Sabotage -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space stations -- Fiction
There was a rush of vapor. The door was drilled through. Haney picked
Mike up bodily, Joe heaved the door open, and Haney climbed into it,
practically carrying Mike by the scruff of the neck. Joe panted, "Plug
the hole from the inside. Sit on it if you have to!" and slammed the
door shut.
They waited. Sanford's voice came in the ear-phones. It was higher in
pitch than it had been.
"You fools!" he raged. "It's useless! It's stupid to do useless things!
It's stupid to do anything at all--"
There were sudden scuffling clankings. Joe swung about. The Chief and
Sanford were struggling. Sanford flailed his arms about, trying to break
the Chief's faceplate while he screamed furious things about futility.
The Chief got exactly the hold he wanted. He lifted Sanford from the
metal deck. He could have thrown him away to emptiness, then, but he did
not.
He set Sanford in mid-space as if upon a shelf. The raging man hung in
the void an exact man-height above the Platform's surface. The Chief
drew back and left him there, Sanford could writhe there for a century
before the Platform's infinitesimal gravity brought him down.
"Huh!" said the Chief wrathfully. "How's Haney and Mike making out?"
Almost on the instant, twenty yards away, a tiny airlock door thrust out
from the surface of glittering metal, and helmet and antenna appeared.
"You guys can come in now," said Haney's voice in Joe's headphones.
"It's all okay. Mike's pumping out the other locks too, so you can come
in at any of 'em."
The space-suited figures clumped loudly to airlock doors. There were a
dozen or more small airlocks in various parts of the hull, besides the
great door to admit supply ships. The Chief growled and moved toward
Sanford now raging like the madman his helplessness made him.
"No," said Joe shortly. "He'd fight again. Go inside. That's an order,
Chief."
The Chief grunted and obeyed. Joe went to the nearest airlock and
entered the great steel hull.
Sanford floated in emptiness, two yards from the Space Platform he would
have turned into a derelict. He did not move farther away. He did not
fall toward it. There was nobody to listen to him. He cried out in
blood-curdling fury because other men were smarter than he was. Other
men had solved problems he could not solve. Other men were his
superiors. He screamed his rage.
Presently the Platform revolved slowly beneath him. It was turned, of
course, by the monster gyros which in turn were controlled by the pilot
gyros Joe and Haney and the Chief and Mike had repaired when saboteurs
smashed them.
The Platform rotated sedately. A great gap appeared in it. The door of
the supply ship lock moved until Sanford, floating helplessly, was
opposite its mouth.
A rod with a rounded object at its end appeared past the docked supply
ship. It reached out and touched Sanford's helmet. It was the magnetic
grapple which drew space ships into their dock.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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