Chapter 13

On the day of the take-off there were a number of curious side-effects from the completion of the Space Platform. There was a very small country on the other side of the world which determined desperately to risk its existence on the success of the Platform’s flight. It had to choose between abject submission to a powerful neighbor, or the possibility of a revolution in which its neighbor’s troops would take on the semblance of citizens for street-fighting purposes. If the Platform got aloft, it could defy its neighbor. And in a grim gamble, it did.

There was also a last-ditch fight in the United Nations, wherein the Platform was denounced and a certain block of associated countries issued an ultimatum, threatening to bolt the international organization if the Platform went aloft. And again there had to be a grim gamble. If the Platform did not take to space and so furnish ultimately a guarantee of peace, the United Nations would face the alternatives of becoming a military alliance for atomic war, or something less than an international debating society.

Of course there were less significant results. There were already fourteen popular songs ready for broadcast, orchestrated and rehearsed with singers ready to saturate the ears of the listening public. They ranged from We’ve Got a Warship in the Sky, which was more or less jingoistic, to a boy-and-girl melody entitled We’ll Have a Moon Just for Us Two. The latter tune had been stolen from a hit of four years before, which in turn had been stolen from a hit of six years before that, and it had been stolen from a still earlier bit of Bach, so it was a rather pretty melody.

And of course there was a super-colossal motion picture epic in color and with musical numbers, champing in its film cans for simultaneous first-run showings in eight different key cities. It was titled To the Stars, and three separate endings had been filmed, of which the appropriate one would of course be used in the eight separate world premières. One ending had the Platform fail due to sabotage, and the hero--played by an actor who had interrupted his seventh honeymoon to play the part--splendidly prepared to build it all over again. The second ending closed with the Platform headed for Alpha Centaurus--which was hardly the intention of anybody outside of filmdom. The third ending was secret, but it was said that hard-boiled motion-picture executives had cried like babies when it was thrown on preview screens.

These, of course, were merely sidelights. They were not very important in the Shed. There, work went on at a feverish rate although there was no longer any construction work to be done. In theory, therefore, the members of welders and pipe-fitters and steel-construction and electrical and other unions should have retired gracefully to Bootstrap. Members of building-maintenance and rigging and wrecking and other assorted unions should have been gathered together in far cities, screened by security, and brought to Bootstrap and paid overtime to pull up wood-block flooring and unbolt and jack out the proper sections of the Shed’s eastern wall.

But if there had been anything of that sort tried, it would have produced bloodshed. The men who’d built the Platform were going to see it depart this Earth or else. They’d never have a second chance. It would work the first time or it wouldn’t work at all.

So the Platform was made ready for its take-off by the men who had made it. A gigantic section--two full gores--of the Shed’s wall was unbolted in two pieces, and each piece thrust outward at the top and bottom, so that they were offset from the rest of the huge half-globe. There were hundreds of wheels at their bottom which for the first time touched the sixteen lines of rails laid with unbelievable solidity around the outside of the Shed. And then the monstrous sections were rolled aside. A vast opening resulted, and morning sunlight smote for the first time mankind’s very first space craft.

Joe saw the sunlight strike, and his first sensation was of disappointment. The normal shape of the Platform was ungainly, but now it was practically hidden by the solid-fuel rockets which would consume themselves in their firing. Also, the floor of the Shed looked strange. It was littered with the clumsy shapes of pushpots, trucked to this place in an unending stream all night long. A very young lieutenant from the pushpot airfield hunted up Joe and assured him that every drop of fuel in every pushpot’s tanks had been tested twice--once in the storage tanks, and again in the pushpots. Joe thanked him very politely.

There was no longer any scaffolding. There were no trucks left except two gigantic cranes, which could handle the pushpots like so many toys. And the effect of sunlight pouring into the Shed seemed strange indeed.

Outside, there were carpenters hammering professionally upon a hasty grandstand of timber. Most of the carpenters would have been handier with rivet guns or welding torches, but it would have been indiscreet to comment. As fast as a final timber was spiked in place, somebody hastily wound it with very tawdry bunting. Men were stringing wires to the grandstand, and other men were setting up television and movie cameras. Two Security men grimly stood by each camera amid a glittering miscellany of microphones.

Joe was lucky. Or perhaps Sally pulled wires. Anyhow, the two of them had a vantage point for which many other people would have paid astonishing sums. They waited where the circular ramp between the two skins of the Shed was broken by the removal of the doorway. They were halfway up the curve of the Shed’s roof, at the edge of the great opening, and they could see everything, from the pushpot pilots as they were checked into their contraptions, to the sedate arrival of the big brass at the grandstand below.

There was a reverberant humming from the Shed now. It might have been the humming of wind blowing across its open section. Joe and Sally saw a grim knot of Security men escorting four crew members to a flight of wooden steps that led up to a lower air-lock door--Joe had reason to remember that door--and watched them enter and close the air lock behind them. Then the security men pulled away the wooden stairs and hauled them completely away. There were a very few highly trusted men making final inspections of the Platform’s exterior. One of them was nearly on a level with Joe and Sally. Other men were already lowering themselves down on ropes that they later jerked free, but this last man on top did a very human thing. When he’d finished his check-up to the last least detail, he pulled something out of his hip pocket. It was a tobacco can full of black paint. There was a brush with it. He painted his name on the silvery plates of the Platform, “C. J. Adams, Jr.,” and satisfiedly began his descent to the ground. His name would go up with the Platform and be visible for uncounted generations--if all went well. He reached the ground and walked away, contented.

The cranes began their task. Each one reached down deliberately and picked up a pushpot. They swung the pushpots to vertical positions and presented them precisely to the Platform’s side. They clung there ridiculously. Magnetic grapples, of course. Joe and Sally, at the end of the corridor in the wall, could see the heads of the pushpot pilots in their plastic domes.

Music blared from behind the grandstand. The seats were being filled. But naturally, the least important personages were arriving first. There were women in costumes to which they had given infinite thought--and nobody looked at them except other women. There was khaki. There were gray business suits--slide-rule men, these, who had done the brain-work behind the Platform’s design. Then black broadcloth. Politicians, past question. There is nothing less impressive from a height of two hundred feet than a pot-bellied man in black broadcloth walking on the ground.

There were men in uniforms which were not of the United States armed forces. They ran heavily to medals, which glittered. There were more arrivals, and more, and more. The newsreel and TV cameras nosed around.

The cranes worked methodically. They dipped, and deftly picked up a thing shaped like the top half of a loaf of bread. They swung that metal thing to the Platform’s side. Each time it clung fast, like a snail or slug to the surface on which it crawls. Many pushpots clung even to the rocket tubes--the same tubes that would presently burn away and vanish. So Joe and Sally saw the pushpots in a new aspect: blunt metal slugs with gaping mouths which were their air scoops.

The tinny music from below cut off. Somebody began an oration. The men who had built the Platform were not interested in fine phrases, but this event was broadcast everywhere, and some people might possibly tune to the channels that carried the speakers and their orations rather than the channels that showed the huge, bleak, obscured shape of the monster that was headed either for empty space or pure disaster.

The speaker stopped, and another took his place. Then another. One man spoke for less than a minute, and the stands went wild! But the one who followed made splendid gestures. He talked and talked and talked. The cranes cleaned up the last of the waiting pushpots, and the Platform itself was practically invisible.

The cranes backed off and went away, clanking. The orator raised his voice. It made small echoes in the vast cavern that was the Shed. Somebody plucked the speaker’s arm. He ended abruptly and sat down, wiping his forehead with a huge blue handkerchief.

There was a roar. A pushpot had started its motor. Another roar. Another. One by one, the multitude of clustering objects added to the din. In the open a single jet was appalling. Here, the noise became a sound which was no longer a sound. It became a tumult which by pure volume ceased to be anything one’s ears could understand. It reached a peak and held there. Then, abruptly, all the motors slackened in unison, and then roared more loudly. The group controls within the Platform were being tested. Three--four--five times the tumult faded to the merely unbearable and went up to full volume again.

Joe felt Sally plucking at his arm. He turned, and saw a jet plane’s underbelly, very close, and its swept-back wings. It was climbing straight up. Then he saw another jet plane streaking for the great dome’s open door. It moved with incredible velocity. It jerked upward and climbed over the Shed’s curve and was gone. But there were others and others and others.

These were the fighter ships of the jet-plane guard. For months on end they had flown above the Shed, protecting it. Now they were going aloft to relieve the present watchers. They were rising to spread out as an interceptor screen for hundreds of miles in every direction, in case somebody should be so foolish as to try again the exploit of the night before. They would not see the monster in the Shed again. So in a single line which reached to the horizon, they made this roaring run for the one last glimpse which was their right. Joe saw tiny specks come streaking down out of the sky to queue up for this privileged view of the Platform before it rose.