Moe looked at him curiously for a moment, then shrugged. "Why not? If it wasn't for you we wouldn't be in here at all tonight. Go ahead. I'll meet you at the Ship. Make a nice big fire!"
And then Moe was gone and Matt stood alone in the room. He stood and stared down at the dead bodies; Loevy's face showing fear and frustration just as it must have when Moe's bullet found his heart; the Colonel, slumped partially across Loevy's body, the Bulldog face in a tight angry knot, even in death. The colonel had been a brave man, a tough one. Matt wished suddenly that he had not had to die.
He crossed hurriedly to the file and pulled the sheaf of papers from the drawer. A sheaf of blue papers—blue papers with white lines....
Blue-prints!
That was what Loevy had meant. The calculations had been completed, the blue-prints made. The ship had been almost completed, and now it was destroyed—
But the blue-prints remained—
Here were the hopes and dreams of centuries. Here were the plans, the specifications, the construction plans. Fifty years of the Earth's resources, and now the project they had planned and specified was being destroyed in a single night, the night of the fifty-fourth of July—
He stared at the prints, his whole body trembling. He hated the Rocket, he hated everything it had ever stood for in the old world before the crash. It had stripped him of his home, robbed him of his future. It had robbed the whole world of its heritage, and he hated it.
And yet, to go to the planets had always been man's great dream. The ship could be destroyed without utterly destroying the dream. Because someday, somehow, men could take these precious papers, sometime when the world was sane again, and build another ship—