Space Platform by Murray Leinster (audio ebook reader TXT) 📖

side of the shaft as it turned....

“Going to have precession!” warned Mike. “Have to have a polishing surface. Quarter turn behind the cutter. That’ll hold it.”

Joe only remembered afterward to be astonished that Mike would know gyro theory. At the moment he merely swallowed quickly to get the words out.

[Pg 56]

“Right! And if we cut too far down we can plate the bearing up to thickness and cut it down again——”

“Plate it up with iridium,” said the Chief. He waved a steak knife. “Man! This is gonna be fun! No tolerance you say, Joe?”

“No tolerance,” agreed Joe. “Accurate within the limits of measurement.”

The Chief beamed. The Platform was a challenge to all of humanity. The pilot gyro was essential to the functioning of the Platform. To provide that necessity against impossible obstacles was a challenge to the four who were undertaking it.

“Some fun!” repeated the Chief, blissfully.

They ate their steaks, talking. They consumed huge slabs of apple pie with preposterous mounds of ice cream on top, still talking urgently. They drank coffee, interrupting each other to draw diagrams. They used up all the paper napkins, and were still at it when someone came heavily toward the table. It was the stocky man who had fought with Haney on the Platform that day. Braun.

He tapped Haney on the shoulder. The four at the table looked up.

“We hadda fight today,” said Braun in a queer voice. He was oddly pale. “We didn’t finish. You wanna finish?”

Haney growled.

“That was a fool business,” he said angrily. “That ain’t any place to fight, up on the job! You know it!”

“Yeah,” said Braun in the same odd voice. “You wanna finish it now?”

Haney said formidably: “I’m not dodgin’ any fight. I didn’t dodge it then. I’m not dodgin’ it now. You picked it. It was crazy! But if you got over the craziness——”

Braun smiled a remarkably peculiar smile. “I’m still crazy. We finish, huh?”

Haney pushed back his chair and stood up grimly. “Okay, we finish it! You coulda killed me. I coulda killed you too, with that fall ready for either of us.”

“Sure! Too bad nobody got killed,” said Braun.

[Pg 57]

“You fellas wait,” said Haney angrily to Joe and the rest. “There’s a storeroom out back. Sid’ll let us use it.”

But the Chief pushed back his chair.

“Uh-uh,” he said, shaking his head. “We’re watchin’ this.”

Haney spoke with elaborate courtesy: “You mind, Braun? Want to get some friends of yours, too?”

“I got no friends,” said Braun. “Let’s go.”

The Chief went authoritatively to the owner of Sid’s Steak Joint. He paid the bill, talking. The owner of the place negligently jerked his thumb toward the rear. This was not an unparalleled request—for the use of a storeroom so that two men could batter each other undisturbed. Bootstrap was a law-abiding town, because to get fired from work on the Platform was to lose a place in the most important job in history. So it was inevitable that the settlement of quarrels in private should become commonplace.

The Chief leading, they filed through the kitchen and out of doors. The storeroom lay beyond. The Chief went in and switched on the light. He looked about and was satisfied. It was almost empty, save for stacked cartons in one corner. Braun was already taking off his coat.

“You want rounds and stuff?” demanded the Chief.

“I want fight,” said Braun thickly.

“Okay, then,” snapped the Chief. “No kickin’ or gougin’. A man’s down, he has a chance to get up. That’s all the rules. Right?”

Haney, stripping off his coat in turn, grunted an assent. He handed his coat to Joe. He faced his antagonist.

It was a curious atmosphere for a fight. There were merely the plank walls of the storeroom with a single dangling light in the middle and an unswept floor beneath. The Chief stood in the doorway, scowling. This didn’t feel right. There was not enough hatred in evidence to justify it. There was doggedness and resolution enough, but Braun was deathly white and if his face was contorted—and it was—it was not with the lust to batter and injure and maim. It was something else.

The two men faced each other. And then the stocky, [Pg 58]swarthy Braun swung at Haney. The blow had sting in it but nothing more. It almost looked as if Braun were trying to work himself up to the fight he’d insisted on finishing. Haney countered with a roundhouse blow that glanced off Braun’s cheek. And then they bore in at each other, slugging without science or skill.

Joe watched. Braun launched a blow that hurt, but Haney sent him reeling back. He came in doggedly again, and swung and swung, but he had no idea of boxing. His only idea was to slug. He did slug. Haney had been peevish rather than angry. Now he began to glower. He began to take the fight to Braun.

He knocked Braun down. Braun staggered up and rushed. A wildly flailing fist landed on Haney’s ear. He doubled Braun up with a wallop to the midsection. Braun came back, fists swinging.

Haney closed one eye for him. He came back. Haney shook him from head to foot with a chest blow. He came back. Haney split his lip and loosened a tooth. He came back.

The Chief said sourly: “This ain’t a fight. Quit it, Haney! He don’t know how!”

Haney tried to draw away, but Braun swarmed on him, striking fiercely until Haney had to floor him again. He dragged himself up and rushed at Haney—and was knocked down again. Haney stood over him, panting furiously.

“Quit it, y’fool! What’s the matter with you?”

Braun started to get up again. The Chief interfered and held him, while Haney glared.

“He ain’t going to fight any more, Braun,” pronounced the Chief firmly. “You ain’t got a chance. This fight’s over. You had enough.”

Braun was bloody and horribly battered, but he panted: “He’s got enough?”

“Are you out o’ your head?” demanded the Chief. “He ain’t got a mark on him!”

“I ain’t—got enough,” panted Braun, “till he’s got—enough!”

His breath was coming in soblike gasps, the result of [Pg 59]body blows. It hadn’t been a fight but a beating, administered by Haney. But Braun struggled to get up.

Mike the midget said brittlely: “You got enough, Haney. You’re satisfied. Tell him so.”

“Sure I’m satisfied,” snorted Haney. “I don’t want to hit him any more. I got enough of that!”

Braun panted: “Okay! Okay!”

The Chief let him get to his feet. He went groggily to his coat. He tried to put himself into it. Mike caught Joe’s eye and nodded meaningfully. Joe helped Braun into the coat. There was silence, save for Braun’s heavy, labored breathing.

He moved unsteadily toward the door. Then he stopped.

“Haney,” he said effortfully, “I don’t say I’m sorry for fighting you today. I fight first. But now I say I am sorry. You are good guy, Haney. I was crazy. I—got reason.”

He stumbled out of the door and was gone. The four who were left behind stared at each other.

“What’s the matter with him?” demanded Haney blankly.

“He’s nuts,” said the Chief. “If he was gonna apologize——”

Mike shook his head.

“He wouldn’t apologize,” he said brittlely, “because he thought you might think he was scared. But when he’d proved he wasn’t scared of a beating—then he could say he was sorry.” He paused. “I’ve seen guys I liked a lot less than him.”

Haney put on his coat, frowning.

“I don’t get it,” he rumbled. “Next time I see him——”

“You won’t,” snapped Mike. “None of us will. I’ll bet on it.”

But he was wrong. The others went out of the storeroom and back into Sid’s Steak Joint, and the Chief politely thanked the proprietor for the loan of his storeroom for a private fight. Then they went out into the neon-lighted business street of Bootstrap.

“What do we do now?” asked Joe.

“Where you sleeping?” asked the Chief hospitably. “I can get you a room at my place.”

“I’m staying out at the Shed,” Joe told him awkwardly. [Pg 60]“My family’s known Major Holt a long time. I’m staying at his house behind the Shed.”

Haney raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

“Better get out there then,” said the Chief. “It’s midnight, and they might want to lock up. There’s your bus.”

A lighted bus was waiting by the curb. Its doors were open, but it was empty of passengers. Single busses ran out to the Shed now and then, but they ran in fleets at shift-change time. Joe went over and climbed aboard the bus.

“We’ll turn up early,” said the Chief. “This won’t be a shift job. We’ll look things over and lay out what we want and then get to work, eh?”

“Right,” said Joe. “And thanks.”

“We’ll be there with our hair in braids,” said Mike, in his cracked voice. “Now a glass of beer and so to bed. ’Night.”

Haney waved his hand. The three of them marched off, the two huge figures of Haney and the Chief, with Mike trotting truculently between them, hardly taller than their knees. They were curiously colorful with all the many-tinted neon signs upon them. They turned into a diner.

Joe sat in the bus, alone. The driver was off somewhere. The sounds of Bootstrap were distinctive by night. Footsteps, and the jangling of bicycle bells, and voices, and a radio blaring somewhere and a record-shop loud-speaker somewhere else, and a sort of underriding noise of festivity.

There was a sharp rap on the glass by Joe’s window. He started and looked out. Braun—battered, and bleeding from the corner of his mouth—motioned urgently for him to come to the door of the bus. Joe went.

Braun stared up at him in a new fashion. Now he was neither dogged nor fierce nor desperate to look at. Despite the beating he’d taken, he seemed completely and somehow frighteningly tranquil. He looked like somebody who has come to the end of torment and is past any feeling but that of relief from suffering.

“You—” said Braun. “That girl you were with today. Her pop is Major Holt, eh?”

Joe frowned, and reservedly said that he was.

[Pg 61]

“You tell her pop,” said Braun detachedly, “this is hot tip. Hot tip. Look two kilometers north of Shed tomorrow. He find something bad. Hot! You tell him. Two kilometers.”

“Y-yes,” said Joe, his frown increasing. “But look here——”

“Be sure say hot,” repeated Braun.

Rather incredibly, he smiled. Then he turned and walked quickly away.

Joe went back to his seat in the empty bus, and sat there and waited for it to start, and tried to figure out what the message meant. Since it was for Major Holt, it had something to do with security. And security meant defense against sabotage. And “hot” might mean merely significant, or—in these days—it might mean something else. In fact, it might mean something to make your hair stand on end when thought of in connection with the Space Platform.

Joe waited for the bus to take off. He became convinced that Braun’s use of the word “hot” did not mean merely “significant.” The other meaning was what he had in mind.

Joe’s teeth tried to chatter.

He didn’t let them.

[Pg 62]

6

Major Holt wasn’t to be found when Joe got out to the Shed. And he wasn’t in the house in the officers’-quarters area behind it. There was only the housekeeper, who yawned pointedly as she let Joe in. Sally was presumably long since asleep. And Joe didn’t know any way to get hold of the Major. He assured himself that Braun was a good guy—if he weren’t he wouldn’t have insisted on taking a licking before he apologized—and he hadn’t said there was any hurry. Tomorrow, he’d said. So Joe uneasily let himself be led to a room with a cot, and he was asleep in what seemed seconds. But just the same he was badly worried.

In fact, next morning Joe woke at a practically unearthly hour with Braun’s message pounding on his brain. He was downstairs waiting when the housekeeper appeared. She looked startled.

“Major Holt?” he asked.

But the Major was gone. He must have done with no more than three or four hours’ sleep. There was an empty coffee cup whose contents he’d gulped down before going back to the security office.

Joe trudged to the barbed-wire enclosure around the officers’-quarters area and explained to the sentry where he wanted to go. A sleepy driver whisked him around the half-mile circle to the security building and he found his way to Major Holt’s office.

The plain and gloomy secretary was already on the job, too. She led him in to face Major Holt. He blinked at the sight of Joe.

“Hm.... I have some news,” he observed. “We back-tracked the parcel that exploded when it was dumped from the plane.”