"But take a guy like me!" said Mike the midget bitterly. "I weigh forty-five pounds, not two hundred! I use four pounds of food and air a day. A cabin for me to live in would be four feet high an' five across. Bein' smaller, it wouldn't need so much bracing. You could do it for two hundred pounds. Three hundred for grub and air, fifty for me. Me on the moon supplied for two months would come to five-fifty pounds. Sixteen tons of fuel to get me to the moon direct! To carry the weight of the ship--it's smaller!--fifty tons maximum!" "I--see...," said Sally, frowning. He looked at her suspiciously, but there was no mockery in her face. "It'd take a six-hundred-ton rocket to get a full-sized man to the moon," he said with sudden flippancy, "but a guy my size could do the same job of stranglin' in a fifty-ton job. Counting how much easier it'd be to get back, with atmosphere deceleration, I could make a trip, land, take observations, pick up mineral specimens, and get back--all in a sixty-ton rocket. That's just ten per cent of what it'd cost to take a full-sized man one way!" He stamped his foot. Then he said coldly: "Haney, sittin' still you're a sittin' duck!" The comment was just. Joe knew that Sally was on the lakeward side of this small island, and that there were impenetrable rocks between her and the mainland. But Haney sat crosslegged where he could watch the mainland, and he hadn't moved in a long while. If someone did intend to commit murder from a distance, Haney was offering a chance for a very fine target. He moved. "Yeah!" said Mike with fine irony, reverting to his topic. "I could show you plenty of figures! There are other guys like me! We've got as much brains as full-sized people! If the big brass had figured on us small guys, they coulda made the Platform the size of a four-family house an' it'd ha' been up in the sky right now, with guys like me running it. Guys my size could man the ferry rockets bringin' up fuel for storage, and four of us could take a six-hundred-ton rocket an' slide out to Mars an' be back by springtime--next springtime!--with all the facts and the photographs to prove 'em! By golly----" Then he made a raging, helpless gesture. "But that's just the big picture," he said bitterly. "Right now, right at this minute, we could make it easy to finish the Platform the way it's building in the Shed! There are ferry rockets building somewhere else. You know about them?" Sally said apologetically: "Yes. I know there'll be smaller rocket ships going up to the Platform. They'll carry fuel and stores and exchanges for the crew. Yes, I know there are ferry rockets building."