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. And it had taken four months’ work merely to get it perfectly balanced!
It had been the most accurate piece of machine work ever done on Earth. It was balanced to a microgram—to a millionth of the combined weight of three aspirin tablets. It would revolve at 40,000 revolutions per minute. It had to balance perfectly or it would vibrate intolerably. If it vibrated at all it would shake itself to pieces, or, failing that, send aging sound waves through all the Platform’s substance. If it vibrated by the least fraction of a ten-thousandth of an inch, it would wear, and vibrate more strongly, and destroy itself and possibly the Platform. It needed the precision of an astronomical telescope’s lenses—multiplied! And it was bent. It was exactly as useless as if it had never been made at all.
Joe felt as a man might feel if the mirror of the greatest telescope on earth, in his care, had been smashed. As if the most priceless picture in the world, in his charge, had been burned. But he felt worse. Whether it was his fault or not—and it wasn’t—it was destroyed.
A truck rolled up and was stopped by a guard. There was talk, and the guard let it through. A small crane lift came over from the hangars. Its normal use was the lifting of plane motors in and out of their nacelles. Now it was to pick up the useless pieces of equipment on which the best workmen and the best brains of the Kenmore Precision Tool Company had worked unceasingly for eight calendar months, and which now was junk.
Joe watched, numbed by disaster, while the crane hook went down to position above the once-precious objects. Men shored up the heavy things and ran planks under them, and then deftly fitted rope slings for them to be lifted by. It was late afternoon by now. Long shadows were slanting as the crane truck’s gears whined, and the slack took up, and the first of the four charred objects lifted and swung, spinning slowly, to the truck that had come from the Shed.
Joe froze, watching. He watched the second. The third did not spin. It merely swayed. But the fourth.... The lines up to the crane hook were twisted. As the largest of the four crates lifted from its bed, it twisted the lines toward straightness. It spun. It spun more and more rapidly, and then more and more slowly, and stopped, and began to spin back.
Then Joe caught his breath. It seemed that he hadn’t breathed in minutes. The big crate wasn’t balanced. It was spinning. It wasn’t vibrating. It spun around its own center of gravity, unerringly revealed by its flexible suspension.
He watched until it was dropped into the truck. Then he went stiffly over to the driver of the car that had brought him.
“Everything’s all right,” he said, feeling a queer astonishment at his own words. “I’m going to ride back to the Shed with the stuff I brought. It’s not hurt too much. I’ll be able to fix it with a man or two I can pick up out here. But I don’t want anything else to happen to it!”
So he rode back out to the Shed on the tailboard of the truck that carried the crates. The sun set as he rode. He was smudged and disheveled. The reek of charred wood and burnt insulation and scorched wrappings was strong in his nostrils. But he felt very much inclined to sing.