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.