The Lotus Caves Read Free Page A

faster until it was a gleaming, vanishing speck in the sky. That was when Mrs. Miller started crying.
    She had stopped by the time they took the crawler back to the Bubble, but the silence was worse than on the way out. Marty left them at the main airlock to make his way home. Mr. Miller said: “Thanks for coming along, Marty.”
    Mrs. Miller said: “You’ll come and see us still?” Her hands held his lightly. “We wouldn’t like to lose touch with you, Marty.”
    As if one could lose touch with anyone inside the confines of the Bubble. He said: “I won’t lose touch, Mrs. Miller.”

2
    The Great Balloon Crime
    M ARTY FOUND IT EVEN WORSE than he had expected. He went around to the Millers for Paul’s first visiphone call, and was already restless from three days of mooching about, wondering what to do and whom to talk to. The screen’s circle showed Paul’s head and shoulders and, fuzzily, the room behind. He realized he had had some fantastic notion that there would be a landscape—trees and stuff—but of course Paul was in the rehabilitation center, under artificial gravity. The room was very little different from rooms here.
    Conversation was strained and awkward. Halfway through contact was lost in a burst of static which drowned sound and vision for half a minute or more. Mr. Miller was swearing under his breath: you got no extra time for loss of picture. When it had cleared up, Paul said to him: “I set up my chess set for that game we were playing. I’ll mail you my next move.”
    Mail came in with the supply rockets, photographically reduced onto transparencies which you read through a magnifier. The schedule was roughly three in two months. It was going to take a long time to finish the game.
    Marty said: “Fine. You’re going to lose that ­castle, whatever you do.”
    The seconds ticked on. In a way the five minutes of the call dragged, and in a way it seemed to be over almost as soon as it began. The circle flashed and died in the middle of a sentence from Paul. Mr. Miller said heavily: “That’s that,” and switched off. It would be a month before their next contact. It was not just a question of cost: the channels were needed for scientific and administrative communications and private calls were strictly rationed.
    By the next call, or at least by the one after that, Marty thought, Paul would be out of the rehabilitation center, living a normal life. An Earth life. He said: “Thanks for letting me sit in, Mr. Miller. Hope I didn’t hog things too much.”
    Mrs. Miller said: “Can’t you stay awhile, Marty?”
    â€œAfraid not. I’ve got a whole load of homework needs doing.”
    That was true, but he did not head back home right away. He felt restless and frustrated. He thought a workout in the gym might help, and dialed a cabin to the Recreation Center. It was near the middle of the Bubble, one of the tallest buildings, with six floors between the gym in the lower basement and the Starlight Room on the roof, which was the one place people could go out to dine. You cooked your own food on the infra and prepared your own wine from instant, but at least the setting was different. A little different, anyway.
    He found he had hit a bad time. The exercising machines were all full with people waiting, and the pool was crowded also. There was a little more room on the bars, but he found he had soured on the idea of exercise. It seemed better to go upstairs and take in part of the current movie at the ground-floor theater. He had seen it already, and not thought much of it, but he had an idea he would feel less surrounded. He went up the stairs in float jumps, touching down on every fourth or fifth step.
    He stuck the film for five minutes before boredom drove him out. He ought, he knew, to take a cabin home and start demolishing that homework. Instead he went up two more floors to the library