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Never mind," she said, and turned away. He watched her as she crossed the recreation room floor and stepped through the exit sphincter. She was just a silly girl, of course, but she had pointed up a very real problem of starship life when she asked, "Why do I always have to go to dances with Roger Bond?" The Valhalla was practically a self-contained universe.
The officer grabbed his coat collar and hustled him to the sidewalk. "You're under arrest!" "You can't arrest me!" Boswellister squirmed and jerked away. He shouted, "Follow me!" and ran north, a good part of the crowd after him. He shrieked an order into the pickup while he ran over the bridge towards Moorpark. A woman spotted the Ipplinger starship that followed overhead.
"A bunch of bloody incompetents," he said, and laughed. "This is the one thing I would never have dreamed that a man could sleep, and wake up in a starship, and find the starship manned by blunderers." "Euphoric," said Paula, to the two men. "At that," said Webber sourly, "there may be something in what he says about us."
When Boswellister reached the corner of Ventura and Laurel Canyon, he made his stand on the southeast corner, facing the hills over which the Ipplinger starship would come to hover over the intersection and be revealed by him. He contacted control and ordered the halo focus for his head. He reached up and felt the circle, planted firmly over his brow. He smiled to himself and went into his pitch.
It started with curt conversation between Jones and the pilot, Al Jones loathed this part of it, but Al turned out to be something of a ham on the problems of approaching a new solar system. Cut to computers back on Earth. Back to the control-room of the starship. Pictures of the local sun, and comments on its differentness from the sun that had nourished the human race since time began.
Every starship had to undergo a rigorous inspection whenever it touched down on Earth. The Valhalla probably wouldn't have any difficulties, since it had been gone only nine years Earthtime. But ships making longer voyages often had troubles with the inspectors.
The gleaming white metal of walls and ceiling was unfamiliar. There was a slight, persistent tingling vibration in everything that was unfamiliar, too. He was not in Wheel Five. He had seen every cell in it and none of them were like this. Also, there lacked the persistent susurrant sound of the ventilation pumps. Where You're in a ship, Kieran. A starship.
It was bound to capture the audience, put them in the right mood of awe-struck superstitious reverence, make the revelation of the great circle of the Ipplinger starship overhead a thing of wonderment and devotion-focus. The Blond Terror should now look upwards, guide the eyes of the audience, bring them to the recognition.
They had pretty much the same shape, and it was so hard to remember what Earth's continents looked like when there were so many other worlds. But that's South America. And so that's North America just above it. The place where I was born. Then the 0800 alarm went off, the four commanding gongs that Alan always heard as It's! Time! Wake! Up! The starship began to stir into life.
Art Kandin's in charge." "Thanks," Alan said. "I'd better go see him." "Sure. And " Alan nodded. "Yes. That's Steve." He passed between the cargo hoists and clambered onto the escalator rampway that led to the main body of the ship. It rose, conveying him seventy feet upward and through the open passenger hatch to the inner section of the towering starship.
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