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

which was to take mankind's first real, actual step toward the stars. As they moved centerward, a big
sixteen wheel truck-and-trailer outfit backed out of an opening under the maze of scaffolding, and turned
clumsily. It carefully circled the scaffolding and moved toward a sidewall of the Shed. A section of the
wall lifted inward like a flap, and the sixteen wheeler and its trailer trundled out into
the sunlight. Four other trucks scurried after it. Other trucks came in. The sidewall section closed.
There was the smell of engine fumes and hot metal, and of ozone from electric sparks. There was that
indescribable sound a man can get homesick f6r, to be found only where constructions of massive metal
worked on by men produce an atmosphere that does not exist anywhere else. Joe walked almost like
someone in a dream, with Sally satisfiedly silent beside bun, until the scaffolds, which looked like veiling,
became latticework and he saw openings.
They walked into one such tunnel. The bulk of the Platform loomed above them with a sort of crushing
menace. There were trucks rumbling all around underneath, in the maze of scaffold columns. Some
carried ready loaded cages waiting to be snatched up by hoists. Crane grips came down, and snapped fast
on the cages, and lifted them up and out of sight. There was a Diesel running somewhere, and a man stood
and stared up and and made motions with his hands, and the Diesel adjusted its running to his signals.
Then some empty cages came down and landed in a waiting truck body with loud clanking noises, and
somebody cast off the hooks and the truck grumbled and went away.
Sally spoke to a preoccupied man in shut sleeves with a badge on an armband near his shoulder. He
looked carefully at the passes she carried, using a flashlight to make sure of them. Then he led them to a
shaft up which a hoist ran. It was very noisy, here. A rivetgun banged away somewhere nearby, and the
plates of the Platform seemed to ring with the sound, and the echoes screeched, and the bedlam sounded
infinitely good to Joe's ears. The man with the armband shouted into a telephone and a hoistcage came
down and Joe and Sally stepped on it. Joe took a firm grip on Sally's shoulder, and the hoist shot upward.
The hugeness of the Shed and the Platform grew even more apparent as the hoist accelerated toward the
roof. The flooring seemed to expand. Spidery scaffoldbeams dropped past them. There were things being
built over by the sidewall. Joe saw a crawling inplant towtruck
moving past these enigmatic objects. It was a tiny truck, no more than four feet high and with twelve-inch
wheels. It dragged behind it flat plates of metal with turnedup edges. They slid over the floor like
toboggans. Cryptic loads were carried on those plates, and the towtruck stopped by a mass of steel piping
being put together, and began to push stuff off the plates....
Then the hoist slowed abruptly and Sally winced a little. The hoist stopped.
Here, twenty storeys high, a welding crew worked on the skin of the Platform itself. The plating curved in
and there was a wide flat space parallel to the ground. There was, a great gaping opening beyond, where
plating was not yet placed and framemembers rose roofward for a long way still. The opening, Joe
guessed, would eventually be the door of an airlock. This flat surface was for a tender rocket to anchor to
by magnets, when it came up from Earth with supplies or reliefs for the Platform's crew, or with fuel to be
stored for an exploring-ship's eventual use. Yes. A rocket would anchor here and then inch toward that
doorway.
There were half a dozen men in the welding crew. They should have been working. But two men battered
savagely at each other, their tools thrown down. One was tall and lean, with a wrinkled face and an
expression of intolerable fury. The other was dark and squat, with a look of desperation. A third man was
in the act of putting down his welding torchтАФhe'd carefully turned it off firstтАФto try to interfere. Another
man gaped. Still another was climbing up a ladder from the scaffold-level below.
Joe put Sally's hand on the hoist-upright, instinctively freeing himself for action.
The lanky man lashed out a terrific roundhouse blow. It landed. The stocky man bored in. Joe had an
instant's clear sight of his face. It was not the face of a man enraged. It had the look of a man both
desperate and despairing.
Then the lanky man's foot slipped. He lost balance and the stocky man's fist landed. The thin man reeled
backward.
Sally cried out, shaking. The lanky man teetered on the edge of the flat place. Behind him, the plating