She showed him the living quarters. They centered in a great open space sixty feet long and twenty wide and high. There were bookshelves, and two balconies, and chairs. Private cabins opened from it on different levels, but there were no steps to them. Yet there were comfortable chairs with straps so that when a man was weightless he could fasten himself in them. There were ash trays, ingeniously designed to look like exactly that and nothing else. But ashes would not fall into them, but would be drawn into them by suction. There was unpatterned carpet on the floor and on the ceiling.
“It’s going to feel queer,” said Sally, oddly quiet, “when all this is out in space, but it will look fairly normal. I think that’s important. This room will look like a big private library more than anything else. One won’t be reminded every second, by everything he sees, that he’s living in a strictly synthetic environment. He won’t feel cramped. If all the rooms were small, a man would feel as if he were in prison. At least this way he can pretend that things are normal.”
Her mind was not wholly on her words. She’d been frightened for Joe. And he was acutely aware of it, because he felt a peculiar after-effect himself.
“Normal,” he said drily, “except that he doesn’t weigh anything.”
“I’ve worried about that,” said Sally. “Sleeping’s going to be a big problem.”
“It’ll take getting used to,” Joe agreed.
There was a momentary pause. They were simply looking about the great room. Sally stirred uneasily.
“Tell me what you think,” she said. “You’ve been in an elevator that started to drop like a plummet. When the Platform is orbiting it’ll be like that all the time, only worse. No weight. Joe, if you were in an elevator that seemed to be dropping and dropping and dropping for hours on end—do you think you could go to sleep?”
Joe hadn’t thought about it. And he was acutely conscious of Sally, just then, but the idea startled him.
“It might be hard to adjust to,” he admitted.