Book Night on Union Station by E M Foner

Book Night on Union Station by E M Foner

Author:E M Foner [Foner, E M]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paradise Pond Press
Published: 2017-10-29T23:00:00+00:00


Twelve

“Are you feeling better yet?” Kevin asked Dorothy. “I know that three days from Union Station to Earth was pushing it, but the Stryx offered it as an option, and I figure the less time you spend in Zero-G the better.”

“I’m fine in Zero-G, the problem was you cutting my Farling medicine patches in quarters. If I ever find out that you were lying about bringing just enough for the round trip, the marriage is off.”

“We’re already married and you can’t divorce me, the Frunge don’t recognize it. The best you can do is to get a waiver that allows you to take a second husband.”

“Watch where you’re going!” Dorothy shouted as the floater narrowly missed an abandoned box truck on the broken-up highway.

“I’m not driving this thing, it’s on autopilot. Weren’t you listening when your grandmother explained how it all worked?”

“I didn’t feel well, and besides, I thought you just talked to it.”

“You have to know what to say. It’s an autopilot, not an AI.”

“Where’s this place we’re going again?”

“One of those universities that couldn’t find enough students or funding to keep going after the Stryx opened Earth. Your mom got a whole list of them from the president’s people, but this one is near the place with the carnival equipment.”

“But that was like a hundred years ago. Are you sure they have any books left?”

“I’m just going by what the EarthCent people told us. It’s not a hundred years either, more like eighty, and the university didn’t close immediately. It took decades to ferry all those people off Earth back before the elevator was built. The alien labor contractors had to do it with big shuttles.”

“Like the ones Flower has on her colony ship?”

“Those are for moving people who are awake. I watched a Grenouthian documentary about how the aliens recruited whole towns from Earth for contracts, and they used specialty transports where everybody except for the crew was put in stasis. Some of the big ones could carry a hundred thousand people in one go, and it saves a ton of space when you don’t need to feed all those people or give them room to move around. They just stack them in like cargo.”

“What difference does it make if the university shut down forty years ago rather than eighty? My dad says that you can’t leave buildings alone for more than a couple of years on Earth or they’ll have trees growing out of them.”

“I don’t remember all the details, but the campus was sold off to somebody, maybe a religious group.”

“Why didn’t they sell all of the books?”

“I don’t know, Dorothy. Maybe something to do with their religion. There was a note from Hildy Gruen, the president’s girlfriend, to be careful about what we say to them.”

“Arriving at Haven in one minute,” the floater informed them.

“Wow, look at all those tall buildings,” Dorothy said. “They remind me of hotels.”

“Probably student housing. These universities were supposedly like self-contained cities, with their own police force and everything.”

The



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