Murray Leinster (Duke Classic SiFi)

This acknowledgment is necessary if I am to say thanks to some experts
to whom I am indebted. There is Captain Charles Benjamin, who read over
the aviation parts of this book with pursed lips and a belligerent
attitude toward questionable statements of fact or observation. There is
Dr. John Drury Clark, whose authoritative knowledge of rocket fuels was
the basis for admitted but not extravagant extrapolation on my part.
There is the crew of a four-engined transport ship, who argued over my
manuscript and settled the argument by a zestful, full-scale
crash-landing drill—repeat, "drill"—expressly to make sure I had
described all the procedure just right. There is Willy Ley, whom I would
like to exempt from responsibility for any statement in the book, while
I acknowledge the value of personal talks with him and the pleasure
anybody who has ever read his books will recognize. And there is Dr.
Hugh S. Rice of the Hayden Planetarium, who will probably be surprised
to find that I feel I owe him gratitude. They are in great part
responsible for the factual matter in this book.

I think I may add, though, that I worked on it too.

MURRAY LEINSTER
"Ardudwy"
Gloucester, Va.

There wasn't anything underneath but clouds, and there wasn't anything
overhead but sky. Joe Kenmore looked out the plane window past the
co-pilot's shoulder. He stared ahead to where the sky and cloud bank
joined—it was many miles away—and tried to picture the job before him.
Back in the cargo space of the plane there were four big crates. They
contained the pilot gyros for the most important object then being built
on Earth, and it wouldn't work properly without them. It was Joe's job
to take that highly specialized, magnificently precise machinery to its
destination, help to install it, and see to its checking after it was
installed.

He felt uneasy. Of course the pilot and co-pilot—the only two other
people on the transport plane—knew their stuff. Every imaginable
precaution would be taken to make sure that a critically essential
device like the pilot gyro assembly would get safely where it belonged.
It would be—it was being—treated as if it were a crate of eggs instead
of massive metal, smoothed and polished and lapped to a precision
practically unheard of. But just the same Joe was worried. He'd seen the
pilot gyro assembly made. He'd helped on it. He knew how many times a
thousandth of an inch had been split in machining its bearings, and the
breath-weight balance of its moving parts. He'd have liked to be back in
the cargo compartment with it, but only the pilot's cabin was
pressurized, and the ship was at eighteen thousand feet, flying west by
south.

He tried to get his mind off that impulse by remembering that at
eighteen thousand feet a good half of the air on Earth was underneath
him, and by hoping that the other half would be as easy to rise above
when the gyros were finally in place and starting out for space. The
gyros, of course, were now on their way to be installed in the
artificial satellite to be blasted up and set in an orbit around the
Earth as the initial stage of that figurative stepladder by which men
would make their first attempt to reach the stars. Until that Space
Platform left the ground, the gyros were Joe's responsibility.

The plane's co-pilot leaned back in his chair and stretched luxuriously.
He loosened his safety belt and got up. He stepped carefully past the
column between the right- and left-hand pilot seats. That column
contained a fraction of the innumerable dials and controls the pilots of
a modern multi-engine plane have to watch and handle. The co-pilot went
to the coffeepot and flipped a switch. Joe fidgeted again on his
improvised seat. Again he wished that he could be riding in back with
the crates. But it would be silly to insist on perching somewhere in the
freight compartment.

There was a steady roaring in the cabin—the motors. One's ears got
accustomed to it, and by now the noise sounded as if it were heard
through cushions. Presently the coffeepot bubbled, unheard. The co-pilot
lighted a cigarette. Then he drew a paper cup of coffee and handed it to
the pilot. The pilot seemed negligently to contemplate some dozens of
dials, all of which were duly duplicated on the right-hand, co-pilot's
side. The co-pilot glanced at Joe.

"Coffee?"

"Thanks," said Joe. He took the paper cup.

The co-pilot said: "Everything okay with you?"

"I'm all right," said Joe. He realized that the co-pilot felt talkative.
He explained: "Those crates I'm traveling with—. The family firm's
been working on that machinery for months. It was finished with the
final grinding done practically with feather dusters. I can't help
worrying about it. There was four months' work in just lapping the
shafts and balancing rotors. We made a telescope mounting once, for an
observatory in South Africa, but compared to this gadget we worked on
that one blindfolded!"

"Pilot gyros, eh?" said the co-pilot. "That's what the waybill said. But
if they were all right when they left the plant, they'll be all right
when they are delivered."

Joe said ruefully: "Still I'd feel better riding back there with them."

"Sabotage bad at the plant?" asked the co-pilot. "Tough!"

"Sabotage? No. Why should there be sabotage?" demanded Joe.

The co-pilot said mildly: "Not quite everybody is anxious to see the
Space Platform take off. Not everybody! What on earth do you think is
the biggest problem out where they're building it?"

"I wouldn't know," admitted Joe. "Keeping the weight down? But there is
a new rocket fuel that's supposed to be all right for sending the
Platform up. Wasn't that the worst problem? Getting a rocket fuel with
enough power per pound?"

The co-pilot sipped his coffee and made a face. It was too hot.

"Fella," he said drily, "that stuff was easy! The slide-rule boys did
that. The big job in making a new moon for the Earth is keeping it from
being blown up before it can get out to space! There are a few gentlemen
who thrive on power politics. They know that once the Platform's
floating serenely around the Earth, with a nice stock of atom-headed
guided missiles on board, power politics is finished. So they're doing
what they can to keep the world as it's always been—equipped with just
one moon and many armies. And they're doing plenty, if you ask me!"

"I've heard—" began Joe.

"You haven't heard the half of it," said the co-pilot. "The Air
Transport has lost nearly as many planes and more men on this particular
airlift than it did in Korea while that was the big job. I don't know
how many other men have been killed. But there's a strictly local hot
war going on out where we're headed. No holds barred! Hadn't you heard?"

It sounded exaggerated. Joe said politely: "I heard there was
cloak-and-dagger stuff going on."

The pilot drained his cup and handed it to the co-pilot. He said: "He
thinks you're kidding him." He turned back to the contemplation of the
instruments before him and the view out the transparent plastic of the
cabin windows.

"He does?" The co-pilot said to Joe, "You've got security checks around
your plant. They weren't put there for fun. It's a hundred times worse
where the whole Platform's being built."

"Security?" said Joe. He shrugged. "We know everybody who works at the
plant. We've known them all their lives. They'd get mad if we started to
get stuffy. We don't bother."

"That I'd like to see," said the co-pilot skeptically. "No barbed wire
around the plant? No identity badges you wear when you go in? No
security officer screaming blue murder every five minutes? What do you
think all that's for? You built these pilot gyros! You had to have that
security stuff!"

"But we didn't," insisted Joe. "Not any of it. The plant's been in the
same village for eighty years. It started building wagons and plows, and
now it turns out machine tools and precision machinery. It's the only
factory around, and everybody who works there went to school with
everybody else, and so did our fathers, and we know one another!"

The co-pilot was unconvinced. "No kidding?"

"No kidding," Joe assured him. "In World War Two the only spy scare in
the village was an FBI man who came around looking for spies. The
village cop locked him up and wouldn't believe in his credentials. They
had to send somebody from Washington to get him out of jail."

The co-pilot grinned reluctantly. "I guess there are such places," he
said enviously. "You should've built the Platform! It's plenty different
on this job! We can't even talk to a girl without security clearance for
an interview beforehand, and we can't speak to strange men or go out
alone after dark—."

The pilot grunted. The co-pilot's tone changed. "Not quite that bad," he
admitted, "but it's bad! It's really bad! We lost three planes last
week. I guess you'd call it in action against saboteurs. One flew to
pieces in mid-air. Sabotage. Carrying critical stuff. One crashed on
take-off, carrying irreplaceable instruments. Somebody'd put a detonator
in a servo-motor. And one froze in its landing glide and flew smack-dab
into its landing field. They had to scrape it up. When this ship got a
major overhaul two weeks ago, we flew it with our fingers crossed for
four trips running. Seems to be all right, though. We gave it the works.
But I won't look forward to a serene old age until the Platform's out of
atmosphere! Not me!"

He went to put the pilot's empty cup in the disposal slot.

The plane went on. There wasn't anything underneath but clouds, and
there wasn't anything overhead but sky. The clouds were a long way down,
and the sky was simply up. Joe looked down and saw a faint spot of
racing brightness with a hint of colors around it. It was the sort of
nimbus that substitutes for a shadow when a plane is high enough above
the clouds. It raced madly over the irregular upper surface of the cloud
layer. The plane flew and flew. Nothing happened at all. This was two
hours from the field from which it had taken off with the pilot gyro
cases as its last item of collected cargo. Joe remembered how grimly the
two crew members had prevented anybody from even approaching it on the
ground, except those who actually loaded the cases, and how one of the
two had watched them every second.

Joe fidgeted. He didn't quite know how to take the co-pilot's talk. The
Kenmore Precision Tool plant was owned by his family, but it wasn't so
much a family as a civic enterprise. The young men of the village grew
up to regard fanatically fine workmanship with the casual
matter-of-factness elsewhere reserved for plowing or deep-sea fishing.
Joe's father owned it, and some day Joe might head it, but he couldn't
hope to keep the respect of the men in the plant unless he could handle
every tool on the place and split a thousandth at least five ways. Ten
would be better! But as long as the feeling at the plant stayed as it
was now, there'd never be a security problem there.