Location, location, and location, says my cousin Arnie, the real estate broker. The way I figure it, time plays a part in land values, too. The Nipple offices were topside because, when the rag was founded, topside meant cheap. Walter had had money even way back then, but he'd been a cheap son of a bitch since the dawn of time. He got a deal on the seven-story surface structure, and who cared if it leaked? He liked the view.

Now everybody likes views, and the fine old homes in Bedrock are the worst slums in King City. But I suspect one big blow-out could turn the whole city topsy-turvy again.

I had a corner office on the sixth floor. I hadn't done much with it other than to put in a cot and a coffeemaker. I tossed my hat on the cot, slapped the desk terminal until it lighted up, and pressed my palm against a read-out plate. My story was downloaded into the main computer in just under a second. In another second, the printer started to chatter. Walter prefers hard copy. He likes to make big blue marks on it. While I waited I looked out over the city. My home town.

The News Nipple Tower is near the bottom of the J of King City. From it you can see the clusters of other buildings that mark the sub-surface Malls. The sun was still three days from rising. The lights of the city dwindled in the distance and blended in with the hard, unblinking stars overhead.

Almost on the horizon are the huge, pearly domes of King City farms.

It's pretty by night, not so lovely by day. When the sun came up it would bathe every exposed pipe and trash pile and abandoned rover in unsympathetic light; night pulled a curtain over the shameful clutter.

Even the parts that aren't junk aren't all that attractive. Vacuum is useful in many manufacturing processes and walls are of no use for most of them. If something needed to be sheltered from sunlight, a roof was enough.

Loonies don't care about the surface. There's no ecology to preserve, no reason at all to treat it as other than a huge and handy dumping ground. In some places the garbage was heaped to the third story of the exterior buildings. Give us another thousand years and we'll pile the garbage a hundred meters deep from pole to pole.

There was very little movement. King City, on the surface, looked bombed out, abandoned.

The printer finished its job and I handed the copy to a passing messenger. Walter would call me about it when it suited him. I thought of several things I could do in the meantime, failed to find any enthusiasm for any of them. So I just sat there and stared out over the surface, and presently I was called into the master's presence.

#

Walter Editor is what is known as a natural.

Not that he's a fanatic about it. He doesn't subscribe to one of those cults that refuse all medical treatment developed since 1860, or 1945, or 2020. He's not impressed with faith healing. He's not a member of Lifespan, those folks who believe it's a sin to live beyond the Biblical threescore and ten, or the Centenarians, who set the number at one hundred. He's just like most of the rest of us, prepared to live forever if medical science can maintain a quality life for him. He'll accept any treatment that will keep him healthy despite a monstrously dissolute life style.