Space Platform Part 23

They'll see it as a chance to do their stuff with us to run interference for them.--Sally, does your father sure-enough trust us?"

Sally nodded.

"He doesn't talk very cordially, but he trusts you."

"Okay," said Mike. "You tell him, private, that I'm setting up something tricky. He can laugh off anything his security guys report that I'm mixed up in. Joe'll see that he gets the whole picture beforehand. But he ain't to tell anybody--not _any_body--that something is getting framed up. Right?"

"I'll ask him," said Sally. "He is pretty desperate. He's sure some last-minute frantic a.s.sault on the Platform will be made. But----"

"We'll tip him in plenty of time," said Mike with authority. "In time for him to play along, but not for a leak to spoil things. Okay?"

"I'll make the bargain," Sally a.s.sured him, "if it can be made."

Mike nodded. He drained his coffee cup and slipped down from his chair.

"Come on, Chief! C'mon, Haney!"

He led them out of the room.

Joe fiddled with his spoon a moment, and then said: "The crewman I was to have subbed for if he didn't get well--he did, didn't he?"

Sally answered reluctantly: "Y-yes."

Joe said measuredly: "Well, then--that's that! I guess it will be all right for me to stick around and watch the take-off?"

Sally's eyes were misty.

"Of course it will, Joe! I'm so sorry!"

Joe grinned, but even to himself his face seemed like a mask.

"Into each life some rain must fall. Let's go out and see what's been accomplished since I went to sleep. All right?"

They went out of the Platform together. And as soon as they reached the floor of the Shed it was plain that the stage had been set for stirring events.

The top five or six levels of scaffolding had already been removed, and more of the girders and pipes were coming down in bundles on lines from giraffelike cranes. There were some new-type trucks in view, too, giants of the kind that carry ready-mixed concrete through city streets. They were pouring a doughy white paste into huge buckets that carried it aloft, where it vanished into the mouths of tubes that seemed to replace the scaffolding along the Platform's sides.

"Lining the rockets," said Sally in a subdued voice.

Joe watched. He knew about this, too. It had been controversial for a time. After the pushpots and their jatos had served as the first two stages of a multiple-rocket aggregation, the Platform carried rocket fuel as the third stage. But the Platform was a highly special ballistic problem. It would take off almost horizontally--a great advantage in fueling matters. This was practical simply because the Platform could be lifted far beyond effective air resistance, and already have considerable speed before its own rockets flared.

Moreover, it was not a s.p.a.ce s.h.i.+p in the sense of needing rockets for landing purposes. It wouldn't land. Not ever. And again there was the fact that men would be riding in it. That ruled out the use of eight- and ten- and fifteen-gravity acceleration. It had to make use of a long period of relatively slow acceleration rather than a brief terrific surge of power. So its very special rockets had been designed as the answer.

They were solid-fuel rockets, though solid fuels had been long abandoned for long-range missiles. But they were entirely unlike other solid-fuel drives. The pasty white compound being hauled aloft was a self-setting refractory compound with which the rocket tubes would be lined, with the solid fuel filling the center. The tubes themselves were thin steel--absurdly thin--but wound with wire under tension to provide strength against bursting, like old-fas.h.i.+oned rifle cannon.

When the fuel was fired, it would be at the muzzle end of the rocket tube, and the fuel would burn forward at so many inches per second. The refractory lining would resist the rocket blast for a certain time and then crumble away. Crumbling, the refractory particles would be hurled astern and so serve as reaction ma.s.s. When the steel outer tubes were exposed, they would melt and be additional reaction ma.s.s.

In effect, as the rocket fuel was exhausted, the tubes that contained it dissolved into their own blast and added to the accelerating thrust, even as they diminished the amount of ma.s.s to be accelerated. Then the quant.i.ty of fuel burned could diminish--the tubes could grow smaller--so the rate of speed gain would remain constant. Under the highly special conditions of this particular occasion, there was a notable gain in efficiency over a liquid-fuel rocket design. For one item, the Platform would certainly have no use for fuel pumps and fuel tanks once it was in its...o...b..t. In this way, it wouldn't have them. Their equivalent in ma.s.s would have been used to gain velocity. And when the Platform finally rode in s.p.a.ce, it would have expended every ounce of the driving apparatus used to get it there.

Now the rocket tubes were being lined and loaded. The time to take-off was growing short indeed.

Joe watched a while and turned away. He felt very good because he'd finished his job and lived up to the responsibility he'd had. But he felt very bad because he'd had an outside chance to be one of the first men ever to make a real s.p.a.ce journey--and now it was gone. He couldn't resent the decision against him. If it had been put up to him, he'd probably have made the same hard decision himself. But it hurt to have had even a crazy hope taken away.

Sally said, trying hard to interest him, "These rockets hold an awful lot of fuel, Joe! And it's better than scientists thought a chemical fuel could ever be!"

"Yes," said Joe.

"Fluorine-beryllium," said Sally urgently. "It fits in with the pushpots' having pressurized c.o.c.kpits. Rockets like that couldn't be used on the ground! The fumes would be poisonous!"

But Joe only nodded in agreement. He was apathetic. He was uninterested.

He was still thinking of that lost trip in s.p.a.ce. He realized that Sally was watching his face.

"Joe," she said unhappily, "I wish you wouldn't look like that!"

"I'm all right," he told her.

"You act as if you didn't care about anything," she protested, "and you do!"

"I'm all right," he repeated.

"I'd like to go outside somewhere," she said abruptly, "but after what happened up at the lake, I mustn't. Would you like to go up to the top of the Shed?"

"If you want to," he agreed without enthusiasm.

He followed when she went to a doorway--with a security guard beside it--in the sidewall. She flashed her pa.s.s and the guard let them through. They began to walk up an inclined, endless, curving ramp. It was between the inner and outer skins of the Shed. There had to be two skins because the Shed was too big to be ventilated properly, and the hot desert suns.h.i.+ne on one side would have made "weather" inside.

There'd have been a convection-current motion of the air in the enclosed s.p.a.ce, and minor whirlwinds, and there could even be miniature thunderclouds and lightning. Joe remembered reading that such things had happened in a shed built for Zeppelins before he was born.

They came upon an open gallery, and there was a security man looking down at the floor and the Platform. He had a very good view of all that went on.

They went around another long circuit of the slanting gallery, dimly lighted with small electric bulbs. They came to a second gallery, and saw the Platform again. There was another guard here.

They were halfway up the globular wall now, and were visibly suspended over emptiness. The view of the Platform was impressive. There were an astonis.h.i.+ng number of rocket tubes being fastened to the outside of that huge object. Three giant cranes, working together, hoisted a tube to the last remaining level of scaffolding, and men swarmed on it and fastened it to the swelling hull. As soon as it was fast, other men hurried into it with the white pasty stuff to line it from end to end. The tubes would nearly hide the structure they were designed to propel. But they'd all be burned away when it reached its destination.

"Wonderful, isn't it?" asked Sally hopefully.

Joe looked, and said without warmth, "It's the most wonderful thing that anybody ever even tried to do."

Which was true enough, but the zest of it had unreasonably departed for Joe for the time being. His disappointment was new.

Halfway around again, Sally opened a door, and Joe was almost surprised out of his lethargy. Here was a watching post on the outside of the monstrous half-globe. There were two guards here, with fifty-caliber machine guns under canvas hoods. Their duties were tedious but necessary. They watched the desert. From this height it stretched out for miles, and Bootstrap could be seen as a series of white specks far away with hills behind it.

Ultimately Sally and Joe came to the very top of the Shed into the open air. From here the steep plating curved down and away in every direction. The suns.h.i.+ne was savagely bright and s.h.i.+ning, but there was a breeze. And here there was a considerable expanse fenced in--almost an acre, it seemed. There were metal-walled small buildings with innumerable antennae of every possible shape for the reception of every conceivable wave length. There were three radar bowl reflectors turning restlessly to scan the horizon, and a fourth which went back and forth, revolving, to scan the sky itself. Sally told Joe that in the very middle--where there was a shed with a domelike roof which wasn't metal--there was a wave-guide radar that could spot a plane within three feet vertically, and horizontally at a distance of thirty miles, with greater distances in proportion.

There were guns down in pits so their muzzles wouldn't interfere with the radar. There were enough non-recoil anti-aircraft guns to defend the Shed against anything one could imagine.

"And there are jet planes overhead too," said Sally. "Dad asked to have them reinforced, and two new wings of jet fighters landed yesterday at a field somewhere over yonder. There are plenty of guards!"

The Platform was guarded as no object in all history had ever been guarded. It was ironic that it had to be protected so, because it was actually the only hope of escape from atomic war. But that was why some people hated the Platform, and their hatred had made it seem obviously an item of national defense. Ironically that was the reason the money had been provided for its construction. But the greatest irony of all was that its most probable immediate usefulness would be the help it would give in making nuclear experiments that weren't safe enough to make on Earth.