The comment was just. Joe knew that Sally was on the lakeward side of this small island, and that there were impenetrable rocks between her and the mainland. But Haney sat crosslegged where he could watch the mainland, and he hadn’t moved in a long while. If someone did intend to commit murder from a distance, Haney was offering a chance for a very fine target. He moved.
“Yeah!” said Mike with fine irony, reverting to his topic. “I could show you plenty of figures! There are other guys like me! We’ve got as much brains as full-sized people! If the big brass had figured on us small guys, they coulda made the Platform the size of a four-family house an’ it’d ha’ been up in the sky right now, with guys like me running it. Guys my size could man the ferry rockets bringin’ up fuel for storage, and four of us could take a six-hundred-ton rocket an’ slide out to Mars an’ be back by springtime—next springtime!—with all the facts and the photographs to prove ’em! By golly——”
Then he made a raging, helpless gesture.
“But that’s just the big picture,” he said bitterly. “Right now, right at this minute, we could make it easy to finish the Platform the way it’s building in the Shed! There are ferry rockets building somewhere else. You know about them?”
Sally said apologetically: “Yes. I know there’ll be smaller rocket ships going up to the Platform. They’ll carry fuel and stores and exchanges for the crew. Yes, I know there are ferry rockets building.”
“Those ferry rockets,” said Mike sardonically, “carry four men, plus two replacements for the crew. They’ll carry air for ten days. But put four of us small guys in a ferry rocket! We’d have air and grub for two months, almost! Pull out the pay load and put in a hydroponic garden and communicators and we’d be a Platform, right then! Send up another ferry rocket to join us, and it could bring guided missiles! The ferry rockets could be finished quicker than the Platform! Send up three ferry rockets with midgets as crews, an’ we could weld ’em together and have a Space Platform in orbit and working—and what’d be the use of sabotaging the big Platform then? The job would be done! There’d be no sense sabotaging the big Platform because the little one could do anything the big one could! It’d be up there and working! But,” he demanded bitterly, “do you think anybody’ll do anything as sensible as that?”
His small features were twisted in angry rebellion. And he was quite right in all his reasoning. Mankind could have made the journey to the planets in a hurry, and it could have had its Space Platform in the sky much more quickly, if only it could have consented to be represented by people like Mike—who would have represented mankind very valiantly.
Sally said distressedly: “Oh, Mike, it’s all true and I’m so sorry!”
And she meant it. Joe liked Sally especially right then, because she didn’t patronize Mike, or try to reason him out of his heartbreak.
Then Haney said abruptly: “Somebody’s spotted the Chief.”