five
miles from its target. The damage it did was negligible.

The work on the preparation for the Platform's take-off went on. When
the all-clear signal sounded inside the Shed, nobody paid any attention.
They were too busy.

13

On the day of the take-off there were a number of curious side-effects
from the completion of the Space Platform. There was a very small
country on the other side of the world which determined desperately to
risk its existence on the success of the Platform's flight. It had to
choose between abject submission to a powerful neighbor, or the
possibility of a revolution in which its neighbor's troops would take on
the semblance of citizens for street-fighting purposes. If the Platform
got aloft, it could defy its neighbor. And in a grim gamble, it did.

There was also a last-ditch fight in the United Nations, wherein the
Platform was denounced and a certain block of associated countries
issued an ultimatum, threatening to bolt the international organization
if the Platform went aloft. And again there had to be a grim gamble. If
the Platform did not take to space and so furnish ultimately a guarantee
of peace, the United Nations would face the alternatives of becoming a
military alliance for atomic war, or something less than an
international debating society.

Of course there were less significant results. There were already
fourteen popular songs ready for broadcast, orchestrated and rehearsed
with singers ready to saturate the ears of the listening public. They
ranged from _We've Got a Warship in the Sky_, which was more or less
jingoistic, to a boy-and-girl melody entitled _We'll Have a Moon Just
for Us Two_. The latter tune had been stolen from a hit of four years
before, which in turn had been stolen from a hit of six years before
that, and it had been stolen from a still earlier bit of Bach, so it was
a rather pretty melody.

And of course there was a super-colossal motion picture epic in color
and with musical numbers, champing in its film cans for simultaneous
first-run showings in eight different key cities. It was titled _To the
Stars_, and three separate endings had been filmed, of which the
appropriate one would of course be used in the eight separate world
_premieres_. One ending had the Platform fail due to sabotage, and the
hero--played by an actor who had interrupted his seventh honeymoon to
play the part--splendidly prepared to build it all over again. The
second