"I am?"
"No doubt about it."
"Well, could you go ahead and do that for me?"
"Certainly, Ed. I could. I will."
It was one of those times when she had remembered again how to fly, and it was marvelously easy-you just leaned forward out of a window or anywhere, and spread your arms, and soared up into the twilight wind. Past the blowing treetops now, past the dark shapes of birds, or perhaps not birds, but-Now the tall buildings were ahead, and she turned, but the buildings were everywhere. And she was caught by the currents between the buildings that crowded closer and closer until ...
. . . in an exploding ball of fire, and she came upright screaming. Stone came in and grabbed her by the shoulders. "What the hell is the matter?"
"Just a dream. Hold me, please."
CHAPTER 31
The Cube Team was having its regular Monday morning session.
"How are we coming on the Cube concept, Kevin?"
"Pretty well. Putting the structure up is fairly straightforward, but loading fast enough is a real bitch. Our rough projections show if we're going to make the deadline, figuring a target date of twenty oh five for start of construction, we've got to load approximately two million a day while construction is going on. Now to do that, we've either got to build a scaffold a mile high, or load with helicopters, or else build the Cube into the side of a mountain. Our feeling now is the mountain is the way to go. We sink a mile-wide shaft into the mountainside, and build roads up to the top, and a conveyor system that transports the loads at high speed to the level you're working on. Every time you fill a level, the conveyor system can be shortened, and the loading gets faster instead of slower."
"I think that makes sense. Now, what about the suspended animation gadgets, George?"
"According to Ed, the aliens are supposed to furnish those, but I don't know if they're thinking of just enough to put people into S.A. at the site, or if we're going to have enough to use them worldwide, or what, and I don't see how we can plan our system until we do know. Now there's a group in Japan that's developed an S.A. system of their own, and if that checks out, I think we ought to use it and not wait for the aliens. Because transport will be a lot easier if we can put people into boxes at the source and ship them that way."
"You say if it checks out?"
"Well, so far they haven't been able to get their experimental animals out of S.A. They've got some gerbils that have been laying there looking good as new for six months, but unless you revive them how can you tell? So I'm not sure, but it seems to me if the aliens have a system like 1 his, they must know how to tum it off, and it may be we're going to have to go that way just because we don't have enough time."
Sunday morning he called her from Istanbul. "Hey, did you see the news? There was a flash flood in Afghanistan, killed three hundred people."
"So?"
"So don't you remember, about the story in the magazine? That was the date I told you about, July six, the tidal wave."
"But this wasn't a tidal wave, was it?"
"Spoilsport," he said, and hung up.
The Cube Team was meeting again.
"What about people that have got heirlooms, old jewelry, paintings that can't be replaced? Are they going to have to leave all that behind?"
"And national treasures. Okay, there's room in those boxes for more than just the body, especially if it's a young child. The fact that we're standardizing the boxes means that in the case of small people, and children, there's going to be a lot of extra space. Why not let them fill that space with favorite possessions, anything they can't bear to leave behind? We'd have a hard time talking them out of it, anyway. They can take money if they want to, or jewels, bullion, whatever valuables they have."
"Some of them might want to take food, to make sure they have something to eat when they get there."
"Just as a digression, what are we going to eat when we get to the other planet?"
"I don't know. "
"Well, some people might want to take seeds. That would be a good idea, and they don't need much space."
"And books, or at least cubes. Cube players, holos. Musical instruments."
"Musical instruments take up a lot of space. Pianos, for instance."
"Okay, then plans for musical instruments. And all kinds of other things. Tools."
"That makes sense to me. They can stuff in whatever the box will hold, and that will add to the weight but not the cubic. People with a lot of kids will have an advantage, and if they're poor people, hey, they can sell space to rich people."
That winter there were ice storms from Boston to I\or-folk, flooding in Bangladesh, a new volcano in Iceland and another one in Hawaii. Stone was home again in late March, and they had three days together.
One afternoon they were alone in the living room, idly watching the holonews and playing Scrabble. " . . . reports of a huge flapping black thing in the sky," the talking head was saying. "And in Cleveland, a bizarre rain of cats fell in an outlying district this morning. Scientists say that rains of frogs and fish have been recorded before, but this is a first for cats. In Algiers ..."
That reminded her of something, and she asked him, "Could you draw me a picture of an alien?"
"I don't know. I'm no artist."
"Try it, anyway."
Stone found a piece of paper and a scriber, painstakingly drew something that looked like a child's picture, with a round head, oval body, and six sausages for arms.
"That isn't very good. Let's try the computer." She sat down in front of the terminal, asked for a menu and selected CAD. "You can draw on those things, too?" he said, looking over her shoulder.
"Sure." She put together some spheres and ovoids to make a yellow head, body, arms. "Let's work on the head first. Eyes? Are there two?"
"Yeah."
She added the eyes. "Are these the right shape?"
"No, rounder than that. And bigger."
She made the changes. "This where they go?"
"No, lower. And the forehead should be more like bulgier."
They worked on the face until Stone was satisfied. The last step was the spines, that made the face look like a sea creature's. Then they did the body, the arms, fingers. "Hey, that's pretty good," Stone said.
She stared at the image broodingly. "Is this the right color?"
"I don't know, the light was funny. Maybe a little browner."
She made the adjustment, saved the image. She printed out a copy, folded it up and put it in her bag.
"What did you want that for?" he asked.
"I don't know. Something to look at."
"How did it make you feel?"
"Scared. And something else, I don't know what."
"Bad news about the suspended animation gadgets. I sent Tom over there to take a look, and he says not only they can't get their gerbils out of S.A., but they can't move them."
"They can't move them? How come?"
"I don't understand it myself. They say their apparatus generates a cryonic field of over a billion hertz, okay, and what it does, apparently it rotates the object in the field through an infinite series of parallel universes. So, every picosecond, instead of the gerbil you started with, you've got another gerbil that's right where it was on that worldline when you turned the current on. So you can't move it, because even if you could do it in a picosecond, the next picosecond it would be right back where it started. They took the apparatus away, and the gerbil just hung there in the middle of the air. They gave Tom a hammer and asked him to hit the gerbil. He said it almost broke his wrists. Didn't even muss the gerbil's hair. "