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

He swung around. It was the lean man, Haney, whom he'd last seen atop the Platform. The man Joe'd kept
from dropping from the level place twenty storeys up. "Hello." Joe murmured.
"I thought you were big brass," Haney rambled. "But big brass don't ride the busses." ' "I'm going in to try
to hunt up the Chief," said Joe.
Haney grunted. He looked estimatingly at Joe. His glance fell to Joe's hands. Joe had been digging farther
into the crates, and afterward he'd washed up, but packing grease is hard to get off. When mixed with soot
and charcoal it leaves signs. Haney relaxed.
"We usually eat together," he observed, satisfied that Joe was regular, because his hands weren't soft and
because mechanic's soap had done an incomplete job on them. "The Chief's a good guy. Join us?"
"Sure!" said Joe. "And thanks."
A brittle voice sounded somewhere around Haney's knees. Joe looked down, startled. The midget he'd
seen up on the Platform nodded up at him. He'd squirmed through the press in Haney's wake. He seemed
to bristle a little out of pure habit. Joe made room for him.
"I'm okay," said the midget pugnaciously.
Haney made a formal introduction.
"Mike Scandia." He thumbed at Joe. "He's eating with us. Wants to find the Chief."
There had been no reference to the risk Joe had run in keeping Haney from a twenty storey fall. Now
Haney said warmly, "I wanted to say thanks anyhow for keeping your mouth shut. New here?"
Joe nodded. The noise in the bus made any sort of talk difficult. Haney appeared used to it.
"Saw you with Major Holt's daughter," he observed again. "That's why I thought you were brass. Figured
one or the other'd tell on Braun. You didn't, or somebody'd've raised cain. But I'll handle it."
Braun would be the man Haney had been fighting. If he wanted to handle it his way, it was naturally none
of Joe's business. He said nothing.
"Braun's a good enough guy," said Haney. "Crazy, that's all. He picked that fight. Picked it! Up there!
Coulda been him knocked off, an' I'd've been in a mess! I'll see him tonight."
The midget said something biting in his peculiarly cracked and brittle voice.
The bus rolled and rolled and rolled. It was a long way to Bootstrap. The desert outside was utterly black
and featureless. Once a convoy of tracks came from ahead and disappeared behind, going to the Shed. Joe
heard but didn't see them. They passed on the other side.
Presently, though, lights twinkled in the night. Presently again the bus slowed, in line with the others.
Then there were barracklike buildings, succeeding each other. Then there was a corner and all the light
outside changed. The busses drew up to a curb and stopped, and everybody was in a great hurry to get out,
shoving unnecessarily, and Joe let himself be carried along by the crowd.
He found himself on the sidewalk with bright neon signs up and down the street. He was in the midst of
the crowd which was the middle shift, released. It eddied and dispersed without lessening the number of
people about. Most of the figures in sight were men. There were very few women. The neon signs
proclaimed that here one could buy beer, and that this was Fred's Place, and this was Sid's Steak Joint.
There was bowling. There was pool. A store, remaining open for this shift's trade, sold fancy shirts and
strictly practical workclothes and highly eccentric items of personal adornment. A movie house.
Somewhere a record shop fed repetitious music to the night air. There was movement and crowding all
about, but the middle of the street was almost empty save for the busses. There were some bicycles but
practically no other wheeled traffic. After all, Bootstrap was strictly a security town. A man could leave
whenever he chose, but there were formalities, and personal cars weren't practical.
"Chief'11 be yonder," said Haney in Joe's ear. "Come along."
They shouldered their way along the sidewalk. The passersby were of a typeтАФconstruction men.
Somebody here had taken part in the building of every skyscraper and bridge and dam put up in a man's
working life. They could have been kept away from the Space Platform job only by a flat security refusal
to let them be hired.
Haney and Joe moved toward Sid's Steak Joint, with Mike the midget marching truculently between them.
Joe marshalled in his mind what he was going to tell the