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areas were Ukrainian or Asiatic. In this immense, polyglot community was to be found everything that was happening in America.
    He drove to Eagle Rock, an area that was still predominantly Old Establishment middle-class and found a motor inn that looked acceptable. In the lobby he punched the attention plate and the screen lit up. The clerk looked like a college girl working part-time out of her student apartment. "May I help you, sir?" She looked Hispanic and had a nice smile.
    "I need a single room for a few days. Do your rooms have holo service and infonet screens?"
    "Yes, sir, all our units are fully equipped. Please place your card in the slot and I'll key it for your room." Thor put his card in the slot and the girl's eyes widened when she read the credit rating.
    "Is there a car rental nearby?" Thor asked.
    "That information should be on the infonet, sir. All the nearby restaurants and entertainment centers will be listed, too. Just key in the name of your hotel: Omega Inns, Eagle Rock location number two."
    "Thank you," Thor said. The girl's image winked out and the number of his unit appeared on the screen along with a disembodied voice for the visually impaired or the illiterate: "Your unit is five six six. Your unit is five six six. Enjoy your stay."
    He parked the Porsche and took his bag up to the room. He chose some anonymous sports clothes from his small selection and found a nearby coffee shop for breakfast. Today he would institute his casual study of changes in holographic programming. He stopped in a convenience store and picked up several self-heating meals and appropriate beverages. This was going to call for a few inert days as a cushion veg, so he reminded himself to find a nearby dojo and make reservations for a daily workout.
    With his bag of supplies in one arm, he stuck his card into the slot beside the door. The door slid open and he set the bag on a table. The room wasn't what he was used to these days, but it was at least as good as his first-year college digs had been. It was a small cubicle about five paces on a side, with a fungusbed large enough for two, a small table with two chairs, and a tiny bathroom. One wall was a picture window looking toward the old downtown section of L.A., where several small smoke plumes probably denoted modest riots. Best of all, another wall was covered by a holoscreen. He studied its controls and found a fairly complete listing of channels and services. It had a mask for retinal projection, but he disliked the gadgets. They gave him headaches and made it difficult to focus his eyes for an hour after he removed them.
    He dragged a floor cushion before the screen, stuck his card in the screen slot, and keyed into the infonet He punched the keyboard for Media; Visual; History: –10 years; Daily program guide. An instant later the Greater Los Angeles guide for that date ten years previously began rolling slowly up the screen. He modified his request to the programming of the five major networks. He was instantly transported into a major nostalgia-wallow. There were all the programs he had grown up with. Many of them had been long-running series even at that date. At least one show in five had featured spacers in some way or other. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, space opera had become the premier format for action-adventure programming, and had stayed in that place for the next several decades. Only police and war series were even in competition.
    There was Pioneers , set in the asteroid belt at the time of the earliest mining operations; Tarkovskygrad , about the terrible first years of Martian settlement; L-5 , a semi-comedy in which the builders of the wholly artificial orbiting environments found themselves in a new, insane predicament every week. There was Space Marine! , which had been his favorite program while growing up, because Sam Taggart occasionally showed up as the senior commandant of the Corps. Makeup and computer enhancement had