James P. Hogan Read Online Free Page B

a central tower disappearing through the roof to connect to the hub. Alternating with the three major spokes were three slimmer ones, which terminated in the middle of the agricultural zones between the towns at built-up transportation and processing complexes known simply as Agricultural Stations 1, 2, and 3.
    The town that the party arrived in was called Turgenev, and constituted the administrative and social center. The tour began with a stop high up on the central tower above the main square, where the guides led the visitors through from the elevators onto an outside terrace for a general view of the colony. Paula judged the roof to be fifty to a hundred feet above where they were standing. The cross-section of the rim was not circular as in a true torus, but flattened like a wide automobile tire, with the roof stretching away horizontally for a distance on either side before it curved over and down to become the sides. Illumination came from two rows of what looked like immense, golden-glowing, venetian-blind slats receding upward and out of sight with the sweep of the roof – louvered reflectors that admitted light from an external mirror system. Power for the colony’s industries came from nuclear reactors located at the hub.
    Below the terrace, a ribbonlike miniworld curved away and upward between enclosing walls a little under a sixth of a mile apart. The nearer buildings were higher, merging into a monolith of tiered plazas, ramps, pedestrian ways, and bridges around the tower to form the town’s center. Architectural styles were varied and followed light, airy, clean designs incorporating plenty of color and glass, intermixed with screens of natural greenery. The strangest thing was the geometry, or lack of it – for everywhere and on all levels, walls met at odd, asymmetrical angles, passages branched between buildings, roadways curved beneath underpasses to emerge in a different direction, and nothing seemed to run square to anything else, anywhere. Presumably the intention was to break up the underlying continuity and dissolve the sense of living inside a tube. If so, it worked.
    “The architect who designed this must have had a fetish about rhomboids,” Paula remarked as they looked out from the terrace.
    There were many figures moving about; below, a vehicle emerged from behind a building, moving along some kind of track. Farther away, the townscape gave way to a more open composition of public buildings and residential units, trees, and parks, with glints of water in several places. The terrain climbed on either side to form a roughly U-shaped valley about a central strip, with buildings giving way to terraces of crops and pasture strips for animals farther away in the agricultural zone. Due to unanticipated difficulties with maintaining the ecological balance, which the Russians freely admitted, the general scene was not as idyllic as their public-relations releases had enthusiastically promised when construction commenced. In some places the metal shoring walls stood bare between tiers of barren, grayish-looking soil formed from processed moondust, and in others the vegetation was yellowy and limp. Their official line now was that this was only the first phase, and aesthetics would be attended to later; and most reactions were to concede that that was what experimentation was all about. This was a prototype colony, after all.
    “Conventional enclosed dwellings are not functionally necessary, of course, since the climate can be controlled at all times,” the Russian guide was saying. “As you can see, however, familiar styles and arrangements into neighborhood groupings are used, to give a feeling of normality as far as is practicable. The designers of Valentina Tereshkova took the view that the forms of houses which people have evolved on Earth over long periods of time best reflect the kinds of surroundings they prefer to live in. There seemed no reason to change it – at least, until much more