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Updated: May 13, 2025
They were pouring a doughy white paste into huge buckets that carried it aloft, where it vanished into the mouths of tubes that seemed to replace the scaffolding along the Platform's sides. "Lining the rockets," said Sally in a subdued voice. Joe watched. He knew about this, too. It had been controversial for a time.
But even that would send the tin cans an enormous distance, in time. There was no air to slow them. The tin cans twinkled as they left the Platform's steel expanse. They moved away at a speed of possibly 20 to 30 miles an hour. They floated off in all possible directions. They would never reach Earth, of course.
I can understand that the others should wish to do this; I can understand that they will inevitably do it in the long run; but why on earth do you, of all men, want to help them in pulling down a platform on which you yourself might, if you chose, stand well above their heads and shoulders? 'Because I feel the platform's an unjust one, Ernest answered, warmly.
The Chief drew back and left him there, Sanford could writhe there for a century before the Platform's infinitesimal gravity brought him down. "Huh!" said the Chief wrathfully. "How's Haney and Mike making out?" Almost on the instant, twenty yards away, a tiny airlock door thrust out from the surface of glittering metal, and helmet and antenna appeared.
But with the Platform's situation seemingly hopeless, he'd been starkly unable to face the fact that he wasn't clever or brilliant or intelligent enough. If Joe's solution to the proximity fuse bombs had been offered before his emotional collapse, he could have accepted it grandly, and in so doing have made it his own. But it was too late for that now.
But ah Washington does not look at it in exactly the same way." Sally touched Joe warningly. But her face was very bright and proud. Joe felt queer. "Joe," said the Major tiredly, "was an alternate for membership in the Platform's crew. But for penicillin, or something of the sort that made a sick man get well quickly, Joe would be up there in the Platform's orbit now.
He considered ruefully that however convenient this system might be out in the Platform's orbit, it left something to be desired on Earth. But there were clean clothes waiting when he came out. He dressed and felt brand new and utterly peaceful and rested, and it seemed to him very much like the way he had often felt on a new spring morning. It was very, very good!
Each one reached down deliberately and picked up a pushpot. They swung the pushpots to vertical positions and presented them precisely to the Platform's side. They clung there ridiculously. Magnetic grapples, of course. Joe and Sally, at the end of the corridor in the wall, could see the heads of the pushpot pilots in their plastic domes. Music blared from behind the grandstand.
He was drained and empty of emotion because his job was done and he'd lost a very flimsy hope to be one of the Platform's first crew. He didn't really feel better until late that night, when suddenly he realized that life was real and life was earnest, because a panting man was trying to strangle Joe with his bare hands.
There had been four separate and independent attempts to wreck the Platform at the same time. One was, of course, the plan of those sympathetic characters who had volunteered to help Mike and his gang win the status of spacemen by firing the Platform's rockets. There were not many of them, and they had lost heavily. They'd had thermite bombs to destroy the Platform's vitals.
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