He didn't find out until later what the trouble was. The man who'd tried so earnestly to kill him was Miss Ross's fiance. She had met this man during a vacation, as a government secretary, and he was a refugee with an exotic charm that would have fascinated a much more personable and beautiful woman than Miss Ross. They had a whirlwind romance. He confided to her his terror of emissaries from his native country who might kill him. And of course she was more fascinated still. When he asked her to marry him she accepted his proposal. Then, just two weeks before her assignment to the Space Platform project, he vanished. Miss Ross was desperate and lovesick. One day her telephone rang and his anguished voice told her he'd been abducted, and if she told the police he would be tortured to death. He begged her not to do anything to cause him more torment than was already his. She'd been trying to keep him alive ever since. Once, when she couldn't bring herself to carry out an order she'd been given--with threats of torment to him if she failed--she'd received a human finger in the mail, and a scrawled and blood-stained note which cried out of unspeakable torment and begged her not to doom him to more. So Miss Ross, who was Major Holt's secretary and one of his most trusted assistants, had been giving information to one group of saboteurs all the while. She was the most dangerous security leak in the whole Platform project. But her fiance wasn't a captive. He was the head of that group of saboteurs. He'd made love to her and proposed to her merely to prepare her to supply the information he wanted. He needed only to write a sufficiently agonized note, or gasp tormented pleas on a telephone, to get what he wanted. Incidentally, he still had all his fingers when Joe knocked him cold. Sally had recognized him as the subject of a snapshot she'd once seen Miss Ross crying over. Miss Ross had hidden it hastily and told her it was someone she had once loved, now dead. And this inadvertent disclosure that Miss Ross was the security leak the Major had never had a clue to could only have come about through such confusion as Mike had instigated and Haney and the Chief and Joe had organized. But Joe learned those facts only later. At the moment, there was still the Platform to be gotten aloft. And there was plenty of work to do. There were two small rips in the plating, caused by fragments of the exploded truck. There were some bullet holes. The Platform could resist small meteorites at forty-five miles a second, but a high-velocity small-arm projectile could puncture it. Those scars of battle had to be welded shut. The rest of the scaffolding had to come down and the rest of the rocket tubes had to be affixed. And there was cleaning up to be done.