Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi) (8 page)

Gloating over the solution he'd found, Joe could have hugged himself.
Hanging to a strap in the waiting bus, he saw another bus start off with
a grinding of gears and a spouting of exhaust smoke. It trundled to the
highway and rolled away. Another and another followed it. Joe's bus fell
in line. They headed for Bootstrap in a convoy, a long, long string of
lighted vehicles running one behind the other.

It was dark outside. The Shed was alone, for security. It was twenty
miles from the town where its work force slept and ate and made merry.
That was security too. One shift came off, and went through a security
check, and during that time the Shed was empty save for the security
officers who roamed it endlessly, looking for trouble. Sometimes they
found it. The shift coming on also passed through a security check.
Nobody could get into the Shed without being identified past question.
The picture-badge stage was long since passed on the Space Platform job.
Security was tight!

The long procession of busses rolled through the night. Outside was dark
desert. Overhead were many stars. Inside the jammed bus were swaying
figures crowded in the aisle, and every seat was filled. There was the
smell of sweat, and oil, and tobacco. Somebody still had garlic on his
breath from lunch. There was the noise of many voices. There was an
argument two seats up the aisle. There was the rumble of the motor, and
the peculiar whine of spinning tires. Men had to raise their voices to
be heard above the din.

A swaying among the crowded figures more pronounced than that caused by
the motion of the bus caught Joe's eye. Somebody was crowding his way
from the back toward the front. The aisle was narrow. Joe clung to his
strap, thinking hard and happily about the rebalancing of the gyros.
There could be no tolerance. It had to be exact. There had to be no
vibration at all....

Figures swayed away from him. A hand on his shoulder.

"Hiya."

He swung around. It was the lean man, Haney, whom he'd kept from being
knocked off the level place two hundred feet up.

Joe said: "Hello."

"I thought you were big brass," said Haney, rumbling in his ear. "But
big brass don't ride the busses."

"I'm going in to try to hunt up the Chief," said Joe.

Haney grunted. He looked estimatingly at Joe. His glance fell to Joe's
hands. Joe had been digging further into the crates, and afterward he'd
washed up, but packing grease is hard to get off. When mixed with soot
and charcoal it leaves signs. Haney relaxed.

"We mostly eat together," he observed, satisfied that Joe was regular
because his hands weren't soft and because mechanic's soap had done an
incomplete job on them. "The Chief's a good guy. Join us?"

"Sure!" said Joe. "And thanks."

A brittle voice sounded somewhere around Haney's knees. Joe looked down,
startled. The midget he'd seen up on the Platform nodded up at him. He'd
squirmed through the press in Haney's wake. He seemed to bristle a
little out of pure habit. Joe made room for him.

"I'm okay," said the midget pugnaciously.

Haney made a formal introduction.

"Mike Scandia." He thumbed at Joe. "Joe Kenmore. He's eating with us.
Wants to find the Chief."

There had been no reference to the risk Joe had run in keeping Haney
from a two-hundred-foot fall. But now Haney said approvingly: "I wanted
to say thanks anyhow for keeping your mouth shut. New here?"

Joe nodded. The noise in the bus made any sort of talk difficult. Haney
appeared used to it.

"Saw you with—uh—Major Holt's daughter," he observed again. "That's
why I thought you were brass. Figured one or the other'd tell on Braun.
You didn't, or somebody'd've raised Cain. But I'll handle it."

Braun would be the man Haney had been fighting. If Haney wanted to
handle it his way, it was naturally none of Joe's business. He said
nothing.

"Braun's a good guy," said Haney. "Crazy, that's all. He picked that
fight. Picked it! Up there! Coulda been him knocked off—and I'd ha'
been in a mess! I'll see him tonight."

The midget said something biting in his peculiarly cracked and brittle
voice.

The bus rolled and rolled and rolled. It was a long twenty miles to
Bootstrap. The desert outside the bus windows was utterly black and
featureless, but once a convoy of trucks passed, going to the Shed.

Presently, though, lights twinkled in the night. Again the bus slowed,
in column with the others. Then there were barrackslike buildings,
succeeding each other, and then there was a corner and suddenly the
outside was ablaze with light. The busses drew up to the curb and
stopped, and everybody was immediately in a great hurry to get out,
shoving unnecessarily, and Joe let himself be carried along by the
crowd.

He found himself on the sidewalk with bright neon signs up and down the
street. He was in the midst of the crowd which was the middle shift
released. It eddied and dispersed without seeming to lessen. Most of the
figures in sight were men. There were very, very few women. The neon
signs proclaimed that here one could buy beer, and that this was Fred's
Place, and that was Sid's Steak Joint. Bowling. Pool. A store—still
open for this shift's trade—sold fancy shirts and strictly practical
work clothes and highly eccentric items of personal adornment. A movie
house. A second. A third. Somewhere a record shop fed repetitious music
to the night air. There was movement and crowding and jostling, but the
middle of the street was almost empty save for the busses. There were
some bicycles, but practically no other wheeled traffic. After all,
Bootstrap was strictly a security town. A man could leave whenever he
chose, but there were formalities, and personal cars weren't practical.

"Chief'll be yonder," said Haney in Joe's ear. "Come along."

They shouldered their way along the sidewalk. The passers-by were of a
type—construction men. Somebody here had taken part in the building of
every skyscraper and bridge and dam put up in Joe's lifetime. They could
have been kept away from the Space Platform job only by a flat refusal
by security to let them be hired.

Haney and Joe moved toward Sid's Steak Joint, with Mike the midget
marching truculently between them. Men nodded to them as they passed.
Joe marshaled in his mind what he was going to tell the Chief. He had a
trick for fixing the pilot gyros. A speck of rust would spoil them, and
they had been through a plane crash and a fire and explosions, but his
trick would do, in ten days or less, what the plant back home had needed
four months to accomplish. The trick was something to gloat over.

Into Sid's Steak Joint. A juke box was playing. Over in a booth, four
men ate hungrily, with a slot TV machine in the wall beside them showing
wrestling matches out in San Francisco. A waiter carried a huge tray
from which steam and fragrant odors arose.

There was the Chief, dark and saturnine to look at, with his straight
black hair gleaming in the light. He was a Mohawk, and he and his tribe
had taken to steel construction work a long time back. They were good.
There were not many big construction jobs on which the Chief's tribesmen
were not to be found working. Forty of them had died together in the
worst construction accident in history, when a bridge on its way to
completion collapsed in the making, but there were a dozen or more at
work on the Space Platform now. The Chief had essayed machine-tool work
at the Kenmore plant, and he'd been good. He'd pitched on the plant
baseball team, and he'd sung bass in the church choir, but there had
been nobody else around who talked Indian, and he'd gotten lonely. At
that, though, he'd left because the Space Platform began and wild horses
couldn't have kept him away from a job like that!

He'd held a table for Haney and Mike, but his eyes widened when he saw
Joe. Then he grinned and almost upset the table to stand up and greet
him.

"Son-of-a-gun!" he said warmly. "What you doin' here?"

"Right now," said Joe. "I'm looking for you. I've got a job for you."

The Chief, still grinning, shook his head.

"Not me, I'm here till the Platform's done."

"It's on the job," said Joe. "I've got to get a crew together to repair
something I brought out here today and that got smashed in the landing."

The four of them sat down. Mike's chin was barely above the table top.
The Chief waved to a waiter. "Steaks all around!" he bellowed. Then he
bent toward Joe. "Shoot it!"

Joe told his story. Concisely. The pilot gyros, which had to be perfect,
had been especially gunned at by saboteurs. An attack with possibly
stolen proximity-fused rockets. The plane was booby-trapped, and
somebody at an airfield had had a chance to spring the trap. So it was
wreckage. Crashed and burned on landing.

The Chief growled. Haney pressed his lips together. The eyes of Mike
were burning.

"Plenty of that sabotage stuff," growled the Chief. "Hard to catch the
so-and-sos. Smash the gyros and the take-off'd have to wait till new
ones got made—and that's more time for more sabotage."

Joe said carefully: "I think it can be licked. Listen a minute, will
you?"

The Chief fixed his eyes upon him.

"The gyros have to be rebalanced," said Joe. "They have to spin on their
own center of gravity. At the plant, they set them up, spun them, and
found which side was heavy. They took metal off till it ran smoothly at
five hundred r.p.m. Then they spun it at a thousand. It vibrated. They
found imbalance that was too small to show up before. They fixed that.
They speeded it up. And so on. They tried to make the center of gravity
the center of the shaft by trimming off the weight that put the center
of gravity somewhere else. Right?"

The Chief said irritably: "No other way to do it! No other way!"

"I saw one," said Joe. "When they cleaned up the wreck at the airfield,
they heaved up the crates with a crane. The slings were twisted. Every
crate spun as it rose. But not one wobbled! They found their own centers
of gravity and spun around them!"

The Chief scowled, deep in thought. Then his face went blank.

"By the holy mud turtle!" he grunted. "I get it!"

Joe said, with very great pains not to seem triumphant, "Instead of
spinning the shaft and trimming the rotor, we'll spin the rotor and trim
the shaft. We'll form the shaft around the center of gravity, instead of
trying to move the center of gravity to the middle of the shaft. We'll
spin the rotors on a flexible bearing base. I think it'll work."

Surprisingly, it was Mike the midget who said warmly, "You got it! Yes,
sir, you got it!"

The Chief took a deep breath. "Yeah! And d'you know how I know? The
Plant built a high-speed centrifuge once. Remember?" He grinned with the
triumph Joe concealed. "It was just a plate with a shaft in the middle.
There were vanes on the plate. It fitted in a shaft hole that was much
too big. They blew compressed air up the shaft hole. It floated the
plate up, the air hit the vanes and spun the plate—and it ran as sweet
as honey! Balanced itself and didn't wobble a bit! We'll do something
like that! Sure!"

"Will you work on it with me?" asked Joe. "We'll need a sort of
crew—three or four altogether. Have to figure out the stuff we need. I
can ask for anybody I want. I'm asking for you. You pick the others."

The Chief grinned broadly. "Any objections, Haney? You and Mike and me
and Joe here? Look!"

He pulled a pencil out of his pocket. He started to draw on the plastic
table top, and then took a paper napkin instead.

"Something like this—"

The steaks came, sizzling on the platters they'd been cooked in. The
outside was seared, and the inside was hot and deliciously rare.
Intellectual exercises like the designing of a machine-tool operation
could not compete with such aromas and sights and sounds. The four of
them fell to.

But they talked as they ate. Absorbed and often with their mouths full,
frequently with imperfect articulation, but with deepening satisfaction
as the steaks vanished and the method they'd use took form in their
minds. It wouldn't be wholly simple, of course. When the rotors were
spinning about their centers of gravity, trimming off the shaft would
change the center of gravity. But the change would be infinitely less
than trimming off the rotors' rims. If they spun the rotors and used an
abrasive on the high side of the shaft as it turned....

"Going to have precession!" warned Mike. "Have to have a polishing
surface. Quarter turn behind the cutter. That'll hold it."

Joe only remembered afterward to be astonished that Mike would know gyro
theory. At the moment he merely swallowed quickly to get the words out.

"Right! And if we cut too far down we can plate the bearing up to
thickness and cut it down again—"

"Plate it up with iridium," said the Chief. He waved a steak knife.
"Man! This is gonna be fun! No tolerance you say, Joe?"

"No tolerance," agreed Joe. "Accurate within the limits of measurement."

The Chief beamed. The Platform was a challenge to all of humanity. The
pilot gyro was essential to the functioning of the Platform. To provide
that necessity against impossible obstacles was a challenge to the four
who were undertaking it.

"Some fun!" repeated the Chief, blissfully.

They ate their steaks, talking. They consumed huge slabs of apple pie
with preposterous mounds of ice cream on top, still talking urgently.
They drank coffee, interrupting each other to draw diagrams. They used
up all the paper napkins, and were still at it when someone came heavily
toward the table. It was the stocky man who had fought with Haney on the
Platform that day. Braun.

He tapped Haney on the shoulder. The four at the table looked up.

"We hadda fight today," said Braun in a queer voice. He was oddly pale.
"We didn't finish. You wanna finish?"