Joe felt queer. The Major was telling him, in effect, that he might have kept the Platform from crashing on take–off. It was a good but upsetting sensation. It was still more important to Joe that the Platform get out to space than that he be credited with saving it. And it was not reassuring to hear that it might have been wrecked.
"Your reasoning," added the Major coldly, "was soundly based. It seems certain that there is not one central authority directing all the sabotage against the Platform. There are probably several sabotage organizations, all acting independently and probably hating each other, but all hating the Platform more."
Joe blinked. He hadn't thought of that. It was disheartening.
"It will really be bad," said the Major, "if they ever co–operate!"
"Yes, sir," said Joe.
"But I called you back from the airfield," the Major told him without warmth, "to say that you have done a good job. I have talked to Washington. Naturally, you deserve a reward."
"I'm doing all right, sir," said Joe awkwardly. "I want to see the Platform go up and stay up!"
The Major nodded impatiently.
"Naturally! But—ah—one of the men selected and trained for the crew of the Platform has been—ah—taken ill. In strict confidence, because of sabotage it has been determined to close in the Platform and get it aloft at the earliest possible instant, even if its interior arrangements are incomplete. So—ah—in view of your usefulness, I said to Washington that I believed the greatest reward you could be offered was—ah—to be trained as an alternate crew member, to take this man's place if he does not recover in time."
The room seemed to reel around Joe. Then he gulped and said: "Yes, sir! I mean—that's right. I mean, I'd rather have that, than all the money in the world!"
"Very well." The Major turned to leave the room. "You'll stay here, be guarded a good deal more closely than before, and take instructions. But you understand that you are still only an alternate for a crew member! The odds are definitely against your going!"
"That's—that's all right, sir," said Joe unsteadily. "That's quite all right!"
The Major went out. Joe stood still, trying to realize what all this might mean to him. Then Sally stirred.
"You might say thanks, Joe."
Her eyes were shining, but she looked proud, too.
"I put it in Dad's head that that was what you'd like better than anything else," she told him. "If I can't go up in the Platform myself—and I can't—I wanted you to. Because I knew you wanted to."
She smiled at him as he tried incoherently to talk. With a quiet maternal patience, she led him out on the porch of her father's house and sat there and listened to him. It was a long time before he realized that she was humoring him. Then he stopped short and looked at her suspiciously. He found that in his enthusiastic gesticulations he had been gesticulating with her hand as well as his own.
"I guess I'm pretty crazy," he said ruefully. "Shooting off my mouth about myself up there in space…. You're pretty decent to stand me the way I am, Sally."
He paused. Then he said humbly: "I'm plain lucky. But knowing you and—having you like me reasonably much is pretty lucky too!"
She looked at him noncommittally.
He added painfully: "And not only because you spoke to your father and told him just the right thing, either. You're—sort of swell, Sally!"
She let out her breath. Then she grinned at him.
"That's the difference between us, Joe," she told him. "To me, what you just said is the most important thing anybody's said tonight."
10
The world turned over on its axis with unfailing regularity, and nights followed mornings and mornings followed nights according to well–established precedent. One man turned up in Bootstrap with radiation burns, but he had not offered himself for check over at the hospital. He was found dead in his lodging. Since nobody else appeared to have suffered any burns at all, it was assumed that he was the messenger who had brought the radioactive cobalt to Braun, who also had been doomed by possession of the deadly stuff, but who had broken the chain of fatality by not dumping it free into the air of the Shed. Under the circumstances, then, three–shift work on the Platform was resumed, and three times in each twenty–four hours fleets of busses rolled out of Bootstrap carrying men to work in the Shed, and rolled back again loaded with men who had just stopped working there.
Trucks carried materials to the Shed, and swing–up doors opened in the great dome's eastern wall, and the trucks went in and unloaded. Then the trucks went out of the same doors and trundled back for more materials. In the Shed, shining plates of metal swung aloft, and welding torches glittered in the maze of joists and upright pipes that still covered the monster shape. Each day it was a little more nearly complete. In a separate, guarded workshop by a sidewall, the Chief and Haney and Mike the midget labored mightily to accomplish the preposterous. They grew lean and red–eyed from fatigue, and short of temper and ever more fanatical—and security men moved about in seeming uselessness but never–ceasing vigilance.
There were changes, though. The assembly line of pushpots grew shorter, and the remaining monstrosities around the sidewall were plainly near to completion. There came a day, indeed, when only five ungainly objects remained on that line, and even they were completely plated in and needed only a finishing touch. It was at this time that more crates and parcels arrived from the Kenmore Precision Tool plant, and Joe dropped his schoolroomlike instruction course in space flight for work of greater immediate need. He and his allies worked twice around the clock to assemble the replaced parts with the repaired elements of the pilot gyros. They grew groggy from the desperate need both for speed and for absolute accuracy, but they put the complex device together, and adjusted it, and surveyed the result through red–rimmed eyes, and were too weary to rejoice.
Then Joe threw a switch and the reconstituted pilot gyro assembly began to hum quietly, and the humming rose to a whine, and the whine went deliberately up the scale until it ceased to be audible at all. Presently a dial announced the impossible, and they gazed at a device that seemed to be doing nothing whatever. The gyros appeared quite motionless. They spun with such incredible precision that it was not possible to detect that they moved a hairbreadth. And the whole complex device looked very simple and useless.
But the four of them gazed at it—now that it worked—with a sudden passionate satisfaction. Joe moved a control, and the axis of the device moved smoothly to a new place and stayed there. He moved the control again, and it moved to another position and stayed there. And to another and another and another.
Then the Chief took Joe's place, and under his hand the seemingly static disks—which were actually spinning at forty thousand revolutions per minute—turned obediently and without any appearance of the spectacular. Then Haney worked the controls. And Mike put the device through its paces.
Mike left the gyros spinning so that the main axis pointed at the sun, invisible beyond the Shed's roof. And then all four of them watched. It took minutes for this last small test to show its results. But visibly and inexorably the pilot gyros followed the unseen sun, and they would have resisted with a force of very many tons any attempt to move them aside by so little as one–tenth of a second of arc, which would mean something like one three–hundred–thousandth of a right angle. And these pilot gyros would control the main gyros with just this precision, and after the Platform was out in space could hold the Platform itself with the steadiness needed for astronomical observation past achievement from the surface of the Earth.
The pilot gyros, in a word, were ready for installation.