Sam gave a dark, thick-lipped leer. “Very. Of course, I was much younger then. And one’s tastes shift, if not exactly change. Still, I visit the old neighborhood ...” (Bron thought: Family man, high-powered, big, black, and handsome Sam ... ?) “The point is: the government,” Sam went on, in a perfectly reasonable tone (in which Bron now found himself listening for the lighter overtones in that security-provoking bass), “is simply not interested in my rather common sexual history or your rather peculiar one. And you had told me about your whoring days. I admit, I was surprised the first time. But shock value diminishes with repetition.”
“You hadn’t told me,’9Bron said, sullenly.
Sam raised the other eyebrow. “Well ... you never asked.”
Bron suddenly didn’t feel like talking any more, unsure why. But Sam, apparently comfortable with Bron’s moody silences, settled back in his (her? No, “his.” That’s what the public channels suggested at any rate) seat and looked out the window.
They sped through the dim, glittering landscape of green ice, gray rock, and stars.
Perhaps a kilo away, Bron saw something he thought was the Space Port that Sam said wasn’t. A minute later Sam pointed out at something he said was.
“Where?” Bron couldn’t see.
“Over there. You can just catch a glimpse of the edge, right between those two whatyamacallits.”
“I still can’t tell where you’re—” at which point they plunged into covered tunnel; lights came on in the car. The engine whine intruded on Bron’s awareness by lowering pitch. They slowed. They stopped. Then it was green, pastel corridors and opulently-appointed waiting rooms that, while you had a drink and were introduced to people—the rest of Sam’s entourage—trundled quietly along invisible tracks, were hauled up unseen lifts—people laughed and glanced down at the geometrically patterned carpet when, once, the floor shook—and you were guided to the proper door by the little colored lights and the people in the party who were obviously old hands at this sort of thing. (There was no one resembling a steward around; but Bron wasn’t sure if that was “standard tourist” or just “government.”) He was enthusiastically telling someone who appeared to be enthusiastically listening about his own emigration trip to the Outer Satellites twelve years back, which “... let me tell you, was a different matter entirely. I mean, the whole three thousand of us were drugged to the gills through the whole thing: and what fa in this drink, anyway—” when he realized, in the midst of laughing, that six months ... six weeks from now, he probably would never think of any of these affable George’s and Angela’s and Aroun’s and Enid’s and Hotai’s again. I mean, he thought, it’s a political mission: nobody’s even mentioned politics! I haven’t even asked Sam what the mission fa! Is that, he wondered as they walked along another corridor (some of the group were riding smoothly on the moving strip down the corridor’s side; others ambled beside it, chatting and laughing) what Sam meant by politically low-volatile?
In one of the larger, more opulent, mobile rooms, with luxurious reclining chairs on its several, carpeted levels, there were more drinks, more music, more conversation ...
“This is all marvelous, Sam!” someone called out. “But when do we get on the ship?”
Someone else lifted their ankle to check a complex chronometer strapped there: “I believe we’ve been on it for the last two minutes and forty seconds,” which drew a group Ooooo! and more laughter.
“Take off in seventeen minutes.” Sam came down the scroll-railed steps. “This is my cabin. Just take any couch you want.”
Over the next ten minutes Bron learned that the blonde, blue-eyed woman on the couch next to Bron’s was part of Sam’s family commune, and that the tan, plump girl, going around saying, “Drugs? Drugs, everyone?” and clapping her hand to the side of the neck of anyone who smiled and nodded, was their daughter.
“You mean you really can do it without drugs?” someone asked.
“Well, Sam means for us to watch the take-off,” the blonde woman said, lying back on her couch and craning around to see the speaker. “So I’d suggest you take them—it can be a little unsettling, otherwise.”
“That’s exactly why I asked,” the other speaker said.
When the plump girl got to Bron’s couch, on an impulse he smiled and shook his head. “No, thank you ...” But her hand clapped him anyway; then she jerked it away and looked distressed:
“Oh, I’m dreadfully sorry—You said ‘No’—!”
“Urn ... that’s all right,” Bron mumbled.
“Well, maybe you didn’t get very much—” and she darted off to the next couch.
A buzzer sawed through the cabin. A lot of the more opulent things—lighting fixtures, wall sculptures, shelves, ornamental tables—folded up or down or side—
ways into walls, floor, and ceiling. Several of the couches swung around so that they were all facing the same way in the now rather institutional-looking space. The wall before them hummed apart. What had been a corridor before was now a wall-sized window on star-speckled night, cut with a few girders, the tops of a few buildings visible at its bottom.
From the ceiling a screen folded down, its face a-flash with myriad numbers, grids, and graphs.
There has never been a spaceship accident more than three seconds past take-off less than 100 percent fatal, Bron recalled—which probably meant he had not gotten much of the take-off drugs.
“I always find these trips so exciting—” someone said—“no matter where or how many times I go. I have no idea why ...”
Blue numbers (which were becoming more and more prevalent across the screen) he knew were the final navigation check figures. Red numbers (and a whole bunch went from blue to red) meant those figures had been approved and fed into the take-off computer.
“There’s no turning back now,” someone said solemnly.
“I hope the swimming pool cover is on tight,” someone else said (and everyone chuckled). “I’d hate to have to take a swim too early.”
Bron settled against the padding. Something began to roar—rather far away—on his right; then something else—much closer—on his left. There were only two blue numbers now, amidst a full field of red: and they were flickering oddly, which made him suspect they were broken.
Someone said: “I don’t think those blue numbers are right ...”
Someone else said: “Sam, I told you, you should have gotten a government cabin. The government’s never wrong.”
People chuckled again.
Then the building tops and the girders were gone. And the stars were moving.
The cabin lurched.
“Whoopsy-daisy!” someone called.
People laughed again.
Down had suddenly and disconcertingly established itself in some direction near his feet. Bron felt himself slip on the pad. The stars jerked to the side on the panoramic window; a moment later they were wiped away by landscape, moving too fast for Bron to tell if they were ten meters or ten—therel A web of lights and more lights swept by: Tethys itself. Every one Oooooed again.
They were at least ten kilometers up.
Stars now. Now landscape ... but moving more slowly—at least forty. When the pitted horizon passed again, Bron could make out a distant curve. Then the cabin rocked grandly backward ... or rather, “down” reestablished itself under the floor.
The screen, its two, broken, blue numbers still flickering (all the others were out now), folded into the ceiling.
Was it the drug—or that he hadn’t gotten enough of one of the several drugs, or too much of another? ... he stayed on his couch for quite a while, gazing at the circling stars. Ancient Earth men had tried to pick out pictures on those blue-white points. He tried to superimpose her face; but neither the stars, nor his memory, stayed still enough.
When he finally got up, people were already walking around. On the upper level, at the top of the stairs, the pool-cover had retracted. A few people were already paddling about. Light fixtures, bar, sculptures, and tables were once more out; and a trap had opened up with steps down into the cabin’s free-fall section: a drum as big as this one just “below” it, with “real” (that is, only when accelerating) gravity (“Guests are requested not to take liquids from one level to the other,” said the sign on the stand beside the ladder, in whose white plastic rings already stood four or five unfinished drinks.) Completing his circuit of the pool, Bron walked back down the carpeted steps, with a drink now, as three people came up, laughing hysterically about something inane.