ry 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 k