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"Blood bother a doctor?" She laughed softly. "Well, it was late, right before the last act..."
Render leaned back and smiled, lit a cigarette, listened.
Outside, the country settled down to a smooth plain and he coasted across it like a bowling ball, right in the groove all the way to the pocket.
He passed a walking man.
Beneath high wires and above buried cables, he was walking again, beside a great branch of the road-tree, walking through snow-specked air and broadcast power.
Cars sped by, and a few of their passengers saw him.
His hands were in the pockets of his jacket and his head was low, because he looked at nothing. His collar was turned up and heaven's melting contributions, the snowflakes, were collected on the brim of his hat.
He wore rubbers. The ground was wet and a little muddy.
He trudged on, a stray charge within the field of a great generator.
"... Di
"Why not?" said Render.
"Say eight?"
" 'Eight.' Tally-ho!"
Some of them dropped down out of the sky, but mainly they came spi
The cars released their people onto platforms within the great car-hives. The air-taxis set theirs free in landing areas, near to the kiosks of the underground belt-way.
But whatever the means by which they arrived, the people toured Exhibit Hall on foot.
The building was octagonal, its roof an inverted soup bowl. Eight non-functional triangles of black stone provided decoration at each corner, without.
The soup bowl was a selective filter. Right now, it was sucking all the blue out of the gray evening and was glowing faintly on the outside—whiter than all the dirty snows of yesterday. Its ceiling was a cloudless summer sky at eleven o'clock in the a.m., without a sun to mar its Morning Glory frosting.
The people flowed beneath this sky, passed among the exhibits, moved like a shallow stream through a place of rocks.
They moved in ripples and random swirlings. They eddied; they churned, bubbled, babbled. Occasionally, there was a sparkle...
They poured steadily from the parked machines beyond the blue horizon.
After they had run their course, they completed the circuit by returning to the metal clouds which had borne them to the ru
It was Outward that they passed.
Outward was the Air Force-sponsored Exhibit which had been open for the past two weeks, twenty-four hours a day, and which had drawn spectators from all over the world.
Outward was a survey of Man's achievements in Space.
Heading Outward was a two-star general, with a dozen colonels, eighteen lieutenant colonels, many majors, numerous captains, and countless lieutenants on his staff. Nobody ever saw the general, excepting the colonels and the people from Exhibits, Incorporated. Exhibits, Incorporated owned Exhibit Hall, there by the spaceport, and they set things up in good taste for all the exhibitionists who employed them.
First, to the right, as you entered Toadstool Hall (as it had been dubbed by some Vite), was the Gallery.
In the Gallery were the mural-sized photos that a spectator could almost walk off into, losing himself in the high, slender mountains behind Moonbase III (which looked as if they would sway in the wind, were there any wind to sway them); or wander through the bubble-cap of that undermoon city, perhaps ru
clicking within; or, passing by, enter that rusty desert beneath the greenish sky, cough once or twice, spit bloody spittle, circle the towering walls of the above-ground Port Complex—bluegray, monolithic, built upon the ruins of God knows what—and enter into that fortress where men move like ghosts in a Martian department store, feel the texture of those glassite walls, and make some of the soft and only noises in the whole world; or pass across Mercury's Acre of Hell in the cool of the imagination, tasting the colors—the burning yellow, the ci
After the Gallery were the Grav-rooms, to which one might climb by means of a stairway smelling of fresh-cut lumber. At the top, one might select the grav one wished—Moon-weight, Mars-weight. Merc-weight—and ride back to the floor of the Hall on a diminishing cushion of air, elevator-like, knowing for a moment the feeling of weight personal carried on the chosen world impersonal. The platform drops down, the landing is muffled... Like falling into hay, like falling into a feather bed.
Next, there was a waist-high rail—brass. It went around the Fountain of the Worlds.
Lean over, look down...
Scooped out of the light was a bottomless pool of black...
It was an orrery.
In it, the worlds swung on magnetic lines, glowing. They moved around a burning beachball of a sun; the distance to the outer ones was scaled down, and they shone frostily, palely, through the murk; the Earth was emerald, turquoise;
Venus was milky jade; Mars, an orange sherbet; Mercury, butter, Galliano, breadcrust, fresh-baked.
Food and riches hung in the Fountain of the Worlds. Those who hungered and lusted leaned on the brass rail and stared. Such is the stuff dreams are made of.
The others looked and passed by, going on to see the full-sized reconstruction of the decompression chamber of Moonbase I, or to hear the valve manufacturer's representative give little-known facts concerning the construction of the pressure-locks and the power of the air pumps. (He was a short, red-haired man who knew many statistics.) Or they rode across the Hall in the cars of the overhead-suspension monorail. Or they saw the 20-minute Outward—With Stops At Spots film, which was so special as to feature a live narrator rather than soundtrack. They mounted freshly-heaped wall-cliffs in scaleboats, and they operated the pincers of the great claw-cans, used for off-Earth strip-mining.
Those who hungered stayed longer, though, in one place.
They stayed longer, laughed less.
They were the part of the flow which formed pools, sparkled...
"Interested in heading out some day?"
The boy turned his head, shifted on his crutches.
He regarded the lieutenant colonel who had addressed him. The officer was tall. Ta
"Why?" asked the boy.
"You're about the right age to be pla
"I've read the literature..."
"Doubtless. Everyone your age has. But now you're seeing samples—and mind you, they're only samples—of the actuality. That's the big, new frontier out there—the great
frontier. You can't know the feeling just from reading the booklets."
Overhead, the monorail-car rustled on its way across the Hall. The officer indicated it with his pipe.
"Even that isn't the same as riding the thing over a Grand Canyon of ice," he noted.