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

it on now. The interior of the cabin is being watched from the ground. No more tricks like the phony colonel and the atom bomb that didn’t ‘explode.’”

Joe sat quite still. He noticed that the plane was slanting gradually downward. His eyes went to the dial that showed descent at somewhere between two and three hundred feet a minute. That was for his benefit. The cabin was pressurized, though it did not attempt to simulate sea-level pressure. It was a good deal better than the outside air, however, and yet too quick a descent meant discomfort. Two to three hundred feet per minute is about right.

The ground took on features. Small gulleys. Patches of coloration too small to be seen from farther up. The feeling of speed increased. After long minutes the plane was only a few thousand feet up. The pilot took over manual control from the automatic pilot. He seemed to wait. There was a plaintive, mechanical beep-beep and he changed course.

“You’ll see the Shed in a minute or two,” said the co-pilot. He added vexedly, as if the thing had been bothering him, “I wish I hadn’t missed that sandy-haired guy putting his hand in the wheel well! Nothing happened, but I shouldn’t have missed it!”

Joe watched. Very, very far away there were mountains, but he suddenly realized the remarkable flatness of the ground over which they were flying. From the edge of the world, behind, to the very edge of these far-distant hills, the ground was flat. There were gullies and depressions here and there, but no hills. It was flat, flat, flat....

The plane flew on. There was a tiny glimmer of sunlight. Joe strained his eyes. The sunlight glinted from the tiniest possible round pip on the brown earth. It grew as the plane flew on. It was half a cherry stone. It was half an orange, with gores. It was the top section of a sphere that was simply too huge to have been made by men.

There was a thin thread of white that ran across the dun-colored range and reached that half-ball and then ended. It was a highway. Joe realized that the half-globe was the Shed, the monstrous building made for the construction of the Space Platform. It was gigantic. It was colossal. It was the most stupendous thing that men had ever created.

Joe saw a tiny projection near the base of it. It was an office building for clerks and timekeepers and other white-collar workers. He strained his eyes again and saw a motor truck on the highway. It looked extraordinarily flat. Then he saw that it wasn’t a single truck but a convoy of them. A long way back, the white highway was marked by a tiny dot. That was a motor bus.

There was no sign of activity anywhere, because the scale was so great. Movement there was, but the things that moved were too small to be seen by comparison with the Shed. The huge, round, shining half-sphere of metal stood tranquilly in the midst of emptiness.

It was bigger than the pyramids.

The plane went on, descending. Joe craned his neck, and then he was ashamed to gawk. He looked ahead, and far away there were white speckles that would be buildings: Bootstrap, the town especially built for the men who built the Space Platform. In it they slept and ate and engaged in the uproarious festivity that men on a construction job crave on their time off.

The plane dipped noticeably.

“Airfield off to the right,” said the co-pilot. “That’s for the town and the job. The jets—there’s an air umbrella overhead all the time—have a field somewhere else. The pushpots have a field of their own, too, where they’re training pilots.”

Joe didn’t know what a pushpot was, but he didn’t ask. He was thinking about the Shed, which was the greatest building ever put up, and had been built merely to shelter the greatest hope for the world’s peace while it was put together. He’d be in the Shed presently. He’d work there, setting up the contents of the crates back in the cargo space, and finally installing them in the Platform itself.

The pilot said: “Pitot and wing heaters?”

“Off,” said the co-pilot.

“Spark and advance——”

Joe didn’t listen. He looked down at the sprawling small town with white-painted barracks and a business section and an obvious, carefully designed recreation area that nobody would ever use. The plane was making a great half-circle. The motor noise dimmed as Joe became absorbed in his anticipation of seeing the Space Platform and having a hand in its building.

The co-pilot said sharply: “Hold everything!”

Joe jerked his head around. The co-pilot had his hand on the wheel release. His face was tense.

“It don’t feel right,” he said very, very quietly. “Maybe I’m crazy, but there was that sandy-haired guy who put his hand up in the wheel well back at that last field. And this don’t feel right!”

The plane swept on. The airfield passed below it. The co-pilot very cautiously let go of the wheel release, which when pulled should let the wheels fall down from their wells to lock themselves in landing position. He moved from his seat. His lips were pinched and tight. He scrabbled at a metal plate in the flooring. He lifted it and looked down. A moment later he had a flashlight. Joe saw the edge of a mirror. There were two mirrors down there, in fact. One could look through both of them into the wheel well.

The co-pilot made quite sure. He stood up, leaving the plate off the opening in the floor.

“There’s something down in the wheel well,” he said in a brittle tone. “It looks to me like a grenade. There’s a string tied to it. At a guess, that sandy-haired guy set it up like that saboteur sergeant down in Brazil. Only—it rolled a little. And this one goes off when the wheels go down. I think, too, if we belly-land——Better go around again, huh?”

The pilot nodded. “First,” he said evenly, “we get word down to the ground about the sandy-haired guy, so they’ll get him regardless.”

He picked up the microphone hanging above and behind him and began to speak coldly into it. The transport plane started to swing in wide, sweeping circles over the desert beyond the airport while the pilot explained that there was a grenade in the nose wheel well, set to explode if the wheel were let down or, undoubtedly, if the ship came in to a belly landing.

Joe found himself astonishingly unafraid. But he was filled with a pounding rage. He hated the people who wanted to smash the pilot gyros because they were essential to the Space Platform. He hated them more completely than he had known he could hate anybody. He was so filled with fury that it did not occur to him that in any crash or explosive landing that would ruin the gyros, he would automatically be killed.

3

The pilot made an examination down the floor-plate hole, with a flashlight to see by and two mirrors to show him the contents of a spot he could not possibly reach with any instrument. Joe heard his report, made to the ground by radio.

“It’s a grenade,” he said coldly. “It took time to fix it the way it is. At a guess, the ship was booby-trapped at the time of its last overhaul. But it was arranged that the booby trap had to be set, the trigger cocked, by somebody doing something very simple at a different place and later on. We’ve been flying with that grenade in the wheel well for two weeks. But it was out of sight. Today, back at the airfield, a sandy-haired man reached up and pulled a string he knew how to find. That loosened a slipknot. The grenade rolled down to a new position. Now when the wheel goes down the pin is pulled. You can figure things out from that.”

It was an excellent sabotage device. If a ship blew up two weeks after overhaul, it would not be guessed that the bomb had been placed so long before. Every search would be made for a recent opportunity for the bomb’s placing. A man who merely reached in and pulled a string that armed the bomb and made it ready for firing would never be suspected. There might be dozens of planes, now carrying their own destruction about with them.

The pilot said into the microphone: “Probably....” He listened. “Very well, sir.”

He turned away and nodded to the co-pilot, now savagely keeping the ship in wide, sweeping circles, the rims of which barely touched the farthermost corner of the airport on the ground below.

“We’ve authority to jump,” he said briefly. “You know where the chutes are. But there is a chance I can belly-land without that grenade blowing. I’m going to try that.”

The co-pilot said angrily: “I’ll get him a chute.” He indicated Joe, and said furiously, “They’ve been known to try two or three tricks, just to make sure. Ask if we should dump cargo before we crash-land!”

The pilot held up the microphone again. He spoke. He listened.

“Okay to dump stuff to lighten ship.”

“You won’t dump my crates,” snapped Joe. “And I’m staying to see you don’t! If you can ride this ship down, so can I!”

The co-pilot got up and scowled at him.

“Anything I can move out, goes. Will you help?”

Joe followed him through the door into the cargo compartment.

The space there was very considerable, and bitterly cold. The crates from the Kenmore plant were the heaviest items of cargo. Other objects were smaller. The co-pilot made his way to the rear and pulled a lever. Great, curved doors opened at the back of the plane. Instantly there was such a bellowing of motors that all speech was impossible. The co-pilot pulled out a clip of colored-paper slips and checked one with the nearest movable parcel. He painstakingly made a check mark and began to push the box toward the doors.

It was not a conspicuously sane operation. So near the ground, the plane tended to waver. The air was distinctly bumpy. To push a massive box out a doorway, so it would tumble down a thousand feet to desert sands, was not so safe a matter as would let it become tedious. But Joe helped. They got the box to the door and shoved it out. It went spinning down. The co-pilot hung onto the doorframe and watched it land. He chose another box. He checked it. And another. Joe helped. They got them out of the door and dropping dizzily through emptiness. The plane soared on in circles. The desert, as seen through the opened clamshell doors, reeled away astern, and then seemed to tilt, and reeled away again. Joe and the co-pilot labored furiously. But the co-pilot checked each item before he jettisoned it.

It was a singularly deliberate way to dump cargo to destruction. A metal-bound box. Over the edge of the cargo space floor. A piece of machinery, visible through its crate. A box marked Instruments. Fragile. Each one checked off. Each one dumped to drop a thousand feet or more. A small crated dynamo. This item and that. A crate marked Stationery. It would be printed forms for the timekeepers, perhaps. But it wasn’t.

It dropped out. The plane bellowed on. And suddenly there was a burst of blue-white flame on the desert below. The box that should have contained timecards had contained something very much more explosive. As the plane roared on—rocking from the shock wave of the explosion—Joe saw a crater and a boiling cloud of smoke and flying sand.

The co-pilot spoke explosively and furiously, in the blasting uproar of the motors. He vengefully marked the waybill of the parcel that had exploded. But then they went back to the job of