"They always put them on last. But don't be surprised at anything you find or don't find inside. As soon as the skeleton's up they put the armor on, and then build the rest of the ship out from the middle. It might be slower getting material in through the airlock openings, but it holds things together while they're working."
They put on the car's lights, lifted to the top, and let down through the upper opening. It was like entering a huge globular spider's web, globe within globe of interlaced girders and struts and braces, extending from the center to the outer shell. Even the spider was home—a three-hundred-foot ball of collapsium, looking tiny at the very middle.
"Why, this isn't a ship!" Vibart cried in disgust. "This is just the outside of a ship. They haven't done a thing inside."
"Oh, yes, they have," Jacquemont contradicted, aiming a spotlight toward the shimmering ball in the middle. "They have all the engines in—Abbott lift-and-drive, Dillingham hyperdrives, pseudograv, power reactors, converters, everything. They wouldn't have put on the shielding if they hadn't. They did that as soon as they had the outside armor on."
"Wonder why they didn't finish her, if they got that far," Retief said.
"They didn't need her. They'd had it; they wanted to go home."
"Well, we're not going to finish her, not with any fifteen men," Retief said. "One man has only two hands, two feet and one brain; he can only handle so much robo-equipment at a time."
"I never expected we'd build a ship ourselves," Conn said. "We came to look the place over and get a few claims staked. When we've done that, we'll go back and get a real gang together."
"I don't know where you'll find them," Jacquemont commented. "We'll need a couple of hundred, and they ought all to be graduate engineers. We can't do this job with farm-tramps."
"You made some good shipyard men out of farm-tramps on Barathrum."