Speaker 1: Chapter twelve of Space Platform by Murray Leinster. This LibriVox
Speaker 1: recording is in the public domain. Space Platform, Chapter twelve.
Speaker 1: The incoming shift had a messy clean up job to do.
Speaker 1: It was accomplished only because security men abruptly took over
Speaker 1: the work of gang bosses, and all ordinary labor on
Speaker 1: the platform was put aside until normal operations were again possible.
Speaker 1: Even that would not have been feasible but for the
Speaker 1: walkie talkies the security men wore. As the situation was
Speaker 1: sorted out, it was explained to them, and they relayed
Speaker 1: the news for the satisfaction of the curiosity of those
Speaker 1: who worked under them. No work, no explanation. It produced
Speaker 1: immediate and satisfactory cooperation all around. There had been four
Speaker 1: separate and independent attempts to wreck the platform at the
Speaker 1: same time. One was, of course, the plan of those
Speaker 1: sympathetic characters who had volunteered to help Mike and his
Speaker 1: gang win the status of spacemen by firing the platform's rockets.
Speaker 1: There were not many of them, and they lost heavily.
Speaker 1: They'd had thermite bombs to destroy the platform's vitals. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: the survivors talked freely, if morosely and that was that
Speaker 1: there had been a particularly ungifted attempt to cause panic
Speaker 1: in the incoming shift in the rooms where its members
Speaker 1: were screened before admission to work. Somebody had tried to
Speaker 1: establish complete confusion there by firing revolver shots in the crowd,
Speaker 1: expecting the workers to break through to the floor and
Speaker 1: assign gentlemen with slabs of explosive to get to the
Speaker 1: platform with them. The gentlemen with the explosives had run
Speaker 1: into major Holtz security reserve, and they got nowhere. The
Speaker 1: creators of panic with revolver shots were finally rescued from
Speaker 1: their shift mates and more or less scraped up from
Speaker 1: the screening room floor. They were in very bad shape
Speaker 1: and carted off to be patched up for questioning. The
Speaker 1: members of this group had been impractical idealists, and besides,
Speaker 1: some of them had lost their nerve, as was evidenced
Speaker 1: by the discovery of abandoned explosives and detonators in the
Speaker 1: locker room and men's room of the shed. The most
Speaker 1: dangerous attempt was, of course, that perfectly planned and coordinated assault,
Speaker 1: which had been merely carried out at its original time
Speaker 1: without either being hastened or delayed. By Mike's activities. The
Speaker 1: plan had been beautifully contrived, and it would certainly have
Speaker 1: been successful but for the machine gun bullets from the
Speaker 1: gallery and the fight Joe's followers put up underneath the platform.
Speaker 1: The exact instant when the whole shed would be most
Speaker 1: nearly empty had been fixed upon, and three separate units
Speaker 1: had worked in perfect timing. There been the men in
Speaker 1: the stall truck. He delayed his exit from the shed
Speaker 1: to the precise fraction of a second to get the
Speaker 1: doors open at the perfect instant. The explosive laden trucks
Speaker 1: had raced in at the exact second when they were
Speaker 1: most certain to get underneath the platform and detonate their cargoes.
Speaker 1: There been a perfect diversion plan for that too. Smoke
Speaker 1: bombs and explosions in the outgoing screening rooms had created
Speaker 1: real panic, and but for Joe's order for his group's
Speaker 1: walkie talkies to be turned off, would have drawn every
Speaker 1: security man on duty to that spot. Mike's trick then
Speaker 1: had brought some saboteurs into the open, but had merely
Speaker 1: happened to coincide with the most dangerous and well organized
Speaker 1: coup of all. However, it was due to his trick
Speaker 1: that the platform was now a wreck. There was also
Speaker 1: another break that was sheer coincidence. It was a discovery
Speaker 1: that could not possibly have turned up save in a
Speaker 1: situation of pure chaos artificially induced. Joe had had to
Speaker 1: react in a personal and vengeful way to the manner
Speaker 1: in which his especial antagonist had fought him. One expects
Speaker 1: a man to fight fair by instinct, and to turn
Speaker 1: to fowls if he does in desperation only. But Joe's
Speaker 1: personal opponent hadn't tried a single fair trick. It was
Speaker 1: as if he'd never heard of a fist blow, but
Speaker 1: only of murder and mayhem. Joe felt an individual enmity
Speaker 1: toward him. Joe didn't consider himself the most urgent of
Speaker 1: the injured when doctors and nurses took up the work
Speaker 1: of patching, but Sally was there to help, and she
Speaker 1: went deathly pale when she saw his blood stained throat.
Speaker 1: She dragged him quickly to a doctor, and the doctor
Speaker 1: looked at Joe and dropped everything else. But it wasn't
Speaker 1: too serious. The antisept Dick's hurt, and the stitching was unpleasant,
Speaker 1: but Joe was more worried by the knowledge that Sally
Speaker 1: was standing there and suffering for him. And when he
Speaker 1: got up from the emergency operating table, the doctor nodded
Speaker 1: grimly to him. That was close, said the doctor whoever
Speaker 1: chewed you, was working for your juggular vein. And he
Speaker 1: was half way through the wall when he stopped. A
Speaker 1: fraction of an inch more and he'd have had you, thanks,
Speaker 1: said Joe. His neck fell clumsy with bandages, and when
Speaker 1: he tried to turn his head, the stitch is hurt.
Speaker 1: Sallie's hand trembled in his when she led him away.
Speaker 1: I didn't think I'd ever dislike anybody so much, said
Speaker 1: Joe angrily as I did that man while he was
Speaker 1: chewing on my throat. We were trying to kill each other,
Speaker 1: of course, but confound it. People don't bite. Did you
Speaker 1: kill him, asked Sally in a shaky voice. Not that
Speaker 1: I'll mind. I would have hated the thought, ordinarily, But
Speaker 1: Joe halted. There was a row of stretchers not too
Speaker 1: long at that in the emergency hospital space. He looked
Speaker 1: down at the unconscious man who'd fought him. There he is,
Speaker 1: he said, irritably. I banged him pretty hard, I don't
Speaker 1: like to hate anybody, but the way he fought, Sallie's
Speaker 1: teeth chattered. Suddenly, she called to one of the security
Speaker 1: men standing guard by the stretchers. I think my father
Speaker 1: is going to want to talk to him, she said, unsteadily.
Speaker 1: Don't let him be taken away to the hospital until
Speaker 1: Dad knows. Please. She started away, her face dead white
Speaker 1: and her hand stone cold. What's the matter, demanded Joe sabotage,
Speaker 1: said Sally, in an indescribable tone had a suggestion of heartbreak.
Speaker 1: She went into her father's office alone. She came out
Speaker 1: again with him, and her father looked completely stricken. Miss Ross,
Speaker 1: his secretary, was with him too. Her face was like
Speaker 1: a mask of marble. She had always been a plain woman,
Speaker 1: a gloomy one, a morbid one, But at the new
Speaker 1: and horrible look on her face, Joe turned his eyes away.
Speaker 1: Then Sally was crying beside him, and he put his
Speaker 1: arm clumsily around her and let her sob on his shoulder.
Speaker 1: Completely puzzled, he didn't find out until later what the
Speaker 1: trouble was. The man who tried so earnestly to kill
Speaker 1: him was Miss Ross's fiancee. She had met this man
Speaker 1: during a vacation as a government secretary, and he was
Speaker 1: a refugee with an exotic charm that would have fascinated
Speaker 1: a much more personable and beautiful woman than Miss Ross.
Speaker 1: They had a whirlwind romance. He confided to her his
Speaker 1: terror of emissaries from his native country who might kill him,
Speaker 1: and of course she was more fascinated still when he
Speaker 1: asked her to marry him. She accepted his proposal. Then,
Speaker 1: just two weeks before her assignment to the Space Platform project,
Speaker 1: he vanished. Miss Ross was desperate and love sick. One day,
Speaker 1: her telephone rang, and his anguished voice told her he'd
Speaker 1: been abducted and if she told the police, he would
Speaker 1: be tortured to death. He begged her not to do
Speaker 1: anything to cause him more torment than was already his.
Speaker 1: She'd been trying to keep him alive ever since. Once,
Speaker 1: when she couldn't bring herself to carry out an order
Speaker 1: she'd been given, with threats of torment to him if
Speaker 1: she failed, she'd received a human finger in the mail
Speaker 1: and a scrawled and blood stained note which cried out
Speaker 1: of unspeakable torment and begged her not to doom him
Speaker 1: to more So, Miss Ross, who was Major Holt secretary
Speaker 1: on one of his most trusted assistants, had been giving
Speaker 1: information to one group of saboteurs all the while. She
Speaker 1: was the most dangerous security leak in the whole platform project.
Speaker 1: But her fiancee wasn't a captive. He was the head
Speaker 1: of that group of saboteurs. He'd made love to her
Speaker 1: and proposed to her merely to prepare her to supply
Speaker 1: the information he wanted. He needed only to write a
Speaker 1: sufficiently agonized note or gasp, tormented pleas on a telephone
Speaker 1: to get what he wanted. Incidentally, he still had all
Speaker 1: his fingers when Joe knocked him cold. Sally had recognized
Speaker 1: him as the subject of a snapshot she'd once seen
Speaker 1: Miss Ross crying over. Miss Ross had hidden it hastily
Speaker 1: and told her it was someone she had once loved,
Speaker 1: now dead. And this inadvertent disclosure that Miss ross us
Speaker 1: was the security leak the Major had never had a
Speaker 1: clue to could only have come about through such confusion
Speaker 1: as Mike had instigated and Hainey and the Chief and
Speaker 1: Joe had organized. But Joe learned those facts only later.
Speaker 1: At the moment, there was still the platform to be
Speaker 1: gotten aloft, and there was plenty of work to do.
Speaker 1: There were two small rips in the plating caused by
Speaker 1: fragments of the exploded truck. There were some bullet holes.
Speaker 1: The platform could resist small meteorites at forty five miles
Speaker 1: a second, but a high velocity small arm projectile could
Speaker 1: puncture it. Those scars of battle had to be welded shut.
Speaker 1: The rest of the scaffolding had to come down, and
Speaker 1: the rest of the rocket tubes had to be affixed,
Speaker 1: and there was cleaning up to be done. These things
Speaker 1: occupy the shift that came on at the time of
Speaker 1: the multiple sabotaged assaults. At first the work was ragged,
Speaker 1: but the policy of turning the security men into news
Speaker 1: broadcasters worked well. After all, the platform was a construction job,
Speaker 1: and the men who worked on it were not softies.
Speaker 1: Most of them had seen men killed before. Before the
Speaker 1: shift was over, a definite work rhythm was evident. Men
Speaker 1: had begun to take an even greater pride in the
Speaker 1: thing they had built because it had been assailed and
Speaker 1: not destroyed, and the job was almost over. Salli went
Speaker 1: back to her father's quarters to try to sleep. Joe
Speaker 1: stayed in the shed. His throat was painful enough so
Speaker 1: that he didn't want to go to bed until he
Speaker 1: was genuinely tired, and he was thoroughly wrought up. Mike
Speaker 1: the Midget had gone peacefully to sleep again, curled up
Speaker 1: in a corner of the outgoing screening room. His fellow
Speaker 1: midgets talked satisfiedly among themselves, presently to show their superiority
Speaker 1: to mere pitched battles. Two of them brought out a
Speaker 1: miniature pack of cards and started a card game while
Speaker 1: they waited for a bus to take them back to Bootstrap.
Speaker 1: The chiefs Indian Associates loafed comfortably while waiting for the
Speaker 1: same buses later they would put in for overtime and
Speaker 1: get it. Hainy mourned that he had been remote from
Speaker 1: the scene of action and was merely responsible for the
Speaker 1: presence and placing and firing of the machine guns that
Speaker 1: had certainly kept the platform from being blown up from below.
Speaker 1: It seemed that nothing else would happen to bother anybody.
Speaker 1: But there was one thing more. The thing happened just
Speaker 1: two hours before it was time for the shift to
Speaker 1: change once again, and when normal work was back in
Speaker 1: progress in the shed, everything seemed fully organized and serene.
Speaker 1: Everything in the shed had settled down and nothing had
Speaker 1: happened outside. There was ample exterior protection, of course, but
Speaker 1: the outside side guard system hadn't had anything to do
Speaker 1: for a very long time. Men at radar screens were
Speaker 1: bored and sleepy from sheer inactivity and silence. Pilots and
Speaker 1: jet planes two miles and five miles and eight miles
Speaker 1: high had long since grown weary of the splendid view
Speaker 1: below them. After all, one can get very used to
Speaker 1: late slanting moonlight on cloud masses far underneath, and bright
Speaker 1: and hostile seeming stars overhead. So the thing was well timed.
Speaker 1: A Canadian station noticed the pip on its radar screen. First.
Speaker 1: The radar observer was puzzled by it. It could have
Speaker 1: been a meteor, and the Canadian observer at first thought
Speaker 1: it was, but it wasn't going quite fast enough, and
Speaker 1: it lasted too long. It was traveling six hundred seventy
Speaker 1: two miles an hour, and it was headed due south
Speaker 1: at sixty thousand feet. The speed could have been within reason,
Speaker 1: provided it didn't stay constant, but it did. There was
Speaker 1: something traveling south at eleven miles a minute or better.
Speaker 1: A mile in five plus seconds. It didn't slow, it
Speaker 1: didn't drop. The Canadian radar man debated painfully. He stopped
Speaker 1: his companion from the reading of a magazine article about
Speaker 1: chinchilla breeding in the home. He showed him the pip
Speaker 1: still headed south and almost at the limit of his
Speaker 1: radar instruments range. They discussed the thing dubiously. They decided
Speaker 1: to report it. They had a little trouble getting the
Speaker 1: call through the night. Long distance operators were sleepy. Because
Speaker 1: of the difficulty of making the call. The radar men
Speaker 1: became obstinate and insisted on putting it through. They reported
Speaker 1: to Ottawa that some object flying at sixty thousand feet
Speaker 1: and six hundred seventy two miles an hour was crossing
Speaker 1: Canada headed for the un United States. There was a
Speaker 1: further time loss. Somebody in authority had to be awakened,
Speaker 1: and somebody had to decide that a further report was justified.
Speaker 1: Then the trick had to be accomplished. And a sleepy
Speaker 1: man in a bathrobe and slippers listened and said, sleepily, Ah,
Speaker 1: of course, you'll tell the Americans. It's only neighborly, and
Speaker 1: patted back to his bed to go to sleep again.
Speaker 1: Then he waked up suddenly and began to sweat. He'd
Speaker 1: realized that this might be the beginning of atomic war,
Speaker 1: so he set phone bells to jangling furiously all over Canada,
Speaker 1: and jet planes began to boom in the darkness, But
Speaker 1: there was only one object in the sky over the
Speaker 1: Dakotas it went higher, it went to seventy thousand feet
Speaker 1: and then eighty. How this was managed is not completely known,
Speaker 1: because there are still some details of that flight that
Speaker 1: have never been completely explained. But certainly Jado's flared briefly
Speaker 1: at some point, and the object reached ninety thousand feet,
Speaker 1: where a jet motor would certainly be useless, And then
Speaker 1: almost certainly rockets flared once more, and well south of
Speaker 1: the dakotas it started down in a trajectory like that
Speaker 1: of an artillery shell, but with considerably higher speed than
Speaker 1: most artillery shells achieve. It was at about this time
Speaker 1: that the siren in the shed began its choppy, hiccoughing
Speaker 1: series of warm up notes. The news from Canada arrived,
Speaker 1: as a matter of fact, some thirty seconds after the
Speaker 1: outer perimeter radar screen around the platform gave its warning.
Speaker 1: Then there was no hesitation or delay at all. Men
Speaker 1: were already tumbling out of bed at three airfields, buckling
Speaker 1: helmets and hoping their oxygen tanks would function properly. Then
Speaker 1: the radars atop the shed itself picked up the moving speck,
Speaker 1: and small blue white flames began to rise from the
Speaker 1: ground and go streaking away in the darkness in astonishing numbers.
Speaker 1: The covers of the guns at the top of the
Speaker 1: shed slid aside miles away. Jet plane shot skyward, and
Speaker 1: newly wakened pilots looked at their night fighting instruments and
Speaker 1: swore unbelievingly at the speed they were told the plunging
Speaker 1: object was making. The jet pilots gave their motors everything
Speaker 1: they could take, but it didn't look good. The planes
Speaker 1: of the jet umbrella over the shed stopped cruising and sprinted,
Speaker 1: and they were the only ones likely to get in
Speaker 1: front of the object in time. Inside the shed, the
Speaker 1: siren howled dismally, and all the security men were snapping.
Speaker 1: Radar alarm, all out, radar alarm, all out, And men
Speaker 1: were moving fast too. Some came down from the platform
Speaker 1: on hoists, dropping with rectlye speed to the floor level
Speaker 1: some didn't wait for a turn at that. They slid
Speaker 1: down one upright, swung around the cross piece on the
Speaker 1: level below, and slid down another vertical pipe. For a
Speaker 1: minute or more, it looked as if the scaffolds oozed
Speaker 1: black droplets which slid down its pipes, but the drops
Speaker 1: were men. The floor became speckled and spotted with dots
Speaker 1: running for its exits. The sirens ceased its wailing, and
Speaker 1: its noise went down and down in pitch until it
Speaker 1: was a baritone moan that dropped to base and ceased.
Speaker 1: Then there was no sound but the men moving to
Speaker 1: get out of the shed. There were trucks too, Those
Speaker 1: that had been loading with dismantled scaffolding roared for the
Speaker 1: doors to get out and away. Some men jumped on
Speaker 1: board as they passed. The exit door swung up to
Speaker 1: let them go. But it was very quiet in the
Speaker 1: shed at that. There was no noise but a few
Speaker 1: fleeing trucks and the murmur, which was the voices of
Speaker 1: the security men hurrying the work crew out. There was
Speaker 1: less to hear than went on ordinarily, and it was
Speaker 1: a long distance across the floor of the shed. Joe
Speaker 1: stood with his fists clenched absurdly. This could only be
Speaker 1: an air attack. An air attack could only mean an
Speaker 1: atom bomb attack. And if there was an atom bomb
Speaker 1: dropped on the shed, there'd be no use getting outside.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't be merely a fish in bomb. It would
Speaker 1: be a hell bomb, a bomb which used the kind
Speaker 1: of bomb that shattered Hiroshima only as a primer for
Speaker 1: the real explosive. Nobody could hope to get beyond the
Speaker 1: radius of its destruction before it hit. Joe heard himself raging.
Speaker 1: He thought of Sally. She'd be in the range of
Speaker 1: annihilation too, And Joe knew such fury and hatred because
Speaker 1: of Sally that he forgot everything else. He didn't run,
Speaker 1: he couldn't escape, he couldn't fight back. But because he hated,
Speaker 1: he had to do something to defy. He found himself
Speaker 1: moving toward the platform, his jaws clenched. It was pure, blind,
Speaker 1: instinctive defiance. He was not the only one to have
Speaker 1: that reaction. Men running toward the sidewall exits began to
Speaker 1: get out of breath from their running. They slowed. Presently,
Speaker 1: they stopped. They scowled and raged, like Joe. Some of
Speaker 1: them looked with burning eyes up at the roof of
Speaker 1: the shed, though their thoughts went on beyond it. The
Speaker 1: security guards repeated radar alarm, all out, Radar alarm, all out.
Speaker 1: Someone snarled nuts to that Joe saw a man walking
Speaker 1: in the same direction as himself. He was walking deliberately
Speaker 1: back to the platform. Somebody else was headed back two
Speaker 1: very peculiarly. Almost all the men on the floor had
Speaker 1: ceased to run. They began to gather in little groups.
Speaker 1: They knew flight was useless. They talked briefly, profanely. Here
Speaker 1: and there men started disgustedly back toward the platform. Their
Speaker 1: lips moved in expressions of furious scorn. Their scorn was
Speaker 1: of themselves. There was a gathering of men about the
Speaker 1: base of the framework that still partly veiled the platform.
Speaker 1: They tended to face outward angrily and to clench their fists.
Speaker 1: Then somebody started an engine. A man began to climb
Speaker 1: furiously back to where he had been at work. Quite unreasonably,
Speaker 1: other men followed him. Hammers began defiantly and enragingly to sound.
Speaker 1: The work crew in the shed went defiantly and furiously
Speaker 1: back to work. A clamor was set up that was
Speaker 1: almost the normal working noise. It was the only possible
Speaker 1: way in which those men could express the raging contempt
Speaker 1: they felt for those who would destroy the thing they
Speaker 1: worked on. But there were some other men who could
Speaker 1: do more. There were three levels of jet planes above
Speaker 1: the shed, and they could dive. The highest one got
Speaker 1: first to the line along which the missile from an
Speaker 1: unknown place was plunging toward the shed. That plane steadied
Speaker 1: on a collision course and let go its wingload of rockets.
Speaker 1: It peeled off and got out of the way. Seconds later,
Speaker 1: the others from the jet umbrella were arriving. A tiny
Speaker 1: spray of proximity fused rockets blazed furiously toward the invisible thing.
Speaker 1: From the heights. Other planes, and yet others came hurtling
Speaker 1: to the line, their radars briskly computed for them, there
Speaker 1: were more rockets. The black painted thing, with more than
Speaker 1: the speed of an artillery shell, plunged in to a
Speaker 1: miniature hail of rockets. They flamed viciously half a dozen
Speaker 1: a dozen explosions that were pure futility. Then there was
Speaker 1: an explosion that was not Nobody saw it because its
Speaker 1: puny detonation was instantly wiped out in a blaze of
Speaker 1: such incredible incandescence that the aluminum paint on jet plane
Speaker 1: still miles away was scorched and blistered instantly. The light
Speaker 1: of that flare was seen for hundreds of miles. The
Speaker 1: sound later on was heard farther still, and the desert
Speaker 1: vegetation miles below the hell bomb showed signs of searing
Speaker 1: when the morning came, but the thing from the north
Speaker 1: was vaporized utterly, some forty five miles from its target.
Speaker 1: The damage it did was negligible. The work on the
Speaker 1: preparation for the platform's take off went on. When the
Speaker 1: all clear signal sounded inside the shed, nobody paid any attention.
Speaker 1: They were too busy. End of Chapter twelve.