m is something to do with my  hands
at  idle  moments, better than needlepoint and potentially much
more profitable. If you don't practice the moves you find  your
hands freeze up on you at a critical moment.
     But  I  never  play  solitaire, and the reason is a little
embarrassing. I cheat. Which is all very well for blackjack  or
five-card stud, but what's the point in solitaire?
     Point or not, I eventually found myself laying out a hand.
     Pretty soon I got into it. Not the game itself, than which
there are few purer wasters of time, but the cards. You have to
be able  to  visualize  the  order,  make  them your friends so
they'll tell you things. Do it long enough  and  you'll  always
know what the next card will be, and you'll know what the cards
are  that  you can't see, as sure as if they were marked on the
back.
     I did it for a long time, until Winston got up  and  began
to  scratch  at  the  wall of the tent. Better get him into his
suit before he got frantic, I thought, and looked up  into  the
face  of  the  girl.  She was standing there, outside the tent,
grinning down at Winston, and she had a telescope tucked  under
her arm. She looked at me and shook a finger: naughty, naughty.
     "Wait!" I shouted. "I want to talk to you."
     She  smiled  again,  shrugged  her shoulders, and became a
perfect mirror. All I  could  see  of  her  was  the  distorted
reflection  of  the  tent  and  the  ground  she  stood on. The
distortions twisted and flowed and began to  dwindle.  Pressing
my face against the tent wall I could follow her progress for a
little  while  since  she was the only moving object out there.
She wasn't in any hurry and I thought she looked back over  her
shoulder, but there was no way to be sure.
     I  got  into  my suit quickly, thought it over, and suited
Winston, too. I let him out, knowing  his  ears  and  sense  of
smell were totally useless out here but hoping some other doggy
sense  would  give  me a lead. He shuffled off, trying to press
his nose to the ground as he usually did,  succeeding  only  in
getting  moondust  on  the bottom of his helmet. I followed him
with my flashlight.
     Soon he stopped and tried to press his face to the surface
with more than his usual doggedness. I knelt and looked at what
he was trying to pick up. It was a bit of spongy material  that
crumbled in my glove when I lifted it. I laughed aloud; Winston
looked up, and I patted the top of his helmet.
     "I  might  have  know  you wouldn't miss food, even if you
can't smell it," I told him. And we set off together, following
the trail of breadcrumbs.

        =*= =*= =*= =*=

        CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE








     Feeling  not  unlike  the  hood  ornament  on   a   luxury
rover--and  showing  a lot more chrome-plated belly than either
Mr. Rolls or Mr. Royce would have approved of--I stepped boldly
forth into the sunlight, almost as naked as the day I was born.
Boldly, if you don't  dwell  on  the  thirty  minutes  I  spent
getting  up my nerve to do it in the first place. Naked, if you
don't count the mysterious force field that kept me wrapped  in
a warming blanket of air at least five millimeters thick.
     Even  the  warming part was illusory. It certainly felt as
if the air was keeping me warm, and without that  psychological
reassurance  I doubt if I'd have made it. Actually, the air was
cooling me, which is  always  the  problem  in  a  space  suit,
whether  bought  off  the  shelf at Hamilton's or hocus-pocused
into existence by the Genius of the Robert  A.  Heinlein.  See,
the human body generates heat, and a spacesuit has to be a good
insulator,  that's its main purpose; the heat will build up and
choke you without an outlet. See?
     Oh, brother. If you had a chuckle at  my  explanations  of
nanoengineering  and  cybernetics,  wait  till you hear Hildy's
Field Suits Made Simple.
     "You're doing fine, Hildy," Gretel  (not  her  real  name)
coaxed. "I know it takes some getting used to."
     "How  would you know that?" I countered. "You grew up in a
field suit."
     "Yeah, but I've taken tenderfeet out before."
     Tenderfeet,  indeed.  I  bent  over  to  see  those  pedal
extremities,  thinking  I'd  have to get reacquainted with them
post-partum. I wiggled  my  toes  and  light  wiggled  off  the
reflections.  Like  wearing thick mylar socks, only all I could
feel was what appeared to be the rough surface of  Luna.  There
was  some  feedback principle at work there, I'd been told; the
field kept me floating five millimeters high no matter how hard
I pressed down. And a good thing, too. Those rock were hot.
     "How's the breathing?" Gretel asked, in a funny voice  I'd
get  used  to  eventually. Part of the field suit package was a
modification of my implanted telephone so that sub-vocalization
could  be  heard  over  the  channel   the   Heinleiners   used
suit-to-suit.
     "I still want to gasp," I said.
     "Say again?"
     I repeated it, saying each word carefully.
     "That's just psychotic."
     I  think  she meant psychosomatic, or maybe psychological.
Or possibly psychotic was  the  perfect  word.  How  would  you
describe  someone  who  trusted  her delicate hide to a spatial
effect that, as near as I could understand it, had no existence
in the real world?
     The desire to breathe  was  real  enough,  even  though  a
suppressor  of  some  kind  was at work in my brain cutting off
that part of the autonomic nervous system. My body was  getting
all  the  oxygen  it  needed,  but  when  your  lungs have been
inhaling and exhaling for over a hundred years,  some  part  of
you gets a little alarmed when asked to shut it off for an hour
or  so.  I'd  been  holding my breath for almost ten minutes so
far. I felt about ready to go back inside and gulp.
     "You want to go back inside?"
     I wondered if I'd been muttering to  myself.  Gotta  watch
that. I shook my head, remembered how hard that was to see, and
mouthed "No."
     "Then  take  my  hand,"  she said. I did, and our two suit
fields melted together and I felt her  bare  hand  in  mine.  I
could  see  that, if these things ever got on the market, there
was going to be a big fad in lovemaking under the stars.
     #
     Don't go shopping for a field suit just yet, though.
     They'll surely be available in  a  few  years,  what  with
current   conditions.   A  lot  of  people  are  angry  at  the
Heinleiners for not just bestowing the patents  gratis  to  the
general public. I've heard mutterings. A lot of good it will do
the  mutterers; they simply don't understand Heinleiners. There
goddam sure ain't no such thing as a free  lunch,  and  they're
out to prove it.
     As  I  write this, the Heinleiners are still pretty pissed
off, and who could blame them? All charges have naturally  been
dropped,  the statutes of limitations have expired, as it were.
Nobody's out hunting them. Yet I swore a  solemn  oath  not  to
reveal  the  names  of  any of them until given permission, and
that permission has not been granted, and who's to say  they're
wrong?  Say  what  you will about me as a reporter, but I never
revealed a source, and I never will. Hence,  the  girl  I  will
call  "Gretel."  Hence  all  the  aliases  I will bestow on the
people I met after I followed Gretel's trail into  the  perfect
mirror.
     And  I  promised  not to lie to you, but from here on in I
will not always tell  you  the  whole  truth.  Events  have  of
necessity  been  edited,  to  protect  people with no reason to
trust authority but who trusted me and then found . . . but I'm
getting ahead of myself.
     #
     The trail of breadcrumbs led into the rubble  that  washed
at  the  base  of  the  Heinlein. At first it seemed as if they
vanished into a blank wall, but I found  that  if  I  ducked  a
little there was a way through.
     Luckily,  I  had  Winston  on  a  leash,  because  he  was
straining to head right into the pile, and  god  knows  if  I'd
ever  have  found  him  again. I shined my flashlight under the
overhang--which  seemed  to  be  the  back  end  of  a  vintage
rover--and  saw  it  would  be  possible  to  squirm my way in.
Without the crumbs I never would have  tried  it,  as  I  could
already see four ways to go. But I did go in, wondering all the
time  just  how stable this whole pile was, if I dared brush up
against anything.
     Not too far in it became clear I  was  on  a  pathway.  At
first  it  was  just  bare rock. Soon there was a flooring laid
down, made of discarded plastic wall panels. I tested each step
cautiously, but it seemed firm. I found  each  panel  had  been
spot  welded  to some of the more massive pieces of debris that
made up the jackstraw jumble. I further saw, looking around the
edge of the roadway, that the ground was no longer down  there.
My  flashlight  picked  up an endless array of junk. If there'd
been any air I might have tried dropping a coin or something; I
had a feeling I'd hear it clatter for a long time.
     For a while I kept testing each new panel cautiously,  but
each  was as firmly in place as the last. I decided I was being
silly. People obviously used this path with some frequency, and
despite its impromptu nature it seemed sturdy enough.  Flashing
my light around above me I could soon see the tunnel itself had
been  made  by some kind of boring machine. It was cylindrical,
and a lot of rubbish had been blasted  or  cut  away;  I  found
sliced  edges  of metal beams on each side of the tunnel, as if
the center sections had been cut out. I hadn't  seen  it  as  a
cylinder  at  first  because  its  walls  were  so relentlessly
baroque, not covered with anything as they  would  be  in  King
City.
     Before  long  I  came  to  a  string of lights hung rather
haphazardly along the left-hand side of  the  tunnel.  And  not
long  after  that  I  saw  somebody  approaching me from a good
distance. I shined the light at the person, and she shined  her
light  at  me,  and  I saw she was also pregnant and also had a
bulldog on a leash, which seemed too much for coincidence.
     Winston didn't put it together. Instead, he plowed forward
in his usual way, either to greet a new friend or  to  rend  an
enemy  into  bloody  gobbets,  who could tell? I could hear the
clang over my suit radio when he hit. He sat down hard,  having
had no visible effect upon the perfect mirror.
     Neither  did  I,  though I scrupulously did all the futile
things people do in stories  about  humans  encountering  alien
objects: chunking rocks, swinging a makeshift club, kicking it.
I  left  no  scratches  on  it.  ("Mister  President,  it is my
scientific opinion the saucer is made of an alloy never seen on
Earth!") I'd have tried fire, electricity, lasers,  and  atomic
weapons,  but  I  didn't  have any handy. Maybe lasers wouldn't
have been the best idea.
     So I waited, wondering if she'd been watching  me,  hoping
she'd  had  a good laugh at my expense, feeling sure she hadn't
led me this far just to strand me, and in a moment the  surface
of  the mirror bulged and became a human face. The face smiled,
and then the rest of the body appeared. At first I thought  she
was  moving  forward,  but  it turned out the mirror was moving
back and the field was forming around her body  as  she  simply
stood there.
     It  moved back about three meters, and she beckoned to me.
I went to her, and  she  made  some  gestures  which  I  didn't
understand.  Finally  I got the idea that I was to hold on to a
bar fastened to the wall. I did, and the girl crouched and held
on to Winston, who seemed happy to see her.
     There was a loud bang and something slammed into me.  Bits
of  trash  and  dust  swirled,  maybe  a  little mist, too. The
perfect mirror was no longer where it had been and the corridor
had changed. I looked around and saw the walls were now  coated
with the same mirror, and the flat surface had re-formed behind
me, where it had been originally. A rather dramatic airlock.
     For  a  few  more  seconds  Gretel  was  still  wrapped in
distortion, then her suit field vanished  and  she  became  the
nude ten-year-old who had run through my dreams for such a long
time.  She was saying something. I shook my head and glanced at
the readouts  for  exterior  temperature  and  pressure--  pure
habit,  I could see and hear the air was okay-- then I took off
my helmet.
     "First thing," Gretel said, "you've got to promise not  to
tell my father."
     "Not to tell him what?"
     "That  you  saw  me  on  the  surface  without my suit. He
doesn't like it when I do that."
     "I wouldn't, either. Why do you do it?"
     "You gotta promise, or you can just go home."
     I did. I would have promised one hell of a lot  of  things
to get farther down that tunnel I could see stretching ahead of
me.  I  even  would have kept most of them. Personally, I don't
view a promise made to a ten-year-old  to  be  binding,  if  it
involves a matter of safety, but I'd keep that one if I could.
     I  had  a  thousand  questions, but wasn't sure how to ask
them. I'm a good interviewer, but  getting  answers  out  of  a
child  takes a different technique. It would be no problem--the
problem with Gretel was getting her to shut  up--but  I  didn't
know  it  at  the  time.  Right then she was squatting, getting
Winston out of his helmet, so I watched  and  waited.  Liz  had
promised  me  Winston never bit people unless ordered to do so,
and I sure hoped that was true.
     Once again Winston came through for  me.  He  greeted  her
like  a  long-lost  friend, bowling her over in his attempts to
lick her face, reducing her to giggles. I helped  her  get  him
out of the rest of his suit.
     "You  could get out of yours, too, if you want to," Gretel
said.
     "It's safe?"
     "You might have asked that before I  took  off  the  dog's
helmet."
     She had a point. I started peeling out of it.
     "You've led me a merry chase," I said.
     "It  took me a while to convince my father we ought to let
you in at all. But I'm never in  a  hurry  about  such  things,
anyway. Do you good to wait."
     "What changed his mind?"
     "Me,"  she said, simply. "I always do. But it wasn't easy,
you being a reporter and all."
     A year ago that would have surprised  me.  Working  for  a
newspad  you  don't  get  your  face  as well-known as straight
television reporters do. But recent events had changed that. No
more undercover work for me.
     "Your father doesn't like reporters?"
     "He doesn't like publicity. When you talk to  him,  you'll
have to promise not to use any of it in a story."
     "I don't know if I can promise that."
     "Sure, you can. Anyway, that's between you and him."
     We were walking down the round, mirrored corridor by then.
When we  came  to  another mirrored wall like the one I'd first
encountered, she didn't slow down but headed right for it. When
she was a meter away it vanished to reveal another long section
of walkway. I looked behind us and there  it  was.  Simple  and
effective.  The  bored-out tubes were lined with the field, and
these safety barriers were spaced out along the way.  This  new
technology   would  revolutionize  Lunar  building  techniques,
whatever it was.
     I was bursting with questions about it, but my feeling for
her was that it wasn't the right time to ask them. I was  there
as the result of a child's whim, and it would be a good idea to
see  where  I  stood  with her, get on her good side as much as
possible.
     "So . . ." I said. "Did you like the toys?"
     "Oh, please," she said. Not a promising beginning. "I'm  a
little grown up for that."
     "How  old  are  you?" There was always the chance I'd read
her wrong from the beginning; she could be older than me.
     "I'm eleven, but I'm precocious. Everyone says so."
     "Especially Daddy?"
     She grinned at me. "Never Daddy. He  says  I'm  a  walking
argument  for retroactive birth control. Okay, sure I liked the
toys, only I'd prefer to think of them  as  charming  antiques.
Mostly, I liked the dog. What's his name?"
     "Winston.  So  that's  why  you  talked  your  father into
letting me in?"
     "No. I could get a dog easily enough."
     "Then I don't get it. I worked so hard to interest you."
     "You did? That's neat. Hell, Hildy, I'd have asked you  in
if you'd just sat out there on your butt."
     "Why?"
     She  stopped  and  turned  to me, and the look on her face
told me what was coming. I'd seen that look before.
     "Because you work for the Nipple. It's  my  favorite  pad.
Tell me, what was Silvio really like?"
     #
     Most  of my conversations with Gretel got around to Silvio
sooner or later, usually after long and adoring detours through
the celebrity underbrush of the current pre-pubescent idols  of
television  and  music. I'd interviewed Silvio a total of three
times, been at social occasions  where  he  was  present  maybe
twenty  times,  exchanged perhaps a dozen sentences with him at
those functions. It didn't matter. It was all gold  to  Gretel,
who  was easily twice as star-struck as most girls her age. She
hung on my every word.
     Naturally, I made up a lot. If I could do it in print, why
not to her? And it was good practice for telling  her  all  the
intimate details of the teeny stars, few of whom I'd even heard
of, much less met.
     Is  that  awful?  I suppose it is, lying to a little girl,
but I'd done worse in my life, and how badly did it  hurt  her?
The  whole  gossip  industry, flagshipped by the Nipple and the
Shit, is of questionable moral worth to begin with, but it's  a
very  old  industry, and as such, must fill a basic human need.
I've apologized for it enough here. The biggest  difference  in
my  stories  to  her  was  that,  when I was writing it, it was
usually nasty gossip. My stories to her were usually nice ones.
I viewed it as paying my keep. If Scheherazade could do it, why
not Hildy Johnson?
     #
     I was grateful that she held my hand on that first  stroll
on  the  surface.  Breathing  is  perhaps  the  most underrated
pleasure in life. You notice it  when  something  smells  good,
curse  it  when  something stinks, but the rest of the time you
don't even think of it. It's as natural as . . . well, see?  To
really  appreciate  it,  try holding your mouth and nose closed
for three minutes, or however long it takes to reach  the  edge
of  blackout.  That  first breath that brings you back from the
edge of death will be the sweetest thing  you  ever  tasted,  I
guarantee it.
     Now try it for thirty minutes.
     The oxygen in my new lung was supposed to be good for that
long,  with  a  five  to  seven  minute margin. "Think of it as
thirty," Aladdin had said, when he installed it. "That'll  keep
you safe."
     "I'll  think  of it as fifteen," I retorted. "Maybe five."
I'd been sitting in his clinic at the time, the left side of my
chest laid open, the ugly gray mass of what had  recently  been
my  left  lung  lying  in  a  pan  on  a  table  like  so  much
butcher-shop special of the day.
     "Don't   talk,"   he   warned.   "Not   when   I'm   doing
respiratory-system  work."  He  wiped  a drop of blood from the
corner of my mouth.
     "Maybe one," I said. He picked up the new lung, a thing of
shiny metal with some trailing tubes, shaped very much  like  a
lung, and started shoving it into the chest cavity. It made wet
sucking sounds going in. I hate surgery.
     I'd  have  thought  it  was something brand-new but for my
recent researches into vacuum technology. One part  of  it  was
revolutionary,  but  the  rest  had  been cobbled together from
things developed and set aside a long time ago.
     The Heinleiners weren't the first to work on  the  problem
of adapting the human body to the Lunar surface. They were just
the first ones to find a more or less practical answer. Most of
the  lung  Aladdin put inside me was just an air bottle, filled
with compressed oxygen. The rest was an interface  device  that
allowed  the oxygen to be released directly into my bloodstream
while at the same time cleansing  the  carbon  dioxide.  A  few
other  implants  allowed some of the gas to be released through
new openings in my skin, carrying off heat. None of it was new;
most of it had been experimented with as early as the year 50.
     But the year 50 wasn't railroad time.  The  system  wasn't
practical.  You still had to wear a garment to protect you from
the heat  and  the  cold,  and  it  had  to  protect  you  from
both--extremes  never  seen  on  Earth--while  at the same time
keeping the vacuum from your skin, bleeding off waste heat, and
a host of other requirements. Such garments were available; I'd
bought two of them within the last year.  They  were  naturally
much  improved  from  the  mummy bags the first space explorers
wore, but they worked on the same principles. And  they  worked
better  than  the  implanted  lungs. If you're going to have to
wear a suit, after all, what's  the  point  of  a  thirtyminute
supply of air in place of a lung? If you plan much of a stay on
the surface you're going to have to back-pack most of your air,
just like Neil Armstrong did.
     And the Heinleiners did, too, for longer stays. But they'd
solved  the  problem  of what to do with the suit: just turn it
off when not in use.
     I supposed they'd also solved the psychological problem of
the suits, which was the panic reflex when one has not breathed
normally for some time, but I suspected the answer was the same
one a child learns in her first swimming lesson. Do it  enough,
and you'll stop being afraid.
     I'd  done  it  for  fifteen  minutes  now, and I was still
frightened. My heart was racing and my palm  was  sweating.  Or
was that Gretel's?
     "You'll  sweat quite a bit," she said, when I asked. "It's
normal. That layer of air will stay pretty hot, but not too hot
to handle. Also, the sweat helps to bleed off  the  heat,  just
like it does inside."
     I'd   been  told  the  suit's  distance  from  one's  body
fluctuated by about a millimeter  in  a  regular  rhythm.  That
varied  the  volume considerably, sucking waste air from inside
you and expelling it into vacuum in  a  bellows  action.  Water
vapor  went  along  with  it,  but a lot just dripped down your
skin.
     "I think I'd like to go back in now," I mouthed, and  must
have done it well enough, because I heard her say "Okay," quite
clearly.  That was the same circuitry the CC used to talk to me
in private, back when I was still speaking to him.  Aside  from
the respirator/air supply/field generator, and a few air ducts,
not  much  had  needed  to be done to prepare me for field suit
use.  Some  of  that's  because  I  was  already  wired  to   a
fare-thee-well,  as  the  CC  had  pointed  out  on  my  direct
interface jaunts. Some adjustments had been made to my eardrums
to keep them from hurting in fluctuating pressures, and  a  new
heads-up  display  had been added so that when I closed my eyes
or just blinked, I saw figures concerning body temperature  and
remaining  air  supply  and so forth. There were warning alarms
I'd been told would sound in various situations, and  I  didn't
intend ever to hear any of them. Mostly, with a field suit, you
just  wore  it.  And  all  but a tiny portion of that, you wore
inside.
     The air lock I'd used to get into the secret  warrens  was
only   for  inanimate  objects,  or  people  wearing  inanimate
objects, like the old-style suit I'd been wearing. If you had a
field suit in, you simply stepped into the wall of  mirror  and
your  own  suit  melted into it, like a drop of mercury falling
into a quicksilver pool. That was the only way to get through a
null-field  barrier  other  than  turning  it  off.  They  were
completely  reflective  on both sides. Nothing got through, not
air, not bullets, not  light  nor  heat  nor  radio  waves  nor
neutrinos. Nothing.
     Well, gravity got through, whatever gravity is. Don't seek
the answer  to  that  one in these pages. But magnetism didn't,
and Merlin was working on the gravity part. Follow-up  on  that
still to come.
     Just before Gretel and I stepped through I saw part of the
mirror wall distorted in the shape of a face. That was the only
way to  see through the wall, just stick your face in, and even
that was tough to get used  to.  Gretel  and  her  brother-what
else?--Hansel did it as naturally as I'd turn my head to glance
out  a  window.  Me,  I had to swallow hard a few times because
every reflex I had was telling me I was going to smash my  nose
against that reflection of myself.
     But I had no trouble this time because I wanted very badly
to be  on  the  other side of that mirror. I was running by the
time I hit it. And of course there was no sensation of  hitting
anything--my suit simply vanished as it went through the larger
field--with  the  result that, because some part of me had been
braced for impact, had been flinching, wincing, bracing myself,
it was like reaching for that non-existent top step, and I  did
a comical cakewalk as if the floor was coated with banana peels
and  came  that  close  to  a pratfall any silent film comedian
would have envied.
     Before you snicker, you go and try it.
     Gretel claimed to be able to  distinguish  people's  faces
when  covered by a null suit. I supposed that if you grew up in
one it would be possible; they  were  still  all  chrome-plated
masks  to  me,  and  probably would be for a long time. But I'd
figured it was Hansel who poked his face through, since  that's
where  we'd  left  him, watching Winston, and it was indeed him
who greeted me after my maiden voyage in the new  suit.  Hansel
was  a  lad  of fifteen, a tall, awkward, rather shy boy with a
shock of blonde hair like his sister's and a  certain  look  in
his eye I'm sure he got from his father. I thought of it as the
mad scientist's gleam. As if he'd like to take you apart to see
how you worked, only he was too polite to ask if he could. He'd
put you back together, I hasten to add, or at least he'd intend
to,  though the skills might not always be up to the intent. He
got that from his father, too. Where the shyness  came  from  I
had no idea. It was not inherited paternally.
     "I  just  got  a  phone call from the ranch," Hansel said.
"Libby says the palomino mare is about to foal."
     "I got it, too," Gretel said. "Let's go."
     They were off while I was still catching my breath. It had
been a long time since I'd tried to keep up with children,  but
I didn't dare let these get out of my sight. I wasn't sure if I
could  find my way back to the Heinlein alone. Sounds unlikely,
doesn't it? If there's one thing Lunarians are  good  at,  it's
negotiating  a  threedimensional maze, or at least we'd like to
think so. But the mazes of King City tend to be of  two  types:
radiating  out  from a central plaza, with circular ring roads,
or a north/south up/down grid. The paths of the  Delambre  Dump
were more like a plate of spaghetti. Two days in Delambre would
have any urban planner ready for a padded cell. It just growed.
     The paths I was now hurrying down had been made by nothing
more mysterious than obsolescent tunneling machines--one of the
other  things  Lunarians  are good at. They usually bored their
way through rock, but the sort  of  techno-midden  stratigraphy
found  in  Delambre  presented  them  no problems; they'd laser
their way through anything. The  Heinleiners  had  a  dozen  of
them,  all  found on site, repaired, and seemingly just sort of
set loose to find their own way. Not really, but anyone who had
tried to find a rhyme or reason in the pathways had  to  figure
an earthworm would have done a tidier job.
     Once  the  wormholes  were  there, human crews came in and
installed the flooring out of whatever plastic panels  were  at
hand.  Since  those  panels  had been a construction staple for
over a century, they weren't hard to find. The last step was to
provide an ALU every hundred meters or so. An ALU  was  an  Air
Lock  Unit,  and consisted of this: a null-field generator with
logics to run their odd locking systems at each end, a big  can
of  air  serviced  weekly  by autobots, and a wire running to a
solar panel on top of the heap of garbage to  power  the  whole
thing. When somebody got around to it glow- and heat-wires were
strung along the top of the tunnel so they wouldn't be too cold
or  dark,  but these were viewed as luxuries, and not all parts
of the tunnels had them.
     A  more  jack-leg,  slip-shod  system   of   keeping   the
Breathsucker  at bay had never been seen on this tired old orb,
and nobody with half a brain would trust her one and only  body
to it for a split second. And with good reason: breakdowns were
frequent,  repairs  were  slow. Heinleiners simply didn't care,
and why should they? If part of the tunnel went down, your suit
would switch on and you'd have plenty of time  to  get  to  the
next segment. They just didn't worry much about vacuum.
     It  made  for  weird travel, and another reason to keep up
with the children. Both  of  them  were  carrying  flashlights,
which  were  almost  mandatory  in  the  tunnels, and which I'd
forgotten again. We came to a dark, cold section and it was all
I could do to keep their darting lights in sight. Sure, I could
call them back if I got lost, but I was determined not  to.  It
wouldn't  have  been fun, you see, and above all kids just want
to have fun. You don't want to get  a  reputation  as  somebody
they have to keep waiting for.
     It  was  cold,  too,  right  up to the point of chattering
teeth, and then my suit switched on automatically and before  I
got out of the dark I was warm again. Winston looked back at me
and barked. He was still in his old-style suit, Hansel carrying
his  helmet. They'd wanted me to let them give him a null-suit,
but I didn't know how to explain it to Liz.
     #
     The first time the children took me to  the  farm,  I  had
been  expecting to see a hydroponic or dirt-based plantation of
the sort most Lunarians know must be out there  somewhere,  but
would  have  to  consult  a  directory  to  find, and had never
actually seen. I'd been to one in the course of  a  story  long
ago--I've  been  most  places  in  my  century--and  since  you
probably haven't I'll say they tend to be quite dull. Not worth
you time. Whether the crop is corn  or  potatoes  or  chickens,
what you see are low rooms with endless rows of cages or stalls
or  furrows  or troughs. Machines bring food or nutrients, haul
away waste, harvest the final product. Most animals are  raised
underground,  most  plants on the surface, under plastic roofs.
All of it is kept distant from  civilization  and  hardly  ever
talked  about,  since  so  many  of  us can't bear to think the
things we eat ever grew  in  dirt,  or  at  one  time  cackled,
oinked, and defecated.
     I  was  expecting  a  food  factory,  albeit  one built to
typical Heinleiner specs, as Aladdin once described them to me:
"Jerry-rigged, about threequarter-assed, and hellishly unsafe."
Later I did see  a  farm  just  like  that,  but  not  the  one
belonging  to  Hansel  and Gretel and their best friend, Libby.
Once again I'd forgotten I was dealing with children.
     The farm was behind a big pressure  door  aboard  the  old
Heinlein  that  said CREW'S MESS #1. Inside a lot of tables had
been shoved  together  and  welded  solid  to  make  waist-high
platforms.  These  had  been  heaped with soil and planted with
mutant grasses and bonsai trees. The scene had been laced  with
little  dirt roads and an HO Gauge railroad layout, dotted with
dollhouses   and   dollbarns   and   little   doll   towns   of
often-incompatible  scales.  The  whole  thing  was  about  one
hundred by fifty meters, and it was here  the  children  raised
their horselets and other things. Lots of other things.
     Being  children, and Heinleiners, it was not as neat as it
might have been. They'd forgotten to provide good drainage,  so
large  parts  suffered  from  erosion. A grandiose plan to make
mountains against the back wall had the look of a project never
finished and long-neglected, with bare orange  plastic  matting
showing  the  bones  of  where the mountains would have been if
they hadn't run out of both enthusiasm and plaster of Paris.
     But if you squinted and used your imagination,  it  looked
pretty  good.  And  your  nose didn't need to be fooled at all.
Walk in the door and you'd immediately know you were in a place
where horses and cattle roamed free.
     Libby called to us from one of the  little  barns,  so  we
climbed  up  a  stile  and  onto  the platform itself. I walked
gingerly, afraid to step on a tree or, worse, a horse.  When  I
got  there the three of them were kneeling beside the red-sided
barn. They had the roof lid raised and  were  peering  down  to
where the mare was lying on her side on a bed of straw.
     "Look! It's coming out!" Gretel squeaked. I did look, then
looked  away,  and  sat  down  beside the barn, knocking over a
section of white rail fence as I did so. Hell,  the  fence  was
just  for show, anyway; the cows and horses jumped over it like
grasshoppers. I lowered my head a  little  and  decided  I  was
going to be all right. Probably.
     "Something  wrong, Hildy?" Libby asked. I felt his hand on
my shoulder and made an effort to look up at him and smile.  He
was  a  red-headed  boy  of  almost eighteen, even lankier than
Hansel, and he had a crush on me. I patted his hand and said  I
was fine and he went back to his pets.
     I'm  not  notably queasy, but I'd been having these spells
associated with pregnancy. I still had a month to go,  far  too
late to change my mind. It was an experience I wasn't likely to
forget.  Trust  me,  when  you  get  up  at  three A.M. with an
insatiable  hunger  for  chocolate-coated  oysters,  you  don't
forget  it.  The  sight  of it coming back up in the morning is
unlikely to slip your mind, either.
     I'd been a little concerned about the pre-natal care I was
getting. There was a problem, in that I could hardly  go  to  a
clinic  in  King  City,  as  the medics were bound to notice my
unorthodox left lung. The Heinleiners had a few  doctors  among
them  and the one I'd been seeing, "Hazel Stone," told me I had
nothing to worry about. Part of me believed her,  and  part  of
me--a new part I was just beginning to understand: the paranoid
mother--  did  not. It didn't seem to surprise her and she took
the time to do what she could to put my mind at ease.
     "It's true the stuff I have out here isn't  as  up-to-date
as  my  equipment  in  King City," she had said. "But we're not
talking trephining and leeches, either. The fact is that you're
doing well enough I could deliver him by hand if I had to, with
just some clean water and rubber gloves. I'll see  you  once  a
week  and  I  guarantee  I'll  spot  any possible complications
instantly." She then offered to "just take him out now and  pop
him  in  a  bottle,  if  you want to. I'll keep him right in my
office, and I'll hook up as many machines as it takes  to  make
you feel better."
     I'd  realized she was just humoring me, but I gave it some
thought. Then I told her, no, I was determined to stick it  out
to  the  end,  since I'd come this far, and I said I realized I
was being silly.
     "It's part of the territory," she had said. "You get  mood
swings,  and  irrational  impulses,  cravings.  If  it gets bad
enough, I can do something about those, too." Maybe it was just
a reaction to all the tampering the CC had recently been  doing
to  me,  but  I  refused  her  mood levelers. I didn't like the
swings, and I'm not a masochist, but  if  you're  going  to  do
this, Hildy, I told myself, you should find out what it's like.
Otherwise, you might as well just read about it.
     But the real source of my nervousness was just as silly as
a plate  of  pickles and ice cream. Since I was still living in
Texas and commuting to Delambre, I had  also  been  seeing  Ned
Pepper  once  a  week,  too.  Ostensibly it was to keep him and
others from getting suspicious, but I'm pretty sure it was also
because I found him oddly reassuring. The thing  is,  while  no
one  held  any  brief for his medical knowledge or skills, most
people felt he was a damn good intuitive diagnostician. Had  he
been  born in a simpler era he might have made quite a name for
himself. And . . .
     "Hildy," he told me, tapping his stethoscope  against  his
lip,  "I  don't  want  to  alarm  you, but something about this
pregnancy makes me nervous as a jacked-off  polecat."  He  took
another  pull  on  his  bottle  and  staggered to his feet as I
settled my skirt back around my legs. That's  the  only  reason
I'd  been  able  to go to him and not the King City sawbones; a
West Texas gynecological exam barely disarranged your clothing.
The Doctor would poke his cold metal heartbeat  disc  under  my
shirt  and  listen to my heart and the fetal one, thump my back
and  my  belly,  take  my  body  temperature   with   a   glass
thermometer,  then  ask  me to swing my feet up into these here
stirrups, my dear. I knew he had a shiny brass speculum he  was
dying to try out but I drew the line at that. Just let him look
and  play  doctor and we'd both go home happy. So what was this
nervous shit? He didn't have any right to be nervous.  He  sure
didn't have the right to tell me about it. He seemed to realize
that as soon as the slug of redeye hit his belly.
     "I  assume  you're  getting  real medical care?" he asked,
sheepishly. When I told him I was, he nodded, and  snapped  his
suspenders.  "Well,  then.  Don't  fret  yourself  none.  He'll
probably come out a ridin' a wild bronc and  dealin'  five-card
stud. Just like his mama."
     Naturally,  I  did  worry.  Pregnancy is insanity, take it
from me.
     #
     When I was sure my nausea had passed I stood  up  and  saw
I'd  been sitting on the hen coop. It had a steel framework but
my weight had loosened a lot of the fake wooden shingles  glued
to  the  sides.  A  rooster  about  the  size  of  a  mouse was
protesting this outrage by pecking at my toes. Inside,  several
dozen hens were . . . well, egging him on. Sorry.
     The  colt  wouldn't  be  standing  on his own for a little
while yet, but the show was basically over. Hansel  and  Gretel
and  Libby  moved  off  to  other  pursuits.  I stayed a little
longer, empathizing with the mare, who looked up at me as if to
say You'll get your turn soon enough, Miss Smarty. I reached in
and stroked the new-born with  my  fingertip,  and  the  mother
tried  to bite my hand. I didn't blame her. I got up, dusted my
knees, and headed over to the farm house.
     I knew the house lid was hinged; I'd seen the kids lift it
up. But I was still ambivalent enough about these pets  that  I
didn't  want  to  do  that.  Instead I bent over and pushed the
little doorbell. In a moment one of the male kewpies  came  out
and looked up expectantly, hoping for a treat.
     If  the  horselets  and mini-kine and dwarfowl were cherry
bombs in a scale of illegal  explosiveness,  then  the  kewpies
were  ten  sticks  of  dynamite. Kewpies were little people, no
more than twenty centimeters tall.
     The children had named them  well.  These  are  not  adult
human beings, done to scale. In an effort to make them smarter,
Libby  had  given  them  bigger  brains, and thus bigger heads.
Perfectly sane reasoning, for a child. It might even be  right,
for  all  I knew about it. But though he assured me the current
generation was much more clever than the  two  preceding  ones,
they  were  no  more intelligent than any of several species of
monkey.
     They were not human, let's get that out of the  way  right
now.  But  they  contained  human  genes,  and that is strictly
forbidden on Luna under laws over two centuries old.  I  didn't
have  any  of  these creepy little baby dolls to ride my little
horselet when I was a nipper. I don't think  anybody  did.  No,
these  were  the result of Libby's enquiring young mind, and no
one else's.
     If you could get over the shock and  horror  almost  every
Lunarian  would  feel  at  first sight of the things, they were
actually quite cute. They smiled a lot, and were eager to grasp
your finger in their tiny little hands. Most of them could  say
a  word  or  two,  things  like "candy!" and "Hi!" A few formed
rudimentary sentences. Possibly they could have been trained to
do more, but the children didn't take the  time.  In  spite  of
their  hands  they  were  not  tool users. They were not little
people. And they were cute.
     Enough of that. The fact is they made  my  skin  crawl  on
some  very  primitive  level. They were bad juju. They were the
forbidden fruit of  the  Tree  of  Science.  They  were  faerie
sprites, and thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
     So  the real truth is I couldn't make up my mind about the
damn things. On the one hand, what  had  attracted  me  to  the
Heinleiners  was  the  fact  that they were doing things no one
else  was  doing.  So  .  .  .  all  reasonable   and   logical
rationalizations aside . . . why did they have to do that?
     While  I  was  still  pondering this question, not for the
first time, someone came up beside me and lifted the lid of the
farm house. I looked in with him,  and  we  both  frowned.  The
inside  of  the  structure was furnished with little chairs and
beds, the former tumbled over and the latter not occupied. Half
a dozen kewpies were curled up here and there,  sleeping  where
the  urge  had  taken  them, and there were piles of what you'd
expect from animals where that urge had taken them. It  went  a
long  way toward helping me believe they weren't little people.
It also recalled documentary horror films  from  the  twentieth
century of homes for the insane and the retarded.
     The  man let the lid drop, looked around, and bellowed for
his children, who came running from where they had been  racing
model  cars,  guilty  looks on their faces. He glowered down at
them.
     "I told you that if you can't keep your  pets  clean,  you
can't have them," he said.
     "We  were gonna clean them up, Dad," Hansel said. "Soon as
we finished the race. Isn't that right, Hildy?"
     The little bastard. Fearing that my  sufferance  here  was
still  very  much  dependent on these precocious brats, I said,
diplomatically I hope, "I'm sure they would have."
     And I said that because I wasn't about to lie to  the  man
standing beside me, father to Hansel and Gretel, and the man on
whose  good  graces my continued presence among the Heinleiners
really relied.
     This is the man  the  media  has  always  referred  to  as
"Merlin,"  since  he  would never reveal his real name. I'm not
even sure if I know his real name, and I think he trusts me  by
now,  as  much  as  he  ever will. But I don't like the name of
Merlin, so in this account I will refer to him as Mister Smith.
Valentine Michael Smith.

        =*= =*= =*= =*=

        CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO








     Mister V.M. Smith, leader of the Heinleiners, was  a  tall
man,  ruggedly  handsome in the mold of some of our more virile
movie stars, with white, even teeth that  flashed  with  little
points of light when he smiled and blue eyes that twinkled with
wisdom and compassion.
     Did I say he was tall? Actually, he was a little shrimp of
a guy.  Or,  come  to  think  of  it,  I'd say he was of medium
height. And by golly, maybe his hair was black and curly.  Ugly
he  was,  with  a snaggled-toothed smile like a dead pig in the
sunshine. Hell, maybe he was bald.
     When you get right down to it, I'm not even going to swear
he was male.
     I think the heat is largely off of him by now, but he  (or
she)   thinks   differently,  so  there  will  not  even  be  a
description  of  him  from  me.  My  portraits  of  the   other
Heinleiners,  children  included,  are  deliberately  vague and
quite possibly misleading. To picture him, do what  I  do  when
reading  a  novel: just pick a famous face you like and pretend
he looks like that. Or make your own  composite.  Try  a  young
Einstein,  with  unruly hair and a surprised expression. You'll
be wrong, although I will swear there was a look in his eyes as
if the universe was  a  much  stranger  place  than  he'd  ever
imagined.
     And  that  business about leading the Heinleiners . . . if
they had a leader, he was it. It was Smith who had  made  their
isolated   way  of  life  possible  with  his  researches  into
forgotten sciences. But the  Heinleiners  were  an  independent
bunch. They didn't go in for town meetings, were unlikely to be
found  on the rosters of service clubs--didn't really hold much
of a brief for democracy,  when  you  get  right  down  to  it.
Democracy,  one  of  them  said to me once, means you get to do
whatever the majority of silly sons of bitches says you have to
do. Which is not to say they favored dictatorship ("getting  to
do  what  one  silly  son  of a bitch says you have to do." op.
cit.). No, what they liked (if I may quote one more  time  from
my  Heinleiner  philosopher) was forgetting about all the silly
sons of bitches and doing what they damn well pleased.
     This is a hazardous way of life  in  a  totally  urbanized
society,  apt to land you in jail--where an embarrassing number
of Heinleiners did live. To live like that you need elbow room.
You need Texas, and I mean the real Texas, before  the  arrival
of  the  iron horse, before the Mexicans, before the Spaniards.
Hell, maybe before the Indians. You needed the Dark  Continent,
the  headwaters  of  the  Amazon,  the  South  Pole,  the sound
barrier,  Everest,  the  Seven  Lost   Cities.   Wild   places,
unexplored  places,  not  good  old stodgy old Luna. You needed
elbow room and adventure.
     A lot of Heinleiners had lived in disneys, some still  did
as  at least a better alternative to the anthill cities. But it
didn't take long to discover what toy frontiers  they  actually
were.  The  asteroid  belt  and  the  outer  planets  had  high
concentrations of these crotchety malcontents, too, but it  had
been  a  long time since either place had been a real challenge
to humanity. A lot of ship's captains were Heinleiners,  a  lot
of  solitary miners. None of them were happy-possibly that type
of person can never be happy-but at least they were  away  from
the  masses  of humanity and less likely to get into trouble if
offered   an   intolerable   insult--like   bad   breath,    or
inappropriate laughter.
     That's   unfair.  While  there  were  quite  a  number  of
antisocial hotheads among them, most had learned  to  socialize
with  the  group, swallow the unpleasantness of daily life, put
up with the thousand small things we  each  endure  every  day.
It's  called civilization. It's making your needs, your dreams,
subservient to the greater good, and we all do it. Some  of  us
do  it  so  well we forget we ever had dreams of adventure. The
Heinleiners did it badly; they  still  remembered.  They  still
dreamed.
     Those  dreams  and five cents will get you a cup of coffee
anywhere in Luna. The Heinleiners realized that,  until  Mister
Smith came along and made them think fairy tales can come true,
if you wish upon a star.
     I  followed  Smith  out  of  the farm, where he'd left his
children and Libby hard  at  work  cleaning  out  the  kewpies'
house.  We  were  in  one  of  the  long  corridors of the R.A.
Heinlein, some of which, like this one, were  coated  with  the
silvery  null-field.  I  was  about  to  go  after  him  when I
remembered Winston. I stuck my head back into the room, snagged
his helmet, and  whistled,  and  he  came  lumbering  out  from
beneath  the  tables.  He was licking his chops and I thought I
saw traces of blood around his mouth.
     "Have you been eating  horses  again?"  I  asked  him.  He
merely gazed up and licked his nose. He knew he wasn't supposed
to  get  up on the tables, but there were always some horselets
that had foolishly jumped off and he felt they were fair  game.
I  didn't  know  what  the kids thought of his hunting, since I
didn't know if they were aware of it; I hadn't told them. But I
know Winston was getting a taste for horsemeat.
     I'd thought I'd have to hurry to catch up with Smith,  but
when  I  looked  up  I  saw  he'd  paused a little way down the
corridor and was waiting for me.
     "So  you're  still  around,  eh?"  he  said.  Yessir,   my
reputation in the old R.A.H. couldn't have been higher.
     "I guess it's because I just love children."
     He  laughed  at  that. I'd only met him three times before
and not talked to him very long on any of those occasions,  but
he  was  one  of those people good at sizing others up on short
acquaintance. Most of us think we are, but he was.
     "I know they're not easy to love," he  said.  "I  probably
wouldn't  love  them  so  much  if  they  were."  It was a very
Heinleinerish thing to say; these folks cherish perversity, you
understand.
     "You're saying only a father could love 'em?"
     "Or a mother."
     "That's what I'm counting  on,"  I  said,  and  patted  my
belly.
     "You'll either love him quick, or drown him." We walked on
for a  while without saying anything. Every once in a while one
of the null-field safety locks would vanish in front of us  and
re-appear  behind us. All automatic, and all happening only for
those with null-suits installed.
     These people didn't engineer anything any better than they
had to, and the reason was simply that they had this  marvelous
back-up system. It's going to be revolutionary, I tell you.
     "I get the feeling you don't approve," he said, at last.
     "Of what? Your kids? Hey, I was just--"
     "Of what they do."
     "Well,  Winston  sure  does. I think he's eaten half their
stock."
     I was thinking fast. I wanted to learn more from this man,
and the way to do that is not by running down his children  and
his  way  of  life.  But one of the things I knew about him was
that he didn't like liars, was good  at  detecting  them,  and,
though  a career in reporting had made me a world-class liar, I
wasn't sure I could get one by him. And I wasn't sure I  wanted
to.  I had hoped I'd put a lot of that behind me. So instead of
answering his question, I  said  something  else,  a  technique
familiar to any journalist or politician.
     And it seemed to have worked. He just grunted, and reached
down to  pet  Winston's  ugly  mug.  Once  more  the hound came
through for me, not taking off the hand  at  the  wrist.  Still
digesting the horselet, probably.
     #
     We  came  to a door marked MAIN DRIVE ROOM, and he held it
open for me. You could have driven a golf ball  into  the  room
and  never  hit a wall, and you could have driven a medium-size
rover race in it. Whether you could drive a spaceship the  size
of the Heinlein was very much an open question. But in front of
me were the signs that someone was trying.
     Most  of  the  cavernous  room  was filled with structures
whose precise description I must  leave  to  your  imagination,
since the drive room of the Heinlein is still a closely-guarded
secret and certainly will be until long after they get the damn
thing  to  work.  I  will  say  this: whatever you imagine will
surely be far off the mark. It is  unexpected,  and  startling,
like  opening the hood of a rover and finding it's powered by a
thousand mice licking a thousand tiny crankshafts,  or  by  the
moral  power  of  virginity.  And  this:  though I could hardly
identify anything as basic as a nut and bolt in the fantastical
mess, it still had the look of Heinleiner engineering,  wherein
nothing is ever any better than it has to be. Maybe if they get
time  to  move  beyond  prototypes they'll get more elegant and
more careful, but in the meantime it's "Don't bend that wrench.
Get a bigger hammer." Heinleiner toolboxes must be filled  with
bubblegum and bobby pins.
     And yes, O good and faithful reader, they were planning to
launch the hulk of the old Robert A. Heinlein into interstellar
space.  You  heard  it  here  first.  They  were  not, however,
planning to do it with an  endless  stream  of  nuclear  cherry
bombs  pooting  out  the  tailpipe.  Just  what principles were
envisioned is still proprietary information, but I can  say  it
was  a  variant technology of the mathematics that produced the
null-field. I can say it because no one but Smith and a handful
of others know what that technology is.
     Just imagine them harnessing the old wreck to  a  team  of
very large swans, and leave it at that.
     "As  you  can  see,"  Smith was saying as we walked down a
long and fairly rickety flight of metal stairs,  "they've  just
about  frabjulated the primary phase of the osmosifractionating
de-hoodooer. And those guys  ratattating  the  willy-nilly  say
they ought to have it whistling Dixie in three days' time."
     No secrecy involved here. I'd have written exactly what he
said,  if  I  had  any  hope of remembering it, and the meaning
would have been the same: nothing. Smith never seemed  to  mind
if  his  audience  was  coming  into the clubhouse two or three
holes behind him; he rattled off his own private jargon without
regard to whether or not it was being  monitored.  Sometimes  I
thought  it  just  helped  him  to  think out loud. Sometimes I
thought he was showing off. Probably a little of both.
     But I can't get away from the subject of the  interstellar
drive without mentioning the one time he made an attempt to put
it  in  layman's  terms.  It stuck in my mind, possibly because
Smith had a way of making "layman" rhyme with "retarded."
     "There are basically three states of matter," he had said.
"I call them wackiness, dogmatism, and perversity. The universe
of our  experience  is  almost  totally  composed  of  dogmatic
matter,  just  as it's mostly what we call 'matter,' as opposed
to 'anti-matter'--though dogmatic matter includes  both  types.
Every  once  in  a great while we get evidence of some perverse
matter. It's when you move into the realm of the wacky that you
have to watch out."
     "I've known that all my life," I had told him.
     "Ah, but the possibilities!" he had said, waving his  hand
at the drive taking shape in the engine room of the Heinlein.
     As  he  did now, providing the sort of segue I hate when a
director does it in a movie, but the fact is Smith had a  habit
of  waving  his hand grandly when coming upon his mighty works.
Hell, he had a right.
     "See what can come from the  backwaters  of  science?"  he
said.  "Physics  is  a  closed  book,  they  all said. Put your
talents to work in something useful."
     "'They jeered me at the Sorbonne!'" I suggested.
     "They  threw  eggs  when  I  presented  my  paper  at  the
Institute!  Eggs!"  He  leered  at  me,  drywashing  his hands,
hunching his shoulders. "The fools! Let them see  who  has  the
last  laugh, ha ha HA!" He dropped the mad scientist impression
and patted a huge machine on its metal flank, a cowboy gentling
a horse. Smith could have been insufferably stuffy  except  for
the fact he'd seen almost as many old movies as I had.
     "No  kidding,  Hildy,  the fools are going to be impressed
when they see what I've wrung out of  the  tired  old  husk  of
physics."
     "You'll  get  no argument from me," I said. "What happened
to physics, anyway? Why was it neglected for so long?"
     "Diminishing returns. They spent an insane amount of money
on the GSA about a century ago, and when they turned it on they
found out they'd hubbled it up. The repairs would have--"
     "The GSA?"
     "Global Supercooled Accelerator. You can still find a  lot
of it, running right around the Lunar equator."
     I remembered it then; I'd followed it part of the way when
I ran in the Equatorial Rover Race.
     "They  built  big  instruments  out  in  space,  too. They
learned  a  lot  about   the   universe,   cosmologically   and
sub-atomically, but very little of it had any practical use. It
got  to where learning any more, in the directions physics kept
going, would cost trillions just to tool up.  If  you  did  it,
when you were done you'd have learned what went on in the first
billionth  of  a  nanosecond  of  creation, and then you'd just
naturally want to know what happened in the first thousandth of
a nano-nano-second, only that'd cost ten times as much.  People
got  tired  of  paying  those kind of bills to answer questions
even less reality-based than theology,  and  the  smart  people
noticed that for peanuts you could find out practical things in
biological science."
     "So all the original research now is in biology," I said.
     "Hah!"  he shouted. "There is no original research, unless
you count some of the things the Central Computer does.  Oh,  a
few people here and there." He waved his hand, dismissing them.
"It's  all engineering now. Take well-known principles and find
a way to make a better toothpaste." His eyes lit up. "That's  a
perfect  example.  A  few  months  back, I woke up and my mouth
tasted like peppermint. I looked into it, turns out it's a  new
sort  of 'bot. Some idiot thought this up, built it, and let it
loose on an unsuspecting public. It's in the water, Hildy!  Can
you imagine?"
     "It's  a crying shame," I muttered, trying not to meet his
eye.
     "Well, I got the  antidote.  Maybe  my  mouth  does  taste
rotten  in the morning, but at least it tastes like me. Reminds
me who I am." Which I guess is a perfect example  of  both  the
perversity  of  Heinleiners  and  the  cultural  passivity they
rebelled against. And the big reason I liked them, in spite  of
their best efforts to thwart my affection.
     "It's  all  handed  down  from  on  high now," he went on.
"We're like savages at an altar, waiting  for  miracles  to  be
handed  down.  We don't envision the miracles we might work, if
we set ourselves to it."
     "Like little people, eight inches high and  smart  as  lab
rats."
     He  winced,  the  first  indication  I'd  had  of  a moral
uncertainty.  Thank  god  for  that;  I  like  people  to  have
opinions, but people with no doubts scare me.
     "You  want  me  to  defend  that? Okay. I've brought those
children up to think for themselves, and to question authority.
It's not unlimited; me or somebody who knows more about it  has
to  approve  their  projects, and we keep an eye on them. We've
created a place where they can be free to make their own rules,
but they're children, they have to follow our rules, and we set
as few as possible. Do you realize this is the  only  place  in
Luna  where  the eyes of our mechanical Big Brother can't look?
Not even the police can come in here."
     "I have no reason to love the Central Computer, either."
     "I didn't think so. I thought you might have  a  story  to
tell  about  that, or I'd never have let you in. You'll tell it
when you're ready. Do you know why Libby makes little people?"
     "I didn't ask him."
     "He might have told you; might not have. It's his solution
to the same problem I'm working on:  interstellar  travel.  His
reasoning  is, a smaller human being requires less oxygen, less
food, a smaller spacecraft. If we were all eight  inches  high,
we could go to Alpha Centauri in a fuel drum."
     "That's crazy."
     "Not  crazy.  Ridiculous,  probably.  Unattainable, almost
certainly. Those kewpies live about three years,  and  I  doubt
they'll  ever  have  much  of  a  brain. But it's an innovative
solution to a problem the rest of Luna isn't even  working  on.
Why  do you think Gretel goes running across the surface in her
birthday suit?"
     "You weren't supposed to know about that."
     "I've forbidden it. It's  dangerous,  Hildy,  but  I  know
Gretel,  and  I  know she's still trying it. And the reason is,
she hopes she'll eventually adapt herself to living  in  vacuum
without any artificial aids."
     I  thought  of  the  fish  stranded on the beach, flopping
around, probably doomed but still flopping.
     "That's not how evolution works," I said.
     "You know it and I know it. Tell it  to  Gretel.  She's  a
child,  and a smart one, but with childish stubbornness. She'll
give it up sooner or later. But  I  can  guarantee  she'll  try
something else."
     "I hope it's less hare-brained."
     "From  your  lips  to  God's ears. Sometimes she . . ." He
rubbed his face, and made a dismissing gesture with  his  hand.
"The  kewpies  make  me uneasy, I'll admit that. You can't help
wondering how human they are, and if they are human, whether or
not they have any rights, or should have any rights."
     "It's experimentation on humans,  Michael,"  I  said.  "We
have some pretty strong laws on that subject."
     "What  we have are taboos. We do plenty of experimentation
on human genes. What  we're  forbidden  to  do  is  create  new
humans."
     "You don't think that's a good idea?"
     "It's never that simple. What I object to are blanket bans
on anything.  I've  done  a  lot  of  research into this--I was
against it at first, just like you seem to be. You want to hear
it?"
     "I'd be fascinated."
     We'd come to an area of the engine room I  thought  of  as
his  office,  or laboratory. It was the place I'd spent most of
what little time I'd had with him. He liked to put his feet  up
on  a  wooden  desk as old as Walter's but a lot more battered,
look off into infinity, and expound. So far, his innate caution
had always stopped him from getting too  deeply  into  anything
when  I  was  around,  but  I  sensed  he  needed an outsider's
opinion. The lab? Think of it as full of bubbling  retorts  and
sizzling Jacob's ladders. Omit the hulking body strapped to the
table;  that  was  his children's domain. The place didn't look
anything  like  that,  but   it's   the   proper   stage   set,
metaphorically.
     "It's  a  question  of  where  to draw the line," he said.
"Lines have to be drawn; even I realize that. But the  line  is
constantly moving. In a progressing society, the line should be
moving.  Did  you  know  it  was  once  illegal  to terminate a
pregnancy?"
     "I'd heard of it. Seems very strange."
     "They'd decided that  a  fetus  was  a  human.  Later,  we
changed  our  minds. Society used to keep dead people hooked up
to something called  'lifesupport,'  sometimes  for  twenty  or
thirty years. You couldn't turn the machines off."
     "Their brains were dead, you mean."
     "They  were  dead,  Hildy,  by our standards. Corpses with
blood being pumped through them. Bizarre, creepy as  hell.  You
wonder  what  they were thinking of, what their reasoning could
possibly have been. When people knew they were dying, when they
knew that death was  going  to  be  horribly  painful,  it  was
thought wrong of them to kill themselves."
     I  looked  away; I don't know if he caught it, but I think
he did.
     "A doctor couldn't help them die; he'd get prosecuted  for
murder.  Sometimes  they  even withheld the drugs that would be
best at stopping the pain. Any drug that dulled the senses,  or
heightened  them,  or  altered the consciousness in any way was
viewed as sinful--except for the two  most  physically  harmful
drugs:  alcohol and nicotine. Something relative harmless, like
heroin, was completely illegal, because it was addictive, as if
alcohol was not. No one had the right to determine what he  put
into  his  own  body,  they  had  no  medical  bill  of rights.
Barbaric, agreed?"
     "No argument."
     "I've  studied  their  rationalizations.  They  make  very
little   sense   now.   The  reasons  for  the  bans  on  human
experimentation make a lot of sense. The potential for abuse is
enormous. All genetic research involves hazards. So rules  were
evolved . . . and then set in stone. No one has taken a look at
them  in  over  two hundred years. My position is, it's time to
think it over again."
     "And what did you come up with?"
     "Hell,  Hildy,  we've  barely  started.  A  lot   of   the
prohibitions  on  genetic  research  were  made  at a time when
something released into  the  environment  could  theoretically
have  disastrous results. But we've got room to experiment now,
and fool-proof means of isolation. Do the work on an  asteroid,
and  if something goes wrong, quarantine it, then shove it into
the sun."
     I had no problem with that, and told him so.
     "But what about the human experiments?"
     "They make me queasy, just like you. But that's because we
were raised to view them as evil.  My  children  have  no  such
inhibitions. I've told them all their lives that they should be
able  to  ask  any  question. And they should be able to do any
experiment, as long as they feel they have a reasonable idea of
its outcome. I help them with that  part,  me,  and  the  other
parents."
     I  probably  had a dubious expression on my face. It would
have made perfect sense, since I was feeling dubious.
     "I'm way ahead of you," he said. "You're going to bring up
the old 'superman' argument."
     I didn't dispute it.
     "I think it's time that one was looked at again. They used
to call it 'playing God.' That term has fallen  out  of  favor,
but  it's  still  there.  If  we're going to set out to improve
humans genetically, to build a new human, who's going  to  make
the  choices?  Well,  I can tell you who's making them now, and
I'll bet you know the answer, too."
     It didn't take a lot of thought. "The CC?" I ventured.
     "Come on," he said, getting up from his desk.  "I'm  going
to show you something."
     #
     I  had  a hard time keeping up with him--would have at the
best of times, but my current  state  of  roly-polytude  didn't
help  things.  He  was  one of those straight-ahead people, the
sort who, when they've decided where they're  going,  can't  be
easily diverted. All I could do was waddle along in his wake.
     Eventually  we  reached the base of the ship, which I knew
mainly because we left square corridors and  right-angle  turns
for the haphazard twists of the Great Dump. Not long after that
we  descended  some  stairs  and were in a tunnel bored through
solid rock. I still had no idea how far this network  extended.
I  gathered  it  was  possible to walk all the way to King City
without ever visiting the surface.
     We came to an abandoned, dimly-lit tube station. Or it had
been abandoned at one time, but the  Heinleiners  had  restored
it:  pushed  the  trash on the platform to one side, hung a few
lights, homey touches like that. Floating a  fraction  above  a
gleaming  silver  rail  was  a  sixperson Maglev car of antique
design. It had no doors, peeling paint, and  the  sign  on  the
side  still  read MALL 5-9 SHUTTLE. With stops at all the major
ghost warrens along the way, no doubt: this baby was old.
     Random cushions had been spread on the rippedout seats and
we sat on those and Smith pulled on a cord which rang a  little
tinkling bell, and the car began to glide down the rail.
     "The  whole idea of building a superman has acquired a lot
of negative baggage over the years," he said, picking up as  if
the  intervening  walk  had  never  happened.  As  if he needed
another annoying characteristic. "The German Fascists  are  the
first  ones  I'm aware of who seriously proposed it, as part of
an obsolete and foolish racial scheme."
     "I've read about them," I said.
     "It's nice to talk to someone who knows a little  history.
Then  you'll know that by the time it became possible to tinker
with genes, a lot more objections had been raised. Many of them
were valid. Some still are."
     "Is that  something  you'd  like  to  see?"  I  asked.  "A
superman?"
     "It's  the  word  that  throws  you off. I don't know if a
'superman' is possible, or desirable. I think an altered  human
is  an  idea  worth  looking into. When you consider that these
carcasses we're walking around in were evolved to thrive in  an
environment we've been evicted from . . ."
     Maybe  he  said  more, but I missed it, because just about
then we had a head-on collision with another tram going in  the
opposite  direction. Obviously, we didn't really. Obviously, it
was just the reflection of the headlights of our own car as  we
approached  another  of  those ubiquitous null-fields. And even
more obviously, you weren't there to stand up and shout like  a
fool  and see your life pass before your eyes, and I'll bet you
would have, too. Or maybe I'm just slow to catch on.
     Smith didn't think so. He  was  very  apologetic  when  he
realized  what  had  happened,  and  took time to tell me about
another little surprise in store, which happened a minute later
when a nullfield vanished in front of us  and,  with  a  little
gust  of  wind,  we  entered vacuum and began to really pick up
speed. The tunnel walls blurred in the beam of our  headlights,
details snatched away before they could be perceived.
     He  had more to say on the subject of human engineering. I
didn't get it all because I was concentrating on not breathing,
still learning to wear a null-suit. But I got his main points.
     He thought that while Gretel's method was wrong, her  goal
was  worthwhile,  and  I  couldn't  see what was wrong with it,
either. Basically, we either  manufacture  our  environment  or
adapt to it. Both have hazards, but it did seem high time we at
least start discussing the second alternative.
     Take  weightlessness, for example. Most people who spent a
lot of time in free-fall had some body adaptations made, but it
was all surgical. Human legs are too strong; push too hard  and
you  can  fracture your skull. It's handy to have hands instead
of feet at the ends of your ankles.  Feet  are  as  useless  as
vermiform  appendices  in freefall. It's also useful to be able
to bend and twist more than the human body normally can.
     But the question before the court was this: should  humans
be  bred  to space travel? Should the useful characteristics be
put into the genes, so children are born with hands instead  of
feet?
     Maybe  so,  maybe  not.  We weren't talking radical change
here,  or  anything  that  couldn't  be  done  just  as  easily
surgically, without raising the troublesome issues of more than
one species of human being.
     But what about a human adapted to vacuum? I've no idea how
to go  about  it,  but it probably could be done. What would he
look like? Would he feel  superior  to  us?  Would  we  be  his
brother,  or  his cousin, or what? one thing was sure: it would
be a lot easier to do it genetically than with the knife. And I
feel certain the end result would not look very human.
     I chewed that one over quite a bit  in  the  coming  days,
examining  my  feelings.  I  found  that most of them came from
prejudice, as Smith had said. I'd been raised to think  it  was
wrong. But I found myself agreeing that it was at least time to
think it over again.
     As long as I didn't have to clean up after kewpies.
     #

     The  train  car  pulled into a siding at another abandoned
station where somebody had scrawled the  word  "Minamata"  over
whatever  had  been  there  before.  I had no idea how far we'd
come, or in what direction.
     "This is still part of the Delambre dump, more  or  less,"
Smith said, so at least I had a general idea. We started down a
long,  filthy  corridor,  Smith's  flashlight beam bobbing from
wall to wall as we walked. In a movie, rats  and  other  vermin
would  have been scuttling out of our way, but a rat would have
needed a null-suit to survive this place; mine  was  still  on,
and I was still thinking about breathing.
     "There's  really no reason why the stuff in here shouldn't
be spread out over the surface like the rest of  the  garbage,"
he went on. "I think it's mainly psychological reasons it's all
pumped  in  here.  This  is  a  nasty  place.  If it's toxic or
radioactive  or  biochemically  hazardous,  this  is  where  it
comes."
     We  reached  an  air  lock  of  the  kind  that used to be
standard when I was a child, and  he  motioned  me  inside.  He
slapped  a  button, then gestured toward the air fitting on the
side of my chest.
     "Turn that counter-clockwise," he said. "They only come on
automatically when there's a vacuum. There's  gas  where  we're
going, but you don't want to breathe it."
     The lock cycled and we stepped into Minamata.
     The  place  had  no  name  on the municipal charts of King
City, just Waste Repository #2. The Heinleiners  had  named  it
after  a  place in Japan that had suffered the first modern-day
big environmental disaster, when industries had pumped  mercury
compounds  into  a bay and produced a lot of twisted babies. So
sorry, mom. That's the breaks.
     Minamata Luna was really just a very large, buried storage
tank. By large, I mean you could have parked four starships the
size of the Heinlein without scraping the fenders. Texas  is  a
lot  bigger,  but  it doesn't feel like being a bug in a bottle
because you can't see the  walls.  Here  you  could,  and  they
curved upward and vanished into a noxious mist. The far end was
invisible.
     Maybe  there  was some artificial light in there. I didn't
see any, but they were hardly necessary. The  bottom  third  of
the  horizontal cylinder was full of liquid, and it glowed. Red
here, green there . . . sometimes a ghastly blue. The makers of
horror films would have killed to get that blue.
     We had entered at what seemed the axis  of  the  cylinder,
which  was  rounded  off  at  this end, like a pressure tank. A
ledge, three meters wide and with a railing, curved  away  from
us  in  each direction, but to the right was blocked off with a
warning sign. Looking past  it,  I  could  see  the  ledge  had
crumbled  away  in several places. When I looked back Smith was
already moving away from me toward the left. I hurried to catch
up with him.
     I never did quite catch him. Every time I got close my eye
was drawn by the luminescent sea off to my  right,  and  a  few
hundred meters down.
     The thing about that sea . . . it moved.
     At  first  I  only saw the swirls of glowing color like an
oil film on water. I'd always thought colorful things were just
naturally pretty things, but Minamata taught me differently. At
first I couldn't  explain  my  queasy  reaction.  None  of  the
colors, by themselves, seemed all that hideous (except for that
blue).  Surely  that  same swirl of color, on a shirt or dress,
would be a gorgeous thing. Wouldn't it? I couldn't see why not.
I began walking more slowly, trailing my hand along the top  of
the rail, trying to figure why it all disturbed me so.
     The  side of the cylinder went straight down from the edge
of the ledge we walked on, then gradually curved  inward  until
it  met  the  fluorescent sea. Waves were rolling sluggishly to
crash against the metal sides of the tank.
     Waves, Hildy? What could be causing  waves  in  this  foul
soup?
     Maybe  some  agitating  mechanism,  I  thought,  though  I
couldn't see any use for one. Then I saw a part of the sea hump
itself up, ten or twenty meters high--it was hard to judge  the
scale  from  my vantage point. Then I saw strange shapes on the
borderline between sea and shore, things that moved  among  the
mineral  efflorescences  that grew like arthritic fingers along
that metal beach. Then I saw something that, I thought,  raised
its  head  on  a  spavined neck and looked at me, reached out a
hungry hand . . .
     Of course, it was a long way off. I could have been wrong.
     Smith took my arm without a word and  urged  me  along.  I
didn't look at the Minamata Sea again.
     #
     We  came  to a series of circular mirrors standing against
the vertical wall to our left. Each had a  number  over  it.  I
realized  that  tunnels  had been bored into the walls here and
each had been sealed off with a null-field barrier.
     Smith stopped  before  the  eighth,  pointed  at  it,  and
stepped in. I followed him, and found myself in a short tunnel,
maybe  twenty  meters  long, five meters high. Halfway down the
tunnel were metal bars. Beyond that point  a  level  floor  had
been  built  to  support  a  cot,  chair, desk, and toilet, all
looking as if they'd been ordered from  some  cheap  mail-order
house.  On our side of the bars was a portable air plant, which
seemed to be doing its job,  as  my  suit  had  vanished  as  I
stepped through the field. Spare oxygen cylinders and crates of
food were stacked against the wall.
     Sitting on the cot and watching a slash-boxing show on the
television, was Andrew MacDonald. He glanced up from the screen
as we entered, but he did not rise.
     Possibly  this  was  a  new point of etiquette. Should the
dead rise for the living? Be sure to ask at your next seance.
     "Hello, Andrew," Smith said. "I've brought someone to  see
you."
     "Yes?"  Andrew  said,  with  no  great  interest. His eyes
turned to me, lingered for a moment.  There  was  no  spark  of
recognition.   Worse   than   that,  there  was  none  of  that
penetrating quality I'd seen on the day he . . . hell, how else
can I say it? On the day he died. For a moment  I  though  this
was  just  some guy who looked a lot like Andrew. I guess I was
half right.
     "Sorry," he said, and shrugged. "Don't know her."
     "I'm not surprised," Smith said. He looked at  me.  I  had
the  feeling  I  was  supposed  to  say  something  perceptive,
intelligent. Maybe I was supposed to have figured it all out.
     "What the fuck's going on here?" I said, which was  a  lot
better  than  "duuuuh,"  which  was  my  first reaction, though
neither really qualifies as perceptive.
     "Ask him," Andrew said. "He thinks I'm dangerous."
     I'd started toward the bars but Smith put his hand  on  my
arm and shook his head.
     "See what I mean?" the prisoner said.
     "He  is  dangerous,"  Smith  told  me. "When he first came
here, he nearly killed a man. Would have, but we got to him  in
time. Want to tell us about that, Andrew?"
     He shrugged. "He stepped on my foot. It wasn't my fault."
     "I've  had enough of this," I said. "What the hell are you
people doing in here? I saw this man die, or his twin brother."
     Smith was about to say something, but I'd  finally  gotten
Andrew  interested. He stood and came to the bars, held on with
one hand while the other played idly with his genitals. You see
that sometimes, in old alkies  or  voluntary  skitzys  down  in
Bedrock.  It's  a free planet, right? Nobody can stop them, but
people hurry by, like you don't stop and stare  if  someone  is
vomiting,  or  picking  his  nose. I'd never seen an apparently
healthy man masturbating with such utter lack of modesty.  What
had they done to him?
     "How  did  I do?" he asked me, tugging and squeezing. "All
they'll tell me is I died in the ring. You were there? Were you
close up? Who was it that got me? Damn, the least they could do
is give me a tape."
     "Are you really Andrew MacDonald?"
     "That's my name, ask me again and I'll tell you the same."
     "It's him," Smith said, quietly. "That's what I've finally
decided, after thinking it over a lot."
     "That's not what you said last time," the man  said.  "You
said  I was only part of old Andy. The mean part. I don't think
I'm mean." He lost interest in his penis and stretched  a  hand
through  the bars, gesturing. "Toss me a can of that beef stew,
boss man. I've had my eye on that for days."
     "You've got plenty of food in there."
     "Yeah, but I want stew."
     Smith got a plastic can and lobbed it toward the cell; the
man snagged it and tore off the top. He took a big handful  and
crammed  it into his mouth, chewing noisily. There was a stove,
a table, and utensils plainly  in  sight  behind  him,  but  he
didn't seem to care.
     "I didn't see you fight," I said, at last.
     "Shit.  You  know, I'd like you if you weren't so fat. You
wanna fuck?" A gravy-covered hand went to his groin once again.
"Let's get brown, honey."
     I'm going to ignore  the  rest  of  his  antics.  I  still
remember them vividly, and still find them disturbing. I'd once
wanted  to  make  love  to  this  man. I'd once found him quite
attractive.
     "I was there when they carried you back from the ring,"  I
said.
     "The good old squared circle. The sweet science. All there
is, really, all there is. What's your name, fatty?"
     "Hildy.   You   were  mortally  injured  and  you  refused
treatment."
     "What a jerk I must have been. Live to fight another  day,
huh?"
     "I'd always thought so. And I thought what you were doing,
risking  your  life,  was stupid. I thought it was unnecessary,
too, but you told me your reasons, and I respect them."
     "A jerk," he repeated.
     "I guess, when it came time for you to  live  up  to  your
bargain, I thought you were stupid, too. But I was impressed. I
was  moved.  I  can't  say  I  thought you were doing the right
thing, but your determination was awesome."
     "You're a jerk, too."
     "I know."
     He continued shoving stew into his  face,  looking  at  me
with no real spark of human feeling I could detect. I turned to
Smith.
     "It's  time  you told me what's going on here. What's been
done to this man? If this  is  an  example  of  what  you  were
talking about on the way . . ."
     "It is."
     "Then  I  don't want anything to do with it. In fact, damn
it, I know I promised not to talk about you  and  your  people,
but--"
     "Hang on a minute, Hildy," Smith said. "This is an example
of human experimentation, but we didn't do it."
     "The CC," I said, after a long pause. Who else?
     "There's  something  seriously wrong with the CC, Hildy. I
don't know what it is, but I know the results. This man is one.
He's a cloned body, grown from Andrew  MacDonald's  corpse,  or
from  a  tissue  sample. When he's in a mood to talk, he's said
things we've checked against  his  records,  and  it  seems  he
really  does  have  MacDonald's  memories.  Up  to  a point. He
remembers things up to  about  three  or  four  years  ago.  We
haven't  been able to test him thoroughly, but what tests we've
been able to run bear out what we've seen from other  specimens
like him. He thinks he is MacDonald."
     "Damn right I am," the prisoner chimed in.
     "For  all  practical  purposes, he's right. But he doesn't
remember the Kansas  Collapse.  He  doesn't  remember  Silvio's
assassination.  I  was certain he wouldn't remember you, and he
didn't. What's happened is that his memories were  recorded  in
some way, and played back into this clone body."
     I thought it over. Smith gave me time to.
     "It  doesn't  work," I said, finally. "There's no way this
thing could have turned into the man I met  in  only  three  or
four years. This guy is like a big, spoiled child."
     "Big is right, babe," the man said, with the gesture you'd
expect.
     "I  didn't  say  the  copy  was perfect," Smith said. "The
memories seem to be extremely  good.  But  some  things  didn't
record.  He  has  no social inhibitions whatsoever. No sense of
guilt  or  shame.  He  really  did  try  to  kill  a  man   who
accidentally  stepped on his foot, and he never saw what was so
wrong about it. He's incredibly  dangerous,  because  he's  the
best  fighter in Luna; that's why we have him here, in the best
prison we can devise. We, who don't even believe in prisons."
     I could see it would be a tough one to get out of. If  you
got  past  the  null-field,  there  were  the  toxic  gases  of
Minamata. Beyond that, vacuum.
     It seemed that "MacDonald" was the most recent of  a  long
line  of  abandoned experiments. Smith wouldn't tell me how the
Heinleiners had come to have him, except to say  that,  in  his
case, he'd most likely been sent.
     "Early  on  in  this  program,  we had a pipeline into the
secret lab where this work was going  on.  The  first  attempts
were  pathetic.  We  had people who just sat there and drooled,
others who tore at themselves with their teeth. But the CC  got
better  with  practice. Some could pass as normal human beings.
Some of them live with us. They're limited, but  what  can  you
do? I think they're human.
     "But  lately,  we've  been getting surprise packages, like
Andrew here. We lock them up, interrogate them.  Some  of  them
are  harmless.  Others . . . I don't think we can ever let them
free."
     "I don't understand. I mean,  I  see  this  one  could  be
dangerous, but--"
     "The CC wants in here."
     "Into Minamata?"
     "No,  this  is  his  place.  You saw the water down there.
That's his work. He wants into the Heinleiner enclave. He wants
the null-field. He wants to know if  I'm  successful  with  the
stardrive.  He  wants  to know other things. He found out about
our access to his forbidden experiments, and we started getting
people like Andrew. Walking time bombs, most of them.  After  a
few  tragic  incidents,  we  had  to  institute  some  security
precautions. Now we're careful about the dead people we let  in
here."
     It  was  not the first time an action by the CC had turned
my world upside-down. You live in a time and a  place  and  you
think  you  know  what's  going on, but you don't. Maybe no one
ever did.
     Smith had unloaded too many things on me too quickly.  I'd
had  some  practice  at that, with the CC playing games with my
head, but I wonder if anyone ever gets really good at it.
     "So he's working on immortality?" I asked.
     "Of a sort. The oldest people around now are pushing three
hundred. Most people think there's a  limit  on  how  long  the
human brain can be patched up in one way or another. But if you
could make a perfect record of everything a human being is, and
dump it into another brain . . ."
     "Yeah  .  . . but Andrew is dead. This thing . . . even if
it was a better copy, it still wouldn't be Andrew. Would it?"
     "Hey, Hildy," Andrew said. When I turned to face him I got
a big glob of cold, canned beef stew right in the kisser.
     He never looked more like an ape as he capered around  his
cell,  hugging  himself,  bent over with laughter. It showed no
signs of stopping. And the funny thing was, after a brief flash
of homicidal  intent,  I  found  it  impossible  to  hate  him.
Whatever the CC had left out of this man, he was not evil, as I
had  first  thought.  He was childish and completely impulsive.
Some sort of governor had not been copied right; his conscience
had been smudged in  transmission,  there  was  static  in  his
self-control. Think of it, do it. A simple philosophy.
     "Come on next door," Smith said, after giving me some help
getting  the  worst mess off me. "You can clean up there, and I
have something to show you."
     So we went through the null-field again--Andrew was  still
laughing--walked  eight  or  nine steps further to cell #9, and
stepped in.
     And who should I see there but Aladdin, he  of  the  magic
lungs,  standing on this side of a barred cell identical to the
one we'd just left. Only this one was  not  occupied,  and  the
door stood open.
     "Who's  this  one for?" I asked. "And what's Aladdin doing
here?" Some days I'm quick, but this didn't seem to be  one  of
them.
     "There's  no  assigned  occupant  yet, Hildy," Smith said,
displaying something that had once been a  flashlight  but  had
now folded out into what just had to be a Heinleiner weapon--it
had that gimcrack look. "We're going to ask you some questions.
Not many, but the answers may take a while, so get comfortable.
Aladdin's  here  to remove your null-suit generator if we don't
like the answers."
     There was a long, awkward silence. Being held at  gunpoint
is  not something any of us had much experience of, from either
end of the gun. It's a social  situation  you  don't  run  into
often. Try it at your next party, see how the guests handle it.
     To  their  credit,  I  don't think they liked it much more
than me.
     "What do you want to know?"
     "Start with all your dealings with  the  Central  Computer
over the last three years."
     So I told them everything.
     #

     Gretel,  that  sweet  child,  would have invited me in the
first weekend, as it turned out. It was Smith and  his  friends
who  held up the approval. They were checking me out, and their
resources for doing so were formidable.  I'd  been  watched  in
Texas. My background had been researched. As I went along there
were  a  few times when I missed this or that detail, and I was
always corrected. To lie would have  been  futile  .  .  .  and
besides, I didn't want to lie. If anyone had the answers to the
questions  I'd  been  asking myself about the CC, it was surely
these people. I wanted to help them  by  telling  everything  I
knew.
     I don't want to make this sound more dire than it actually
was. Fairly  early we all relaxed. The flashlight was re-folded
and put away. If they'd been really suspicious of me  I'd  have
been  brought here on my first visit, but after the things they
had told me it was only prudent for them to interrogate  me  in
the way they did.
     The  thing  that  had upset them was my suicide attempt on
the surface. It had left behind physical evidence, in the  form
of  a  ruptured  faceplate,  and set them to wondering if I had
really died up there.
     And as I continued talking about  it  a  disturbing  thing
occurred to me: what if I had?
     How  could  I ever know, really? If the CC could record my
memories and play them back into a cloned body,  would  I  feel
any  different  than  I did then? I couldn't think of a test to
check it, not one I could do myself. I found myself hoping they
had one. No such luck.
     "I'm not worried about that, Hildy," Smith  said,  when  I
brought  it  up. In retrospect, maybe that wasn't a smart thing
to do, pointing out that they couldn't be sure of  me,  either,
but  it  didn't  matter, since they'd already thought of it and
made up their minds. "If the CC  has  gotten  that  good,  then
we're licked already."
     "Besides,"  Aladdin  put  in,  "if  he's  that  good, what
difference would it make?"
     "It  could  be  important  if  he'd  left  a  posthypnotic
suggestion,"  Smith  said.  "A  perfect  copy  of Hildy, with a
buried injunction to spy on us and spill her guts when she went
back to King City."
     "I hadn't thought of that," Aladdin said, looking as if he
wished the flashlight hadn't been put away so hastily.
     "As I said, if he's that good we might as well  give  up."
He  stood,  and  stretched.  "No, my friends. At some point you
have to stop the tests. At some point you just have to go  with
your  feelings. I'm very sorry to have done this to you, Hildy,
it's against all I believe in. Your  personal  life  should  be
your  own.  But  we're  engaged in a quiet war here. No battles
have been fought, but the enemy is constantly feeling  us  out.
The  best  we  can do is be like a turtle, pull into a shell he
can't penetrate. I'm sorry."
     "It's okay. I wanted to talk about it, anyway."
     He held out his hand, and I took it,  and  for  the  first
time  in many, many years, I felt like I belonged to something.
I wanted  to  shout  "Death  to  the  CC!"  Unfortunately,  the
Heinleiners were short on slogans, membership badges, that sort
of thing. I sort of doubted I'd be offered a uniform.
     Hell,  they  didn't  even  have  a secret handshake. But I
accepted the ordinary one I was offered gratefully. I was in.

        =*= =*= =*= =*=

        CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE








     What did you do during the Big Glitch?
     It's an interesting question from several angles.  If  I'd
asked  what  you  were  doing  when  you  heard Silvio had been
assassinated, I'd get back a variety of answers, but  a  minute
after  you  heard  ninety-nine percent of you were glued to the
newspad (twenty-seven percent to the Nipple). It's the same for
other large, important events, the kind that shape  our  lives.
But  each  of you will have a different story about the Glitch.
The story will start like this:
     Something major in your life  suffered  a  malfunction  of
some   kind.   Depending   on  what  it  was,  you  called  the
repair-person or the police or simply started screaming  bloody
murder.  The next thing you did (99.99 percent of you, anyway),
was turn on your newspad to see what the  hell  was  happening.
You turned it on, and you got . . . nothing.
     Our    age    is   not   simply   information-rich.   It's
information-saturated.  We  expect  that  information   to   be
delivered  as  regularly  as the oxygen we breathe, and tend to
forget the delivery  is  as  much  at  the  mercy  of  fallible
machines  as  is  the  air.  We  view  it as only slightly less
important than air. Two seconds of  down-time  on  one  of  the
major  pads  will generate hundreds of thousands of complaints.
Irate  calls,  furious   threats   to   cancel   subscriptions.
Frightened  calls.  Panicky  calls.  To turn on the pad and get
nothing but white noise and fuzz  is  Luna's  equivalent  of  a
planet-wide   earthquake.   We   expect  our  info-nets  to  be
comprehensive, ubiquitous, and global, and we expect  it  right
now.
     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,  twentyfive  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  connect  them,
pressurized them, and moved in  like  poor  relations.  Instant
slum.
     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 running the
sewers in the three biggest enclaves,  and  selling  water  and
fertilizer  to  farmers.  You paid through the nose to hook up,
and it was worth it, because who wants to handle  every  detail