Sally said in horror: "Oh, no!"
"The CO2 bottles were filled with an inflammable or an explosive gas," said her father, unbending. "Instead of making a fire impossible, they made it certain. We'll have to watch out for that trick now, too."
Joe was too disheartened for any emotion except a bitter depression and a much more bitter hatred of those who were ready to commit any crime—and had committed most—in the attempt to destroy the Platform.
The Shed that housed it rose and rose against the skyline. It became huge. It became monstrous. It became unbelievable. But Joe could have wept when the car pulled up at an angular, three–story building built out from the Shed's base. From the air, this substantial building had looked like a mere chip. The car stopped. They got out. A sentry saluted as Major Holt led the way inside. Joe and Sally followed.
The Major said curtly to a uniformed man at a desk: "Get some clothes for this man. Get him a long–distance telephone connection to the Kenmore Precision Tool Company. Let him talk. Then bring him to me again."
He disappeared. Sally tried to smile at Joe. She was still quite pale.
"That's Dad, Joe. He means well, but he's not cordial. I was in his office when the report of sabotage to your plane came through. We started for Bootstrap. We were on the way when we saw the first explosion. I—thought it was your ship." She winced a little at the memory. "I knew you were on board. It was—not nice, Joe."
She'd been badly scared. Joe wanted to thump her encouragingly on the back, but he suddenly realized that that would no longer be appropriate. So he said gruffly: "I'm all right."
He followed the uniformed man. He began to get out of his scorched and tattered garments. The sergeant brought him more clothes, and he put them on. He was just changing his personal possessions to the new pockets when the sergeant came back again.
"Kenmore plant on the line, sir."
Joe went to the phone. On the way he discovered that the banging around he'd had when the plane landed had made a number of places on his body hurt.
He talked to his father.
Afterward, he realized that it was a queer conversation. He felt guilty because something had happened to a job that had taken eight months to do and that he alone was escorting to its destination. He told his father about that. But his father didn't seem concerned. Not nearly so much concerned as he should have been. He asked urgent questions about Joe himself. If he was hurt. How much? Where? Joe was astonished that his father seemed to think such matters more important than the pilot gyros. But he answered the questions and explained the exact situation and also a certain desperate hope he was trying to cherish that the gyros might still be repairable. His father gave him advice.
Sally was waiting again when he came out. She took him into her father's office, and introduced him to her father's secretary. Compared to Sally she was an extraordinarily plain woman. She wore a sorrowful expression. But she looked very efficient.
Joe explained carefully that his father said for him to hunt up Chief Bender—working on the job out here—because he was one of the few men who'd left the Kenmore plant to work elsewhere, and he was good. He and the Chief, between them, would estimate the damage and the possibility of repair.
Major Holt listened. He was military and official and harassed and curt and tired. Joe'd known Sally and therefore her father all his life, but the Major wasn't an easy man to be relaxed with. He spoke into thin air, and immediately his sad–seeming secretary wrote out a pass for Joe. Then Major Holt gave crisp orders on a telephone and asked questions, and Sally said: "I know. I'll take him there. I know my way around."
Her father's expression did not change. He simply included Sally in his orders on the phone.
He hung up and said briefly: "The plane will be surveyed and taken apart as soon as possible. By the time you find your man you can probably examine the crates. I'll have you cleared for it."
His secretary reached in a drawer for order forms to fill out and hand him to sign. Sally tugged at Joe's arm. They left.
Outside, she said: "There's no use arguing with my father, Joe. He has a terrible job, and it's on his mind all the time. He hates being a Security officer, too. It's a thankless job—and no Security officer ever gets to be more than a major. His ability never shows. What he does is never noticed unless it fails. So he's frustrated. He's got poor Miss Ross—his secretary, you know—so she just listens to what he says must be done and she writes it out. Sometimes he goes days without speaking to her directly. But really it's pretty bad! It's like a war with no enemy to fight except spies! And the things they do! They've been known even to booby–trap a truck after an accident, so anybody who tries to help will be blown up! So everything has to be done in a certain way or everything will be ruined!"
She led him to an office with a door that opened directly into the Shed. In spite of his bitterness, Joe was morosely impatient to see inside. But Sally had to identify him formally as the Joe Kenmore who was the subject of her father's order, and his fingerprints had to be taken, and somebody had him stand for a moment before an X–ray screen. Then she led him through the door, and he was in the Shed where the Space Platform was under construction.
It was a vast cavern of metal sheathing and spidery girders, filled with sound and detail. It took him seconds to begin to absorb what he saw and heard. The Shed was five hundred feet high in the middle, and it was all clear space without a single column or interruption. There were arc lamps burning about its edges, and high up somewhere there were strips of glass which let in a pale light. All of it resounded with many noises and clanging echoes of them.
There were rivet guns at work, and there were the grumblings of motor trucks moving about, and the oddly harsh roar of welding torches. But the torch flames looked only like marsh fires, blue–white and eerie against the mass of the thing 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.