“You’ll get a full clearance,” she told him. “It has to go through channels. Me—I have influence. I always come in through security, and I have the door guards trained. And I do have business in the Platform.”
He turned his head to look at her.
“Interior decoration,” she explained. “And don’t laugh! It isn’t prettifying. It’s psychology. The Platform was designed by engineers and physicists and people with slide rules. They made a beautiful environment for machinery. But there will be men living in it, and they aren’t machines.”
“I don’t see——”
“They designed the hydroponic garden,” said Sally with a certain scorn. “They calculated very neatly that eleven square feet of leaf surface of a pumpkin plant will purify all the air a resting man uses, and so much more will purify the air a man uses when he’s working hard. So they designed the gardens for the most efficient production of the greatest possible leaf surface—of pumpkin plants! They figured food would be brought up by the tender rockets! But can you imagine the men in the Platform, floating among the stars, living on dehydrated food and stuffing themselves hungrily with pumpkins because that is the only fresh food they have?”
Joe saw the irony.
“They’re thinking of mechanical efficiency,” said Sally indignantly. “I don’t know anything about machinery, but I’ve wasted an awful lot of time at school and otherwise if I don’t know something about human beings! I argued, and the garden now isn’t as mechanically efficient, but it’ll be a nice place for a man to go into. He won’t smell pumpkin plants all the time, either. I’ve even gotten them to include some flowers!”
They were very near the Platform. And it was very near to completion. Joe looked at it hungrily, and he felt a great sense of urgency. He tried to strip away the scaffolding in his mind and see it floating proudly free in emptiness, with white-hot sunshine glinting from it, and only a background of unwinking stars.
Sally’s voice went on: “And I’ve really put up an argument about the living quarters. They had every interior wall painted aluminum! I argued that in space or out of it, where people have to live, it’s housekeeping. This is going to be their home. And they ought to feel human in it!”
They passed into one of the openings in the maze of uprights. All about them there were trucks, and puffing engines, and hoists. Joe dragged Sally aside as a monstrous truck-and-trailer came from where it had delivered some gigantic item of interior use. It rumbled past them, and she led the way to a flight of temporary wooden stairs with two security guards at the bottom. Sally talked severely to them, and they grinned and waved for Joe to go ahead. He went up the steps—which would be pulled down before the Platform’s launching—and went actually inside the Space Platform for the first time.