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Updated: May 24, 2025
The mechanic made very neat fabric patches over the two holes, upper and lower. He began to go over the fuselage. The pilot turned away. "I'll go talk to Bootstrap," he told the co-pilot. "You keep an eye on things." "I'll keep two eyes on them," said the co-pilot. The pilot went toward the control tower of the field. Joe looked around.
"I've a tip for you," said Joe. "I think it should be checked right away. I don't feel too good about it." The Major waited impatiently. And Joe explained, very carefully, about the fight on the Platform the day before, Braun's insistence on finishing the fight in Bootstrap, and then the tip he'd given Joe after everything was over. He repeated the message exactly, word for word.
The sounds of Bootstrap were distinctive by night. Footsteps, and the jangling of bicycle bells, and voices, and a radio blaring somewhere and a record-shop loud-speaker somewhere else, and a sort of underriding noise of festivity. There was a sharp rap on the glass by Joe's window. He started and looked out.
They crowded in and came straight to the bed, and the leader, a big man with a crooked nose, seized me by the ear as if he were taking hold of a bootstrap. I sat up, and another poked a lantern in my face. "That's him," said one of them. "No, he was older," said another. "He looks like he would steal a dog, anyhow," said the man with the lantern. "Bring him along, Pike."
This transport plane was flying to a small town improbably called Bootstrap, carrying one of the most essential devices for the Platform's equipment. In the desert near Bootstrap there was a gigantic construction shed. Inside that shed men were building exactly the monstrous object that Joe pictured to himself.
Joe drove carefully down the single street, turning out widely once to dodge a dog sleeping placidly in an area normally reserved for traffic. Finally they came to the foothills, and then the road curved and recurved as it wound among them. And two hours from Bootstrap they reached Red Canyon. They first saw the dam from downstream. It was a monstrous structure of masonry, alone in the mountains.
They looked like anybody else from Bootstrap. Casual, rough work clothing.... Haney bent down and picked up four good throwing stones. His expression was pained. Joe said: "We've got pistols, Haney, and Sally's a good shot." The men came on. Their manner was elaborately casual. Joe stepped up into view. "No visitors!" he called. "We don't want company!"
Members of building-maintenance and rigging and wrecking and other assorted unions should have been gathered together in far cities, screened by security, and brought to Bootstrap and paid overtime to pull up wood-block flooring and unbolt and jack out the proper sections of the Shed's eastern wall. But if there had been anything of that sort tried, it would have produced bloodshed.
They were especially entitled to be the crew of this first supply ship. When the Platform was being built, its pilot-gyros had been built by a precision tool firm owned by Joe's father. He'd gone by plane with the infinitely precise apparatus to Bootstrap, to deliver and install it in the Platform. And the plane was sabotaged, and the gyros were ruined.
But some men too can lift themselves, though theirs is an intellectual bootstrap, into a life that moves above these denser airs. Theirs is an intensity that goes deeper than daydreaming, although it admits distant kinship. Through what twilight and shadows do such men climb until night and star-dust are about them! Theirs is the dizzy exaltation of him who mounts above the world.
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