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Updated: June 12, 2025
It was his job to get the gyros delivered and set up in the Space Platform. He had failed. The black car braked to a stop. There was Major Holt. Joe had seen him six months before. He'd aged a good deal. He looked grimly at the two pilots. "What happened?" he demanded. "You dumped your fuel! What burned like this?" Joe said thickly: "Everything was dumped but the pilot gyros. They didn't burn!
We've known them all their lives. They'd get mad if we started to get stuffy. We don't bother." "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!"
He tried to get his mind off that impulse by remembering that at eighteen thousand feet a good half of the air on Earth was underneath him, and by hoping that the other half would be as easy to rise above when the gyros were finally in place and starting out for space.
Joe felt a peculiar twinge of panic. Nobody who is accustomed only to Earth can quite realize at the beginning the conditions of handling vehicles in space. But Joe cracked the braking rockets. He stopped. He hung seemingly motionless in space. The Platform was a good half-mile away. He tried the gyros, and the space wagon went into swift spinning. He reversed them and straightened out almost.
Now the load of desperate men from the overturned survivor scurried for the Platform with parts of its cargo. If they could fight their way inside the Platform, they could blast its hull open, or demolish its controls or shatter its air pumps and its gyros and turn its air tanks into sieves.
"Power deck," Connel called into the intercom, "check in!" "Power deck, aye!" reported Barret. "Radar deck, check in!" "Radar deck, aye!" Professor Hemmingwell acknowledged in a thin voice. "Feed reactant!" Connel ordered. "Reactant feeding at D-9 rate," said Barret after a split-second pause. "Energize cooling pumps!" "Cooling pumps, aye!" "Cut in take-off gyros!" "Gyros on," repeated Barret.
The pilot gyros, which had to be perfect, had been especially gunned at by saboteurs. An attack with possibly stolen proximity-fused rockets. The plane was booby-trapped, and somebody at an airfield had had a chance to spring the trap. So it was wreckage. Crashed and burned on landing. The Chief growled. Haney pressed his lips together. The eyes of Mike were burning.
Not until the Platform's up and there's no more reason for her to be in danger." The Major said remotely: "I shall have to arrange for more than that. I shall put you in touch with your father by telephone. You will explain to him, in detail, exactly how the repair of your apparatus is planned. I understand that the gyros can be duplicated more quickly by the method you have worked out?"
They were serious, but not tragic. The tragedy was the gyros themselves. On their absolute precision and utterly perfect balance the whole working of the Platform would depend. And the rotors were gashed in one place, and the shafts were bent. Being bent and nicked, the precision of the apparatus was destroyed. Its precision lost, the whole device was useless.
The busses stopped and opened their doors. The waiting men stormed in, shoving zestfully, calling to each other, scrambling for seats or merely letting themselves be pushed on board. The bus Joe found himself on was jammed in seconds. He held on to a strap and didn't notice. He was absorbed in the rapt contemplation of his idea for the repair of the pilot gyros.
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