A crystal sphere, roughly 20 feet in diameter, was in a low enough orbit over Jupiter to afford the two men and four women floating on their backs inside of it a flattened view of the giant ball of gas stretching to infinity. For nearly an hour the toga-clad sextet lounged suspended in the bubble’s weightless atmosphere. A gentle vibration of botanically scented air soothed their bodies as no water massage or vibrating machine could. A breath-taking show of roiling Jovian clouds played a kinetic symphony of color before their eyes.

It was literally what the doctor ordered for all of them.

Vera, floating between Andrea and Glen, turned to Andrea and said, "You’ve got a knack for this VRS stuff. Truth!"

"Truth!" echoed Blue and Glen in chorus the way DZ kids did when one of their group said something the whole group was likely to agree with.

Kimberly Fleetwood and Leah Flores chuckle.

With the dark-skinned Leah on her right and the darker-skinned Blue on her left, Kimberly felt like the cream filling in a popular sandwich cookie. She knew better than to say that to either of them, but that didn’t keep her from enjoying the delicious thought. She felt as though she would melt away with joy at any moment. It had been like this in the after-glow of her first round of love-making with Blue. That was the only other time in her life she had experienced anything like it.

She looked around the six-point star formed by the virtual reality bodies of her unlikely collection of friends and the smile already on her face broadened. Friends. These people, who law and custom conspired to keep apart, were indeed her friends; her first real ones since adolescence. Looking at them, she knew that her heightened sense of well-being was only partially attributable to the VRS. It was the people she was sharing it with who gave the setting its full measure of gratifying potential. These people loved her unconditionally and she loved them. If there was an ultimate purpose to life, Kimberly had yet to come within sight of it. But if there were refueling stops of positive energy along the way, this had to be one of them.

Blue felt Kimberly’s hand in his and saw her reach for Leah’s. Andrea, who was already holding Leah’s hand reached for Vera’s. Vera took Glen’s, grinning broadly in anticipation of the two guys balking at clasping hands like a bunch of Campfire Girls.

They didn’t balk. Nor did they see the joining of hands as a ritual for young girls. They saw it partly as Andrea and Leah did, as an act of spiritual fellowship they enjoyed after one of Rev. Urlan’s more inspiring church service. They also saw it as a show of solidarity between teammates before a big game. They were as deeply affected by the power of what was happening as Kimberly, Andrea and Leah.

In a Pentecostal church, all but one of the people in the bubble would have eventually shimmied, shouted, fainted, spoken in tongues or danced in the aisles for the Lord. In this setting so close to one of God’s most awesomely beautiful creations, whatever it was that moved within the people involved, did so in a way that was less demonstrative but no less profound. It was like a protracted orgasm, without the convulsions or the mess.

Vera was the last to feel the energy flowing through the others. When it did hit, it hit hard. She threw back her head and groaned, as if in pain. The sound didn’t have to be explained to Glen or Kimberly or Leah or Andrea; they knew what it was.

When the tide of pure pleasure lifting the spirits of the six cultural outlaws ebbed, it left them on a much higher emotional plain than they started with. It was a result Andrea had hoped for when she set up the VRS under Blue’s expert guidance, though she couldn’t take credit for the intense experience which had brought them where they were. That had been a weird, unanticipated bonus. In retrospect it was a little scary; a step so far beyond her intellectual reach that she dared not give it much thought. She could see that everyone, with the possible exception of Blue, felt the same way.

Andrea broke the circle of joined hands with a stretch of her arms over her head. The sudden move propelled her downward in slow-motion, giving her time to mentally adjust to the VRP propulsion feature that Blue had designed into the program. In a vacuum, moving her arms would have gotten her nowhere. Blue had given the air in the sphere the properties of water without the wetness, which allowed her to swim in it as she would underwater.

Squealing with glee, she allowed here bare feet to touch down on the inner surface of the sphere. Leah saw what she was doing and swam to the opposite end of the enclosure as Andrea bent her knees and sprang forward, catching Leah around her waist before she could set herself and flinging her helplessly against Kimberly. Vera joined in the spontaneous game, followed swiftly by Glen, who took hold of Blue’s bare ankle and hurled him into the bouncing bodies of his other friends. Blue’s head bounced painlessly off of Andrea’s like one rubber ball bouncing off of another, throwing them both into a fit of laughter. They were hardly alone. Everyone was laughing, choosing sides, switching sides and making up rules of the game as they went.

The roughhousing inside the bubble reminded Vera of a pillow fight with her sister when they were little. To Leah it was more like Dodge’em Cars at Cedar Point. Kimberly likened it to a free-for-all in her parents’ swimming pool while Glen thought of a King-of-the-Hill contest he was an enthusiastic part of in the Army. Andrea flashed back on a nude, five-way, Jell-O wrestling match at a secret all-girl sex-club in college.

Blue could liken it to nothing in his recent past. For his friends, it was harmless uninhibited fun. For him, it was dangerous. Extremely dangerous.

Andrea was the first to notice Blue’s emotional retreat from the game. He was smiling and allowing himself to be bounced from place to place, but he was holding his emotions tightly in check. In most any other case, she would have seen that as a symptom of neurosis. In Blue’s case, she was beginning to see that something else was going on. Whatever it was, it was rational. And that scared her.

"Okay, okay," she said, trying to slow everyone down, "We have to stop...Come on, that’s enough!"

Blue tried to go along with her but Kimberly and Vera wouldn’t let him. Then Glen backed off and the others had to. Kimberly and Leah pouted. Vera protested. "Who says we have to stop?"

"Our husbands," said Kimberly, settling down between Blue and Glen and helping Leah to steady herself in front of them. "We’ve probably been gone too long already."

"Not me," said Vera. "I’m getting a divorce."

Kimberly and Leah gasped. Blue did a double-take.

"I am, too," said Glen.

Kimberly, Leah and Blue all gave Glen a double-take.

"I’m not a divorce lawyer," said Leah, "but I don’t have to know any more about the law than you do to know that’s not practical."

"Jill is a lush," said Glen.

Kimberly blinked.

Leah’s expression went from incredulous to hopeful. "Does she have a drinking license?"

"No," said Glen. "She’s been drinking without a license for as long as I’ve known her."

Kimberly couldn’t believe it. "I’ve never seen her intoxicated."

"You’ve never seen her sober," said Glen. "With these breath tablets they have, you’d never smell it on her and she knows not to get falling-down drunk. She kinda stays half in the bag all the time and she’s learned how to function well enough under the influence to fool people."

Vera frowned, "Is that why she doesn’t drive?"

"Yeah. If you can’t pass the Alcohol Consumption Test you can’t even take the test for a driver’s license."

"Why didn’t you tell me this before?"

"It’s not what you think, Vera," said Glen, reading the implied accusation that he hadn’t really wanted to leave his wife all those years he told Vera he couldn’t. "I didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to drink. I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t asked for the divorce."

It was Kimberly’s turn to be upset with him, "Are you saying that you risked a time scan that could have involved all of us instead of waiting until you were sure that she had as much to hide as you did?"

Glen blushed. He had no answer for that one.

After a long silence, Blue excused himself, mumbling something about having to use the bathroom before beaming out. Glen tried to excuse himself, but the women wouldn’t let him go.

"Damn!" said Vera to Glen, "It’s bad enough that you sat on this ACT thing all these years—"

"I didn’t sit on anything. I told you, I just found out."

Andrea could see that Vera wasn’t buying it. She wasn’t sure that she could buy it either, but she was willing to grant him the subconscious ambivalence it would have taken to overlook such an obvious way out of his marriage as his wife’s illegal consumption of alcohol. There was the question of raising their son, a job he may not have felt competent to handle alone or with a divorced woman in his household as his new wife. Andrea could think of other plausible explanations for Glen’s late decision to ask for a divorce. She could think of no good reason not to give him the benefit of the doubt.

"Let’s face it," said Andrea to Glen and the women who were upset with him, "falling in love in the twenty first century can be hazardous to anybody’s health if Big Brother doesn’t like the match-up. We’re in something big. And we’re in it together. We can’t go beating each other up over what we think somebody should or shouldn’t have done because of a time scan threat from the state."

Kimberly shook her head slowly. "It’s not the state we have to worry so much about, it’s the network."

Leah cocked her head, "Whattayah mean, the network? Condor? Tanaka?"

"Tanaka doesn’t have a Ballot channel," said Kimberly, "Condor is the one we have to worry about."

Leah scoffed, "CBI didn’t write the divorce laws. It didn’t invent the NEZ system or pass the Michigan Gidarb bill. All it does is program shows for telewindows."

"Wrong," said Kimberly. "You may think that your legal maneuvering has kept the State of Michigan off balance all this time, but it hasn’t. Condor has Jack so frustrated that he wishes he’d never gotten involved in this STOPIT campaign."

All ears were on Kimberly. This was explosive information Leah could and would make use of. "Did he tell you that?"

"Of course," said Kimberly, "I’m his wife. Every time he gets too close to the source of the X Channel he gets shut down cold. The Party won’t help without the go-ahead from the network and the network is the source."

Leah played the devil’s advocate. "Just because adult programmers and merchandisers tap into the Condor net doesn’t mean the network put’em up to it. Blue sure as hell doesn’t have anything to do with Condor or the Party. The wife of CBI’s Chief Executive Officer is a STOPIT charter member. How can you say they’re on our side and we have to worry about them at the same time?"

"I didn’t say they were on our side. They don’t give a damn about us. They probably want the same thing STOPIT does, only they don’t want to pull the plug now. Jack jumped the gun and they want to spank him for it. That’s what he thinks anyhow. Now that I’ve gotten him into watching the programs with me he sees the pattern. He recognizes a lot of faces you and I wouldn’t know and all of’em are like us—people who hate the Party. The point of having an X Channel is to cow everybody into towing the Party line every waking moment of their lives through fear of showing up there. If they didn’t let people like Blue tap into the net they wouldn’t have had the cover they needed for the transmissions they wanted to make."

Andrea nodded. "When enough people have been silenced, they can do away with the X Channel altogether."

The others nodded along with Andrea. "Yeah," said Vera. "And they can hold it as a threat indefinitely."

Slowly, the five friends drifted to the Jupiter side of the bubble for one last look before they beamed out of the VRS. Kimberly beamed out first. Vera swam into Glen’s arms and kissed him on the lips before she beamed out. Glen then nodded at the remaining women and beamed out.

"I guess we should leave," said Leah.