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

he had a new view of it. When anything important is to be done, nine-tenths of the job of accomplishing it
is fighting off the obstacles put in its way by people whose business it isn't. He began to feel a great
respect for those people he'd never thought about before; the people who were simply and doggedly
getting the job done despite those who wanted things to stay as they were.
Presently the transport sank down toward the clouds. It swept through them blindly in the mist. And then
there was solid ground, and a remarkably small airfield, and the pilot and co-pilot began a sort of ritual
conversation Joe .dimly saw might be as important as anything else.
"Pitot and wingheaters," said the pilot.
The co-pilot put his hand successively on two controls.
"Off."
"Spark advance," said the pilot.
The co-pilot moved his hands.
"Blowers?" тАв ..
"Low," said the co-pilot.
"Fuel selectors?" ;
The co-pilot moved his hands again to the appropriate; controls, verifying that they were as he reported
them. >
"Main on," he said matter-of-factly. "Crossfeed off."
The transport slanted down steeply for the landing field which had looked so small at first, but expanded
remarkably as they drew near.
Joe found himself scowling. He began to see how complex a job it was merely to get the Space Platform
ready to try to start off on a journey that in theory should last forever. It was daunting to think that before
a habitable artificial moon could be built and lifted to space, such wildly irrelevant things would be
needed as ways to find
undesirable private planes in cloudbanks, and even a checklist for a transport plane to be used before
every takeoff and landingтАФjust to make sure that necessary, precious, precision parts could be flown to
the job. The details involved in getting the Platform built began to loom up as a monstrous, perhaps
impossible burden.
But the job was worth doing. Joe was glad he was to have a share in it.

2
THE TRANSPORT plane stood by the door of a hangar on the military airfield, and mechanics stood well
back from it and looked it over. One man crawled over the tail assembly and found one small, ragged hole
in the aluminum sheeting of the stabilizer. When the war rockets exploded, some fragment had gone
through. The pilot verified that the tiny missile had hit no inner strengthening member inside. He nodded.
The mechanic made two very neat patches over the two holes, upper and lower. He continued his
examination of the fusilege. The pilot turned away.
"I'll go talk to Bootstrap," he told the co-pilot. "You keep an eye on things."
"I'll keep two eyes on them," said the co-pilot.
The pilot moved oft,.toward the control tower of the field. Joe looked around. The transport ship seemed
very large, suddenly, standing as it did on a concrete apron with its tricycle landing gear let down. It
somehow made one think of an enormous and misshapen insect, standing elaborately high on inadequate,
spindling legs. Its cargo body, in particular, didn't look right for an aircraft. The top of the cargo section
went smoothly back to the stabilizing surfaces, but the bottom did not taper. It
ended aft in a clumsy looking bulge which was closed by a huge pair of clamshell doors. It was designed
that way so very large objects could be run into the rear opening. But it didn't look streamlined, and it
definitely wasn't pretty.
"Did anything get into the cargohold?" asked Joe in sudden anxiety. "Did the cases I'm responsible for get
hit?"
After all, four rockets had exploded deplorably near the transport. If one fragment had struck, others could