“That I’d like to see,” said the co-pilot skeptically. “No barbed wire around the plant? No identity badges you wear when you go in? No security officer screaming blue murder every five minutes? What do you think all that’s for? You built these pilot gyros! You had to have that security stuff!”
“But we didn’t,” insisted Joe. “Not any of it. The plant’s been in the same village for eighty years. It started building 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. “In World War Two the only spy scare in the village was an FBI man who came around looking for spies. The village cop locked him up and wouldn’t believe in his credentials. They had to send somebody from Washington to get him out of jail.”
The co-pilot grinned reluctantly. “I guess there are such places,” he 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 for an interview beforehand, and we can’t speak to strange men or go out alone after dark—.”
The pilot grunted. The co-pilot’s tone changed. “Not quite that bad,” he admitted, “but it’s bad! It’s really bad! We lost three planes last week. I guess you’d call it in action against saboteurs. One flew to pieces in mid-air. Sabotage. Carrying critical stuff. One crashed on take-off, carrying irreplaceable instruments. Somebody’d put a detonator in a servo-motor. And one froze in its landing glide and flew smack-dab into its landing field. They had to scrape it up. When this ship got a major overhaul two weeks ago, we flew it with our fingers crossed for four trips running. Seems to be all right, though. We gave it the works. But I won’t look forward to a serene old age until the Platform’s out of atmosphere! Not me!”
He went to put the pilot’s empty cup in the disposal slot.
The plane went 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 a faint spot of racing brightness with a hint of colors around it. It was the sort of nimbus that substitutes for a shadow when a plane is high enough above the clouds. It raced madly over the irregular upper surface 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 gyro cases as its last item of collected cargo. Joe remembered how grimly the two crew members had prevented anybody from even approaching it on the ground, except those who actually loaded the cases, and how one of the two had watched them every second.
Joe fidgeted. He didn’t quite know how to take the co-pilot’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 casual matter-of-factness elsewhere reserved for plowing or deep-sea fishing. Joe’s father owned it, and some day Joe might head it, but he couldn’t hope to keep the respect of the men in the plant unless he could handle every tool on the place and split a thousandth at least five ways. Ten would be better! But as long as the feeling at the plant stayed as it was now, there’d never be a security problem there.
If the co-pilot was telling the truth, though—.
Joe found a slow burn beginning inside him. He had a picture in his mind that was practically a dream. It was of something big and bright and ungainly swimming silently in emptiness with a field of stars behind it. The stars were tiny pin points of light. They were unwinking and distinct because there was no air where this thing floated. The blackness between them was absolute because this was space itself. The thing that floated was a moon. A man-made moon. It was an artificial satellite of Earth. Men were now building it. Presently it would float as Joe dreamed of it, and where the sun struck it, it would be unbearably bright, and where there were shadows, they would be abysmally black—except, perhaps, when earthshine from the planet below would outline it in a ghostly fashion.
There would be men in the thing that floated in space. It swam in a splendid orbit about the world that had built it. Sometimes there were small ships that—so Joe imagined—would fight their way up to it, panting great plumes of rocket smoke, and bringing food and fuel to its crew. And presently one of those panting small ships would refill its fuel tanks to the bursting point from the fuel other ships had brought—and yet the ship would have no weight. So it would drift away from the greater floating thing in space, and suddenly its rockets would spout flame and fumes, and it would head triumphantly out and away from Earth. And it would be the first vessel ever to strike out for the stars!
That was the picture Joe had of the Space Platform and its meaning. Maybe it was romantic, but men were working right now to make that romance come true. This transport plane was flying to a small town improbably called Bootstrap, carrying one of the most essential devices for the Platform’s equipment. In the desert near Bootstrap there was a gigantic construction shed. Inside that shed men were building exactly the monstrous object that Joe pictured to himself. They were trying to realize a dream men have dreamed for decades—the necessary space platform that would be the dock, the wharf, the starting point from which the first of human space explorers could start for infinity. The idea that anybody could want to halt such an undertaking made Joe Kenmore burn.
The co-pilot painstakingly crushed out his cigarette. The ship flew with more steadiness than a railroad car rolls on rails. There was the oddly cushioned sound of the motors. It was all very matter-of-fact.
But Joe said angrily: “Look! Is any of what you said—well—kidding?”
“I wish it were, fella,” said the co-pilot. “I can talk to you about it, but most of it’s hushed up. I tell you——”
“Why can you talk to me?” demanded Joe suspiciously. “What makes it all right for you to talk to me?”
“You’ve got passage on this ship. That means something!”
“Does it?” asked Joe.
The pilot turned in his seat to glance at Joe.
“Do you think we carry passengers regularly?” he asked mildly.
“Why not?”
Pilot and co-pilot looked at each other.
“Tell him,” said the pilot.
“About five months ago,” said the co-pilot, “there was an Army colonel wangled a ride to Bootstrap on a cargo plane. The plane took off. It flew all right until twenty miles from Bootstrap. Then it stopped checking. It dove straight for the Shed the Platform’s being built in. It was shot down. When it hit, there was an explosion.” The co-pilot shrugged. “You won’t believe me, maybe. But a week later they found the colonel’s body back east. Somebody’d murdered him.”
Joe blinked.
“It wasn’t the colonel who rode as a passenger,” said the co-pilot. “It was somebody else. Twenty miles from Bootstrap he’d shot the pilots and taken the controls. That’s what they figure, anyhow. He meant to dive into the construction Shed. Because—very, very cleverly—they’d managed to get a bomb in the plane disguised as cargo. They got the men who’d done that, later, but it was rather late.”
Joe said dubiously: “But would one bomb destroy the Shed and the Platform?”
“This one would,” said the co-pilot. “It was an atom bomb. But it wasn’t a good one. It didn’t detonate properly. It was a fizz-off.”
Joe saw the implications. Cranks and crackpots couldn’t get hold of the materials for atom bombs. It took the resources of a large nation for that. But a nation that didn’t quite dare start an open war might try to sneak in one atom bomb to