The Golden Globe

So there is the physical rundown. The reality was more colorful. I saw them when I woke up. I'd say there were fifty or sixty of them, which meant there were probably a lot more since you only see them when they're oriented such that the sun's light is reflected toward you. There is no way to tell how big each one was, or how distant. One moment an angel would seem truly vast and impossibly distant; the next, I'd convinced myself it was the size of a coin, and only inches from my face. There is no sense of scale. But they flashed and fluttered all around me, and I was enchanted by the rainbow of colors. One seemed to fill a quarter of the sky. It was a pale gold, and I could see stars through it.

Then we hit one.

No sound, no impact. No warning at all. One moment I was watching the distant disks, and the next the universe was bisected by an infinite plain of multicolored light.

It was a sight few people have been granted. The only way to touch an angel is to hit it at high speed. If you decelerate, the force of your engines will destroy it long before you get there. But at the speed we were traveling, the ship punched right through its diaphanous body without warning. I don't think the crew had any idea it was in front of them. How would they? It was between us and the sun, and we could only see it after we'd gone through. Not that they could have done anything if they had been aware of it.

At our speed, any object of reasonable size would be there and gone before your eye could register it. Not the angel. There it was, stretching away to infinity, shrinking not at all as I watched.

Its surface was a fractal swirl of every color of the rainbow. It was like a drop of oil on water, or the surface of a soap bubble. Or something like an aurora I once saw on Mars, but frozen.

Except for one spot. That spot was no color at all, and it seemed to be centered in the endless plain. Well, of course it would be. I could never tell if we'd hit the angel dead center or near the edge, but it was so vast that unless we were very near the edge, it just didn't matter. It was endless in all directions.

The spot was like a hole in space, full of blackness, but then I began to see stars at the bottom of it. It seemed to be getting bigger slowly. It finally dawned on me that I was seeing the hole the ship had punched through the surface of the angel, and considering the speed at which we were leaving it behind, the hole was growing at a monstrous rate.

It kept growing for the twenty minutes or so that I watched it, and then, as suddenly as it appeared, the angel was gone. All at once, from edge to edge.

It must have taken a considerable time for the hole to consume the entire angel. What had happened was we had moved far enough that the sun's light no longer reflected from the angel. It was still there, though going away to wherever punctured angels go.

The whole thing made me quite happy for a time. I hardly tasted the awful stuff I was chewing on. But eventually reality intruded again, and I knew it was time to get back to sleep. I really didn't want to, I sort of wanted to skip over what was coming next.

And it was history, after all. Over and done with. In the past.

Oh, poor Sparky.

The Daewoo Caterpillar lurks in cold, airless tu

He had encountered the beast twice before. He never got a good look at it, not that he minded. This time he feared he might have to look directly into its dreadful countenance. He was sure it was the last thing his living eyes would see.

Once more Dodger was a toy balloon, hurrying to keep up with his father's headlong progress down the deserted corridor. Deserted? Abandoned, actually. Here and there were piles of steel rods and ceiling panels and other, mysterious building blocks, some under plastic tarps, all of it dusty. It was entirely possible that no one but Dodger and his father had been down this corridor in the last ten years.

Dodger had been down it twice before. He didn't want to get to the end of it again.

His father was holding his hand too tightly. But that was the least of his problems.

He searched for the words that would bring them to a halt.

To be or not to be.

Friends, Romans, countrymen.

Now is the winter of our discontent.

But, soft!

It was useless. He knew all the words, and none would do him any good, because this wasn't about learning, this wasn't the bathtub. This was the Breathsucker, and the Daewoo Caterpillar. This was as bad as it gets.

"Please," he whispered. He tried not to, but the word had just come bubbling from his mouth. He felt a string of spit rolling down his chin, and he wiped at it with his free hand. "Please, what?" his father said. "Please, Father. Please don't."

Those weren't the words; his father kept up his relentless progress toward the end of the corridor. He could see it now, in the widely spaced work lights hanging from strings overhead. The end of the world.

"I'll tell him," he burst out. "I'll tell him how wrong I was. I'll tell Mr. Peppy I'll wear the pants." No reaction. Only a few more yards to go now.

"Let's... let's just go to Mars! Let's forget the whole thing. We have lots of money now. We—"

Suddenly his father's face was before him, filling the whole universe. Those beloved ice-blue eyes. Eyes that flashed now, eyes that glistened with sincerity, eyes that could be bottomless pools of love, eyes you could swim in, warm eyes. But eyes that now betrayed their sadness, that told Dodger he had let his father down. Mad eyes.

John Valentine spoke barely above a whisper.

"This is not about pants, Dodge," he said. "This is not about money. This is about... artistic control."

"Sure," Dodger said, nodding furiously. "I'll tell Mr. Peppy—"

"This is about presenting a united front. This is about you and me, about family. It's us against them, Dodger. Us against them. We're outnumbered, always will be. If I can't count on you, who can I count on?"

"You can count on me, Father, I swear I—"

"I don't want to do this, son. But I'm convinced it's the right thing to do. It's the way I learned my lesson, and I think you'll learn from it, too."

"I've already learned, Father."

"Never." Valentine had barely raised his voice, yet somehow the word rang in the empty corridor. He held up a forefinger, wagged it back and forth in front of Dodger's face.

"Never contradict your father in public."

"I won't. I promise."

"Never disagree with me in front of strangers."

And before Dodger could promise again never to go against the family, his father picked him up and shoved him through the open door of the ancient airlock.

This was no ordinary airlock. Regular airlocks had a dozen safety devices. They were co

That it did exist was the result of oversight. The construction project had gone bankrupt, and all the plans and permits were long forgotten now, moldering in some disused memory chip, filed away with the dissolution papers of the bank that had funded it and the company that had started building it. Years had passed, a building boom had come and gone, and this tu