wo to three
hundred feet per minute is about right.

The ground took on features. Small gulleys. Patches of coloration too
small to be seen from farther up. The feeling of speed increased. After
long minutes the plane was only a few thousand feet up. The pilot took
over manual control from the automatic pilot. He seemed to wait. There
was a plaintive, mechanical _beep-beep_ and he changed course.

"You'll see the Shed in a minute or two," said the co-pilot. He added
vexedly, as if the thing had been bothering him, "I wish I hadn't missed
that sandy-haired guy putting his hand in the wheel well! Nothing
happened, but I shouldn't have missed it!"

Joe watched. Very, very far away there were mountains, but he suddenly
realized the remarkable flatness of the ground over which they were
flying. From the edge of the world, behind, to the very edge of these
far-distant hills, the ground was flat. There were gullies and
depressions here and there, but no hills. It was flat, flat, flat....

The plane flew on. There was a tiny glimmer of sunlight. Joe strained
his eyes. The sunlight glinted from the tiniest possible round pip on
the brown earth. It grew as the plane flew on. It was half a cherry
stone. It was half an orange, with gores. It was the top section of a
sphere that was simply too huge to have been made by men.

There was a thin thread of white that ran across the dun-colored range
and reached that half-ball and then ended. It was a highway. Joe
realized that the half-globe was the Shed, the monstrous building made
for the construction of the Space Platform. It was gigantic. It was
colossal. It was the most stupendous thing that men had ever created.

Joe saw a tiny projection near the base of it. It was an office building
for clerks and timekeepers and other white-collar workers. He strained
his eyes again and saw a motor truck on the highway. It looked
extraordinarily flat. Then he saw that it wasn't a single truck but a
convoy of them. A long way back, the white highway was marked by a tiny
dot. That was a motor bus.

There was no sign of activity anywhere, because the scale was so great.
Movement there was, but the things that moved were too small to be seen
by comparison with the Shed. The huge, round, shining half-sphere of
metal stood tranquilly in the midst of emptiness.

It was bigger than the pyramids.

The plane went on, descending. Joe craned his neck, and then he was
ashamed to gawk. He looked ahe