four people. He got into it, and Dr. Chuka got in beside
him. Chuka waved his hand. The cage started up.

Bordman winced as the ground dropped away below. It was ghastly to be
dangling in emptiness like this. He wanted to close his eyes. The cage
went up and up and up. It took many long minutes to reach the top.

There was a platform there. Newly-made. The sunlight was blindingly
bright. The landscape was an intolerable glare. Bordman adjusted his
goggles to maximum darkness and stepped gingerly from the swaying cage
to the hardly more solid-seeming area. Here he was in mid-air on a
platform barely ten feet square. It was rather more than twice the
height of a metropolitan skyscraper from the ground. There were actual
mountain-crests only half a mile away and not much higher. Bordman was
acutely uncomfortable. He would get used to it, but----

* * * * *

"Well?" he asked fretfully. "Chuka said you needed me here. What's the
matter?"

Ralph Redfeather nodded very formally. Aletha was here, too, and two of
Chuka's foremen--one did not look happy--and four of the Amerind
steel-workers. They grinned at Bordman.

"I wanted you to see," said Aletha's cousin, "before we threw on the
current. It doesn't look like that little grid could handle the sand it
took care of. But Lewanika wants to report."

A dark man who worked under Chuka--and looked as if he belonged on solid
ground--said carefully:

"We cast the beams for the small landing grid, Mr. Bordman. We melted
the metal out of the cliffs and ran it into molds as it flowed down."

He stopped. One of the Indians said:

"We made the girders into the small landing grid. It bothered us because
we built it on the sand that had buried the big grid. We didn't
understand why you ordered it there. But we built it."

The second dark man said with a trace of swagger:

"We made the coils, Mr. Bordman. We made the small grid so it would work
the same as the big one when it was finished. And then we made the big
grid work, finished or not!"

Bordman said impatiently:

"All right. Very good. But what is this? A ceremony?"

"Just so," said Aletha, smiling. "Be patient, Mr. Bordman!"

Her cousin said conversationally:

"We built the small grid on the top of the sand. And it tapped the
ionosphere for power. No lack of power then! And we'd set it to heave up
sand instead of ships. Not to heave it out into space, but to give it up
to mile a s