thrown by Haney. It knocked the breath out of him and his pistol fell from his hand.

Joe fired deliberately at the widely grinning man and saw him spin around. Mike’s target rifle spat again and the man Joe had hit wheeled and ran heavily, making incoherent yells. The one who’d tumbled scrambled to his feet and fled, hopping crazily, favoring one leg. Deserted, the third man turned and ran too, still doubled over and still gasping.

Mike’s voice crackled. He was in a towering rage because of the way the target rifle shot. It threw high and to the right. The shooting gallery paid off in cigarettes for high scores—so the guns didn’t shoot straight.

Until this moment Joe had been relatively calm, because he had something to do. But just then he heard Sally say “Oh!” in a queer voice. He whirled. Unknown to him, she had not been waiting under cover, but standing with her pistol out and ready. And her face was very white, and she was plucking at her hair. A strand came away in her fingers. A bullet had clipped it just above her shoulder.

Then Joe went sick ... weak ... trembling, and he disgraced himself by half-hysterically grabbing Sally and demanding to know if she was hurt, and raging at her for exposing herself to fire, while his throat tried to close and shut off his breath from horror.

There came loud pop-pop-popping noises. With the peculiar reverberation of sound over water, two motorcycles started from the powerhouse along the crest of the dam. They streaked for the shore carrying five men, one of whom was the Chief, with a red-checked tablecloth about his middle, brandishing a fire axe in default of other weapons.

The danger was over.

But the assassins couldn’t be followed immediately. They still had at least two pistols. Eight men and a girl, counting Mike, with an armament of only two pistols, a .22 rifle, two shotguns and a fire axe were not a properly equipped posse to hunt down killers. Also by now it was close to sunset.

So the victors did the sensible thing. Joe and Sally and Haney and the Chief—his clothes retrieved—plus Mike headed back for Bootstrap. Joe and Sally rode in the Major’s black car, and the other three in the jalopy they’d rented for the afternoon. On the way into the canyon below the dam, they stopped at the parked car their would-be assassins had come in. They removed its distributor and fan belt. The other men returned to the powerhouse with their shotguns and the fire axe, and telephoned to Bootstrap. The three gunmen who had planned murder became fugitives, with no means of transportation but their legs. They had a good many thousand square miles of territory to hide in, but it wasn’t likely that they had food or any competence to find it in the wilds. Two were certainly hurt. With dogs and planes and organization, it should be possible to catch them handily, come morning.

So Joe and Sally drove back to Bootstrap with the other car following closely through all the miles that had to be covered in the dark. Halfway back, they met a grim search party in cars, heading for the dam to begin their man hunt in the morning. After that, Joe felt better. But his teeth still tended to chatter every time he thought of Sally’s startled, scared expression as she pulled away a lock of her hair that had been severed by a bullet.

When they got back to the Shed, Major Holt looked tired and old. Sally explained breathlessly that her danger was her own fault. Joe’d thought she was safely under cover....

“It was my fault,” said the Major detachedly. “I let you