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

Sally was waiting again when he came out. She took him into her father's office and introduced him
to her father's secretaryтАФan extraordinarily plain woman with a sorrowful expressionтАФand Joe
explained carefully that he was to hunt up Chief Bender, who was working on the Platform. He was
one of the few firstclass men who'd left the Kenmore plant to work elsewhere. Joe and the Chief,
between them, should estimate the damage and the possibility of repair.
Major Holt listened. He was military and official and harassed and curt and tired. Joe had known
Sally and
therefore her father all his life, but Major Holt wasn't an easy man to be relaxed with. He spoke into
thin air and his sadseeming secretary wrote out a pass for Joe. Then he gave crisp orders on a
telephone and asked questions.
Sally said, "I know! I'll take him there. I know my way around."
Her father's expression did not change. He simply included Sally hi his orders on the phone. Then he
said briefly, "The plane will be surveyed and taken apart as soon as possible. Then you can examine
the crates. I'll have you cleared for it.'"
His secretary reached in a drawer for orderforms to fill out and hand to him to sign. Sally tugged at
Joe's arm. They left.
Outside, she said, "There's no use arguing with him, Joe. He has a terrible job and it's on his mind all
the tune. He's got poor Miss RossтАФhis secretary, you know тАФso she just listens to what he says must
be done and she writes it out. He goes days, sometimes, without speaking to her directly. But things
are pretty bad! It's like a war with no enemy to fight, but only spies. And the things they do! They've
been known even to boobytrap a truck after an accident they've caused, so anybody who tries to help
will be killed. Everything has to be done hi a certain way or it will be ruined!"
She led him to an office with a door opening directly into the Shed. In spite of his bitterness, he was
morosely impatient to see inside there. But Sally had to identify him formally as the Joe Kenmore
who was the subject of her father's orders, and his fingerprints had to be taken, and somebody had
him stand for a moment before an X-ray screen. Then she led the way through the door, and he was hi
the Shed where the Space Platform was under construction.
It was a vast cavern of metal sheathing and spidery girders, filled with sounds and detail. It took him
seconds to begin to absorb what he saw and heard. The Shed was forty storeys high in the middle, and
it was all clear space without a. single column or interruption. There were arclamps burning about its
edges, and high up somewhere there were strips of glass which let in an insufficient light.
All of it resounded with many noises and clanging echoes of them.
There were rivetguns at work, and there were the grumblings of motortrucks moving about, and the oddly
harsh noise of welding torches. But the torchflames looked only like marshfires, blue-white and eerie,
against the mass of the thing that was being built.
It was not too clear to the eye, this incomplete Space Platform. There seemed to be a sort of mist; a glamor
about it, which was partly a veiling mass of scaffolding. But Joe stared at it with an emotion which blotted
out his feeling of shame.
It was gigantic. It had the dimensions of an ocean liner. It was strangely shaped. Partly obscured by the
fragile seeming framework about it, there was bright plating in swelling curves, and the plating reached up
irregularly and followed a peculiar pattern, and above the plating there were framemembersтАФthemselves
shining brightly hi the light of many arclampsтАФand they rose up and up toward the roof of the Shed itself.
The Platform was ungainly and it was huge, and it rested under a hollow metal half-globe that could have
doubled for a sky. It was not more than thirty storeys high, itself, but there were men working on its
uppermost parts, and they seemed like specks. The far side of the Shed's floor had other men there, and
they resembled merely jerkily moving motes. Joe couldn't see their legs move as they walked. The shed
and the Platform were monstrous!
Joe felt Sally's eyes upon him. She looked proud, somehow. He took a deep breath, speechless.
She said, "Come on."
They walked across acres of floor, all paved with glistening wooden blocks. They moved toward the thing