Arklet 174 belonged to a heptad, or a cluster of seven arklets all connected to a hexagonal frame; it and five other arklets surrounded a seventh, which was positioned in the middle of the hexagon, where it served as a twenty-four-hour-a-day common room and working area for the people who lived in the others. Four to five people were assigned to each of those, and two more had been shoehorned into small private cabins at the boiler room end of the central arklet, so the total population of the heptad, including Julia, was twenty-nine. This increased to thirty when Spencer Grindstaff managed to hitch a ride on a Flivver that was bringing a spare part and a technician from Izzy to fix a problem in one of the arklets’ thrusters. The technician returned to Izzy when he was finished, but Spencer stayed, and talked his way into a berth on Arklet 215. There was a tendency for arklets within a group to become segregated by sex over time, as the populations sorted themselves out; 215, which was predominantly male, ran on the same shift as 174, which was all-female. They both ran on second shift, which, for reasons that were now purely historical, tended to be culturally American. They slept from dot 8 to dot 16. First shift was Asian and third shift was European. The cultural shadings were perpetuated by food: the warm odors that greeted one’s nostrils upon entering the common space first thing in the "morning," the tastes one could expect to savor in the "evening." Since space food was lacking in variety, this was largely a matter of spices. The second shifters had their little bottles of Tabasco, the first shifters had plastic packets of curry powder, and so on.