There was a platform there. Newly-made. The sunlight was blindingly bright. The landscape was an intolerable glare. Bordman adjusted his goggles to maximum darkness and stepped gingerly from the swaying cage to the hardly more solid-seeming area. Here he was in mid-air on a platform barely ten feet square. It was rather more than twice the height of a metropolitan skyscraper from the ground. There were actual mountain-crests only half a mile away and not much higher. Bordman was acutely uncomfortable. He would get used to it, but---- * * * * * "Well?" he asked fretfully. "Chuka said you needed me here. What's the matter?" Ralph Redfeather nodded very formally. Aletha was here, too, and two of Chuka's foremen--one did not look happy--and four of the Amerind steel-workers. They grinned at Bordman. "I wanted you to see," said Aletha's cousin, "before we threw on the current. It doesn't look like that little grid could handle the sand it took care of. But Lewanika wants to report." A dark man who worked under Chuka--and looked as if he belonged on solid ground--said carefully: "We cast the beams for the small landing grid, Mr. Bordman. We melted the metal out of the cliffs and ran it into molds as it flowed down." He stopped. One of the Indians said: "We made the girders into the small landing grid. It bothered us because we built it on the sand that had buried the big grid. We didn't understand why you ordered it there. But we built it." The second dark man said with a trace of swagger: "We made the coils, Mr. Bordman. We made the small grid so it would work the same as the big one when it was finished. And then we made the big grid work, finished or not!" Bordman said impatiently: "All right. Very good. But what is this? A ceremony?" "Just so," said Aletha, smiling. "Be patient, Mr. Bordman!" Her cousin said conversationally: "We built the small grid on the top of the sand. And it tapped the ionosphere for power. No lack of power then! And we'd set it to heave up sand instead of ships. Not to heave it out into space, but to give it up to mile a second vertical velocity. Then we turned it on." "And we rode it down, that little grid," said one of the remaining Indians, grinning. "What a party! Manitou!" Redfeather frowned at him and took up the narrative. "It hurled the sand up from its center. As you said it would, the sand swept air with it. It made a whirlwind, bringing more sand from outside the grid into its field. It was a whirlwind with fifteen megakilowatts of power to drive it. Some of the sand went twenty miles high. Then it made a mushroom-head and the winds up yonder blew it to the west. It came down a long way off, Mr. Bordman. We've made a new dune-area ten miles downwind. And the little grid sank as the sand went away from around it. We had to stop it three times, because it leaned. We had to dig under parts of it to get it straight up again. But it went down into the valley."