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

to be alive.
Joe realized how fully they had to depend on that training as he left Major Holt's quarters and headed for
the Shed's nearest entrance. The Shed was gigantic. There were hills to the westward, but only flat and
arid plain to the east and south and north. There was but one town in hundreds of miles, and that was
Bootstrap, built to house the workmen who'd built the Platform and the still invisible, ferociously howling
pushpots and now the small supply ships for it, of which the first was to thrust out to meet the Platform
today.
The Shed seemed very near because of its monstrous size. When he was actually at the base of its wall, it
seemed to fill half the firmament and more than half the horizon. He went in, and felt self-conscious when
the guard's eyes fell on his uniform. There was a tiny vestibule, then he was in the Shed itself, and it was
gigantic.
There were acres of wood-block flooring. There was a vast, steel-girdered arching roof which was fifty
storeys high. All this had been needed when the Space Platform was built. Men on the far side were
merely specks, and the rows of windows to admit light usually did no more than make a gray twilight
inside. But there was light enough today. To the east the Shed's wall was split from top to bottom. A
colossal triangular gore had been loosened and thrust out and rolled aside, and a doorway a hundred and
fifty feet wide let in the sunshine. Through it, Joe could see the fiery red ball which was the sun just
leaving the world's edge.
But there was something more urgent for him to look at. The small supply ship had been moved into its
launching cage. Only Joe, perhaps, would really have recognized it. Actually it was a streamlined hull of
steel, eighty feet long by twenty in diameter. There were stubby metal finsтАФuseless in space and even on
takeoff, but essential for the planned method of landing on its return. There were thick quartz ports in the
bow section. But its form was completely concealed now by the attached, exterior takeoff rockets. It had
been shifted into a huge cradle of steel beams from which it was to rise to space. Men swarmed about it
and over it, checking and re-checking every possible thing that could make or mar its ascent to emptiness.
The other three crew members were readyтАФHaney and Chief Bender and Mike Scandia. They were
especially entitled to be the crew of this first supply ship. When the Platform was being built, its pilot
gyros had been built by a precision tool firm owned by Joe's father. He'd accompanied the infinitely
precious device to Bootstrap, by plane. He was to deliver and install the gyros in the Platform. And the
plane was sabotaged and the gyros ruined. They'd required four months to make, and four months more
for balancing to absolute no-tolerance accuracy. The Platform couldn't wait so long for duplicates. So Joe
had improvised a process for repair. And with Haney to devise special machine tool setups, and the chief
to use fanatically fine workmanship, and Mike and Joe aiding according to their gifts, they'd rebuilt the
apparatus in an impossibly short tune. The idea was Joe's, but he couldn't have done the job without the
others.
And there had been other, incidental triumphs. They were not the only ones who worked feverishly for the
glory of having helped to build the Earth's first actually inhabitable artificial moon. But they had
accomplished more than most. Joe had even been appointed to be an alternate member of the Platform's
crew. But the man he was to have substituted for recovered from an illness, and Joe was left behind at the
Platform's launching. But all four of them had demonstrated special qualities, and as a team they were
very special indeed. So, as a team, they were chosen to serve in the small ships that would supply the
Platform.
Now they were ready to begin. The chief grinned exuberantly as Joe ducked through the bars of the
launching cage and approached the ship. He was a Mohawk IndianтАФone of that tribe which for two
generations has supplied steelworkers to every bridge and dam and skyscraper job on the continent. He
was brown and bulky and explosive. Haney looked tense and strained. He was tall and lean and a good
man in any sort of trouble. Mike blazed excitement. He was forty-one inches high and he was full-grown.
He had worked on the Platform, bucking rivets and making welds and inspections in places too small for a
normal-sized man to reach. He frantically resented any concession to his size, and in fact he was all man,
only the small economy size.