The probeship hangar was a monolithic slum. That description, even in retrospect, seems very nearly perfect. The building was longer and wider than the Asadi clearing, but, crisscrossed with swaths of luminous paint, it had a tarry-looking exterior that took it altogether out of the natural order of things. Doors as large as rain-forest thunderheads rumbled aside on metal tracks on the north and south flanks of the building, while smaller doors – for people – punctuated the hangar’s length like the spaces between a comb’s teeth, so numerous were they. Across the lower right-hand corner of the hangar’s southern wall swept the beginnings of an embarrassingly erotic mural, laser etched at midnight by a bored Komm-service guard who was summarily court-martialed and reassigned to another colony planet. Satyr. Maiden. Stag. Two years before, a perfunctory attempt to fill and smooth the laser scars had been abandoned before the guard’s artwork succumbed utterly, and now – even though nobody remembered his name – the man was a legend in Frasierville’s Komm-service barracks as well as in most of the major pleasure houses on Night Drag Boulevard.
Inside, volumes of space. Automatically self-polarizing skylights permitted the passage of light while aiding in the maintenance of a consistent internal temperature (approximately 30°C, fairly warm). We weren’t going to have air conditioning, Moses had said, but at least we probably wouldn’t fall victim to heat stroke, either. Three catwalks made of metal dock plates and extensible steel platforms went around the hangar’s interior at different but adjustable heights. In addition, one end of the facility boasted a recreation area for the higher-ranking probeship engineers (the ones who had never made it to BoskVeld, and never would), with carpeted pathways running among tubs of artificial botanicals and simulated teakwood flower boxes. A kidney-shaped swimming pool nestled at an off-center confluence of the meandering carpets – but a structural defect kept the pool from holding water and Moses had never given anyone authorization to repair it.
The probeship hangar embarrassed Moses. Everything about it recalled for him the folly of BoskVeld’s rising expectations after Glaktik Komm’s decision to colonize. Only the fact that the hangar’s floor and mezzanines provided Chaney Field with a good deal of needed storage space had prevented Moses from having the building razed. The gantry, I sometimes thought, he allowed to stand as a symbol of popular gullibility – but the hangar, well, it simply gave him a headache.
Using a stretcher, the paramedic and I carried the Asadi into the recreation area, where we lowered our burden to the green all-purpose carpeting near the swimming pool.
The young woman, looking about critically, said, ‘This place is sort of a cross between a tropical paradise and a veldt-rover factory, isn’t it?’
Moses thanked her for her help and told her she could return to the van, which, after canting the Asadi to the floor and collapsing the stretcher under her arm, she did with almost over-obedient cheerfulness.
‘I’d suggest you put him in the swimming pool and unroll one of those prefab soft-wall fences with the plug-in gates,’ Moses said. ‘That way, you’ll have him confined and under control. If you want to, you can extend a ramp from the lowest catwalk and sit guard over him. A hose will take care of most of your sanitation problems.’
Moses, I thought, seemed almost obsessed with sanitation problems. He must have seen the amusement in my face.
‘Your Asadi stinks,’ he said defensively. ‘I’m just trying to get you settled in, under reasonably favorable circumstances. This isn’t anything like quarantine, you know. It’s more an adaptation to available resources.’
‘It ought to do,’ I said placatingly.
‘How long do you intend to be here, anyway? You seem to have thrown over your initial prospectus.’
‘I suppose that depends on the kind of “work” Elegy wants Kretzoi to do with our friend here.’ I nudged the Asadi gently with my boot. ‘And on the results of that work.’
‘Do you think you can keep him alive?’
‘We’ll need an assortment of plants from the Wild to provide him the basics of the Asadi diet. After that . . . well, it’s up to him.’
‘I’ll see to it you have what you need,’ Moses told me. ‘I’ll also send in some people to help you get up that fence.’
Moses gave me an odd half wave, and left me alone with my Asadi in the immense, solitary hangar. I carried the creature down the steps of the empty swimming pool and deposited him gently on the bottom of the deep end.
Ten or fifteen minutes later a crew of civki laborers came into the hangar, found a roll of soft-wall fencing, and installed it around the pool with a double gate near the shallow end and several swan-necked supports to keep it from falling. The fence was bright yellow – Sol-colored – so cheerful in its juxtaposition with the pastel-green interior of the pool that, looking down upon the scene from an extensible catwalk ramp, I simply had to smile.
Elegy and Kretzoi joined me late that afternoon, long after the Asadi had recovered from his second drugging. They entered the hangar’s recreation area from the south, saw me beckoning from my vantage overhead, and found a metal stairway by which to ascend to the first lofty mezzanine. I was taking notes at a desk assembled from a square of plastic dock plating, and when they had squeezed along the catwalk to places on either side of me, I nodded down at the pool.
‘How is he?’
