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He could feel hardness under the resilient surface and got the impression that it was rubber padding over something very dense and heavy like bone that held him. He could see large patches of light in regular rows above but could make out little detail. |
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The room was small but big enough for Mike. There was a closet in one wall with built-in drawers and a sliding door. The door had a big mirror on it. A clear window in the ceiling provided a sky-light about a meter square. He looked around for some way to open it, but couldn't figure out how. |
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It was like the pictures he'd seen of the fabled Amazon basin but thicker and higher and it covered every square meter of the planet that wasn't water. They'd flown for hours over the endless rolling sea of dark green, marveling at its uniformity and richness. They saw no mountains to speak of, just rolling, green terrain broken only by the irregular band of a shallow sea that wrapped the globe, or an occasional outcropping forced up from below. |
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It took less than a minute to cover the distance from his shelter to the perimeter. He jumped up on a fallen log at the jungle's edge then leapt like an ape into the thick foliage, feeling his blood heat in anticipation. The cool green branches and rough vines felt good against his bare skin. |
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Phil walked over and cautiously nudged one with a toe, too. The bumpy skin was loose under his foot but the loose skin couldn't hide the thick muscles under it. He imagined what they would look like scrabbling up out of those odd seats in a rage and hoped he wouldn't get a chance to see it. |
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She hoped a miracle would happen and when she opened her eyes she would see blue sky and bright light. She prayed for it, but when she finally looked, the ceiling's black surface filled her vision and gave dark substance to the dread. The black, bubbly surface would press down on her for the next twelve hours as she retreated to the darkest regions of her mind, and groaned. When the cutting began, the ceiling’s ugliness would stamp its wet print on her soul once more. |
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The worst part was that all the food was out on the floor and you had to reach over and around all the other hands and sometimes two hands came down on the same bag of chips and if one of you was nice, a hand would drift over to a box of cookies or something else. It was the embarrassment of having to reach and make claim to the food that she hated most. There was almost always enough. They were very careful about making sure the incubators had enough food. |
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She had put a little extra effort into the bed, which was the only meaningful accouterment. They were allowed access to the blankets and the abundance of sleeping bags in the dump on a regular basis. It was always warm in the ship and she couldn't stand the idea of sleeping in a sleeping bag because of it, but the idea of being uncovered while she slept bothered her so she had a nice soft bed made of several sleeping bags as a mattress and a light blanket over that. |
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She'd worked as a mechanic in a steel mill in Detroit one summer and it had a place called the soaking pits. They put huge ingots of steel down in the soaking pits and put a huge thick cover over them and blasted them with hot gas until they were soaked through with heat and red hot so they could roll the ingots out into thin sheet steel. This place reminded her of that, only it was a chamber filled with goo with a two-foot space of air above her head. |
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He walked toward the tunnel and with each step he felt the sticky, resilient floor tug at his feet. He watched the clear liquid dripping from the nipples covering the roof of the tunnel for a moment, then stuck his hand out cautiously into the rain to make sure it was really water and not acid. |
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The warehouse was cluttered and disorganized to Mike's eye, but the others took no notice. Eddie introduced himself to a guy who was stacking containers with a fork-lift and asked him where he could find Joan Thomas. He pointed to an office attached to the dock a few hundred meters away. On the way, they walked past hundreds of coffin-sized Number 10 shipping containers packed with goods ready for distribution. |
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The terrain on Verde was rugged under the thick carpet of jungle. Ravines, pits, hills and an occasional marsh pond dotted the landscape, making travel by truck or small tractor dicey at best. The ravines were the worst; steep drop-offs choked with vegetation. Some of them were fifty meters deep. The defoliators had done a good job of whacking back the plant life, but the terrain’s coarse characteristics remained -- at least for the moment. |
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