Turning around to face her I was speechless. "Explain this, this..." she yelled."I'm sorry dear," I finally got out. "Please, let me explain." I alrea...y told you to explain, stupid! Get out of there! Well!?"I stumbled to the bed, sat down, and, while she paced back and forth, recounted what I have discussed above."So, you do this to get off? I'm not satisfying your urges?" she asked."Please, it's just different. You satisfy all my other urges, this is just different." I responded."God, look at. He said it should be able to pull the stairway closed so it could be welded. The problem was going to be the old weld should be cleaned off before a new weld was made.I went back down and gave the chief my plan. I was going to have Bob on the roof holding my safety rope while I used a portable back pack gas rig to first clean the old weld, then connect two support pieces that should have already been there. When it was stable I would re-weld the cleaned ends where it was broken. I separated a. I took off, but was finding it hard going in the grass. As soon as we got to the street though, it became a lot easier. We didn't say much on the way over to her apartment. I was too busy getting enough oxygen in my lungs to keep pedaling, and Eileen was trying hard to keep herself balanced on the handlebars. We were just going fast enough to keep the bike from falling over because it had become an uphill climb. I was relieved when her apartment building came into view. If it had been much. She’d reconstructed an entire city for me. I couldn’t disappoint her.I nodded.There were no words. Instead, it was a feeling, akin to emerging from a small, dim grotto into a bright sunlit valley: a sudden, swift broadening of awareness.Looking up, I felt the keys to the locks of a hundred thousand doors raining down into my mind. Longshot’s subsystems ⁠— helm, power, navigation ⁠— began to report their statuses, whispers in my brain. I could reach a factotum at the edge of the city and tell it.