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

massive metal, smoothed and polished and lapped to a precision practically unheard-of. But just the same
Joe was worried. He'd seen the pilot gyro made. He'd helped on it. He knew how many times a thousandth
of an inch had been split in machining its bearings, and the breath-weight balance of its moving parts.
He'd have liked to be back in the cargo compartment with it, but only the pilots' cabin was
pressurized, and the ship was at eighteen thousand feet, flying west by south.
He tried to be reasonable about it. At eighteen thousand feet a good half of the air on Earth was
underneath him. He hoped the rest would be as easy to rise above when the gyros were finally in place and
starting out for emptiness. The gyros, of course, were now on their way to be installed in the first manned,
permanent, really decisive artificial satellite of Earth. There were other man-made satellites now; there
were reputedly more than two hundred hurtling objects circling the Earth out of atmosphere. Some of
them were even useful, in that they reported levels of solar radiation and cloud-patterns on Earth as seen
from space, and some of them relayed messages and even TV programs around the bulge of mankind's
home planet. But the Space Platform would be something else. It would be the initial, very first step of
that figurative stepladder by which men would begin to climb toward the stars.
Astronauts had circled the Earth hi nearby space. Somej had made multiple circuits of the Earth. But every
one] had descended to Earth again, bringing his space capsule with him. The Space Platform wasn't
coming back. Men would live in it, protected by massive covering shields, while they rose up beyond the
Van Alien belts of deadly radiation. They'd take refuge hi shielded areas when solar flares made empty
space deadly to all known forms of living creatures. But hi between they'd solve the problems nobody'd
been even able to work on, for lack of a habitable satellite in space. And of course, from the very
beginning it would be the answer to aggression and threats of atomic war.
The plane's co-pilot leaned back in his chair and] stretched luxuriously. He loosened his safetybelt and!
stood up. He stepped carefully past that column between] the right hand and left hand pilot seats. That
column con-! tained a fraction of the innumerable dials and controls the pilots of a modern multiengine
plane have to watch andi handle. The co-pilot went to the coffeepot and nipped aj switch. Joe fidgeted. He
wished he could be riding in back] with the crates. But his uneasiness seemed silly.
There was a steady roaring in the cabin. One got accustomed to the noise of the motors, and by now it
sounded as if heard through cushions. Presently lie coffeepot bubbled. The co-pilot drew a paper cup of
coffee and handed it to the pilot. The pilot drank. The co-pilot said, "Coffee?"
"No thanks," Joe replied.
"Everything okay with you?"
"I'm all right." Joe realized that the co-pilot felt talkative. He explained, "Those crates I'm travelling
withтАФ. The family firm's been working on that machinery for months. It was finished up with the final
grinding practically done with feather dusters. I can't help worrying about it. There was four months' work
in just lapping the shafts and balancing the rotos. We made a telescope mounting once, but compared to
this job, we did that one blindfolded!"
"And watching all the time against sabotage, eh?"
"No," said Joe hi surprise. "Why should we?"
"Not everybody," said the co-pilot wryly, "is anxious to see the Platform take off. What do you think is the
biggest problem where they're building it?"
The co-pilot sipped at bis own coffee and made a face. It was too hot.
"The main problem," he observed, "is keeping it from being blown up. There are plenty of sputniks and
what-niks and such junk aloft. But once the Space Platform is floating around up there with a nice stock of
atomic headed missiles on board, there are a lot of troublemakers who'll have to sing small. So they're
doing what they can, to make the world safe for power politics. And they're doing plenty!"
"I've heardтАФ," began Joe.
"You haven't heard the half of it," said the co-pilot. "The Air Transport's lost nearly as many planes on this
job as in Asia, when that was the big transport job. There's a local hot war going on. No holds barred!
Hadn't you heard?"
"Oh, I heard there was cloak-and-dagger stuff going on," said Joe politely.