The other three crew-members were ready--Haney and Chief Bender and Mike
Scandia. They were especially entitled to be the crew of this first
supply ship. When the Platform was being built, its pilot-gyros had been
built by a precision tool firm owned by Joe's father. He'd gone by plane
with the infinitely precise apparatus to Bootstrap, to deliver and
install it in the Platform. And the plane was sabotaged, and the gyros
were ruined. They'd consumed four months in the building, and four
months more for balancing with absolute no-tolerance accuracy. The
Platform couldn't wait so long for duplicates. So Joe had improvised a
method of repair. And with Haney to devise special machine-tool setups
and the Chief to use fanatically fine workmanship, and Mike and Joe
aiding according to their gifts, they'd rebuilt the apparatus in an
impossibly short time. The original notion was Joe's, but he couldn't
have done the job without the others.

And there had been other, incidental triumphs by the team of four. They
were not the only ones who worked feverishly for the glory of having
helped to build the Earth's first artificial moon, but they had
accomplished more than most. Joe had even been appointed to be an
alternate member of the Platform's crew. But the man he was to have
substituted for recovered from an illness, and Joe was left behind at
the Platform's launching. But all of them had rated some reward, and it
was to serve in the small ships that would supply the man-made
satellite.

Now they were ready to begin. The Chief grinned exuberantly as Joe
ducked through the bars of the launching cage and approached the ship.
He was a Mohawk Indian--one of that tribe which for two generations had
supplied steel workers to every bridge and dam and skyscraper job on the
continent. He was brown and bulky and explosive. Haney looked tense and