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Eidgenössische technische Hochschule Mobile

The spaceliner ETH Mobile was not a hollowed asteroid but rather one of the very large manufactured ships built in lunar orbit in the previous century. Made by Swiss universities and engineering firms that continued to operate them, they were combinations of glassy metals, bioceramics, aerogels, and water both frozen and liquid. They were extremely fast; frequent small fission explosions firing behind a pusher plate at the rear of the ship accelerated it at a one-g equivalent for those inside, and this very rapid rate of acceleration was typically maintained to the midpoint of a trip, at which point the ship was going so fast that it was necessary for it to turn and decelerate at the same rate. But even decelerating for half of each trip, the average speeds were so high that relatively short transit times were possible all over the solar system, and the longer the trip, the faster the top speeds became, so it was not a linear thing: Earth to Mercury took three and a half days; Saturn to Mercury, eleven days; across the Neptune orbit (“width of solar system”), sixteen days.

ETH Mobile was outfitted with characteristic Swiss elegance, undemonstrative and superb, evoking the ocean liners of the classic era but entering whole new realms of human comfort, the floors warm, the air tangy, the food and drink a string of masterpieces. There were floor-to-ceiling window walls on many of the public decks, affording spectacular views of the stars and any local object they passed. About ten thousand people could be accommodated, all in luxury. Design in the hotel section combined great slabs of metal with vegetable prints and a William Morris wall vine. The park that filled one tall floor of the ship was an arboretum occupied by a semitropical canopy forest, featuring parts of several South American biomes, including animals from these zones that could handle a few moments of weightlessness without too much risk of injury. What the animals thought of these turnaround moments of zero g was a matter much studied but little understood. It did not appear to make the animals different in subsequent behavior. Sloths did not even seem to notice. Monkeys and jaguars and tapirs floated up chattering and moaning, coyotes howling with their usual genius; then after a suspended moment they would all together float sweetly back to the ground. In this same time the sloths hung from their branches—down, sideways, down again, sometimes spinning all the way round—never once waking up. Not unlike certain people in that regard.