by Ben Bova
“I feel fine,” he whispered to his wife, in the middle of the demonstration. Then he startled the guides and his fellow circus folk alike by tossing his cane aside and leaping five meters into the air, shouting at the top of his lungs, “I feel wonderful!”
The circus performers were taken off to special orientation lectures, but Rolando and his wife were escorted by a pert young redhead into the office of Moonbase’s chief administrator.
“Remember me?” asked the administrator as he shook Rolando’s hand and half-bowed to his wife. “I was the physicist at Columbia who did that TV commercial with you six or seven years ago.”
Rolando did not in fact remember the man’s face at all, although he did recall his warning about gravity. As he sat down in the chair the administrator proffered, he frowned slightly.
The administrator wore zippered coveralls of powder blue. He hiked one hip onto the edge of his desk and beamed happily at the Rolandos. “I can’t tell you how delighted I am to have the circus here, even if it’s just for a month. I really had to sweat blood to get the corporation’s management to okay bringing you up here. Transportation’s still quite expensive, you know.”
Rolando patted his artificial leg. “I imagine the bionics company paid their fair share of the costs.”
The administrator looked slightly startled. “Well, yes, they have picked up the tab for you and Mrs. Rolando.”
“I thought so.”
Rolando’s wife smiled sweetly. “We are delighted that you invited us here.”
They chatted a while longer and then the administrator personally escorted them to their apartment in Moonbase’s tourist section. “Have a happy stay,” he said, by way of taking his leave.
Although he did not expect to, that is exactly what Rolando did for the next many days. Moonbase was marvelous! There was enough gravity to keep his insides behaving properly, but it was so light and gentle that even his obese body with its false leg felt young and agile again.
Rolando walked the length and breadth of the great Main Plaza, his wife clinging to his arm, and marveled at how the Moonbase people had landscaped the expanse under their dome, planted it with grass and flowering shrubs. The apartment they had been assigned to was deeper underground, in one of the long corridors that had been blasted out of solid rock. But the quarters were no smaller than their mobile home back on Earth, and it had a video screen that took up one entire wall of the sitting room.
“I love it here!” Rolando told his wife. “I could stay forever!”
“It’s only for one month,” she said softly. He ignored it.
Rolando adjusted quickly to walking in the easy lunar gravity, never noticing that his wife adjusted just as quickly (perhaps even a shade faster). He left his cane in their apartment and strolled unaided each day through the shopping arcades and athletic fields of the Main Plaza, walking for hours on end without a bit of pain.
He watched the roustabouts who had come up with him directing their robots to set up a Big Top in the middle of the Plaza, a gaudy blaze of colorful plastic and pennants beneath the great gray dome that soared high overhead.
The Moon is marvelous, thought Rolando. There was still gravity lurking, trying to trip him up and make him look ridiculous. But even when he fell, it was so slow and gentle that he could put out his powerful arms and push himself up to a standing position before his body actually hit the ground.
“I love it here!” he said to his wife, dozens of times each day. She smiled and tried to remind him that it was only for three more weeks.
At dinner one evening in Moonbase’s grander restaurant (there were only two, not counting cafeterias) his earthly muscles proved too strong for the Moon when he rammed their half-finished bottle of wine back into its aluminum ice bucket. The bucket tipped and fell off the edge of the table. But Rolando snatched it with one hand in the midst of its languid fall toward the floor and with a smile and a flourish deposited the bucket with the bottle still in it back on the table before a drop had spilled.
“I love it here,” he repeated for the fortieth time that day.
Gradually, though, his euphoric mood sank. The circus began giving abbreviated performances inside its Big Top, and Rolando stood helplessly pinned to the ground while the spotlights picked out the young fliers in their skintight costumes as they soared slowly, dreamily through the air between one trapeze and the next, twisting, spinning, somersaulting in the soft lunar gravity in ways that no one had ever done before. The audience gasped and cheered and gave them standing ovations. Rolando stood rooted near one of the tent’s entrances, deep in shadow, wearing a tourist’s pale green coveralls, choking with envy and frustrated rage.
The crowds were small—there were only a few thousand people living at Moonbase, plus perhaps another thousand tourists—but they shook the plastic tent with their roars of delight.
Rolando watched a few performances, then stayed away. But he noticed at the Olympic-sized pool that raw teenagers were diving from a thirty-meter platform and doing half a dozen somersaults as they fell languidly in the easy gravity. Even when they hit the water the splashes they made rose lazily and then fell back into the pool so leisurely that it seemed like a slow-motion film.
Anyone can be an athlete here, Rolando realized as he watched tourists flying on rented wings through the upper reaches of the Main Plaza’s vaulted dome.
Children could easily do not merely Olympic, but Olympian feats of acrobatics. Rolando began to dread the possibility of seeing a youngster do a quadruple somersault from a standing start.
“Anyone can defy gravity here,” he complained to his wife, silently adding, Anyone but me.
It made him morose to realize that feats which had taken him a lifetime to accomplish could be learned by a toddler in half an hour. And soon he would have to return to Earth with its heavy, oppressive, mocking gravity.
I know you’re waiting for me, he said to gravity. You’re going to kill me—if I don’t do the job for myself first.
Two nights before they were due to depart, they were the dinner guests of the chief administrator and several of his staff. As formal an occasion as Moonbase ever has, the men wore sport jackets and turtleneck shirts, the women real dresses and jewelry. The administrator told hoary old stories of his childhood yearning to be in the circus. Rolando remained modestly silent, even when the administrator spoke glowingly of how he had admired the daring feats of the Great Rolando—many years ago.
After dinner, back in their apartment, Rolando turned on his wife. “You got them to invite us up here, didn’t you?”
She admitted, “The bionics company told me that they were going to end your consulting fee. They want to give up on you! I asked them to let us come here to see if your leg would be better in low gravity.”
“And then we go back to Earth.”
“Yes.”
“Back to real gravity. Back to my being a cripple!”
“I was hoping . . .” Her voice broke and she sank onto the bed, crying.
Suddenly Rolando’s anger was overwhelmed by a searing, agonizing sense of shame. All these years she had been trying so hard, standing between him and the rest of the world, protecting him, sheltering him. And for what? So that he could scream at her for the rest of his life?
He could not bear it any longer.
Unable to speak, unable even to reach his hand out to comfort her, he turned and lumbered out of the apartment, leaving his wife weeping alone.
He knew where he had to be, where he could finally put an end to this humiliation and misery. He made his way to the Big Top.
A stubby gunmetal-gray robot stood guard at the main entrance, its sensors focusing on Rolando like the red glowing eyes of a spider.
“No access at this time except to members of the circus troupe,” it said in a synthesized voice.
“I am the Great Rolando.”
“One moment for voiceprint identification,” said the robot, then, “Approved.”
; Rolando swept past the contraption with a snort of contempt.
The Big Top was empty at this hour. Tomorrow they would start to dismantle it. The next day they would head back to Earth.
Rolando walked slowly, stiffly to the base of the ladder that reached up to the trapezes. The spotlights were shut down. The only illumination inside the tent came from the harsh working lights spotted here and there.
Rolando heaved a deep breath and stripped off his jacket. Then, gripping one of the ladder’s rungs, he began to climb: good leg first, then the artificial leg. He could feel no difference between them. His body was only one-sixth its earthly weight, of course, but still the artificial leg behaved exactly as his normal one.
He reached the topmost platform. Holding tightly to the side rail he peered down into the gloomy shadows a hundred feet below.
With a slow, ponderous nod of his head the Great Rolando finally admitted what he had kept buried inside him all these long anguished years. Finally the concealed truth emerged and stood naked before him. With tear-filled eyes he saw its reality.
He had been living a lie all these years. He had been blaming gravity for his own failure. Now he understood with precise, final clarity that it was not gravity that had destroyed his life.
It was fear.
He stood rooted on the high platform, trembling with the memory of falling, plunging, screaming terror. He knew that this fear would live within him always, for the remainder of his life. It was too strong to overcome; he was a coward, probably had always been a coward, all his life. All his life.
Without consciously thinking about it Rolando untied one of the trapezes and gripped the rough surface of its taped bar. He did not bother with resin. There would be no need.
As if in a dream he swung out into the empty air, feeling the rush of wind ruffling his gray hair, hearing the creak of the ropes beneath his weight.
Once, twice, three times he swung back and forth, kicking higher each time. He grunted with the unaccustomed exertion. He felt sweat trickling from his armpits.
Looking down, he saw the hard ground so far below. One more fall, he told himself. Just let go and that will end it forever. End the fear. End the shame.
“Teach me!”
The voice boomed like cannon fire across the empty tent. Rolando felt every muscle in his body tighten.
On the opposite platform, before him, stood the chief administrator, still wearing his dinner jacket.
“Teach me!” he called again. “Show me how to do it. Just this once, before you have to leave.”
Rolando hung by his hands, swinging back and forth. The younger man’s figure standing on the platform came closer, closer, then receded, dwindled as inertia carried Rolando forward and back, forward and back.
“No one will know,” the administrator pleaded through the shadows. “I promise you; I’l1 never tell a soul. Just show me how to do it. Just this once.”
“Stand back,” Rolando heard his own voice call. It startled him.
Rolando kicked once, tried to judge the distance and account for the lower gravity as best as he could, and let go of the bar. He soared too far, but the strong composite mesh at the rear of the platform caught him, yieldingly, and he was able to grasp the side railing and stand erect before the young administrator could reach out and steady him.
“We both have a lot to learn,” said the Great Rolando. “Take off your jacket.”
For more than an hour the two men swung high through the silent shadowy air. Rolando tried nothing fancy, no leaps from one bar to another, no real acrobatics. It was tricky enough just landing gracefully on the platform in the strange lunar gravity. The administrator did exactly as Rolando instructed him. For all his youth and desire to emulate a circus star, he was no daredevil. It satisfied him completely to swing side by side with the Great Rolando, to share the same platform.
“What made you come here tonight?” Rolando asked as they stood gasping sweatily on the platform between turns.
“The security robot reported your entry. Strictly routine, I get all such reports piped to my quarters. But I figured this was too good a chance to miss!”
Finally, soaked with perspiration, arms aching and fingers raw and cramping, they made their way down the ladder to the ground. Laughing.
“I’ll never forget this,” the administrator said. “It’s the high point of my life.”
“Mine too,” said Rolando fervently. “Mine too.”
Two days later the administrator came to the rocket terminal to see the circus troupe off. Taking Rolando and his wife to one side, he said in a low voice that brimmed with happiness, “You know, we’re starting to accept retired couples for permanent residence here at Moonbase.”
Rolando’s wife immediately responded, “Oh, I’m not ready to retire yet.”
“Nor I,” said Rolando. “I’ll stay with the circus for a few years more, I think. There might still be time for me to make a comeback.”
“Still,” said the administrator, “when you do want to retire . . .”
Mrs. Rolando smiled at him. “I’ve noticed that my face looks better in this lower gravity. I probably wouldn’t need a facelift if we come to live here.”
They laughed together.
The rest of the troupe was filing into the rocket that would take them back to Earth. Rolando gallantly held his wife’s arm as she stepped up the ramp and ducked through the hatch. Then he turned to the administrator and asked swiftly:
“What you told me about gravity all those years ago—is it really true? It is really universal? There’s no way around it?”
“Afraid not,” the administrator answered. “Someday gravity will make the Sun collapse. It might even make the entire universe collapse.”
Rolando nodded, shook the man’s hand, then followed his wife to his seat inside the rocket’s passenger compartment. As he listened to the taped safety lecture and strapped on his safety belt he thought to himself: So gravity will get us all in the end.
Then he smiled grimly. But not yet. Not yet.
ZERO GEE
The next three stories tell a connected tale about the early life of an Air Force astronaut named Chester A. Kinsman. Essentially, these stories deal with his loss of innocence and his first step toward real maturity. Or, to thoroughly mix metaphors and sources, the stories taken together form a miniature Paradise Lost and Purgatorio.
Kinsman has been with me since the late 1940s. I knew him from birth to death. He was the protagonist in the first novel I ever wrote, which was never published. But he showed up again in Millennium (1976), Kinsman (1979) and The Kinsman Saga (1987).
Eventually, Chet Kinsman changes the world. But in these early stories, he’s the one who must change.
Incidentally, these stories—written in the early 1960s—are about a future that never came to pass. The Air Force was never allowed to orbit its own space stations. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union established weaponry in orbit. Film cameras were replaced by digital.
But that doesn’t make the stories less true.
* * *
Joe Tenny looked like a middle linebacker for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Sitting in the cool shadows of the Astro Motel’s bar, swarthy, barrel-built, scowling face clamped on a smoldering cigar, he would never be taken for that rarest of all birds: a good engineer who is also a good military officer.
“Afternoon, Major.”
Tenny turned on his stool to see old Cy Calder, the dean of the press-service reporters covering the base.
“Hi. Whatcha drinking?”
“I’m working,” Calder answered with dignity. But he settled his once-lanky frame onto the next stool.
“Double Scotch,” Tenny called to the bartender. “And refill mine.”
“An officer and a gentleman,” murmured Calder. His voice was gravelly, matching his face.
As the bartender slid the drinks to them, Tenny said, “You wanna know who got the assignment.”
“I told you
I’m working.”
Tenny grinned. “Keep your mouth shut ‘til tomorrow? Murdock’ll make the official announcement then, at his press conference.”
“If you can save me the tedium of listening to the good colonel for two hours to get a single name out of him, I’ll buy the next round, shine your shoes for a month, and arrange to lose an occasional poker pot to you.”
“The hell you will!”
Calder shrugged. Tenny took a long pull on his drink. Calder did likewise.
“Okay. You’ll find out anyway. But keep it quiet until Murdock’s announcement. It’s going to be Kinsman.”
Calder put his glass down on the bar carefully. “Chester A. Kinsman, the pride of the Air Force? That’s hard to believe.”
“Murdock picked him.”
“I know this mission is strictly for publicity,” Calder said, “but Kinsman? In orbit for three days with Photo Day magazine’s prettiest female? Does Murdock want publicity or a paternity suit?”
“Come on, Chet’s not that bad . . .”
“Oh no? From the stories I hear about your few weeks over at the NASA Ames center, Kinsman cut a swath from Berkeley to North Beach.”
Tenny countered, “He’s young and good-looking. And the girls haven’t had many single astronauts to play with. NASA’s gang is a bunch of old farts compared to my kids. But Chet’s the best of the bunch, no fooling.”
Calder looked unconvinced.
“Listen. When we were training at Edwards, know what Kinsman did? Built a biplane, an honest-to-God replica of a Spad fighter. From the ground up. He’s a solid citizen.”
“Yes, and then he played Red Baron for six weeks. Didn’t he get into trouble for buzzing an airliner?”
Tenny’s reply was cut off by a burst of talk and 1aughter. Half a dozen lean, lithe young men in Air Force blues—captains, all of them—trotted down the carpeted stairs that led into the bar.
“There they are,” said Tenny. “You can ask Chet about it yourself.”