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express platforms, and went straight up to them on the eastbound
side.
The clerk in the shoe store was a human, a plump, youngish woman,
older than Ariel. She quirked her mouth in a half-humorous fashion
at Derec s socks and said, Been running the strips, eh? She
produced neat, cheap shoes expeditiously, checked his ration tag in
her machine, accepted the money tag, and waved them away, calling,
Next time be more careful of the edges!
Back to the expressway.
She heard Derec s breath speed up beside her, as Old Town Sector
came rushing toward them, but they saw none of the yeast farmers
from before less than an hour ago.
I ll walk the rest of the way before I ll ride this thing into Yeast
Town, she said, leaning over to shout at Derec.
Yeah, he said weakly. Ariel saw that he was staring up at the high
ceiling, which was higher here than in Webster Groves. There was
probably nothing overhead but the roof of the City, for here the ways
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were in a great slash through the building blocks. No matter he was
having a claustrophobic attack.
Ariel sympathized she had had several of them herself. At the
moment it was the crowds, not the oppressive buildings, that made
her own breath come short.
Before she could attempt to reassure him, Derec gripped her arm and
pointed: Gateway-Arch Plaza Exit. They descended hastily and rode
the ramp down under the ways, found a sign pointing north, and
followed it to a localway, also plainly marked.
Presently they entered the Gateway-Arch Plaza.
It was enormous. Gaping like rubes, they stepped out of the way of
swarms of chattering Earthers, and frankly stared. The Gateway Arch
itself was smaller, perhaps, than the Pillar of the Dawn on Aurora that
commemorated the early pioneers, and surely was less moving than
the memorial at the pillar s base, where outstanding men and women
of each generation were honored. But at a hundred ninety meters tall,
the arch was no small monument. Its span was nearly equal to its
height, and the roof was another ten meters above it. It was all matte
stainless steel, ancient looking but in good repair.
The room that enclosed the whole mastodonic fabrication was
commensurate in size, over two hundred meters in diameter, its
circular walls a cliff of concrete and metal around the arch. This cliff
was covered with the balconies of high-rated apartments.
Derec walked boldly toward the lower area between the feet of the
arch, and Ariel followed, inwardly amused at the awe on the faces of
some of the Earthmen some showed unmistakable signs of
agoraphobia, exposed to this much open space.
Below the arch was a museum dating from pre-spaceflight times,
which might have been interesting, but they were looking for a train
station. Quietly determined to ask no directions, they wasted half an
hour, some of it in looking at exhibits. Ariel was struck by the
unfinished look of the items people used in the pre-industrial age, all
made by crude hand methods. Derec pointed out a plaque that stated
that, in the old days, citizens had ridden a sort of tramway up inside
the arch
Agoraphobia, he said, echoing her thought.
Ariel nodded and led him briskly out of the museum. It felt like
underground to her, and the crowds of Earthers swarming around
were bringing on another claustrophobic attack. She felt much more
sympathetic to them and less inclined to sneer at Earthly phobias.
They had to leave the plaza itself to find the route to the station; they
had been following the plaza signs and hadn t noticed the station
signs when they left the localway. The station was a level or two
deeper, and a different route took them there.
There were fewer people here, but below the passenger level they
found a series of freightways crisscrossing the City, which carried
heavy items in bulk containers. Many men in rough clothing rode
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these ways in handling carts, shunting the big containers off the belts
at their destinations. These freightways all traveled at a walking pace,
no more.
At the station they also found the terminus of a tube system for small
capsules. Letters and small items parcel post could be blown about
the City very rapidly by this system, and Derec became quite excited
by it.
He d seen a system like this before, on a somewhat different scale.
The Robot City robots had generated a tremendous vacuum as a side
effect of their Key-manufacturing facility, and Derec and Ariel had
ridden the vacuum tubes more than once when they were in a hurry.
But here on Earth they were using the same technology not because
they had a vacuum they could use; they had to create a vacuum to
make it work. In one form or another, Derec knew, vacuum tubes like
these had been used since the early industrial age and Earth had
apparently never discarded their use, because on Earth they made
sense.
Much more efficient than sending a car with a robot, he said.
It is if your houses are close together, Ariel thought. On the Spacer
worlds, they were scattered.
The station seemed to deal mostly in inter-urban freight, but there
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