The Golden Globe

I didn't have that knowledge, but who cares?

It was even more beautiful than I remembered it.

"Is this Hank's Bank?"

"Yes, you have—"

"Automated answering service?"

"That's right, you have—"

"Looking for an account in the name of Otis B. Driftwood."

"We have no—"

"Cleopatra Pepperday?"

"We have no—"

"T. Frothingwell Bellows?"

"We have no—"

"So long."

Three more down. It was looking like a losing proposition.

I wish I could say I had time, leisure, and the temperament to enjoy the approach to Oberon II. If you don't like fireworks, there are also the holoboards, which we started picking up while still a thousand miles out. Miles on a side, they trumpet the allures of the big hotels and casinos and shows, with more glitter per square foot than anyplace since Old Las Vegas.

In reality, I had only two things on my mind. My stomach, and my bowels.

I had been awake almost continuously for the previous week, having stretched the deadballs as far as I could. I had grown a beard, and my toenails looked like pruning hooks. There are 168 hours in a standard week. Ten thousand minutes. I had spent every one of them thinking about food.

I had eaten the last of my provisions. I had licked the wrapping paper and cardboard, then I ate the cardboard. Then I ate the paper. I chewed on rags, hoarded my last ten sticks of chewing gum like some wild-eyed troll at the bottom of a well. I hate to admit this, but several times I thought about Toby, snuggled safe and warm only a few feet beneath me. I began to wonder if he'd taste like chicken.

They say that historical fasters like Gandhi and Hornburg eventually didn't feel much in the way of hunger. That's what they say, but you couldn't prove it by me. It only got worse, hour by hour, and when I thought it couldn't possibly get any worse, it did. Then it got worse again.

There was really only one thing to distract me from my hunger, and that was the state of my lower digestive tract. Every ounce of high-nutrition food I'd eaten since the trip began was down there now, a bolus about the size and shape of Phobos and twice as hard. It was going to take surgery to pass it, I felt sure, and the medico had better go in with a sharp pickax and plenty of dynamite.

So pardon me if I sort of skip lightly over the arrival (thousands of ships at least as large as mine, floating inside a vast cylinder spangled with the light from a billion portholes), the transfer (swarms of robot tugs no bigger than park squirrels detaching each cargo pod, reading its destination, then jetting off toward the correct bay like ten thousand maniacs charging for a front-row seat at a Motomania Show), and my exit from the Pantechnicon and subsequent reentry into public pressure (my spine was trying to form some unusual letter—Q or Z, I think—and my legs promised never to be straight again). When I could walk I looked briefly, with little enthusiasm, at the cargo pod Ukulele Lou had rejected at Pluto. All I could determine was that whatever had been inside was spoiled, for sure. Then I had to step lively as a big cargobot plucked the damaged pod from the line and took it off somewhere, presumably to fill out quintuplicate insurance forms. I couldn't pick out the pod Lou had escaped to. It might have been delivered to a bay clear on the other side of the hub for all I knew. I wished him luck again, and found the exit to public corridors.

Thirty seconds later I was devouring the mother of all hamburgers, the National Gall'ry, the Garbo's sal'ry, the Camembert of hamburgers. Actually, it was a MacVending 15¢ Microwave Special, dab of ketchup, dab of mayo, hold the pickle, lettuce, purple Bermuda onion, beefsteak tomato, sprouts, mustard, slice of Cheddar cheese and everything else you might think of, but by then I was ready to lick dried soda pop and crushed peppermints off the auditorium floor... and like it. So I shall always treasure that burger.

I ate two more just like it, hurried to the bathroom and threw them all up, went back outside, and ate another that seemed likely to stay down. Then I sought out the nearest Minute Surgery franchise and had someone take care of the other problem. I promised you I would skip over that part, and I will, though I did take note of some of the medico's expressions of astonishment and merriment, and some of my own caustic replies for possible use in my next Punch and Judy show.

I shall similarly give short shrift to the most glorious meal I have ever eaten. I would gladly spend several hours describing it, which is about the time I spent eating it, but my powers of description would surely fail me. It was, after all, simply good, solid, restaurant food. There were no hummingbird livers or ocelot's tongues or jellied kumquat tidbits. Nothing exotic at all, really. A big steak and mashed potatoes and corn, stuff like that, followed by most of a cherry pie and a pint of ice cream. It wasn't the preparation that made it taste so wonderful, it was the special sauce starvation provides. And it didn't take three hours to eat because it was a trencherman's groaning board. I just took the time to savor every bite. You should try that sometime, though I doubt you could ever experience my intense delight unless you'd gone that long without eating.

Refueled, reamed out, begi

I'd been meaning to go direct to the elevators, but took the time to check into a coin-op shower 'n shave. I came out feeling, if not exactly ready to whip the world, at least ready to go a few rounds with it.

Normally I wouldn't spend much time describing an elevator ride. But on Oberon II, nothing is quite like it is on other planets, and elevators are one of the most different.

Oh, and I'll drop that "Oberon II" business right now. I quickly realized that, in the time I'd been away, Oberon II had become simply, Oberon. What we used to call Oberon, the rocky moon, was now called Old Oberon. It made sense. There were a few thousand holdouts still living on Old Oberon, and a few tens of thousands of demolition miners and so forth, but as the moon began increasingly to resemble a rotten apple with big bites taken out of it even those few residents would have to move.

I remembered some of the grand old theaters of Old Oberon: the Palace, the Olivier, the Streep, the Chicago, and wondered if any of them were still standing in the gloomy airless rubble. Not to worry. All of them, and many more, plus a great variety of other structures had been plucked bodily out of the path of the marauding bulldozers. Most of them were sitting in mothballs at the Ob4 Trojan point, waiting for enough of the rim to be built to support an historical disneyland, the first to re-create a time since the Invasion, to be known as (guess what) Old Oberon. If all these New, Old, II, and whatever Oberons have you a bit confused, join the club. And don't worry about it.

Elevators. First, stop thinking in terms of a box that opens and closes and moves up and down in a shaft. Now, follow me... and watch your step as you board, please....

"The Noon elevator will be departing from Level 20, Concourse B, at 9:00 A.M.," the a