The Golden Globe

Of course, it made things a little edgy when you realized their safety net didn't do you a damn bit of good. When I had to go to the enclave, I got my business done quickly, and got out. Which is just how the Heinleiners wanted it.

If you were looking for all the inside dope on the mysterious Heinleiners, you'll have to go elsewhere. I could relate what went on, using assumed names and euphemisms, but it would be ninety percent lies. For one thing, most of the people I met prefer to stay firmly underground at this point. Remember, not that long ago duly appointed representatives of the Lunar state were shooting at them. They're still a little pissed off. Wouldn't you be? For another, I've been shown some things I swore never to talk about, and talking around them would soon leave me with nothing to say.

Then there's the matter of what I was doing in there. Changing my appearance yet again, naturally. Obtaining a few necessary items for Poly—nothing more than little white lies, in her case—and sending her on her way. (Goodbye, sweet Poly, you were a great traveling companion. Sorry about the fingers. And we'll see no more of you in this story.)

But most of my short time there was consumed in several strictly illegal activities involving becoming someone else. We're not talking about phonying up a hopper's license here; this identity had to stand up to close scrutiny for whatever time I'd be spending in Luna. The statute of limitations hasn't expired on any of it, so it would be foolish to set down the details here. And, frankly, you never know when you'll need to pull some of these same tricks again. Better they don't become common knowledge. If you really need to know how to do it, find a criminal and ask him. And be ready to pay.

When you travel around as much as I do, and have lived as long as I have, the one constant you notice is change.

The species is still expanding, though the talk about doing something to correct that has been getting more and more serious. (What, pray tell? Spaying and neutering? Ah, but don't get me started on that.) I'm not denying it is a problem. With the death rate edging closer and closer to zero, about all that has saved us so far is that very few people want more than one or two children. It's not hard to see a time when every bit of rock in the system is honeycombed down to the core with antlike trillions. There's a school of thought that maintains one reason for the Invasion was our overpopulation of the earth. If we keep growing exponentially, the reasoning goes, might the Invaders take notice of us once again?

I don't pretend to understand anything about the Invaders, beyond the fact that it took them three days to nearly a

But frankly I sort of like the changes I see in my travels. Almost always it is an expansion of what I saw before, and like my father, I hold to an old-fashioned idea once called "progress." Other than a growing population, there hasn't been a lot of it since the Invasion. Scientific research is at an all-time low. And why not? We live practically as long as we want, in perfect health and vitality. Machines can do practically everything that needs to be done, so that leisure has become our biggest "problem." Biology is well understood, and the practical limits of the exploration of physics have been reached, for now, anyway.

So I take pleasure in seeing how this or that enclave has grown. I was delighted at Oberon, and when I return, if ever, I'm sure it will delight me again to see the wheel complete.

But Luna is a little different. Luna is, and always will be, "home." Unstable as my early childhood was, numerous as my "homes" might have been, it was always Luna, the fabulous Golden Globe, that I hailed from. There's a bit of snobbery in that, something like the way the residents of New York, London, Paris, or Rome might have felt. All roads lead to the Big Apple, as it were. If you're from somewhere else, you're from nowhere. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.

But the other part is the same, I suspect, whether you hail from The City or from Catfish Row, from the Golden Globe or from Bottom. You sort of wish it would stay the same. You'd like to go back and find something familiar.

You'd like to think you can go home.

You can't, of course. Even if the old hometown is stagnant as a played-out mine, it's gotten older, and so have you. You look at it through different eyes. The ivy on the old castle walls has grown thicker, the paint on the old shack has peeled off. More likely, the old castle has been torn down to make room for a housing development, and the shack... well, you can't even locate where it was. It gives you a certain feeling of transience.

My whole life has been transient. When I go home, I want to return to something solid.

Fat chance. I spent my first few hours wandering aimlessly through the broad commercial corridors of King City, a place I used to know like Act One of Julius Caesar, always just a little bit lost.

I spent a few hours training and slidewalking to various haunts from my past, finding most of them either no longer there or so changed as to be almost unrecognizable. It had been a good many years since I had dared return to Luna, and even that had been a rash chance on my part. After that many years, even if the place is still there and not much altered physically, the people are different. Where's that old gang of mine? Moved, most often. Hanging out somewhere else. So I moved on, too, on to the Rialto.

For drama in the English language, the de facto tongue of our time, when you think Theater District, you think Broadway. London may have eclipsed it in some ways, in some eras, but it never had the glitter. Shortly pre-Invasion, the theater scene in Miami was certainly one to reckon with. But how many songs can you think of about Collins Avenue?

No, the Great White Way was the theater Mecca... until The Rialto came along.

It had to be that way. Luna is by far the most populous of the inhabited planets. King City is the biggest city in Luna, three times larger than its nearest competitor. Our civilization is blessed or cursed with more leisure time than any in history. The urge to find something to do can get a little desperate. The living theater was never going to give movies and television much competition for the leisure dollar, but even a tiny fraction of the Lunarians' vast disposable income was enough to support a broad boulevard two miles long and bespangled with more theatrical jewels than the Tsarina's Tiara. When the "day" lights dimmed overhead and the marquees lit up, the street didn't so much glitter as explode in colored light.

I strolled down the avenue, hands jammed in my pockets, wishing for a fedora hat and a studio cloudburst so I could be Gene Kelly singin' in the rain. I wanted to hoof it through the shoeshine parlor like Fred Astaire in The Band Wagon. I was George M. Cohan, a Yankee Doodle boy. I was a brass band, a wild Count Basie blast, the bells of St. Peter's in Rome, and tissue paper on a comb. If I had a home, this was it. The center of the universe.

Oh, I'm not saying it was all familiar. Twenty years earlier a fever of renovation had swept down The Rialto like a demented dervish, and not all the changes were to my liking. The street was now lined with lampposts pretending to be gaslights; some spavined city pla