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Updated: June 12, 2025
"Plenty of that sabotage stuff," growled the Chief. "Hard to catch the so-and-sos. Smash the gyros and the take-off'd have to wait till new ones got made and that's more time for more sabotage." Joe said carefully: "I think it can be licked. Listen a minute, will you?" The Chief fixed his eyes upon him. "The gyros have to be rebalanced," said Joe. "They have to spin on their own center of gravity.
It would be welded later, but first it was tried out. And it moved the main gyros! They weighed many times what the pilot gyros did, but even when they were spinning the pilot gyros stirred them.
At four by the sun Thorn could point to a huge air-dreadnaught hanging by lazily revolving gyros barely two miles away. He waved wildly, frantically, but the big ship drifted on, unseeing. The Fighting Force was no longer looking for Thorn and Sylva. They had been carried into the rocket-ship fourteen hours and more before.
Haney and Joe moved toward Sid's Steak Joint, with Mike the midget marching truculently between them. Men nodded to them as they passed. Joe marshaled in his mind what he was going to tell the Chief. He had a trick for fixing the pilot gyros.
The largest was bent askew by the force of the crash or an explosion, Joe didn't know which. The smallest was a twisted mass of charcoal. Joe gulped, and dug into them with borrowed tools. The pilot gyros of the Space Platform would apply the torque that would make the main gyros shift it to any desired position, or else hold it absolutely still.
The Platform turned precisely and exactly back to its original position, and Joe's heart pounded in his throat, because he knew that the turning had been done with the gyros, and they had been handled by the pilot gyros for which he was responsible. Then the Platform moved again. It lifted by inches and swayed forward.
So the ship rose lightly, almost skittishly. When gyros turned to make it drift sidewise as a helicopter tilts in Earth's atmosphere it fairly swooped to a new position. Somebody jockeyed it this way and that. Cochrane got to the control-room by holding on with both hands to railings. He was angry and appalled.
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.
If the Major gives us a free hand, and then in the last five minutes takes his own measures so they can't leak out ahead of time and tip off the gangs we want to get we oughta knock off all the expert saboteurs who know the weak spots in the Platform. For instance those who know that thermite in the gyros would mess everything up all over again."
So Joe had to watch his instruments and listen to the tinny voice behind him and steer the ship against accidental wobblings as the Earth fell away behind him. He battled against the fatigue of continuing to live, and struggled with gyros and steering jets to keep the ship on its hair-line course. He panted heavily.
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