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breaking – last time it was the incredibly important flash that Hollywood heartthrobs Brad and Bobby Gonzalez were breaking up. It's called a freeze crowd. If you aren't wearing your own stereo, or if you didn't give goose crap about the affairs of two empty-headed pretty boys, it looked like time had stopped, or that somebody had sprayed everyone with liquid nitrogen. A few others were hurrying, like us. Most likely they had relatives on the American East Coast or Caribbean islands, like us.
    See, our grandmother lived in Daytona Beach.
    I mean, right on the beach.
    The Blast-Off was bigger than it had been in my dad's day, but it was still a mouse among elephants. The "Blast-Off Tower Wing" had been added to the old two-story structure the year I was born, though Grandma admitted it was a grandiose word for a building whose neighbors were twenty-five and thirty stories high.
    Which would stand up to a tsunami better? I wondered. A ten-story mouse or a thirty-story elephant?
    And they'd said to get up high.
    How high is high?
     
    We came tearing around the side of the front desk at a speed that normally would have earned us a chewing out even from Dad. No Running, Jumping, or Skateboarding in the Lobby! The signs were posted everywhere, you couldn't miss them, and right under it Nonresidents Must Wear Helmets at all Times ! It was for Earthies, who are always hurting themselves or somebody else by something as simple as trying to turn a corner too fast without leaning over far enough. As for jumping... there's a reason why all the ceilings in the Red Thunder Hotel are padded.
    We didn't wear no stinking helmets, of course. Not since we were eight. We'd have died of shame.
    Actually, only one staff member noticed us at all. The rest were staring at the various news channels on the walls behind the desk. Nobody was getting checked in or out, but that was okay; nobody was trying to. The freeze crowd effect was still working for most of them.
    As we barreled around the corner Elaine, a beautiful Indonesian clerk who I'd had a crush on since I was old enough to have crushes, and our best friend on the day staff, looked over at us with an expression of concern on her face. She knew where our grandmother lived. And I suddenly remembered that she was a survivor of the '04 tsunami in the Indian Ocean. She had told us about it once, I couldn't remember the circumstances. She had been three, and her whole family was wiped out. She was found in the branches of a tree, barely alive, three days later. No wonder she looked concerned.
    We ran down the ramp in the narrow hallway. The Owner's Suite is in the Frank Lloyd Wright prairie style, like the rest of the Red Thunder, and if that doesn't make a lot of sense to you, you're not the only one. The decor is all wood, angular and spare, and the big room is dominated by a floor-to-ceiling wall of what looks like glass panes, angled inward at the top. It shows a nice vista of hotel row, which is a long line of whimsical towers and attached pleasure domes that reminds a lot of people of the Las Vegas Strip.
    It's actually just vidpaper. We were standing about ten feet below ground level; there was nothing but concrete beyond the glass. But it fools the eye. Just as good as the view from the very expensive penthouse suites.
    When we get tired of it, we switch it to some Earth scene.
    Dad doesn't wear stereos. Never. He hates them, and would be a lot happier if they'd never been invented. He'd be a lot happier if no one in his family ever wore them, but he knows that's a battle he can't win. He gets even by making the desk clerks use old-fashioned screens and keyboards. "This is a first-class establishment," he says. "Our clients don't want to see a bunch of people wearing space cadet goggles." That was years ago, when stereos really did look sort of goofy. The ones me and Elizabeth and most other people wear these days are slim, formfitting, you'd hardly know them from regular wraparound