Yeah, right. Don't set your watch by that. When it all cooled down some, or possibly before, those friends in high places who had been bought, or who used the services best provided by a group like the Charonese Mafia, would step forward and get a new bail hearing and Izzy would be out the door. I checked the papers all the time so I'd be sure not to miss his release. Possibly I could arrange to be a thousand yards from the prison door, with a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight.
I can dream, can't I?
Toby came bounding up to me, a little red rubber ball in his mouth, and pawed at my arm. It's Toby's biggest weakness; he's got a regular ball-chasing jones. Toss anything round in his presence and he instantly forgets he is a civilized, serious, high IQ sort of dog who can count to five. His pink tongue hangs out and he reverts to puppyhood, his eyes fastened on the ball with that total concentration only a dog can achieve. God knows where he'd found this one. In the shrubbery, abandoned by another dog, judging from the well-chewed surface. I took it from his mouth.
"Wanna fetch, Toby? Wanna go fetch?" He jumped up and down deliriously, wagging his entire body and yipping with joy. I made as if to throw the ball and he froze, ready to hold that position until Charon warmed up or I threw it, one or the other.
I threw it, and away he went. In heaven. What a hard life he led.
I was in one of the little roll-up parks the wheel engineers scattered along the Edge as construction progressed. There was a wading pool for children, a gazebo/bandstand structure, public toilets that really looked like brick, but weren't. A build-it-yourself playground in riotous plastic colors. About a hundred fine, sturdy trees: pines, maples, huge spreading oaks, and cherry, orange, apple, and banana trees that grew real fruit all year round. All it lacked was the Big Rock Candy Mountain and bubblers dispensing cold pop and lemonade. To look at it, you would never guess all the trees were in huge pots, all the grass only a veneer of sod that could be taken up and moved when the construction workers were ready to extend this section another few miles.
The parks were there more for tourists than for local children. The attraction, naturally, was the Edge itself. The Oberoni shrewdly knew that once you get tourists to a scenic wonder, you'd better give them something to do besides gape. And while you're at it, sell them overpriced souvenirs and junk food. Not far from this sylvan setting was a portable amusement park featuring the Big Dip, a roller coaster that plunged off the Edge three times in the course of the ride.
You would think the Edge would be enough. It was certainly more than enough for me.
I was sitting on the concrete sidewalk that defined the Edge, doing what every tourist not afflicted with terminal acrophobia does when he gets there: sit with one's feet dangling over infinity. Three times already I had been asked to snap the picture of some group pretending to fall off, or peering cautiously down.
It helps to sneak up on it, sit down securely, and then swing your legs over. I don't have any great trouble with heights, but there are heights and then there are heights. Nowhere was there anything as high as the Edge. At the Edge, you were standing at the top of infinity.
All very safe, of course. No need to have a lot of frozen tourist corpses orbiting Uranus. Bad publicity.
Every hundred yards or so along the Edge signs were prominently posted: JUMP AT YOUR OWN RISK. OB$100 FEE CHARGED FOR RETRIEVAL.
Somewhere down there about a mile or two away was the all-but-invisible plastic substance that kept the air in at the Edges. A big bubble of it covered all the ends of the wheel. If you jumped or fell off the Edge, you would soon hit this stuff and bounce, and bounce again, and probably bounce a dozen times before coming to rest. Then the Edge Patrol would lower a rope harness to you and you would be hauled in like a trout. Unless you'd sprained an ankle or broken a bone, in which case it became a rescue, and they'd go down with a litter and charge you OB$500. It was a rather expensive way of getting a thrill, to my mind, but dozens of people did it every day. For five dollars, at sites all up and down the Edge, they could be attached to a bungee cord and get a better ride much more cheaply. But go figure tourists, eh?
Here and there in the air before me like hundreds of varicolored butterflies were gull-winged gliders and gossamer-winged pedal fliers taking advantage of the updrafts along the Edge. There were at least that many kites of all shapes and sizes. It was a kaleidoscopic traffic jam in the air. Glorious!
Toby returned with the ball and dropped it at my side, then stared at it as if willpower alone could lift it and toss it. I picked it up and gestured as if to throw it off the Edge. He got ready to jump. I should know better than to even tease about that. Toby is basically fearless; he'd go over the Edge in a minute. I turned and tossed it as far as I could toward the pressurehead.
I said very safe. I did not say completely safe.
The pressurehead is a wall of steel fifty miles wide and five miles high. An Edge City was defined as that space, not yet permanently occupied, between the pressurehead and the Edge. It was punctured in hundreds of places along the bottom by what looked like wide, inviting open doors, but were actually open air locks. At each door was a prominent sign warning you that you were leaving a category-B pressure environment and entering a category-D area. Many people live their whole lives without visiting a D area. Those rankings took many factors into account, I'd been told, but boiled down to how many surfaces there were between your tender and irreplaceable ass and hard vacuum. Category D meant there was only one barrier, the invisible plastic substance that provided a working environment for construction workers and visitors to Edge City. If that membrane was punctured, you'd hear all hell's klaxons and sirens, and find the air locks back to the safe world were now closed, and taking groups of twenty at their usual, maddeningly slow, now perhaps fatally slow, rate, as your ears popped and your nose started bleeding.
How many times had this happened during the construction of the wheel? So far, zero. How much did I worry about a blowout? About the same. Most of the people around me seemed to feel the same way. They brought their children here, they came to play or stretch out on the grass, they camped out "overnight," when the great lights shining down from the hub were turned off for eight hours.
When another five miles of wheel was complete, the pressurehead was detached from the huge bolts holding it in place, and rolled toward the Edge and its new mooring. I'd like to see that. They have big parades and fireworks and festivals and music. Clowns and troubadours and, of course, outdoor theater.
I threw the rubber ball a few more times, when who should come shambling down the walkway but Elwood P. Dowd. He stopped a few steps away and stood looking down at me, his hands thrust into his baggy gray slacks, playing pocket pool or fiddling with his spare coins or whatever it was he did when wearing that thoughtful expression on his face.
"I didn't see you around on the trip from Pluto," I said.
"No, you didn't," he drawled. "Claustrophobia. And you didn't pack enough to eat."
He lowered himself down on my left side, dangled his feet with his clunky brown hard-leather shoes and argyle socks. He always sits on my left, because he's deaf in his left ear. He told me he'd fallen through an iced-over pond when he was young, back in Bedford Falls. Elwood had plenty of stories like that. He'd been a United States senator for three years, and he'd flown solo across the Atlantic Ocean. He'd been the leader of a swing band.
"Yeah, I know," I said. "The old Pantechnicon's not good enough for you. Which way did you travel this time? On the buddy seat of some witch's broom? Borne on the gentle wings of angels? Scanned, digitized, strewn through the ether to fetch up here, at the edge of human folly?"