It seemed the tigers and the birds came with the territory. Hal had revived them without being told to. The rest of it was up to us. The choices were not unlimited—no rhinos, no aardvarks, no baboons—but we could have turned the place into a reasonable imitation of Noah's Ark, if Noah had only saved small-to-medium animals. We were a bit more selective. Poly chose a dozen different types of lizard and another dozen poison arrow frogs, looking like porcelain or enamelware in screaming bright colors, not looking real at all until they jumped. I'd say there were a few hundred of them, but you'd never know it unless you looked for them.
She also revived a twenty-foot python. I told her I didn't like snakes much, and it had no effect at all. The snake and I gave each other a wide berth.
I scrolled through the catalog, bemused to think these creatures were sleeping in some secret recess of the ship. Made you feel God-like, you know? Which I suppose a billionaire thought he was entitled to feel. How about a brace of crocodiles? How would Poly like that? Maybe they'd eat the snake. I'd always liked monkeys; I'd had a pet chimp back in my glory days. But they were a little too noisy and active, it seemed to me.
"I have well-behaved monkeys," Hal advised me, and we selected a family of golden lion tamarins and a pair of slow lorises. There is no such thing as a fast loris; I checked.
Hal may have fudged a bit about the tamarins. They squeaked and peeped, but it wasn't an unpleasant or intrusive sound. It fit right in with the birdcalls.
Both Poly and I started out in staterooms. We flipped a coin, and she won the captain's suite. Within a week we were both camping out in the habidome. There was a Peter Pan tree house midway up a towering live oak: three rooms, running water, view of the falls. Poly moved into that. The other structure was a shack on stilts, sort of leaning out over the pond, like a Dogpatch backdrop in "L'il Abner." ("The part of Marryin' Sam has evolved, over the years, into an opportunity for political jokes and jabs at celebrities. Keith Van Tyne steals scene after scene from Abner and Daisy Mae."—Hermes Blaze) Sitting on my porch, I could drop a line into the pond and usually come up with a catfish or bass. For a while Poly and I played Adam and Eve, frying the fish and serving it with wild fruits and veggies we gathered ourselves. I began to buy into that ancient idea of the "natural man," free of civilization's encumbrances. I mentioned it to Hal.
"Bugs," Hal said.
"Beg your pardon?"
"There are no noxious insects in the habidome. Butterflies, moths, all selected for color, and dragonflies, likewise. There are beetles you'll seldom see, and insects belowground. But you wouldn't like this place nearly as much if it came equipped with black clouds of mosquitoes. Tarantulas. Centipedes a foot long that crawl into bed with you—"
"I get the picture."
After a few weeks we went back to the gourmet meals prepared by the galley. It's amazing how quickly you can get tired of fried fish.
Still, I recall my time aboard the Halley as one of the two or three best times of my life. Partly that is because... nothing happened. Though I was still running as fast as I could, though a human monster was still yapping at my heels, there was nothing to be done about it until I left the Halley. I could kick back, relax, for the first time in what felt like decades. I could stop and think about things. One day was much like the next; we fell into comfortable routines. Poly stopped being pissed off with me, for no real reason I could see other than that... I was Sparky. Somehow that made a difference. Maybe the shock of finding out I hadn't lied about that made her reexamine what had gone down with Comfort and his evil sister, and allowed her to see it wasn't entirely my fault. That though I had made a terrible mistake in leaving her alone in the room, there had been no malice, only carelessness, involved. And I had come back.
"There are three ways you can go about this, Mr. Valentine," the medtech said. "First, we can put you to sleep and have the whole thing over in less than a month."
"I like the sound of that," Sparky said.
"It has its attractions," admitted the tech. "However, when you wake up, you'll be... oh, I'd guess you're going to run six feet, six-one, something in there. You'll be well over twice your current weight. You'll have to learn how to shave."
"That should be easy enough."
"Shaving? No problem. But longer arms and legs will be a big problem. I've followed several cases, and you should expect half a dozen major, painful accidents in the first year. That's not counting the dozens of scrapes and bruises you'll pick up every day, the number of times you'll bang your head on the ceiling."
"I see," Sparky said, thinking it over.
"You'll be the clumsiest man in Luna," he said, with a chuckle. "In the normal course of things, we adjust to our bodies gradually, as they change gradually. In Luna, of course, those bodies are dangerously overpowered. You know how to handle it at your current dimensions and musculature. It would be like letting a baby operate heavy equipment... if you'll pardon the expression."
"That's okay, Doc." Sparky liked the guy. So few people just came right out and laid the truth on the line.
"The second option," the tech went on, "is simply to stop the inhibitors that have kept you prepubescent for twenty years. You'd grow up at the normal rate, reach your full growth in five or six years. This is really the optimum way of doing it."
"I don't have that kind of time."
"No one ever seems to. Why are we all so much in a hurry? We don't even know how long we can live. We're sure three hundred years is possible, perhaps a lot more. All the strides we've made since 'threescore and ten,' and still we rush around, frazzle our nerves, ruin our digestion... and you don't want to hear any of this.
"Third approach. We combine the first two methods. We don't put you to sleep. We can hurry it up and have you fully grown in six months, or stretch it out to more like two years."
"Six months sounds good."
"Why did I know you were going to say that? Six months it is." He made a notation on Sparky's chart, then webbed it off to the machines that would handle the actual treatment.
"You're still gonna be clumsy," he pointed out. "At least you'll take it an inch at a time, though. There are some unpleasant side effects, but we can help with most of them. You'll be hungry almost all the time. There could be some stomach and bowel trouble. You may not grow entirely at the same rate, head to toe. Usually it's the legs that grow a little too fast; you may look a bit odd for a few months. There's a chance you'll get a really disgusting crop of zits. It'll be so bad you might want to stay home so you won't frighten little children; a week, two weeks, tops. You'll yodel like a Swiss accordion player until your voice stabilizes. Then there's the matter of sex...."
"Yeah? What about it?"
"Never mind. You might actually enjoy that part."
Sparky laughed. "Doc, I am twenty-nine years old, you know. I know about sex. I've been having sex a long time now."
"Whatever you say."
The treatment itself took only a few minutes. Some mysterious, disgusting brown goo was forced into a vein. He tasted metal in the back of his mouth for a moment, then a violent red brew was pumped into him and the taste went away. His vision blurred; he imagined steam blowing out of his ears, and smiled at the image. Wouldn't that be cool? Then his eyes could roll around in their sockets like slot machine tumblers....