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“Thank you,” she said “Bobbie Bobbie Draper”

“Chuck,” he replied “Look at the ground, then slowly look to the horizon Whatever you do, don’t look straight up”

“I think I got it this tilance and said, “Serin

On her second trip outside, she did as Chuck had recoround for a fewof massive sensory overload But only a little A thousand scents hit her nose, co for dominance The rich aroarden dome The oil and hot metal from a fabrication lab The ozone of electric motors All of them hit her at once, layered on top of each other and mixed with scents too exotic to na, constructionoff, all at once and all the time It was no wonder it had caused a panic Just two senses’ worth of data threatened to overwhelm her Add that impossibly blue sky that stretched on forever …

Bobbie stood outside, eyes closed, breathing until she heard Chuck let the door close behind her Now she was co Chuck to let her back in would be ad defeat He’d clearly done so to look weak in front of the cootten e of inputs, she opened her eyes again, looking down at the concrete of the ay Slowly, she lifted the sidewalks passing through reen space Beyond it in the distance was a gray wall that ularly spaced on it The UN co aet out

She needn’t have worried As she approached the guarded gate to the outside world, the security system queried her terminal, which assured it of her VIP status A cauard post scanned her face, compared it to the picture on file, and verified her identity while she was still twenty uard snapped her a sharp salute and asked if she’d need a ride

“No, just going for a walk,” she said

The guard s down the street leading away from the UN complex, then turned around to see two ar her at a discreet distance She shrugged and walked on Soot lost or hurt

Once Bobbie was outside the UN cos rose around her like walls of steel and glass, er saw it Sh-pitched whine and the scent of ozone

And people were everywhere

Bobbie had gone to a couple of ga Stadium on Mars, to watch the Red Devils play The stadium had seats for twenty thousand fans Because the Devils were usually at the bottoenerally held less than half that That relatively reatest number of humans Bobbie had ever seen in one place at one time There were billions of people on Mars, but there weren’t a lot of open spaces for the doo streets that seemed to stretch into infinity, Bobbie was sure she saw aine how o-inducing heights in every direction around her, and couldn’t Millions of people, probably in just the buildings and streets she could see

And if Martian propaganda was right, ht now didn’t have jobs She tried to i any particular place you had to be on any given day

What the Earthers had discovered is that when people have nothing else to do, they have babies For a brief period in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the population had looked like it row As her education, and frorew smaller