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

on the air, even if they had wings to put wing flaps on. Those dinkuses are things to have bad dreams about!”

Again, a door opened and a man in uniform with an apron in front came marching in with a tray. There was tomato juice and ham and eggs and coffee. He served Joe briskly and marched out again.

“That’s Hotel de Gink service,” said Talley. “No wasted motion, no sloppy civilities. He was about to eat that himself, he gave it to you, and now he’ll cook himself a double portion of everything. What are you doing here, anyhow?”

Joe shrugged. It occurred to him that it would neither be wise nor creditable to say that he’d been sent here to split up a target at which saboteurs might shoot.

“I guess I’m attached for rations,” he observed. “There’ll be orders along about me presently, I suppose. Then I’ll know what it’s all about.”

He fell to on his breakfast. The thunderous noises of the pushpots taking off made the mess hall quiver. Joe said between mouthfuls: “Funny way for anything to take off, riding on—it looked like a truck.”

“It is a truck,” said Talley. “A high-speed truck. Fifty of them specially made to serve as undercarriages so pushpot pilots can practice. The pushpots are really only expected to work once, you know.”

Joe nodded.

“They aren’t to take off,” Talley explained. “Not in theory. They hang on to the Platform and heave. They go up with it, pushing. When they get it as high as they can, they’ll shoot their jatos, let go, and come bumbling back home. So they have to practice getting back home and landing. For practicing it doesn’t matter how they get aloft. When they get down, a big straddle truck on caterpillar treads picks them up—they land in the doggonedest places, sometimes!—and brings ’em back. Then a crane heaves them up on a high-speed truck and they do it all over again.”

Joe considered while he ate. It made sense. The function of the pushpots was to serve as the first booster stage of a multiple-stage rocket. Together, they would lift the Platform off the ground and get it as high as their jet motors would take it traveling east at the topmost speed they could manage. Then they’d fire their jatos simultaneously, and in doing that they’d be acting as the second booster stage of a multiple-stage rocket. Then their work would be done, and their only remaining purpose would be to get their pilots back to the ground alive, while the Platform on its own third stage shot out to space.

“So,” said Talley, “since their pilots need to practice landings, the trucks get them off the ground. They go up to fifty thousand feet, just to give their oxygen tanks a chance to conk out on them; then they barge around up there a while. The advanced trainees shoot off a jato at top speed. It’s gauged to build them up to the speed they’ll give the Platform. And then if they come out of that and get back down to ground safely, they uncross their fingers. A merry life those guys lead! When a man’s made ten complete flights he retires. One flight a week thereafter to keep in practice only, until the big day for the Platform’s take-off. Those guys sweat!”

“Is it that bad?”

The pilot grunted. The co-pilot—Talley—spread out his hands.

“It is that bad! Every so often one of them comes down untidily. There’s something the matter with the motors. They’ve got a little too much power, maybe. Sometimes—occasionally—they explode.”

“Jet motors?” asked Joe. “Explode? That’s news!”

“A strictly special feature,” said Talley drily. “Exclusive with pushpots for the Platform. They run ’em and run ’em and run ’em, on test. Nothing happens. But occasionally one blows up in flight. Once it happened warming up. That was a mess! The field’s been losing two pilots a week. Lately more.”

“It doesn’t sound exactly reasonable,” said Joe slowly. He put a last forkful in his mouth.

“It’s also inconvenient,” said Talley, “for the pilots.”

The pilot—Walton—opened his mouth.

“It’d be sabotage,” he said curtly, “if there was any way to do it. Four pilots killed this week.”

He lapsed into silence again.

Joe considered. He frowned.

A pushpot, outside the building, hysterically bellowed its way across the runway and its noise changed and it was aloft. It went spiraling up and up. Joe stirred his coffee.

There were thin shoutings outside. A screaming, whistling noise! A crash! Something metallic shrieked and died. Then silence.

Talley, the co-pilot, looked sick. Then he said: “Correction. It’s been five pushpots exploded and five pilots killed this week. It’s getting a little bit serious.” He looked sharply at Joe. “Better drink your coffee before you go look. You won’t want to, afterward.”

He was right.

Joe saw the crashed pushpot half an hour later. He found that his ostensible assignment to the airfield for the investigation of sabotage was quaintly taken at face value there. A young lieutenant solemnly escorted him to the spot where the pushpot had landed, only ten feet from a hangar wall. The impact had carried parts of the pushpot five feet into the soil, and the splash effect had caved in the hangar wall-footing. There’d been a fire, which had been put out.

The ungainly flying thing was twisted and torn. Entrails of steel tubing were revealed. The plastic cockpit cover was shattered. There were only grisly stains where the pilot had been.

The motor had exploded. The jet motor. And jet motors do not explode. But this one had. It had burst from within, and the turbine vanes of the compressor section were revealed, twisted intolerably where the barrel of the motor was ripped away. The jagged edges of the tear testified to the violence of the internal explosion.

Joe looked wise and felt ill. The young lieutenant very politely looked away as Joe’s face showed how he felt. But of course there were the orders that said he was a sabotage expert. And Joe felt angrily that he was sailing under false colors. He didn’t know anything about sabotage. He believed that he was probably the least qualified of anybody that security had ever empowered to look into methods of destruction.

Yet, in a sense, that very fact was an advantage. A man may be set to work to contrive methods of sabotage. Another man may be trained to counter him. The training of the second man is essentially a study of how the first man’s mind works. Then it can be guessed what this saboteur will think and do. But such a trained security man will often be badly handicapped if he comes upon the sabotage methods of a second man—an entirely different saboteur who thinks in a new fashion. The security man may be hampered in dealing with the second man’s sabotage just because he knows too much about the thinking of the first.

Joe went off and scowled at a wall, while the young lieutenant waited hopefully nearby.

He was in a false position. But he could see that there was something odd here. There was a sort of pattern in the way the other sabotage incidents had been planned. It was hard to pick out, but it was there. Joe thought of the trick of booby-trapping a plane during its major overhaul, and then arming the traps at a later date.... A private plane had been fitted to deliver proximity rockets in mid-air when the transport ship flew past. There was the explosion of the cargo parcel which was supposed to contain requisition forms and stationery. And the attempt to smash the entire Platform by getting an atomic bomb into a plane and having a saboteur shoot the crew and then deliver the bomb at the Shed in an officially harmless aircraft....

The common element in all those sabotage tricks was actually clear enough, but Joe wasn’t used to thinking in such terms. He did know, though, that there was a pattern in those devices which did not exist in the blowing up of jet motors from inside.

He scowled and scowled, racking his brains, while the young lieutenant watched respectfully, waiting for Joe to have an inspiration. Had Joe known it, the lieutenant was deeply impressed by his attempt at concentration on the problem it had not been Major Holt’s intention for Joe to consider. When Joe temporarily gave up, the young lieutenant eagerly showed him over the whole field and all its workings.

In mid-morning another pushpot fell screaming from the skies. That made six pushpots and six pilots for this week—two today. The things had no wings. They had no gliding angle. Pointed up, they could climb unbelievably. While their engines functioned, they could be controlled after a fashion. But they were not aircraft in any ordinary meaning of the word. They were engines with fuel tanks and controls in their exhaust blast. When their engines failed, they were so much junk falling out of the sky.

Joe happened to see the second crash, and he didn’t go to noon mess at all. He hadn’t any appetite. Instead, he gloomily let himself be packed full of irrelevant information by the young lieutenant who considered that since Joe had been sent by security to look into sabotage, he must be given every possible opportunity to evaluate—that would be the word the young lieutenant would use—the situation.

But all the time that Joe followed him about, his mind fumbled with a hunch. The idea was that there was a pattern of thinking in sabotage, and if you could solve it, you could outguess the saboteur. But the trouble was to figure out the similarity he felt existed in—say—a private plane shooting rockets and overhaul mechanics planting booby traps and faked shippers getting bombs on planes—and come to think of it, there was Braun....

Braun was the key! Braun had been an honest man, with an honest loyalty to the United States which had given him refuge. But he had been blackmailed into accepting a container of atomic death to be released in the Shed. Radioactive cobalt did not belong in the Shed. That was the key to the pattern of sabotage. Braun was not to use any natural thing that belonged in the Shed. He was to be only the means by which something extraneous and deadly was to have been introduced.

That was it! Somebody was devising ingenious ways to get well-known destructive devices into places where they did not belong, but where they would be effective. Rockets. Bombs. Even radioactive cobalt dust. All were perfectly well-known means of destruction. The minds that planned those tricks said, in effect: “These things will destroy. How can we get them to where they will destroy something?” It was a strict pattern.

But the pushpot sabotage—and Joe was sure it was nothing else—was not that sort of thing. Making motors explode.... Motors don’t explode. One couldn’t put bombs in them. There wasn’t room. The explosions Joe had seen looked as if they’d centered in the fire basket—technically the combustion area—behind the compressor and before the drive vanes. A jet motor whirled. Its front vanes compressed air, and a flame burned furiously in the compressed air, which swelled enormously and poured out past other vanes that took power from it to drive the compressor. The excess of blast poured out astern in a blue-white flame, driving the ship.

But one couldn’t put a bomb in a fire basket. The temperature would melt anything but the refractory alloys of which a jet motor has to be built. A bomb placed there would explode the instant a motor was started. It couldn’t resist until the pushpot took off. It couldn’t....

This was a different kind of sabotage. There was a different mind at work.

In the afternoon Joe watched the landings, while the young lieutenant followed him patiently about. A pushpot landing was quite unlike the landing of any other