... Johnny’s been hittin’ the bistros just like in the old days before he began goin’ steady with his favorite dancing girl--who practically vanished from tri-di as well as the nite spots while they were makin’ it together.... Let that be a lesson, kids: don’t hide your light o’ love behind a bushel, or even a bushel of high-priced acres. If you don’t take her out to shine every once in a while, she’ll take off the first time some guy offers her the Moon.... _from the syndicated capitol gossip column, “Phlip Asides From Inside,” by Lenny Phlip, Mexcity, September 18, 1977._ PART EIGHT _September 21, 1977_ _Dollars Dome--4_ P.M. (_C.S.T._) He watched her face through the clear plastic of the pressure suit helmet, and tried to identify the “waiting” look. She was too absorbed to see him staring, but she wasn’t just thinking, or daydreaming. Listening? That was how it looked, but not _quite_.... He touched helmets. “What do you hear that I don’t?” he asked. Lee started slightly, like someone snapped out of daydream. “Hear?” she asked. _Well, it was worth a try_, he thought. Maybe just plain fantasizing, after all? “_See_ is more like it,” she said. “I was looking at the design they make. I guess I got half-hypnotized, following the lines.” He looked. When he first looked, before he began watching her instead, he had noticed only a small marble interweaving of ganglion-like ropes of cells. Now the randomness of the arrangement was less apparent; it _could_ hypnotize if you tried to follow the branchings-off and connections between rope-colonies. There was a sense of _almost_-order-- He shook his head and looked away. “Damn! You know I never really _looked_ at them before. They _do_ get you....” “Oh, they’re not all like that,” she said quickly. “Just the ones out here. Every time you change the soil or air, _they_ change. One of the tanks in Earth-normal, you’d think it was full of just _dirt_--they’re just scattered through like regular Earth soil microorganisms. But this Moon-type mutation links up this way, and Thad says--” That was at least the twelfth time on the trip he had heard _Thad says_. “--says the things that look kind of like nerves _are_ actually linked up that way--I don’t mean, they’re really like _nerves_, but each rope is a separate colony, and he thinks they might have some kind of communication even, where two ropes connect. Either that or some kind of symbiosis or syzygy or--” “Thad says all _that_?” Phil broke in, laughing at the earnest-student manner of her recitation.