He assumed that the L5 Hilton was located in the center of Lagrange City, as the largest town in Island One was called. Before him now stretched an area of what would be called three or four city blocks, back on Earth. Houses, most of them two or three stories in height, lined quite narrow streets. The streets bore no traffic save bicycles and pedestrians, all coverall garbed.
It came to Bruce that they looked more like convicts in a prison than citizens of a community. The buildings had a stark look that at first didn’t come home to him. Then he realized what it was. They were all metal, brick, cement, and clear plastic; there was no wood. None were painted. But that, he supposed, made sense. The ingredients of paint were expensive in Lagrange Five. He supposed that this was one of the amenities Gatena had mentioned that would have to be postponed. There must be a multitude of them.
On some of the terraces of the apartment houses, attempts had been made at a touch of gardening. But somehow it didn’t seem to come off. At this distance, at least, he could see little, if any, color of flowers. There were some sad greens, even one attempt at a lawn, but it was rather unsuccessful.
Beyond the city limits he could make out less-developed areas. To each side of the narrow strip of living space were equally wide strips of what he knew to be panes of coated high-impact plastic stretching on like gigantic picture windows to the other end of the 3,300 foot-long cylinder that was Island One. He looked up and, yes, there beyond the panes were other strips of living space and he could actually see other buildings, other soil areas, and even small people moving about—upside down. Island One’s interior was composed of three such strips of living space, alternating with three strips of windows. He had read all about it, of course, and examined endless photographs, watched endless programs devoted to the project, but now it came home to him in all reality.
Suddenly impatient with the inadequacy of his viewing point, he turned and hurried to the door. He went down the stairs to the lobby and headed for the front entry, leading out to the town. From her desk, the girl Gatena had called Maggie frowned worriedly at him, but said nothing. The doors were open and he headed through.
There was a green-coveralled husky there. He touched a finger to his cap and said, “Where were you going, sir?”
Bruce scowled at him. “Why, I was going for a walk.”
“Do you have a pass, sir?”
“A pass? What in the hell do you mean, a pass? I’m Bruce Carter. I just got in an hour or so ago. I’m not acquainted with procedure. What do I need a pass for?”
The other said politely, but not too politely, “You have to have a pass from Security before you can go out on your own, Mr. Carter.”
“See here,” Bruce told him, putting on an air of indignation. “I was invited to Island One by Doctor Ryan. I’m a journalist. I came up to do some articles. I’ll go wherever I damn well please.”
“Yes, sir. But not without a pass or a guide. That’s the rule, sir. I didn’t make it up.”
Bruce glared at him for a moment, then gave up. The cloddy was obviously just doing his job. The freelancer turned and headed back into the lobby. He ignored the sorrowful look that Maggie bent on him.
He headed across the thinly peopled room just in time to witness the arrival of Prince Abou ben Abel, attended by three or four coverall-clad Lagrangists and followed by a dozen docking bay workers carrying luggage. They swept across the lobby toward the stairs. It would seem that the Arab need not be checked out by Maggie, the receptionist.
While all eyes were on the princely party, Bruce Carter slipped through the door leading to the monorail station.
Joe was still posted outside the hotel door. He said, “Mr. Carter! Where were you going? Looking for your luggage? It oughta be here any time.”
Bruce sighed deeply and said, “Oh no. I’m in no hurry. I’ve got to see Carl Gatena’s boss, Ron Rich, shortly. But I thought I’d stretch my legs and take another look at the subway station. Interesting transportation setup, that. Just what a place like this calls for.”
The other hesitated. “You want to leave the hotel—without a guide?”
“It’s not that,” Bruce said, complaint in his voice. “I just want to stretch my legs. I’ve been cooped up in that damn spaceship for days. And I can’t just parade up and down the lobby. I’d look like a dizzard.”
“Oh, well. Go ahead. But don’t leave the station. You’re not supposed to go out without a guide.”
Bruce headed down the corridor.
What in the hell wasn’t he supposed to go out without a guide for, damn it? Right here in Lagrange City, how could he be expected to get in the way of construction workers—he hadn’t even seen any out the window—or get himself into some dangerous position because he was a greenhorn to space. Safety precautions are great, but you can carry routine too far.
He entered the station, just in time to see a monorail car pull in containing Mary Beth Houston and Rick Venner, along with four others. He waved to them but didn’t go over. Instead, he headed for what was obviously the main entrance to the terminal.
There was no Security man at the entrance and he issued forth into the street. He knew he was being childish. When in Rome, you should do as the wops do, and if the powers that be thought it best that he not be wandering around on his own without a guide the first time he went out, he should have gone along with them. However, both Gatena and the guard at the entry to the L5 Hilton had irritated him. He was going to spend the next half hour or so seeing the town on his own, or know reasons why.
The first impressions he had gained looking out the window of his hotel room were now largely borne out. Lagrange City had an artificial quality far and beyond anything he had ever seen before. All buildings were in metal, cement, plastic, or a sort of gray or chalky colored brick, which predominated. There were no signs of wood. Come to think of it, most plastics, like synthetic fibers, were derived from hydrocarbons, usually petroleum, but weighed less than glass. In Island One the stuff would have to be shipped up from Earth. And in shipping, weight was at a premium.
The streets were narrow, in view of the lack of vehicular traffic, and there weren’t as many colonists on them as he might have expected. About half of those rode on bicycles.
There was a good deal of prefabrication in the architecture, but it wasn’t universal. Some of the houses were largely of brick, perhaps of compressed slag. The single houses, in particular, were quite small, with a basic area of about 23 feet by 23 feet. Most of them were two-storied, but he passed two or three single-story dwellings. Whoever lived in the latter must have had about as much space as in a medium-sized trailer back Earthside. The next-sized house seemed exactly twice the area of the smallest ones and they too were usually two or even three stories. The next size was three times the size of the smallest ones.
And then it came to him. Each colonist was probably allowed a set amount of living space—by the looks of it, about 500 square feet, the area of a moderate-sized living room. If you lived alone, that was it, and if you wanted more space, you had to go up. But if two people lived together, they had a thousand square feet of ground area to work with. He passed a rather large dwelling, and there were two coverall-clad children, the first he had seen in Island One thus, far, playing out in front of it. That fitted in. Probably two, or even more, families had pooled their land allotment. There was even room out in the front for a small garden area, which looked as though it got insufficient care; at least such plants as there were looked on the dejected side.
He passed, from time to time, what were obviously community buildings of some sort. Either that, or office buildings. There were no signs. Obviously there was no need of them. Members of the community would know if they were restaurants, movie houses, stores, or whatever. As a matter of fact, that was one of the few desirable attributes of Lagrange City. No signs. They were a pet abomination of his back home.
He tried to sum up his first impression, and decided on drab. But that wasn’t exactly it. T
he buildings were all new, the streets were all spotless, everything was neat. But…perhaps the word was colorless. There was an unlived-in feeling.
Lagrange City was far from extensive. He had no way of knowing just how many residents there were, but it couldn’t be many, certainly not over a couple of thousand. Though you never knew about some of those community buildings. They might have been dormitories for single men and women, with several hundred living in each.
He came to the end of the buildings area in short order and to what he assumed was supposed to be a park. There was a bandstand in its center, various walks, and benches spaced along them. A few people strolled through, and there were a few kids. Some of the benches were occupied, though not many. It came to Bruce Carter that there was a comparatively small span of years in the colonists he had seen thus far. Aside from the children, most of whom seemed to be about ten years of age, everybody looked somewhere between thirty and forty. There didn’t seem to be any teenagers and no elderly folk. But that probably made sense. Younger people wouldn’t have the education and experience to qualify for a job at Lagrange Five and elderly ones would only be a drag on the community’s resources, consuming but not producing.
It was time he made some personal contact. He sat down on a bench that had a sole occupant, a man of about his own age. On his breast pocket was stitched Pal Barack.
Bruce said in Esperanto, in which he had taken a crash course, “Mind if I sit down?”
The other looked over at him indolently and in the same language, with a slight European accent said, “You can fall down as far as I’m concerned.” But then he grinned mischievously, to take the edge off his words.
He was on the short side, swarthy of complexion, and with a nervous quality. He projected the impression that he could become excitable very easily, though right now he was leaning back, his arms over the back of the bench and his legs stretched out before him. He had been staring lazily up above.
Bruce’s eyes followed the other’s. There, above them, was one of the alternating strips of land area. Bruce, of course, was as yet far from adjusted to the sight.
The other said idly, pointing to a man in a field, “Look at that stupid funker up there. Only 328 feet away. I’ve been here four years, eleven months, three weeks, six days, and four hours, but I still can’t get over the feeling that if nature called and he answered, I’d get a shower down here and it wouldn’t be rain.”
Bruce laughed.
The other was gratified. He said, “You know, off and on I’ve wondered: if I could get hold of some heavy rubber bands, I could make a sling shot and hit one of those upside-down cloddies or maybe break some of the windows in those isolated houses.”
Bruce laughed again. “At that distance?”
The other looked over at him, pretending indignation. “Why not? It’s 328 feet, but you’ve got to remember that the higher the stone gets, the less gravity there is. When it hits the halfway mark it begins to be attracted by the gravity up there and begins to fall.” He looked over at the newcomer to his bench, seemingly noticing the lack of a name on the breast pocket of Bruce’s overalls. He said, “You must be from the hotel.”
“That’s right,” Bruce said. “I just pulled in this morning.”
“How come you haven’t got a couple of those Security funkers trailing around with you? They don’t usually let an earthworm out of their sight.”
Bruce frowned at him. “Why not?”
“Because they don’t want outsiders to find out what a farce this whole thing is.”
Bruce said softly, “Such as what?”
The other grunted sour amusement. “Such as what we were just talking about, for instance. The diameter of this island is 328 feet and it’s 3,280 feet long. Like a dizzard, I didn’t bother to figure that out before I signed up for this stupid job. That means we’ve got a circumference of 1032 feet. We’re divided into six strips, running from one end of the cylinder to the other, alternating solar strips and living space. So how wide does that make each strip—171.6 feet. In that initial propaganda of his, old Ryan was describing towns, rivers, lakes, woods, and what not, even in this Island One. Ha! How big a lake or river can you have with a working space only 171 feet across? How big a town? The L5 Hilton isn’t as big a hotel as all that, but it stretches all the way across this strip. And that river bit. How in the hell can you have a river flowing along through lunar lava dust?”
Bruce scowled at that. He said, “Well, after trees, bushes, grass, and other vegetation were growing, it’d be just like any other stream. The vegetation holds the river banks. Humus accumulates, all that sort of thing.”
“What vegetation?” the other said scornfully. “You mean you think we’re going to turn this whole island into one big hydroponic tank? And how about all that crud those physicists gave us about fish in the rivers and lakes, and ducks and even swans swimming around? What in the hell would the fish eat and the ducks and swans? You’d have to go out and feed them every day by hand and toss fish food into the ponds and streams. What shit!”
“Wait a minute, now,” Bruce said. “I’m green up here but I’ve read about it. The idea is a closed-cycle ecology. The animals eat the plants and breathe out carbon dioxide, and their excrement is fertilizer. And the plants give off oxygen. Everything is recycled; the water, the air, the human refuse—everything. It’s a closed system.”
The other nodded, wearily. “Yeah, that’s the theory they started off with, but it’d never been tried on this scale. And we haven’t been able to make it work.” The other turned and pointed at the dozen or so trees planted around the park. “See those fruit trees? I planted them myself. I’m a landscapes a gardener. You know what a gardener starts with down Earthside? Good black earth, with vegetation in it, rotting leaves and so forth, and with worms and bugs in it, some of them microscopic. You know what we start with here? Breccia, lava dust from the moon. Sure, you can grow plants, even trees, in lava dust, given water and the correct nutrients. You can do it with no soil at all, in a hydroponics tank. But it means that you’ve got to tend each plant each day. It’s a job, keeping a hydroponic tank going. The damn plants will die on you at the drop of a hat. Ah, the hell with it. You couldn’t understand.”
He turned and pointed out one of the stunted little trees in the park. “I’ve got to water ’em every day. But what good is it going to do? That’s supposed to be an apple tree. Back on Earth, it takes about eight years to get an apple tree to bear any amount at all. But in eight years, if it survives that long, where’s that tree going to get room for its root system? The soil’s about a yard deep. What are the roots going to find down in that soil? You’re going to have to continue treating it like it was in a hydroponic farm for the rest of its existence. Ah, the hell with it.” He thrust his feet out farther before him, in disgust.
Seemingly, the other was on his pet peeve. Bruce Carter changed subjects. He said, “What was that about you having been here four years, eleven months and…”
The other grinned suddenly. “That’s right, and three weeks, and six days, and four and a half hours. And tomorrow my contract’s up and I’m getting the hell out of this overgrown submarine.”
Bruce was interested. “Don’t figure on signing up again, eh?”
The other gawked over at him as though he’d gone completely around the bend. “Do I look drivel-happy? I’ve never even heard of anybody who wanted to stay up here as soon as he got a chance to leave. Five years ago they shortened the minimum contract period from ten years to five, trying to attract more qualified workers. And now, along in here, the five-year boys are beginning to see their contracts expire.”
The other was obviously a malcontent, Bruce decided. “What’s wrong with it up here?” he said. “I can see that it’s no paradise, but…”
Pal Barack laughed bitterly. “What’s right with it? We get some food from our hydroponic gardens, but all the fertilizer has to come up from Earth, along with carbon for carbon dioxide, and nit
rogen for air. So mostly we eat dehydrated food. A man can live on about a pound a day. It’s Godawful. All the fresh meat we get is rabbit and chicken. For all practical purposes, there is no booze, except a little jungle juice we ferment ourselves. It’s so expensive to ship up it’s prohibitive. Some bootleg, of course, but it’s nearly as expensive. Then there aren’t enough women, not nearly enough. And there isn’t enough entertainment, except the canned stuff. And the only tobacco is black market. And…”
Bruce brought forth a pack of cigarettes and said, “Smoke?”
Pal Barack contemplated him, then reached out and selected a cigarette with a sigh. He said, “You haven’t got a match or a lighter, have you? I’ve given up carrying them.”
“Sure,” Bruce said. “Here, take the pack.” He handed it over and reached for his book of matches.
The other’s eyes bugged. “Listen, chum-pal,” he said, as though hating to reveal the fact to his new acquaintance but being forced to through conscience. “In Island One a package of butts costs fifty dollars and up, when you can find them. You sure you want to give these away? How long you going to be up here and how big’s your supply?”
“It’s all right,” Bruce told him. “I don’t smoke myself. Down at the shuttleport in New Albuquerque one of the employees there told me to use up my baggage allowance with liquor and cigarettes. That they were worth their weight in gold up here. So I didn’t even bring my portable voco-typer. I figured I could borrow one in Island One. By the way, my name’s Bruce Carter.”
They shook hands. Pal Barack sucked in smoke blissfully. He said, “My name’s Barack. Pal Barack. I’m a Hungarian gypsy. Don’t ever trust a Hungarian and especially don’t trust a gypsy. Did you hear the one about the Hungarians being the only people in the world who can go into a revolving door behind you and come out ahead of you?”
Bruce laughed and said, “The way I heard it, they’re the only people who can go into a telephone booth and leave by a rear door.”
The Hungarian gardener said, “Look, are you the writer? I’ve read some articles by a Bruce Carter.”
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