and poetic look for as long as he lived, participation in ‘the
plan had given his expression a kind of executive overlay,
which at best made it assume a mask-like rigidity, and at
worst coarsened it somehow.
Yet despite the bleeding away of the years, the spaceship
was still only a hulk. It lay upon a platform built above the
tumbled boulders of the sandbar which stretched out from
one wall of the world. It was an immense hull of pegged
wood, broken by regularly spaced gaps through which the
raw beams of its skeleton could be seen.
Work upon it had progressed fairly rapidly at first, for it
was not hard to visualize what kind of vehicle would be
needed to crawl through empty space without losing its water;
Than and his colleagues had done that job well. It had been
recognized, too, that the sheer size of the machine would en-
force a long period of construction, perhaps as long as two
full seasons; but neither Shar and his assistants nor Lavon
had anticipated any serious snag.
For that matter, part of the vehicle’s apparent incomplete-
ness was an illusion. About a third of its fittings were to con-
sist of living creatures, which could not be expected to install
themselves in the vessel much before the actual takeoff.
Yet time and time again, work on the ship had to be halted
for long periods. Several times whole sections needed to be
ripped out, as it became more and more evident that hardly
a single normal, understandable concept could be applied to
the problem of space travel.
The lack of the history plate, which the Para steadfastly