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A caterwheel truck came lurching and rolling and rumbling down the side of the pit. It had a sunshade and ground-reflector wings, and Bordman rode tiredly on a hobbyhorse saddle in its back cargo section. He wore a heat-suit.

The truck reached the pit’s bottom. There was a tool shed there. The caterwheel-truck bumped up to it and stopped. Bordman got out, visibly cramped by the jolting, rocking, exhausting-to-unaccustomed-muscles ride.

“Do you want to go in the shed and cool off?” asked Chuka brightly.

“I’m all right,” said Bordman curtly. “I’m quite comfortable, so long as you feed me that expanded air.” It was plain that he resented needing even a special air supply. “What’s all this about? Bringing the Warlock in? Why the insistence on my being here?”

“Ralph has a problem,” said Chuka blandly. “He’s up there. See? He needs you. There’s a hoist. You’ve got to check degree-of-completion anyhow. You might take a look around while you’re up there. But he’s anxious for you to see something. There where you see the little knot of people. The platform.”

Bordman grimaced. When one was well started on a survey, one got used to heights and depths and all sorts of environments. But he hadn’t been up on steel-work in a good many months. Not since a survey on Kalka IV nearly a year ago. He would be dizzy at first.

He accompanied Chuka to the spot where a steel cable dangled from an almost invisibly thin beam high above. There was a strictly improvised cage to ascend in–planks and a handrail forming an insecure platform that might hold four people. He got into it, and Dr. Chuka got in beside him. Chuka waved his hand. The cage started up.

Bordman winced as the ground dropped away below. It was ghastly to be dangling in emptiness like this. He wanted to close his eyes. The cage went up and up and up. It took many long minutes to reach the top.

There was a platform there. Newly-made. The sunlight was blindingly bright. The landscape was an intolerable glare. Bordman adjusted his goggles to maximum darkness and stepped gingerly from the swaying cage to the hardly more solid-seeming area. Here he was in mid-air on a platform barely ten feet square. It was rather more than twice the height of a metropolitan skyscraper from the ground. There were actual mountain-crests only half a mile away and not much higher. Bordman was acutely uncomfortable. He would get used to it, but—-

* * * * *

“Well?” he asked fretfully. “Chuka said you needed me here. What’s the matter?”

Ralph Redfeather nodded very formally. Aletha was here, too, and two of Chuka’s foremen–one did not look happy–and four of the Amerind steel-workers. They grinned at Bordman.

“I wanted you to see,” said Aletha’s cousin, “before we threw on the current. It doesn’t look like that little grid could handle the sand it took care of. But Lewanika wants to report.”

A dark man who worked under Chuka–and looked as if he belonged on solid ground–said carefully:

“We cast the beams for the small landing grid, Mr. Bordman. We melted the metal out of the cliffs and ran it into molds as it flowed down.”

He stopped. One of the Indians said:

“We made the girders into the small landing grid. It bothered us because we built it on the sand that had buried the big grid. We didn’t understand why you ordered it there. But we built it.”

The second dark man said with a trace of swagger:

“We made the coils, Mr. Bordman. We made the small grid so it would work the same as the big one when it was finished. And then we made the big grid work, finished or not!”

Bordman said impatiently:

“All right. Very good. But what is this? A ceremony?”