The Halley provided spin gravity by detaching the power plant from the living quarters and moving them far apart, tethered by a strong cable. Then spin was applied. Since the engines were ten times as massive as the life support, the center of gravity was very close to the engines, which moved slowly. The quarters zipped around at a much higher speed. Think of an Olympic hammer thrower, twirling around almost in place, while the end of the hammer goes extremely fast. We were twirling fast enough to feel one-third gee.
I do recall checking Toby before hobbling to the spa. He seemed chipper enough, when we got spin and his cage retracted. Hal later told me Toby had been sedated and was unlikely to remember anything. Dogs are pretty happy-go-lucky, anyway; once something unpleasant is gone, it is forgotten.
Poly and I both dozed for a time after my conversation with Hal. I recall waking up once at the gentle sound of a bell, to find a floating breakfast tray had found me. On it was a steaming mug of coffee, a huge glass of orange juice, a Bloody Mary, and a bowl of what looked like oatmeal. Trying not to look at the oatmeal, I downed all the beverages and went right back to sleep.
The next time I opened my eyes, Toby was standing beside the pool, and he was coughing up blood.
Poly says I came out of the pool slick as a seal, just seemed to sort of levitate. I don't recall it, but I do know that two seconds earlier I'd have sworn I couldn't walk, much less levitate. Somehow I found myself kneeling beside Toby, gently probing, saying soothing words in baby talk, like most of us do when dealing with dogs. His mouth, muzzle, and chest were dripping with blood. And his belly was swollen, taut as a grape. It didn't add up.
Toby seemed perky as could be, licking my hands, trying to jump up and lick my face. When I settled down a little, I saw it was not blood he had coughed up, but bloody meat. Either he was heaving his poor little guts out, or there was a much simpler explanation.
"Is he hurt bad?" Poly was kneeling beside me. I became aware we were both naked, and slippery wet. She caught my double take, and a frown line appeared between her eyebrows. Even in my debilitated state, she was a lovely sight. But she probably thought me callous.
"He's found something to eat," I said. "The little pig ate too much, and now he's throwing it up. He'll be fine."
"Are you sure?"
I dipped my hand in the pool and splashed some on Toby, and we watched the blood wash away. Toby endured this with his tongue hanging out, then looked thoughtful, trotted a few steps away, and retched up a chunk of meat the size of a golf ball. He studied it, then looked back at me, pink tongue lolling again, as if to say, "Would you get a load of that!" Dogs are disgusting sometimes.
We tracked pink footprints out of the spa, down a passageway, and into a room with a sign overhead reading GALLEY. Coming from the other direction was a hemispherical cleaning robot, a foot in diameter, painted to look like a ladybug. It was cleaning up the bloody spoor. Okay, so the logical place to find raw meat was in the galley, but how had Toby found it?
He looked up at me, read my mind, and trotted to a corner, where he sniffed the floor thoroughly, then stepped onto a pressure plate in the floor. There was a rattle and a gurgle, and a hunk of raw meat the size of a Virginia ham plopped out of a chute and onto the floor. Blood oozed from it. I touched the meat and found it was body temperature.
"Hal," I said. "What's this all about?" Toby had grabbed the thing and was trying to pull it away from me. God knows what he intended to do. Bury it?
"I'm not sure I understand your question. Are you asking me the meaning of life?"
"No, I'm asking how Toby got all this meat."
"Ah. There is a scent of food on the pressure plate. No doubt he smelled it, and in his explorations, activated the meat dispenser."
I wondered if he was acting like a literal-minded machine just for the fun of it, put one over on the stupid humans.
"One more time," I said. "Why is there a meat dispenser that dispenses ten pounds of raw flesh at a time?"
"That is to feed the tigers," Hal said.
Well, silly me. Of course a billionaire's yacht would come equipped with tigers. And speak of the devil...
"Oh, my god!" Poly whispered. "He's so beautiful!"
The tiger paused in the doorway, looked at me. Looked at Poly. Glanced at Toby. Cocked his head a little and looked at Toby again. Yaaaaaaawned. Then padded into the galley, five hundred pounds of silent power. He sniffed at the meat, glanced at Toby a third time—the dog was transfixed, not a whisker twitching—and settled down with one paw on the food and began ripping off chunks. In a moment another big cat came through the door. This one didn't even break stride, though she gave us a cursory once-over. She went straight to the meat and stole it right out of the jaws of the first one. He growled at this thievery—a sound that, even though you know they are perfectly harmless, makes every hair follicle on my body seal up tight as a spinster's butt—then stepped on the pressure plate and snagged the meat as it tumbled out. He carried it to another corner and chowed down.
So that was our first adventure on the Halley. After that, things became pretty much routine until we reached Jupiter.
The Halley, or her living quarters, anyway, was shaped pretty much like a flying saucer. A thick frisbee with a half dome on top. The saucer part consisted of a circular passageway with doors leading to rooms that lined the outer rim of the saucer. (Should that be hatches leading to compartments? I'm going to dispense with the phony nautical terminology spacers love so much.) We've seen the spa, and the galley. Also out there were the owner's cabin, guest cabins, a billiard room, a library, a formal dining room with places for eight, and two holocabins. One simulated beach settings, and the other let you pretend you were in various forest environments.
There were no servants' quarters, since Halley carried no human staff. Everything was done by robots who were seldom seen, popping in and out of hidey-holes mostly when you weren't looking. But they kept everything scrupulously clean, and if you needed something, they delivered it promptly.
I would have thought a ship like that would have accommodations for a larger number. Instead, the builder had opted for larger and more luxurious quarters for a smaller number of people. Though naturally the Halley could carry scores of people in a pinch, she was designed for no more than eight.
But the tastiest stuff was in the middle, under the dome.
The original owner must have been a nature lover. The center of his ship was a circular mini-disney called the habidome and the theme was rain forest. There was a waterfall, a babbling brook, a pond, and a few dozen trees festooned with vines and orchids and bromeliads and other such lush tropical flora. The floor was grass or packed dirt. No attempt had been made to deceive the eye, as in the holos. The dome was simply a dome, not a blue sky. It was all too orderly and well tended to look like the real thing. What it reminded me of was the big bird enclosure at the King City Zoo. Aptly enough, I guess, since the place had a lot of birds in it. Toucans, macaws, cockatoos, parrots, I don't know what-all. Hummingbirds no bigger than your thumb, in any color you wanted.
We'd been aboard a couple of days before I wondered where all the critters had been during the high boost. The answer was, suspended in liquid, revived only when the environment was ready for them. Floating in liquid was a good way, it turned out, to miss most of the bad effects of high gee. "So why didn't you float us in liquid?" I asked Hal. "Next time I will. But it takes about a day to prepare your body for it. We didn't have time."
"Next time?" I asked, cautiously.
"Next time won't be so bad," he said. I didn't pursue it. Most of the trees and bushes bore edible fruit of some kind. Not always what you'd expect, either. One tree I knew was not an apple tree, because I looked it up in the library, bore tart, crisp Mclntoshes on one side, and Valencia oranges on the other.