ke them back to
Bootstrap.

The Chief's Indian associates loafed comfortably while waiting for the
same busses. Later they would put in for overtime--and get it. Haney
mourned that he had been remote from the scene of action, and was merely
responsible for the presence and placing and firing of the machine guns
that had certainly kept the Platform from being blown up from below.

It seemed that nothing else would happen to bother anybody. But there
was one thing more.

That thing happened just two hours before it was time for the shift to
change once again, and when normal work was back in progress in the
Shed. Everything seemed fully organized and serene. Everything in the
Shed had settled down, and nothing had happened outside.

There was ample exterior protection, of course, but the outside-guard
system hadn't had anything to do for a very long time. Men at radar
screens were bored and sleepy from sheer inactivity and silence. Pilots
in jet planes two miles and five miles and eight miles high had long
since grown weary of the splendid view below them. After all, one can
get very used to late, slanting moonlight on cloud masses far
underneath, and bright and hostile-seeming stars overhead.

So the thing was well timed.

A Canadian station noticed the pip on its radar screen first. The radar
observer was puzzled by it. It could have been a meteor, and the
Canadian observer at first thought it was. But it wasn't going quite
fast enough, and it lasted too long. It was traveling six hundred
seventy-two miles an hour, and it was headed due south at sixty thousand
feet. The speed could have been within reason--provided it didn't stay
constant. But it did. There was something traveling south at eleven
miles a minute or better. A mile in five-plus seconds. It didn't slow.
It didn't drop.

The Canadian radarman debated painfully. He stopped his companion from
the reading of a magazine article about chinchilla breeding in the home.
He showed him the pip, still headed south and almost at the limit of
this radar instrument's range. They discussed the thing dubiously. They
decided to report it.

They had a little trouble getting the call through. The night
long-distance operators were sleepy. Because of the difficulty of making
the call, the radarmen became obstinate and insisted on putting it
through. They reported to Ottawa that some object flying at sixty
thousand feet and six hundred seventy-two miles an hour was cro