Free Cosmos Incorporated by Maurice G. Dantec Page A

mass production of folding suitcase-houses, and several million Japanese workers used these to live in the streets even as the first thousand-floor mega-towers were sprouting up like mushrooms.
    In North America, the concept was taken up and adapted to fit local conditions. In Grand Junction, smaller-scale capsule hotels are the norm, as they are in most of Canada and the neighboring American states. Simply put, they are
the
motel of the twenty-first century.
    This particular hotel was a quadrilateral-shaped building around sixty meters long on each side, with 110 capsules on each of its four walls; it was ten floors high, with a double-elevator nacelle and service, security, and maintenance capsules on each floor—the minimum legal standard for establishments of UManHome’s ilk. The building has a central patio covered with a pale pink resin roof six meters high, at the four corners of which are wide columns in the neoclassical style typical of this area. These columns rise to support the antiradiation dome that covers the structure and is meant to protect those within it from falling particles. A cement-composite and cheap polymetallic alloy cubbyhole separates the antiradiation dome from the rest of the building. There is a service staircase accessible via magnetic key; it is near the door to this staircase that Plotkin had been able to detect the substandard holes and cracks in the ceiling, with radiation levels slightly above the norm.
    There is, of course, a network of interior and exterior multifrequency surveillance cameras, standard-model, Ukrainian-made but of good quality. Their small, globular, black-violet eyes are dotted along the hallways and service stairways, in the elevators and corridors of the first floor, in the entryway and on the patio, in the reception office, and all the way out to the sidewalks, where an archway of simple metal tubes tries feebly to replicate a Soviet flight tower.
    The hotel is at almost the very end of Leonov Alley; the other motels are farther to the south, where the city’s population is more concentrated. After the numbers 30–32000—as Plotkin noted during his taxi ride—the strip changes little by little into a simple street lined with conifer woods and groups of houses, several dance clubs, and two or three more motels like his own, spaced farther and farther apart.
    At the northern end of the road, Plotkin can make out an autobridge. It was from that direction that the cyberdog had come, when he saw it for the first time.
    A dense and black wooded abyss caps the street and fills the horizon. The autobridge spans it and joins, via an unfinished access road, an old, unused municipal road. A billboard there reads, in yellow letters against a verdigris background: NORTH JUNCTION.
    This dilapidated municipal road leads east between two long, upward-sloping concrete ramps, then disappears among the emerald fronds of a hill lit sporadically by ghostly bluish streetlamps.
    To the west, the North Junction road descends Monolith Hills toward Gemini Drive and the downtown area, whose many lights create a glittering dome of brilliance that arches over the city and touches the cosmodrome to the north, spreading luminescence and various types of electromagnetic interference that render it not uncommon to see a missile transformed via malfunction into an exploding firework visible for a hundred kilometers.
    Crossing the autobridge, Plotkin finds a staircase carved into the concrete ramp that allows him to access the North Junction road. Another sign at the bottom of the stairs bears an arrow pointing east toward the hills and the words: TO HEAVY METAL VALLEY, NEXUS ROAD, 6 MILES.
    He briefly explores the area around the autobridge. There is only a peripheral surveillance system, a half-century-old panoramic camera set up by the Grand Junction Transportation Board; it has obviously been repaired twenty times and is still miraculously in operation, and sits atop an antique telephone