Joe saw a tiny projection near the base of it. It was an office building
for clerks and timekeepers and other white-collar workers. He strained
his eyes again and saw a motor truck on the highway. It looked
extraordinarily flat. Then he saw that it wasn't a single truck but a
convoy of them. A long way back, the white highway was marked by a tiny
dot. That was a motor bus.
There was no sign of activity anywhere, because the scale was so great.
Movement there was, but the things that moved were too small to be seen
by comparison with the Shed. The huge, round, shining half-sphere of
metal stood tranquilly in the midst of emptiness.
It was bigger than the pyramids.
The plane went on, descending. Joe craned his neck, and then he was
ashamed to gawk. He looked ahead, and far away there were white speckles
that would be buildings: Bootstrap, the town especially built for the
men who built the Space Platform. In it they slept and ate and engaged
in the uproarious festivity that men on a construction job crave on
their time off.
The plane dipped noticeably.
"Airfield off to the right," said the co-pilot. "That's for the town and
the job. The jets--there's an air umbrella overhead all the time--have a
field somewhere else. The pushpots have a field of their own, too, where
they're training pilots."
Joe didn't know what a pushpot was, but he didn't ask. He was thinking
about the Shed, which was the greatest building ever put up, and had
been built merely to shelter the greatest hope for the world's peace
while it was put together. He'd be in the Shed presently. He'd work
there, setting up the contents of the crates back in the cargo space,
and finally installing them in the Platform itself.
The pilot said: "Pitot and wing heaters?"
"Off," said the co-pilot.
"Spark and advance----"
Joe didn't listen. He looked down at the sprawling small town with
white-painted barracks and a business section and an obvious, carefully
designed recreation area that nobody would ever use. The plane was
making a great half-circle. The motor noise dimmed as Joe became
absorbed in his anticipation of seeing the Space Platform and having a
hand in its building.
The co-pilot said sharply: "Hold everything!"
Joe jerked his head around. The co-pilot had his hand on the wheel
release. His face was tense.
"It don't feel right," he said very, very quietly. "Maybe I'm crazy, but
there was that sandy-haired guy who put his hand up in the wheel well
back at that last field. And this don't feel right!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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