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

“You know,” said the co-pilot, “there was the devil of a time during the War with sabotage. Down in Brazil there was a field planes used to take off from to fly to Africa. But they’d take off, head out to sea, get a few miles offshore, and then blow up. We must’ve lost a dozen planes that way! Then it broke. There was a guy—a sergeant—in the maintenance crew who was sticking a hand grenade up in the nose wheel wells. German, he was, and very tidy about it, and nobody suspected him. Everything looked okay and tested okay. But when the ship was well away and the crew pulled up the wheels, that tightened a string and it pulled the pin out of the grenade. It went off.... The master mechanic finally caught him and nearly killed him before the MPs could stop him. We’ve got to be plenty careful, whether the ground crews like it or not.”

Joe said drily: “You were, except when they were topping off. You took that for granted.” He told about the sandy-haired man. “He hadn’t time to stick anything in the wheel well, though,” he added.

The co-pilot blinked. Then he looked annoyed. “Confound it! I didn’t watch! Did you?”

The pilot shook his head, his lips compressed.

The co-pilot said bitterly: “And I thought I was security-conscious! Thanks for telling me, fella. No harm done this time, but that was a slip!”

He scowled at the dials before him. The plane flew on.

This was the last leg of the trip, and now it should be no more than an hour and a half before they reached their destination. Joe felt a lift of elation. The Space Platform was a realization—or the beginning of it—of a dream that had been Joe’s since he was a very small boy. It was also the dream of most other small boys at the time. The Space Platform would make space travel possible. Of course it wouldn’t make journeys to the moon or planets itself, but it would sail splendidly about the Earth in an orbit some four thousand miles up, and it would gird the world in four hours fourteen minutes and twenty-two seconds. It would carry atom-headed guided missiles, and every city in the world would be defenseless against it. Nobody could even hope for world domination so long as it floated on its celestial round. Which, naturally, was why there were such desperate efforts to destroy it before its completion.

But Joe, thinking about the Platform, did not think about it as a weapon. It was the first rung on the stepladder to the stars. From it the moon would be reached, certainly. Mars next, most likely. Then Venus. In time the moons of Saturn, and the twilight zone of Mercury, and some day the moons of Jupiter. Possibly a landing could be dared on that giant planet itself, despite its gravity.

The co-pilot spoke suddenly. “How do you rate this trip by cargo plane?” he asked curiously. “Mostly even generals have to go on the ground. You rate plenty. How?”

Joe pulled his thoughts back from satisfied imagining. It hadn’t occurred to him that it was remarkable that he should be allowed to accompany the gyros from the plant to their destination. His family firm had built them, so it had seemed natural to him. He wasn’t used to the idea that everybody looked suspicious to a security officer concerned with the safety of the Platform.

“Connections? I haven’t any,” said Joe. Then he said, “I do know somebody on the job. There’s a Major Holt out there. He might have cleared me. Known my family for years.”

“Yeah,” said the co-pilot drily. “He might. As a matter of fact, he’s the senior security officer for the whole job. He’s in charge of everything, from the security guards to the radar screens and the jet-plane umbrella and the checking of the men who work in the Shed. If he says you’re all right, you probably are.”

Joe hadn’t meant to seem impressive. He explained: “I don’t know him too well. He knows my father, and his daughter Sally’s been kicking around underfoot most of my life. I taught her how to shoot, and she’s a better shot than I am. She was a nice kid when she was little. I got to like her when she fell out of a tree and broke her arm and didn’t even whimper. That shows how long ago it was!” He grinned. “She was trying to act grown-up last time I saw her.”

The co-pilot nodded. There was a brisk chirping sound somewhere. The pilot reached ahead to the course-correction knob. The plane changed course. Sunshine shifted as it poured into the cabin. The ship was running on automatic pilot well above the cloud level, and at an even-numbered number of thousands of feet altitude, as was suitable for planes traveling south or west. Now it droned on its new course, forty-five degrees from the original. Joe found himself guessing that one of the security provisions for planes approaching the Platform might be that they should not come too near on a direct line to it, lest they give information to curious persons on the ground.

Time went on. Joe slipped gradually back to his meditations about the Platform. There was always, in his mind, the picture of a man-made thing shining in blinding sunlight between Earth and moon. But he began to remember things he hadn’t paid too much attention to before.

Opposition to the bare idea of a Space Platform, for instance, from the moment it was first proposed. Every dictator protested bitterly. Even politicians out of office found it a subject for rabble-rousing harangues. The nationalistic political parties, the peddlers of hate, the entrepreneurs of discord—every crank in the world had something to say against the Platform from the first. When they did not roundly denounce it as impious, they raved that it was a scheme by which the United States would put itself in position to rule all the Earth. As a matter of fact, the United States had first proposed it as a United Nations enterprise, so that denunciations that politicians found good politics actually made very poor sense. But it did not get past the General Assembly. The proposal was so rabidly attacked on every side that it was not even passed up to the Council—where it would certainly have been vetoed anyhow.

But it was exactly that furious denunciation which put the Platform through the United States Congress, which had to find the money for its construction.

In Joe’s eyes and in the eyes of most of those who hoped for it from the beginning, the Platform’s great appeal was that it was the necessary first step toward interplanetary travel, with star ships yet to come. But most scientists wanted it, desperately, for their own ends. There were low-temperature experiments, electronic experiments, weather observations, star-temperature measurements, astronomical observations.... Any man in any field of science could name reasons for it to be built. Even the atom scientists had one, and nearly the best. Their argument was that there were new developments of nuclear theory that needed to be tried out, but should not be tried out on Earth. There were some reactions that ought to yield unlimited power for all the world from really abundant materials. But there was one chance in fifty that they wouldn’t be safe, just because the materials were so abundant. No sane man would risk a two-per-cent chance of destroying Earth and all its people, yet those reactions should be tried. In a space ship some millions of miles out in emptiness they could be. Either they’d be safe or they would not. But the only way to get a space ship a safe enough distance from Earth was to make a Space Platform as a starting point. Then a ship could shoot away from Earth with effectively zero gravity and full fuel tanks. The Platform should be built so civilization could surge ahead to new heights!

But despite these excellent reasons, it was the Platform’s enemies who really got it built. The American Congress would never have appropriated funds for a Platform for pure scientific research, no matter what peacetime benefits it promised. It was the vehemence of those who hated it that sold it to Congress as a measure for national defense. And in a sense it was.

These were ironic aspects Joe hadn’t thought about before, just as he hadn’t thought about the need to defend the Platform while it was being built. Defending it was Sally’s father’s job, and he wouldn’t have a popular time. Joe wondered idly how Sally liked living out where the most important job on Earth was being done. She was a nice kid. He remembered appreciatively that she’d grown up to be a very good-looking girl. He tended to remember her mostly as the tomboy who could beat him swimming, but the last time he’d seen her, come to think of it, he’d been startled to observe how pretty she’d grown. He didn’t know anybody who ought to be better-looking.... She was a really swell girl....

He came to himself again. There was a change in the look of the sky ahead. There was no actual horizon, of course. There was a white haze that blended imperceptibly into the cloud layer so that it was impossible to tell where the sky ended and the clouds or earth began. But presently there were holes in the clouds. The ship droned on, and suddenly it floated over the edge of such a hole, and looking down was very much like looking over the edge of a cliff at solid earth illimitably far below.

The holes increased in number. Then there were no holes at all, but only clouds breaking up the clear view of the ground beneath. And presently again even the clouds were left behind and the air was clear—but still there was no horizon—and there was brownish earth with small green patches and beyond was sere brown range. At seventeen thousand feet there were simply no details.

Soon the clouds were merely a white-tipped elevation of the white haze to the sides and behind. And then there came a new sound above the droning roar of the motors. Joe heard it—and then he saw.

Something had flashed down from nowhere. It flashed on ahead and banked steeply. It was a fighter jet, and for an instant Joe saw the distant range seem to ripple and dance in its exhaust blast. It circled watchfully.

The transport pilot manipulated something. There was a change in the sound of the motors. Joe followed the co-pilot’s eyes. The jet fighter was coming up astern, dive brakes extended to reduce its speed. It overhauled the transport very slowly. And then the transport’s pilot touched one of the separate prop-controls gently, and again, and again. Joe, looking at the jet, saw it through the whirling blades. There was an extraordinary stroboscopic effect. One of the two starboard propellers, seen through the other, abruptly took on a look which was not that of mistiness at all, but of writhing, gyrating solidity. The peculiar appearance vanished, and came again, and vanished and appeared yet again before it disappeared completely.

The jet shot on ahead. Its dive brakes retracted. It made a graceful, wallowing, shallow dive, and then climbed almost vertically. It went out of sight.

“Visual check,” said the co-pilot drily, to Joe. “We had a signal to give. Individual to this plane. We didn’t tell it to you. You couldn’t duplicate it.”

Joe worked it out painfully. The visual effect of one propeller seen through another—that was identification. It was not a type of signaling an unauthorized or uninformed passenger would expect.

“Also,” said the co-pilot, “we have a television camera in the instrument board yonder. We’ve turned