It drew Sanford, squirming and streaming, into the great lock. The outer doors closed. Before air was admitted to the inside, Sanford went suddenly still. When they took him out of his suit he was apparently unconscious. He could not be roused. Freed, he drew his knees up to his chin in the position in which primitive peoples bury their dead. He seemed to sleep. Brent examined him carefully. "Catatonia," he said distastefully. "He spent his life thinking he was smarter than anybody else--smarter, probably, than all the universe. He believed it. He couldn't face the fact that he was wrong. He couldn't stay conscious and not know it. So he's blacked out. He refuses to be anything unless he can be smartest. We'll have to do artificial feeding and all that until we can get him down to Earth to a hospital." He shrugged. "We'd better report this down to Earth," Joe said. "By the way, better not describe our screen of tin cans on radio waves. Not even microwaves. It might leak. And we want to see if it works." Just forty-two hours later they found out that it did work. A single rocket came climbing furiously out from Earth. It came from the night-side, and they could not see where it was launched, though they could make excellent guesses. They got a single guided missile ready to crash it if necessary. It wasn't necessary. The bomb from Earth detonated 300 miles below the artificial satellite. Its proximity fuse, sending out small radar-type waves, had them reflected back by an empty sardine can thrown away from the Platform by Mike Scandia forty-some hours ago. The sardine can had been traveling in its own private orbit ever since. The effect of Mike's muscles had not been to send it back to Earth, but to change the center of the circular orbit in which it floated. Sometimes it floated above the Platform--that was on one side of Earth--and sometimes below it. It was about 300 miles under the Platform when it reflected urgent, squealing radar frequency waves to a complex proximity fuse in the climbing rocket. The rocket couldn't tell the difference between a sardine can and a Space Platform. It exploded with a blast of pure brightness like that of the sun. The Platform went on its monotonous round about the planet from which it had risen only weeks before. Sanford was strapped in a bunk and fed through a tube, and on occasion massaged and variously tended to keep him alive. The men on the Platform worked. They made telephoto maps of Earth. They took highly magnified, long-exposure photographs of Mars, pictures that could not possibly be made with such distinctness from the bottom of Earth's turbulent ocean of air.