"Murray Leinster - Space Platform" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

The jet shot on ahead. Its divebrakes retracted. It made a graceful, shallow dive, and then climbing almost
vertically skyward, it went out of sight.
"Visual check," said the co-pilot drily, to Joe. "We had a signal to give. Individual to this plane. We didn't
tell it to you. You couldn't duplicate it."
Joe worked it out painfully. The visual effect of one propeller seen through another. This was
identification. It was not a type of signalling an unauthorized or uninformed passenger would expect.
"Also," said the co-pilot," we have a television camera in the instrument board yonder. It's turned on now.
The interior of the cabin is being watched from the ground. No more tricks like the phony colonel."
Joe sat quite still. He noted that the plane was slanting gradually downward. His eyes went to the dial that
showed descent at somewhere between two and three hundred feet a minute. That was for his benefit. The
cabin was pressurized, though it didn't attempt to simulate sealevel air pressure. It was a good deal better
than the outside air, though, and yet too quick a descent meant discomfort. Two to three hundred feet per
minute was about right.
The ground took on features. Small gulleys. Patches of coloration too small to be seen from farther up.
The feeling of speed increased. After many long minutes the plane was only a few thousand feet high. The
pilot took over manual control from the automatic pilot. He seemed to wait. There was a plaintive,
mechanical "Beep-beep" and he changed course.
"You'll see the Shed hi a minute or two," said the copilot. He added vexedly as if the thing had been
bothering him; "I wish I hadn't missed that sandy haired guy putting his hand hi the nosewheel well!
Nothing happened, but I shouldn't have missed it!"
Joe watched. Very, very far away there were mountains, but he suddenly realized the remarkable flatness
of the ground over which they flew. From the edge of the world, behind, to the very edge of the far distant
hills, the ground was flat. There were gullies and depressions here and there, but no hills. It was flat, flat,
flat!
There was a tiny glimmer of reflected sunlight as the plane flew on. Joe strained his eyes. The sunlight
glinted from the tiniest possible round pip on the brown earth. It grew as the plane flew on. It was half a
cherrystone. It was half an orange, with gores. It was the top hah* of a sphere that was simply too huge to
have been made by men.
There was a thin thread of white that ran across the dun colored range and reached that halfball and ended
there. It was a highway. Joe realized that the halfglobe was the Shed, the monstrous building made for the
construction of the space platform. It was gigantic. It was colossal. It was the most stupendous thing that
men had ever created.
There was a tiny projection near the base of it. It was an office building for clerks and timekeepers and the
like.
He strained his eyes again and saw a motortruck on the white highway. It looked extraordinary long. He
saw that it wasn't a track but a convoy of them. A long way back, the highway was marked with a tiny dot.
That was a motorbus.
There was no sign of activity anywhere, because the scale was too 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 other white speckles which would be buildings. Bootstrap, the town especially
built for the men who built the Space Platform. In it they slept and ate and engaged hi the uproarious
festivity that men on a construction job tend to crave on their time off.
The plane dipped noticeably, now.
"Airfield off to the right," said the co-pilot. "That's for
тАвthe town and the job. The jetsтАФthere's an air umbrella
overhead all the timeтАФhave a field somewhere else. The
pushpots have a field of their own, too, where they're