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They reached the air lock of the Polaris and climbed wearily aboard. At the end of the first day, on the new satellite, they were exhausted. A few minutes after entering the giant cruiser they were all sound asleep.

Dawn of the second day on Roald saw the vast plain crowded with men at work. The first community objective was the construction of an atmosphere station, and before the woman and children had finished lunch, they were breathing synthetically produced air.

Working from a master plan that had been devised back at Space Academy before the expedition blasted off, the colonists were divided into three separate crews: the wreckers, those who would remove essential parts from the spaceships as they were needed; the movers, those who would haul the parts to construction sites; and the builders, those who would take the parts and construct the community buildings.

The first and most difficult job was building a gigantic maneuverable derrick and jet barge for removing, hauling, and installing the heavy machinery.

Astro had been assigned to the crew responsible for the construction of the jet barge. With many of the vital parts aboard the crashed freighters still hot with radioactivity, the crew had to improvise. And Astro, with his native talent for mechanics, soon became the unspoken leader of the crew. Even the supervisor acknowledged the young cadet's superior ability and allowed him a free hand in the construction of the barge. After six hours of hard labor, the "mover" was finished. It was not the streamlined machine its designer had conceived, but it was effective, in some cases, more so than the designer imagined. A low, flat table roughly three hundred feet square, it moved on sledlike runners and was powered by two dozen rockets. On each of the four sides there was a two-hundred-foot boom which could be swung around in a 360° arc and was capable of lifting three hundred tons. Astro's most outstanding improvement on the original design was what he termed "adjustment rockets," placing single rockets that could be individually controlled on all four sides, so that the operator of the giant jet barge could jockey into perfect position anywhere. The machine quickly demonstrated it could move anything, anywhere.

Roger worked with the supervisor of the assembly groups, ordering supplies and machinery as they were needed from the wrecking crews and seeing that they were sent to the right place at the right time. One of his first jobs was the assembling of materials for the construction of the Administration Building of the colony. Less than five days after the foundation had been dug, the last gleaming sheets of Titan crystal were welded together and the building towered over the plain, a glistening monument to man's first flight to the stars.

Tom had been assigned to work closely with Vidac, who was responsible for all the construction on Roald. The young cadet welcomed the chance to observe the man in action, and time after time he found contradictions in the character of the lieutenant governor. Vidac's attitude and behavior in his drive to build the colony were completely different from his actions on the long space flight. He was a man of firmness and immediate decision. Shooting from one project to another in a jet boat, he would listen to the supervisors' complaints, make a snap decision, and then head for another project. Once Tad Winters and Ed Bush, who had taken over Astro's jet barge, had hesitated when trying to transfer a four-hundred-ton lift. A bank of atomic motors from Fleet Ship Number Twelve was to be installed in the main power plant for the colony. The motors were in a position where it was impossible to use more than one of the booms for the lift. Bush and Winters tried futilely to maneuver the jet barge into position where they could use two booms, and when Vidac arrived he promptly took charge. Using Tom as signalman, Vidac stood at the controls of the giant derrick, and after testing the strain on the five-inch cables, he