Edmond Dantes had a bigger cell than this.
Life had already settled into something of a dull routine in the plastic little world. Lou, Kori, and Bonnie were met by a greeting committee when they stepped through the airlock from the shuttle rocket. They were shown to their quarters. After he had unpacked his lone travel bag, Lou received a phone call from Mrs. Kaufman, who was acting as her husband’s secretary now, asking him to meet with the Director’s Council right after breakfast the following “morning.”
Time, of course, was completely arbitrary aboard the satellite. So everyone ran on the same clock, set on Universal Time. When it was midnight in Greenwich, England, it was midnight aboard the satellite.
Lou spent his first “evening” prowling through the uphill corridors. He couldn’t find Bonnie, didn’t know where her quarters were or what her phone number was. Same thing for Kori. He could have asked someone,- but instead he started walking along the main corridor. It was completely featureless, bare plastic walls broken only by bare plastic doors. All alike, except for tiny room numbers on them.
There were other people drifting through the corridors, most of them strangers, but a few men and women that he had worked with at the Institute. They nodded recognition or mumbled a hello. If they were surprised to see him, or wondered why they hadn’t seen him before this, they didn’t show it in any way. All Lou could see in their faces was a vague guilt, a shame at being locked up here.
Like the living dead, Lou thought of them.
The only change in the long, sloping, featureless corridor was that every ten minutes or so there was a spiral ladderway that led up toward the next wheel, in closer to the hub of the slowly spinning satellite. After passing several of them, Lou decided to go upstairs and see what was there.
The ladderway ended in another curving corridor, much like the first one, but smaller, narrower, with doors on one side only. This left side must be an outside bulkhead. Lou expected the gravity to be lighter in this second level, but if it was he could • detect no difference. Which meant that the satellite must be much larger than he had envisioned it. He began to realize how big the satellite would have to be to hold two thousand scientists and their immediate families.
As he walked aimlessly along the corridor, he came to a section that was dimly lit. Only a few dull red light panels overhead broke the darkness; it was barely light enough to see your way along. Ahead of him, Lou saw a motionless figure. As he got closer, he recognized him.
“Greg! Hey, Greg!”
Greg Belsen jerked as if startled, then turned to see who had called him.
“Greg!” Lou said, smiling and reaching out to grab his friend’s shoulder. “Boy am I glad to see you!”
“Hello, Lou,” Greg said quietly. “I heard they finally got you here.”
Lou’s smile vanished. This wasn’t the same Greg he had known at the Institute. The nerve had been taken out of him. Then he saw why Greg had been standing at this spot. There was a viewport in the walclass="underline" a small circle of heavily-tinted plastiglass. And outside that viewport hung the Earth. Rich, blue, laced with dazzling white clouds, beckoningly close, alive. It was swinging around in a slow circle, the reflex of the satellite’s spinning motion.
“She’s only a few hundred kilometers away,” Greg said in a soft flat voice that Lou had never heard from him before. “Less than the distance between Albuquerque and Los Angeles. You could go to one of the airlocks and practically jump back home.”
Lou’s blood ran cold.
Lou finally met Bonnie and Kori again the following morning, after a fitful, tossing few hours of dream-filled sleep. They all arrived at the autocafeteria at about the same time, and found each other at the “menu”—actually a wall panel studded with selector buttons. Only the breakfast buttons were lit. The cafeteria could seat perhaps fifty people, at long narrow tables. It was nearly empty.
“No morning rush to work, at least,” Kori said, trying to sound cheerful.
When neither Bonnie nor Lou answered him, he shrugged his bony shoulders and turned to the selector panel to study the available choices for breakfast.
“Are you supposed to meet with Kaufman and the Council this morning?” Lou asked Bonnie.
Kori answered, “Yes, at nine-thirty,” while Bonnie shook her head no.
Surprised, Lou said to Kori, “You are? But you’re not from the Institute. Why would Kaufman want you to report to him?”
“Your Dr. Kaufman has been elected head of this colony,” Kori answered. “Didn’t you know?”
“No, I didn’t. I thought it would be Professor DeVreis—”
With a shake of his head, Kori said, “DeVreis died of a heart attack his first day here.”
“Ohh.” Somehow, Lou felt as if someone close to him had died. He hardly knew DeVreis, but it seemed so unfair for a man who had lived such a rich and useful life to be tossed into exile, to die here, in this place.
Kori turned back to the selector panel and tapped buttons for orange juice, eggs, muffins, sausage, and coffee. Almost immediately a part of the panel slid back to reveal a steaming tray bearing his order.
“Well,” he said, “at least the food looks good.”
Sure it looks good, Lou found himself thinking. You’ve got a chance of getting off this jail.
Turning to Bonnie, he asked, “Kaufman hasn’t sent word to you?”
She shook her head. “No, nobody’s said anything to me about meeting with the Council. I guess they’re going to ignore me unless I decide to stay permanently.”
Lou agreed. “Well, I’m supposed to see them at nine.”
He was a few minutes late. It took him longer than he had expected to find Dr. Kaufman’s office, which was in the second wheel.
It was a long and narrow room, just long enough to have a slight curve to the floor. Kaufman’s desk was at one end, a long conference table at the other. All the furniture was made of plastic and light metals; it all looked temporary and cheap.
Kaufman sat at the head of the table. He had lost weight, Lou saw. There were new lines in his still-proudly handsome face. His thick hair seemed a shade whiter than it had been at the Institute. Greg Belsen, Kurtz, Sutherland, and two strangers filled all but one of the remaining chairs. Lou took the last chair, at the end of the table.
After introducing the two new faces—representatives from labs in Europe—Dr. Kaufman said, “We’re all trying to accustom ourselves to our new environment. The reason for meeting with you this morning is to ask you to select some sort of project for your working hours.”
“Project?” Lou asked.
“Yes,” said Dr. Kaufman. “I don’t believe that we should sit around and do nothing. The government won’t let us have the major types of facilities that we need for our old work—”
“There’s no computer aboard?”
Greg almost laughed. “No computer, Lou. No big toys for any of us. No electron microscopes, no ultracentrifuges, no microsurgery equipment—nothing but early twentieth-century stuff: optical microscopes and Bunsen burners, the kinds of things you buy kids for Christmas.”
Lou felt his lips press into a grim tight line.
Dr. Sutherland explained, “The government doesn’t want us to do anything more on genetic engineering. Even here. They’re afraid that if we start making progress again, we’ll smuggle the information back to Earth. And that’s exactly what they don’t want.”