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Q wore jeans and a good pair of athletic shoes. His shirt was the thin material, white,
of the hospital gown. It was getting hot, afternoon sun, as he trod the dirt road. Only a mile from the city, no vehicles
drove out here. Expanses of lawns, green and deep were on the outskirts of the city, now flatland leading on to the Masters
of Opulence facilities. His guitar went off on the MOO bus two days ago. No one would be stupid enough to throw the guitar
away as trash. First, try to find some idiot who got off the bus and forgot his guitar. Jenkins was a cruel bureaucrat along the line of happy winners, favored contestants in the game of life moved forward
to success. "Where he's going," laughed Jenkins, "he won't need the guitar." What if someone stole the guitar? That was probably
what happeneded. Jenkins could not find anyone who left the guitar. Except for one thing, the bus driver. He remembered the guy
carrying a guitar. He got off in the city. This bus driver, everyone knew, was blamed by Robertson for letting Q escape
in the first place. The world created a huge population wanting to come downtown and live in the finest buildings. Masters of Opulence,
Inc owned a huge, beautiful place ten miles out of town. Ten fame seekers a day left on the bus from downtown, driven by
a man punished now as a chicken factory worker. There was an address on record with his previous employment. They found
Jonny in the break room of Chicken Elegant, the major employer in this region of the United States.
Stein invented the twirling pillars.
In the old days, to create gravity spaceships were round with the floors and seats forming the inside of a sphere facing
in. As the globe spun, it held people to the outside shell of the sphere. Stein changed all that. As huge spaceships were
constructed in space the twirling pillars. These spun rapidly. Zenon's ship was four football fields long and two wide.
It was not rounded at any edge, built in space, it had no need for aerodynamics or rounded edges. The thick glass of Zenon's
ship went up five stories. Underneath the four hundred foot by 200 feet, in space, direction was determined by where one stood. To them, to
the human beings below, the floor towards the twirling pillars was down. That was the exact 400 ft by 200 ft floor where
Zenon's population of close to one hundred thousand stood. Morris and Susan enjoyed their part of the spaceship. They tended a potato
farm. They knew that under the three story, glass structure of the spaceship, they would look up and see infinite space.
They comprehended that thousands of humans populated this part of the ship. There existed plenty of jobs from the guard
posts watching at the top of the glass for possible collisions to the ground personnel maintaining the twirlers and gravity. A previous
advance ship was competing with Zenon. That ship made a speed 10 1/2 times as fast as the home ship (it would arrive 1000
years later and was four times as large as the advance ships. At a speed 10 1/2 times as fast as the home ship, outpacing
Zenon's ship, a collision occurred. Scientific data judged the object to be smaller than expected to destroy a 400 by 200
ship, even if it was all glass.
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