rway....

There were half a dozen men in the welding crew. They should have been
working. But two men battered savagely at each other, their tools thrown
down. One was tall and lean, with a wrinkled face and an expression of
intolerable fury. The other was squat and dark with a look of
desperation. A third man was in the act of putting down his welding
torch--he'd carefully turned it off first--to try to interfere. Another
man gaped. Still another was climbing up by a ladder from the scaffold
level below.

Joe put Sally's hand on the hoist upright, instinctively freeing himself
for action.

The lanky man lashed out a terrific roundhouse blow. It landed, but the
stocky man bored in. Joe had an instant's clear sight of his face. It
was not the face of a man enraged. It had the look of a man both
desperate and despairing.

Then the lanky man's foot slipped. He lost balance, and the stocky man's
fist landed. The thin man reeled backward. Sally cried out, choking. The
lanky man teetered on the edge of the flat place. Behind him, the
plating curved down. Below him there were two hundred feet of fall
through the steel-pipe maze of scaffolds. If he took one step back he
was gone inexorably down a slope on which he could never stop.

He took that step. The stocky man's face abruptly froze in horror. The
lanky man stiffened convulsively. He couldn't stop. He knew it. He'd go
back and on over the rounded edge, and fall. He might touch the
scaffolding. It would not stop him. It would merely set his body
spinning crazily as it dropped and crashed again and again before it
landed two hundred feet below.

It was horror in slow motion, watching the lean man stagger backward to
his death.

Then Joe leaped.

4

For an instant, in mid-air, Joe was incongruously aware of all the
noises in the Shed. The murky, girdered ceiling still three hundred feet
above him. The swelling, curving, glittering surface of steel
underneath. Then he struck. He landed beside the lean man, with his left
arm outstretched to share his impetus with him. Alone, he would have had
momentum enough to carry himself up the slope down which the man had
begun to descend. But now he shared it. The two of them toppled forward
together. Their arms were upon the flat surface, while their bodies
dangled. The feel of gravity pulling them slantwise and downward was
purest nightmare.

But then, as Joe's innards crawled, the same stocky man who had knocked