recision Tool Company instantly closeted themselves with Mike in Major
Holt's quarters. The powder metallurgy men turned up an hour later, and
a three-star general from Washington. They joined the highly technical
discussion.

Joe waited around outside, feeling left out of things. He sat on the
porch with Sally while the moon rose over the desert and stars shone
down. Inside, matters of high importance were being battled over with
the informality and heat with which practical men get things settled.
But Joe wasn't in on it. He said annoyedly, "You'd think my father'd
have something to say to me, in all this mess! After all, I have
been--well, I have been places! But all he said was, 'How are you, Son?
Where's this Mike you talked about?'"

Sally said calmly, "I know just how you feel. You've made me feel that
way." She looked up at the moon. "I thought about you all the time you
were gone, and I--prayed for you, Joe. And now you're back and not even
busy! But you don't---- It would be nice for you to think about me for a
while!"

"I am thinking about you!" said Joe indignantly.

"Now what," said Sally interestedly, "in the world could you be thinking
about me?"

He wanted to scowl at her. But he grinned instead.

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 s