And it was as Loftus said. He slewed onto the flat, dust-covered plain like a ski jumper, falling but going forward at a hell of a rate, probably using up the last of his fuel in a single, sustained, straight-ahead blast. And then there was a flurry of dust maybe ten miles long. And after that, even with the 'scope, you couldn't see anything. "Good try," I heard myself saying. "Might've made it!" Loftus said, hope ragged in his voice. "He just might've--" "All alone, oxygen enough for almost two months if he cuts way down," I heard Knight say softly. But I was already calling Kolomar. "Destroyed," I said. And I wished I could've been lying to his teeth. * * * * * From the time Kolomar got back to Earth it took just two days for him, with maybe just a touch of help from his floor-leader brother, to pry the government loose from a half-billion bucks. It took him just twenty-four hours more to get the Pentagon to release plans for a Moon-landing ship that had been mouldering in a vault for the last fifteen years; plans that nobody'd known about since the day they were drawn, I guess; plans just waiting for that half-billion. He had his toughest time with our own scientists. It was sort of the way McGinty had said. The thing would need weeks of study, months of testing, years to perfect, they told him. He told them it was only going to take them a month to get it built. I said I hated him and I do, but you have to give a Liberal-Democrat his due. As with every other job he tackled, when Kolomar wanted to move he knew where to go and he could move fast. And he had long practice at throwing his rank, and the rank that was always behind that. Right now, his job was to retrieve the microstats in McGinty's wrecked L-8--before the Comrades. And he was going to do that job if he had to sandbag the President himself. The project was farmed out to I don't know how many of our biggest industries; all I ever heard was that it carried the highest work-priority any job had ever carried. And the industries took it, triple-shift, day and night. It still took longer than a month. It took nine weeks. And then our shuttles were hauling up the parts, and extra crews were slamming them together as fast as they arrived in the satellite's orbit. That was done in a matter of hours. The Comrades bluffed around at doing the same thing, but all they could do was go through the motions. Take incentive away from anybody and you just can't deliver. They couldn't. We did. Funny thing too when you think it was due to the efforts of one of the most disliked of our men. Irony, maybe, but that's the way things work out sometimes. It was just ten weeks to the day after he crashed that I was bringing the first Moon-landing ship ever built down over the plain where McGinty'd smashed up. Kolomar was co-piloting right next to me. Yes, we found the wrecked L-8 without much trouble.