Four workmen arrived from the Holmes' Yacht shipyard. They looked at
blueprints and drawings made by Holmes and Burke together, regarded
with pained expressions the material they were to use, and set to
work. This was on the day the second Russian space-probe lifted from
somewhere in the Caucasus Mountains at 1:10 A.M., local time.
The second probe did not veer off its proper line. Its four boosters
fired at appropriate intervals and it went streaking off toward
emptiness almost straight away from the sun. It left behind it a thin
whining transmission which was not at all like the beepings of the
asteroid transmitter.
In two days a framework of struts and laths took form outside the
construction shed. It looked more like a mock-up of a radio telescope
than anything else, but it was smaller and had a different shape. It
was an improbable-looking bowl. Under Holmes' supervision, dozens of
sacks of plaster of Paris found their way into it, coating it roughly
on the outside and very smoothly within. It was then lined tenderly
with carefully cut sections of fluffy cloth, with bars and beams and
girders placed between the layers. Then reeking drums of liquid were
moved to the working-site and their contents saturated the glass-wool.
The smell was awful, so the workmen knocked off for a day until it
diminished. But Sandy and Pam continued to expostulate with shippers
by long-distance, type letters threatening lawsuits if orders were
not filled immediately, and once found that items Burke indignantly
demanded had come in and Holmes had carted them off and used them
without notifying anybody. That was the day Pam threatened to resign.
"It looks like a pudding," grumbled Pam, after Sandy had mollified her
and Burke had apologized for having made her fight needlessly with two
transport-lines, a shipping department, and a vice-president in charge
of sales. "And they act like it was a baby!"
"It'll be a ship," said Sandy. "You know what kind."
"I'll believe it when I see it," said Pam. Then she demanded
indignantly, "Has Joe looked at you twice since this nonsense started?"
"No," admitted Sandy. "He works all the time. At night he has a
receiver tuned to the beepings to make sure he knows if the broadcast
changes again. The Russians are still trying to make a two-way contact.
But the broadcast just keeps on, ignoring everybody." Then she said,
"Anyhow, Joe's going to feel awful if it doesn't work. I've got to be
around to pick up the pieces of his vanity and put them together again."
"Huh!" said Pam. "Catch me doing that!"
At just that moment Holmes came into the office with a finger dripping
blood. He had been supervising and, at the same time, assisting in
the building of an additional section of laths and struts and he was
annoyed with himself for the small injury which interfered with his
work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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