The block was completely immersed in the water now and the level in the barrel had hardly risen at all. "Ninety percent air," Johns assured him. I doubt there's any structural material on the face of the earth that combines the structural strength with the lightness of honeycomb."
Ron Ellick nodded. Or offthe face of the earth, either. "How much for the blocks?"
Johns rubbed his chin and looked thoughtful. "The aluminum kind or the--"
"Each."
Johns cited a list of prices from memory. Ron Ellick wrote them down on a notepad. "OK, Johnny, I'll talk to my people. You can ship it to California?"
Johns nodded. "Son, the way the market is right now, I'll carry it to California."
«logon»
«I have caught the bug. MYCROFT.»
«logoff»
Ted Marshall was a young man, round of face and soft of muscle. At 5' 11" and 160 pounds, he gave the odd impression of being both skinny and overweight. He had an aversion to athletics of any sort. Every morning he watched a run of joggers pound by his home, lifting them up and putting them down; a peculiarly elaborate form of self-torture. In high school, he had taken remedial gym.
He held the chip up to the light and looked at it. "How many books does it hold?"
"About five hundred," said Will Waxman. The old man with the bushy patriarch's beard laid four more on the table. "This is almost my entire library. The last one, there? That's the Encyclopaedia Britannica."
Ted grunted and laid the first chip down. All five had been modified to look like Nintendo "Game Boy" cartridges. "Cyberbooks. And you want to know if I can duplicate them?"
Will Waxman nodded. "And the reader." He set a Sony Bookman on the table between them. "Maybe a dozen of each?"
Ted picked up the Bookman. "Where did you get this baby? I thought their import was banned."
"It is."
Ted inserted one of the cartridges into the Bookman and touched the "game buttons." "How does it--Never mind, I got it. This is page forward; and this is page back. Hey! You've of the entire Heinlein canon in here! And Asimov and de Camp and… What does this button do?"
"It moves the cursor around so you can tab hypertext buttons. Go ahead, move it to the story title you want to read and then press the 'A' button."
Ted did so and smiled when he saw the title page appear on the screen. He glanced at the other cartridges. "This must be a lot of fun when you're browsing through the encyclopedia."
"Flying through the encyclopedia," Will corrected him, "like a stone from David's sling skipping over the water. No, more like jaunting in Bester's The Stars My Destination or the stepping discs in Niven's Ringworld. Did you ever hear Philip Jose Farmer's definition of a dullard?"
Ted shook his head. "No."
Will grinned. "Someone who looks a thing up in the encyclopedia, turns directly to the entry, reads it, and then closes the book."
Ted laughed. "It's a damn shame they banned these things. The trade problem--"
"Trade friction had nothing to do with it." Will took the Bookman from Ted, saw that it was open to Pebble in the Sky and flipped through the electronic pages. "Can you imagine any gadget better designed to seduce the Video Generation into reading?"
Ted frowned. "Nah. Conspiracy theories are fun, but it's usually just ineptitude or--"
"A well-read, educated public is more difficult to lead around by the nose ring." Will leaned across the table. "Can you duplicate the chips and the reader, Ted? I need to know."
Ted Marshall shook his head. "No, I can't. The programming? No problem. But the chips themselves… I'm not a hardware man."
The old man sighed. "I was hoping to keep my originals. Oh, well."
Ted held out a placating hand. "Hold on, Will. I don't know how to duplicate the hardware, but I know someone who knows someone."
Free-lance electrosmithing was almost as incriminating as free-lance programming. Will didn't ask further. Ted Marshall made the Bookman and its chips vanish. "I'll see what I can do. You won't mind if I make copies for myself, will you?"
"Of course not."
"Still. Won't the, uh…" He cast his eyes toward the ceiling. "Don't our friends need things like algae for their hydroponics a lot more than they need books?"
Will shoo his head. "Man does not live by pond scum alone."
«logon»
«Ghost: Honeycomb, won't you be my baby. Batman»
«logoff»
"Oh, what a cute little bunny rabbit!" said Adrienne Martine-arnes, stooping over to peer into the cage. The oversize rodent inside laid her ears back and sniffed. The Gnawing incisors lay bucktoothed over the lower lip. Yes, aren't you cute." And plump, too. Rabbits gave good meat per volume. So did guinea pigs.
"May I help you?" The pet store manager had come up behind her.
Adrienne rose and turned. "Yes, you may." She had the commanding presence of the queen of Olympus. A white streak accented her otherwise black hair, as lightning does the night sky. "How much are the rabbits and the guinea pigs? The manager told her and she nodded. She pulled a checkbook from her handbag. "And do you give quantity discounts?"
When they came to the Interstate bridge over the Mississippi, they slowed, and Harry and Jenny came by on the motorcycle. Harry held up his hand, thumb and forefinger in a circle.
"All clear," Bob said. "At least from outside."
Alex could see the St. Louis waterfront laid out below him. Many of the docks and wharfs along the river stood dry and inaccessible, since so much of the river's source water was locked up in northern ice. Starved as she was, though, the Mississippi was still a mighty stream; and tug barges and riverboats crowded her like a Manhattan street. The Missouri, which entered a few miles upstream, was still running near strength wind and rain patterns having so far kept her watershed nearly ice-fee.
Even so, Alex noticed two barges aground o a mud bar near the East St. Louis side of the river. Grain barges from the north, Bob told him. Files of people, ant-mall in the distance, marched on and off the barges, balancing baskets full of grain on their heads. He wondered how much of the cargo they could salvage before rats and rot did for the rest.
Gordon, sitting between them, suddenly perked, up and pointed through the windshield. "What is that?" he asked.
"That is the Gateway Arch," said Bob, taking the exit onto Memorial Drive. "Our destination."
"But what does it do? What is its function?"
"The Arch? There's an elevator inside that takes you to an observation platform on top. And there used to be a Pioneer Museum underneath; that's closed up now for lack of funds."
"That's all? Not for microwave relay or, your word… weather observation or such?"
"No, it was a tourist attraction. A monument. Why?"
Gordon shook his head in wonder. "I have never seen such an artifact built for no useful purpose. Could make poem about such beauty. Building under constraint of gravity field is like building poem under constraint of sonnet form. Requires craft and artistry."
Alex noticed Gordon's lips move and grunted. The stilyagin was probably trying to compose a poem on the spot. It was that sort of distraction that got him put on probation, then on the dip trip.
But Gordon was right about its beauty. In orbit Alex would not have wondered twice about the Arch. Such construction would have been easy, given the mass… which is never given, in orbit. That's why we need Moonbase so badly. All that free mass! But in a gravity field… how did they keep it up? Its soaring lines seemed to defy gravity. He tried to imagine the forces acting on the arch. The downward vectors must be translated into vectors along the length of the arch itself. A neat problem in basic physics. It was a fascinating planet. His eyes travelled along the sleek parabola until, in an odd echo to his thoughts, he saw what looked like vector arrows pointing down from the top of the Arch. As he watched, the arrowheads swayed slightly in the wind.