Furthermore, ammonia and methane clouds ensured that no man without a portable environment unit was going to wander around. Possibly because of these conditions, which Billiard had passed through only hours before on his way from the shuttle field to the dome, it seemed even warmer inside than the 25 degrees Centigrade which the colonists who had built the dome considered optimum. Even though windows were completely useless in a necessarily enclosed, controlled environment, Billiard’s room was equipped with a pair of them; they were cast from delite, the material used in spaceship port construction, and were at least three-quarters of an inch thick. Local law required that each building inside the dome be environmentally self-contained, in case of dome failure, and only delite was adequate for windows, in case of explosive decompression. It was expensive to rent a suite with such old-fashioned windows—and there were consequently few apartments that had them—but Billiard was willing pay for it: he had a role that had to be played, and that role required that he accept nothing but the very best.
