two to ten o'clock
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 .