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elevator.
    “Madam?”
    “Are we going straight down to the ring now? We’re not going to see anything up here first?”
    “There is really nothing of special interest to see up here.”
    “Nothing? That’s surprising. What’s behind that far bulkhead, and the pipes back there, for instance—between here, where we’re standing, and the next spoke?”
    “Only storage tanks—fuel for the Earth and lunar transporters, various agricultural and industrial chemicals, and water.”
    “You must store an enormous amount of everything. There’s nothing else?”
    “Just storage tanks, madam.”
    Earnshaw glanced at Paula and raised an eyebrow. That was where the launchers for some of the ejectable modules that Jonathan Watts had talked about were supposed to be located.

    After the long flight up from Earth orbit, the return to normal bodyweight as the elevator moved out to the rim felt like a debilitating heaviness creeping through their bodies; but in another respect, it was reassuring to emerge walking naturally again.
    Valentina Tereshkova contained three built-up urban zones inside its main torus, which in the official bureaucratese of the predistributed literature were designated, mind-bogglingly, “high-density residential-occupational social units.” The bureaucrats didn’t have to live there, however, and the Russian guides who accompanied the visitors down from the hub referred to them simply as “towns.” Each was clustered around the base of one of the major spokes, which formed a central tower disappearing through the roof to connect to the hub. Alternating with the three major spokes were three slimmer ones, which terminated in the middle of the agricultural zones between the towns at built-up transportation and processing complexes known simply as Agricultural Stations 1, 2, and 3.
    The town that the party arrived in was called Turgenev, and constituted the administrative and social center. The tour began with a stop high up on the central tower above the main square, where the guides led the visitors through from the elevators onto an outside terrace for a general view of the colony. Paula judged the roof to be fifty to a hundred feet above where they were standing. The cross-section of the rim was not circular as in a true torus, but flattened like a wide automobile tire, with the roof stretching away horizontally for a distance on either side before it curved over and down to become the sides. Illumination came from two rows of what looked like immense, golden-glowing, venetian-blind slats receding upward and out of sight with the sweep of the roof—louvered reflectors that admitted light from an external mirror system. Power for the colony’s industries came from nuclear reactors located at the hub.
    Below the terrace, a ribbonlike miniworld curved away and upward between enclosing walls a little under a sixth of a mile apart. The nearer buildings were higher, merging into a monolith of tiered plazas, ramps, pedestrian ways, and bridges around the tower to form the town’s center. Architectural styles were varied and followed light, airy, clean designs incorporating plenty of color and glass, intermixed with screens of natural greenery. The strangest thing was the geometry, or lack of it—for everywhere and on all levels, walls met at odd, asymmetrical angles, passages branched between buildings, roadways curved beneath underpasses to emerge in a different direction, and nothing seemed to run square to anything else, anywhere. Presumably the intention was to break up the underlying continuity and dissolve the sense of living inside a tube. If so, it worked.
    “The architect who designed this must have had a fetish about rhomboids,” Paula remarked as they looked out from the terrace.
    There were many figures moving about; below, a vehicle emerged from behind a building, moving along some kind of track. Farther away, the townscape gave way to a more open composition of public buildings and