Silently and invisibly they sped in a long, cylindrical space pattern.
Object, Terra.
Not unmindful of danger, Sol was working furiously. Factories, their dies rusting the yard, were turning out parts for the atomic sphere. Dymodines fairly rattled off of production lines and were installed in the minor ships. Modines, the personal side-arm miniature of the dymodine, came with a rush down the production-line conveyors and slid into wrapping machines; were wrapped against all destructive, natural forces and then were packed in boxes for shipment.
Planet-mounted snatchers came to location by skytrain in parts and were assembled on the spot by skilled technicians.
The vast machines that generated the atomic sphere were being assembled and shipped to the several places. Here they went together, fitted bit by bit by machinists and technical men who worked furiously against time to complete the job before the Loard-vogh came.
They were many years building the original Palomar telescope, but this was war, and the techniques of fabrication had advanced since then. Perhaps the experience gained in that monstrous job—and in other mighty projects, some war-driven, some peace-measures—gave Sol the technical skill she needed. There would be no matter of years, this time. It was a matter of four very short months.
One hundred and twenty days. Just one small third of a year. And there is a saturation point in the manpower curve; just because one man can dig a well in sixty days, it is no sign that sixty men can dig the well in one day. They could, mathematically, but you can't get sixty men with shovels in a three-foot circle either mathematically or physically.
So time bore on relentlessly. Time that for the Loard-vogh seemed endlessly droning by was racing like fury for the laboring Terrans.
For at the same instant that Vorgan was groaning about the four-month wait, Thompson was complaining about the utter impossibility of getting anything done in four months.