do the job that would let the Space Platform take off! He'd tell her,
first chance.

It was very good to be alive.

5

There was nobody in the world to whom the Space Platform was
meaningless. To Joe and a great many people like him, it was a dream
long and stubbornly held to and now doggedly being made a reality. To
some it was the prospect of peace and the hope of a quiet life: children
and grandchildren and a serene look forward to the future. Some people
prayed yearningly for its success, though they could have no other share
in its making. And of course there were those men who had gotten into
power and could not stay there without ruthlessness. They knew what the
Platform would mean to their kind. For, once world peace was certain,
they would be killed by the people they ruled over. So they sent grubby,
desperate men to wreck it at any cost. 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. Fleets of busses rolled out from the
small town twenty miles away, their headlights making a procession of
paired flames in the darkness. They rolled into the unloading area and
disgorged the late shift--ten to six--to be processed by security and
admitted to the Shed. Then, quite empty, the busses went trundling
around to where Joe waited with the released shift milling around him.

The busses stopped and opened their doors. The waiting men stormed in,
shoving zestfully, calling to each other, scrambling for seats or merely
letting themselves be pushed on board. The bus Joe found himself on was
jammed in seconds. He held on to a strap and didn't notice. He was
absorbed in the rapt contemplation of his idea for the repair of the
pilot gyros. The motors could be replaced easily enough. The foundation
of his first despair had been the belief that everything could be
managed but one thing; that the all-important absolute accuracy was the
only thing that couldn't be achieved. Getting that accuracy, back at the
plant, had consumed four months of time. Each of the gyros was four feet
in diameter and weighed five hundred pounds. Each spun at 40,000 r.p.m.
It had to be machined from a special steel to assure that it would not
fly to pieces from sheer centrifugal fo