Murray Leinster - Space Platform

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There wasn't anything underneath but the clouds, and nothing overhead but the sky-

Suddenly threads of white smoke appeared, silhouetted against the silvery metal of an

approaching craft. They were not misty wisps of vapor; they were dense, sharply defined

rocket trails.

The pilot watched grimly, helplessly. "That craft shot rockets at us. If they're guided we're

stuck."

TOMORROW'S WORLD

through the minds of TODAY'S BEST WRITERS

CLIFFORD D. S1MAK

LESTER DEL REY JAMES BLISH

PHILIP K. DICK POUL ANDERSON

ALGIS BUDRYS ROBERT SILVERBERG

MILTON LESSER RAYMOND F. JONES

M. C. PEASE FRANK BELKNAP LONG MANLY BANISTER

and BELMONT SCIENCE FICTION

MASTERS OF SCIENCE FICTION

THE PENULTIMATE TRUTH

WORLDS WITHOUT END

GODLING, GO HOME!

TIME OUT OF JOINT

THE DARK BEASTS

WAY OUT

THINGS

5JSACE

MOTfiAYLEINSTER

A COMPLETELY NEW EDITION

BELMONT BOOKS • NEW YORK CITY

SPACE PIATFORM A BEIMONT BOOK-April 1965

Published by

Belmont Productions, Inc.

66 Leonard Street, New York, N. Y. 10013

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

THERE WASN'T anything underneath but clouds, and there wasn't anything overhead but sky. Joe Kenmore

looked out the plane window past the co-pilot's shoulder. He stared ahead to where the sky and cloudbank

joined— many miles away—and tried to picture the job before him. Back in the cargo-space of the plane

there were four big crates. They contained the pilot gyros for the most important object then being built on

Earth; an object that wouldn't work without them. It was Joe's job to take the highly specialized,

magnificently precise machinery to its destination, help to install it, and check it after it was installed.

He felt uneasy. Of course the pilot and co-pilot—the only other people in the transport plane—knew their

stuff. Every imaginable precaution would be taken to make sure that a critically essential device like the

pilot gyro assembly would get safely where it belonged. It was being treated as if it were eggs instead of

massive metal, smoothed and polished and lapped to a precision practically unheard-of. But just the same

Joe was worried. He'd seen the pilot gyro made. He'd helped on it. He knew how many times a thousandth

of an inch had been split in machining its bearings, and the breath-weight balance of its moving parts.

He'd have liked to be back in the cargo compartment with it, but only the pilots' cabin was

pressurized, and the ship was at eighteen thousand feet, flying west by south.

He tried to be reasonable about it. At eighteen thousand feet a good half of the air on Earth was

underneath him. He hoped the rest would be as easy to rise above when the gyros were finally in place and

starting out for emptiness. The gyros, of course, were now on their way to be installed in the first manned,

permanent, really decisive artificial satellite of Earth. There were other man-made satellites now; there

were reputedly more than two hundred hurtling objects circling the Earth out of atmosphere. Some of

them were even useful, in that they reported levels of solar radiation and cloud-patterns on Earth as seen

from space, and some of them relayed messages and even TV programs around the bulge of mankind's

home planet. But the Space Platform would be something else. It would be the initial, very first step of

that figurative stepladder by which men would begin to climb toward the stars.

Astronauts had circled the Earth hi nearby space. Somej had made multiple circuits of the Earth. But every

one] had descended to Earth again, bringing his space capsule with him. The Space Platform wasn't

coming back. Men would live in it, protected by massive covering shields, while they rose up beyond the

Van Alien belts of deadly radiation. They'd take refuge hi shielded areas when solar flares made empty

space deadly to all known forms of living creatures. But hi between they'd solve the problems nobody'd

been even able to work on, for lack of a habitable satellite in space. And of course, from the very

beginning it would be the answer to aggression and threats of atomic war.

The plane's co-pilot leaned back in his chair and] stretched luxuriously. He loosened his safetybelt and!

stood up. He stepped carefully past that column between] the right hand and left hand pilot seats. That

column con-! tained a fraction of the innumerable dials and controls the pilots of a modern multiengine

plane have to watch andi handle. The co-pilot went to the coffeepot and nipped aj switch. Joe fidgeted. He

wished he could be riding in back] with the crates. But his uneasiness seemed silly.

There was a steady roaring in the cabin. One got accustomed to the noise of the motors, and by now it

sounded as if heard through cushions. Presently lie coffeepot bubbled. The co-pilot drew a paper cup of

coffee and handed it to the pilot. The pilot drank. The co-pilot said, "Coffee?"

"No thanks," Joe replied.

"Everything okay with you?"

"I'm all right." Joe realized that the co-pilot felt talkative. He explained, "Those crates I'm travelling

with—. The family firm's been working on that machinery for months. It was finished up with the final

grinding practically done with feather dusters. I can't help worrying about it. There was four months' work

in just lapping the shafts and balancing the rotos. We made a telescope mounting once, but compared to

this job, we did that one blindfolded!"

"And watching all the time against sabotage, eh?"

"No," said Joe hi surprise. "Why should we?"

"Not everybody," said the co-pilot wryly, "is anxious to see the Platform take off. What do you think is the

biggest problem where they're building it?"

The co-pilot sipped at bis own coffee and made a face. It was too hot.

"The main problem," he observed, "is keeping it from being blown up. There are plenty of sputniks and

what-niks and such junk aloft. But once the Space Platform is floating around up there with a nice stock of

atomic headed missiles on board, there are a lot of troublemakers who'll have to sing small. So they're

doing what they can, to make the world safe for power politics. And they're doing plenty!"

"I've heard—," began Joe.

"You haven't heard the half of it," said the co-pilot. "The Air Transport's lost nearly as many planes on this

job as in Asia, when that was the big transport job. There's a local hot war going on. No holds barred!

Hadn't you heard?"

"Oh, I heard there was cloak-and-dagger stuff going on," said Joe politely.

The pilot put down his paper cup and handed it over. He said, "He thinks you're kidding him."

He turned back to the contemplation of the instruments before him and the view out the transparent plastic

of the windows.

"He does?" The co-pilot said skeptically, "You don't have barbed wire around your plant, do you? No

identity badges. No Security officer screaming blue murder every five minutes. You don't have that kind

of stuff at all! Or do you?"

"We don't," said Joe. "We know everybody who works at the plant. We've known them all their lives. The

plant's been in the same village for eighty years. It started making wagons and plows, and now it turns out

machine tools and precision machinery. It's the only factory around, and everybody who works there went

to school with everybody else, and so did our fathers, and we know one another!"

The co-pilot was unconvinced.

"No kidding?"

"No kidding," Joe assured him.

"I guess there are such places," the co-pilot said enviously. "You should've built the Platform! It's plenty

different on this job! We can't even talk to a girl without Security clearance, and we can't speak to

strangers or be out after dark."

The pilot grunted. The co-pilot's tone changed.

"It's not quite that bad," he admitted, "but it isn't fun. Last week was a bad one. We lost three planes. One

flew to pieces in midair: Sabotage; carrying critical stuff. One crashed on take-off: carrying irreplaceable

instruments; somebody'd put a detonator in a servomotor. And one froze in its landing approach and flew

smack into the field; they had to scrape it up. This ship got a major overhaul two weeks ago. We flew it

with our fingers crossed the first three trips. Maybe it's all right. But I won't look forward to a serene old

age until the Platform's up and out of atmosphere. Not me!"

He went to put the pilot's empty cup in the disposal slot.

The plane flew on. There wasn't anything underneath but clouds, and there wasn't anything overhead but

sky.

The clouds were a long way down, and the sky was simply up. Joe looked down and saw the rainbow-

ringed shadow of the flying plane. It raced madly over the irregular upper surfaces of the cloud layer. The

plane flew and flew. Nothing happened at all. This was two hours from the field from which it had taken

off with the pilot gyros as its last item of collected cargo. Joe remembered how sharply the two crew

members had prevented anybody from even approaching the plane on the ground, with the sole exception

of men actually loading on the crates. And those workers had been watched every second.

Joe fidgeted. He didn't know how to take the copilot's talk. The Kenmore Precision Tool plant was owned

by his family, but it wasn't so much a family as a civic enterprise. The young men of the village grew up

to regard fanatically fine workmanship with the casualness elsewhere reserved for plowing or deepsea

fishing. Joe's father owned the plant now, and some day Joe might head it, but he couldn't hope to keep the

respect of the men unless he could handle any tool in the place and split a thousandth at least five ways.

Ten would be better. But while the feeling at the plant was the way it was now, there'd never be a security

problem.

If the co-pilot was telling the truth, though ...

Joe found a slow anger beginning inside him. He'd had a picture in his mind which was practically a

dream. It was of something big and bright and ungainly floating silently in emptiness with a field of stars

behind it. It would be the space platform.

Other, lesser artificial satellites might flash enviously past below it. They were a strange and motley crew.

Some were shaped like cones, some like balls, some like pyramids, and many of them sprouted whiplike

antennae in all directions. Some waved paddles. Some looked like nightmares. But they were very, very,

very much smaller than the platform and very far below it.

From the Platform the stars were tiny pinpoints of light. They were unwinking and distinct because there

was no air, here, and the blackness between them was absolute because this was space itself. The platform

was a moon. A manmade moon in which men could live and

work. It was a very vividly pictured dream, as Joe thought of it. It would be unbearably bright where the

sun shone on it, and abysmally black in the shadows,— except that sometimes the earthshine would

outline it in a ghostly fashion.

Most important, there would be men inside it, working, while it made a splendid orbit around the world

that had built it. Sometimes there'd be small ships—-so Joe envisioned it—which would fight their way up

to it, panting great plumes of rocket vapor, to bring food and air and fuel to its crew. And eventually there

would come a ship that wouldn't go down again to the vast and nearby world. It would fill its fueltanks

with the fuel the other ships had brought—and it would have no weight at all. So it could be allowed to

drift away from the Platform and suddenly its rockets would spout flame and fumes, and it would head

triumphantly out and away from Earth. And it would be the first vessel ever to strike out for the stars.

That was the picture Joe had of the Space Platform and its meaning. Maybe it was romantic, but men were

laboring now to make it real. This transport plane flew now toward a small town improbably called

Bootstrap, carrying one of the most completely essential devices for the Platform's equipment. In the

desert near Bootstrap there was a gigantic construction shed. Inside it, men were building exactly the

monstrous object Joe imagined. They were trying to realize a dream men have had for decades— the

necessary platform' which would be the dock, the launching pad, the starting point from which the first of

human space explorers could start men's march toward infinity.

The idea that anybody could want to halt such an enterprise made Joe Kenmore burn.

The co-pilot painstakingly crushed out his cigarette. The ship flew with rather more of steadiness than a

railroad car upon its rails. There was the constant, oddly cushioned sound of the motors. It was all very

matter-of-fact.

"Look!" Joe said angrily, "Is any of what you've said —well—kidding?"

"I wish it were, fella," said the co-pilot. "I can talk to you about it, but most of it's hushed up. I tell you—"

"Why can you talk to me?" demanded Joe suspiciously. "What makes it all right for you to talk to me?"

"You've got passage on this ship. That means something!"

"Does it?"

The pilot turned in his seat to glance at Joe.

"Do you think we carry passengers regularly?" he asked mildly.

"Why not?"

Pilot and co-pilot looked at each other.

'Tell him," said the pilot.

"About five months ago," said the co-pilot, "an Army colonel wangled a ride to Bootstrap on a cargo

plane. The plane took off. It flew all right until it was twenty miles from Bootstrap. Then it stopped

checking. It drove straight for the Shed the Platform's built in. It was shot down. When it hit, there was an

explosion."

The co-pilot shrugged. "You won't believe it, maybe. But a week later they found the colonel's body back

East. Somebody'd murdered him."

Joe blinked.

"It wasn't the colonel who rode as a passenger," added the co-pilot unnecessarily. "It was somebody else.

Twenty miles from Bootstrap he'd shot the pilot and taken the controls. They figure he meant to dive into

the Shed. He had an atom bomb on board his plane. It's detonator didn't happen to work."

Joe saw the implication, here. Cranks and crackpots might hate the Platform. Many of them did. But they

couldn't get hold of an atomic bomb. It would take a large nation to have it on hand. So it wasn't only

cranks and crackpots who objected to the building of the Platform. There could be nations, not quite

willing to go to war, but certainly ready to try anything less. And the result in a strictly limited field would

be as near warfare as anybody dared.

The pilot said sharply, "Something down below!"

The co-pilot fairly leaped into the righthand seat. He

was in place and his safetybelt buckled in half a heartbeat.

"Check," he said in a new tone. "Where?" The pilot pointed.

"I saw something dark," he said briefly, "where there was a hole hi that cloud."

The co-pilot threw a switch. Within seconds a new sound entered the cabin. "Beep ...... beep ..... beep

..... beep." They were thin, batlike squeaks, spaced a

full half-second apart, rising in pitch during their brief hearability. The co-pilot snatched a handphone

from the wall above his head and held it to his lips.

"Flight two-twenty calling," he said crisply. "Something's got a radar on us. We saw it. We're at eighteen

thousand and—" here the floor of the cabin tilted markedly—"now we're climbing. Get a fix on us and

come a'running! Over!"

He took the phone from his lips and said conversationally, "Using radar is proof there's dirty work at the

crossroads. Somebody's taking a chance!"

Joe clenched his hands. The pilot did things to the levers on the column between the two pilots' seats. He

said curtly, "Arm the jatos."

The co-pilot clicked down a lever and murmured, "Check!"

All this took place in seconds. The pilot had said, "I see something," and instantly there was swift, tense

teamwork hi action. A call by radio, asking for help. The plane climbing for greater clearance between it

and the clouds. The jatos made ready for firing. They were the jet-assisted-take-off rockets which on a

short field or a rough one would double the engine's thrust for a matter of seconds. In straightaway flight

they should make the plane leap like a scared rabbit. But they wouldn't burn long.

"I don't like this," said the co-pilot hi a flat voice. '1 don't see what—"

Then he stopped. Something zoomed out of a cloud. The thing was incredible and commonplace at the

same time. The thing that appeared was a silver winged private plane, two motored, of the sort that cruises

three hundred miles an hour and can do five, if pushed. It was expensive, but not large. It came straight up

out of the cloud layer and went lazily over on its back and dived down into the cloud layer again. It looked

like somebody stunting, against all reason, in clouds,—where a sensible man does not stunt. It looked like

the kind of crazy thing for which there is no justification.

But there was an explanation for this.

At the very top of the loop, threads of white smoke appeared. They should have been unnoticeable against

the cloud. But for the fraction of an instant they were silhouetted against the plane's own silver wings. And

they were not thin vapor. They were dense, sharply defined rocket trails.

They leaped upward. They unreeled a cord of writhing smoke. They gained velocity, instant by instant.

The pilot hit something with the heel of his hand. There was a heartstopping delay. Then the transport ship

leaped forward with a force to stop one's breath. The jatos bellowed and the ship jumped. The sound of the

motors was drowned out by the jatos' roar. Joe was slammed against the back of his seat. He struggled to

resist the force which pushed him tailward. He heard the pilot saying calmly.

"... rockets. If they're sidewinders or anything that homes on its target, we're sunk!"

But this was an undercover operation. It was intended to be murder. It was definitely intended to sabotage

the Space Platform. And saboteurs and murderers and undercover operators of all varieties have to work

against a definite handicap. They can't use equipment such as authorized personnel find useful. If a

saboteur uses a rocket, he can't test a sophisticated guidance system to be sure it will work right. There can

be no countdown on preparations for a murder; it has to be done when chance allows it. So the means used

to attack the transport plane had to be practically primitive; a two-motored private plane and rockets that

could track their target by the heat of its exhaust. An actual fighter plane would have had Joe and the

others absolutely at its mercy. But not a plane like this one.

The co-pilot said between his teeth; "Not sidewinders; no. But they'll have proximity fuses ..."

Then the plane bucked. At that moment it was very probably strained far past the limit of stress for which

it was designed. Only one rocket detonated. The others went off instants afterward. The rockets had

proximity fuses. Had they ringed the transport ship and gone off with it enclosed, it would now have been

a tumbling bit of wreckage. But the jatos had thrown it ahead and out of the rockets' target area. Now they

cut off and it seemed as if the ship had braked. But the pilot dived steeply for speed.

The co-pilot was saying coldly into the microphone, "It shot rockets. Looked like Army issue three point

fives with proximities. They missed, but we're mighty lonely!"

The plane tore on, both pilots watching the cloud-bank below. They moved their bodies as they stared out

the windows, so that by nq possibility would the plane's window mask something that they should see.

As they searched, the co-pilot went on evenly into the transmitter at his lips, "He wouldn't have more than

four rockets, and he's dumping his racks and firing-equipment now. But he might have a friend with him.

Better get here fast if you want to catch him! He'll be the most innocent private pilot you ever saw!"

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摘要：

Therewasn'tanythingunderneathbuttheclouds,andnothingoverheadbutthesky-Suddenlythreadsofwhitesmokeappeared,silhouettedagainstthesilverymetalofanapproachingcraft.Theywerenotmistywispsofvapor;theyweredense,sharplydefinedrockettrails.Thepilotwatchedgrimly,helplessly."Thatcraftshotrocketsatus.Ifthey'regu...

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Murray Leinster - Space Platform

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