Steel Beach

To this day, the Big Glitch is the mainstay of the counseling industry in Luna. Those who deal in crisis management have found it a fabulous meal ticket that shows no signs of expiring. They rate it higher, in terms of stress produced, than being the victim of violent assault, or the loss of a parent.

One of the things that made it so stressful was that everyone's experience was different. When your world-view, your opinions and the "facts" you base them on, the events that have shaped our collective consciousness, what you like (because everyone else does) and what you don't like (ditto), all come over that all-pervasive newspad, you're a bit at sea when the pad goes down and you suddenly have to react for yourself. No news of how people in Arkytown are taking it. No endless replays of the highlights. No pundits to tell you what to think about it, what people are doing about it (so you can do the same). You're on your own, pal. Good luck. Oh, and by the way, if you choose wrong, it can kill you, buddy.

The Glitch is the one big event where nobody saw the whole thing in an overview provided by experts whose job it is to trim the story down to a size that will fit a pad. Everybody saw just a little piece of it, their own piece. Almost none of those pieces really mattered in the larger scheme of things. Mine didn't, either, though I was closer to the "center" of the story, if it had a center, than most of you. Only a handful of experts who finally brought it under control ever really knew what was going on. Read their accounts, if you're qualified, if you want to know what really went on. I've tried, and if you can explain it to me please send a synopsis, twenty-five words or less, all entries to be scrupulously ignored.

So know going in that I'm not going to provide many technical details. Know that I'm not going to tell you much about what went on behind the scenes; I'm as ignorant of it as anyone else.

No, this is simply what happened to me during the Big Glitch…

Afterwards, when it became necessary to talk about Delambre and the colony of weirdos in residence there, the newspads had to come up with a term everyone would recognize, some sort of shorthand term for the place and the people. As usual in these situations, there was a period of casting about and market research, listening to what the people themselves were calling it. I heard the place called a village, a warren, and a refuge. My particular favorite was "termitarium." It aptly described the random burrows in the Delambre trash heap.

Pads who didn't like the Heinleiners called the residents a cabal. Pads who admired them referred to Delambre and the ship as a Citadel. There was even confusion about the term "Heinleiner." It meant, depending on who you were talking about, either a political philosophy, a seriously crackpot religion (eventually known as "Organized Heinleiners"), or the practitioners of scientific civil disobedience loosely led by V.M. Smith and a few others.

Simplicity eventually won out, and the R.A.H., the trash pile adjacent to it, and certain caves and corridors that linked the whole complex to the more orderly world came to be called "Heinlein Town."

Simplicity has its virtues, but to call it a town was stretching the definition.

There were forces other than the Heinleiners' militant contrariness that worked against Heinlein Town ever fielding a softball team, electing a dog catcher, or putting up signs at the city limits-wherever those might be-saying Watch Us Grow! Not all the "citizens" were engaged in the type of forbidden research done by Smith and his offspring. Some were there simply because they preferred to be isolated from a society they found too constricting. But because a lot of illegal things were going on, there had to be security, and the only kind the Heinleiners would put up with was that afforded by Smith's null-field barriers: the elect could just walk right through it, while the un-washed found it impenetrable.

But the security also entailed some things even an anarchist would find inconvenient.

The constriction most of these people were fleeing could be summed up in two words: Central Computer. They didn't trust it. They didn't like it peering into their lives twenty-four hours a day. And the only way to keep it out was to keep it completely out. The only thing that could do that was the null-field and the related technologies it spun off, arcane arts to which the CC had no key.

But no matter what your opinion of the CC, it is damn useful. For instance, whatever line of work you are in, I'd be willing to bet it would be difficult to do it without a telephone. There were no telephones in Heinlein Town, or none that reached the outside world, anyway. There was no way to reach the planet-wide data net in any fashion, because all methods of interfacing with it were as useful coming in as going out. If Heinlein Town had one hard and fast rule it was this: The CC shall extend no tentacle into the Delambre Enclave (my own term for the loose community of trash-dwellers).

Hey, folks, people have to work. People who live completely away from the traditional municipal services have an even stronger work imperative. There was no oxygen dole in Heinlein Town. If you stayed, and couldn't pay your air assessment, you could damn well learn to breathe vacuum.

One result was that eighty percent of "Heinlein Town" residents were no more resident than I was. I was a weekender because I didn't want to give up my home and my place in Texas. Most weekenders lived in King City and spent all their free time in Delambre because they had to pay the bills and found it impossible to earn any money in Heinlein Town. There were not many full-time economic niches available, a fact that galled the Heinleiners no end.

Heinlein Town? Here's what it was really like:

There were half a dozen places with enough people living close by to qualify as towns or villages. The largest of these was Virginia City, which had as many as five hundred residents. Strangeland was almost as big. Both towns had sprung up because of an accident of the process of waste disposal: a few score very large tin cans had been jumbled together at these locations, and they were useful for living and farming. By large, I mean up to a thousand meters in length, half that in diameter. I think they had been strap-on fuel tanks at one time. The Heinleiners had bored holes to co

You couldn't help being reminded of Bedrock, though these people were often quite prosperous. There were no zoning regulations that didn't relate to health and safety. Sewage treatment was taken seriously, for instance, not only because they didn't want the place to stink like Bedrock but because they didn't have access to the bounty of King City municipal water. What they had had been trucked in, and it was endlessly re-used. But they didn't understand the concept of a public eyesore. If you wanted to string a line across one of the tanks and hang your laundry on it, it's a free country, ain't it? If you thought manufacturing toxic gases in your kitchen was a good idea, go ahead, cobber, but don't have an accident, because civil liability in Heinlein Town could include the death penalty.

Nobody really owned land in Delambre, in the sense of having a deed or title (hold on, Mr. H., don't spin in your grave yet), but if you moved into a place nobody was using, it was yours. If you wanted to call an entire million-gallon tank home, that was fine. Just put up a sign saying KEEP OUT and it had the force of law. There was plenty of space to go around.

Everything was private enterprise, often a cooperative of some kind. I met three people who made a living by ru