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.

It occurred to Joe that he should have sent Sally a message that she didn't need to cry as a substitute for him. He felt swell! He knew how to do the job that would let the Space Platform take off! He'd tell her, first chance.

It was very good to be alive.



5

There was nobody in the world to whom the Space Platform was meaningless. To Joe and a great many people like him, it was a dream long and stubbornly held to and now doggedly being made a reality. To some it was the prospect of peace and the hope of a quiet life: children and grandchildren and a serene look forward to the future. Some people prayed yearningly for its success, though they could have no other share in its making. And of course there were those men who had gotten into power and could not stay there without ruthlessness. They knew what the Platform would mean to their kind. For, once world peace was certain, they would be killed by the people they ruled over. So they sent grubby, desperate men to wreck it at any cost. They were prepared to pay for or to commit any crime if the Space Platform could be smashed and turmoil kept as the norm of life on Earth.

And there were the people who were actually doing the building.

Joe rode a bus into Bootstrap that night with some of them. The middle shift—two to ten o'clock—was off. Fleets of busses rolled out from the small town twenty miles away, their headlights making a procession of paired flames in the darkness. They rolled into the unloading area and disgorged the late shift—ten to six—to be processed by security and admitted to the Shed. Then, quite empty, the busses went trundling around to where Joe waited with the released shift milling around him.

The busses stopped and opened their doors. The waiting men stormed in, shoving zestfully, calling to each other, scrambling for seats or merely letting themselves be pushed on board. The bus Joe found himself on was jammed in seconds. He held on to a strap and didn't notice. He was absorbed in the rapt contemplation of his idea for the repair of the pilot gyros. The motors could be replaced easily enough. The foundation of his first despair had been the belief that everything could be managed but one thing; that the all-important absolute accuracy was the only thing that couldn't be achieved. Getting that accuracy, back at the plant, had consumed four months of time. Each of the gyros was four feet in diameter and weighed five hundred pounds. Each spun at 40,000 r.p.m. It had to be machined from a special steel to assure that it would not fly to pieces from sheer centrifugal force. Each was plated with iridium lest a speck of rust form and throw it off balance. If the shaft and bearings were not centered exactly at the center of gravity of the rotors—five hundred pounds of steel off balance at 40,000 r.p.m. could raise the devil. They could literally wreck the Platform itself. And "exactly at the center of gravity" meant exactly. There could be no error by which the shaft was off center by the thousandth of an inch, or a ten-thousandth, or even the tenth of a ten-thousandth. The accuracy had to be absolute.

Gloating over the solution he'd found, Joe could have hugged himself. Hanging to a strap in the waiting bus, he saw another bus start off with a grinding of gears and a spouting of exhaust smoke. It trundled to the highway and rolled away. Another and another followed it. Joe's bus fell in line. They headed for Bootstrap in a convoy, a long, long string of lighted vehicles running one behind the other.

It was dark outside. The Shed was alone, for security. It was twenty miles from the town where its work force slept and ate and made merry. That was security too. One shift came off, and went through a security check, and during that time the Shed was empty save for the security officers who roamed it endlessly, looking for trouble. Sometimes they found it. The shift coming on also passed through a security check. Nobody could get into the Shed without being identified past question. The picture-badge stage was long since passed on the Space Platform job. Security was tight!

The long procession of busses rolled through the night. Outside was dark desert. Overhead were many stars. Inside the jammed bus were swaying figures crowded in the aisle, and every seat was filled. There was the smell of sweat, and oil, and tobacco. Somebody still had garlic on his breath from lunch. There was the noise of many voices. There was an argument two seats up the aisle. There was the rumble of the motor, and the peculiar whine of spinning tires. Men had to raise their voices to be heard above the din.

A swaying among the crowded figures more pronounced than that caused by the motion of the bus caught Joe's eye. Somebody was crowding his way from the back toward the front. The aisle was narrow. Joe clung to his strap, thinking hard and happily about the rebalancing of the gyros. There could be no tolerance. It had to be exact. There had to be no vibration at all....

Figures swayed away from him. A hand on his shoulder.

"Hiya."

He swung around. It was the lean man, Haney, whom he'd kept from being knocked off the level place two hundred feet up.

Joe said: "Hello."

"I thought you were big brass," said Haney, rumbling in his ear. "But big brass don't ride the busses."

"I'm going in to try to hunt up the Chief," said Joe.

Haney grunted. He looked estimatingly at Joe. His glance fell to Joe's hands. Joe had been digging further into the crates, and afterward he'd washed up, but packing grease is hard to get off. When mixed with soot and charcoal it leaves signs. Haney relaxed.

"We mostly eat together," he observed, satisfied that Joe was regular because his hands weren't soft and because mechanic's soap had done an incomplete job on them. "The Chief's a good guy. Join us?"

"Sure!" said Joe. "And thanks."

A brittle voice sounded somewhere around Haney's knees. Joe looked down, startled. The midget he'd seen up on the Platform nodded up at him. He'd squirmed through the press in Haney's wake. He seemed to bristle a little out of pure habit. Joe made room for him.

"I'm okay," said the midget pugnaciously.

Haney made a formal introduction.

"Mike Scandia." He thumbed at Joe. "Joe Kenmore. He's eating with us. Wants to find the Chief."

There had been no reference to the risk Joe had run in keeping Haney from a two-hundred-foot fall. But now Haney said approvingly: "I wanted to say thanks anyhow for keeping your mouth shut. New here?"

Joe nodded. The noise in the bus made any sort of talk difficult. Haney appeared used to it.

"Saw you with—uh—Major Holt's daughter," he observed again. "That's why I thought you were brass. Figured one or the other'd tell on Braun. You didn't, or somebody'd've raised Cain. But I'll handle it."

Braun would be the man Haney had been fighting. If Haney wanted to handle it his way, it was naturally none of Joe's business. He said nothing.

"Braun's a good guy," said Haney. "Crazy, that's all. He picked that fight. Picked it! Up there! Coulda been him knocked off—and I'd ha' been in a mess! I'll see him tonight."

The midget said something biting in his peculiarly cracked and brittle voice.

The bus rolled and rolled and rolled. It was a long twenty miles to Bootstrap. The desert outside the bus windows was utterly black and featureless, but once a convoy of trucks passed, going to the Shed.

Presently, though, lights twinkled in the night. Again the bus slowed, in column with the others. Then there were barrackslike buildings, succeeding each other, and then there was a corner and suddenly the outside was ablaze with light. The busses drew up to the curb and stopped, and everybody was immediately in a great hurry to get out, shoving unnecessarily, and Joe let himself be carried along by the crowd.

He found himself on the sidewalk with bright neon signs up and down the street. He was in the midst of the crowd which was the middle shift released. It eddied and dispersed without seeming to lessen. Most of the figures in sight were men. There were very, very few women. The neon signs proclaimed that here one could buy beer, and that this was Fred's Place, and that was Sid's Steak Joint. Bowling. Pool. A store—still open for this shift's trade—sold fancy shirts and strictly practical work clothes and highly eccentric items of personal adornment. A movie house. A second. A third. Somewhere a record shop fed repetitious music to the night air. There was movement and crowding and jostling, but the middle of the street was almost empty save for the busses. There were some bicycles, but practically no other wheeled traffic. After all, Bootstrap was strictly a security town. A man could leave whenever he chose, but there were formalities, and personal cars weren't practical.

"Chief'll be yonder," said Haney in Joe's ear. "Come along."

They shouldered their way along the sidewalk. The passers-by were of a type—construction men. Somebody here had taken part in the building of every skyscraper and bridge and dam put up in Joe's lifetime. They could have been kept away from the Space Platform job only by a flat refusal by security to let them be hired.

Haney and Joe moved toward Sid's Steak Joint, with Mike the midget marching truculently between them. Men nodded to them as they passed. Joe marshaled in his mind what he was going to tell the Chief. He had a trick for fixing the pilot gyros. A speck of rust would spoil them, and they had been through a plane crash and a fire and explosions, but his trick would do, in ten days or less, what the plant back home had needed four months to accomplish. The trick was something to gloat over.

Into Sid's Steak Joint. A juke box was playing. Over in a booth, four men ate hungrily, with a slot TV machine in the wall beside them showing wrestling matches out in San Francisco. A waiter carried a huge tray from which steam and fragrant odors arose.

There was the Chief, dark and saturnine to look at, with his straight black hair gleaming in the light. He was a Mohawk, and he and his tribe had taken to steel construction work a long time back. They were good. There were not many big construction jobs on which the Chief's tribesmen were not to be found working. Forty of them had died together in the worst construction accident in history, when a bridge on its way to completion collapsed in the making, but there were a dozen or more at work on the Space Platform now. The Chief had essayed machine-tool work at the Kenmore plant, and he'd been good. He'd pitched on the plant baseball team, and he'd sung bass in the church choir, but there had been nobody else around who talked Indian, and he'd gotten lonely. At that, though, he'd left because the Space Platform began and wild horses couldn't have kept him away from a job like that!

He'd held a table for Haney and Mike, but his eyes widened when he saw Joe. Then he grinned and almost upset the table to stand up and greet him.

"Son-of-a-gun!" he said warmly. "What you doin' here?"

"Right now," said Joe. "I'm looking for you. I've got a job for you."

The Chief, still grinning, shook his head.

"Not me, I'm here till the Platform's done."

"It's on the job," said Joe. "I've got to get a crew together to repair something I brought out here today and that got smashed in the landing."

The four of them sat down. Mike's chin was barely above the table top. The Chief waved to a waiter. "Steaks all around!" he bellowed. Then he bent toward Joe. "Shoot it!"

Joe told his story. Concisely. The pilot gyros, which had to be perfect, had been especially gunned at by saboteurs. An attack with possibly stolen proximity-fused rockets. The plane was booby-trapped, and somebody at an airfield had had a chance to spring the trap. So it was wreckage. Crashed and burned on landing.

The Chief growled. Haney pressed his lips together. The eyes of Mike were burning.

"Plenty of that sabotage stuff," growled the Chief. "Hard to catch the so-and-sos. Smash the gyros and the take-off'd have to wait till new ones got made—and that's more time for more sabotage."

Joe said carefully: "I think it can be licked. Listen a minute, will you?"

The Chief fixed his eyes upon him.

"The gyros have to be rebalanced," said Joe. "They have to spin on their own center of gravity. At the plant, they set them up, spun them, and found which side was heavy. They took metal off till it ran smoothly at five hundred r.p.m. Then they spun it at a thousand. It vibrated. They found imbalance that was too small to show up before. They fixed that. They speeded it up. And so on. They tried to make the center of gravity the center of the shaft by trimming off the weight that put the center of gravity somewhere else. Right?"

The Chief said irritably: "No other way to do it! No other way!"

"I saw one," said Joe. "When they cleaned up the wreck at the airfield, they heaved up the crates with a crane. The slings were twisted. Every crate spun as it rose. But not one wobbled! They found their own centers of gravity and spun around them!"

The Chief scowled, deep in thought. Then his face went blank.

"By the holy mud turtle!" he grunted. "I get it!"

Joe said, with very great pains not to seem triumphant, "Instead of spinning the shaft and trimming the rotor, we'll spin the rotor and trim the shaft. We'll form the shaft around the center of gravity, instead of trying to move the center of gravity to the middle of the shaft. We'll spin the rotors on a flexible bearing base. I think it'll work."

Surprisingly, it was Mike the midget who said warmly, "You got it! Yes, sir, you got it!"

The Chief took a deep breath. "Yeah! And d'you know how I know? The Plant built a high-speed centrifuge once. Remember?" He grinned with the triumph Joe concealed. "It was just a plate with a shaft in the middle. There were vanes on the plate. It fitted in a shaft hole that was much too big. They blew compressed air up the shaft hole. It floated the plate up, the air hit the vanes and spun the plate—and it ran as sweet as honey! Balanced itself and didn't wobble a bit! We'll do something like that! Sure!"

"Will you work on it with me?" asked Joe. "We'll need a sort of crew—three or four altogether. Have to figure out the stuff we need. I can ask for anybody I want. I'm asking for you. You pick the others."

The Chief grinned broadly. "Any objections, Haney? You and Mike and me and Joe here? Look!"

He pulled a pencil out of his pocket. He started to draw on the plastic table top, and then took a paper napkin instead.

"Something like this——"

The steaks came, sizzling on the platters they'd been cooked in. The outside was seared, and the inside was hot and deliciously rare. Intellectual exercises like the designing of a machine-tool operation could not compete with such aromas and sights and sounds. The four of them fell to.

But they talked as they ate. Absorbed and often with their mouths full, frequently with imperfect articulation, but with deepening satisfaction as the steaks vanished and the method they'd use took form in their minds. It wouldn't be wholly simple, of course. When the rotors were spinning about their centers of gravity, trimming off the shaft would change the center of gravity. But the change would be infinitely less than trimming off the rotors' rims. If they spun the rotors and used an abrasive on the high side of the shaft as it turned....

"Going to have precession!" warned Mike. "Have to have a polishing surface. Quarter turn behind the cutter. That'll hold it."

Joe only remembered afterward to be astonished that Mike would know gyro theory. At the moment he merely swallowed quickly to get the words out.

"Right! And if we cut too far down we can plate the bearing up to thickness and cut it down again——"

"Plate it up with iridium," said the Chief. He waved a steak knife. "Man! This is gonna be fun! No tolerance you say, Joe?"

"No tolerance," agreed Joe. "Accurate within the limits of measurement."

The Chief beamed. The Platform was a challenge to all of humanity. The pilot gyro was essential to the functioning of the Platform. To provide that necessity against impossible obstacles was a challenge to the four who were undertaking it.

"Some fun!" repeated the Chief, blissfully.

They ate their steaks, talking. They consumed huge slabs of apple pie with preposterous mounds of ice cream on top, still talking urgently. They drank coffee, interrupting each other to draw diagrams. They used up all the paper napkins, and were still at it when someone came heavily toward the table. It was the stocky man who had fought with Haney on the Platform that day. Braun.

He tapped Haney on the shoulder. The four at the table looked up.

"We hadda fight today," said Braun in a queer voice. He was oddly pale. "We didn't finish. You wanna finish?"

Haney growled.

"That was a fool business," he said angrily. "That ain't any place to fight, up on the job! You know it!"

"Yeah," said Braun in the same odd voice. "You wanna finish it now?"

Haney said formidably: "I'm not dodgin' any fight. I didn't dodge it then. I'm not dodgin' it now. You picked it. It was crazy! But if you got over the craziness——"

Braun smiled a remarkably peculiar smile. "I'm still crazy. We finish, huh?"

Haney pushed back his chair and stood up grimly. "Okay, we finish it! You coulda killed me. I coulda killed you too, with that fall ready for either of us."

"Sure! Too bad nobody got killed," said Braun.

"You fellas wait," said Haney angrily to Joe and the rest. "There's a storeroom out back. Sid'll let us use it."

But the Chief pushed back his chair.

"Uh-uh," he said, shaking his head. "We're watchin' this."

Haney spoke with elaborate courtesy: "You mind, Braun? Want to get some friends of yours, too?"

"I got no friends," said Braun. "Let's go."

The Chief went authoritatively to the owner of Sid's Steak Joint. He paid the bill, talking. The owner of the place negligently jerked his thumb toward the rear. This was not an unparalleled request—for the use of a storeroom so that two men could batter each other undisturbed. Bootstrap was a law-abiding town, because to get fired from work on the Platform was to lose a place in the most important job in history. So it was inevitable that the settlement of quarrels in private should become commonplace.

The Chief leading, they filed through the kitchen and out of doors. The storeroom lay beyond. The Chief went in and switched on the light. He looked about and was satisfied. It was almost empty, save for stacked cartons in one corner. Braun was already taking off his coat.

"You want rounds and stuff?" demanded the Chief.

"I want fight," said Braun thickly.

"Okay, then," snapped the Chief. "No kickin' or gougin'. A man's down, he has a chance to get up. That's all the rules. Right?"

Haney, stripping off his coat in turn, grunted an assent. He handed his coat to Joe. He faced his antagonist.

It was a curious atmosphere for a fight. There were merely the plank walls of the storeroom with a single dangling light in the middle and an unswept floor beneath. The Chief stood in the doorway, scowling. This didn't feel right. There was not enough hatred in evidence to justify it. There was doggedness and resolution enough, but Braun was deathly white and if his face was contorted—and it was—it was not with the lust to batter and injure and maim. It was something else.

The two men faced each other. And then the stocky, swarthy Braun swung at Haney. The blow had sting in it but nothing more. It almost looked as if Braun were trying to work himself up to the fight he'd insisted on finishing. Haney countered with a roundhouse blow that glanced off Braun's cheek. And then they bore in at each other, slugging without science or skill.

Joe watched. Braun launched a blow that hurt, but Haney sent him reeling back. He came in doggedly again, and swung and swung, but he had no idea of boxing. His only idea was to slug. He did slug. Haney had been peevish rather than angry. Now he began to glower. He began to take the fight to Braun.

He knocked Braun down. Braun staggered up and rushed. A wildly flailing fist landed on Haney's ear. He doubled Braun up with a wallop to the midsection. Braun came back, fists swinging.

Haney closed one eye for him. He came back. Haney shook him from head to foot with a chest blow. He came back. Haney split his lip and loosened a tooth. He came back.

The Chief said sourly: "This ain't a fight. Quit it, Haney! He don't know how!"

Haney tried to draw away, but Braun swarmed on him, striking fiercely until Haney had to floor him again. He dragged himself up and rushed at Haney—and was knocked down again. Haney stood over him, panting furiously.

"Quit it, y'fool! What's the matter with you?"

Braun started to get up again. The Chief interfered and held him, while Haney glared.

"He ain't going to fight any more, Braun," pronounced the Chief firmly. "You ain't got a chance. This fight's over. You had enough."

Braun was bloody and horribly battered, but he panted: "He's got enough?"

"Are you out o' your head?" demanded the Chief. "He ain't got a mark on him!"

"I ain't—got enough," panted Braun, "till he's got—enough!"

His breath was coming in soblike gasps, the result of body blows. It hadn't been a fight but a beating, administered by Haney. But Braun struggled to get up.

Mike the midget said brittlely: "You got enough, Haney. You're satisfied. Tell him so."

"Sure I'm satisfied," snorted Haney. "I don't want to hit him any more. I got enough of that!"

Braun panted: "Okay! Okay!"

The Chief let him get to his feet. He went groggily to his coat. He tried to put himself into it. Mike caught Joe's eye and nodded meaningfully. Joe helped Braun into the coat. There was silence, save for Braun's heavy, labored breathing.

He moved unsteadily toward the door. Then he stopped.

"Haney," he said effortfully, "I don't say I'm sorry for fighting you today. I fight first. But now I say I am sorry. You are good guy, Haney. I was crazy. I—got reason."

He stumbled out of the door and was gone. The four who were left behind stared at each other.

"What's the matter with him?" demanded Haney blankly.

"He's nuts," said the Chief. "If he was gonna apologize——"

Mike shook his head.

"He wouldn't apologize," he said brittlely, "because he thought you might think he was scared. But when he'd proved he wasn't scared of a beating—then he could say he was sorry." He paused. "I've seen guys I liked a lot less than him."

Haney put on his coat, frowning.

"I don't get it," he rumbled. "Next time I see him——"

"You won't," snapped Mike. "None of us will. I'll bet on it."

But he was wrong. The others went out of the storeroom and back into Sid's Steak Joint, and the Chief politely thanked the proprietor for the loan of his storeroom for a private fight. Then they went out into the neon-lighted business street of Bootstrap.

"What do we do now?" asked Joe.

"Where you sleeping?" asked the Chief hospitably. "I can get you a room at my place."

"I'm staying out at the Shed," Joe told him awkwardly. "My family's known Major Holt a long time. I'm staying at his house behind the Shed."

Haney raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

"Better get out there then," said the Chief. "It's midnight, and they might want to lock up. There's your bus."

A lighted bus was waiting by the curb. Its doors were open, but it was empty of passengers. Single busses ran out to the Shed now and then, but they ran in fleets at shift-change time. Joe went over and climbed aboard the bus.

"We'll turn up early," said the Chief. "This won't be a shift job. We'll look things over and lay out what we want and then get to work, eh?"

"Right," said Joe. "And thanks."

"We'll be there with our hair in braids," said Mike, in his cracked voice. "Now a glass of beer and so to bed. 'Night."

Haney waved his hand. The three of them marched off, the two huge figures of Haney and the Chief, with Mike trotting truculently between them, hardly taller than their knees. They were curiously colorful with all the many-tinted neon signs upon them. They turned into a diner.

Joe sat in the bus, alone. The driver was off somewhere. The sounds of Bootstrap were distinctive by night. Footsteps, and the jangling of bicycle bells, and voices, and a radio blaring somewhere and a record-shop loud-speaker somewhere else, and a sort of underriding noise of festivity.

There was a sharp rap on the glass by Joe's window. He started and looked out. Braun—battered, and bleeding from the corner of his mouth—motioned urgently for him to come to the door of the bus. Joe went.

Braun stared up at him in a new fashion. Now he was neither dogged nor fierce nor desperate to look at. Despite the beating he'd taken, he seemed completely and somehow frighteningly tranquil. He looked like somebody who has come to the end of torment and is past any feeling but that of relief from suffering.

"You—" said Braun. "That girl you were with today. Her pop is Major Holt, eh?"

Joe frowned, and reservedly said that he was.

"You tell her pop," said Braun detachedly, "this is hot tip. Hot tip. Look two kilometers north of Shed tomorrow. He find something bad. Hot! You tell him. Two kilometers."

"Y-yes," said Joe, his frown increasing. "But look here——"

"Be sure say hot," repeated Braun.

Rather incredibly, he smiled. Then he turned and walked quickly away.

Joe went back to his seat in the empty bus, and sat there and waited for it to start, and tried to figure out what the message meant. Since it was for Major Holt, it had something to do with security. And security meant defense against sabotage. And "hot" might mean merely significant, or—in these days—it might mean something else. In fact, it might mean something to make your hair stand on end when thought of in connection with the Space Platform.

Joe waited for the bus to take off. He became convinced that Braun's use of the word "hot" did not mean merely "significant." The other meaning was what he had in mind.

Joe's teeth tried to chatter.

He didn't let them.



6

Major Holt wasn't to be found when Joe got out to the Shed. And he wasn't in the house in the officers'-quarters area behind it. There was only the housekeeper, who yawned pointedly as she let Joe in. Sally was presumably long since asleep. And Joe didn't know any way to get hold of the Major. He assured himself that Braun was a good guy—if he weren't he wouldn't have insisted on taking a licking before he apologized—and he hadn't said there was any hurry. Tomorrow, he'd said. So Joe uneasily let himself be led to a room with a cot, and he was asleep in what seemed seconds. But just the same he was badly worried.

In fact, next morning Joe woke at a practically unearthly hour with Braun's message pounding on his brain. He was downstairs waiting when the housekeeper appeared. She looked startled.

"Major Holt?" he asked.

But the Major was gone. He must have done with no more than three or four hours' sleep. There was an empty coffee cup whose contents he'd gulped down before going back to the security office.

Joe trudged to the barbed-wire enclosure around the officers'-quarters area and explained to the sentry where he wanted to go. A sleepy driver whisked him around the half-mile circle to the security building and he found his way to Major Holt's office.

The plain and gloomy secretary was already on the job, too. She led him in to face Major Holt. He blinked at the sight of Joe.

"Hm.... I have some news," he observed. "We back-tracked the parcel that exploded when it was dumped from the plane."

Joe had almost forgotten it. Too many other things had happened since.

"We've got two very likely prisoners out of that affair," said the Major. "They may talk. Also, an emergency inspection of other transport planes has turned up three other grenades tucked away in front-wheel wells. Ah—CO_2 bottles have turned out to have something explosive in them. A very nice bit of work, that! The sandy-haired man who fueled your plane—ah—disappeared. That is bad!"

Joe said politely: "That's fine, sir."

"All in all, you've been the occasion of our forestalling a good deal of sabotage," said the Major. "Bad for you, of course.... Did you find the men you were looking for?"

"I've found them, but—."

"I'll have them transferred to work under your direction," said the Major briskly. "Their names?"

Joe gave the names. The Major wrote them down.

"Very good. I'm busy now——"

"I've a tip for you," said Joe. "I think it should be checked right away. I don't feel too good about it."

The Major waited impatiently. And Joe explained, very carefully, about the fight on the Platform the day before, Braun's insistence on finishing the fight in Bootstrap, and then the tip he'd given Joe after everything was over. He repeated the message exactly, word for word.

The Major, to do him justice, did not interrupt. He listened with an expression that varied between grimness and weariness. When Joe ended he picked up a telephone. He talked briefly. Joe felt a reluctant sort of approval. Major Holt was not a man one could ever feel very close to, and the work he was in charge of was not likely to make him popular, but he did think straight—and fast. He didn't think "hot" meant "significant," either. When he'd hung up the phone he said curtly: "When will your work crew get here?"

"Early—but not yet," said Joe. "Not for some time yet."

"Go with the pilot," said the Major. "You'd recognize what Braun meant as soon as anybody. See what you see."

Joe stood up.

"You—think the tip is straight?"

"This isn't the first time," said Major Holt detachedly, "that a man has been blackmailed into trying sabotage. If he's got a family somewhere abroad, and they're threatened with death or torture unless he does such-and-such here, he's in a bad fix. It's happened. Of course he can't tell me! He's watched. But he sometimes finds an out."

Joe was puzzled. His face showed it.

"He can try to do the sabotage," said the Major precisely, "or he can arrange to be caught trying to do it. If he's caught—he tried; and the blackmail threat is no threat at all so long as he keeps his mouth shut. Which he does. And—ah—you would be surprised how often a man who wasn't born in the United States would rather go to prison for sabotage than commit it—here."

Joe blinked.

"If your friend Braun is caught," said the Major, "he will be punished. Severely. Officially. But privately, someone will—ah—mention this tip and say 'thanks.' And he'll be told that he will be released from prison just as soon as he thinks it's safe. And he will be. That's all."

He turned to his papers. Joe went out. On the way to meet the pilot who'd check on his tip, he thought things over. He began to feel a sort of formless but very definite pride. He wasn't quite sure what he was proud of, but it had something to do with being part of a country toward which men of wholly different upbringing could feel deep loyalty. If a man who was threatened unless he turned traitor, a man who might not even be a citizen, arranged to be caught and punished for an apparent crime against a country rather than commit it—that wasn't bad. There can be a lot of things wrong with a nation, but if somebody from another one entirely can come to feel that kind of loyalty toward it—well—it's not too bad a country to belong to.

Joe had a security guard with him this time, instead of Sally, as he went across the vast, arc-lit interior of the Shed and past the shimmering growing monster that was the Platform. He went all the way to the great swinging doors that let in materials trucks. And there were guards there, and they checked each driver very carefully before they admitted his truck. But somehow it wasn't irritating. It wasn't scornful suspicion. There'd be snide and snappy characters in the Security force, of course, swaggering and throwing their weight about. But even they were guarding something that men—some men—were willing to throw away their lives for.

Joe and his guard reached one of the huge entrances as a ten-wheeler truck came in with a load of shining metal plates. Joe's escort went through the opening with him and they waited outside. The sun had barely risen. It looked huge but very far away, and Joe suddenly realized why just this spot had been chosen for the building of the Platform.

The ground was flat. All the way to the eastern horizon there wasn't even a minor hillock rising above the plain. It was bare, arid, sun-scorched desert. It was featureless save for sage and mesquite and tall thin stalks of yucca. But it was flat. It could be a runway. It was a perfect place for the Platform to start from. The Platform shouldn't touch ground at all, after it was out of the Shed, but at least it wouldn't run into any obstacles on its way toward the horizon.

A light plane came careening around the great curved outer surface of the Shed. It landed and taxied up to the door. It swung smartly around and its side door opened. A bandaged hand waved at Joe. He climbed in. The pilot of this light, flimsy plane was the co-pilot of the transport of yesterday. He was the man Joe had helped to dump cargo.

Joe climbed in and settled himself. The small motor pop-popped valiantly, the plane rushed forward over hard-packed desert earth, and went swaying up into the air.

The co-pilot—pilot now—shouted cheerfully above the din: "Hiya. You couldn't sleep either? Burns hurt?"

Joe shook his head.

"Bothered," he shouted in reply. Then he added, "Do I do something to help, or am I along just for the ride?"

"First we take a look," the pilot called over the motor racket. "Two kilometers due north of the Shed, eh?"

"That's right."

"We'll see what's there," the pilot told him.

The small plane went up and up. At five hundred feet—nearly level with the roof of the Shed—it swung away and began to make seemingly erratic dartings out over the spotty desert land, and then back. Actually, it was a search pattern. Joe looked down from his side of the small cockpit. This was a very small plane indeed, and in consequence its motor made much more noise inside its cabin than much more powerful engines in bigger ships.

"Those burns I got," shouted the pilot, staring down, "kept me awake. So I got up and was just walking around when the call came for somebody to drive one of these things. I took over."

Back and forth, and back and forth. From five hundred feet in the early morning the desert had a curious appearance. The plane was low enough for each smallest natural feature to be visible, and it was early enough for every shrub or hummock to cast a long, slender shadow. The ground looked streaked, but all the streaks ran the same way, and all were shadows.

Joe shouted: "What's that?"

The plane banked at a steep angle and ran back. It banked again. The pilot stared carefully. He reached forward and pushed a button. There was a tiny impact underfoot. Another steep banking turn, and Joe saw a puff of smoke in the air.

The pilot shouted: "It's a man. He looks dead."

He swung directly over the small prone object and there was a second puff of smoke.

"They've got range finders on us from the Shed," he called across the two-foot space separating him from Joe. "This marks the spot. Now we'll see if there's anything to the hot part of that tip."

He reached over behind his seat and brought out a stubby pole like a fishpole with a very large reel. There was also a headset, and something very much like a large aluminum fish on the end of the line.

"You know Geiger counters?" called the pilot. "Stick on these headphones and listen!"

Joe slipped on the headset. The pilot threw a switch and Joe heard clickings. They had no pattern and no fixed frequency. They were clickings at strictly random intervals, but there was an average frequency, at that.

"Let the counter out the window," called the pilot, "and listen. Tell me if the noise goes up."

Joe obeyed. The aluminum fish dangled. The line slanted astern from the wind. It made a curve between the pole and the aluminum plummet, which was hollow in the direction of the plane's motion. The pilot squinted down and began to swing in a wide circle around the spot where an apparently dead man had been sighted, and above which puffs of smoke now floated.

Three-quarters of the way around, the random clickings suddenly became a roar.

Joe said: "Hey!"

The pilot swung the plane about and flew back. He pointed to the button he'd pushed.

"Poke that when you hear it again."

The clickings.... They roared. Joe pushed the button. He felt the tiny impact.

"Once more," said the pilot.

He swung in nearer where the dead man lay. Joe had a sickening idea of who the dead man might be. A sudden rush of noise in the headphones and he pushed the button again.

"Reel in now!" shouted the pilot. "Our job's done."

Joe reeled in as the plane winged steadily back toward the Shed. There were puffs of smoke floating in the air behind. They had been ranged on at the instant they appeared. Somebody back at the Shed knew that something that needed to be investigated was at a certain spot, and the two later puffs of smoke had said that radioactivity was notable in the air along the line the two puffs made. Not much more information would be needed. The meaning of Braun's warning that his tip was "hot" was definite. It was "hot" in the sense that it dealt with radioactivity!

The plane dipped down and landed by the great doors again. It taxied up and the pilot killed the motor.

"We've been using Geigers for months," he said pleasedly, "and never got a sign before. This is one time we were set for something."

"What?" asked Joe. But he knew.

"Atomic dust is one good guess," the pilot told him. "It was talked of as a possible weapon away back in the Smyth Report. Nobody's ever tried it. We thought it might be tried against the Platform. If somebody managed to spread some really hot radioactive dust around the Shed, all three shifts might get fatally burned before it was noticed. They'd think so, anyhow! But the guy who was supposed to dump it opened up the can for a look. And it killed him."

He climbed out of the plane and went to the doorway. He took a telephone from a guard and talked crisply into it. He hung up.

"Somebody coming for you," he said amiably. "Wait here. Be seeing you."

He went out, the motor kicked over and caught, and the tiny plane raced away. Seconds later it was aloft and winging southward.

Joe waited. Presently a door opened and something came clanking out. It was a tractor with surprisingly heavy armor. There were men in it, also wearing armor of a peculiar sort, which they were still adjusting. The tractor towed a half-track platform on which there were a crane and a very considerable lead-coated bin with a top. It went briskly off into the distance toward the north.

Joe was amazed, but comprehending. The vehicle and the men were armored against radioactivity. They would approach the dead man from upwind, and they would scoop up his body and put it in the lead-lined bin, and with it all deadly radioactive material near him. This was the equipment that must have been used to handle the dud atom bomb some months back. It had been ready for that. It was ready for this emergency. Somebody had tried to think of every imaginable situation that could arise in connection with the Platform.

But in a moment a guard came for Joe and took him to where the Chief and Haney and Mike waited by the still incompletely-pulled-away crates. They had some new ideas about the job on hand that were better than the original ones in some details. All four of them set to work to make a careful survey of damage—of parts that would have to be replaced and of those that needed to be repaired. The discoveries they made would have appalled Joe earlier. Now he merely made notes of parts necessary to be replaced by new ones that could be had within the repair time for rebalancing the rotors.

"This is sure a mess," said Haney mournfully, as they worked. "It's two days just getting things cleaned up!"

The Chief eyed the rotors. There were two of them, great four-foot disks with extraordinary short and stubby shafts that were brought to beautifully polished conical ends to fit in the bearings. The bearings were hollowed to fit the shaft ends, but they were intricately scored to form oil channels. In operation, a very special silicone oil would be pumped into the bearings under high pressure. Distributed by the channels, the oil would form a film that by its pressure would hold the cone end of the bearing away from actual contact with the metal. The rotors, in fact, would be floated in oil just as the high-speed centrifuge the Chief had mentioned had floated on compressed air. But they had to be perfectly balanced, because any imbalance would make the shaft pierce the oil film and touch the metal of the bearing—and when a shaft is turning at 40,000 r.p.m. it is not good for it to touch anything. Shaft and bearing would burn white-hot in fractions of a second and there would be several devils to pay.

"We've got to spin it in a lathe," said the Chief profoundly, "to hold the chucks. The chucks have got to be these same bearings, because nothing else will stand the speed. And we got to cut out the bed plate of any lathe we find. Hm. We got to do our spinning with the shaft lined up with the earth's axis, too."

Mike nodded wisely, and Joe knew he'd pointed that out. It was true enough. A high-speed gyro could only be run for minutes in one single direction if its mount were fixed. If a precisely mounted gyro had its shaft pointed at the sun, for example, while it ran, its axis would try to follow the sun. It would try not to turn with the earth, and it would wreck itself. They had to use the cone bearings, but in order to protect the fine channellings for oil they'd have to use cone-shaped shims at the beginning while running at low speed. The cone ends of the shaft would need new machining to line them up. The bearings had to be fixed, yet flexible. The——

They had used many paper napkins the night before, merely envisioning these details. New problems turned up as the apparatus itself was being uncovered and cleaned.

They worked for hours, clearing away soot and charred material. Joe's list of small parts to be replaced from the home plant was as long as his arm. The motors, of course, had to be scrapped and new ones substituted. Considering their speed—the field strength at operating rate was almost imperceptible—they had to be built new, which would mean round-the-clock work at Kenmore.

A messenger came for Joe. The security office wanted him. Major Holt's gloomy secretary did not even glance up as he entered. Major Holt himself looked tired.

"There was a man out there," he said curtly. "I think it is your friend Braun. I'll get you to look and identify."

Joe had suspected as much. He waited.

"He'd opened a container of cobalt powder. It was in a beryllium case. There was half a pound of it. It killed him."

"Radioactive cobalt," said Joe.

"Definitely," said the Major grimly. "Half a pound of it gives off the radiation of an eighth of a ton of pure radium. One can guess that he had been instructed to get up as high as he could in the Shed and dump the powder into the air. It would diffuse—scatter as it sifted down. It would have contaminated the whole Shed past all use for years—let alone killing everybody in it."

Joe swallowed.

"He was burned, then."

"He had the equivalent of two hundred and fifty pounds of radium within inches of his body," the Major said unbendingly, "and naturally it was not healthy. For that matter, the container itself was not adequate protection for him. Once he'd carried it in his pocket for a very few minutes, he was a dead man, even though he was not conscious of the fact."

Joe knew what was wanted of him.

"You want me to look at him," he said.

The Major nodded.

"Yes. Afterward, get a radiation check on yourself. It is hardly likely that he was—ah—carrying the stuff with him last night, in Bootstrap. But if he was—ah—you may need some precautionary treatment—you and the men who were with you."

Joe realized what that meant. Braun had been given a relatively small container of the deadliest available radioactive material on Earth. Milligrams of it, shipped from Oak Ridge for scientific use, were encased in thick lead chests. He'd carried two hundred and fifty grams in a container he could put in his pocket. He was not only dead as he walked, under such circumstances. He was also death to those who walked near him.

"Somebody else may have been burned in any case," said the Major detachedly. "I am going to issue a radioactivity alarm and check every man in Bootstrap for burns. It is—ah—very likely that the man who delivered it to this man is burned, too. But you will not mention this, of course."

He waved his hand in dismissal. Joe turned to go. The Major added grimly: "By the way, there is no doubt about the booby-trapping of planes. We've found eight, so far, ready to be crashed when a string was pulled while they were serviced. But the men who did the booby-trapping have vanished. They disappeared suddenly during last night. They were warned! Have you talked to anybody?"

"No sir," said Joe.

"I would like to know," said the Major coldly, "how they knew we'd found out their trick!"

Joe went out. He felt very cold at the pit of his stomach. He was to identify Braun. Then he was to get a radiation check on himself. In that order of events. He was to identify Braun first, because if Braun had carried a half-pound of radioactive cobalt on him in Sid's Steak Joint the night before, Joe was going to die. And so were Haney and the Chief and Mike, and anybody else who'd passed near him. So Joe was to do the identification before he was disturbed by the information that he was dead.

He made the identification. Braun was very decently laid out in a lead-lined box, with a lead-glass window over his face. There was no sign of any injury on him except from his fight with Haney. The radiation burns were deep, but they'd left no marks of their own. He'd died before outer symptoms could occur.

Joe signed the identification certificate. He went to be checked for his own chances of life. It was a peculiar sensation. The most peculiar was that he wasn't afraid. He was neither confident that he was not burned inside, nor sure that he was. He simply was not afraid. Nobody really ever believes that he is going to die—in the sense of ceasing to exist. The most arrant coward, stood before a wall to be shot, or strapped in an electric chair, finds that astoundingly he does not believe that what happens to his body is going to kill him, the individual. That is why a great many people die with reasonable dignity. They know it is not worth making too much of a fuss over.

But when the Geiger counters had gone over him from head to foot, and his body temperature was normal, and his reflexes sound—when he was assured that he had not been exposed to dangerous radiation—Joe felt distinctly weak in the knees. And that was natural, too.

He went trudging back to the wrecked gyros. His friends were gone, leaving a scrawled memo for him. They had gone to pick out the machine tools for the work at hand.

He continued to check over the wreckage, thinking with a detached compassion of that poor devil Braun who was the victim of men who hated the idea of the Space Platform and what it would mean to humanity. Men of that kind thought of themselves as superior to humanity, and of human beings as creatures to be enslaved. So they arranged for planes to crash and burn and for men to be murdered, and they practiced blackmail—or rewarded those who practiced it for them. They wanted to prevent the Platform from existing because it would keep them from trying to pull the world down in ruins so they could rule over the wreckage.

Joe—who had so recently thought it likely that he would die—considered these actions with an icy dislike that was much deeper than anger. It was backed by everything he believed in, everything he had ever wanted, and everything he hoped for. And anger could cool off, but the way he felt about people who would destroy others for their own purposes could not cool off. It was part of him. He thought about it as he worked, with all the noises of the Shed singing in his ears.

A voice said: "Joe."

He started and turned. Sally stood behind him, looking at him very gravely. She tried to smile.

"Dad told me," she said, "about the check-up that says you're all right. May I congratulate you on your being with us for a while?—on the cobalt's not getting near you?—or the rest of us?"

Joe did not know exactly what to say.

"I'm going inside the Platform," she told him. "Would you like to come along?"

He wiped his hands on a piece of waste.

"Naturally! My gang is off picking out tools. I can't do much until they come back."

He fell into step beside her. They walked toward the Platform. And it was still magic, no matter how often Joe looked at it. It was huge beyond belief, though it was surely not heavy in proportion to its size. Its bright plating shone through the gossamer scaffolding all about it. There was always a faint bluish mist in the air, and there were the marsh-fire lights of welding torches playing here and there. The sounds of the Shed were a steady small tumult in Joe's ears. He was getting accustomed to them, though.

"How is it you can go around so freely?" he asked abruptly. "I have to be checked and rechecked."

"You'll get a full clearance," she told him. "It has to go through channels. Me—I have influence. I always come in through security, and I have the door guards trained. And I do have business in the Platform."

He turned his head to look at her.

"Interior decoration," she explained. "And don't laugh! It isn't prettifying. It's psychology. The Platform was designed by engineers and physicists and people with slide rules. They made a beautiful environment for machinery. But there will be men living in it, and they aren't machines."

"I don't see——"

"They designed the hydroponic garden," said Sally with a certain scorn. "They calculated very neatly that eleven square feet of leaf surface of a pumpkin plant will purify all the air a resting man uses, and so much more will purify the air a man uses when he's working hard. So they designed the gardens for the most efficient production of the greatest possible leaf surface—of pumpkin plants! They figured food would be brought up by the tender rockets! But can you imagine the men in the Platform, floating among the stars, living on dehydrated food and stuffing themselves hungrily with pumpkins because that is the only fresh food they have?"

Joe saw the irony.

"They're thinking of mechanical efficiency," said Sally indignantly. "I don't know anything about machinery, but I've wasted an awful lot of time at school and otherwise if I don't know something about human beings! I argued, and the garden now isn't as mechanically efficient, but it'll be a nice place for a man to go into. He won't smell pumpkin plants all the time, either. I've even gotten them to include some flowers!"

They were very near the Platform. And it was very near to completion. Joe looked at it hungrily, and he felt a great sense of urgency. He tried to strip away the scaffolding in his mind and see it floating proudly free in emptiness, with white-hot sunshine glinting from it, and only a background of unwinking stars.

Sally's voice went on: "And I've really put up an argument about the living quarters. They had every interior wall painted aluminum! I argued that in space or out of it, where people have to live, it's housekeeping. This is going to be their home. And they ought to feel human in it!"

They passed into one of the openings in the maze of uprights. All about them there were trucks, and puffing engines, and hoists. Joe dragged Sally aside as a monstrous truck-and-trailer came from where it had delivered some gigantic item of interior use. It rumbled past them, and she led the way to a flight of temporary wooden stairs with two security guards at the bottom. Sally talked severely to them, and they grinned and waved for Joe to go ahead. He went up the steps—which would be pulled down before the Platform's launching—and went actually inside the Space Platform for the first time.

It was a moment of extreme vividness for him. Within the past hour he'd come to think detachedly of the possibility of death for himself, and then had learned that he would live for a while yet. He knew that Sally had been scared on his account, and that her matter-of-fact manner was partly assumed. She was at least as much wrought up as he was.

And this was the first time he was going into what would be the first space ship ever to leave the Earth on a non-return journey.



7

Nobody could have gone through the changes of emotion Joe had experienced that morning and remained quite matter-of-fact. Seeing a dead man who had more or less deliberately killed himself so that he wouldn't have to kill Joe—for one—had its effect. Knowing that it was certainly possible the man hadn't killed himself in time had another. Being checked over for radiation burns which would mean that he'd die quite comfortably within three or four days, and then learning that no burns existed, was something of an ordeal. And Sally—of course her feelings shouldn't have been as vivid as his own, but the fact that she'd been scared for him held some significance. When, on top of all the rest, he went into the Space Platform for the first time, Joe was definitely keyed up.

But he talked technology. He examined the inner skin and its lining before going beyond the temporary entrance. The plating of the Platform was actually double. The outer layer was a meteor-bumper against which particles of cosmic dust would strike and explode without damage to the inner skin. They could even penetrate it without causing a leak of air. Inside the inner skin there was a layer of glass wool for heat insulation. Inside the glass wool was a layer of material serving exactly the function of the coating of a bulletproof gasoline tank. No meteor under a quarter-inch size could hope to make a puncture, even at the forty-five-mile-per-second speed that is the theoretical maximum for meteors. And if one did, the selfsealing stuff would stop the leak immediately. Joe could explain the protection of the metal skins. He did.

"When a missile travels fast enough," he said absorbedly, "it stops acquiring extra puncturing ability. Over a mile a second, impact can't be transmitted from front to rear. The back end of the thing that hits has arrived at the hit place before the shock of arrival can travel back to it. It's like a train in a collision which doesn't stop all at once. A meteor hitting the Platform will telescope on itself like the cars of a railroad train that hits another at full speed."

Sally listened enigmatically.

"So," said Joe, "the punching effect isn't there. A meteor hitting the Platform won't punch. It'll explode. Part of it will turn to vapor—metallic vapor if it's metal, and rocky vapor if it's stone. It'll blow a crater in the metal plate. It'll blow away as much weight of the skin as it weighs itself. Mass for mass. So that weight for weight, pea soup would be just as effective armor against meteors as hardened steel."

Sally said: "Dear me! You must read the newspapers!"

"The odds figure out, the odds are even that the Platform won't get an actual meteor puncture in the first twenty thousand years it's floating round the Earth."

"Twenty thousand two seventy, Joe," said Sally. She was trying to tease him, but her face showed a little of the strain. "I read the magazine articles too. In fact I sometimes show the tame article writers around, when they're cleared to see the Platform."

Joe winced a little. Then he grinned wryly.

"That cuts me down to size, eh?"

She smiled at him. But they both felt queer. They went on into the interior of the huge space ship.

"Lots of space," said Joe. "This could've been smaller."

"It'll be nine-tenths empty when it goes up," said Sally. "But you know about that, don't you?"

Joe did know. The reasons for the streamlining of rockets to be fired from the ground didn't apply to the Platform. Not with the same urgency, anyhow. Rockets had to burn their fuel fast to get up out of the dense air near the ground. They had to be streamlined to pierce the thick, resisting part of the atmosphere. The Platform didn't. It wouldn't climb by itself. It would be carried necessarily at slow speed up to the point where jet motors were most efficient, and then it would be carried higher until they ceased to be efficient. Only when it was up where air resistance was a very small fraction of ground-level drag would its own rockets fire. It wouldn't gain much by being shaped to cut thin air, and it would lose a lot. For one thing, the launching process planned for the Platform allowed it to be built complete so far as its hull was concerned. Once it got out into its orbit there would be no more worries. There wouldn't be any gamble on the practicability of assembling a great structure in a weightless "world."

The two of them—and the way they both felt, it seemed natural for Joe to be helping Sally very carefully through the corridors of the Platform—the two of them came to the engine room. This wasn't the place where the drive of the Platform was centered. It was where the service motors and the air-circulation system and the fluid pumps were powered. Off the engine room the main gyros were already installed. They waited only for the pilot gyros to control them as a steering engine controls an Earth ship's rudder. Joe looked very thoughtfully at the gyro assembly. That was familiar, from the working drawings. But he let Sally guide him on without trying to stop and look closely.

She showed him the living quarters. They centered in a great open space sixty feet long and twenty wide and high. There were bookshelves, and two balconies, and chairs. Private cabins opened from it on different levels, but there were no steps to them. Yet there were comfortable chairs with straps so that when a man was weightless he could fasten himself in them. There were ash trays, ingeniously designed to look like exactly that and nothing else. But ashes would not fall into them, but would be drawn into them by suction. There was unpatterned carpet on the floor and on the ceiling.

"It's going to feel queer," said Sally, oddly quiet, "when all this is out in space, but it will look fairly normal. I think that's important. This room will look like a big private library more than anything else. One won't be reminded every second, by everything he sees, that he's living in a strictly synthetic environment. He won't feel cramped. If all the rooms were small, a man would feel as if he were in prison. At least this way he can pretend that things are normal."

Her mind was not wholly on her words. She'd been frightened for Joe. And he was acutely aware of it, because he felt a peculiar after-effect himself.

"Normal," he said drily, "except that he doesn't weigh anything."

"I've worried about that," said Sally. "Sleeping's going to be a big problem."

"It'll take getting used to," Joe agreed.

There was a momentary pause. They were simply looking about the great room. Sally stirred uneasily.

"Tell me what you think," she said. "You've been in an elevator that started to drop like a plummet. When the Platform is orbiting it'll be like that all the time, only worse. No weight. Joe, if you were in an elevator that seemed to be dropping and dropping and dropping for hours on end—do you think you could go to sleep?"

Joe hadn't thought about it. And he was acutely conscious of Sally, just then, but the idea startled him.

"It might be hard to adjust to," he admitted.

"It'll be hard to adjust to, awake," said Sally. "But getting adjusted to it asleep should be worse. You've waked up from a dream that you're falling?"

"Sure," said Joe. Then he whistled. "Oh-oh! I see! You'd drop off to sleep, and you'd be falling. So you'd wake up. Everybody in the Platform will be falling around the Earth in the Platform's orbit! Every time they doze off they'll be falling and they'll wake up!"

He managed to think about it. It was true enough. A man awake could remind himself that he only thought and felt that he was falling, and that there was no danger. But what would happen when he tried to sleep? Falling is the first fear a human being ever knows. Everybody in the world has at one time waked up gasping from a dream of precipices down which he plunged. It is an inborn terror. And no matter how thoroughly a man might know in his conscious mind that weightlessness was normal in emptiness, his conscious mind would go off duty when he went to sleep. A completely primitive subconscious would take over then, and it would not be satisfied. It might wake him frantically at any sign of dozing until he cracked up from sheer insomnia ... or else let him sleep only when exhaustion produced unconsciousness rather than restful slumber.

"That's a tough one!" he said disturbedly, and noticed that she still showed signs of her recent distress. "There's not much to be done about it, either!"

"I suggested something," said Sally, "and they built it in. I hope it works!" she explained uncomfortably. "It's a sort of blanket with a top that straps down, and an inflatable underside. When a man wants to sleep, he'll inflate this thing, and it will hold him in his bunk. It won't touch his head, of course, and he can move, but it will press against him gently."

Joe thought over what Sally had just explained. He noticed that they were quite close together, but he put his mind on her words.

"It'll be like a man swimming?" he asked. "One can go to sleep floating. There's no sensation of weight, but there's the feeling of pressure all about. A man might be able to sleep if he felt he were floating. Yes, that's a good idea, Sally! It'll work! A man will think he's floating, rather than falling!"

Sally flushed a little.

"I thought of it another way," she said awkwardly. "When we go to sleep, we go way back. We're like babies, with all a baby's fears and needs. It might feel like floating. But—I tried one of those bunks. It feels like—it feels sort of dreamy, as if someone were—holding one quite safe. It feels as if one were a baby and—beautifully secure. But of course I haven't tried it weightless. I just—hope it works."

As if embarrassed, she turned abruptly and showed him the kitchen. Every pan was covered. The top of the stove was alnico-magnet strips, arranged rather like the top of a magnetic chuck. Pans would cling to it. And the covers had a curious flexible lining which Joe could not understand.

"It's a flexible plastic that's heatproof," said Sally. "It inflates and holds the food down to the hot bottom of the pan. They expected the crew to eat ready-prepared food. I said that it would be bad enough to have to drink out of plastic bottles instead of glasses. They hung one of these stoves upside down, for me, and I cooked bacon and eggs and pancakes with the cover of the pan pointing to the floor. They said the psychological effect would be worth while."

Joe was stirred. He followed her out of the kitchen and said warmly—the more warmly because these contributions to the Space Platform came on top of a personal anxiety on his own account: "You must be the first girl in the world who thought about housekeeping in space!"

"Girls will be going into space, won't they?" she asked, not looking at him. "If there are colonies on the other planets, they'll have to. And some day—to the stars...."

She stood quite still, and Joe wanted to do something about her and the world and the way he felt. The interior of the Platform was very silent. Somewhere far away where the glass-wool insulation was incomplete, the sound of workmen was audible, but the inner corridors of the Platform were not resonant. They were lined with a material to destroy reminders that this was merely a metal shell, an artificial world that would swim in emptiness. Here and now, Joe and Sally seemed very private and alone, and he felt a sense of urgency.

He looked at her yearningly. Her color was a little higher than usual. She was not just a nice kid, she was swell! And she was good to look at. Joe had noticed that before, but now with the memory of her fright because he'd been in danger, her worry because he might have been killed, he thought of her very absurd but honest offer to cry for him.

Joe found himself twisting at the ring on his finger. He got it off, and there was some soot and grease on it from the work he'd been doing. He knew that she saw what he was about, but she looked away.

"Look, Sally," he said awkwardly, "we've known each other a long time. I've—uh—liked you a lot. And I've got some things to do first, but——" He stopped. He swallowed. She turned and smiled at him. "Look," he said desperately, "what's a good way to ask if you'd like to wear this?"

She nodded, her eyes shining a little.

"That was a good way, Joe. I'd like it a lot."

There was an interlude, then, during which she very ridiculously cried and explained that he must be more careful and not risk his life so much! And then there was a faint, faint sound outside the Platform. It was the yapping sound of a siren, crying out in short and choppy ululations as it warmed up. Finally its note steadied and it wailed and wailed and wailed.

"That's the alarm," exclaimed Sally. She was still misty-eyed. "Everybody out of the Shed. Come on, Joe."

They started back the way they'd come in. And Sally looked up at Joe and grinned suddenly.

"When I have grandchildren," she told him, "I'm going to brag that I was the very first girl in all the world ever to be kissed in a space ship!"

But before Joe could do anything about the comment, she was out on the stairs, in plain view and going down. So he followed her.

The Shed was emptying. The bare wood-block floor was dotted with figures moving steadily toward the security exit. There was no hurry, because security men were shouting that this was not an alarm but a precautionary measure, and there was no need for haste. Each security man had been informed by the miniature walkie-talkie he wore. By it every guard could be told anything he needed to know, either on the floor of the Shed, or on the catwalks aloft or even in the Platform itself.

Trucks lined up in orderly fashion to go out the swing-up doors. Men came down from the scaffolds after putting their tools in proper between-shifts positions—for counting and inspection—and other men were streaming quietly from the pushpot assembly line. Except for the gigantic object in the middle, and for the fact that every man was in work clothes, the scene was surprisingly like the central waiting room of a very large railroad station, with innumerable people moving briskly here and there.

"No hurry," said Joe, catching the word from a security man as he passed it on. "I'll go see what my gang found out."

The trio—Haney and Mike and the Chief—were just arriving by the piles of charred but now uncovered wreckage. Sally flushed ever so slightly when she saw the Chief eye Joe's ring on her finger.

"Rest of the day off, huh?" said the Chief. "Look! We found most of the stuff we need. They're gonna give us a shop to work in. We'll move this stuff there. We're gonna have to weld a false frame on the lathe we picked, an' then cut out the bed plate to let the gyros fit in between the chucks. Mount it so the spinning is in the right line."

That would be with the axis of the rotors parallel to the axis of the earth. Joe nodded.

"We'll be able to get set up in the mornin'," added Haney, "and get started. You got the parts list off to the plant for your folks to get busy on?"

Sally said quickly: "He's sending that by facsimile now. Then——"

The Chief beamed in benign mockery. "What you goin' to do after that, Joe? If we got the rest of the day off——?"

Sally said hurriedly: "We were—he was going off on a picnic with me. To Red Canyon Lake. Do you really need to talk business—all afternoon?"

The Chief laughed. He'd known Sally, at least by sight, back at the Kenmore plant.

"No, ma'am!" he told her. "Just askin'. I worked on that Red Canyon dam job, years back. That dam that made the lake. It ought to be right pretty around there now. Okay, Joe. See you as soon as work starts up. In the mornin', most likely."

Joe started away with Sally. Mike the midget called hoarsely: "Joe! Just a minute!"

Joe drew back. The midget's seamed face was very earnest. He said in his odd voice: "Here's something to think about. Somebody worked mighty hard to keep you from getting those gyros here. They might work hard to keep them from getting repaired. That's why we asked for a special shop to work in. It's occurred to me that a good way to stop these repairs would be to stop us. Not everybody would've figured out how to rebalance this thing. You get me?"

"Sure!" said Joe. "You three had better look out for yourselves."

Mike stared at him and grimaced.

"You don't get it," he said brittlely. "All right. I may be crazy, at that."

Joe rejoined Sally. The idea of a picnic was brand new to him, but he approved of it completely. They went to the small exit that led to the security building. They were admitted. There was remarkable calm and efficiency here, even though routine had been upset by the need to stop all work. As they went toward Major Holt's office, Joe heard somebody dictating in a matter-of-fact voice: "... this attempt at atomic sabotage was defeated outside the Shed, but it never had a chance of success. Geiger counters would have instantly shown any attempt to smuggle radioactive material into the Shed...."

Joe glanced sidewise at Sally.

"That's for a publicity release?" he asked.

She nodded.

"It's true, too. Nothing goes in or out of the Shed without passing close to a Geiger counter. Even radium-dial watches show up, though they don't set the sirens to screaming."

Joe said: "I'll get my order for new parts off on the facsimile machine."

But he had to get Major Holt's secretary to show him where to feed in the list. It would go east to the nearest facsimile receiver, and then be rushed by special messenger to the plant. Miss Ross gloomily set the machine and initialed the delivery requisition which was part of the document. It flashed through the scanning process and came out again.

"You and Sally," remarked Sally's father's secretary with a morose sigh, "can go and relax this afternoon. But there's no relaxation for Major Holt. Or for me."

Joe said unhopefully: "I'm sure Sally'd be glad if you came with us."

Major Holt's plain, unglamorous assistant shook her head.

"I haven't had a day off since the work began here," she said frowning. "The Major depends on me. Nobody else could do what I do! You're going to Red Canyon Lake?"

"Yes," agreed Joe. "Sally thought it might be pleasant."

"It's terribly dry and arid here," said Miss Ross sadly. "That's the only body of water in a hundred miles or more. I hope it's pretty there. I've never seen it."

She handed Joe back his original memo from the facsimile machine. An exact copy of his written list, in his handwriting, was now in existence more than fifteen hundred miles away, and would arrive at the Kenmore Precision Tool plant within a matter of hours. There could be no question of errors in transmission! It had to be right!

Sally came out, smiled at her father's secretary, and led Joe down to the entrance.

"I have the car," she said cheerfully, "and there'll be a lunch basket waiting for us at the house. I agreed that the lake was too cold for swimming, though. It is. Snow water feeds it. But it's nice to look at."

They went out the door, and the workers on the Platform were just beginning to pile into the waiting fleet of busses. But the black car was waiting, too. Joe opened the door and Sally handed him the key. She regarded the men swarming on the busses.

"There'll be bulletins all over Bootstrap," she observed, "saying that Braun tried to dust-bomb the Shed. They'll say that he may have carried the cobalt about with him, and so he may have burned other people—in a restaurant, a movie theater, anywhere—while he was carrying the dust and dying without knowing it. So everybody's supposed to report to the hospital for a check-up for radiation burns. Some people may really have them. But Dad thinks that since you weren't burned, Braun didn't carry it around. If anyone is burned, it'll be the person who brought the cobalt here to give him. And—well—he'll turn up because everybody does, and because he's burned he'll be asked plenty of questions."

Joe stepped on the starter. Then he pressed the accelerator and the car sped forward.

They stopped at the house in the officers'-quarters area on the other side of the Shed. Sally picked up the lunch basket that her father's housekeeper had packed on telephoned instructions. They drove away.

Red Canyon was eighty miles from the Shed, and the only way to get there was through Bootstrap, because the only highway away from the Shed led to that small, synthetic town. It was irritating, though they had no schedule, to find that the long line of busses was ahead of them on that twenty-mile stretch. The busses ran nose to tail and filled the road for a half-mile or more. It was not possible to pass so long a string of close-packed vehicles. There was just enough traffic in the opposite direction to make that impracticable.

They had to trail the line of busses as far as Bootstrap and crawl through the crowded streets. Once beyond the town they came to a security stop. Here Sally's pass was good. Then they went rolling on and on through an empty, arid, sun-baked terrain toward the hills to the west. It looked remarkably lonely. Joe thought for the first time about gas. He looked carefully at the fuel gauge. Sally shook her head.

"Don't worry. Plenty of gas. Security takes care of that. When I said where we were going and that I wanted the car, Dad had everything checked. If I live through this, I'll bet I stay a fanatic about cautiousness all my life!"

Joe said distastefully: "I suppose it gets everybody. Mike—the midget, you know—called me back just now to suggest that the people who tried to spoil the gyros might try to harm the four of us to hinder their repair!"

"It's not just foolishness," Sally admitted. "The strain is pretty bad, especially when you know things. You've noticed that Dad's getting gray. That's strain. And Miss Ross is about as tense. Things leak out in the most remarkable way—and Dad can't find out how. Once there was a case of sabotage and he could have sworn that nobody had the information that permitted it but himself and Miss Ross. She had hysterics. She insisted that she wanted to be locked up somewhere so she couldn't be suspected of telling anybody anything. She'd resign tomorrow if she could. It's ghastly." Then she hesitated and smiled faintly: "In fact, so Dad wouldn't worry about me this afternoon——"

He took his eyes off the road to glance at her.

"What?"

"I promised we wouldn't go swimming and——" Then she said awkwardly: "There are two pistols in the glove compartment. Dad knows you. So I promised you'd put one in your pocket up at the lake."

Joe drew a deep breath. She opened the glove compartment and handed him a pistol. He looked at it: .38, hammerless. A good safe weapon. He slipped it in his coat pocket. But he frowned.

"I was looking forward to—not worrying for a while," he said wryly. "But now I'll have to remember to keep looking over my shoulder all the time!"

"Maybe," said Sally, "you can look over my shoulder and I'll look over yours, and we can glance at each other occasionally."

She laughed, and he managed to smile. But the trace of a frown remained on his forehead.

Joe drove and drove and drove. Once they came to a very small town. It may have contained a hundred people. There were gas pumps and a restaurant and two or three general stores, which were certainly too many for the permanent residents. But there were cow ponies hitched before the stores, and automobiles were also in view. The ground here was slightly rolling. The mountains had grown to good-sized ramparts against the sky. Joe drove carefully down the single street, turning out widely once to dodge a dog sleeping placidly in an area normally reserved for traffic.

Finally they came to the foothills, and then the road curved and recurved as it wound among them. And two hours from Bootstrap they reached Red Canyon. They first saw the dam from downstream. It was a monstrous structure of masonry, alone in the mountains. From its top a plume of falling water jetted out.

"The dam's for irrigation," said Sally professionally, "and the Shed gets all its power from here. One of Dad's nightmares is that somebody may blow up this dam and leave Bootstrap and the Shed without power."

Joe said nothing. He drove on up the trail as it climbed the canyon wall in hairpin slants. It was ticklish driving. But then, quite suddenly, they reached the top of the canyon wall and the top of the dam and the level of the lake at once. Here there was a sheet of water that reached back among the barren hillsides for miles and miles. It twisted out of sight. There were small waves on its surface, and grass at its edge. There were young trees. The powerhouse was a small squat structure in the middle of the dam. Not a person was visible anywhere.

"Here we are," said Sally, when Joe stopped the car.

He got out and went around to open the door for her. But she was already stepping out with the lunch basket in her hand when he arrived. He reached for it, and she held on, and they moved companionably away from the car carrying the basket between them.

"There's a nice place," said Sally, pointing.

A small ridge of rock stretched out into the lake, and rose, and spread, and formed what was almost a miniature island some fifty feet across. There were some young trees on it. Sally and Joe climbed down the slope and out the rocky isthmus that connected it with the shore.

Sally let down the lunch box on a stone and laughed for no reason at all as the wind blew her hair. It was a cool wind from over the water. And Joe realized with a shock of surprise that the air felt different and smelled different when it blew over open water like this. Up to now he hadn't thought of the dryness of the air in Bootstrap and the Shed.

The lunch basket was tilted a little. Joe picked it up and settled it more solidly. Then he said: "Hungry?"

There was literally nothing on his mind at the moment but the luxurious, satisfied feeling of being off somewhere with grass and a lake and Sally, and a good part of the afternoon to throw away. It felt good. So he lifted the lid of the lunch basket.

There was a revolver there. It was the other one from the glove compartment of the car. Sally hadn't left it behind. Joe regarded it and said ironically: "Happy, carefree youth—that's us! Which are the ham sandwiches, Sally?"



8

Nevertheless, the afternoon began splendidly. Joe dunked the bottled soft drinks in the lake to cool. Then he and Sally ate and talked and laughed. Joe, in particular, had more than the usual capacity for enjoyment today. He'd been through twenty-four hours of turmoil but now things began to look better. And there was the arrangement with Sally, which had a solid satisfactoriness about it. Sally was swell! If she'd been homely, Joe would have liked her just the same—to talk to and to be with. But she was pretty—and she was wearing his ring. She'd wrapped some string around the inside of the band to make it fit.

The only trouble was that Joe was occasionally conscious of the heavy weight in his right-hand coat pocket.

But they spent at least an hour in contented, satisfying, meaningless loafing that nobody can describe but that everybody likes to remember afterward. From time to time Joe looked ashore, when the weight in his pocket reminded him of danger.

But he didn't look often enough. He was pulling the chilled soft-drink bottles out of the lake when he saw a movement out of the corner of his eye. He whirled, his hand in his pocket....

It was the Chief, with Haney and Mike the midget. They were striding across the rocky small peninsula.

Haney called sharply: "Everything okay?"

"Sure!" said Joe. "Everything's fine! What's the matter?"

"Mike had a hunch," said the Chief. "And—uh—I remembered I worked on the job when this dam was built twelve-fifteen years ago." He looked about him. "It looked different then."

Then he caught Joe's eye and jerked his head almost imperceptibly to one side. Joe caught the signal.

"I'll see about some more soft drinks," he said. "Come help me fish up the bottles."

Sally smiled at the other two. She was already inspecting the lunch basket.

"We still have some sandwiches," she said hospitably, "and some cake."

Haney came forward awkwardly. Mike advanced toward her with something of truculence. Joe knew what was in his mind. If Sally treated him like a freak.... But Joe knew with deep satisfaction that she wouldn't. He went down to the water's edge.