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

of atomic war. So he set phone bells to jangling furiously all over Canada, and jet planes began to boom in the darkness.

But there was only one object in the sky. Over the Dakotas it went higher. It went to seventy thousand feet, and then eighty. How this was managed is not completely known, because there are still some details of that flight that have never been completely explained. But certainly jatos flared briefly at some point, and the object reached ninety thousand feet where a jet motor would certainly be useless. And then, almost certainly, rockets flared once more and well south of the Dakotas it started down in a trajectory like that of an artillery shell, but with considerably higher speed than most artillery shells achieve.

It was at about this time that the siren in the Shed began its choppy, hiccoughing series of warm-up notes. The news from Canada arrived, as a matter of fact, some thirty seconds after the outer-perimeter radar screen around the Platform gave its warning. Then there was no hesitation or delay at all. Men were already tumbling out of bed at three airfields, buckling helmets and hoping their oxygen tanks would function properly. Then the radars atop the Shed itself picked up the moving speck. And small blue-white flames began to rise from the ground and go streaking away in the darkness in astonishing numbers.

The covers of the guns at the top of the Shed slid aside. Miles away, jet planes shot skyward, and newly wakened pilots looked at their night-fighting instruments and swore unbelievingly at the speed they were told the plunging object was making. The jet pilots gave their motors everything they could take, but it didn’t look good.

The planes of the jet umbrella over the Shed stopped cruising and sprinted. And they were the only ones likely to get in front of the object in time.

Inside the Shed, the siren howled dismally and all the Security men were snapping: “Radar alarm! All out! Radar alarm! All out!”

And men were moving fast, too. Some came down from the Platform on hoists, dropping with reckless speed to the floor level. Some didn’t wait for a turn at that. They slid down one upright, swung around the crosspiece on the level below, and slid down another vertical pipe. For a minute or more it looked as if the scaffolds oozed black droplets which slid down its pipes. But the drops were men. The floor became speckled and spotted with dots running for its exits.

The siren ceased its wailing and its noise went down and down in pitch until it was a baritone moan that dropped to bass and ceased. Then there was no sound but the men moving to get out of the Shed. There were trucks, too. Those that had been loading with dismantled scaffolding roared for the doors to get out and away. Some men jumped on board as they passed. The exit doors swung up to let them go.

But it was very quiet in the Shed, at that. There was no noise but a few fleeing trucks, and the murmur which was the voices of the Security men hurrying the work crew out. There was less to hear than went on ordinarily. And it was a long distance across the floor of the Shed.

Joe stood with his fists clenched absurdly. This could only be an air attack. An air attack could only mean an atom-bomb attack. And if there was an atom bomb dropped on the Shed, there’d be no use getting outside. It wouldn’t be merely a fission bomb. It would be a hell bomb—a bomb which used the kind of bomb that shattered Hiroshima only as a primer for the real explosive. Nobody could hope to get beyond the radius of its destruction before it hit!

Joe heard himself raging. He’d thought of Sally. She’d be in the range of annihilation, too. And Joe knew such fury and hatred—because of Sally—that he forgot everything else.

He didn’t run. He couldn’t escape. He couldn’t fight back. But because he hated, he had to do something to defy.

He found himself moving toward the Platform, his jaws clenched. It was pure, blind, instinctive defiance.

He was not the only one to have that reaction. Men running toward the sidewall exits began to get out of breath from their running. They slowed. Presently they stopped. They scowled and raged, like Joe. Some of them looked with burning eyes up at the roof of the Shed, though their thoughts went on beyond it. The security guards repeated, “Radar alarm! All out! Radar alarm! All out!”

Someone snarled, “Nuts to that!”

Joe saw a man walking in the same direction as himself. He was walking deliberately back to the Platform. Somebody else was headed back too....

Very peculiarly, almost all the men on the floor had ceased to run. They began to gather in little groups. They knew flight was useless. They talked briefly. Profanely. Here and there men started disgustedly back toward the Platform. Their lips moved in expressions of furious scorn. Their scorn was of themselves.

There was a gathering of men about the base of the framework that still partly veiled the Platform. They tended to face outward, angrily, and to clench their fists.

Then somebody started an engine. A man began to climb furiously back to where he had been at work. Quite unreasonably, other men followed him.

Hammers began defiantly and enragedly to sound.

The work crew in the Shed went defiantly and furiously back to work. A clamor was set up that was almost the normal working noise. It was the only possible way in which those men could express the raging contempt they felt for those who would destroy the thing they worked on.

But there were some other men who could do more. There were three levels of jet planes above the Shed, and they could dive. The highest one got first to the line along which the missile from an unknown place was plunging toward the Shed. That plane steadied on a collision course and let go its wing load of rockets. It peeled off and got out of the way. Seconds later the others from the jet umbrella were arriving. A tiny spray of proximity-fused rockets blazed furiously toward the invisible thing from the heights.

Other planes and yet others came hurtling to the line their radars briskly computed for them. There were more rockets....

The black-painted thing with more than the speed of an artillery shell plunged into a miniature hail of rockets. They flamed viciously. Half a dozen—a dozen—explosions that were pure futility.

Then there was an explosion that was not. Nobody saw it, because its puny detonation was instantly wiped out in a blaze of such incredible incandescence that the aluminum paint on jet planes still miles away was scorched and blistered instantly. The light of that flare was seen for hundreds of miles. The sound—later on—was heard farther still. And the desert vegetation miles below the hell bomb showed signs of searing when the morning came.

But the thing from the north was vaporized, utterly, some forty-five miles from its target. The damage it did was negligible.

The work on the preparation for the Platform’s take-off went on. When the all-clear signal sounded inside the Shed, nobody paid any attention. They were too busy.

13

On the day of the take-off there were a number of curious side-effects from the completion of the Space Platform. There was a very small country on the other side of the world which determined desperately to risk its existence on the success of the Platform’s flight. It had to choose between abject submission to a powerful neighbor, or the possibility of a revolution in which its neighbor’s troops would take on the semblance of citizens for street-fighting purposes. If the Platform got aloft, it could defy its neighbor. And in a grim gamble, it did.

There was also a last-ditch fight in the United Nations, wherein the Platform was denounced and a certain block of associated countries issued an ultimatum, threatening to bolt the international organization if the Platform went aloft. And again there had to be a grim gamble. If the Platform did not take to space and so furnish ultimately a guarantee of peace, the United Nations would face the alternatives of becoming a military alliance for atomic war, or something less than an international debating society.

Of course there were less significant results. There were already fourteen popular songs ready for broadcast, orchestrated and rehearsed with singers ready to saturate the ears of the listening public. They ranged from We’ve Got a Warship in the Sky, which was more or less jingoistic, to a boy-and-girl melody entitled We’ll Have a Moon Just for Us Two. The latter tune had been stolen from a hit of four years before, which in turn had been stolen from a hit of six years before that, and it had been stolen from a still earlier bit of Bach, so it was a rather pretty melody.

And of course there was a super-colossal motion picture epic in color and with musical numbers, champing in its film cans for simultaneous first-run showings in eight different key cities. It was titled To the Stars, and three separate endings had been filmed, of which the appropriate one would of course be used in the eight separate world premières. One ending had the Platform fail due to sabotage, and the hero—played by an actor who had interrupted his seventh honeymoon to play the part—splendidly prepared to build it all over again. The second ending closed with the Platform headed for Alpha Centaurus—which was hardly the intention of anybody outside of filmdom. The third ending was secret, but it was said that hard-boiled motion-picture executives had cried like babies when it was thrown on preview screens.

These, of course, were merely sidelights. They were not very important in the Shed. There, work went on at a feverish rate although there was no longer any construction work to be done. In theory, therefore, the members of welders and pipe-fitters and steel-construction and electrical and other unions should have retired gracefully to Bootstrap. Members of building-maintenance and rigging and wrecking and other assorted unions should have been gathered together in far cities, screened by security, and brought to Bootstrap and paid overtime to pull up wood-block flooring and unbolt and jack out the proper sections of the Shed’s eastern wall.

But if there had been anything of that sort tried, it would have produced bloodshed. The men who’d built the Platform were going to see it depart this Earth or else. They’d never have a second chance. It would work the first time or it wouldn’t work at all.

So the Platform was made ready for its take-off by the men who had made it. A gigantic section—two full gores—of the Shed’s wall was unbolted in two pieces, and each piece thrust outward at the top and bottom, so that they were offset from the rest of the huge half-globe. There were hundreds of wheels at their bottom which for the first time touched the sixteen lines of rails laid with unbelievable solidity around the outside of the Shed. And then the monstrous sections were rolled aside. A vast opening resulted, and morning sunlight smote for the first time mankind’s very first space craft.

Joe saw the sunlight strike, and his first sensation was of disappointment. The normal shape of the Platform was ungainly, but now it was practically hidden by the solid-fuel rockets which would consume themselves in their firing. Also, the floor of the Shed looked strange. It was littered with the clumsy shapes of pushpots, trucked to this place in an unending stream all night long. A very young lieutenant from the pushpot airfield hunted up Joe and assured him that every drop of fuel in every pushpot’s