Braun would be the man Haney had been fighting. If Haney wanted to handle it his way, it was naturally none of Joe’s business. He said nothing.
“Braun’s a good guy,” said Haney. “Crazy, that’s all. He picked that fight. Picked it! 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.
Presently, though, lights twinkled in the night. Again the bus slowed, in column with the others. Then there were barrackslike buildings, succeeding each other, and then there was a corner and suddenly the outside was ablaze with light. The busses drew up to the curb and stopped, and everybody was immediately in a great hurry to get out, shoving unnecessarily, and Joe let himself be carried along by the crowd.
He found himself on the sidewalk with bright neon signs up and down the street. He was in the midst of the crowd which was the middle shift released. It eddied and dispersed without seeming to lessen. Most of the figures in sight were men. There were very, very few women. The neon signs proclaimed that here one could buy beer, and that this was Fred’s Place, and that was Sid’s Steak Joint. Bowling. Pool. A store—still open for this shift’s trade—sold fancy shirts and strictly practical work clothes and highly eccentric items of personal adornment. A movie house. A second. A third. Somewhere a record shop fed repetitious music to the night air. There was movement and crowding and jostling, but the middle of the street was almost empty save for the busses. There were some bicycles, but practically no other wheeled traffic. After all, Bootstrap was strictly a security town. A man could leave whenever he chose, but there were formalities, and personal cars weren’t practical.
“Chief’ll be yonder,” said Haney in Joe’s ear. “Come along.”
They shouldered their way along the sidewalk. The passers-by were of a type—construction men. Somebody here had taken part in the building of every skyscraper and bridge and dam put up in Joe’s lifetime. They could have been kept away from the Space Platform job only by a flat refusal by security to let them be hired.
Haney and Joe moved toward Sid’s Steak Joint, with Mike the midget marching truculently between them. Men nodded to them as they passed. Joe marshaled in his mind what he was going to tell the Chief. He had a trick for fixing the pilot gyros. A speck of rust would spoil them, and they had been through a plane crash and a fire and explosions, but his trick would do, in ten days or less, what the plant back home had needed four months to accomplish. The trick was something to gloat over.
Into Sid’s Steak Joint. A juke box was playing. Over in a booth, four men ate hungrily, with a slot TV machine in the wall beside them showing wrestling matches out in San Francisco. A waiter carried a huge tray from which steam and fragrant odors arose.