by Ben Bova
To my surprise, Sam’s name was at the top of the list of entrants. Several of the spectators noticed it, too.
“That Sam,” a silver-haired, dark-skinned man chuckled, “he’ll do anything to put himself in the limelight.”
One of the better-looking women said, “Well, it’s his tournament, after all.”
Sam had detailed one of his publicity aides to go out to the first tee and introduce the competitors. And there was a flock of sports reporters there, too, waiting for the golfers to come out.
One by one they stepped through the airlock and out onto the barren, airless floor of Hell Crater. Most of them wore exoskeletons, which made them look like ponderous, clanking robots. As each one reached the first tee the reporters huddled around him or her and asked the same tired old questions:
“How do you feel about playing golf on the Moon?”
“Will your spacesuit hamper your playing?”
“What do you think your chances of winning are?”
And then Sam came waltzing through the airlock and out onto the floor of Hell Crater. We all gasped with surprise. He was wearing nothing more over his coveralls than what looked like a transparent plastic raincoat.
It had leggings and booties that covered his shoes, and gloves so thin I could see the veins on the backs of Sam’s hands. His head was encased in a transparent bubble of a helmet, his red thatch of buzz-cut hair clearly visible through it. The spacesuit looked impossibly flimsy.
The news team that was interviewing each golfer clustered around Sam like a pack of hounds surrounding a fox, firing questions about his spacesuit.
“Nanofabric,” Sam exclaimed, the crooked grin on his face spreading from ear to ear.
Before the news people could take a breath, Sam explained, “The suit was built by nanomachines, from the nanolab at Selene. Dr. Kristine Cardenas is the lab’s director, you know. She won the Nobel Prize for her work on nanotechnology.”
“But … but it’s so … light,” one of the newswomen gushed, from inside her standard hard-shell spacesuit. “How can it possibly protect you?”
“How come it doesn’t stiffen up, like regular suits?” asked another.
“How can it protect you against the radiation?”
“How can it be so flexible?”
Sam laughed and raised both his nanogloved hands to quiet their questions. “You’ll have to ask Dr. Cardenas about the technical details. All I can tell you is that the suit gives as much protection as a standard suit, but it’s a lot more flexible. And easier to put on and take off, lemme tell you. Like old-fashioned pajamas.”
The other golfers, in their standard suits or exoskeletons, hung around the edge of the crowd uneasily. None of them liked being upstaged.
Mai hadn’t appeared yet, and I began to wonder if something was wrong. Then she came through the airlock, wearing a nanosuit, just like Sam.
“No!” I bellowed, startling the tourists sitting around me. I bolted from my chair and ran to the airlock.
There was a team of beefy security guards at the airlock hatch, in dark gray uniforms. They wouldn’t let me take a suit and go outside.
“Only players and the reporters,” their leader told me. “Mr. Gunn’s orders.”
Feeling desperate, I raced to the communications center, down the corridor from the airlock area. It was a small chamber, studded with display screens and staffed by two men and two women. They didn’t want to let me talk to Mai, or Sam, or anybody else out there on the golf course.
“Mr. Gunn’s orders,” they said.
“To hell with Sam’s orders,” I roared at them. “This is a safety issue. Lives are at stake!”
They told me to call the safety office and even offered me a spare console to sit at. I scanned the available comm channels and put my call through. To Mai.
Before the technicians realized what I’d done, Mai’s face came up on the central screen of my console. She smiled at me.
“You left without saying good-bye,” she chided gently.
“Get back inside!” I fairly screamed. “If Sam wants to kill himself that’s his business, but I won’t let him kill you!”
Mai’s face went stern. “Chou, do you think I’m an idiot? This suit is perfectly safe.”
“That may be what Sam says, but—”
“That’s what Dr. Cardenas says,” Mai interrupted. “I’ve spoken with her for hours about the suit. It’s been tested at Selene for months. It’s fine.”
“How can it be?” I was nearly hysterical with fear. “It’s nothing but a thin layer of transparent fabric.”
“Ask Dr. Cardenas,” said Mai. “I’ve got a golf game to play.”
She cut the connection. My screen went blank.
Still sitting at the console, with all four of the comm techs staring at me, I put in a call to Dr. Kristine Cardenas, at the nanotechnology laboratory in Selene.
All her lines were busy. News reporters were besieging her about the nanosuit.
I sank back in the console’s little wheeled chair, terrified that Mai would die of asphyxiation or radiation poisoning or decompression out there in that flimsy suit. Insanely, I felt a grim satisfaction that if Mai died, Sam probably would too.
Numbly I pushed the chair back and began to get up on wobbly legs.
One of the technicians, a youngish woman, said to me, “You can watch the tournament from here, if you like.”
I sank back onto the chair.
One of the male techs added, “If you can sit quietly and keep your mouth shut.”
That’s what I did. Almost.
* * *
IT WAS A weird golf game.
Sam was nothing more than a duffer, yet he was holding his own against some of the best players on Earth.
Encased in an exoskeleton suit, Rufus, the muscular South African, literally scorched his drives out of sight. In the light lunar gravity, the Day-Glo orange balls rose in dreamy slow motion, arced lazily across the starry sky, and sailed gently toward the ground, disappearing over the short horizon.
He was overdriving, slamming the ball beyond the green, into the deep treacherous sand. Then he’d flail away, blasting explosions of sand that slowly settled back to the ground while his ball zoomed into another area of deep sand. When he finally got his ball on the green his putting was miserable.
The more bogeys he got, the harder he powered his drives and the more erratic his putts. In the display screen of the console I was watching I could see his face getting redder and redder, even through the tinted visor of his helmet. And his exoskeleton suit seemed to be getting stiffer, more difficult to move in. Probably sand from his desperate flailings was grinding the suit’s joints.
Sam just took it easy. His drives were erratic, a slice here, a hook there. It took him two or three shots to get on the green, but once there, his putts were fantastic. He sank putts of twenty, even thirty meters. It was as if the ball was being pulled to the cup by some invisible force.
Mai was doing well, also. Her drives were accurate, even though nowhere near long enough to reach the greens. But she always landed cleanly on the fairway and chipped beautifully. She putted almost as well as Sam and kept pace with the leaders.
Both Mai and Sam seemed able to swing much more freely in their nanosuits. Where the other golfers were stiff with their drives and chips, Mai and Sam looked loose and agile. If they’d been bigger, and able to drive the ball farther, they would have led the pack easily.
But my course was really tough on all of them. By the time they reached the last tee, only three of the golfers had broken par. Sam had birdied the last three holes, all par fives, but he was still one above par. The skinny little Indian, Ramjanmyan, was leading at three below.
And Mai was right behind him, at two below.
The eighteenth was the toughest hole on the course, a par six, where the cup was nearly a full kilometer from the tee and hidden behind a slight rise of solid gray rock slanting across the green-painted ground.
“Wow!” yelled the comm techs, rising to their feet. I could even hear the roar of the crowd all the way over in Dante’s lobby.
Sam was next. His drive was long enough to reach the green, all right, but he sliced it badly and the ball thunked down in the deep sand off the edge of the green, almost at the red-painted hazard line.
Groans of disappointment.
“That’s it for the boss,” said one of the techs.
Somehow I found myself thinking, Don’t be so sure about that.
Ramjanmyan’s drive almost cleared the ridge. But only almost. It hit the edge of the rock and bounced high, then fell in that dreamlike lunar slow motion and rolled back almost to the tee. Even in his exoskeleton suit, the Indian seemed to slump like a defeated man.
He was still one stroke ahead of Mai, though, and two strokes in front of his next closest competitor, a lantern-jawed Australian named MacTavish.
But MacTavish overdrove his ball, trying to clear that ridge, and it rolled past the cup to a stop at the edge of the deep sand.
Mai putted carefully, but her ball hit a minuscule pebble at the last instant and veered a bare few centimeters from the cup. She tapped it in, and came away with a double eagle. She now was leading at five below par.
Sam had trudged out to the sand, where his ball lay. He needed to chip it onto the green and then putt it into the hole. Barely bothering to line up his shot, he whacked it out of the sand. The ball bounced onto the green and then rolled and rolled, curving this way and that like a scurrying ant looking for a breadcrumb, until it rolled to the lip of the cup and dropped in.
Pandemonium. All of us in the comm center sprang to our feet, hands raised high, and bellowed joyfully. The crowd in Dante’s lobby roared so hard it registered on the seismograph over in Selene.
Sam was now three below par and so happy about it that he was hopping up and down, dancing across the green, swinging his club over his head gleefully.
Ramjanmyan wasn’t finished, though. He lofted his ball high over the ridge. It seemed to sail up there among the stars for an hour before it plopped onto the middle of the green and rolled to the very lip of the cup. There it stopped. We all groaned in sympathy for him.
But the Indian plodded in his exoskeleton suit to the cup and tapped the ball. His final score was six below par.
The only way for MacTavish to beat him would be for him to chip the ball directly into the cup. The Aussie tried, but his chip was too hard, and the ball rolled a good ten meters past the hole. He ended with a score of four below par.
Ramjanmyan won the tournament at six below par. Mai came in second, five below, and Sam surprised us all with a three below par score, putting him in fourth place.
* * *
EVERYONE CELEBRATED FAR into the night: golfers, tourists, staffers, and all. Sam reveled the hardest, dancing wildly with every woman in Dante’s Inferno while the band banged out throbbing, wailing neodisco numbers.
I danced with Mai, no one else. And she danced only with me. It was well past midnight when the party started to break up. Mai and I walked back to her hotel room, tired but very, very happy.
Until I thought about what tomorrow would bring. Mai would leave to return to Earth. I’d be an unemployed golf course architect stranded on the Moon.
“You’re awfully quiet,” Mai said as we stepped into her room.
“You’ll be leaving tomorrow,” I said.
“I’ll get the best lawyers on Earth,” she said as she slid her arms around my neck. “Earth’s a big place. Your ex-wife can’t harass you anywhere except Singapore.”
I shook my head. “Don’t be so sure. Her mother has an awful lot of clout.”
“We’ll find a place…”
“And spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders? That’s not what I want for you, Mai.”
She kissed me lightly, just brushing her lips on mine. “Sufficient for the day are the evils thereof.”
“Huh?”
Mai smiled at me. “Let’s worry about things tomorrow. We’re here together tonight.”
So I tried to forget about my troubles. I even succeeded—for a while.
* * *
I WAS AWAKENED by the phone’s buzzing. I cracked one eye open and saw that Mai was sleeping soundly, peacefully curled up beside me.
“Audio only,” I told the phone.
Sam’s freckled face sprang up on the phone’s screen, grinning lopsidedly.
“Mai, I’ve got the medical reports here,” he began.
“Quiet,” I whispered urgently. “Mai’s still asleep.”
“Charlie?” Sam lowered his voice a notch. “So that’s where you are. I called you at your place. We’ve gotta talk about financial arrangements.”
Severance pay, I knew.
“Come over to my office around eleven thirty. Then we’ll go to lunch.”
“Mai’s flight—”
“Plenty of time for that. My office. Eleven thirty. Both of you.”
They say that today is the first day of the rest of your life. I went through the morning like a man facing a firing squad. The rest of my life, I knew, was going to be miserable and lonely. Mai seemed sad, too. Her usual cheerful smile was nowhere in sight.
We got to Sam’s office precisely at eleven thirty and settled glumly onto the sawed-off chairs in front of his desk. Sam beamed down at us like he hadn’t a care in the world. Or two worlds, for that matter.
“First,” he began, “the radiation badges we all wore show that the nanosuits protected us just as well as the standard suits protected everybody else.”
“Dr. Cardenas will be pleased,” Mai said listlessly.
“You bet she is,” Sam replied. “We’re having dinner together over at Selene this evening.”
Dr. Cardenas was a handsome woman, from what I’d heard of her. Was Sam on the hunt again? Does a parrot have feathers?
“Okay,” he said, rubbing his hands together briskly, “now let’s get down to business.”
The firing squad was aiming at me.
“Charlie, you don’t have much experience in business administration, do you?”
Puzzled by his question, I answered, “Hardly any.”
“That’s okay. I can tell you everything you need to know.”
“Need to know for what?”
Sam looked surprised. “To manage the golf course, naturally.”
“Manage it?” My voice squeaked two octaves higher than normal.
“Sure, what else? I’ll be too busy to do it myself.”
Mai gripped my arm. “That’s wonderful!”
“And you, oh beauteous one, will be our pro, of course.” Sam announced, chuckling at his little pun.
“Me?”
Nodding, Sam replied, “Sure, you. This way the two of you can stay together. Sort of a wedding present.” Then he fixed me with a stern gaze. “You do intend to marry the lady, don’t you?”
I blurted, “If she’ll have me!”
Mai squeezed my hand so hard I thought bones would break. I hadn’t realized how strong playing golf had made her.
“Okay, that’s it,” Sam said happily. “You’ll manage the course, Charlie, and Mai, you’ll be the pro.”
“And what will you do, Sam?” Mai asked.
“Me? I’ve got to set up the company that’ll manufacture and sell nanosuits. Kris Cardenas is going to be my partner.”
I felt my jaw drop open. “You mean this whole tournament was just a way of advertising the nanosuits?”
With a laugh, Sam answered, “Got a lot of publicity for the suits, didn’t it? I’m already getting queries
from the rock rats, out in the Asteroid Belt. And the university consortium that’s running the Mars exploration team.”
I shook my head in admiration for the man. Sam just sat there grinning down at us. The little devil had opened up a new sport for lunar residents and tourists, solved my legal problem, created a career for me, and found a way for Mai and me to marry. Plus, he was starting a new industry that would revolutionize the spacesuit business.
Before I could find words to thank Sam, Mai asked him, “Will you answer a question for me?”
“Sure,” he said breezily. “Fire away.”
“How did you learn to putt like that, Sam? Some of your putts were nothing short of miraculous.”
Sam pursed his lips, looked up at the ceiling, swiveled back and forth on his chair.
“Come on, Sam,” Mai insisted. “The truth. It won’t go farther than these four walls.”
With a crooked, crafty grin, Sam replied, “You’d be surprised at how much electronics you can pack into a golf ball.”
“Electronics?” I gasped.
“A transmitter in the cups and a receiver in the ball,” Mai said. “Your putts were guided into the cups.”
“Sort of,” Sam admitted.
“That’s cheating!” I exclaimed.
“There’s nothing in the rules against it.”
That’s Sam. As far as he’s concerned, rules are made to bend into pretzels. And looking up at his grinning, freckled face, I just knew he was already thinking about some new scheme. That’s Sam Gunn. Unlimited.
INTRODUCTION TO
“A COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN”
You know you’re getting old when you start receiving lifetime achievement awards. That’s been happening to me with increasing frequency lately, so I know something of how Alexander Alexandrovich Ignatiev feels.
Heading for a new frontier, six light-years from Earth, Ignatiev is an old man in the midst of youngsters. “Old” and “young” are relative terms here, for in this tale biomedical advancements have lengthened the human lifespan considerably.
Still, Ignatiev feels old, useless, bitterly unhappy with his one-way trip to a distant star. He has a different frontier to explore, his own inner strength and determination, his own inner desire to feel useful, admired, even loved.