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

to smile. But the trace of a frown remained on his forehead.

Joe drove and drove and drove. Once they came to a very small town. It may have contained a hundred people. There were gas pumps and a restaurant and two or three general stores, which were certainly too many for the permanent residents. But there were cow ponies hitched before the stores, and automobiles were also in view. The ground here was slightly rolling. The mountains had grown to good-sized ramparts against the sky. Joe drove carefully down the single street, turning out widely once to dodge a dog sleeping placidly in an area normally reserved for traffic.

Finally they came to the foothills, and then the road curved and recurved as it wound among them. And two hours from Bootstrap they reached Red Canyon. They first saw the dam from downstream. It was a monstrous structure [Pg 88]of masonry, alone in the mountains. From its top a plume of falling water jetted out.

“The dam’s for irrigation,” said Sally professionally, “and the Shed gets all its power from here. One of Dad’s nightmares is that somebody may blow up this dam and leave Bootstrap and the Shed without power.”

Joe said nothing. He drove on up the trail as it climbed the canyon wall in hairpin slants. It was ticklish driving. But then, quite suddenly, they reached the top of the canyon wall and the top of the dam and the level of the lake at once. Here there was a sheet of water that reached back among the barren hillsides for miles and miles. It twisted out of sight. There were small waves on its surface, and grass at its edge. There were young trees. The powerhouse was a small squat structure in the middle of the dam. Not a person was visible anywhere.

“Here we are,” said Sally, when Joe stopped the car.

He got out and went around to open the door for her. But she was already stepping out with the lunch basket in her hand when he arrived. He reached for it, and she held on, and they moved companionably away from the car carrying the basket between them.

“There’s a nice place,” said Sally, pointing.

A small ridge of rock stretched out into the lake, and rose, and spread, and formed what was almost a miniature island some fifty feet across. There were some young trees on it. Sally and Joe climbed down the slope and out the rocky isthmus that connected it with the shore.

Sally let down the lunch box on a stone and laughed for no reason at all as the wind blew her hair. It was a cool wind from over the water. And Joe realized with a shock of surprise that the air felt different and smelled different when it blew over open water like this. Up to now he hadn’t thought of the dryness of the air in Bootstrap and the Shed.

The lunch basket was tilted a little. Joe picked it up and settled it more solidly. Then he said: “Hungry?”

There was literally nothing on his mind at the moment [Pg 89]but the luxurious, satisfied feeling of being off somewhere with grass and a lake and Sally, and a good part of the afternoon to throw away. It felt good. So he lifted the lid of the lunch basket.

There was a revolver there. It was the other one from the glove compartment of the car. Sally hadn’t left it behind. Joe regarded it and said ironically: “Happy, carefree youth—that’s us! Which are the ham sandwiches, Sally?”

[Pg 90]

8

Nevertheless, the afternoon began splendidly. Joe dunked the bottled soft drinks in the lake to cool. Then he and Sally ate and talked and laughed. Joe, in particular, had more than the usual capacity for enjoyment today. He’d been through twenty-four hours of turmoil but now things began to look better. And there was the arrangement with Sally, which had a solid satisfactoriness about it. Sally was swell! If she’d been homely, Joe would have liked her just the same—to talk to and to be with. But she was pretty—and she was wearing his ring. She’d wrapped some string around the inside of the band to make it fit.

The only trouble was that Joe was occasionally conscious of the heavy weight in his right-hand coat pocket.

But they spent at least an hour in contented, satisfying, meaningless loafing that nobody can describe but that everybody likes to remember afterward. From time to time Joe looked ashore, when the weight in his pocket reminded him of danger.

But he didn’t look often enough. He was pulling the chilled soft-drink bottles out of the lake when he saw a movement out of the corner of his eye. He whirled, his hand in his pocket....

It was the Chief, with Haney and Mike the midget. They were striding across the rocky small peninsula.

Haney called sharply: “Everything okay?”

“Sure!” said Joe. “Everything’s fine! What’s the matter?”

“Mike had a hunch,” said the Chief. “And—uh—I remembered I worked on the job when this dam was built twelve-fifteen years ago.” He looked about him. “It looked different then.”

[Pg 91]

Then he caught Joe’s eye and jerked his head almost imperceptibly to one side. Joe caught the signal.

“I’ll see about some more soft drinks,” he said. “Come help me fish up the bottles.”

Sally smiled at the other two. She was already inspecting the lunch basket.

“We still have some sandwiches,” she said hospitably, “and some cake.”

Haney came forward awkwardly. Mike advanced toward her with something of truculence. Joe knew what was in his mind. If Sally treated him like a freak.... But Joe knew with deep satisfaction that she wouldn’t. He went down to the water’s edge.

“What’s up, Chief?” he asked in a low tone.

“Mike hadda hunch,” rumbled the Chief. “Somebody tried to smash the stuff you brought. They did. But we started gettin’ set to mend it. So what would they do? Polish us off. If they were set to atom-dust the whole Shed an’ everybody in it, they wouldn’t stop at four more murders.”

Joe fished for a pop bottle.

“Mike said something like that back at the Shed,” he observed.

“Yeah. But you were the one who figured things out. You’d be first target. Haney and Mike and me—we’d be hard to knock off in a crowd in Bootstrap. But you and her headed off by y’selves. Mike figured you mightn’t be safe. So we checked.”

Joe brought up one bottle and then another.

“We’re all right. Haven’t seen a soul.”

“Don’t mean a soul hasn’t seen you,” growled the Chief. “A car left Bootstrap less than twenty minutes behind you. There were three guys in it. It’s parked down below the dam, outa sight. We saw it. And when we came up, careful, we spotted three guys hidin’ out behind the rocks yonder. They look to me like they’re waiting for somebody to go strolling back from the shoreline, so’s—uh—maybe folks out at the powerhouse can’t see ’em. That’d be you and her, huh?”

[Pg 92]

Joe went cold. Not for himself. For Sally.

“There’s nobody else around,” said the Chief. “Who’d they be waiting for but you two? Suppose they got a chance to kill you. They’d take the car keys. They’d drop your two bodies somewheres Gawdknowswhere. There’d be considerable of a hunt for you two. Major Holt would be upset plenty. Security might get loosened up. There might be breaks for guys who wanted to do a little extra sabotage—besides maybe hamperin’ the repairin’ of the pilot gyros. Then they could try for Haney and Mike and me.”

Joe said coldly: “I’ve got a pistol and so has Sally. Shall we take those pistols and go ask those three if they want to start something?”

The Chief snorted.

“Use sense! It’s good you got the pistols, though. I snagged a twenty-two rifle from a shooting gallery. It was all I could get in a hurry. But go huntin’ trouble? Fella, I want to see that Platform go up! I’ll take care of things now. Good layout here. They got to come across the open to get near. Don’t say anything to Sally. But we’ll keep our eyes open.”

Joe nodded. He carried the chilled, dripping bottles back to where Haney solemnly ate a sandwich, sitting crosslegged with his back to the lake and regarding the shore. The Chief dragged a .22 repeating rifle from inside his belt, where it had hung alongside his thigh. He casually strolled over to Mike and dropped the rifle.

“You said you felt like target practice,” he remarked blandly. “Here’s your armament. Any more sandwiches, ma’am?”

Sally smilingly passed him the last. She left the top of the basket open. The pistol that had been there was gone. Then Sally’s eyes met Joe’s and she was aware that his three friends had not come here merely to crash a picnic. But she took it in stride. It was an additional reason for Joe to approve of Sally.

“Me,” said the Chief largely, “I’m goin’ to swim. I haven’t had any more water around me than a shower bath for so [Pg 93]long that I crave to soak and splash. I’ll go yonder and dunk myself.”

He wandered off, taking bites from the sandwich as he went. He vanished. Haney leaned back against a sapling, his eyes roving about the shoreline and the rocks and brush behind it.

Mike was talking in his crackling, high-pitched voice.

“But just the same it’s crazy! Fighting sabotage when we little guys could take over in a week and make sabotage just plain foolish! We could do the whole job while the saboteurs weren’t looking!”

Sally said with interest: “Have you got the figures? Were they ever passed on?”

“I spent a month’s pay once,” said Mike sardonically, “hiring a math shark to go over them. He found one mistake. It raised the margin of what we could do!”

Sally answered: “Joe! Listen to this! Mike says he has the real answer to sabotage, and, in a way, to space travel! Listen!”

Joe dropped to the ground.

“Shoot it,” he said.

He was grimly alert, just the same. There were men waiting for them to start back to the car. These saboteurs were armed, and they intended to murder Sally and himself. Joe’s jaws clamped tautly shut at the grim ideas that came into his mind.

But Mike was beginning to speak.

“Forget about the Platform a minute,” he said, standing up to gesticulate, because he was only three and a half feet high. “Just figure on a rocket straight to the moon. With old-style rockets they’d a’ had to have a mass ratio of a hundred and twenty to one. You’d have to burn a hundred and twenty tons of old-style fuel to land one ton on the moon. Now it could be done with sixty, and when the Platform’s up, that figure’ll drop again! Okay! You’re gonna land a man on the moon. He weighs two hundred pounds. He uses up twenty pounds of food and drink and oxygen a day. Give him grub and air for two months—twelve hundred pounds. A cabin [Pg 94]seven feet high and ten feet across. Sixteen hundred pounds, counting insulation an’ braces for strength. That makes a pay load of a ton an’ a half, and you’d have to burn a hundred an’ eighty tons of fuel—old-style—to take it to the moon, and another hundred an’ twenty for every ton the rocket ship weighed. You might get a man to the moon with a twelve-hundred-ton rocket—maybe. That’s with the old fuels. He’d get there, an’ he’d live two months, an’ then he’d die for lack of air. With the new fuels you’d need ninety tons of fuel to carry the guy there, and sixty more for every ton the ship weighed itself. Call it six hundred tons for the rocket to carry one man to the moon.”

Sally nodded absorbedly.

“I’ve seen figures like that,” she agreed.

“But take a guy like me!” said Mike the midget bitterly. “I weigh forty-five pounds, not two hundred! I use four pounds of food and air a day. A cabin for me to live in would be four feet high an’ five across. Bein’ smaller, it wouldn’t need so much bracing. You could do it for two hundred pounds. Three hundred for grub and air, fifty for me. Me on the moon supplied for two months would come to five-fifty pounds. Sixteen tons of fuel to get me to the moon direct! To carry the weight of the ship—it’s smaller!—fifty tons maximum!”

“I—see...,” said Sally, frowning.

He looked at her suspiciously, but there was no mockery in her face.

“It’d take a six-hundred-ton rocket to get a full-sized man to the moon,” he said with sudden flippancy, “but a guy my size could do the same job of stranglin’ in a