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Updated: May 24, 2025
Mike figured you mightn't be safe. So we checked." Joe brought up one bottle and then another. "We're all right. Haven't seen a soul." "Don't mean a soul hasn't seen you," growled the Chief. "A car left Bootstrap less than twenty minutes behind you. There were three guys in it. It's parked down below the dam, outa sight. We saw it.
They went out the door, and the workers on the Platform were just beginning to pile into the waiting fleet of busses. But the black car was waiting, too. Joe opened the door and Sally handed him the key. She regarded the men swarming on the busses. "There'll be bulletins all over Bootstrap," she observed, "saying that Braun tried to dust-bomb the Shed.
They stopped at the house in the officers'-quarters area on the other side of the Shed. Sally picked up the lunch basket that her father's housekeeper had packed on telephoned instructions. They drove away. Red Canyon was eighty miles from the Shed, and the only way to get there was through Bootstrap, because the only highway away from the Shed led to that small, synthetic town.
"It's a dirty trick!" "Which," Joe assured him, "I commit only because there's a robot ship from Bootstrap coming up any time now. And we'll need to pick it up and tow it here." He went to the control-room to see if he could get a vision connection to Earth. He got the beam, and he got Sally on the screen. A report of the attack on the Platform had evidently already gone down to Earth.
But that couldn't affect the facts. The world at large, of course, received no inkling of the events in preparation. The Shed and the town of Bootstrap and all the desert for a hundred-mile circle round about, were absolutely barred to all visitors. Anybody who came into that circle stayed in. Most people were kept out.
Up there! Coulda been him knocked off and I'd ha' been in a mess! I'll see him tonight." The midget said something biting in his peculiarly cracked and brittle voice. The bus rolled and rolled and rolled. It was a long twenty miles to Bootstrap. The desert outside the bus windows was utterly black and featureless, but once a convoy of trucks passed, going to the Shed.
They still had at least two pistols. Eight men and a girl, counting Mike, with an armament of only two pistols, a .22 rifle, two shotguns and a fire axe were not a properly equipped posse to hunt down killers. Also by now it was close to sunset. So the victors did the sensible thing. Joe and Sally and Haney and the Chief his clothes retrieved plus Mike headed back for Bootstrap.
Hanging to a strap in the waiting bus, he saw another bus start off with a grinding of gears and a spouting of exhaust smoke. It trundled to the highway and rolled away. Another and another followed it. Joe's bus fell in line. They headed for Bootstrap in a convoy, a long, long string of lighted vehicles running one behind the other. It was dark outside. The Shed was alone, for security.
Bootstrap was a law-abiding town, because to get fired from work on the Platform was to lose a place in the most important job in history. So it was inevitable that the settlement of quarrels in private should become commonplace. The Chief leading, they filed through the kitchen and out of doors. The storeroom lay beyond. The Chief went in and switched on the light.
They're laying out a railroad." "A railroad? You don' say! How'll it come?" "Why, right this way." Lancaster caught the other by the bootstrap. "Shore?" he asked. "Sure," repeated Lounsbury; "sure as death and taxes. It's bound to run somewhere between the coulée and Medicine Mountain, and it'll stop at least for a few years at the Missouri.
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