The pilot grunted. The co-pilot's tone changed. "Not quite that bad," he admitted, "but it's bad! It's really bad! We lost three planes last week. I guess you'd call it in action against saboteurs. One flew to pieces in mid-air. Sabotage. Carrying critical stuff. One crashed on take-off, carrying irreplaceable instruments. Somebody'd put a detonator in a servo-motor. And one froze in its landing glide and flew smack-dab into its landing field. They had to scrape it up. When this ship got a major overhaul two weeks ago, we flew it with our fingers crossed for four trips running. Seems to be all right, though. We gave it the works. But I won't look forward to a serene old age until the Platform's out of atmosphere! Not me!"
He went to put the pilot's empty cup in the disposal slot.
The plane went on. There wasn't anything underneath but clouds, and there wasn't anything overhead but sky. The clouds were a long way down, and the sky was simply up. Joe looked down and saw a faint spot of racing brightness with a hint of colors around it. It was the sort of nimbus that substitutes for a shadow when a plane is high enough above the clouds. It raced madly over the irregular upper surface of the cloud layer. The plane flew and flew. Nothing happened at all. This was two hours from the field from which it had taken off with the pilot gyro cases as its last item of collected cargo. Joe remembered how grimly the two crew members had prevented anybody from even approaching it on the ground, except those who actually loaded the cases, and how one of the two had watched them every second.
Joe fidgeted. He didn't quite know how to take the co-pilot's talk. The Kenmore Precision Tool plant was owned by his family, but it wasn't so much a family as a civic enterprise. The young men of the village grew up to regard fanatically fine workmanship with the casual matter-of-factness elsewhere reserved for plowing or deep-sea fishing. Joe's father owned it, and some day Joe might head it, but he couldn't hope to keep the respect of the men in the plant unless he could handle every tool on the place and split a thousandth at least five ways. Ten would be better! But as long as the feeling at the plant stayed as it was now, there'd never be a security problem there.