e for balancing with absolute no-tolerance accuracy. The
Platform couldn't wait so long for duplicates. So Joe had improvised a
method of repair. And with Haney to devise special machine-tool setups
and the Chief to use fanatically fine workmanship, and Mike and Joe
aiding according to their gifts, they'd rebuilt the apparatus in an
impossibly short time. The original notion was Joe's, but he couldn't
have done the job without the others.

And there had been other, incidental triumphs by the team of four. They
were not the only ones who worked feverishly for the glory of having
helped to build the Earth's first artificial moon, but they had
accomplished more than most. Joe had even been appointed to be an
alternate member of the Platform's crew. But the man he was to have
substituted for recovered from an illness, and Joe was left behind at
the Platform's launching. But all of them had rated some reward, and it
was to serve in the small ships that would supply the man-made
satellite.

Now they were ready to begin. The Chief grinned exuberantly as Joe
ducked through the bars of the launching cage and approached the ship.
He was a Mohawk Indian--one of that tribe which for two generations had
supplied steel workers to every bridge and dam and skyscraper job on the
continent. He was brown and bulky and explosive. Haney looked tense and
strained. He was tall and lean and spare, and a good man in any sort of
trouble. Mike blazed excitement. Mike was forty-one inches high and he
was full-grown. He had worked on the Platform, bucking rivets and making
welds and inspections in places too small for a normal-sized man to
reach. He frantically resented any concessions to his size and he was as
good a man as any. He simply was the small, economy size.

"Hiya, Joe," boomed the Chief. "All set? Had breakfast?"

Joe nodded. He began to ask anxious questions. About steering-rocket
fuel and the launching cage release and the take-off rockets and the
reduction valve from the air tanks--he'd thought of that on the way
over--and the short wave and loran and radar. Haney nodded to some
questions. Mike said briskly, "I checked" to others.

The Chief grunted amiably, "Look, Joe! We checked everything last night.
We checked it again this morning. I even caught Mike polishing the
ejection seats, because there wasn't anything else to make sure of!"

Joe managed a smile. The ejection seats were assuredly the most unlikely
of all devices to