The Golden Globe

"The driver doesn't run the legs," Poly told me. "He steers, gets her where she needs to go, then stops her and lets the spi

The closest I saw in a reference book, much later, was the black widow spider. I don't know if she had a red hourglass under her belly or not, but Poly said she definitely was not a black widow. She was a cross between many web-weaving species, with a lot of made-to-order genes stuck in there to make her do the sort of weaving the engineers wanted: a thousand-mile web anchored only at the center, precisely opposite of what most weaving spiders would naturally do.

"The D-9s don't weave," Poly said. "They sit in one spot and start extruding silk, and smaller spiders grab those and start ru

The spider started moving, off our rail and to one side. The driver waved at us as he went by, and then the elevator started moving again. I got a last glimpse of the thousands of spi

"D-3s," Poly told me. With horror, I realized the tide was a million "small" spiders, no bigger than a collie dog.

I'm not overly fond of any animal without fur. I don't like spiders at all. I listened with half an ear as Poly told me more than I wanted to know about the sex life, diet, pedigree, care of, and general all-around good social standing of ninety-ton arachnids. When she was a girl, she used to go to the "stables" and her father let her hand-feed Miss Dixie. A vision straight out of Dante, for my money. What did she feed the beast? Sugar cubes? Dead cattle? Giant house-flies? I didn't ask. Then something she said made me sit up straight.

"Here, now," I said. "You say this spider was here to patch up the spoke? You're talking about the spoke that my own very precious body is currently dangling from? The spoke I was led to believe was strong enough to support three Noon Arcs if it had to? This is the spoke that spider is fixing?"

She laughed, but I was only partly in jest. Who wants to be dangling at the end of a rope over the Grand Canyon like The Perils of Pauline and then see the rope start to fray? Not me.

"I didn't say patching up. I said 'strengthening.' One reason it could support three times what it's called on to support is that we keep alert and ahead of any deterioration. Computers figure it out, naturally. The thing is, the stresses on the web are greater during construction than they will be when the rim is complete. Then it'll settle into a state of constant, easy-to-predict stress. We'll need only about one percent of the spiders we use today."

Maybe so, I thought, but it struck me that moving into this damn thing before it was finished might not be such a hot idea. I mean, would you move a chair and a television into an apartment where they were still blasting the kitchen and bedroom out of rock?

And another odd thought. What would happen to those other ninety-nine spiders when the wheel was complete? If their drivers were sentimental enough to name the monsters, would they be eager to see them tossed on a scrap heap? And don't forget about the animal-rights lunatics. Scarcely a flea can be poisoned in Luna without triggering a march. Think what a lobby these critters would have.

Not to worry. I later learned the surviving D-9s (whose life span was not known) would be moved to the Ariel II project.

I was about to make my move on Poly when she headed me off at the pass.

"I was going up to the casino for a while," she said. "Would you like to go with me?"

No, but I'd like to... strike that. I gave her a rueful smile.

"One thing my daddy taught me well," I said. "Never gamble. And I never do."

"I was thinking of going to one of the card tables, play a little five-card draw."

"Poker?" I said. "Why didn't you say so? Lead the way."

I lost a small amount, and by the fifth hand I realized she was working with one of the other players. He looked to be about her age, and had a bad habit of tinkering with his ring that a really alert house would have quickly spotted. But there was no house here, except for the two percent they automatically extracted from each pot: table rental, basically. Few casinos make much money from the card tables. Apparently once you were seated and had your chips in front of you, the house didn't care if you telegraphed your intentions to your partner by farting in Morse code, so long as the other players didn't object. None of the other four had any idea what was going on.

By the tenth hand I had their system figured out, and I took them for several hundred dollars. By the fifteenth hand they knew I was onto them, so I cashed in my chips and winked at the guy as I left. I went up a level and ordered a drink and took it to a window seat. The Coriolanus Force was coming from a steep angle now, "down" was somewhere between a perpendicular to the spoke and another to the rim. The elevator accommodated this by turning the cable-side FLOOR into a series of three-foot-wide steps. It made everything look a little cockeyed. The row of windows I was looking through, for instance, had been horizontal when I first saw this deck. Now they were at a thirty-degree angle to my internal "level." Don't worry about it if you can't visualize it. I had to see a computer model of it before I got it straight in my head.

"How long did it take you to catch on to us?" Poly said, placing her drink on the table beside mine, sitting beside me. (The glasses? Magnetic bases with clear glass hemispheres mounted on little gimbals. Turn them upside down and nothing would spill. In zero gee a top snapped over the liquid automatically and you sipped through a straw.)

"You guys weren't bad at all," I told her, fudging a little. She wasn't bad. He was playing with fire. "Don't ever get in a rough game, for high stakes. Your boyfriend might not make it out alive."

"His name is Brian, and he's not my boyfriend."

"No?"

"A classmate and violin rehearsal partner. We're really terrible, aren't we?"

"Don't play with the big boys," I reemphasized.

She shrugged. "It was just for fun. Kind of exciting, but we never took very much money. We didn't want to make anybody suspicious."

"You win enough, somebody at the table's go

"What if they don't?"

"Make sure you're sitting close to the door. Not in front of it, not with your back to it. Then hope, if you're cornered, that the weapon you brought to the table is better than the ones they brought."

"You carry a weapon to a poker game?" She looked excited at the idea.

"Always."

"What's the best one?"

"The sense not to sit down with killers."

"That's not a weapon."

"Depends on how you employ it. It's the best one I know." And the one I've used the least, I added, dolefully, to myself.

She cocked her head the way self-confident, lovely young girls do, girls who haven't suffered much yet. A girl who is trying to decide if you are a pearl in her oyster or just sand in her clam.

"You've been around a bit, haven't you?" she asked.

"Here and there."

"I've never been off Oberon. It sounds like an exciting way to live."

"You mean professional gambling?"

"You said you never gamble."

"Poker's not gambling. And I'm not a professional. It's too exciting a way to make a living." This was true, though over the years I've played here and there, depending on my circumstances and the qualifications of the other players. (Who do you want to play with? Rich people, people who won't miss it, and who fancy themselves card sharks.)