Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (6 page)

Sally was waiting again when he came out. She took him into her father's
office, and introduced him to her father's secretary. Compared to Sally
she was an extraordinarily plain woman. She wore a sorrowful expression.
But she looked very efficient.

Joe explained carefully that his father said for him to hunt up Chief
Bender—working on the job out here—because he was one of the few men
who'd left the Kenmore plant to work elsewhere, and he was good. He and
the Chief, between them, would estimate the damage and the possibility
of repair.

Major Holt listened. He was military and official and harassed and curt
and tired. Joe'd known Sally and therefore her father all his life, but
the Major wasn't an easy man to be relaxed with. He spoke into thin air,
and immediately his sad-seeming secretary wrote out a pass for Joe. Then
Major Holt gave crisp orders on a telephone and asked questions, and
Sally said: "I know. I'll take him there. I know my way around."

Her father's expression did not change. He simply included Sally in his
orders on the phone.

He hung up and said briefly: "The plane will be surveyed and taken apart
as soon as possible. By the time you find your man you can probably
examine the crates. I'll have you cleared for it."

His secretary reached in a drawer for order forms to fill out and hand
him to sign. Sally tugged at Joe's arm. They left.

Outside, she said: "There's no use arguing with my father, Joe. He has a
terrible job, and it's on his mind all the time. He hates being a
Security officer, too. It's a thankless job—and no Security officer
ever gets to be more than a major. His ability never shows. What he does
is never noticed unless it fails. So he's frustrated. He's got poor Miss
Ross—his secretary, you know—so she just listens to what he says must
be done and she writes it out. Sometimes he goes days without speaking
to her directly. But really it's pretty bad! It's like a war with no
enemy to fight except spies! And the things they do! They've been known
even to booby-trap a truck after an accident, so anybody who tries to
help will be blown up! So everything has to be done in a certain way or
everything will be ruined!"

She led him to an office with a door that opened directly into the Shed.
In spite of his bitterness, Joe was morosely impatient to see inside.
But Sally had to identify him formally as the Joe Kenmore who was the
subject of her father's order, and his fingerprints had to be taken, and
somebody had him stand for a moment before an X-ray screen. Then she led
him through the door, and he was in the Shed where the Space Platform
was under construction.

It was a vast cavern of metal sheathing and spidery girders, filled with
sound and detail. It took him seconds to begin to absorb what he saw and
heard. The Shed was five hundred feet high in the middle, and it was all
clear space without a single column or interruption. There were arc
lamps burning about its edges, and high up somewhere there were strips
of glass which let in a pale light. All of it resounded with many noises
and clanging echoes of them.

There were rivet guns at work, and there were the grumblings of motor
trucks moving about, and the oddly harsh roar of welding torches. But
the torch flames looked only like marsh fires, blue-white and eerie
against the mass of the thing that was being built.

It was not too clear to the eye, this incomplete Space Platform. There
seemed to be a sort of mist, a glamour about it, which was partly a
veiling mass of scaffolding. But Joe gazed at it with an emotion that
blotted out even his aching disappointment and feeling of shame.

It was gigantic. It had the dimensions of an ocean liner. It was
strangely shaped. Partly obscured by the fragile-seeming framework about
it, there was bright plating in swelling curves, and the plating reached
up irregularly and followed a peculiar pattern, and above the plating
there were girders—themselves shining brightly in the light of many arc
lamps—and they rose up and up toward the roof of the Shed itself. The
Platform was ungainly and it was huge, and it rested under a hollow
metal half-globe that could have doubled for a sky. It was more than
three hundred feet high, itself, and there were men working on the bare
bright beams of its uppermost parts—and the men were specks. The far
side of the Shed's floor had other men on it, and they were merely
jerkily moving motes. You couldn't see their legs as they walked. The
Shed and the Platform were monstrous!

Joe felt Sally's eyes upon him. Somehow, they looked proud. He took a
deep breath.

She said: "Come on."

They walked across acres of floor neatly paved with shining wooden
blocks. They moved toward the thing that was to take mankind's first
step toward the stars. As they walked centerward, a big sixteen-wheel
truck-and-trailer outfit backed out of an opening under the lacy haze of
scaffolds. It turned clumsily, and carefully circled the scaffolding,
and moved toward a sidewall of the Shed. A section of the wall—it
seemed as small as a rabbit hole—lifted inward like a flap, and the
sixteen-wheeler trundled out into the blazing sunlight. Four other
trucks scurried out after it. Other trucks came in. The sidewall section
closed.

There was the smell of engine fumes and hot metal and of ozone from
electric sparks. There was that indescribable smell a man can get
homesick for, of metal being worked by men. Joe walked like someone in a
dream, with Sally satisfiedly silent beside him, until the
scaffolds—which had looked like veiling—became latticework and he saw
openings.

They walked into one such tunnel. The bulk of the Platform above them
loomed overhead with a crushing menace. There were trucks rumbling all
around underneath, here in this maze of scaffold columns. Some carried
ready-loaded cages waiting to be snatched up by hoists. Crane grips came
down, and snapped fast on the cages, and lifted them up and up and out
of sight. There was a Diesel running somewhere, and a man stood and
stared skyward and made motions with his hands, and the Diesel adjusted
its running to his signals. Then some empty cages came down and landed
in a waiting truck body with loud clanking noises. Somebody cast off the
hooks, and the truck grumbled and drove away.

Sally spoke to a preoccupied man in shirt sleeves with a badge on an arm
band near his shoulder. He looked carefully at the passes she carried,
using a flashlight to make sure. Then he led them to a shaft up which a
hoist ran. It was very noisy here. A rivet gun banged away overhead, and
the plates of the Platform rang with the sound, and the echoes
screeched, and to Joe the bedlam was infinitely good to hear. The man
with the arm band shouted into a telephone transmitter, and a hoist cage
came down. Joe and Sally stepped on it. Joe took a firm grip on her
shoulder, and the hoist shot upward.

The hugeness of the Shed and the Platform grew even more apparent as the
hoist accelerated toward the roof. The flooring seemed to expand.
Spidery scaffold beams dropped past them. There were things being built
over by the sidewall. Joe saw a crawling in-plant tow truck moving past
those enigmatic objects. It was a tiny truck, no more than four feet
high and with twelve-inch wheels. It dragged behind it flat plates of
metal with upturned forward edges. They slid over the floor like
sledges. Cryptic loads were carried on those plates, and the tow truck
stopped by a mass of steel piping being put together, and began to
unload the plates.

Then the hoist slowed abruptly and Sally winced a little. The hoist
stopped.

Here—two hundred feet up—a welding crew worked on the skin of the
Platform itself. The plating curved in and there was a wide flat space
parallel to the ground. There was also a great gaping hole beyond.
Though girders rose roofward even yet, this was as high as the plating
had gone. That opening—Joe guessed—would ultimately be the door of an
air lock, and this flat surface was designed for a tender rocket to
anchor to by magnets. When a rocket came up from Earth with supplies or
reliefs for the Platform's crew, or with fuel to be stored for an
exploring ship's later use, it would anchor here and then inch toward
that doorway....

There were half a dozen men in the welding crew. They should have been
working. But two men battered savagely at each other, their tools thrown
down. One was tall and lean, with a wrinkled face and an expression of
intolerable fury. The other was squat and dark with a look of
desperation. A third man was in the act of putting down his welding
torch—he'd carefully turned it off first—to try to interfere. Another
man gaped. Still another was climbing up by a ladder from the scaffold
level below.

Joe put Sally's hand on the hoist upright, instinctively freeing himself
for action.

The lanky man lashed out a terrific roundhouse blow. It landed, but the
stocky man bored in. Joe had an instant's clear sight of his face. It
was not the face of a man enraged. It had the look of a man both
desperate and despairing.

Then the lanky man's foot slipped. He lost balance, and the stocky man's
fist landed. The thin man reeled backward. Sally cried out, choking. The
lanky man teetered on the edge of the flat place. Behind him, the
plating curved down. Below him there were two hundred feet of fall
through the steel-pipe maze of scaffolds. If he took one step back he
was gone inexorably down a slope on which he could never stop.

He took that step. The stocky man's face abruptly froze in horror. The
lanky man stiffened convulsively. He couldn't stop. He knew it. He'd go
back and on over the rounded edge, and fall. He might touch the
scaffolding. It would not stop him. It would merely set his body
spinning crazily as it dropped and crashed again and again before it
landed two hundred feet below.

It was horror in slow motion, watching the lean man stagger backward to
his death.

Then Joe leaped.

For an instant, in mid-air, Joe was incongruously aware of all the
noises in the Shed. The murky, girdered ceiling still three hundred feet
above him. The swelling, curving, glittering surface of steel
underneath. Then he struck. He landed beside the lean man, with his left
arm outstretched to share his impetus with him. Alone, he would have had
momentum enough to carry himself up the slope down which the man had
begun to descend. But now he shared it. The two of them toppled forward
together. Their arms were upon the flat surface, while their bodies
dangled. The feel of gravity pulling them slantwise and downward was
purest nightmare.

But then, as Joe's innards crawled, the same stocky man who had knocked
the lean man back was dragging frantically at both of them to pull them
to safety.

Then there were two men pulling. The stocky man's face was gray. His
horror was proof that he hadn't intended murder. The man who'd put down
his welding torch pulled. The man who'd been climbing the ladder put his
weight to the task of getting them back to usable footing. They reached
safety. Joe scrambled to his feet, but he felt sick at the pit of his
stomach. The stocky man began to shake horribly. The lanky one advanced
furiously upon him.

"I didn' mean to keel you, Haney!" the dark one panted.

The lanky one snapped: "Okay. You didn't. But come on, now! We finish
this—"

He advanced toward the workman who had so nearly caused his death. But
the other man dropped his arms to his sides.

"I don' fight no more," he said thickly. "Not here. You keel me is okay.
I don' fight."

The lanky man—Haney—growled at him.

"Tonight, then, in Bootstrap. Now get back to work!"

The stocky man picked up his tools. He was trembling.

Haney turned to Joe and said ungraciously: "Much obliged. What's up?"

Joe still felt queasy. There is rarely any high elation after one has
risked his life for somebody else. He'd nearly plunged two hundred feet
to the floor of the Shed with Haney. But he swallowed.

"I'm looking for Chief Bender. You're Haney? Foreman?"

"Gang boss," said Haney. He looked at Joe and then at Sally who was
holding convulsively to the upright Joe had put her hand on. Her eyes
were closed. "Yeah," said Haney. "The Chief took off today. Some kind of
Injun stuff. Funeral, maybe. Want me to tell him something? I'll see him
when I go off shift."

There was an obscure movement somewhere on this part of the Platform. A
tiny figure came out of a crevice that would someday be an air lock. Joe
didn't move his eyes toward it. He said awkwardly: "Just tell him Joe
Kenmore's in town and needs him. He'll remember me, I think. I'll hunt
him up tonight."

"Okay," said Haney.

Joe's eyes went to the tiny figure that had come out from behind the
plating. It was a midget in baggy, stained work garments like the rest
of the men up here. He wore a miniature welding shield pushed back on
his head. Joe could guess his function, of course. There'd be corners a
normal-sized man couldn't get into, to buck a rivet or weld a joint.
There'd be places only a tiny man could properly inspect. The midget
regarded Joe without expression.

Joe turned to the hoist to go down to the floor again. Haney waved his
hand. The midget lifted his, in grave salutation.

The hoist dropped down the shaft. Sally opened her eyes.

"You—saved that man's life, Joe," she said unsteadily. "But you scared
me to death!"

Joe tried to ignore the remark, but he still seemed to feel slanting
metal under him and a drop of two hundred feet below. It had been a
nightmarish sensation.

"I didn't think," he said uncomfortably. "It was a crazy thing to do.
Lucky it worked out."

Sally glanced at him. The hoist still dropped swiftly. Levels of
scaffolding shot upward past them. If Joe had slipped down that rolling
curve of metal, he'd have dropped past all these. It was not good to
think about. He swallowed again. Then the hoist checked in its descent.
It stopped. Joe somewhat absurdly helped Sally off to solid ground.