A Reasonable World

29

The idea of a weekend on Star Towers came to Harry Conlon in connection with his upcoming tenth anniversary. Harry was a large ham-fisted man who had made it big in ceramic pipe— well, not exactly big by Texas standards, but not so bad, either, for a guy who could barely read the sports. Jolene, his third and best-looking wife, already had enough jewels and furs to hide her completely from sight; and besides, nobody either one of them knew had ever been to Star Towers, and this would be something to talk about—a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

When he mentioned the trip casually to friends, as he found increasingly frequent occasion to do, he noticed that their eyes bugged involuntarily; that was very gratifying, and he began to think he had made an upscale decision. It turned out that Jolene had to have new jewels and furs for the trip, in order not to disgrace him in front of all those billionaires, but as Harry said, it was only money. He got a big juicy kiss for that, and Jolene did one or two things that night that she didn’t usually do.

They flew to Houston, stayed in a hotel overnight, and the next morning, after indoctrination, medical checkups and parasite screening, they put on their special shoes and filed aboard the spacecraft with a few hundred other people, a very select bunch, naturally: distinguished-looking men, most of them past middle life, and women dressed to destroy, even though they all wore slacks or culotte dresses. “Isn’t that what’s-her-name, the holo star?” Jolene whispered excitedly. “And that one, I know I’ve seen his face—is he a senator or what? Look at the rock his wife has on her finger!”

Harry squeezed her arm, and she squeezed back. He figured he was going to get his money’s worth just in accelerated female gratitude and affection, but the next part was not so great. An attendant strapped them into reclining seats which reminded Harry unpleasantly of dental chairs, between plastic curtains that were like the way they curtained somebody off in the hospital when they were about to die. Harry’s heart was hitting him in the chest; he began to feel he had made a serious mistake.

The holos on the ceiling lit up and showed the head of a young woman, who said, “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Hi-lift Five, Flight Nineteen to Star Towers. My name is Wendy, I’m your chief cabin attendant. We are now in final preflight check mode, all systems are go, and we will lift off in approximately two minutes. While we are waiting, I would like to point out some of the features of your accommodations aboard. The controls of your holos are in the left-hand armrest of each acceleration couch, along with controls for lights and ventilation, and the call button for the cabin attendants. The controls of the couch itself are in the righthand armrest, where you will also find headphones for your holos and music, a box of tissues, and a small white envelope for your use in case you should experience stomach uneasiness in flight. Reading matter is stored in the wall cabinet at the head of every couch, and in this cabinet you will also find a mesh bag containing the loose articles and jewelry which you surrendered prior to boarding. Please use these articles with caution and do not let them escape while we are in zero gravity. Also in the wall cabinet you will find complimentary toiletries, stationery and postcards, and hairnets for use in zero gravity conditions. Once we have gone through the powered phase of our flight, cabin attendants will assist you with any difficulties you may have. As soon as the countdown begins, please make sure that your couch is in the fully extended position, that your belts are fastened, and that you are lying comfortably with your head straight, your legs slightly apart and your arms on the armrests. Thank you, and enjoy your flight.”

Harry noticed that she hadn’t said anything about what to do in an emergency. What did that mean, that if there was an emergency, there wasn’t anything to do? After a pause, a man’s voice said on the loudspeakers, “Prepare for lift-off. Cabin attendants, take your couches.” Then the countdown, “five, four,” and the whole thing, while Jolene was yelling, “Harry, I want to get off!” and then a roar that shook his back teeth like castanets, and a leaden weight falling over his whole body. Out of the comer of one eye he could see that Jolene’s face was all pulled out of shape, like his; her mouth was stretched open sideways, exposing her teeth like a dead rat’s, and her boobs were flat as cow pies. Harry blacked out for a minute. When he came to, the roar had stopped, and now the weight was gone—all the weight. He felt like the cabin was falling, even though he knew it wasn’t, and he grabbed the armrests in a death-grip.

“Well, folks,” the Captain’s voice was saying, “that’s it for now. We’ll be performing an orbital correction in about an hour. Until then, move around the cabin if you want, but please keep your feet on the floor and don’t try to float around in the cabin. When you are in your seats, please keep your belts fastened.”

Beside him, Jolene was throwing up. The steward came by with a little vacuum cleaner, and handed her some tissues afterward. Then it was Harry’s turn, but at least he got the barf-bag over his mouth first.

That was the way it went. Even when they weren’t sick, their faces were flushed and puffy, and their noses were stopped up. Harry got over the idea that he was falling after the first hour or so. But there were retching sounds from somewhere in the cabin pretty much all the time, and unless a person kept their headphones on they couldn’t help being reminded, so he and Jolene didn’t say more than two words to each other, and neither of them could face the idea of lunch.

They both got to the bathroom and used the vacuum toilet okay, or at least Harry did. Jolene came back from there with her face set, muttering, “I’ll never do this again.”

Then the Captain’s voice said, “Folks, if you want to get a look at Star Towers, there’s a telescopic view on channel thirteen now.”

They turned it on, and saw a little white stick with a knob at both ends, slowly turning against blackness. A dumbbell, the brochures had called it, but if it was a dumbbell it would have to be twenty yards long. Something almost too thin to see was sticking out of both knobs, and there was another bulge in the middle. Then the view changed to the Earth, like a blue-and-white beachball. Then Star Towers again.

The Captain came down the aisle with a frick, frick of velcro. He was a handsome young man with a beefy jaw, and he knelt by Jolene’s couch. “Feeling better, folks?”

“I'll be glad when I get some weight back!” said Jolene. “I never thought I’d say that!”

“Why, ma’am, I wouldn’t say you needed to lose an ounce.”

“How big is this L-Five thing, anyhow?” Harry asked.

“The arm is a little over forty-seven hundred feet long, Mr. Conlon, and the two spheres are two hundred forty feet in diameter.”

“Two hundred forty? It looked a lot bigger than that in the brochures.”

“Well, in fact, it really is bigger inside than outside. They don’t call it L-Five, by the way.”

“No, why not?”

“That was the name of the place they originally thought they were going to put the habitat—one of the Lagrangian points. Later they found out this orbit was better, but the name stuck.”

“So what do you call this orbit?”

“Well, the technical term is a three-one resonant orbit, so we call it Toro. Pretty cute, huh?” He turned to Jolene. “We’ll be docking real soon, and then you’ll feel better, Miz Conlon. That’s a promise.” He grinned and fricked away down the aisle.

“I wish he wouldn’t do that,” Jolene said in an undertone. “Why doesn’t he stay up there and fly the plane?”

“It isn’t a plane.”

“Well, you know what I mean.” She put her headphones on and channel-hopped until she found a holo she hadn’t seen. Her mouth was set in a way he recognized. Christ, she had better feel better, or this trip would be half a megabuck down the toilet.

They watched on the holos as the white dumbbell drifted closer until it was so enormous that the ends went out of sight. They were moving toward the middle, where there was a cylindrical bulge and a cluster of antennas and things. The engines fired and stopped, fired and stopped. There was a barely perceptible jar, then a gentle rotation.

Cabin attendants rigged a guideline up the aisle and helped the passengers along it. Other guidelines led from the exit along a velcro path that curved down, then up, and eventually brought them to a big blue cylinder, like a metal cake pan sticking down from the ceiling. They got in through the open door, about fifty of them, walked up the side, and attendants velcroed their feet to the ceiling. Harry couldn’t tell which way was up anymore. The attendants handed them all barf bags and got out, the door closed, and the cylinder started moving. Then there was no doubt about up and down—they were hanging from the ceiling—but after about a minute the whole cylinder seemed to swing around right-side up. A few people were retching again. After another minute the car sighed to rest; a door opened in the side. Then a glassed-in walkway, through which they could see buildings and shrubbery below, and another elevator.

The ground level was beautifully landscaped, with a lot of flowers and shrubs, but it certainly was smaller than he had expected. The brochures had made it look like a small-town park; it was really more like the lobby of a large hotel. Overhead, cantilevered sections stuck out, level after level, so that the open space was widest at the bottom and narrowest at the top. A tall window curved up one side, and Harry thought he could glimpse another set of buildings through the sunlight that was streaming in. Maybe there was another section over there, but he didn’t see how that could be.

A little open-topped robot bus took them across to their hotel. The air was cool and fresh, with pine and flower scents in it. In the lobby there was a slowly rotating holo of the Earth, with numbers that showed what time it was in all the important places. A sign at the desk said: star towers, your vacation wonderland. TEMPERATURE TODAY: 72° F, 22° C. GRAVITY AT THIS LEVEL: 89% EARTH NORMAL. HAVE A HAPPY!

A computer signed them in at the desk; then a robot bellman came to conduct them to their room. Harry looked at him curiously; he had never seen one before, except once from a distance in a fancy hotel. The bellman’s body was off-white plastic with inlaid brass buttons; his hands were lifelike in white gloves. His head was a holo in a tank on his shoulders. The face inside was that of a cheerful-looking young man.

Their room was on the third floor; it was sparkling clean and beautifully decorated, but pretty damn small. When Harry handed him forty dollars, the bellman looked at it as if he had never seen money before.

“Son,” Harry said, “I just got here. How much do people usually give you?”

“A hundred and up, sir,” the young robot said apologetically. “Everything costs more than you’re used to on Star Towers.”

Harry gave him the hundred. Afterward he looked at the prices on the room-service menu, and saw that the bellman had told the honest truth. Harry had expected to be gouged, had braced himself for it, but two hundred bucks for a bacon and tomato sandwich?

Then he noticed a sign in the holo that said: good evening! this is spacy, your personal computer attendant. IF YOU WOULD LIKE SOME INFORMATION ABOUT STAR TOWERS, PLEASE SAY “YES.”

“Okay,” said Harry.

The holotube lighted up with the image of a young woman’s smiling face. Behind her was a view of the sunlit buildings of Star Towers, with people strolling happily in the park below.

“Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. Conlon. Tell me, what would you like to see first—some general information about Star Towers, or the low-gravity cultural events, the casinos, the cabarets, the restaurants?” As she spoke, an animated menu appeared behind her in the tube.

“Let’s see the casino,” said Jolene. The computer image vanished, and they saw elegant men and women gathered around a roulette table, the men in formal evening wear, the women in long gowns. “Look at that burnout dress!” said Jolene reverently. “Spacy, mirror.”

The holo obediently turned into a mirror, and Jolene fussed unhappily with her hair. “I’ve got to have my hair done,” she said. “Spacy, will you please make me an appointment?”

“Certainly. One moment. You’re in luck, Mrs. Conlon —there has been a cancellation at two o’clock tomorrow afternoon Houston time.”

They went downstairs and walked around the park awhile, looking at the other tourists, then had dinner in the hotel dining room, eight hundred bucks apiece. Jolene got a headache, and they went to bed early. The next day, after breakfast, they went to the light show and the space museum, and they watched some low-gravity ballet on the big holo in the park. There were signs all over in English, French, German, and other languages, some of them not even in regular letters. This place reminded Harry of a theme park without the rides. Except for the lower gravity and the curving wall behind the buildings, there was nothing to tell them they weren’t on Earth—they couldn’t even see the goddamn stars, except in holos that they could have watched without leaving home.

They spent some time at the pool on the top level, where the sign said GRAVITY 83% EARTH NORMAL, and Harry felt like he had lost about thirty pounds. The most desirable rooms were up here, Harry realized; that was one more thing he hadn’t known when he made the reservations.

Later, looking around as they crossed the park toward a cafe visible on the opposite terrace, Harry saw that most of the people here looked rich but few looked happy. There were two or three younger men, flamboyantly dressed, who were smiling too broadly, probably on drugs; the rest seemed glum. A little group of Japanese went by, looking the way Japanese usually did. Then a scowling guy in a turban.

After they ordered breakfast, Harry pointed to the tall window between two buildings on the other side. “What’s over there?” he asked the robot waiter. “Looks like another space as big as this one.”

The waiter smiled courteously. “It’s a holo, sir,” he said. “Many people feel more comfortable if they can see for long distances.”

Lunch, almost the cheapest thing on the menu, was four hundred dollars apiece, and dinner was seven. Counting meals, tips, and entertainment, Harry figured he would be lucky to get out of here for less than ten thousand over and above the cost of the flight and the hotel room.

That afternoon, while Jolene was at the hairdresser’s, Harry went to a cocktail lounge. He sat at the bar and had a bourbon and water. “Tell me something,” he said to the bartender, a tall young robot with bushy black hair. “Is there anything to do in this place that you couldn’t do at home cheaper?”

The bartender smiled. “Sir, have you ever heard of sex in free fall?”

“Yeah. You know, I wondered about that. Is it available?”

The bartender nodded slowly. “At a price, of course.”

“Oh, yeah. How much?”

“Ten thousand for half an hour’s privacy in the docking area. That’s if you bring your own girl.”

“Girls available too?”

“Everything’s available.”

“Just curious—how much for the girl?”

“That depends, sir. Anywhere from three thousand to twelve or more.”

“Jesus,” said Harry.

Later, when he suggested to Jolene that she might like to enjoy a unique experience in space, she said, “Are you serious? After what I went through on that ship, do you think I would go into free fall again one minute sooner than I have to? Grow up, Harry.”

Then she told him she was having dinner with a woman she had met at the hairdresser’s. Harry grabbed a sandwich in the coffee shop and then went to the casino. He played the slots awhile, won a small pot and ended up only about two hundred down. Encouraged, he went to the blackjack table, where two men and a woman were already playing. The woman was a striking blonde in a paper dress. After a while Harry noticed that the robot dealer was paying her about two hands out of three.

Harry caught her eye and said, “Hey, if I buy you a drink, will you tell me how you do that?”

She smiled. “I just play the odds. But you can buy me a drink anyway, lover.”

They cashed in and went to a booth in the casino lounge. Harry was feeling a pleasant excitement. The blonde, who said her name was Caroline, ordered a Tom Collins from the robot waitress; Harry had bourbon. “Are you a tourist, too,” he asked, “or, uh—”

“I’m an employee,” she said. “I was on the construction crew that built this place, and they gave us the option of staying on. The other option was they’d take our earnings to pay for passage home. That’s the way it goes. Everybody has to have some kind of a hustle. I come over here every day or two to pick up some extra cash.”

“Over here?”

“From the other half of the dumbbell. That’s where most of the employees bunk. It’s not as fancy as this.”

“Hey, I’d like to see that.”

“No, you wouldn’t.” She sipped her drink. “What you’d like to see is the docking chamber.”

Harry felt himself flushing. He leaned forward. “Yeah, you’re right about that. Would you be interested?”

“Sure, lover. You’re heavy or you wouldn’t be here, right?”

“Not that heavy. How much?”

She spread out the fingers of both hands on the table. Harry hesitated only a moment. “I haven’t got it in cash,” he said.

“Not to worry. I take credit cards.”

“No, uh—”

“Somebody might see the statement?”

“Yeah, or— Anyway, I’ll get the cash. Who do I pay for the docking whatchacallit?”

“I’ll take care of that. What time are you on? Houston, probably.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, late tonight would be the best.”

“Two o’clock?”

She took a minicom from her purse, tapped buttons, looked at the readout. “Yes, two is okay. Go up the way you came in, take the elevator. And don’t forget your velcro shoes.”

Harry went to the bank and got twenty nice new thousand-dollar bills. That night after the cabaret, taking a chance, he made a tentative move on Jolene; as he expected, she had a headache and took a sleeping pill. At half-past one, when she was snoring, he got up and dressed quietly. He found the velcro shoes in the bureau, put them in his pocket, and let himself out into the hall.