Crack-voiced, off-key, in every way like a fingernail drawn across the blackboard of his soul, the song cauterwauled in John Clancy's helmet earphones:

"...Building on the Line, Team.  Building on the Line!
"Building Transmit Stations all along the ###### Line!
"Light-years out and all alone,
"We have cannibalized the drone;
"And there's no way to go home
  "'Till we get the Station working on the ###### Line!"

Clancy closed his mind to the two thousandth, four hundred and - what?  He had even got to the point where he had lost count of the times Arthur Plotchin had sung it.  Was that a win, he wondered, suddenly - a point for Plotch, in finally driving him to lose count?  Or was it a point for him, in that he had managed to shut out the singing, at least to the point of losing his involuntary count of the times Plotch had sung it?

A bright light hit him in the faceplate, momentarily blinding him; and the singing broke off.

"Heads up, Clance!"  It was Plotch's voice, cracking like static now in the earphones.  "Keep your mind on your work, dim-bulb! Time to fire the wire!"

Clancy deliberately did not answer, while he slowly counted off six secondq - "One-Mississippi, two Mississippi..."  It was one of the things he could be sure rubbed Plotch the wrong way; even as he knew Plotch was sure by this time that the endless repetition of the Line Song was like sandpaper to Clancy's eaw  nerves.

"What?" Clancy said, at the end of the sixth second.

"You heard me, you..." Notch choked a little and went silent, in his turn.

Clancy grinned savagely inside his helmet.  With the flash from Plotch's signal-light blinked out of his eyes, now, he could make out the other's silver-suited figure with the black rectangle of tinted glass that was its faceplate.  Plotch stood holding his wire gun by the other of the last two terminal rods in the almost-completed Star-Point.  He was some hundred yards off across the barren rock of this hell-born world, with its two hundred degrees below zero temperature, its atmosphere that was poisonous, and almost non-existent to boot, with its endless rock surface, its red clouds always roiling threateningly overhead and the not-quite-heard gibber of uneasy native spirits always nagging at a man just below the level of his hearing.