(eng) Murray Leinster - To the Stars 02 by Space Tug

Author:Space Tug [Tug, Space]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

7

Time passed. Hours, then days. Things began to happen. Trucks appeared, loaded down with sacks of white powder. The powder was very messily mixed with water and smeared lavishly over the now waterproofed wooden mockup of a space ship. It came off again in sections of white plaster, which were numbered and set to dry in warm chambers that were constructed with almost magical speed. More trucks arrived, bearing such diverse objects as loads of steel turnings, a regenerative helium-cooling plant from a gaswell—it could cool metal down to the point where it crumbled to impalpable powder at a blow—and assorted fuel tanks, dynamos, and electronic machinery.

Ten days after Mike's first proposal of concreted steel as a material for space ship construction, the parts of the first casting of the mockup were assembled. They were a mold for the hull of a space ship. There were more plaster sections for a second mold ready to be dried out now, but meanwhile vehicles like concrete mixers mixed turnings and filings and powder in vast quantities and poured the dry mass here and there in the first completed mold. Then men began to wrap the gigantic object with iron wire. Presently that iron wire glowed slightly, and the whole huge mold grew hotter and hotter and hotter. And after a time it was allowed to cool.

But that did not mean a ceasing of activity. The plaster casts had been made while the concreting process was worked out. The concreting process—including the heating—was in action while fittings were being flown to the Shed. But other hulls were being formed by metal-concrete formation even before the first mold was taken down.

When the plaster sections came off, there was a long, gleaming, frosty-sheened metal hull waiting for the fittings. It was a replacement of one of the two shot-down space craft, ready for fitting out some six weeks ahead of schedule. Next day there was a second metal hull, still too hot to touch. The day after that there was another.

Then they began to be turned out at the rate of two a day, and all the vast expanse of the Shed resounded with the work on them. Drills drilled and torches burned and hammers hammered. Small diesels rumbled. Disk saws cut metal like butter by the seemingly impractical method of spinning at 20,000 revolutions per minute. Convoys of motor busses rolled out from Bootstrap at change-shift time, and there were again Security men at every doorway, moving continually about.

But it still didn't look too good. There is apparently no way to beat arithmetic, and a definitely grim problem still remained. Ten days after the beginning of the new construction program, Joe and Sally looked down from a gallery high up in the outward-curving wall of the Shed. Acres of dark flooring lay beneath them. There was a spiral ramp that wound round and round between the twin skins of the fifty-story-high dome. It led finally to the Communications Room at the very top of the Shed itself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.