g south or west. Now it droned on its new course,
forty-five degrees from the original. Joe found himself guessing that
one of the security provisions for planes approaching the Platform might
be that they should not come too near on a direct line to it, lest they
give information to curious persons on the ground.

Time went on. Joe slipped gradually back to his meditations about the
Platform. There was always, in his mind, the picture of a man-made thing
shining in blinding sunlight between Earth and moon. But he began to
remember things he hadn't paid too much attention to before.

Opposition to the bare idea of a Space Platform, for instance, from the
moment it was first proposed. Every dictator protested bitterly. Even
politicians out of office found it a subject for rabble-rousing
harangues. The nationalistic political parties, the peddlers of hate,
the entrepreneurs of discord--every crank in the world had something to
say against the Platform from the first. When they did not roundly
denounce it as impious, they raved that it was a scheme by which the
United States would put itself in position to rule all the Earth. As a
matter of fact, the United States had first proposed it as a United
Nations enterprise, so that denunciations that politicians found good
politics actually made very poor sense. But it did not get past the
General Assembly. The proposal was so rabidly attacked on every side
that it was not even passed up to the Council--where it would certainly
have been vetoed anyhow.

But it was exactly that furious denunciation which put the Platform
through the United States Congress, which had to find the money for its
construction.

In Joe's eyes and in the eyes of most of those who hoped for it from the
beginning, the Platform's great appeal was that it was the necessary
first step toward interplanetary travel, with star ships yet to come.
But most scientists wanted it, desperately, for their own ends. There
were low-temperature experiments, electronic experiments, weather
observations, star-temperature measurements, astronomical
observations.... Any man in any field of science could name reasons for
it to be built. Even the atom scientists had one, and nearly the best.
Their argument was that there were new developments of nuclear theory
that needed to be tried out, but should not be tried out on Earth. There
were some reactions that ought to yield unlimited power for all the
world from really abundan