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Space Platform Murray Leinster
In the little desert town of Bootstrap stands a huge metal shed. In the shed men are building an object that can change the history of mankind. It is a Space Platform. Propelled to an orbit 4000 miles from Earth this platform will serve as the starting place for man’s exploration of mysterious outer space. When young Joe Kenmore came to Bootstrap to install pilot gyros in the Platform he hadn’t bargained for sabotage or murder or love. But Joe learned that ruthless agents were determined to wreck the project. He found that the beautiful girl he loved, and men like The Chief, a rugged Indian steelworker, and Mike, a midget who made up for his size by brains, would have to fight with their bare hands to make man’s age old dream of space travel come true! With scientific accuracy and imagination Murray Leinster, one of the world’s top science-fiction writers, describes the building and launching of the platform. Here is a fast-paced story of sabotage and murder directed against a project more secret and valuable than the atom bomb! This classic science fiction novel by Murray Leinster was first published by Shasta in February 1953. Joe Kenmore's adventures in space continued in Space Tug. Murray Leinster was a nom de plume of William Fitzgerald Jenkins (1896-1975), an award-winning American writer of science fiction and alternate history. He wrote and published over 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays. Leinster is credited with the invention of parallel universe stories. Four years before Jack Williamson's The Legion of Time came out, Leinster published his "Sidewise in Time" in the June 1934 issue of Astounding. This was probably the first time that the concept of alternative worlds appeared in modern science fiction. Leinster's 1946 short story "A Logic Named Joe" contains one of the first descriptions of a computer (called a "logic") in fiction. In the story, Leinster was decades ahead of his time in imagining the Internet. He envisioned logics in every home, linked through a distributed system of servers (called "tanks"), to provide communications, entertainment, data access, and commerce; one character says that "logics are civilization." Jenkins was also an inventor, best known for the front projection process used in special effects.
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