uess you'd call it in action against saboteurs. One flew to
pieces in mid-air. Sabotage. Carrying critical stuff. One crashed on
take-off, carrying irreplaceable instruments. Somebody'd put a detonator
in a servo-motor. And one froze in its landing glide and flew smack-dab
into its landing field. They had to scrape it up. When this ship got a
major overhaul two weeks ago, we flew it with our fingers crossed for
four trips running. Seems to be all right, though. We gave it the works.
But I won't look forward to a serene old age until the Platform's out of
atmosphere! Not me!"

He went to put the pilot's empty cup in the disposal slot.

The plane went on. There wasn't anything underneath but clouds, and
there wasn't anything overhead but sky. The clouds were a long way down,
and the sky was simply up. Joe looked down and saw a faint spot of
racing brightness with a hint of colors around it. It was the sort of
nimbus that substitutes for a shadow when a plane is high enough above
the clouds. It raced madly over the irregular upper surface of the cloud
layer. The plane flew and flew. Nothing happened at all. This was two
hours from the field from which it had taken off with the pilot gyro
cases as its last item of collected cargo. Joe remembered how grimly the
two crew members had prevented anybody from even approaching it on the
ground, except those who actually loaded the cases, and how one of the
two had watched them every second.

Joe fidgeted. He didn't quite know how to take the co-pilot's talk. The
Kenmore Precision Tool plant was owned by his family, but it wasn't so
much a family as a civic enterprise. The young men of the village grew
up to regard fanatically fine workmanship with the casual
matter-of-factness elsewhere reserved for plowing or deep-sea fishing.
Joe's father owned it, and some day Joe might head it, but he couldn't
hope to keep the respect of the men in the plant unless he could handle
every tool on the place and split a thousandth at least five ways. Ten
would be better! But as long as the feeling at the plant stayed as it
was now, there'd never be a security problem there.

If the co-pilot was telling the truth, though--.

Joe found a slow burn beginning inside him. He had a picture in his mind
that was practically a dream. It was of something big and bright and
ungainly swimming silently in emptiness with a field of stars behind it.
The stars were tiny pin points of light. They were unwinkin