In their homes, much glass and steel. Their cars
are fast—walking’s for children, except in rooms.
When they take longer trips, they think with contempt
of the jet’s archaic slowness. Monastic
in dedication to work, they apply honed skills,
impatient of less than perfection. They sleep by day
when the bustle of lives might disturb their research,
and labor beneath fluorescent light in controlled environments
fitting their needs, as the dialects
in which they converse, with each other or with
the machines (which are not called machines)
are controlled and fitting. The air they breathe
is conditioned. Coffee and coke keep them alert.
But not one can say they don’t dream,
that they have no vision. Their vision
consumes them, they think all the time
of the city in space, they long for the permanent colony
not just a lab up there, the whole works,
malls, raquet courts, hot tubs, state-of-the-art
ski machines, entertainment . . . Imagine it, they think,
way out there, outside of ‘nature,’ unhampered,
a place contrived by man, supreme
triumph of reason. They know it will happen.
They do not love the earth.
—From A Door in the Hive