rm project.

But her fiance wasn't a captive. He was the head of that group of
saboteurs. He'd made love to her and proposed to her merely to prepare
her to supply the information he wanted. He needed only to write a
sufficiently agonized note, or gasp tormented pleas on a telephone, to
get what he wanted.

Incidentally, he still had all his fingers when Joe knocked him cold.

Sally had recognized him as the subject of a snapshot she'd once seen
Miss Ross crying over. Miss Ross had hidden it hastily and told her it
was someone she had once loved, now dead. And this inadvertent
disclosure that Miss Ross was the security leak the Major had never had
a clue to could only have come about through such confusion as Mike had
instigated and Haney and the Chief and Joe had organized. But Joe
learned those facts only later.

At the moment, there was still the Platform to be gotten aloft. And
there was plenty of work to do. There were two small rips in the
plating, caused by fragments of the exploded truck. There were some
bullet holes. The Platform could resist small meteorites at forty-five
miles a second, but a high-velocity small-arm projectile could puncture
it. Those scars of battle had to be welded shut. The rest of the
scaffolding had to come down and the rest of the rocket tubes had to be
affixed. And there was cleaning up to be done.

These things occupied the shift that came on at the time of the multiple
sabotage assaults. At first the work was ragged. But the policy of
turning the Security men into news broadcasters worked well. After all,
the Platform was a construction job and the men who worked on it were
not softies. Most of them had seen men killed before. Before the shift
was half over, a definite work rhythm was evident. Men had begun to take
an even greater pride in the thing they had built, because it had been
assailed and not destroyed. And the job was almost over.

Sally went back to her father's quarters, to try to sleep. Joe stayed in
the Shed. His throat was painful enough so that he didn't want to go to
bed until he was genuinely tired, and he was thoroughly wrought up.

Mike the midget had gone peacefully to sleep again, curled up in a
corner of the outgoing screening room. His fellow midgets talked
satisfiedly among themselves. Presently, to show their superiority to
mere pitched battles, two of them brought out a miniature pack of cards
and started a card game while they waited for a bus to ta