Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (22 page)

These things occupied the shift that came on at the time of the multiple
sabotage assaults. At first the work was ragged. But the policy of
turning the Security men into news broadcasters worked well. After all,
the Platform was a construction job and the men who worked on it were
not softies. Most of them had seen men killed before. Before the shift
was half over, a definite work rhythm was evident. Men had begun to take
an even greater pride in the thing they had built, because it had been
assailed and not destroyed. And the job was almost over.

Sally went back to her father's quarters, to try to sleep. Joe stayed in
the Shed. His throat was painful enough so that he didn't want to go to
bed until he was genuinely tired, and he was thoroughly wrought up.

Mike the midget had gone peacefully to sleep again, curled up in a
corner of the outgoing screening room. His fellow midgets talked
satisfiedly among themselves. Presently, to show their superiority to
mere pitched battles, two of them brought out a miniature pack of cards
and started a card game while they waited for a bus to take them back to
Bootstrap.

The Chief's Indian associates loafed comfortably while waiting for the
same busses. Later they would put in for overtime—and get it. Haney
mourned that he had been remote from the scene of action, and was merely
responsible for the presence and placing and firing of the machine guns
that had certainly kept the Platform from being blown up from below.

It seemed that nothing else would happen to bother anybody. But there
was one thing more.

That thing happened just two hours before it was time for the shift to
change once again, and when normal work was back in progress in the
Shed. Everything seemed fully organized and serene. Everything in the
Shed had settled down, and nothing had happened outside.

There was ample exterior protection, of course, but the outside-guard
system hadn't had anything to do for a very long time. Men at radar
screens were bored and sleepy from sheer inactivity and silence. Pilots
in jet planes two miles and five miles and eight miles high had long
since grown weary of the splendid view below them. After all, one can
get very used to late, slanting moonlight on cloud masses far
underneath, and bright and hostile-seeming stars overhead.

So the thing was well timed.

A Canadian station noticed the pip on its radar screen first. The radar
observer was puzzled by it. It could have been a meteor, and the
Canadian observer at first thought it was. But it wasn't going quite
fast enough, and it lasted too long. It was traveling six hundred
seventy-two miles an hour, and it was headed due south at sixty thousand
feet. The speed could have been within reason—provided it didn't stay
constant. But it did. There was something traveling south at eleven
miles a minute or better. A mile in five-plus seconds. It didn't slow.
It didn't drop.

The Canadian radarman debated painfully. He stopped his companion from
the reading of a magazine article about chinchilla breeding in the home.
He showed him the pip, still headed south and almost at the limit of
this radar instrument's range. They discussed the thing dubiously. They
decided to report it.

They had a little trouble getting the call through. The night
long-distance operators were sleepy. Because of the difficulty of making
the call, the radarmen became obstinate and insisted on putting it
through. They reported to Ottawa that some object flying at sixty
thousand feet and six hundred seventy-two miles an hour was crossing
Canada headed for the United States.

There was a further time loss. Somebody in authority had to be awakened,
and somebody had to decide that a further report was justified. Then the
trick had to be accomplished, and a sleepy man in a bathrobe and
slippers listened and said sleepily, "Oh, of course you'll tell the
Americans. It's only neighborly!" and padded back to his bed to go to
sleep again. Then he waked up suddenly and began to sweat. He'd realized
that this might be the beginning 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.

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.