smiled as he pulled his hand gently away and wiped the saliva off on Bill's tunic. A casual flick of his finger restored the bodyguard to position, and he moved on to the gunner, pinned on the remaining medal, and stepped back.
“Cut!” Director Ratt shouted. “Print that, it's a natural with that dumb hick going through the slobbering act.” As Bill struggled back to his feet he saw that the Emperor had not returned to the throne but was instead standing in the midst of the milling crowd of actors. The bodyguard had vanished. Bill blinked, bewildered, as a man whipped the Emperor's crown from his head, popped it into a box, and hurried away with it.
“The brake is jammed,” the gunner said, still saluting with a vibrating arm.
“Pull the damn thing down for me. It never works right above shoulder level.” “But-the Emperor-” Bill said, tugging at the locked arm until the brakes squealed and released.
“An actor-what else? Do you think they have the real Emperor giving out medals to other-ranks? Field grade and higher, I bet. But they put on a bit of an act with him so some poor rube, like you, can get carried away. You were great.” “Here you are,” a man said, handing them both stamped metal copies of the medals they were wearing and whipping off the originals.
“Places!” the director's amplified voice boomed. “We got just ten minutes to run through the Empress and the baby kissing with the Aldebranian septuplets for the Fertility Hour. Get those plastic babies out here, and get those damn spectators off the set.” The heroes were pushed into the corridor and the door slammed and locked behind them.
Chapter 2
“I'm tired,” the gunner said, “and besides, my burns hurt.” He had had a short circuit during action in the Enlisted Men's Olde Knocking Shoppe and had set the bed on fire.
“Aw, come on,” Bill insisted. “We have three-day passes before our ship leaves, and we are on Helior, the Imperial Planet! What riches there are to see here, the Hanging Gardens, the Rainbow Fountains, the Jeweled Palaces.
You can't miss them.” “Just watch me. As soon as I catch up on some sleep it's back to the Olde Knocking Shoppe for me. If you're so hot on someone holding your hand while you go sightseeing, take the sergeant.” “He's still drunk.” The infantry sergeant was a solitary drinker who did not believe in cutting comers. Neither did he believe in dilution or in wasting money on fancy packaging. He had used all of his money to bribe a medical orderly and had obtained two carboys of 99 per cent pure grain alcohol, a drum of glucose and saline solution, a hypodermic needle, and a length of rubber tubing.
The ethyl-glucose-saline mixture in carboys had been slung from a rafter over his bunk with the tubing leading to the needle plunged into his arm and taped into place as an intravenous drip. Now he was unmoving, well fed, and completely blind-drunk all the time, and if the metered flow were undisturbed he should stay drunk for two and a half years.
Bill put a finishing gloss on his boots and locked the brush into his locker with the rest of his gear. He might be late getting back. it was easy to get lost here on Helior when you didn't have a Guide. It had taken them almost an entire day to find their way from the studio to their quarters even with the sergeant, a man who knew all about maps, leading the way. As long as they stayed near their own area there was no problem, but Bill had had his fill of the homely pleasures provided for the fighting men. He wanted to see Helior, the real Hehor, the first city of the galaxy. If no one would go with him, he would do it alone.
It was very hard, in spite. of the floor plan, to tell just exactly how far away anything was on Helior, since the diagrams were all diagrammatic and had no scale. But the trip he was planning seemed to be a long one, since one of the key bits of transportation, an evacuated tunnellinear magnetic car, went across at least eighty-four submaps. His destination might very well be on the other side of the planetl A city as large as a planet] The concept was almost too big to grasps In fact, when he thought about it, the concept was too big to grasp.
The sandwiches he had bought from the dispenser in the barracks ran out before he was halfway to his destination, and his stomach, greedily getting adjusted to solid food again, rumbled complaints until he left the slideway in Area 9266-L, Level something or other, or wherever the hell he was, and looked for a canteen. He was obviously in a Typing Area, because the crowds were composed almost completely of women with rounded shoulders and great, long fingers. The only canteen he could find was jammed with them, and he sat in the middle of the high-pitched, yattering crowd and forced himself to eat a meal composed of the only available food: dated- fruitbreadcheese-and-anchovy-paste sandwiches and mashed potatoes with raisin and onion sauce, washed down by herb tea served lukewarm in cups the size of his thumb. It wouldn't have been so bad if the dispenser hadn't automatically covered everything with butterscotch sauce. None of the girls seemed to notice him, since they were all under light hypnosis during the working day in order to cut down their error percentages. He worked his way through the food feeling very much like a ghost as they tittered and yammered over and around him, their fingers, if they weren't eating, compulsively typing their words onto the edge of the table while they talked. He finally escaped, but the meal had had a depressing effect, and this was probably where he made the mistake and boarded the wrong car.
Since the same level and block numbers were repeated in every area, it was possible to get into the wrong area and spend a good deal of time getting good and lost before the mistake was finally realized. Bill did this, and after the usual astronomical number of changes and varieties of transportation he boarded the elevator that terminated, he thought, in the galaxy-famed Palace Gardens.
All of the other passengers got off on lower levels, and the robelevator picked up speed as it hurtled up to the topmost level. He rose into the air as it braked to a stop, and his ears popped with the pressure change, and when the doors opened he stepped out into a snow-filled wind. He gaped about with unbelief and behind him the doors snicked shut and the elevator vanished.
The doors had opened directly onto the metal plain that made up the topmost layer of the city, now obscured by the swirling clouds of snow. Bill groped for the button to recall the elevator, when a vagrant swirl of wind whipped the snow away and the warm sun beat down on him from the cloudless sky. This was impossible.
“This is impossible,” Bill said with forthright indignation.
“Nothing is impossible if I will it,” a scratchy voice spoke from behind Bill's shoulder. “For I am the Spirit of Life.” Bill skittered sideways like a homeostatic robhorse, rolling his eyes at the small, white-whiskered man with a twitching nose and red-rimmed eyes who had appeared soundlessly behind him.
“You got a leak in your think-tank,” Bill snapped, angry at himself for being so goosy.
“You'd be nuts, too, on this job,” the little man sobbed, and knuckled a pendant drop from his nose. “Half- froze, halfcooked and half-wiped out most of the time on oxy. The Spirit of Life,” he quavered, “mine is the power…” “Now that you mention it,” Bill's words were muffled by a sudden flurry of snow, “I am feeling a bit high myself. Wheeee…!!” The wind veered and swept the occluding clouds of snow away, and Bill gaped at the suddenly revealed view.
Slushy snow and pools of water spotted the surface as far as he could see.
The golden coating had been worn away, and the metal was gray and pitted beneath, streaked with ruddy rivulets of rust. Rows of great pipes, each thicker than a man is tall, snaked toward him from over the horizon and ended in funnel like mouths. The funnels were obscured by whirling clouds of vapor and snow that shot high into the air with a hushed roar, though one of the vapor columns collapsed and the cloud dispersed while Bill watched.
“Number eighteen blown!” the old man shouted into a microphone, grabbed a clipboard from the wall, and kicked his way through the slush toward a rusty and dilapidated walkway that groaned and rattled along parallel with the pipes.
Bill followed, shouting at the man, who now completely ignored him. As the walkway, clanking and swaying, carried them along, Bill began to wonder just where the pipes led, and after a minute, when his head cleared a bit, curiosity got the better of him and he strained ahead to see what the mysterious bumps were on the horizon. They slowly resolved themselves into a row of giant spaceships, each one connected to one of the thick pipes. With unexpected agility the old man sprang from the walkway and bounded toward the ship at station eighteen, where the tiny figures of workers, high up, were disconnecting the seals that joined the ship to the pipe. The old man copied numbers from a meter attached to the pipe, while Bill watched a crane swing over with the end of a large,
