But there was little zing in his voice and the words were, of course, lost in the confused sea of sound—musical, argumentative, operatic and otherwise. Heedless, the orchestras played, the ballet dancers whirled, painters sketched, gymnasts tumbled, dramatists soliloquized and the vocalists made it plain that they would give no quarter.
McWorther's World shud-shuddered. And the towering peaks of machinery and grain, cases and crates rumbled ominously as their slopes shifted. Titus' ears popped and he suddenly felt a giddiness that was all out of proportion to the number of juleps he had consumed.
An all-too-brief silence fell over the multitude. Then, as stability returned to the planetoid, they dived back into their various activities.
They were damned fools, McWorther thought. Even if it meant risking their lives, they would be willing to stay there and consort in their Olympian ecstasy of artistic communion. It was a field day, old home week, esoteric anschluss, a fraternal blowout—all rolled into one.
A distant explosion rent what was left of the compact atmosphere. And, as an immediate consequence, additional hundreds of tons of grain hissed down a nearby slope and eased into the lake.
Somewhat concerned, Titus stared at the myriad points of light coruscating deep out in space. What was happening was obvious: There were millions, perhaps billions of articles of freight in the same orbit—all maintaining their distances from the planetoid and from one another by virtue of their mass-repulsion generators. And, where that many electronic units were concerned, the breakdown factor became a predictable quantity. McWorther's World could now expect to be the target of a plunging chunk of cargo once every four or five minutes.
Another few hours, Titus realized, and that interval would be reduced to four or five seconds. For he could readily see the infinite streams of freighters that were still arriving and dropping off additional cargo.
As a matter of fact, it was so thick out there now that only a faint, diffused light was coming through from McWorther's Sun.
Titus poured himself another mintless, sugarless, iceless julep.