Larry climbed up a wide crowded stairway sectioned by polished rails. On his side, people rushed upwards while on the other they moved down together with warm gusts of wind coming from behind them. Loud, brief whistles preceded every wind blow. When Larry reached a platform, the first thing his eyes met was a cinema-sized floating screen of the city railway map with train schedules and train figures moving in real time just above the assembled crowd.
More than thirty citizens had lined up by a single line of train tracks and waited for their transport. A few steps behind them stretched another less orderly line and then a few more steps further stood a sparse crowd. On the vast, a hundred meters long and thirty meters wide black and white chessboard floor there was not a single column, light pole, vending machine or any other obstruction. From five equally spaced robots floating along the wide stairway and repeating the words, "I'm here to help you. If you have a question, please ask." only one was busy talking to a person.
A three on three-meter rectangular mechanical worm with rounded corners emerged out of a tube on the left side of the platform. It came with a booming sound at a speed which blurred passenger shapes visible through a continuous window into a stripe of a drunk rainbow. People standing by the rails swayed and their hair fluttered. The train came from the maximum speed to a standstill in a matter of five seconds posing no discomfort for the passengers most of whom were standing still with their hands lowered and relaxed. The instant the train stopped its sides rolled up into a thing gap inside the roof. The line of people standing by the tracks stepped into the worm and one-fourth of passengers left it through the opposite side. Once the swift exchange finished, the doors slid down and the train accelerated as fast as it had stopped and disappeared in a tunnel ahead producing another loud sound explosion.
Every thirty seconds a new train arrived. Every train was marked in stripes of a particular color which corresponded to the colors of moving worms in the screen above. Orange and reddish worms zigzagged along the outskirts of the city and the middle districts, while green and blue cut the city map diagonally almost in straight lines. On the tracks they flew above the speed of sound and in the hologram they crawled along thin black lines. Watching the trains come and go, time flew by and soon Larry himself was standing by the tracks waiting for a train with a thick pink line.
Had he known what fear and death were, he would have been standing further away from the roaring monster coming at him and passing by a distance of an extended hand, blasting devastating winds to all directions as it went. The train stopped as abruptly and swiftly as the ones before it and after Larry took three steps forward he was on his way to the far north side of the city.
After a moment of darkness, the train emerged into bright sunlight. It ascended along a narrow bridge which started at the rooftops of apartment buildings and climbed closer to the sky until it reached the height of a medium-sized skyscraper The image below was that of an alien mushroom field where every mushroom had decided to mutate into whatever strange thing it wanted to be, be it a brick, a dolphin or a smoking transparent tube. It was a pleasant view for Larry's thoughtful eyes; though during the journey he never got the chance to marvel at it for long enough because every two to three minutes the train entered a confinement of another train station.
The worm dove further into the outskirts as it neared the north edge. During the last fourth of the journey, the train had descended downwards until it came to the ground level. Larry's final stop had no platforms, no roof, and no steps. It was a giant uniform square with many colorful statues of muscular people in tight clothes. The statues depicted the greatest athletes of the last three ages, most of them being flyball, football, basketball, space tennis players, and dancers. Among them was Bill Gordon an attacking flyball player, Larry's old friend and the person whom he came to watch play and with whom he would have an excruciating, boring supper after the game.
आप पढ़ रहे हैं
Escape from Paradise
कल्पित विज्ञानLarry Smith is a famous artist living a careless life in the world of Paradise, a wonderful and beautiful place in which disease, sickness, aging, or death does not exist, a place where beauty flourishes, where robots do all the work and everyone is...
