summoned by telephone. Within forty-five minutes, messengers carried
orders out to the Shed floor and stopped the installation of certain
types of fittings in all but one of the hulls. In an hour and a half,
top technical designers were doing the work of foremen and getting
things done without benefit of blueprints. The proposal was beautifully
simple to put into practice. Guided-missile control systems were already
in mass production. They could simply be adjusted to take care of
drones.

Within twelve hours there were truck-loads of new sorts of supplies
arriving at the Shed. Some were Air Force supplies and some were
Ordnance, and some were strictly Quartermaster. These were not component
parts of space ships. They were freight for the Platform.

And, just forty-eight hours after Joe and Sally looked dispiritedly down
upon the floor of the Shed, there were seven gleaming hulls in launching
cages and the unholy din of landing pushpots outside the Shed. They came
with hysterical cries from their airfield to the south, and they flopped
flat with extravagant crashings on the desert outside the eastern door.

By the time the pushpots had been hauled in, one by one, and had
attached themselves to the launching cages, Joe and Haney and the Chief
and Mike had climbed into the cabin of the one ship which was not a
drone. There were now seven cages in all to be hoisted toward the sky. A
great double triangular gore had been jacked out and rolled aside to
make an exit in the side of the Shed. Nearly as many pushpots, it
seemed, were involved in this launching as in the take-off of the
Platform itself.

The routine test before take-off set the pushpot motors to roaring