The Traffic Division was efficiency made insolent, in glass and chrome
and polished steel, mirrors and windows and looming electronic clerical
machines. Most of one wall was taken up by a TV monitor which gave a
view of the spaceport; a vast open space lighted with blue-white mercury
vapor lamps, and a chained-down skyscraper of a starship, littered over
with swarming ants. The process crew was getting the big ship ready for
skylift tomorrow morning. I gave it a second and then a third look. I'd
be on it when it lifted.
Turning away from the monitored spaceport, I watched myself stride
forward in the mirrored surfaces that were everywhere; a tall man, a
lean man, bleached out by years under a red sun, and deeply scarred on
both cheeks and around the mouth. Even after six years behind a desk, my
neat business clothes--suitable for an Earthman with a desk job--didn't
fit quite right, and I still rose unconsciously on the balls of my feet,
approximating the lean stooping walk of a Dry-towner from the Coronis
plains.
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