A good long one. Next to the library, that's the thing I miss most. It
would be even better, if they made the tubs bigger, so you could swim
around some. But just getting wet all over like that, and splashing in
the water, is fun. Of course, we could never spare enough water for
that on the ship.
Altogether, it was a good evening; everything was fine until I tried
to sleep in that bed. I felt as if I was being suffocated all over.
The floor was almost as bad, but in a different way. And once I got to
sleep, I guess I slept well enough, because I felt fine in the
morning. But then, I think I must have been on a mild oxygen jag all
the time I was down there; nothing seemed to bother me too much. That
morning, I felt so good I worked up my courage to go into a
restaurant again--a different one. The smell was beginning to be
familiar, and I could manage better. I experimented with a cereal
called oatmeal, which was delicious, then I went back to the motel,
packed up all my new belongings, left the key on the desk--as
instructed by the sign on the door--and started out for Denver.
* * * * *
Denver, according to the Encyclopedia Americana, is more of a true
metropolitan area than Colorado Springs; that means--on Earth--that it
is dirtier, more crowded, far less pleasant to look at or live in, and
a great deal more convenient and efficient to do business in. In
Denver, and with the aid of a Colorado driver's license for casual
identification, I was able to sell two of my larger diamonds fairly
quickly, at two different places, for something approximating half of
their full value. Then I parked the car they had given me on a side
street, took my suitcase, coat, and book with me, and walked to the
nearest car sales lot. I left the keys in the old car, for the
convenience of anyone who might want it.
Everything went extraordinarily smoothly, with just one exception. I
had found out everything I needed to know in that library, except that
when dealing with humans, one must always allow for waste time. If I
had realized that at the time I left Colorado Springs that morning,
everything might have turned out very differently indeed--although
when I try to think just what other way it _could_ have turned out, I
don't quite know ... and I wonder, too, how much they knew, or
planned, before they sent me down there....
This much is sure: if I hadn't assumed that a 70-mile trip, with a
60-mile average speed limit, would take approximately an hour and a
half, and if I had realized that buying an automobile was not the same
simple process as buying a nightgown, I wouldn't have been late for my
luncheon appointment. And if I'd been there on time, I'd never have
made the date for that night. As it was, I started out at seven
o'clock in the morning, and only by exceeding the speed limit on the
last twenty miles of the return trip did I manage to pull into that
diner parking space at five minutes before two.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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