with the
whole business. He noticed that the space station had a crude,
unfinished look, as if it had been hastily thrown together from whatever
materials were available. That didn't ring true for a government
enterprise, no matter how secret.

Berg seemed to read his thought again. "We've worked under severe
handicaps," he said. "Look, just suppose a lot of valuable material and
equipment were ferried into space. If it's an ordinary government deal,
you know how many light-years of red tape are involved. Requisitions
have to be filled out in triplicate, every last rivet has to be
accounted for--there'd simply have been too much chance of a rebel spy
getting a lead on us. It was safer all around to use whatever chance
materials could be obtained from salvage or through individual purchases
on other planets. Ever hear of the _Waikiki_?"

"Ummm--seems so--wasn't she the big freighter that disappeared many
years ago?"

"That's the one. A meteor swarm struck her on the way to Venus.
Furthermore, one of them shorted out her engine controls, so that she
swooped out of the ecliptic plane and fell into an eccentric skew orbit.
When this project was first started, one of our astronomers thought he'd
identified the swarm--it has a regular path of its own about the sun,
though the orbit is so cockeyed that spaceships hardly ever even see the
things. Anyway, knowing the orbit of the meteors and that of the
_Waikiki_ at the time, he could calculate where the disaster must have
taken place--which gave us a lead in searching for the hulk. We found it
after a lot of investigation, moved it here, and built the station up
around it. Very handy. And completely secret."

Lancaster had always suspected that Security was a little mad. Now he
knew it. Oh, well--

* * * * *

His room was small and austere, but privacy was nice. The lab crew ate
in a common refectory. Beyond the edge of their territory, great
bulkheads blocked off three-fourths of the space station. Lancaster was
sure that many people and several Martians lived there, for in the days
that followed he saw any number of strangers appearing and disappearing
in the region allowed him. Most of these were workmen of some kind or
other, called in to help the lab crew as needed, but all of them were
tight-lipped. They must have been cautioned not to speak to the guest
more than was strictly necessary.

Living was Spartan in the station. It rotate