that was being built.

It was not too clear to the eye, this incomplete Space Platform. There
seemed to be a sort of mist, a glamour about it, which was partly a
veiling mass of scaffolding. But Joe gazed at it with an emotion that
blotted out even his aching disappointment and feeling of shame.

It was gigantic. It had the dimensions of an ocean liner. It was
strangely shaped. Partly obscured by the fragile-seeming framework about
it, there was bright plating in swelling curves, and the plating reached
up irregularly and followed a peculiar pattern, and above the plating
there were girders--themselves shining brightly in the light of many arc
lamps--and they rose up and up toward the roof of the Shed itself. The
Platform was ungainly and it was huge, and it rested under a hollow
metal half-globe that could have doubled for a sky. It was more than
three hundred feet high, itself, and there were men working on the bare
bright beams of its uppermost parts--and the men were specks. The far
side of the Shed's floor had other men on it, and they were merely
jerkily moving motes. You couldn't see their legs as they walked. The
Shed and the Platform were monstrous!

Joe felt Sally's eyes upon him. Somehow, they looked proud. He took a
deep breath.

She said: "Come on."

They walked across acres of floor neatly paved with shining wooden
blocks. They moved toward the thing that was to take mankind's first
step toward the stars. As they walked centerward, a big sixteen-wheel
truck-and-trailer outfit backed out of an opening under the lacy haze of
scaffolds. It turned clumsily, and carefully circled the scaffolding,
and moved toward a sidewall of the Shed. A section of the wall--it
seemed as small as a rabbit hole--lifted inward like a flap, and the
sixteen-wheeler trundled out into the blazing sunlight. Four other
trucks scurried out after it. Other trucks came in. The sidewall section
closed.

There was the smell of engine fumes and hot metal and of ozone from
electric sparks. There was that indescribable smell a man can get
homesick for, of metal being worked by men. Joe walked like someone in a
dream, with Sally satisfiedly silent beside him, until the
scaffolds--which had looked like veiling--became latticework and he saw
openings.

They walked into one such tunnel. The bulk of the Platform above them
loomed overhead with a crushing menace. There were trucks rumbling all
around underneath, here in this maze of scaff