Each escalator flattened out where it met the floor, and there was a three-meter strip of level surface. Ahead of them, Earthmen strode forward and stepped on without breaking stride, then turned about to face their direction of travel. Derec and Ariel tried to imitate that confident stride. At least the example taught them to enter against the direction of travel, a thing Derec wouldn’t have guessed. They stepped on with only a slight flexing of the legs and a quick shuffle to retain balance. They turned around and looked down, just as the strip dived down behind the wall.
The escalator, they saw, was not actually a stairway, as they had expected; it was a flat, moving ramp. Overhead was a sloping ceiling from which came the muted rumble of drives; one of the other strips, Derec supposed, probably an up strip. The down escalator did a complete half-circle clockwise, then the wall to their right opened and they were on the other side of the junction at the next level down.
One more half-circle, another junction, then there came a full circle with no exit, and they were at the bottom. The murmur became thunderous. The escalator dived into a slit in the floor, and, Derec presumed, ran “underground” for a few meters, only to reverse itself and climb backward, out of the floor and up. There were only two strips, not four, each going both up and down simultaneously.
Two dozen people got off below them, then they got off, and fifty more followed them, dispersing briskly in all directions, fighting through hundreds of people going eight different ways. This junction was four times as busy as the ones they’d seen above. Derec and Ariel tried not to gape.
Light and noise came through the arches that replaced the corridor mouths above, and they saw people whirling past. If before they’d seen hundreds, now they saw thousands!
Derec swallowed a small knot of fear. So many people! He got the distinct impression he’d never seen that many people together before. He realized he was making quick calculations of how much air they were using, and, more importantly, how much was left for him. No, he thought, if there’s enough for eight billio, there’s enough for me.
To right and left, moving strips hurtled past, faster and faster and higher and higher as they got farther from the junction. High overhead were glowing, Crawling signs like worms of light, the largest saying WEBSTER GROVES. Before and behind them, the other two arches opened on the non-moving space between the strips. It was dotted with kiosks-some being communications booths, some being the heads of strips that came up from below. Far away down the concourse was another wide tube coming down from the ceiling, with its four escalators. Behind, at the limits of sight, was another.
They drifted out, read the signs, awed. People swarmed about them, the noise was continuous and not so loud as it seemed, the air was warm and humid and thick with the odor of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people.
“So this is Earth.”
Chapter 4. There’s No Place Like Home Kitchen
Hesitantly, Derec led the way to the expressway that ran west, as it proclaimed. The lightworrns overhead proclaimed KIRKWOOD EXITS NEXT.
They mounted the first strip. It was traveling at about half walking speed, and each succeeding strip was that much faster than the previous. A fat old man skipped nimbly across three strips in a practiced motion that would have sent Derec tumbling. Sedately, he and Ariel crossed three strips, then she gasped and gripped his arm.
Hurriedly they recrossed the strips, going down, and were carried only a little way past their destination. They had gotten nowhere near the fast lanes of the express.
Once between the ways again they were a little puzzled, but there was a kiosk not far away, from which people emerged. Entering it, they found strips to carry them down to a cross-corridor that would take them under the ways. They surfaced on the other side of the express strips, where there was a set of localways, rode the second-slowest strip back for a short distance and got off, to dive into a huge corridor.
It was lined with shops of various kinds, but they didn’t stop to look. Thousands of people were peering through the transparent walls at bright displays of goods.
At the second cross-corridor was the symbol for the Personal. It wasn’t the one to which they were assigned; they must have passed that within minutes after leaving the apartment. At Ariel’s questioning look, Derec nodded, but he felt a qualm though he walked firmly toward the door to the Men’s Personal. For the first time, they were separated.
Don’t look at or speak to anyone, R. David had said. He pushed open the door and found himself in an anteroom. No one lingered there, so he also passed on, through a door ingeniously arranged not to be in line of sight of the first. Inside he saw a series of small hallways lined with blank doors, about half with red lights glowing. Some of these little cubicles were four times as large as others, and as a man exited one he glimpsed such felicities as laundry facilities. The stalls, he supposed, to which he had no access.
The tiny cubicle his keyed plastic strip got him into had a crude john, a metal mirror, and below it a wash basin. There was no towel, merely a device to blow hot, dry air. The showers were at the other end.
He felt better when he left. After a lengthy wait, Ariel reappeared, looking radiant.
Derec stared. Certainly she was looking better than she had in days on shipboard. He had a wild hope that she was not really sick after all, or that she had experienced one of those mysterious remissions that still baffled doctors. Then he realized that he was letting his wishes rule his reason, and cursed himself for setting himself up for a reaction.
“Shall we go?” she asked, smiling and taking his arm.
Itwas not far to the section kitchen to which they were assigned. As T-4s they could go to any kitchen they happened to be near, but that would entail accounting difficulties for the staff of the kitchen, and might draw attention to them.
Three lines of people formed up at the door, right, left, and center. They joined one of the lines, readying their metal ration tags. Ahead of them the Earthers-talking and laughing uninhibitedly, as was their wont-filtered forward, inserting their tags into slots and after a moment recovering them and striding into noisy confusion, removing their hats. There was a strong, pleasant odor of unfamiliar food.
“Hey, Charlie!” came a raucous cry from behind them, making them jump a little. Someone in the line behind them had recognized someone in the next line. “Back from Yeast Town, hey?”
Charlie answered incomprehensibly, something about being good to be back. “Right!” bellowed the man behind them. “No kitchen like home-kitchen, eh?”
Considering that they all must serve food from the same source, Derec thought, that must just be familiarity, not the food. Come to think of it, if everybody ate in such kitchens three times a day, they’d soon get to know their neighbors at the nearby tables.
They moved forward, Derec’s tag slippery in his hand. With nothing better to do, he counted the people passing through the entry. Each line filtered diners through at about one per second. Sixty per minute. At least a hundred and eighty per minute for the three lines. Frost! he thought. And we’ve been in line for five minutes!
It got worse; something like eighteen hundred people must have entered in the ten minutes it took them to work their way to the entry. A turnstile barred their way. Derec boldly thrust his tag into the slot of the machine. It blinked at him (non-positronic computer, he thought), lit up with the legend TABLE J-9/NO FREE CHOICE, and ejected the tag. Derec took it and found that the turnstile gave under pressure from his knee. Ariel followed in a moment, but there was no time to breathe easily.
Beyond stretched an enormous room.
The whole City was one gigantic steel and concrete cavern, and this was the largest opening in it that they had seen, except for the slash of the moving ways. It went on, it seemed, forever. From the ceiling, which glowed coolly, descended pillars in an orderly array, short sections of transparent wall (apparently to minimize noise) and columns apparently full of tubes and cables. Between them stretched the tables-kilometers of tables, in ranks and files. All was confusion, and the Earthers were swarming past them while they stood gaping: the gleam of light on polished imitation wood, the clatter of plastic flatware on plastic plates, the babble of thousands of voices, the crying of children. Behind manual windows to their right and left, men and women dealt with those whose feeding could not be automated.