"We'll go after the ride shuts tonight," Lester said. "All of us. I'll buy him a fruit basket and bring him a mini." The minis were Lester's latest mechanical computers, built inside of sardine cans, made of miniaturized, printed, high-impact alloys. They could add and subtract numbers up to ten, using a hand crank on the side, registering their output on a binary display of little windows that were covered and uncovered by tiny shutters. He'd built his first the day before, using designs supplied by some of his people in Brazil and tweaking them to his liking. The day was as close to a normal day on the ride as Perry could imagine. The crowd was heavy from the moment he opened, and he had to go back into the depths and kick things back into shape a couple times, and one of the chairs shut down, and two of the merchants had a dispute that degenerated into a brawl. Just another day running a roadside attraction in Florida. Lester spelled him off for the end of the day, then they counted the take and said good night to the merchants and all piled into one of Lester's cars and headed for the hospital. "You liking Florida?" Lester called over the seat as they inched forward in the commuter traffic on the way into Melbourne. "It's hot; I like that," Hilda said. "You didn't mention the awesome aesthetics," Lester said. Suzanne rolled her eyes. "Ticky-tacky chic," she said. "I love it here," Lester said. "That contrast between crass, overdeveloped, cheap, nasty strip-malls and unspoiled tropical beauty. It's gorgeous *and* it tickles my funny bone." Hilda squinted out the window as though she were trying to see what Lester saw, like someone staring at a random-dot stereogram in a mall-store, trying to make the three-d image pop out. "If you say so," she said. "I don't find much attractive about human settlement, though. If it needs to be there, it should just be invisible as possible. We fundamentally live in ugly boxes, and efforts to make them pretty never do anything for me except call attention to how ugly they are. I kinda wish that everything was built to disappear as much as possible so we could concentrate on the loveliness of the world." "You get that in Madison?" Lester said. "Nope," she said. "I've never seen any place designed the way I'd design one. Maybe I'll do that someday." Perry loved her just then, for that. The casual "oh, yeah, the world isn't arranged to my satisfaction, maybe I'll rearrange it someday." The duty-nurse was a bored Eastern European who gave them a half-hearted hard time about having too many people visit Death Waits all at once, but who melted when Suzanne gave her a little talk in Russian. "What was that all about?" Perry whispered to her as they made their way along the sour-smelling ward. "Told her we would keep it down -- and complimented her on her manicure." Lester shook his head. "I haven't been in a place like this in so long. The fatkins places are nothing like it."