3
horitative knowledge of rocket fuels was the basis for admitted but not extravagant extrapolation on my part. There is the crew of a four-engined transport ship, who argued over my manuscript and settled the argument by a zestful, full-scale crash-landing drill--repeat, "drill"--expressly to make sure I had described all the procedure just right. There is Willy Ley, whom I would like to exempt from responsibility for any statement in the book, while I acknowledge the value of personal talks with him and the pleasure anybody who has ever read his books will recognize. And there is Dr. Hugh S. Rice of the Hayden Planetarium, who will probably be surprised to find that I feel I owe him gratitude. They are in great part responsible for the factual matter in this book.
I think I may add, though, that I worked on it too.
MURRAY LEINSTER "Ardudwy" Gloucester, Va.
Space Platform
1
There wasn't anything underneath but clouds, and there wasn't anything overhead but sky. Joe Kenmore looked out the plane window past the co-pilot's shoulder. He stared ahead to where the sky and cloud bank joined--it was many miles away--and tried to picture the job before him. Back in the cargo space of the plane there were four big crates. They contained the pilot gyros for the most important object then being built on Earth, and it wouldn't work properly without them. It was Joe's job to take that highly specialized, magnificently precise machinery to its destination, help to install it, and see to its checking after it was installed.
He felt uneasy. Of course the pilot and co-pilot--the only two other people on the transport plane--knew their stuff. Every imaginable precaution would be taken to make sure that a critically essential device like the pilot gyro assembly would get safely where it belonged. It would be--it was being--treated as if it were a crate of eggs instead of massive metal, smoothed and polished and lapped to a precision practically unheard of. But just the same