Sparky didn't, but said he did. Anything to get through the inner door and out of this exposed, public place, where he could be tracked down at any moment.
The door buzzed and he pushed through. Immediately he was blasted by a wall of heat and humidity. Sweat popped out on him, and in his already slightly feverish state he came near to passing out.
But leaning against the nearest wall for a moment restored his equilibrium. The room stopped spinning, the gray at the edges of his vision went away. The robe he was wearing—something he had snatched from a rack in the costume closet with barely a look at it—already seemed damp.
He was in a wide, dim corridor that reminded him of a museum. At intervals along each wall were recessed areas, like dioramas. He'd seen the same sort of thing at the King City Zoo, housing various small amphibians and reptiles in climate controlled, glass-fronted boxes. But these cases had no glass. They ranged in size from about a cubic meter to huge, walk-in environments. For that was what they were, and growing in them were the most fantastical, colorful shapes. They were mushroom gardens.
Back on Earth, fungi had come in a thousand shapes and colors. Presumably they still grew there. Many of the growths in the corridor had come from the Luna Genetic Library, and were direct descendants. Others had been modified, or had adapted to the low-gravity Lunar environment. Sparky was pretty sure no earthly toadstools had stood ten feet high. As to colors, he couldn't say, but these came in every possible shade and combination, from a luminescent violet to a pulsing red, in polka dots, stripes, waves, and overwhelming explosions, like spatter paintings. Some mushrooms were tall and spindly, others thick and squat. There were yellow shelf fungi Sparky could have used as stepping stones to scale the walls, and there were tiny orange and blue and maroon puffs like spilled M Ms.
The small boxes held single species. The big ones were jungles, riots of competitors growing alone or parasitically.
The light was very dim, but swelled as he moved along and faded behind him, giving him enough light to see by. He supposed these things grew better in the dark.
It was a living art gallery, but it was also a farm. He came upon a man in a white coat and chef's hat cutting slices from a green-capped giant and putting them into a basket. He was a plump fellow, and smiled and nodded to Sparky as he passed. He popped a piece of bright orange mushroom into his mouth and turned back to his work.
Sparky turned a corner in the semidarkness and entered a brightly lit area that had to be the kitchen, but not one like he'd ever seen. Alcoves opened off each side of another broad corridor, each alcove containing two or three people in chef's whites. There were preparation tables and ovens and all the rest of the equipment of the culinary arts—and art this most definitely was. He saw a whole suckling pig come out of an oven, apple in its mouth, and be removed to a wheeled table for garnishing and decorating. One alcove seemed entirely devoted to cakes. Great, towering, multicolored baroque masterpieces dripping with marzipan, festooned with fanciful figures and flowers. Some were being worked on, others had already been transferred to a wheeled table.
All the alcoves centered around the tables. Sparky realized what it reminded him of. It was like a scene from an old movie set in a big-city hospital emergency room, with gowned doctors and nurses working intently on patients stretched out on... what was the word? Gurneys.
There was another old movie image, too. A big mortuary, cosmeticians carefully preparing their compliant clients. Sparky didn't know why that image sprang to mind, but it did.
The place certainly didn't smell like a hospital or morgue. He passed a saucier, sizzling a brown, thick liquid in a skillet. It was a heavenly smell. He realized he'd had nothing to eat that day. The image of Amish corn muffins came into his mind and he wondered if he would ever have another.
Finished gurneys were being wheeled through an arched doorway and into the banquet room. Three very long tables were covered with white cloth and being set with the culinary creations. Again, something was out of whack. The whole huge room contained not a single chair. Sparky saw plates the size of garbage can lids, but no silver. Instead of glassware there were punch bowls filled with wine and fruit juices, and small robot devices with rotary pumps which dipped plastic tails into the drink and then delivered it by means of prehensile necks to... who? The standing diners? Diners who had no hands? Sparky couldn't picture the patrons of this feast.
Wondering how much farther he had to go, he passed from the banquet room into a dark, dank, sweltering place he at first could not fathom at all.
A ceiling arched high overhead, almost out of sight. Before him was a twenty-foot surface of government-green ceramic tiles, stretching to his right and his left. Beyond that was a placid surface of water, no more than an inch below the ledge he stood on. It was a swimming pool, and quite a large one. He'd never seen one designed quite like this, though.
In a moment he realized it had been converted from an old tank that had probably once been a part of the vast and complex sewage treatment system of King City. It was a big cylinder lying on its side. The water would be as deep as the ceiling was high, and there would be no shallow end. There was no smell beyond a faint whiff of chlorine, and no sound but the intermittent drip of water condensing on the ceiling and falling back into the pool. No diving board, no poolside chairs, no lifeguards, though the place was big enough they'd need motorboats to get to a drowner quickly. No people.
Were they growing something in here? Fish for the banquet tables behind him? Kelp? He went to the edge and leaned over. A faint emerald shimmer from near the bottom revealed nothing at first, then he saw vague shapes undulating slowly between him and the light. It was like looking down into an atomic-reactor core, the surface glass smooth, the depths crystalline. The occasional mutant five-ton sardine swimming by...
Slow, greasy swells distorted the surface and Sparky straightened and squinted into the darkness. A tubular shape was moving slowly toward him, just beneath the surface. Part of its back broke through and rolled slightly. Could it be some sort of whale? Nothing in Luna was more illegal than to produce anything resembling earthly cetaceans. A hippopotamus, more likely.
It was Uncle Ed.
Sparky never understood how he knew this, but he knew. He hadn't seen his uncle in over twenty years, had not known him well then. The thing wallowing in the water below him at first presented nothing resembling a face. But he knew. Then the thing rolled slightly and at one end, on one side, was a clench of flesh that slowly resolved itself into eyes, nose, and a mouth. There was nothing you could really call a head, and certainly nothing resembling a neck. Just endless, tightly packed folds and rolls of flesh that quivered and undulated with the slow rhythms of the water. One single feature was left of the matinee idol that had been Ed Ventura: his nose. It had defined a profile that graced a million movie posters, and there it sat, surrounded, almost overwhelmed. The lips were now fat and sensuous. The chin? Well, Sparky supposed you could call any of several dozen folds below the mouth a chin, if it pleased you. His cheeks were fat. His forehead was fat; if eyebrows remained, they were buried deep. The eyes were at the bottom of puckered pits, but they were alert and alive.
"Hello, Sparky," the thing said. And there was the source of the blubbery sound he had heard over the intercom. Uncle Ed could barely speak without making a raspberry.