– 7 –

It’s probably a bad idea, all things considered, to build a space elevator over Brentwood. There’s a very good reason that most space elevators are never built at all, and most of the rest are built over the equator.

If you don’t have people like Cheryl and Amber to fold the space around it and manipulate the qualities of rotation, you’d need to have a whole second bootstrap descending to a different point on the planet; and then the whole idea of having a saint pull the space elevator up by its bootstraps — technically, by dragging it through a hope-distorted ninja space — starts to get a little difficult with the technology of the day.

Boots should have two bootstraps! It’s not a bad thing! It’s just not feasible. Not yet!

Even with Cheryl and Amber, though; even with Peter; even with Harold, Keith, and Tom —

But anyway.

It’s probably a bad enough idea just building a space elevator over Brentwood in the first place. But one thing you should absolutely, definitely never do, if you do build a space elevator that stretches up from the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth in Brentwood, is attract the attention and the anger of sextillions of scissors.

That’s just too wayward!

Don’t do that!

Have some kind of methodology where when the scissors come, they are less likely to notice that your space station and central world defense nerve center is tethered to the planet by a single, narrow thread.

“That,” Cheryl agrees —

Not with the narration!

“Was my mistake.”

She’s just staring at the flashing SCISSORS HAVE CUT THROUGH THE BOOTSTRAP warning, and realizing that when she’d designed that panel she really ought to have given the matter more thought.

<< – 6 –

– 8 – >>