Space Platform Part 8

And the rotors were gashed in one place, and the shafts were bent. Being bent and nicked, the precision of the apparatus was destroyed. Its precision lost, the whole device was useless. And it had taken four months' work merely to get it perfectly balanced!

It had been the most accurate piece of machine work ever done on Earth.

It was balanced to a microgram--to a millionth of the combined weight of three aspirin tablets. It would revolve at 40,000 revolutions per minute. It had to balance perfectly or it would vibrate intolerably. If it vibrated at all it would shake itself to pieces, or, failing that, send aging sound waves through all the Platform's substance. If it vibrated by the least fraction of a ten-thousandth of an inch, it would wear, and vibrate more strongly, and destroy itself and possibly the Platform. It needed the precision of an astronomical telescope's lenses--multiplied! And it was bent. It was exactly as useless as if it had never been made at all.

Joe felt as a man might feel if the mirror of the greatest telescope on earth, in his care, had been smashed. As if the most priceless picture in the world, in his charge, had been burned. But he felt worse. Whether it was his fault or not--and it wasn't--it was destroyed.

A truck rolled up and was stopped by a guard. There was talk, and the guard let it through. A small crane lift came over from the hangars. Its normal use was the lifting of plane motors in and out of their nacelles.

Now it was to pick up the useless pieces of equipment on which the best workmen and the best brains of the Kenmore Precision Tool Company had worked unceasingly for eight calendar months, and which now was junk.

Joe watched, numbed by disaster, while the crane hook went down to position above the once-precious objects. Men sh.o.r.ed up the heavy things and ran planks under them, and then deftly fitted rope slings for them to be lifted by. It was late afternoon by now. Long shadows were slanting as the crane truck's gears whined, and the slack took up, and the first of the four charred objects lifted and swung, spinning slowly, to the truck that had come from the Shed.

Joe froze, watching. He watched the second. The third did not spin. It merely swayed. But the fourth.... The lines up to the crane hook were twisted. As the largest of the four crates lifted from its bed, it twisted the lines toward straightness. It spun. It spun more and more rapidly, and then more and more slowly, and stopped, and began to spin back.

Then Joe caught his breath. It seemed that he hadn't breathed in minutes. The big crate wasn't balanced. It was spinning. It wasn't vibrating. It spun around its own center of gravity, unerringly revealed by its flexible suspension.

He watched until it was dropped into the truck. Then he went stiffly over to the driver of the car that had brought him.

"Everything's all right," he said, feeling a queer astonishment at his own words. "I'm going to ride back to the Shed with the stuff I brought.

It's not hurt too much. I'll be able to fix it with a man or two I can pick up out here. But I don't want anything else to happen to it!"

So he rode back out to the Shed on the tailboard of the truck that carried the crates. The sun set as he rode. He was smudged and disheveled. The reek of charred wood and burnt insulation and scorched wrappings was strong in his nostrils. But he felt very much inclined to sing.

It occurred to Joe that he should have sent Sally a message that she didn't need to cry as a subst.i.tute for him. He felt swell! He knew how to do the job that would let the s.p.a.ce Platform take off! He'd tell her, first chance.

It was very good to be alive.

5

There was n.o.body in the world to whom the s.p.a.ce Platform was meaningless. To Joe and a great many people like him, it was a dream long and stubbornly held to and now doggedly being made a reality. To some it was the prospect of peace and the hope of a quiet life: children and grandchildren and a serene look forward to the future. Some people prayed yearningly for its success, though they could have no other share in its making. And of course there were those men who had gotten into power and could not stay there without ruthlessness. They knew what the Platform would mean to their kind. For, once world peace was certain, they would be killed by the people they ruled over. So they sent grubby, desperate men to wreck it at any cost. They were prepared to pay for or to commit any crime if the s.p.a.ce Platform could be smashed and turmoil kept as the norm of life on Earth.

And there were the people who were actually doing the building.

Joe rode a bus into Bootstrap that night with some of them. The middle s.h.i.+ft--two to ten o'clock--was off. Fleets of busses rolled out from the small town twenty miles away, their headlights making a procession of paired flames in the darkness. They rolled into the unloading area and disgorged the late s.h.i.+ft--ten to six--to be processed by security and admitted to the Shed. Then, quite empty, the busses went trundling around to where Joe waited with the released s.h.i.+ft milling around him.

The busses stopped and opened their doors. The waiting men stormed in, shoving zestfully, calling to each other, scrambling for seats or merely letting themselves be pushed on board. The bus Joe found himself on was jammed in seconds. He held on to a strap and didn't notice. He was absorbed in the rapt contemplation of his idea for the repair of the pilot gyros. The motors could be replaced easily enough. The foundation of his first despair had been the belief that everything could be managed but one thing; that the all-important absolute accuracy was the only thing that couldn't be achieved. Getting that accuracy, back at the plant, had consumed four months of time. Each of the gyros was four feet in diameter and weighed five hundred pounds. Each spun at 40,000 r.p.m.

It had to be machined from a special steel to a.s.sure that it would not fly to pieces from sheer centrifugal force. Each was plated with iridium lest a speck of rust form and throw it off balance. If the shaft and bearings were not centered exactly at the center of gravity of the rotors--five hundred pounds of steel off balance at 40,000 r.p.m. could raise the devil. They could literally wreck the Platform itself. And "exactly at the center of gravity" meant exactly. There could be no error by which the shaft was off center by the thousandth of an inch, or a ten-thousandth, or even the tenth of a ten-thousandth. The accuracy had to be absolute.

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 s.h.i.+ft 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 s.h.i.+ft coming on also pa.s.sed through a security check.

n.o.body could get into the Shed without being identified past question.

The picture-badge stage was long since pa.s.sed on the s.p.a.ce 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 p.r.o.nounced 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: "h.e.l.lo."

"I thought you were big bra.s.s," said Haney, rumbling in his ear. "But big bra.s.s 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 bra.s.s. 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 pa.s.sed, 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.