ending closed with the Platform headed for Alpha Centaurus--which
was hardly the intention of anybody outside of filmdom. The third ending
was secret, but it was said that hard-boiled motion-picture executives
had cried like babies when it was thrown on preview screens.

These, of course, were merely sidelights. They were not very important
in the Shed. There, work went on at a feverish rate although there was
no longer any construction work to be done. In theory, therefore, the
members of welders and pipe-fitters and steel-construction and
electrical and other unions should have retired gracefully to Bootstrap.
Members of building-maintenance and rigging and wrecking and other
assorted unions should have been gathered together in far cities,
screened by security, and brought to Bootstrap and paid overtime to pull
up wood-block flooring and unbolt and jack out the proper sections of
the Shed's eastern wall.

But if there had been anything of that sort tried, it would have
produced bloodshed. The men who'd built the Platform were going to see
it depart this Earth or else. They'd never have a second chance. It
would work the first time or it wouldn't work at all.

So the Platform was made ready for its take-off by the men who had made
it. A gigantic section--two full gores--of the Shed's wall was unbolted
in two pieces, and each piece thrust outward at the top and bottom, so
that they were offset from the rest of the huge half-globe. There were
hundreds of wheels at their bottom which for the first time touched the
sixteen lines of rails laid with unbelievable solidity around the
outside of the Shed. And then the monstrous sections were rolled aside.
A vast opening resulted, and morning sunlight smote for the first time
mankind's very first space craft.

Joe saw the sunlight strike, and his first sensation was of
disappointment. The normal shape of the Platform was ungainly, but now
it was practically hidden by the solid-fuel rockets which would consume
themselves in their firing. Also, the floor of the Shed looked strange.
It was littered with the clumsy shapes of pushpots, trucked to this
place in an unending stream all night long. A very young lieutenant from
the pushpot airfield hunted up Joe and assured him that every drop of
fuel in every pushpot's tanks had been tested twice--once in the storage
tanks, and again in the pushpots. Joe thanked him very politely.

There was no longer any scaffolding. There were no