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Perhaps the biggest attention grabber in the Canada pavilion, however, is Hystar, a 16-ft. flying saucer that bears more than a passing resemblance to one of Steven Spielberg's interstellar luxury liners. Filled with helium and propelled by five tiny rotors, Hystar puts on a show in the main hall every 20 minutes, moving, without help of strings or wires, up, down and sideways, as if it had never heard of gravity. The insouciant little saucer has been such a hit--often getting spontaneous applause--that its builders plan to equip it with a TV camera next month so that audiences can watch themselves watching it.
After a neck-wrenching look at Hystar, a visitor might do well to take the SkyTrain, a monorail actually, to the main part of Expo back across town on a 173-acre site along a harbor inlet. Most people probably will feel duty bound to see the pavilions of the Big Three, the U.S., the Soviet Union and China. The bad news is they are far apart from one another, and the lines in front are among the longest; the worse news is that they all seem to have signed a big-power pact to be boring.
China's looks like a discount warehouse, complete with piles of rugs and gewgaws. Inside the Soviet Union's pavilion, there are models of satellites and space stations, a huge pond on which a few little ships make desultory voyages, and a large relief map of the U.S.S.R., with lights pinpointing major cities and prompting a sense of unfortunate irony. In each group there is almost always some black humorist who asks, "Is Chernobyl the one that's glowing brightest?" The American pavilion, dedicated at the last moment to the seven astronauts killed in the Challenger disaster, deals exclusively with space. But most Americans, and most others as well, have already seen much of the material on TV. Even a full-scale interior mock-up of the yet-to-be-built space station has a tired back-to-the-future look: Captain Kirk's Starship Enterprise put on a better show.
All three countries might have taken a lesson from the Japanese, who have thought small rather than big. Much of their display consists of a miniature reproduction of the Japanese transportation system: trains scurrying along a maze of tracks, trucks and cars hurrying along the roads (but stopping obediently for red lights), boats going into harbors, and, up above, airplanes circling on eternal flight paths. Fairgoers whose eyes seemed to glaze at the space gadgetry in the other pavilions appeared mesmerized by this souped-up train set.
Serendipity may prove the best guide, for much of the pleasure of Expo 86 can be found in less expected places and in the more unsophisticated exhibits. The Thai pavilion, for example, contains the throne, 150 years old and encrusted with gold leaf, on which the Siamese King rode his elephant into battle. When the fighting became fierce, explains a helpful sign, the King would leap onto poor Dumbo's neck, the better to spear the enemy. If Hannibal had been so athletic, Carthage might never have fallen. The Singapore exhibit has a replica of a local market, right down to herbs, teas and garish magazines, and the Italian has replicas of Marconi's original radio sets.