r_ was built in the big Transcontinental shops in
Newark; the power they needed was not available in the smaller shops.

Working twenty-four hours a day, in three shifts, skilled men took two
months to finish the hull according to Fuller's specifications. The huge
walls of lux metal required great care in construction, for they could
not be welded; they had to be formed in position. And they could only be
polished under powerful magnets, where the dense magnetic field softened
the lux metal enough to allow a diamond polisher to do the job.

When the hull was finished, there came the laborious work of installing
the power plant and the tremendous power leads, the connectors, the
circuits to the relays--a thousand complex circuits.

Much of it was standard: the molecular power tubes, the molecular ray
projectors, the power tubes for the invisibility apparatus, and many
other parts. All the relays were standard, the gyroscopic stabilizers
were standard, and the electromagnetic braking equipment for the gyros
was standard.

But there would be long days of work ahead for Arcot, Wade, and Morey,
for only they could install the special equipment; only they could put
in the complicated wiring, for no one else on Earth understood the
circuits they had to establish.

During the weeks of waiting, Arcot and his friends worked on auxiliary
devices to be used with the ship. They wanted to make some improvements
on the old molecular ray pistols, and to develop atomic powered heat
projectors for hand use. The primary power they stored in small
space-strain coils in the handgrip of the pistol. Despite their small
size, the coils were capable of storing power for thirty hours of
continuous operation of the rays. The finished weapon was scarcely
larger than a standard molecular ray pistol.

Arcot pointed out that many of the planets they might visit would be
larger than Earth, and they lacked any way of getting about readily
under high gravity. Since something had to be done about that, Arcot did
it. He demonstrated it to his friends one day in the shop yard.

Morey and Wade had just been in to see Fuller about some details of the
ship, and as they came out, Arcot called them over to his work bench. He
was wearing a space suit without the helmet.

The modern space suit is made of woven lux metal wires of extremely
small diameter and airproofed with a rubberoid fluorocarbon plastic, and
furnished with air and heating units. Made as