I shall similarly give short shrift to the most glorious meal I have ever eaten. I would gladly spend several hours describing it, which is about the time I spent eating it, but my powers of description would surely fail me. It was, after all, simply good, solid, restaurant food. There were no hummingbird livers or ocelot's tongues or jellied kumquat tidbits. Nothing exotic at all, really. A big steak and mashed potatoes and corn, stuff like that, followed by most of a cherry pie and a pint of ice cream. It wasn't the preparation that made it taste so wonderful, it was the special sauce starvation provides. And it didn't take three hours to eat because it was a trencherman's groaning board. I just took the time to savor every bite. You should try that sometime, though I doubt you could ever experience my intense delight unless you'd gone that long without eating.
Refueled, reamed out, beginning to feel a reasonable approximation of a human being, I found my way to the freight offices and reclaimed the baggage that until recently had been my home. I glanced at the telltales that showed Toby was alive and well and deflated the dome. Gad! Had I really spent three months in there? The air that came whistling out said it had been at least that long. Whew! Did I smell like that? Probably.
I'd been meaning to go direct to the elevators, but took the time to check into a coin-op shower 'n shave. I came out feeling, if not exactly ready to whip the world, at least ready to go a few rounds with it.
Normally I wouldn't spend much time describing an elevator ride. But on Oberon II, nothing is quite like it is on other planets, and elevators are one of the most different.
Oh, and I'll drop that "Oberon II" business right now. I quickly realized that, in the time I'd been away, Oberon II had become simply, Oberon. What we used to call Oberon, the rocky moon, was now called Old Oberon. It made sense. There were a few thousand holdouts still living on Old Oberon, and a few tens of thousands of demolition miners and so forth, but as the moon began increasingly to resemble a rotten apple with big bites taken out of it even those few residents would have to move.
I remembered some of the grand old theaters of Old Oberon: the Palace, the Olivier, the Streep, the Chicago, and wondered if any of them were still standing in the gloomy airless rubble. Not to worry. All of them, and many more, plus a great variety of other structures had been plucked bodily out of the path of the marauding bulldozers. Most of them were sitting in mothballs at the Ob4 Trojan point, waiting for enough of the rim to be built to support an historical disneyland, the first to re-create a time since the Invasion, to be known as (guess what) Old Oberon. If all these New, Old, II, and whatever Oberons have you a bit confused, join the club. And don't worry about it.
Elevators. First, stop thinking in terms of a box that opens and closes and moves up and down in a shaft. Now, follow me... and watch your step as you board, please....
"The Noon elevator will be departing from Level 20, Concourse B, at 9:00 A.M.," the announcer's voice said. "That is in ten minutes' time. The Noon elevator will be leaving promptly at nine. All aboard, please."
So already this elevator is different, right? In fact, Noon elevators departed every hour on the hour, twenty-four hours a day. Only here, Noon was a destination as well as a time. It's a source of great confusion in communication, but it's solidly entrenched by now, and the Oberoni don't seem to mind it.
The huge partly finished clock face that is Oberon seen from space is the original Twelve and Six spokes, Twelve being flanked by spokes going to Eleven and to One, Six being between Five and Seven. Got it? The one designated as the twelve o'clock position is known as Noon Arc, and the other is Six Arc. People from Twelve are called Nooners. People from Six are called Aussies. I don't know why.
I boarded with plenty of time to spare, found a seat, and strapped in. I spent my time looking out the window until the hatch was sealed. The elevator was only half full, on this level, anyway.
The deck under my feet began to flash in pale blue letters: FLOOR FLOOR FLOOR. A bell sounded, and I sank gratefully into my chair as the car accelerated. Nice to be back in some gravity again.
"All clear," came a voice, and most of the people around me unbuckled and got up. So did I. The acceleration was mild, and didn't last for long. It was quickly followed by another period of weightlessness. The whole trip would be like that.
An elevator moving up and down the spoke of a spinning wheel has some difficult engineering feats to accomplish during the journey. During my first trips, when the wheel was new and consisted only of Twelve and Six, the elevator car was filled with seats mounted on gimbals, so the passengers could swing into any attitude, depending on where the force was coming from at the time. This was logical, but very boring. Stewards would escort you to and from the bathroom, if you were unlucky enough to have to go. I don't even want to try to describe those except for one little horror you can ponder at your leisure. Imagine standing at the toilet, answering nature's call, when suddenly the stream is splashing against the wall, then the ceiling. This happened to me when the gimbal got stuck. I imagine it would be even worse for women.
Now they had a new type of car. What it had to do was quickly and smoothly adjust to acceleration and deceleration, and to transform itself from a weightless environment to a 0.4 gee environment during the length of the trip.
There is no way I could describe all the ingenious dodges the engineers did to pull this off. If that was all they did, it would be impressive enough. But the car also had to be able to start and stop during the trip, and it had to deal with the angular force of Oberon's rotation. Just how this works is far beyond me, but you can see how the turning motion of the spoke would result in gradually increasing weight. It's called, I think, the Coriolanus Force, though why they should name it after him is beyond me. It produces a ride that even seasoned spacers sometimes find hard to take.
I was thinking of taking the elevator—the internal elevator—up to another level when the bell sounded again. A wall—I was pretty sure it had been the "ceiling" when we started—began to flash FLOOR FLOOR FLOOR. The wall I was pretty sure had been the FLOOR FLOOR FLOOR when I sat down now had no chairs attached to it. I couldn't think where they had gone; stolen while my back was turned, no doubt. But being only "pretty sure" of one's location and attitude was a common experience in zero gee, so I didn't worry about it. I was reassured when chairs began sprouting from the new FLOOR FLOOR FLOOR, some of them with sleeping people already strapped in. I kicked over to one, turned my feet to touch the FLOOR3, and felt the weight return to me gradually. Which meant we were slowing down again already, right? Well, it would seem so, but from inside the elevator it was hard to tell just what was happening. I felt a moment of nausea when we abruptly went weightless again—meaning we were now motionless?—and felt that superb lunch turn a cartwheel in my stomach. But the urge to purge went away. I've always had good space legs.
If you think you have good equilibrium as well, the Noon elevator is a good place to give it an acid test. Many a traveler have been humbled by the constantly shifting tides of the trip. The Oberoni call the condition C-sickness. About a quarter of the passengers were wearing Chuck-O-Laters, basically heavy-duty barf bags that strap over your face like a gas mask, with a constant suction and replaceable trap. In spite of them and in spite of the Herculean efforts of cleaning robots, the Noon elevator always smells faintly of vomit.