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roller-coaster ride, had she known what a roller coaster was. The craft rolled, pitched, and yawed with controlled violence. When the sky showed, it started taking on color: inky violet brightening to cerulean. The stars faded away.
    They came in over the Florida coast to a vista of breath-stopping and, to O’Hara, thoroughly alien beauty. The sun was low in the west, almost dim enough to look at directly, illuminating a spectacular array of high cumulus, crimson and gunmetal against a deepening sky. The ocean was almost black, studded with froth that the sun tinged red. The horizon had lost its curve: for the first time in her life the Earth was not just a planet, however special. It was the world.
    From the shoreline to the horizon was a complicated maze of buildings and roads. If you could turn New New inside out and lay it down flat, it wouldn’t cover one tenth part of what was unrolling underneath her, yet this was a small city, she knew.
    It changed abruptly at the edge of the spaceport’s territory. Swampland and scrub, mangrove jungle laced with streams and lakes. A wide, bridged river with a queue of huge barges carrying dumbos to be launched and refilled.
    They were falling lower, impossibly low, and seemed to be gaining speed. An illusion, she knew, but she tightened her throat against crying out as the ground flashed by underneathand then they hit hard, bounced, and the tires were screaming protest; then braking rockets boomed, pushing her hard against the restraining straps, hard enough to hurt her hipbones and shoulders; then they were rolling, more and more slowly, to a quiet stop. Her eyes filled with tears and she started to laugh.

13
Three letters
    John,
    Where to start? You’ve been to the Cape, so I won’t give you a travelogue. It gave me a chill, though, the spaceport’s defenses. I counted ten of those offshore gigawatt lasers; there were probably more over the horizon. (Horizon! This damned planet bends the wrong way.) I wonder if they still work.
    We took a subway to old New York, which only took a little over an hour, even though we stopped at Atlanta, Washington, and Philadelphia. Tempted to get out and see those places, but I guess there’s time for that later.
    I called the school when we got to the station (for some reason they call it Pennsylvania Station; Pennsylvania must be over a hundred kilometers away). They sent a woman to pick me up, an older woman who had emigrated from Von Braun after the crack-up.
    A lot of New York City came down in the Second Revolution, but they must have rebuilt with a vengeance. Pictures can’t do justice, can’t convey the size and intensity of it. I almost fainted when we stepped out on the street.
    I suppose a lot of this wouldn’t affect you, since London is bigger and older than New York. Humor me, though (you’re so good at it).
    Looking up makes me dizzy anyhow. It’s the samemiddle-ear problem you had when you moved to New New, but in reverse. I’m used to operating in a rotating frame of reference. But there’s so much to look up at. The tallest thing I’ve ever seen was the lift tube in Devon’s World. You could stand that up on any street here and not notice it.
    We came up a long escalator and stepped out on 34th Street. I just stared (Mrs. Norris was ready for it and had me by the arm). Half the buildings are so tall their tops are above the cloud. The cloud, as Daniel warned me, is atmospheric pollution from the industries to the south. They keep it at the thousand-meter level with some sort of electrical thing, but it doesn’t work perfectly. The air is thick and has a chemical smell, not too unpleasant. I don’t even notice it anymore, after two days.
    Mrs. Norris went to a stanchion on the sidewalk and pushed a button twice, calling us a cab. Do they have those in London? They’re little yellow robot vehicles, most of them two-person size, some bigger. You get in and tell it your destination, and it computes the most efficient