and they relayed the news for the
satisfaction of the curiosity of those who worked under them. No
work--no explanation. It produced immediate and satisfactory
co-operation all around.

There had been four separate and independent attempts to wreck the
Platform at the same time. One was, of course, the plan of those
sympathetic characters who had volunteered to help Mike and his gang win
the status of spacemen by firing the Platform's rockets. There were not
many of them, and they had lost heavily. They'd had thermite bombs to
destroy the Platform's vitals. Ultimately the survivors talked freely,
if morosely, and that was that.

There had been a particularly ungifted attempt to cause panic in the
incoming shift in the rooms where its members were screened before
admission to work. Somebody had tried to establish complete confusion
there by firing revolver shots in the crowd, expecting the workers to
break through to the floor and assigned gentlemen with slabs of
explosive to get to the Platform with them. The gentlemen with the
explosives had run into Major Holt's security reserve, and they got
nowhere. The creators of panic with revolver shots were finally rescued
from their shift-mates and more or less scraped up from the
screening-room floor--they were in very bad shape--and carted off to be
patched up for questioning. The members of this group had been
impractical idealists, and besides, some of them had lost their nerve,
as was evidenced by the discovery of abandoned explosives and detonators
in the locker room and men's room of the Shed.

The most dangerous attempt was, of course, that perfectly planned and
co-ordinated assault which had been merely carried out at its original
time, without either being hastened or delayed by Mike's activities.
That plan had been beautifully contrived, and it would certainly have
been successful but for the machine-gun bullets from the gallery and the
fight Joe's followers put up underneath the Platform.

The exact instant when the whole Shed would be most nearly empty had
been fixed upon, and three separate units had worked in perfect timing.
There'd been the man in the stalled truck. He'd delayed his exit from
the Shed to the precise fraction of a second to get the doors open at
the perfect instant. The explosive-laden trucks had raced in at the
exact second when they were most certain to get underneath the Platform
and detonate their cargoes. There'd been a perfect diversi