Read Joe Haldeman SF Gateway Omnibus: Marsbound, Starbound, Earthbound for Free Online Page A

stud. I dealt five-card stud a couple of times, the purest game, but that wasn't enough action for most of them.
    Dad was way ahead when I left, which was both satisfying and annoying. I learned that pilot Paul plays pretty much like me, close to the chest. If he stayed in, he had something—or he bluffed so well no one found out.
    I went in with ten dollars and left with twenty. That's another thing Uncle Bert taught me: decide before you sit down how much you're going to win or lose, and stop playing at that point, no matter how long you've been in the game. You may not make any friends if you win the first two hands and leave. But poker's not about making friends, he said.
    The gravity was down to 0.95 when I went back to my chair, and I could almost tell the difference. It was a funny feeling like "Where did I leave my purse?"
    I could just see North America coming up over the edge of the world. Zoomed in on Mexico City, a huge sprawl of places you probably wouldn't like to visit without an armed guard.
    Card was still in virtual, doing something with aliens or busty blondes. I put on the helmet myself and chinned through some of the menu. Nothing that really fascinated me. Curious, I spent a few minutes in "Roman Games: Caligula," but it was loud and gory beyond belief. Settled into "midnight warm ocean calm," and set the timer for six, then watched the southern sky, the beautiful Cross and Magellanic Clouds, roll left and right as the small boat bobbed in the current. I fell asleep for what seemed like about one second, and the chime went off.
    I unlocked the helmet and instantly wished I was back on the calm sea. Someone had heard the dinner bell and puked. They couldn't wait for zero-gee? There went my appetite.
    After a few minutes there was a double chime from the monitor and a little food icon, a plate with wavy lines of steam, started blinking in the corner. I went upstairs to get it, hoping I could eat up there.
    I was the second person up the ladder, and there was a short line forming behind me. They said they would call ten people at a time for dinner, I guess at random.
    There were ten white plastic boxes on the galley table, with our seat numbers. I grabbed mine and snagged a place at the center table, across from the rich kid, Barry.
    He had the same thing I did, a plate with depressions for beef stew with a hard biscuit, a stack of small cooked carrots, and a pile of peas, all under plastic. Everything was hot in the middle and cool on the outside.
    "I guess we can say good-bye to normal food," he said, and I wondered what dinner normally was to him. Linen and crystal, sumptuous gourmet food dished out by servants? "Water boils at 170 degrees, at this pressure," he continued. "It doesn't get hot enough to cook things properly."
    "Yeah, I read about coffee and tea." All instant. The stew was kind of chewy and dry. The carrots glowed radioactively and the peas were a lurid bright green and tasted half raw.
    Funny, the peas started to roll around on their own. A couple jumped off the plate. There was a low moan that seemed to come from everywhere.
    "What the hell?" Barry said, and started to stand up.
    "Please remain seated," Dr. Porter shouted over the sound. The floor and walls were vibrating. "If you're not in your assigned seat, don't return to it until the climber stops."
    "Stops?" he said. "What are we stopping for?"
    "Probably not to pick up new passengers," I said, but my voice cracked with fear.
    Dr. Porter was standing with her feet in stirrup-like restraints, her head inside a VR helmet, her hands on controls.
    "There isn't any danger," her muffled voice said. "The climber will stop for a short time while the ribbon repair vehicle separates to repair a micrometeorite hole." That was the squat machine on top of the climber. It separated with a clang and a lurch; we swayed a little.
    I swallowed hard. So we were stuck here until that thing stitched up the hole in the tape. If it broke, we'd shortly