Something caught his eye:... «The Universe Between»

Something caught his eye: the high-rising office buildings being erected on the concrete footings that spanned the Hudson River from Manhattan to New Jersey. Great, bare steel girders, half-finished buildings, and not a sign of a work crew or welding flare on any of them. Another bottleneck, Hank thought grimly. No steel. Only a trickle from the mills these days, and that seemed to go to South America or Singapore or some place. Of course, sooner or later there was bound to be steel again, and soon even Manhattan District (still fighting to remain an island in the face of the ever-rising metropolitan congestion) would be indistinguishable from the rest of the tight, sky-scraping city that stretched from Maine to Virginia and from the tip of Long Island to the Alleghenies.