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

The pilot put down his paper cup and handed it over. He said, "He thinks you're kidding him."
He turned back to the contemplation of the instruments before him and the view out the transparent plastic
of the windows.
"He does?" The co-pilot said skeptically, "You don't have barbed wire around your plant, do you? No
identity badges. No Security officer screaming blue murder every five minutes. You don't have that kind
of stuff at all! Or do you?"
"We don't," said Joe. "We know everybody who works at the plant. We've known them all their lives. The
plant's been in the same village for eighty years. It started making wagons and plows, and now it turns out
machine tools and precision machinery. It's the only factory around, and everybody who works there went
to school with everybody else, and so did our fathers, and we know one another!"
The co-pilot was unconvinced.
"No kidding?"
"No kidding," Joe assured him.
"I guess there are such places," the co-pilot said enviously. "You should've built the Platform! It's plenty
different on this job! We can't even talk to a girl without Security clearance, and we can't speak to
strangers or be out after dark."
The pilot grunted. The co-pilot's tone changed.
"It's not quite that bad," he admitted, "but it isn't fun. Last week was a bad one. We lost three planes. One
flew to pieces in midair: Sabotage; carrying critical stuff. One crashed on take-off: carrying irreplaceable
instruments; somebody'd put a detonator in a servomotor. And one froze in its landing approach and flew
smack into the field; they had to scrape it up. This ship got a major overhaul two weeks ago. We flew it
with our fingers crossed the first three trips. Maybe it's all right. But I won't look forward to a serene old
age until the Platform's up and out of atmosphere. Not me!"
He went to put the pilot's empty cup in the disposal slot.
The plane flew on. There wasn't anything underneath but clouds, and there wasn't anything overhead but
sky.
The clouds were a long way down, and the sky was simply up. Joe looked down and saw the rainbow-
ringed shadow of the flying plane. It raced madly over the irregular upper surfaces of the cloud layer. The
plane flew and flew. Nothing happened at all. This was two hours from the field from which it had taken
off with the pilot gyros as its last item of collected cargo. Joe remembered how sharply the two crew
members had prevented anybody from even approaching the plane on the ground, with the sole exception
of men actually loading on the crates. And those workers had been watched every second.
Joe fidgeted. He didn't know how to take the copilot's talk. The Kenmore Precision Tool plant was owned
by his family, but it wasn't so much a family as a civic enterprise. The young men of the village grew up
to regard fanatically fine workmanship with the casualness elsewhere reserved for plowing or deepsea
fishing. Joe's father owned the plant now, and some day Joe might head it, but he couldn't hope to keep the
respect of the men unless he could handle any tool in the place and split a thousandth at least five ways.
Ten would be better. But while the feeling at the plant was the way it was now, there'd never be a security
problem.
If the co-pilot was telling the truth, though ...
Joe found a slow anger beginning inside him. He'd had a picture in his mind which was practically a
dream. It was of something big and bright and ungainly floating silently in emptiness with a field of stars
behind it. It would be the space platform.
Other, lesser artificial satellites might flash enviously past below it. They were a strange and motley crew.
Some were shaped like cones, some like balls, some like pyramids, and many of them sprouted whiplike
antennae in all directions. Some waved paddles. Some looked like nightmares. But they were very, very,
very much smaller than the platform and very far below it.
From the Platform the stars were tiny pinpoints of light. They were unwinking and distinct because there
was no air, here, and the blackness between them was absolute because this was space itself. The platform
was a moon. A manmade moon in which men could live and