Joe beckoned. There were more, hurried clankings. Space-suited figures
gathered about.

The Platform rolled on through space. Where it was bright it was very,
very bright, and where it was dark it was blackness. Off in emptiness
the many-colored mass of Earth shone hugely, rolling past. Innumerable
incurious stars looked on. The sun flamed malevolently. The moon floated
abstractedly far away.

Mike was bent above a small round airlock door. He had a distorted
half-cylinder of sheet tin between his space-gloved hands. It reflected
a line of intensified sunlight to the edge of the airlock seal. Haney
ripped fiercely at other tin cans. Joe held another strip of polished
metal. It focused crudely--very crudely--on top of Mike's line of
reflected sunshine. Someone else held the end of a tin can to reflect
more sunshine. Someone else had a larger disk of tin.

They stood carefully still. It looked completely foolish. There were six
men in frozen attitudes, trying to reflect sunshine down to a single
blindingly-bright spot on an airlock door. They seemed breathlessly
tense. They ignored the glories of the firmament. They were utterly
absorbed in trying to make a spot of unbearable brightness glow more
brightly still.

Mike moved his hand to cast a shadow. The steel was a little more than
red-hot for the space of an inch. It would not melt, of course. It could
not. And they had no tools to bend or pierce the presumably softened
metal. But Mike said fiercely: