"Memorize the part number for report," said McCauley, "and get the reamer and clear it." "Yes, sir," said Breen. McCauley pulled gently at a cord and a second girder stirred and floated gently toward him. Below, the sunlit surface of Earth had an extraordinary appearance. It was some sixty-five degrees in diameter. At its edges the shapes of land and water--the planetary markings--were foreshortened and crowded together in an unparalleled fashion. A twelve-inch globe looked at from five inches away will give something of the same effect. From one side of the disk the markings moved toward the center, thickening and taking recognizable form as they neared the middle. Then they went on, distorted in a different fashion as they approached the opposite edge. When McCauley set his second beam in place a wildly twisted Isthmus of Panama appeared out of the misty whiteness which bordered Earth from where he floated. In half an hour it would be directly underneath and plainly recognizable. In another half hour it would be a new shape entirely. Then it would vanish. Only the center of the visible disk resembled any map-maker's representation, and that spot changed and changed and changed as the Space Platform hurtled past. At any given moment McCauley could see a ninth of all the planet's surface, but only a fraction of what he saw was familiar, and that changed continuously. Sammy Breen slid along the Platform's frame to the cabin, the ship which had risen to this place from Earth, but would never return to Earth again. Arrived at the cabin, he seized a handrail, loosened his space rope, and pulled himself to the air lock. Immediately, of course, air would flow into the lock and he could emerge into the cabin's interior. He'd get the tool he needed for a job that should have been done on Earth. Then he'd come out again. Randy tapped on the girder he'd just bolted into place. The vibrations passed through the metal and through McCauley's space suit to the air within it. "I just happened to think," said Randy cheerfully, "that people down on Earth are all excited about this thing we're building. They think it's wonderful. And so it is, at the present moment. But I'm thinking that in a little while it won't be wonderful. It'll be old stuff. And the day'll come when it's a nuisance. There'll be complaints that it's in the way, barging around through space. It'll be in the way of ships taking tourists on week-end trips to Mars. They'll say it's a danger to astrogation. They'll say it should be cleared out of space. They'll insist that it be junked."