hey swung the pushpots to vertical positions and
presented them precisely to the Platform's side. They clung there
ridiculously. Magnetic grapples, of course. Joe and Sally, at the end of
the corridor in the wall, could see the heads of the pushpot pilots in
their plastic domes.

Music blared from behind the grandstand. The seats were being filled.
But naturally, the least important personages were arriving first. There
were women in costumes to which they had given infinite thought--and
nobody looked at them except other women. There was khaki. There were
gray business suits--slide-rule men, these, who had done the brain-work
behind the Platform's design. Then black broadcloth. Politicians, past
question. There is nothing less impressive from a height of two hundred
feet than a pot-bellied man in black broadcloth walking on the ground.

There were men in uniforms which were not of the United States armed
forces. They ran heavily to medals, which glittered. There were more
arrivals, and more, and more. The newsreel and TV cameras nosed around.

The cranes worked methodically. They dipped, and deftly picked up a
thing shaped like the top half of a loaf of bread. They swung that metal
thing to the Platform's side. Each time it clung fast, like a snail or
slug to the surface on which it crawls. Many pushpots clung even to the
rocket tubes--the same tubes that would presently burn away and vanish.
So Joe and Sally saw the pushpots in a new aspect: blunt metal slugs
with gaping mouths which were their air scoops.

The tinny music from below cut off. Somebody began an oration. The men
who had built the Platform were not interested in fine phrases, but this
event was broadcast everywhere, and some people might possibly tune to
the channels that carried the speakers and their orations rather than
the channels that showed the huge, bleak, obscured shape of the monster
that was headed either for empty space or pure disaster.

The speaker stopped, and another took his place. Then another. One man
spoke for less than a minute, and the stands went wild! But the one who
followed made splendid gestures. He talked and talked and talked. The
cranes cleaned up the last of the waiting pushpots, and the Platform
itself was practically invisible.

The cranes backed off and went away, clanking. The orator raised his
voice. It made small echoes in the vast cavern that was the Shed.
Somebody plucked the speaker's arm. He ended abruptly an