Blinding gray, it undulated off to the too-close horizon. A big crater back there . . . five kilometers, fifty? . . . the Maskelyne Crater. Unnaturally sharp mountains in the distance. They reminded Cobb of something he wanted to forget: teeth, ragged clouds . . . the Mountains of Madness. Surely some civilization, somewhere, had believed that the dead go to the Moon.
There was a soft but final-sounding thop from the other side of the ship. The air tunnel. The stewardess cranked open the lock, her sweet ass bobbing with the wheel’s rhythm. On the way out, Sta-Hi asked her for a date.
“Me and Gramps’ll be at the Hilton, baby. Dennis DeMentis. I’ll go insane if I don’t get some drain. Fall on by?”
Her smile was as unreadable as a Halloween mask. “Perhaps you’ll run into me at the lounge.”
“Which . . .” he began.
She cut him off . “There’s only one.” Shaking Cobb’s hand now. “Thank you for traveling with us, sir. Enjoy your stay.”
The space terminal was crowded with boppers. Sta-Hi had seen models of a few of the basic types before, but no two of them waiting out there looked quite alike. It was like stepping into Bosch’s Hell. Faces and . . . “faces” . . . crowding the picture plane top to bottom, front to back.
Hovering right by the door was a smiling sphere holding itself up with a whirling propeller. The smile all but split it in half. “See subterranean cities!” it urged, rolling fake eyeballs.
Down at the end of the ramp waited the visa-checker, looking something like a tremendous stapler. You stuck your visa in there while it scanned your face and fingerprints. KAH-CHUNNNG! Passed.
Standing right next to the visa-checker was a boxy red robot. Things like blue snakes or dragons writhed around his treads. Diggers. The red robot stuck a nervous microphone of a face near Sta-Hi and Cobb, then reeled his head back in.
He reminded Cobb a little of good old Ralph Numbers. But with those diggers there it was better not to ask. It could wait until they met in the museum.
In the lobby, dozens of garish, self-made machines wheeled, slithered, stalked and hovered. Every time Cobb and Sta-Hi would look one way, snaky metal tentacles would pluck at them from the other direction.
“You buy uranium?”
“Got mercury?”
“Old fashion T.V. set?”
“Fuck android girls?”
“Sell your fingers?”
“Moon King relics?”
“Prosthetic talking penis?”
“Chip-market tip-sheet?”
“Home-cooked food?”
“Set up factory?”
“Same time fuck-suck?”
“DNA death code?”
“Dust bath enema?”
“See vacuum bells?”
“Brand-new voice-prints?”
“No-risk brain-tape?”
“You sell camera?”
“Play my songs?”
“Me be you?”
“Hotel?”
Cobb and Sta-Hi jumped into the lap of this last bopper, a husky black fellow contoured to seat two humans.
“No baggage?” he asked.
Cobb shook his head. The black bopper forced his way through the crowd, warding off the others with things like huge pinball flippers. Sta-Hi was silent, still thinking some of those offers over.
The bopper carrying them kept a microphone and camera eye attentively focused on them. “Isn’t there any control?” Cobb asked querulously. “Over who can come in here and bother the arriving passengers?”
“You are our honored guests,” the bopper said obliquely. “Aloha means hello and . . . good-bye. Here is your hotel. I will accept payment.” A little door opened between the two seats.
Sta-Hi drew out his wallet. It was nice and full. “How much do . . .”he began.
“Money is so dull,” the bopper answered. “I would prefer a surprise gift . A complex information.”
Cobb felt in the pockets of his white suit. There was still some scotch, a brochure from the space-liner, a few coins . . .
Boppers were pressing up to them again, plucking at their clothes, possibly snipping out samples.
“Dirt-side newspapers?”
“ ‘Slow boat to China’ ?”
“Execution sense tapes?”
The black bopper had only carried them a hundred meters. Impatiently, Sta-Hi tossed his handkerchief into their carrier’s waiting hopper.
“Aloha,” the bopper said, and rolled back towards the gate, grooving on the slubby weave.
The hotel was a pyramid-like structure filling the center of the dome. Cobb and Sta-Hi were relieved to find only humans in the lobby. Tourists, businessmen, drifters.
Sta-Hi looked around for a reception desk, but could spot none. Just as he was wondering who he might approach, a voice spoke in his ear.
“Welcome to the Disky Hilton, Mr. DeMentis. I have a wonderful room for you and your grandfather on the fifth floor.”
“Who was that?” Cobb demanded, turning his big shaggy head sharply.
“I am DEX, the Disky Hilton.” The hotel itself was a single huge bopper.
Somehow it could point-send its voice to any spot at all . . . indeed it could carry on a different conversation with every guest at once.
The ethereal little voice led Cobb and Sta-Hi to an elevator and up to their room. There was no question of privacy. After heartily drinking a few glasses of water from the carafe, Cobb finally called to Sta-Hi, “Long trip, eh Dennis?”
“Sure was, Gramps. What all do you think we should do tomorrow?”
“Waaal, I think I’ll still be too tuckered out for them big dust-slides. Maybe we should mosey on over to that museum those robots built. Just to ease ourselves in slow like, you know.”
The hotel cleared its throat before talking, so as not to startle them. “We have a bus leaving for the museum at oh-nine-hundred hours.”
Cobb was scared to even look at Sta-Hi. Did DEX know who they really were? And was he on their side or the diggers’ side? And why would any of the boppers be against making Cobb immortal in the first place? He poured out the last of his Scotch, tossed it off, and lay down. He really was tired. The low lunar gravity felt good. You could gain a lot of weight up here. Wondering what would be for breakfast, Cobb drifted into sleep.
10
Sta-Hi threw a blanket onto the old man and walked over to look out the window. Most of the boppers were gone now. They had left a jumble of wheeled refrigeration carts next to the air-lock. Slowly, meticulously, a hunch-backed bopper was lining the carts up.
A human couple strolled around the plaza between the hotel and the visa-checker. There was something odd to Sta-Hi in the studied aimlessness of the couple’s wanderings. He watched them for five minutes and they still didn’t get anywhere. Around and around like mechanical hillbillies in a shooting gallery.
The translucent plastic dome was not far overhead, tinted against the raw sunlight. For the humans it was night in here, but outside the sun still shone, and the boppers were as active as ever. Even though the Lunar day lasts two weeks, and even though the boppers rarely “slept,” they still, perhaps out of nostalgia, but probably out of inertia, kept time by the human twenty-four-hour day system. And to make the humans comfortable, they varied the brightness of their dome accordingly.
Sta-Hi felt a shudder of claustrophobia. His every action was being recorded, analyzed. Every breath, every bite was just another link to the boppers. He was, right now, actually inside a bopper, the big bopper DEX. Why had he let Cobb talk him into coming here? Why had Cobb wanted him?
Cobb was snoring now. For a terrible instant, Sta-Hi thought he saw wires running out of the pillow and into the old man’s scalp. He leaned closer and realized they were just black hairs among the gray. He decided to go down to the lounge. Maybe that stewardess would be there.
The hotel bar and lounge was full, but quiet. Some businessmen were bellied up to the automatic bar. They were drinking moon-brewed beer . . . the dome’s dry air made you mighty thirsty.