ommittally.

He added painfully: "And not only because you spoke to your father and
told him just the right thing, either. You're--sort of swell, Sally!"

She let out her breath. Then she grinned at him.

"That's the difference between us, Joe," she told him. "To me, what you
just said is the most important thing anybody's said tonight."

10

The world turned over on its axis with unfailing regularity, and nights
followed mornings and mornings followed nights according to
well-established precedent. One man turned up in Bootstrap with
radiation burns, but he had not offered himself for check over at the
hospital. He was found dead in his lodging. Since nobody else appeared
to have suffered any burns at all, it was assumed that he was the
messenger who had brought the radioactive cobalt to Braun, who also had
been doomed by possession of the deadly stuff, but who had broken the
chain of fatality by not dumping it free into the air of the Shed. Under
the circumstances, then, three-shift work on the Platform was resumed,
and three times in each twenty-four hours fleets of busses rolled out of
Bootstrap carrying men to work in the Shed, and rolled back again loaded
with men who had just stopped working there.

Trucks carried materials to the Shed, and swing-up doors opened in the
great dome's eastern wall, and the trucks went in and unloaded. Then the
trucks went out of the same doors and trundled back for more materials.
In the Shed, shining plates of metal swung aloft, and welding torches
glittered in the maze of joists and upright pipes that still covered the
monster shape. Each day it was a little more nearly complete. In a
separate, guarded workshop by a sidewall, the Chief and Haney and Mike
the midget labored mightily to accomplish the preposterous. They grew
lean and red-eyed from fatigue, and short of temper and ever more
fanatical--and security men moved about in seeming uselessness but
never-ceasing vigilance.

There were changes, though. The assembly line of pushpots grew shorter,
and the remaining monstrosities around the sidewall were plainly near to
completion. There came a day, indeed, when only five ungainly objects
remained on that line, and even they were completely plated in and
needed only a finishing touch. It was at this time that more crates and
parcels arrived from the Kenmore Precision Tool plant, and Joe dropped
his schoolroomlike instruction course in space flight for work of
grea