uilt to house the workmen who'd built the Platform and the
still invisible, ferociously howling pushpots and now the small supply
ships, the first of which was to make its first trip today.

The Shed seemed very near because of its monstrous size. When he was
actually at the base of its wall, it seemed to fill half the firmament
and more than half the horizon. He went in, and felt self-conscious when
the guard's eyes fell on his uniform. There was a tiny vestibule. Then
he was in the Shed itself, and it was enormous.

There were acres of wood-block flooring. There was a vast,
steel-girdered arching roof which was fifty stories high in the center.
All this size had been needed when the Space Platform was being built.
Men on the far side were merely specks, and the rows of windows to
admit light usually did no more than make a gray twilight inside. But
there was light enough today. To the east the Shed's wall was split from
top to bottom. A colossal triangular gore had been loosened and thrust
out and rolled aside, and a doorway a hundred and fifty feet wide let in
the sunshine. Through it, Joe could see the fiery red ball which was the
sun just leaving the horizon.

But there was something more urgent for him to look at. Pelican One had
been moved into its launching cage. Only Joe, perhaps, would really have
recognized it. Actually it was a streamlined hull of steel, eighty feet
long by twenty in diameter. There were stubby metal fins--useless in
space, and even on take-off, but essential for the planned method of
landing on its return. There were thick quartz ports in the bow-section.
But its form was completely concealed now by the attached, exterior
take-off rockets. It had been shifted into the huge cradle of steel
beams from which it was to be launched. Men swarmed about it and over
it, in and out of the launching cage, checking and rechecking every
possible thing that could make for the success of its flight to space.

The other three crew-members were ready--Haney and Chief Bender and Mike
Scandia. They were especially entitled to be the crew of this first
supply ship. When the Platform was being built, its pilot-gyros had been
built by a precision tool firm owned by Joe's father. He'd gone by plane
with the infinitely precise apparatus to Bootstrap, to deliver and
install it in the Platform. And the plane was sabotaged, and the gyros
were ruined. They'd consumed four months in the building, and four
months mor