Space Platform. Murray Leinster

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СКАЧАТЬ was no sign of activity anywhere, because the scale was so great. Movement there was, but the things that moved were too small to be seen by comparison with the Shed. The huge, round, shining half-sphere of metal stood tranquilly in the midst of emptiness.

      It was bigger than the pyramids.

      The plane went on, descending. Joe craned his neck, and then he was ashamed to gawk. He looked ahead, and far away there were white speckles that would be buildings: Bootstrap, the town especially built for the men who built the Space Platform. In it they slept and ate and engaged in the uproarious festivity that men on a construction job crave on their time off.

      The plane dipped noticeably.

      “Airfield off to the right,” said the co-pilot. “That’s for the town and the job. The jets—there’s an air umbrella overhead all the time—have a field somewhere else. The pushpots have a field of their own, too, where they’re training pilots.”

      Joe didn’t know what a pushpot was, but he didn’t ask. He was thinking about the Shed, which was the greatest building ever put up, and had been built merely to shelter the greatest hope for the world’s peace while it was put together. He’d be in the Shed presently. He’d work there, setting up the contents of the crates back in the cargo space, and finally installing them in the Platform itself.

      The pilot said: “Pitot and wing heaters?”

      “Off,” said the co-pilot.

      “Spark and advance——”

      Joe didn’t listen. He looked down at the sprawling small town with white-painted barracks and a business section and an obvious, carefully designed recreation area that nobody would ever use. The plane was making a great half-circle. The motor noise dimmed as Joe became absorbed in his anticipation of seeing the Space Platform and having a hand in its building.

      The co-pilot said sharply: “Hold everything!”

      Joe jerked his head around. The co-pilot had his hand on the wheel release. His face was tense.

      “It don’t feel right,” he said very, very quietly. “Maybe I’m crazy, but there was that sandy-haired guy who put his hand up in the wheel well back at that last field. And this don’t feel right!”

      The plane swept on. The airfield passed below it. The co-pilot very cautiously let go of the wheel release, which when pulled should let the wheels fall down from their wells to lock themselves in landing position. He moved from his seat. His lips were pinched and tight. He scrabbled at a metal plate in the flooring. He lifted it and looked down. A moment later he had a flashlight. Joe saw the edge of a mirror. There were two mirrors down there, in fact. One could look through both of them into the wheel well.

      The co-pilot made quite sure. He stood up, leaving the plate off the opening in the floor.

      “There’s something down in the wheel well,” he said in a brittle tone. “It looks to me like a grenade. There’s a string tied to it. At a guess, that sandy-haired guy set it up like that saboteur sergeant down in Brazil. Only—it rolled a little. And this one goes off when the wheels go down. I think, too, if we belly-land——Better go around again, huh?”

      The pilot nodded. “First,” he said evenly, “we get word down to the ground about the sandy-haired guy, so they’ll get him regardless.”

      He picked up the microphone hanging above and behind him and began to speak coldly into it. The transport plane started to swing in wide, sweeping circles over the desert beyond the airport while the pilot explained that there was a grenade in the nose wheel well, set to explode if the wheel were let down or, undoubtedly, if the ship came in to a belly landing.

      Joe found himself astonishingly unafraid. But he was filled with a pounding rage. He hated the people who wanted to smash the pilot gyros because they were essential to the Space Platform. He hated them more completely than he had known he could hate anybody. He was so filled with fury that it did not occur to him that in any crash or explosive landing that would ruin the gyros, he would automatically be killed.

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