_September 21, 1977_
_Dollars Dome--4_ P.M. (_C.S.T._)
He watched her face through the clear plastic of the pressure suit
helmet, and tried to identify the “waiting” look. She was too absorbed
to see him staring, but she wasn’t just thinking, or daydreaming.
Listening? That was how it looked, but not _quite_....
He touched helmets. “What do you hear that I don’t?” he asked.
Lee started slightly, like someone snapped out of daydream. “Hear?”
she asked. _Well, it was worth a try_, he thought. Maybe just plain
fantasizing, after all?
“_See_ is more like it,” she said. “I was looking at the design they
make. I guess I got half-hypnotized, following the lines.”
He looked. When he first looked, before he began watching her instead,
he had noticed only a small marble interweaving of ganglion-like ropes
of cells. Now the randomness of the arrangement was less apparent;
it _could_ hypnotize if you tried to follow the branchings-off and
connections between rope-colonies. There was a sense of _almost_-order--
He shook his head and looked away.
“Damn! You know I never really _looked_ at them before. They _do_ get
you....”
“Oh, they’re not all like that,” she said quickly. “Just the ones out
here. Every time you change the soil or air, _they_ change. One of the
tanks in Earth-normal, you’d think it was full of just _dirt_--they’re
just scattered through like regular Earth soil microorganisms. But
this Moon-type mutation links up this way, and Thad says--” That
was at least the twelfth time on the trip he had heard _Thad says_.
“--says the things that look kind of like nerves _are_ actually linked
up that way--I don’t mean, they’re really like _nerves_, but each
rope is a separate colony, and he thinks they might have some kind of
communication even, where two ropes connect. Either that or some kind
of symbiosis or syzygy or--”
“Thad says all _that_?” Phil broke in, laughing at the earnest-student
manner of her recitation.
“And _more_,” she retorted. “But now _you’ll_ never know--We better get
back, I guess. I’m supposed to make like respectable for tonight.” She
started laughing, and took a step away so helmet contact was broken.
He saw the laughter continue, but the sound broke off in the middle.
Inside the pressurized half-track, she opened the face-plate, still
chuckling. “It gets tougher to get dressed every day,” she said. “I
mean, work clothes are fine, but when I have to get _dressed_....”
“Well, take plenty of time,” he said, soberly. “I don’t know what the
honorable investigators would make of it if they knew, but it’s a sure
bet they’d smell headlines in it.”
“I’ll try to worry about it,” she said. “Phil, you know, it’s the
_damnedest_ thing--I suppose I’m in a jam. Or something. I mean, when I
think about it, it’s practically classic--the unwed mother bit, and my
man is sick-sick-sick--and probably half stoned besides--and here I am
taken in by the men in the Moon--maybe that’s what makes it seem like
lovely nonsense instead of Something Awful?”
“You’ve been pretty happy the last couple of weeks, kid?”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Yes, I have, Phil. And I mean what I was
saying--It seems like I _ought_ to be worried and troubled, but--I’m
_not_.” She looked away, and back again.
“Phil, I’m not even worried about Johnny. I don’t know what’s gotten
into me. I don’t mean I don’t _care_. _I do._ Just--it doesn’t _feel_
like anything’s wrong. We’re just apart for a while, that’s all.
I don’t mean that’s what I _think_, Phil, just what I--Oh, _you_
understand! You know, Thad says....”
“Does he?” Phil said meaningfully.
“Phil! You don’t think I--? Oh _no_!”
And he actually believed her. She seemed not _too_ startled, but just
enough--not _too_ scornful, just the right amount. And her laughter was
free.
“Okay,” he said. “I retract. But quit saying it or I’m just as likely
to start sulking.” He managed what he thought was a creditable smile.
_Dollars Dome--7_ P.M. (_C.S.T._)
The dining room on arrival days always wore a bloom of festivity. The
only decorative extras available were the glowing white onion-lilies
provided, one for each table, by the farm section each week
(carefully cultivated in defiant evasion of the ubiquitous regulating
in-quintuplicate official schedules of production and supplies). But
the bright plastic table tops were somehow gayer, the lighting more
luminous, even the clatter of dishes and cutlery in some way more
cheerfully hungry, at Wednesday dinners.
The big difference of course was not in the place but the people: and
not just that they tended to dress a bit more than usual, laugh a bit
oftener, talk a bit freer, but that they were _there_, all together.
“Days” in the Dome were marked off by Mexcity’s Central Time; but
without external dark-and-light cycles to pattern the twenty-four
hours, the Dome worked round the clock, each person fitting his own
preferred schedule into the complex of work-to-be-done. Ordinarily,
only one section of the dining room was in use; and it was in use at
all hours, as groups came and went to and from their elected shifts.
But on Wednesdays, any one not absolutely required at his job was
fairly sure to attend seven P.M. dinner, after the shuttles came in.
This Wednesday night, in particular, the Dome was out in full force--in
party mood, party dress, party manners--to welcome Congressman Ramon
McLafferty and his picked crew of super-snoopers.
Dr. Kutler was seated with four of the congressional investigators
and three higher-echelon Dome scientists at a round table so close
to the speakers’ table that he was literally back-to-back with Lisa
Trovi. He confined his own part in the dinner talk to polite replies
and concentrated on his uneasy appraisal of the behavior of the Dome
people at large, and an amused, but equally uneasy, eavesdropping on
the exchanges between Lee and the visiting congressman.
Lisa’s attitude seemed to be in keeping with the peculiar response of
the Dome as a whole to the invasion: a sort of high faith that warm
welcome and willing liking were enough to absorb anything from outright
ill will to malicious fancy to simple self-interest.
That McLafferty fell short of sharing this feeling was evident. _He
knew_ the dinner, the gaiety, the enthusiasm that greeted him, were
put-up jobs; he accepted them gracefully as his due. And he maintained
this knowledge, based on experience, at least half the way through the
meal. By that time he was so thoroughly conscious of the deep sincerity
of Lee Trovi’s empathetic interest, that the stanchions of isolation
supporting his cynicism were sorely shaken. And when he rose to say the
expected few words after dinner, he was much too practiced an orator
to misinterpret the swell of applause that surrounded him for either
the patter of polite boredom, or the too-regular thumping of planned
demonstration.
Chris used the moment to lean across and say a single word in Lisa’s
ear. From where Phil sat, turned around, right behind her, the word
looked like, “Thanks.”
She turned to Chris, eyebrows raised, baffled.
He nodded toward McLafferty.