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.
Overhead, light-signs indicated the rows, and at Ariel’s nudge Derec started the long trudge to row J.
Because of his Spacer conditioning, he had been thinking of this kitchen as a Spacer restaurant, with maybe a dozen tables, most for four people, some for two, a few for eight or ten. But these tables each seated-he guessed fifty on each side. Even after they reached row J, table 9 was a long way away.
Hesitantly, they approached it-at least it was plainly marked-and found two seats together. The people they passed were grumbling because choice was suspended. “Too many transients,” growled someone, and they felt guilty.
“Food is probably one of the few high spots of their days,” Ariel whispered.
They took their seats and looked at the raised section of the table before them.
NO FREE CHOICE glowed to the right. On the left was a panel that said: Chicken-Sundays, opt. Mon. Fish-Fridays. opt. Sat. On Earth, there was a seven-day week, but Derec had no idea which day was which. There being no choice, he shrugged, glanced at Ariel, and pressed the contact. The panel immediately lit with: Zymosteak: Rare, Med… Well-D? Not Sunday or Friday, he thought. Derec chose well-done and the sign vanished, replaced with Salad: Tonantzin, Calais, Del Fuego, PepperTom?
Ariel shrugged, glancing at him, and they chose, suppressing smiles; neither had heard of any of these dressings.
ORDER PLACED. That sign stared at them for several minutes. The Earthmen around them were a scruffy lot, and Derec realized that he had been subliminally aware of that for some time. Earthers were short, and tended to be plain, if not actually homely. Here and there a handsome man or a beautiful woman attracted admiring glances, but they were a minority.
At least Earth people weren’t starving, as Derec had expected. He knew vaguely that it took a major effort on the part of the population and its robots-restricted to the countryside-to feed Earth. Standard food synthesizers were too expensive, and used much too much energy for Earth to afford. But a large minority of these people were fat, and many more were plump.
At this table they waited patiently, not talking or laughing as at other tables.
“Probably a table for Transients who don’t know each other,” Ariel said, low-toned. There were only a couple of quiet conversations at the table.
Presently, the food ended their embarrassment; a disk slid aside in front of each of them and another rose into position, the second one holding a covered server of plastic. When they removed the servers from the service disks, the latter closed smoothly.
The food looked like steak, baked potato with shrimp sauce, and a salad with dressing on the side. Crusty, faintly yellow bread. It smelled marvelous and, to Derec’s amazement, it was natural. His first bite confirmed that: the rich, subtle, varied flavor of real food was unmistakable. And yet it wasn’t real food, either. Zymosteak? It was plain these people normally got meat only twice a week, with a chance at it on two more days. Four days out of seven.
“I can’t believe it’s so good,” Ariel said under the cover of the clatter of Earthers opening their servers.
Derec hadn’t realized he was so hungry; it hadn’t been that long since breakfast. Perhaps he’d gotten so bored with synthetic food that he’d been eating less and less.
He turned his attention to another problem. They had been served with amazing rapidity. He couldn’t remember service on any Spacer world, but he was sure it wasn’t this fast. There had to be automation behind the scenes. Of course, with no free choice, they had merely to drop the chosen kind of dressing into the server, clamp the lid down, and pop it into an oven for the few seconds required to cook the zymosteak to the desired degree. Probably ran it through the oven on a belt. With a good oven, there could have been ice cream on the same plate and it wouldn’t have melted before the meat was done.
Even so, row J was the last: ten rows of ten tables each; a hundred tables, each seating a hundred. This commissary was equipped to feed ten thousand people. Derec mentioned as much to Ariel, who was as dumbfounded as he. Itwasn’t at capacity now; perhaps there were only six thousand people in the room.
On Aurora, a sports arena that seated ten thousand was a big one.
Halfway through the meal, Derec found his breath coming fast: it was too much. He felt trapped in this concrete cavern, felt that the spacious room was closing in, the ceiling, not low but not high, was the lid of a trap, the mobs of unconscious people around him weren’t real. They probably went all their lives without seeing the sun or open air, he thought, and that made it worse. With difficulty, he fought off the panic, panting.
When they had finished their meals, they put the servers and flatware back on the disk and pressed the same contact again, as they’d seen their neighbors do, and watched them vanish. The exit was on the opposite side. Once outside (an elaborate turnstile permitted exit only), Derec breathed more freely. They were a little at a loss, this not being the way they’d come in, but the sound of the ways was obvious, and they soon found their way back to them.
“The trouble is, there’s no quiet, no private place to talk,” Ariel complained as they hesitated.
“I know. We want to go to the spaceport, but I don’t feel like unfolding the map here.”
“Look…” Ariel fell silent until a chattering cluster of pre-teenage girls had passed, not even noticing them. “Look, the signs indicate that it isn’t ‘rush hour’-whatever that is-R. David mentioned it.”
“Right, and lowly Fours like ourselves can ride the express platforms for many hours yet.”
They made their way up the strips of the local, down again to the motionless strip between the locals and the express, then up again, faster and faster. Derec realized uneasily that if they were to trip and fall at these speeds they might be seriously injured. Nor was there an attentive robot to rush forward and grasp their arms if they should fall. Earthers never fell, he supposed. They learned when very young.