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The heat of the night is ominously suggestive of shed's popularly conceived temperature, and, in the absence of the customary punkah and nodding, see-sawing wallah, a villager is employed to sit beside my charpoy and agitate the air immediately about my head with a big palm-leaf fan.

They started down the long, winding ramp which led between the two skins of the Shed's wall. It was quite empty, this long, curving, descending corridor. It was remarkably private. In a place like the Shed, with frantic activity going on all around, and even at Major Holt's quarters where Sally lived and Joe was a guest, there wasn't often a chance for them to talk in any sort of actual privacy.

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.

In six weeks they'd learned how to handle a spaceship so far as anybody could learn on solid ground if the simulator was correctly built. Nobody could be sure about that. But it was the best training that could be devised. In minutes Joe had finished the coffee and was out of Major Holt's quarters and headed for the Shed's nearest entrance.

They were halfway up the curve of the Shed's roof, at the edge of the great opening, and they could see everything, from the pushpot pilots as they were checked into their contraptions, to the sedate arrival of the big brass at the grandstand below. There was a reverberant humming from the Shed now. It might have been the humming of wind blowing across its open section.

There was a vast, steel-girdered arching roof which was fifty stories high in the center. All this size had been needed when the Space Platform was being built. Men on the far side were merely specks, and the rows of windows to admit light usually did no more than make a gray twilight inside. But there was light enough today. To the east the Shed's wall was split from top to bottom.

Members of building-maintenance and rigging and wrecking and other assorted unions should have been gathered together in far cities, screened by security, and brought to Bootstrap and paid overtime to pull up wood-block flooring and unbolt and jack out the proper sections of the Shed's eastern wall. But if there had been anything of that sort tried, it would have produced bloodshed.

May God support me, but she's the first I'll see; an' while I have life an' strength, she musn't want attendance; an' thank God her shed's on my way to the Daltons!" She then hastily sent her brother into Ballynafail for such comforts as she deemed necessary for both parties; and in the mean time, putting a bonnet over her clean nightcap, she proceeded to the shed in which Sarah M'Gowan lay.

It was quite light here again; away from the protecting shadows of the shed, the rays of the arc lamp played without hindrance on the wharf just as they did on the shed's side door. Below, some ten or twelve feet below, and at the corner of the wharf, a boat, or, rather, a sort of scow, for it was larger than a boat though oars lay along its thwarts, was moored.

And Mike put the device through its paces. Mike left the gyros spinning so that the main axis pointed at the sun, invisible beyond the Shed's roof. And then all four of them watched. It took minutes for this last small test to show its results.