“That’s a good point,” Bob, the teacher, said from somewhere behind. “See, kids, we’re getting something useful out of this trip already.”
“I don’t get it,” the girl said.
“It’s the reason why insects can walk up walls and lift many times their own weight,” Bob told her. “There’s nothing miraculous about it.”
“At such sizes, the gravitational force which dominates at our level of perception is insignificant,” Danchekker said, always ready to deliver to any audience. “One’s experiences would be shaped entirely by adhesion, electrostatic charge, and other surface effects. So if you were reduced to such a size and wore a coat, for example, you wouldn’t be able to take it off. Walking would be entirely different because of the negligible storage of energy in momentum. Hammers and clubs would be quite useless for the same reason.” He looked at Alan. “I trust you take my point?”
“Er… yes,” Alan said. “I guess we’d have to give that some thought.”
Hunt was sitting by Gina, who had been unusually reticent since breakfast. She seemed disturbed or confused about something.
“Some people do things in style,” he commented, although his attempts all morning at being sociable had met with little success. He put it down to a delayed reaction to the stress and the strangeness after three days of her not having a moment to think. “The first time I went on an extraterrestrial trip, it was just a hop across the backyard to Jupiter. You get to go light-years.”
A smile flickered across Gina’s face but didn’t stay put. “Well, you know us Americans: always going to extremes.”
They landed at the spaceport of Geerbaine, which adjoined a regular airport on the western outskirts of Shiban. The reality of actually setting foot on another world seemed to dispel whatever had been hanging over her, and her spirits revived. She said farewell to the two Thuriens who had escorted them down, and stood with Hunt for a while, staring back through a glass wall in the disembarkation ramp at the shining, half-mile-high tower of the Shapieron, which they had glimpsed from afar the day previously, through VISAR.
“Just imagine, that was traveling between stars before our kind even existed,” Gina said. “It’s one thing to read about it and see pictures of it. But to stand this close and know it’s really out there…”
She left it unfinished.
“You sound as if you’re feeling more yourself again, anyhow,” Hunt said. “I was starting to get a bit worried. Maybe there’s such a thing as i-space-sickness, not that I’ve ever heard of it… I don’t know.”
She sighed. “I suppose I have been a bit weird all morning. Everything’s all so new, I guess. I’ll get over it.”
Hunt looked around and across the arrivals area, where groups and individuals were milling around. Danchekker, Sandy, and Duncan were standing near the Florida school party, talking to two hefty, clean-cut, broad-shouldered men in gray suits who put Hunt immediately in mind of Dick Tracy. A short distance away, a woman in a maroon tunic with gold trim and buttons seemed to be collecting together a party that already included Alan and Keith from Disney World, the directors from the Denver corporation, a honeymoon couple that the UNSA team had met at breakfast, who were celebrating their third remarriage to each other, and the Russian psychologists. “I think that’s probably the woman from your hotel,” Hunt said to Gina.
Best Western hotels had displayed more of best American entrepreneurial initiative by acquiring premises at the core of what was rapidly becoming a Terran enclave at Geerbaine. Since Gina was not officially with UNSA and would have no obvious reason for going to PAC, she had made a reservation there under her own name as an independent journalist. She and Hunt would get together again somehow later.
Hunt walked across with Gina and made sure that her name was on the list that the agent from Best Western was checking, and that there were no problems. That completed the party, and the woman began shepherding her flock toward an escalator going up to what looked like a shuttle tube. Hunt turned away and began walking over to rejoin his own group, but was intercepted by Bob, the teacher from Florida.
“I just wanted to say so long and thanks for the company. I enjoyed our talks. Maybe we’ll bump into you guys again while we’re here,” Bob said. Through a glass exit across the floor behind Bob, Hunt could see the school party chattering and jostling as they climbed aboard a bus that was bright pink with green stripes. It was an odd-looking vehicle, running on balls half-contained in hemispherical housings instead of wheels. The center portion of its roof rose into a large, bulbous projection of just the right proportions to immediately suggest a female breast.
“Not staying at the hotel here, then?” Hunt observed as they shook hands.
“No. We decided to take the plunge straight in. A Jevlenese school that we got in touch with in the city offered to put everyone up, so we went for it. Might as well see what it’s all about here, eh? Hell, we can see the inside of a BW any day of the week.”
“Good thinking,” Hunt agreed. “Enjoy the sights.”
“You too. See you around, maybe, Vic.”
The two men who had come to collect the UNSA group were Americans, Hunt discovered when he at last joined them. There was no real reason why he should have been surprised, since the traffic of Terrans to Jevlen had been pretty free, but it wasn’t something he had been expecting.
One’s name was Koberg; the other’s was Lebansky. From their tight-jawed impassivity and overall bearing, they had to be military, Hunt guessed, and was proved right: both were U.S. Secret Service, formerly military police, currently attached to PAC security on Jevlen.
“Security?” Hunt looked puzzled. “I thought JPC turned that proposal down.”
“Yeah, well, that was for a UN force,” Koberg agreed. He gave the impression of being tactfully evasive. “I guess a few things have been happening on the quiet that maybe you won’t have heard about. You know how these things are: Some of our people kind of decided to go ahead anyhow, in a low-visibility way. You might call it a precautionary insurance.”
“Maybe the chief will explain it better when we get back,” Lebansky suggested.
They led the group out of the same exit that the school group had used, just as the pink bus was puffing away. A smaller ground vehicle was waiting for them, similar to a minibus, again riding on balls instead of wheels. Inside were two more men, Jevlenese this time, one in the driver’s station in front, the other seated by the door. Neither of them spoke any Terran languages, but the driver said something over a communications link that sounded like a confirmation that the party had been picked up.
“Today we travel the slow way,” Koberg said as they moved off. “There’s normally a fast-transit tube system into the city, but it’s not running.”
“Hell, what do you mean, ‘normally’?” Lebansky challenged. “The darn things are never running. This is normal.”
“Just when this side of the city’s going to be packed for a big rally that’s going on today,” Koberg said. “Purple-spiral loonies. Ever hear of them?”
“A little,” Hunt said.
“You’ll see plenty of ’em today,” Lebansky promised.
Jevlen had been developed as the home world of the Jevlenese within the Thurien civilization, and as such its layout reflected a human worldview rather than anything predominantly alien. Although Ganymean influence was inevitable, the geometry and architecture conformed to more familiar notions of style and consistency-which came as a relief to those who, after seeing the Vishnu, had prepared themselves for worse.
The metropolis was higher than anything that contemporary Earth had to offer, rising in the center to a monolithic fusion of towers, ramps, terraces, and bridges that dwarfed anything from home in scale and breathtaking concept; but the avenues passing amid the flyovers and disappearing into the central zone at various levels remained avenues, the levels remained levels, “up” meant the same thing everywhere, and surface and line in all directions extrapolated with reassuring predictability.