ways into walls, floor, and ceiling. Several of the couches swung around so that they were all facing the same way in the now rather institutional-looking space. The wall before them hummed apart. What had been a corridor before was now a wall-sized window on star-speckled night, cut with a few girders, the tops of a few buildings visible at its bottom.

From the ceiling a screen folded down, its face a-flash with myriad numbers, grids, and graphs.

There has never been a spaceship accident more than three seconds past take-off less than 100 percent fatal, Bron recalled—which probably meant he had not gotten much of the take-off drugs.

“I always find these trips so exciting—” someone said—“no matter where or how many times I go. I have no idea why ...”

Blue numbers (which were becoming more and more prevalent across the screen) he knew were the final navigation check figures. Red numbers (and a whole bunch went from blue to red) meant those figures had been approved and fed into the take-off computer.

“There’s no turning back now,” someone said solemnly.

“I hope the swimming pool cover is on tight,” someone else said (and everyone chuckled). “I’d hate to have to take a swim too early.”

Bron settled against the padding. Something began to roar—rather far away—on his right; then something else—much closer—on his left. There were only two blue numbers now, amidst a full field of red: and they were flickering oddly, which made him suspect they were broken.

Someone said: “I don’t think those blue numbers are right ...”

Someone else said: “Sam, I told you, you should have gotten a government cabin. The government’s never wrong.”

People chuckled again.

Then the building tops and the girders were gone. And the stars were moving.

The cabin lurched.

“Whoopsy-daisy!” someone called.

People laughed again.

Down had suddenly and disconcertingly established itself in some direction near his feet. Bron felt himself slip on the pad. The stars jerked to the side on the panoramic window; a moment later they were wiped away by landscape, moving too fast for Bron to tell if they were ten meters or ten—therel A web of lights and more lights swept by: Tethys itself. Every one Oooooed again.

They were at least ten kilometers up.

Stars now. Now landscape ... but moving more slowly—at least forty. When the pitted horizon passed again, Bron could make out a distant curve. Then the cabin rocked grandly backward ... or rather, “down” reestablished itself under the floor.

The screen, its two, broken, blue numbers still flickering (all the others were out now), folded into the ceiling.

Was it the drug—or that he hadn’t gotten enough of one of the several drugs, or too much of another? ... he stayed on his couch for quite a while, gazing at the circling stars. Ancient Earth men had tried to pick out pictures on those blue-white points. He tried to superimpose her face; but neither the stars, nor his memory, stayed still enough.

When he finally got up, people were already walking around. On the upper level, at the top of the stairs, the pool-cover had retracted. A few people were already paddling about. Light fixtures, bar, sculptures, and tables were once more out; and a trap had opened up with steps down into the cabin’s free-fall section: a drum as big as this one just “below” it, with “real” (that is, only when accelerating) gravity (“Guests are requested not to take liquids from one level to the other,” said the sign on the stand beside the ladder, in whose white plastic rings already stood four or five unfinished drinks.) Completing his circuit of the pool, Bron walked back down the carpeted steps, with a drink now, as three people came up, laughing hysterically about something inane.

His acceleration couch turned out to contain endless interlocked and interleaved cabinets, compartments, and crannies, which a bony, garrulous redhead, almost short enough to be a midget, took great delight in demonstrating to him. It was a bed, of course; just pull that handle there and a soundproof privacy-bubble—well, almost soundproof—will swing over the whole thing. You can have it opaque or clear with that switch there. And that’s a timer, preadjusted to help you rearrange your sleeping schedule over the ninety-hour trip so that you won’t suffer too hugely from space-lag—though nobody ever follows it on a junket like this, anyway. There’s your reader, though the selections in the file drawer—mark my word—will be monumentally uninspiring. I woulnd’t even look through it, unless you just want a good snicker. (Though I once found one just jammed with twentieth-century science fiction—ever read any? Fascinating stuff!) Swing that half of the sleeping-pad up and you’ll find a place for ablutions; that half, for defecation. And under there—just a second; there you go!—is your luggage.

Which Bron had packed, at Sam’s suggestion, in a small, plastic bag. Sam had said don’t take much; they’d all be pretty informal. But, wandering around the cabin, catching an occasional glimpse into the other luggage compartments when one or another guest was hunting around for some personal effect, he saw that at least three people had brought huge numbers of sacks, packages, bags, practically overflowing their couches. It made him feel slightly apprehensive at first. But as the hours went on, no one seemed about to dress.

He spent a lot of time “down” in the dimly-lit free-fall chamber, looking through the window there at the stars.

“Hey,” Sam called through the trap to him, sometime during the second day out. “Come up here a minute. You have to see this.”

Bron unsnapped the lounge net he’d been floating in, pushed off toward the ladder, pulled up, emerged into the weighted chamber—an odd experience, having your head, then your shoulders, then your arms and chest go all heavy (like getting out of the swimming pool, only very different; he’d compared them a couple of times on this trip, just see)—and came up by the pool.

“Come on, take a look at this.” Sam doffed a drink in one hand, guiding Bron’s shoulder with the other. “Come on.”

By the poolside, at one of the wall tables, sat the bony, little redhead; across from him sat an equally diminutive oriental woman with irregularly-clipped, black hair. Between them was a vlet board. It was only a quarter the size of Lawrence’s. (A small traveling version?) The landscape was simply a laminated 3-D photograph, not Lawrence’s animated holographic surface. The pieces were not carefully carved and painted but merely raised symbols on red and green plastic markers. The astral cube did not have its own stand. But Bron could see, in the deployment of the gods, the detritus of a vicious astral battle that green (the redhead’s side) had evidently won.

Five melds were already down.

The woman threw the dice and, in a rather surprising way (a rather clever one too, Bron thought as soon as the move was completed), managed to bring her Guards in from the right, just as green’s caravan crossed the forge, to pull it out of the influence of the scarlet Magician, substantially multiplied by three reflecting screens.

The redhead tossed the dice, discarded a low Flame, dispersed the screens to the corners of the board in one move (which left Bron, among the game’s half-dozen spectators, frowning) and turned to rearrange a matrix on the astral board. That’s clever! Bron thought. The woman would have to answer it, pulling some of her powers from the Real World, which would leave some of her strongest pieces unprotected.

The edge of the playing board, the table, and the woman’s cheek flickered with reflections off the pool.

Sam nudged Bron and grinned. “I was thinking we might challenge them to a game of doubles, you and me. But I guess they’re a little out of our league.”