These things occupied the shift that came on at the time of the multiple sabotage assaults. At first the work was ragged. But the policy of turning the Security men into news broadcasters worked well. After all, the Platform was a construction job and the men who worked on it were not softies. Most of them had seen men killed before. Before the shift was half over, a definite work rhythm was evident. Men had begun to take an even greater pride in the thing they had built, because it had been assailed and not destroyed. And the job was almost over. Sally went back to her father's quarters, to try to sleep. Joe stayed in the Shed. His throat was painful enough so that he didn't want to go to bed until he was genuinely tired, and he was thoroughly wrought up. Mike the midget had gone peacefully to sleep again, curled up in a corner of the outgoing screening room. His fellow midgets talked satisfiedly among themselves. Presently, to show their superiority to mere pitched battles, two of them brought out a miniature pack of cards and started a card game while they waited for a bus to take them back to Bootstrap. The Chief's Indian associates loafed comfortably while waiting for the same busses. Later they would put in for overtime--and get it. Haney mourned that he had been remote from the scene of action, and was merely responsible for the presence and placing and firing of the machine guns that had certainly kept the Platform from being blown up from below. It seemed that nothing else would happen to bother anybody. But there was one thing more. That thing happened just two hours before it was time for the shift to change once again, and when normal work was back in progress in the Shed. Everything seemed fully organized and serene. Everything in the Shed had settled down, and nothing had happened outside. There was ample exterior protection, of course, but the outside-guard system hadn't had anything to do for a very long time. Men at radar screens were bored and sleepy from sheer inactivity and silence. Pilots in jet planes two miles and five miles and eight miles high had long since grown weary of the splendid view below them. After all, one can get very used to late, slanting moonlight on cloud masses far underneath, and bright and hostile-seeming stars overhead. So the thing was well timed. A Canadian station noticed the pip on its radar screen first. The radar observer was puzzled by it. It could have been a meteor, and the Canadian observer at first thought it was. But it wasn't going quite fast enough, and it lasted too long. It was traveling six hundred seventy-two miles an hour, and it was headed due south at sixty thousand feet. The speed could have been within reason--provided it didn't stay constant. But it did. There was something traveling south at eleven miles a minute or better. A mile in five-plus seconds. It didn't slow. It didn't drop.