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From this height it stretched out for miles, and Bootstrap could be seen as a series of white specks far away with hills behind it. Ultimately Sally and Joe came to the very top of the Shed into the open air. From here the steep plating curved down and away in every direction. The sunshine was savagely bright and shining, but there was a breeze.
Up to now he hadn't thought of the dryness of the air in Bootstrap and the Shed. The lunch basket was tilted a little. Joe picked it up and settled it more solidly. Then he said: "Hungry?" There was literally nothing on his mind at the moment but the luxurious, satisfied feeling of being off somewhere with grass and a lake and Sally, and a good part of the afternoon to throw away. It felt good.
There was but one town in hundreds of miles and that was Bootstrap, built to house the workmen who'd built the Platform and the still invisible, ferociously howling pushpots and now the small supply ships, the first of which was to make its first trip today. The Shed seemed very near because of its monstrous size.
Disk saws cut metal like butter by the seemingly impractical method of spinning at 20,000 revolutions per minute. Convoys of motor busses rolled out from Bootstrap at change-shift time, and there were again Security men at every doorway, moving continually about. But it still didn't look too good. There is apparently no way to beat arithmetic, and a definitely grim problem still remained.
So while he was still wobbly on his feet and would be for days to come, his disposition was vastly improved. There was nobody waiting on the airfield by the town of Bootstrap, but as they landed a black car came smoothly out and stopped close by the transport. Joe got down and climbed into it. Sally Holt was inside.
Under the circumstances, then, three-shift work on the Platform was resumed, and three times in each twenty-four hours fleets of busses rolled out of Bootstrap carrying men to work in the Shed, and rolled back again loaded with men who had just stopped working there.
But a week later they found the colonel's body back east. Somebody'd murdered him." Joe blinked. "It wasn't the colonel who rode as a passenger," said the co-pilot. "It was somebody else. Twenty miles from Bootstrap he'd shot the pilots and taken the controls. That's what they figure, anyhow. He meant to dive into the construction Shed.
Presently, to show their superiority to mere pitched battles, two of them brought out a miniature pack of cards and started a card game while they waited for a bus to take them back to Bootstrap. The Chief's Indian associates loafed comfortably while waiting for the same busses. Later they would put in for overtime and get it.
He would reach it, and swing up the ladder that could just be seen going down the lake side of the dam's top, and he would explain the situation on shore. A telephone call to Bootstrap would bring security men rushing at eighty miles an hour, and parachute troopers a good deal faster.
They were prepared to pay for or to commit any crime if the Space Platform could be smashed and turmoil kept as the norm of life on Earth. And there were the people who were actually doing the building. Joe rode a bus into Bootstrap that night with some of them. The middle shift two to ten o'clock was off.
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