Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (11 page)

Joe realized what that meant. Braun had been given a relatively small
container of the deadliest available radioactive material on Earth.
Milligrams of it, shipped from Oak Ridge for scientific use, were
encased in thick lead chests. He'd carried two hundred and fifty grams
in a container he could put in his pocket. He was not only dead as he
walked, under such circumstances. He was also death to those who walked
near him.

"Somebody else may have been burned in any case," said the Major
detachedly. "I am going to issue a radioactivity alarm and check every
man in Bootstrap for burns. It is—ah—very likely that the man who
delivered it to this man is burned, too. But you will not mention this,
of course."

He waved his hand in dismissal. Joe turned to go. The Major added
grimly: "By the way, there is no doubt about the booby-trapping of
planes. We've found eight, so far, ready to be crashed when a string was
pulled while they were serviced. But the men who did the booby-trapping
have vanished. They disappeared suddenly during last night. They were
warned! Have you talked to anybody?"

"No sir," said Joe.

"I would like to know," said the Major coldly, "how they knew we'd found
out their trick!"

Joe went out. He felt very cold at the pit of his stomach. He was to
identify Braun. Then he was to get a radiation check on himself. In that
order of events. He was to identify Braun first, because if Braun had
carried a half-pound of radioactive cobalt on him in Sid's Steak Joint
the night before, Joe was going to die. And so were Haney and the Chief
and Mike, and anybody else who'd passed near him. So Joe was to do the
identification before he was disturbed by the information that he was
dead.

He made the identification. Braun was very decently laid out in a
lead-lined box, with a lead-glass window over his face. There was no
sign of any injury on him except from his fight with Haney. The
radiation burns were deep, but they'd left no marks of their own. He'd
died before outer symptoms could occur.

Joe signed the identification certificate. He went to be checked for his
own chances of life. It was a peculiar sensation. The most peculiar was
that he wasn't afraid. He was neither confident that he was not burned
inside, nor sure that he was. He simply was not afraid. Nobody really
ever believes that he is going to die—in the sense of ceasing to exist.
The most arrant coward, stood before a wall to be shot, or strapped in
an electric chair, finds that astoundingly he does not believe that what
happens to his body is going to kill him, the individual. That is why a
great many people die with reasonable dignity. They know it is not worth
making too much of a fuss over.

But when the Geiger counters had gone over him from head to foot, and
his body temperature was normal, and his reflexes sound—when he was
assured that he had not been exposed to dangerous radiation—Joe felt
distinctly weak in the knees. And that was natural, too.

He went trudging back to the wrecked gyros. His friends were gone,
leaving a scrawled memo for him. They had gone to pick out the machine
tools for the work at hand.

He continued to check over the wreckage, thinking with a detached
compassion of that poor devil Braun who was the victim of men who hated
the idea of the Space Platform and what it would mean to humanity. Men
of that kind thought of themselves as superior to humanity, and of human
beings as creatures to be enslaved. So they arranged for planes to crash
and burn and for men to be murdered, and they practiced blackmail—or
rewarded those who practiced it for them. They wanted to prevent the
Platform from existing because it would keep them from trying to pull
the world down in ruins so they could rule over the wreckage.

Joe—who had so recently thought it likely that he would die—considered
these actions with an icy dislike that was much deeper than anger. It
was backed by everything he believed in, everything he had ever wanted,
and everything he hoped for. And anger could cool off, but the way he
felt about people who would destroy others for their own purposes could
not cool off. It was part of him. He thought about it as he worked, with
all the noises of the Shed singing in his ears.

A voice said: "Joe."

He started and turned. Sally stood behind him, looking at him very
gravely. She tried to smile.

"Dad told me," she said, "about the check-up that says you're all right.
May I congratulate you on your being with us for a while?—on the
cobalt's not getting near you?—or the rest of us?"

Joe did not know exactly what to say.

"I'm going inside the Platform," she told him. "Would you like to come
along?"

He wiped his hands on a piece of waste.

"Naturally! My gang is off picking out tools. I can't do much until they
come back."

He fell into step beside her. They walked toward the Platform. And it
was still magic, no matter how often Joe looked at it. It was huge
beyond belief, though it was surely not heavy in proportion to its size.
Its bright plating shone through the gossamer scaffolding all about it.
There was always a faint bluish mist in the air, and there were the
marsh-fire lights of welding torches playing here and there. The sounds
of the Shed were a steady small tumult in Joe's ears. He was getting
accustomed to them, though.

"How is it you can go around so freely?" he asked abruptly. "I have to
be checked and rechecked."

"You'll get a full clearance," she told him. "It has to go through
channels. Me—I have influence. I always come in through security, and I
have the door guards trained. And I do have business in the Platform."

He turned his head to look at her.

"Interior decoration," she explained. "And don't laugh! It isn't
prettifying. It's psychology. The Platform was designed by engineers and
physicists and people with slide rules. They made a beautiful
environment for machinery. But there will be men living in it, and they
aren't machines."

"I don't see—"

"They designed the hydroponic garden," said Sally with a certain scorn.
"They calculated very neatly that eleven square feet of leaf surface of
a pumpkin plant will purify all the air a resting man uses, and so much
more will purify the air a man uses when he's working hard. So they
designed the gardens for the most efficient production of the greatest
possible leaf surface—of pumpkin plants! They figured food would be
brought up by the tender rockets! But can you imagine the men in the
Platform, floating among the stars, living on dehydrated food and
stuffing themselves hungrily with pumpkins because that is the only
fresh food they have?"

Joe saw the irony.

"They're thinking of mechanical efficiency," said Sally indignantly. "I
don't know anything about machinery, but I've wasted an awful lot of
time at school and otherwise if I don't know something about human
beings! I argued, and the garden now isn't as mechanically efficient,
but it'll be a nice place for a man to go into. He won't smell pumpkin
plants all the time, either. I've even gotten them to include some
flowers!"

They were very near the Platform. And it was very near to completion.
Joe looked at it hungrily, and he felt a great sense of urgency. He
tried to strip away the scaffolding in his mind and see it floating
proudly free in emptiness, with white-hot sunshine glinting from it, and
only a background of unwinking stars.

Sally's voice went on: "And I've really put up an argument about the
living quarters. They had every interior wall painted aluminum! I argued
that in space or out of it, where people have to live, it's
housekeeping. This is going to be their home. And they ought to feel
human in it!"

They passed into one of the openings in the maze of uprights. All about
them there were trucks, and puffing engines, and hoists. Joe dragged
Sally aside as a monstrous truck-and-trailer came from where it had
delivered some gigantic item of interior use. It rumbled past them, and
she led the way to a flight of temporary wooden stairs with two security
guards at the bottom. Sally talked severely to them, and they grinned
and waved for Joe to go ahead. He went up the steps—which would be
pulled down before the Platform's launching—and went actually inside
the Space Platform for the first time.

It was a moment of extreme vividness for him. Within the past hour he'd
come to think detachedly of the possibility of death for himself, and
then had learned that he would live for a while yet. He knew that Sally
had been scared on his account, and that her matter-of-fact manner was
partly assumed. She was at least as much wrought up as he was.

And this was the first time he was going into what would be the first
space ship ever to leave the Earth on a non-return journey.

Nobody could have gone through the changes of emotion Joe had
experienced that morning and remained quite matter-of-fact. Seeing a
dead man who had more or less deliberately killed himself so that he
wouldn't have to kill Joe—for one—had its effect. Knowing that it was
certainly possible the man hadn't killed himself in time had another.
Being checked over for radiation burns which would mean that he'd die
quite comfortably within three or four days, and then learning that no
burns existed, was something of an ordeal. And Sally—of course her
feelings shouldn't have been as vivid as his own, but the fact that
she'd been scared for him held some significance. When, on top of all
the rest, he went into the Space Platform for the first time, Joe was
definitely keyed up.

But he talked technology. He examined the inner skin and its lining
before going beyond the temporary entrance. The plating of the Platform
was actually double. The outer layer was a meteor-bumper against which
particles of cosmic dust would strike and explode without damage to the
inner skin. They could even penetrate it without causing a leak of air.
Inside the inner skin there was a layer of glass wool for heat
insulation. Inside the glass wool was a layer of material serving
exactly the function of the coating of a bulletproof gasoline tank. No
meteor under a quarter-inch size could hope to make a puncture, even at
the forty-five-mile-per-second speed that is the theoretical maximum for
meteors. And if one did, the selfsealing stuff would stop the leak
immediately. Joe could explain the protection of the metal skins. He
did.

"When a missile travels fast enough," he said absorbedly, "it stops
acquiring extra puncturing ability. Over a mile a second, impact can't
be transmitted from front to rear. The back end of the thing that hits
has arrived at the hit place before the shock of arrival can travel back
to it. It's like a train in a collision which doesn't stop all at once.
A meteor hitting the Platform will telescope on itself like the cars of
a railroad train that hits another at full speed."

Sally listened enigmatically.

"So," said Joe, "the punching effect isn't there. A meteor hitting the
Platform won't punch. It'll explode. Part of it will turn to
vapor—metallic vapor if it's metal, and rocky vapor if it's stone.
It'll blow a crater in the metal plate. It'll blow away as much weight
of the skin as it weighs itself. Mass for mass. So that weight for
weight, pea soup would be just as effective armor against meteors as
hardened steel."

Sally said: "Dear me! You must read the newspapers!"

"The odds figure out, the odds are even that the Platform won't get an
actual meteor puncture in the first twenty thousand years it's floating
round the Earth."

"Twenty thousand two seventy, Joe," said Sally. She was trying to tease
him, but her face showed a little of the strain. "I read the magazine
articles too. In fact I sometimes show the tame article writers around,
when they're cleared to see the Platform."

Joe winced a little. Then he grinned wryly.

"That cuts me down to size, eh?"

She smiled at him. But they both felt queer. They went on into the
interior of the huge space ship.

"Lots of space," said Joe. "This could've been smaller."

"It'll be nine-tenths empty when it goes up," said Sally. "But you know
about that, don't you?"

Joe did know. The reasons for the streamlining of rockets to be fired
from the ground didn't apply to the Platform. Not with the same urgency,
anyhow. Rockets had to burn their fuel fast to get up out of the dense
air near the ground. They had to be streamlined to pierce the thick,
resisting part of the atmosphere. The Platform didn't. It wouldn't climb
by itself. It would be carried necessarily at slow speed up to the point
where jet motors were most efficient, and then it would be carried
higher until they ceased to be efficient. Only when it was up where air
resistance was a very small fraction of ground-level drag would its own
rockets fire. It wouldn't gain much by being shaped to cut thin air, and
it would lose a lot. For one thing, the launching process planned for
the Platform allowed it to be built complete so far as its hull was
concerned. Once it got out into its orbit there would be no more
worries. There wouldn't be any gamble on the practicability of
assembling a great structure in a weightless "world."

The two of them—and the way they both felt, it seemed natural for Joe
to be helping Sally very carefully through the corridors of the
Platform—the two of them came to the engine room. This wasn't the place
where the drive of the Platform was centered. It was where the service
motors and the air-circulation system and the fluid pumps were powered.
Off the engine room the main gyros were already installed. They waited
only for the pilot gyros to control them as a steering engine controls
an Earth ship's rudder. Joe looked very thoughtfully at the gyro
assembly. That was familiar, from the working drawings. But he let Sally
guide him on without trying to stop and look closely.