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

Chief. He had a trick for fixing the pilot gyros. A speck of rust would spoil everything, and they'd been
through a plane crash and a fire and explosions, but his trick would do in ten days or less what the plant
back home had needed four months to do. The trick was something to gloat over.
Into Sid's Steak Joint. A jukebox was playing. Over hi a booth, four men ate hugely with a slot TV
machine in the wall beside them, showing wrestling-matches out in San Francisco. A waiter carried a huge
tray, from which steam and fragrant odors arose.
There was the Chief, dark and saturnine to look at, with his straight black hair gleaming hi the light. He
was a Mohawk, and he and his tribe had taken to steel con- -i struction work a long while back. They were
good. There : were very few big construction jobs hi which the Chief's тАв] tribesmen were not concerned.
Forty of them had died together in the worst construction accident in history, when a bridge on its way to
completion collapsed in the making, but there were not less than two dozen at work _on the Space
Platform. The Chief had essayed machine-tool work at the plant, and he'd been cherished. He pitched on
the village baseball team, and he sang bass in the church choir, but there was nobody else to talk Indian to,
and he'd gotten lonely. At that, though, the Space Platform job was calling, and wild horses couldn't have
kept him from a job like that.
He'd held a table for Haney and Mike, but his eyes widened when he saw Joe. He grinned and almost
upset the table to shake hands.
"Son-of-a-gun!" he~said warmly. "What are you doing here?"
"Right now," said Joe. "I'm looking for you. I've got a job for you."
The Chief, still grinning, shook his head.
"Not me! I'm here till the Platform goes up."
"That's the job," said Joe. "I've got to get a crew to repair something I brought out and that got smashed in
the landing."
The four of them sat down. Mike's chin was barely
above the table-top. The Chief waved to a waiter, "Steaks all around!" Then he bent toward Joe. "Shoot
it!"
Joe told i his story concisely. The pilot gyros, which had to be perfect, had been especially gunned for by
saboteurs. An attempt with possibly stolen proximity fused rockets. The plane was bobbytrapped and
somebody'd armed the trap. There was a shipment aboard thatтАФluckilyтАФblew up hi midair when
jettisoned. Trying a bellylanding, the plane had crashed and burned.
The Chief growled. Haney pressed Ms lips together. The eyes of Mike were hot and angry.
"Plenty of that sabotage stuff," growled the Chief. "Hard to catch the so-and-sos. Smash the gyros and the
take-ofFU have to wait till new ones get made, and that's more time for more sabotage."
"I think it can be licked," Joe said carefully. "Listen a minute, will you?"
The Chief fixed his eyes upon him.
"The gyros have to be rebalanced," said Joe. "They have to spin on their own center of gravity. At the
plant we set them up, spun them, and found which side was heavy. We took metal off until they ran
smoothly at 500 r.p.m. Then we spun it at a thousand. It vibrated. We found unbalances too small to show
up before. We fixed them. We speeded the gyros up again. And so on. JVe tried to make the center of
gravity the center of the shaft by making the center of the shaft the center of gravity. See?"
The Chief said impatiently, "No other way to do it. No other way!"
"I saw one," said Joe. "When they cleaned up the wreck at the airport, they heaved up the crates with a
hoist. The slings were twisted. Every crate but one spun as it rose. But not one wobbled! They found thek
own center of gravity and spun around that!"
The Chief scowled, deep in thought. Then his face went blank.
"By the holy Hopi mud-turtle!" he grunted. "I get it!"
Joe said, with very great pains not to seem triumphant, "Instead of spinning the shaft and trimming the
rotor, we'll spin the rotor and trim the shaft. We'll form the
, shaft around the center of gravity, instead of trying td; move the center of gravity to the center of the
shaft.l> We'll spin the rotors on a flexible bearing-base. I think it'll work."