Then, while the partially built Platform swept onward, without sound or sensation of movement, nothing else happened for a certain time. The three men inside the cabin waited for the metal to warm up from the temperature of liquid air. During full sunshine it went up to the temperature of low-pressure steam. When all the framework was warm enough so it was no longer brittle, the cabin air lock opened. McCauley came out in a silvery space suit. Captain Randy Hall followed him. Lieutenant Sammy Breen came last. McCauley surveyed the framework. Even a tiny meteorite could do damage, because any such object could be expected to hit at a velocity of seven to forty miles per second. But when his inspection was over, McCauley slung a space rope around a girder, straddled the metal beam, and pulled himself effortlessly along to its first triangular junction with the other frame members. He had no weight. Nothing had any weight. One could not fall from the Platform, but one could very easily become lost from it. McCauley had acquired a certain fanatical concern about precautions against loss of contact with the only object within some three thousand miles which would let a man go on living. When he reached the first junction of frame members, McCauley unlooped his space rope from behind the junction, looped it again beyond the joining place, and crawled over to straddle the next girder and slide along it with equal absence of effort until he arrived at the place where he'd left off work a little over an hour before. Randy Hall and Sammy Breen, meanwhile, emulated him, going in other directions. Within five minutes of coming out of the air lock they were perched at three separate places on the absurd framework. With quite inadequate-looking cords they drew large metal beams toward them from their place beside the cabin. McCauley, for example, pulled at a thirty-foot girder with a piece of string. It stirred and shifted and floated to him. He stopped it, his knees holding him fast. Then--very clumsily because of its mass--he maneuvered it into place, slipped bolts through the ready-drilled holes, and tightened up the nuts. He finished his first girder. Randy completed his. Sammy Breen got his section in place, and then stopped. "Major, sir," said his voice via space phone in McCauley's helmet phones, "there's something wrong here. A bolt doesn't go all the way through its hole. It won't force. The hole needs to be reamed out." It was a trivial but annoying happening. The parts for the Space Platform had been cut out, shaped, and drilled on Earth. In theory they should fit perfectly together in space. But somebody had scamped on an inspection job and the result of his carelessness had to be repaired. It had to be done in a nondescript, crazy framework that was hurtling along in orbit at something over eleven thousand five hundred miles an hour. It shouldn't have happened.