aunching were not given by Brown or an officer designated by him,
because Joe forgot all about it.

Brown made a stormy scene about the matter, and Joe was honestly
apologetic, but the Chief and Haney and Mike glared venomously.

The result was completely inconclusive. Joe had not been put under
Brown's command. He and his crew were the only people on the Platform
physically in shape to operate the space wagons, considering the
acceleration involved. Brent and the others were wearing gravity
simulators, and were building back to strength. But they weren't up to
par as yet. They'd been in space too long.

So there was nothing Brown could do. He retreated into icily correct,
outraged dignity. And the others hauled in and unloaded rockets as they
arrived. They came up fast. The processes of making them had been
improved. They could be made faster, heated to sintering temperature
faster, and the hulls cooled to usefulness in a quarter of the former
time. The production of space ship hulls went up to four a day, while
the molds for the Moonship were being worked even faster. The Moonship,
actually, was assembled from precast individual cells which then were
welded together. It would have features the Platform lacked, because it
was designed to be a base for exploration and military activities in
addition to research.

But only twenty days after the recovery and docking of the first robot
ship to rise, a new sort of ship entirely came blindly up as a robot.
The little space wagons hauled it to the airlock and inside. They
unloaded it--and it was no longer a robot. It was a modified hull
designed for the duties of a tug in space. It could carry a crew of
four, and its cargohold was accessible from the cabin. It had an
airlock. More, it carried a cargo of solid-fuel rockets which could be
shifted to firing racks outside its hull. Starting from the platform,
where it had no effective weight, it was capable of direct descent to
the Earth without spiralling or atmospheric braking. To make that
descent it would, obviously, expend four-fifths of its loaded weight in
rockets. And since it had no weight at the Platform, but only mass, it
was capable of far-ranging journeying. It could literally take off from
the Platform and reach the Moon and land on it, and then return to the
Platform.

But that had to wait.

"Sure we could do it," agreed Joe, when Mike wistfully pointed out the
possibility. "It would be good to try it. But u