The Golden Globe

"I'm not sure I understand your question. Are you asking me the meaning of life?"

"No, I'm asking how Toby got all this meat."

"Ah. There is a scent of food on the pressure plate. No doubt he smelled it, and in his explorations, activated the meat dispenser."

I wondered if he was acting like a literal-minded machine just for the fun of it, put one over on the stupid humans.

"One more time," I said. "Why is there a meat dispenser that dispenses ten pounds of raw flesh at a time?"

"That is to feed the tigers," Hal said.

Well, silly me. Of course a billionaire's yacht would come equipped with tigers. And speak of the devil...

"Oh, my god!" Poly whispered. "He's so beautiful!"

The tiger paused in the doorway, looked at me. Looked at Poly. Glanced at Toby. Cocked his head a little and looked at Toby again. Yaaaaaaawned. Then padded into the galley, five hundred pounds of silent power. He sniffed at the meat, glanced at Toby a third time—the dog was transfixed, not a whisker twitching—and settled down with one paw on the food and began ripping off chunks. In a moment another big cat came through the door. This one didn't even break stride, though she gave us a cursory once-over. She went straight to the meat and stole it right out of the jaws of the first one. He growled at this thievery—a sound that, even though you know they are perfectly harmless, makes every hair follicle on my body seal up tight as a spinster's butt—then stepped on the pressure plate and snagged the meat as it tumbled out. He carried it to another corner and chowed down.

So that was our first adventure on the Halley. After that, things became pretty much routine until we reached Jupiter.

The Halley, or her living quarters, anyway, was shaped pretty much like a flying saucer. A thick frisbee with a half dome on top. The saucer part consisted of a circular passageway with doors leading to rooms that lined the outer rim of the saucer. (Should that be hatches leading to compartments? I'm going to dispense with the phony nautical terminology spacers love so much.) We've seen the spa, and the galley. Also out there were the owner's cabin, guest cabins, a billiard room, a library, a formal dining room with places for eight, and two holocabins. One simulated beach settings, and the other let you pretend you were in various forest environments.

There were no servants' quarters, since Halley carried no human staff. Everything was done by robots who were seldom seen, popping in and out of hidey-holes mostly when you weren't looking. But they kept everything scrupulously clean, and if you needed something, they delivered it promptly.

I would have thought a ship like that would have accommodations for a larger number. Instead, the builder had opted for larger and more luxurious quarters for a smaller number of people. Though naturally the Halley could carry scores of people in a pinch, she was designed for no more than eight.

But the tastiest stuff was in the middle, under the dome.

The original owner must have been a nature lover. The center of his ship was a circular mini-disney called the habidome and the theme was rain forest. There was a waterfall, a babbling brook, a pond, and a few dozen trees festooned with vines and orchids and bromeliads and other such lush tropical flora. The floor was grass or packed dirt. No attempt had been made to deceive the eye, as in the holos. The dome was simply a dome, not a blue sky. It was all too orderly and well tended to look like the real thing. What it reminded me of was the big bird enclosure at the King City Zoo. Aptly enough, I guess, since the place had a lot of birds in it. Toucans, macaws, cockatoos, parrots, I don't know what-all. Hummingbirds no bigger than your thumb, in any color you wanted.

We'd been aboard a couple of days before I wondered where all the critters had been during the high boost. The answer was, suspended in liquid, revived only when the environment was ready for them. Floating in liquid was a good way, it turned out, to miss most of the bad effects of high gee. "So why didn't you float us in liquid?" I asked Hal. "Next time I will. But it takes about a day to prepare your body for it. We didn't have time."

"Next time?" I asked, cautiously.

"Next time won't be so bad," he said. I didn't pursue it. Most of the trees and bushes bore edible fruit of some kind. Not always what you'd expect, either. One tree I knew was not an apple tree, because I looked it up in the library, bore tart, crisp Mclntoshes on one side, and Valencia oranges on the other.

It seemed the tigers and the birds came with the territory. Hal had revived them without being told to. The rest of it was up to us. The choices were not unlimited—no rhinos, no aardvarks, no baboons—but we could have turned the place into a reasonable imitation of Noah's Ark, if Noah had only saved small-to-medium animals. We were a bit more selective. Poly chose a dozen different types of lizard and another dozen poison arrow frogs, looking like porcelain or enamelware in screaming bright colors, not looking real at all until they jumped. I'd say there were a few hundred of them, but you'd never know it unless you looked for them.

She also revived a twenty-foot python. I told her I didn't like snakes much, and it had no effect at all. The snake and I gave each other a wide berth.

I scrolled through the catalog, bemused to think these creatures were sleeping in some secret recess of the ship. Made you feel God-like, you know? Which I suppose a billionaire thought he was entitled to feel. How about a brace of crocodiles? How would Poly like that? Maybe they'd eat the snake. I'd always liked monkeys; I'd had a pet chimp back in my glory days. But they were a little too noisy and active, it seemed to me.

"I have well-behaved monkeys," Hal advised me, and we selected a family of golden lion tamarins and a pair of slow lorises. There is no such thing as a fast loris; I checked.

Hal may have fudged a bit about the tamarins. They squeaked and peeped, but it wasn't an unpleasant or intrusive sound. It fit right in with the birdcalls.

Both Poly and I started out in staterooms. We flipped a coin, and she won the captain's suite. Within a week we were both camping out in the habidome. There was a Peter Pan tree house midway up a towering live oak: three rooms, ru

"Bugs," Hal said.

"Beg your pardon?"

"There are no noxious insects in the habidome. Butterflies, moths, all selected for color, and dragonflies, likewise. There are beetles you'll seldom see, and insects belowground. But you wouldn't like this place nearly as much if it came equipped with black clouds of mosquitoes. Tarantulas. Centipedes a foot long that crawl into bed with you—"

"I get the picture."

After a few weeks we went back to the gourmet meals prepared by the galley. It's amazing how quickly you can get tired of fried fish.

Still, I recall my time aboard the Halley as one of the two or three best times of my life. Partly that is because... nothing happened. Though I was still ru