The people flowed beneath this sky, passed among the exhibits, moved like a shallow stream through a place of rocks.
They moved in ripples and random swirlings. They eddied; they churned, bubbled, babbled. Occasionally, there was a sparkle...
They poured steadily from the parked machines beyond the blue horizon.
After they had run their course, they completed the circuit by returning to the metal clouds which had borne them to the running.
It was Outward that they passed.
Outward was the Air Force-sponsored Exhibit which had been open for the past two weeks, twenty-four hours a day, and which had drawn spectators from all over the world.
Outward was a survey of Man's achievements in Space.
Heading Outward was a two-star general, with a dozen colonels, eighteen lieutenant colonels, many majors, numerous captains, and countless lieutenants on his staff. Nobody ever saw the general, excepting the colonels and the people from Exhibits, Incorporated. Exhibits, Incorporated owned Exhibit Hall, there by the spaceport, and they set things up in good taste for all the exhibitionists who employed them.
First, to the right, as you entered Toadstool Hall (as it had been dubbed by some Vite), was the Gallery.
In the Gallery were the mural-sized photos that a spectator could almost walk off into, losing himself in the high, slender mountains behind Moonbase III (which looked as if they would sway in the wind, were there any wind to sway them); or wander through the bubble-cap of that undermoon city, perhaps running a hand along one of the cold lobes of the observational cerebrum and feeling its rapid thoughts
clicking within; or, passing by, enter that rusty desert beneath the greenish sky, cough once or twice, spit bloody spittle, circle the towering walls of the above-ground Port Complex—bluegray, monolithic, built upon the ruins of God knows what—and enter into that fortress where men move like ghosts in a Martian department store, feel the texture of those glassite walls, and make some of the soft and only noises in the whole world; or pass across Mercury's Acre of Hell in the cool of the imagination, tasting the colors—the burning yellow, the cinnamon and the orange—and come to rest at last in Big Ice Box, where Frost Giant battles Fire Wight, and where each compartment is sealed and separately maintained—as in a submarine or transport rocket, and for the same, basic reason; or stroll on out in the direction of the Outer Five, where the hero is heat and cold the villain, stand there in a frosted oven beneath a mountain, hands in pockets, and count the colored streaks in the walls like opals, see the sun as a brilliant star, shiver, exhale vapors, and agree that these are all very wonderful places to have circling about the sun, and nice pictures, too.
After the Gallery were the Grav-rooms, to which one might climb by means of a stairway smelling of fresh-cut lumber. At the top, one might select the grav one wished—Moon-weight, Mars-weight. Merc-weight—and ride back to the floor of the Hall on a diminishing cushion of air, elevator-like, knowing for a moment the feeling of weight personal carried on the chosen world impersonal. The platform drops down, the landing is muffled... Like falling into hay, like falling into a feather bed.
Next, there was a waist-high rail—brass. It went around the Fountain of the Worlds.
Lean over, look down...
Scooped out of the light was a bottomless pool of black...
It was an orrery.
In it, the worlds swung on magnetic lines, glowing. They moved around a burning beachball of a sun; the distance to the outer ones was scaled down, and they shone frostily, palely, through the murk; the Earth was emerald, turquoise;
Venus was milky jade; Mars, an orange sherbet; Mercury, butter, Galliano, breadcrust, fresh-baked.
Food and riches hung in the Fountain of the Worlds. Those who hungered and lusted leaned on the brass rail and stared. Such is the stuff dreams are made of.
The others looked and passed by, going on to see the full-sized reconstruction of the decompression chamber of Moonbase I, or to hear the valve manufacturer's representative give little-known facts concerning the construction of the pressure-locks and the power of the air pumps. (He was a short, red-haired man who knew many statistics.) Or they rode across the Hall in the cars of the overhead-suspension monorail. Or they saw the 20-minute Outward—With Stops At Spots film, which was so special as to feature a live narrator rather than soundtrack. They mounted freshly-heaped wall-cliffs in scaleboats, and they operated the pincers of the great claw-cans, used for off-Earth strip-mining.
Those who hungered stayed longer, though, in one place.
They stayed longer, laughed less.
They were the part of the flow which formed pools, sparkled...
"Interested in heading out some day?"
The boy turned his head, shifted on his crutches.
He regarded the lieutenant colonel who had addressed him. The officer was tall. Tanned hands and face, dark eyes, a small moustache and a narrow, brown pipe, smoldering, were his most prominent features, beyond his crisp and tailored uniform.
"Why?" asked the boy.
"You're about the right age to be planning your future. Careers have to be mapped out pretty far in advance. A man can be a failure at thirteen if he doesn't think ahead."
"I've read the literature..."
"Doubtless. Everyone your age has. But now you're seeing samples—and mind you, they're only samples—of the actuality. That's the big, new frontier out there—the great
frontier. You can't know the feeling just from reading the booklets."
Overhead, the monorail-car rustled on its way across the Hall. The officer indicated it with his pipe.
"Even that isn't the same as riding the thing over a Grand Canyon of ice," he noted.
"Then it is a deficiency on the part of the people who write the booklets," said the boy. "Any human experience should be describable and interpretable—by a good enough writer."
The officer squinted at him.
"Say that again, sonny."
"I said that if your booklets don't say what you want them to say, it's not the fault of the material."
"How old are you?"
"Ten."
"You seem pretty sharp for your age."
The boy shrugged, lifted one crutch and pointed it in the direction of the Gallery.
"A good painter could do you fifty times the job that those big, glossy photos do."
"They are very good photos."
"Of course, they're perfect. Expensive too, probably. But any of those scenes by a real artist could be priceless."
"No room out there for artists yet. Ground-breakers go first, culture follows after."
"Then why don't you change things and recruit a few artists? They might be able to help you find a lot more ground-breakers."
"Hm," said the officer, "that's an angle. Want to walk around with me some? See more of the sights?"
"Sure," said the boy. "Why not? 'Walk' isn't quite the proper verb, though..."
He swung into step beside the officer and they moved about the exhibits.
The scaleboats did a wall crawl to their left, and the claw-cans snapped.
"Is the design of those things really based on the structure of a scorpion's pincers?"
"Yes," said the officer. "Some bright engineer stole a trick from Nature. That is the kind of mind we're interested in recruiting."
The boy nodded.
"I've lived in Cleveland. Down on the Cuyahoga River they use a thing called a Hulan Conveyor to unload the ore-boats. It is based on the principle of the grasshopper's leg. Some bright young man with the sort of mind you're interested in recruiting was lying in his back yard one day, pulling the legs off grasshoppers, and it hit him: 'Hey,' he said, 'there might be some use to all this action.' He took apart some more grasshoppers and the Hulan Conveyer was born. Like you say, he stole a trick that Nature was wasting on things that just hop around in the fields, chewing tobacco and being pesty. My father once took me on a boat trip up the river and I saw the things in operation. They're great metal legs with claws at the end, and they make the most godawful unearthly noise I ever heard—like the ghosts of all the tortured grasshoppers. I'm afraid I don't have the kind of mind you're interested in recruiting."