by Spider
At least, that’s what Norrey or I would have said. Tom, when he met her, had a different opinion.
“Look, Charlie, there’s Tom.”
I should have been fuming mad when I got out of Customs. I felt a little uneasy not being fuming mad. But after six months of extraterrestrial cabin fever, I was finding it curiously difficult to dislike any stranger—even a Customs man.
Besides, I was too heavy to be angry.
“So it is. Tom! Hey, Tom!”
“Oh my,” Norrey said, “something’s wrong.”
Tom was fuming mad.
“Hell. What put the sand in his shorts? Hey, where’re Linda and Raoul? Maybe there’s a hassle?”
“No, they got through before we did. They must have taken a cab to the hotel already—”
Tom was upon us, eyes flashing. “So that’s your paragon? Jesus Christ! Fucking bleeding heart, I’ll wring her scrawny neck. Of all the—”
“Whoa! Who? Linda? What?”
“Oh Christ, later—here they come.” What looked like a vigilante committee was converging on us, bearing torches. “Now look,” Tom said hurriedly through his teeth, smiling as though he’d just been guaranteed an apartment in Paradise, “give these bloodsuckers your best I mean your best shot, and maybe I can scavenge something from this stinking mess.” And he was striding toward them, opening his arms and smiling. As he went I heard him mutter something under his breath that began with “Ms. Parsons,” contained enough additional sibilants to foil the shotgun-mikes, and moved his lips not at all.
Norrey and I exchanged a glance. “Pohl’s Law,” she said, and I nodded (Pohl’s Law, Raoul once told us, says that nothing is so good that somebody somewhere won’t hate it, and vice versa). And then the pack was upon us.
“This way Mister when does your next tape come over here please tell our viewers what it’s really believe that this this new artform is a valid passport or did you look this way Ms. Drummond is it true that you haven’t been able to smile for the cameraman for the Stardance, weren’t you going to look this way to please continue or are readers would simply love to no but didn’t you miss Drummond pardon me Miz Drummond do you think you’re as good as your sister Sharon in the profits in their own country are without honor to welcome you back to Earth this way please,” said the mob, over the sound of clicking, whirring, snapping, and whining machinery and through the blinding glare of what looked like an explosion at the galactic core seen from close up. And I smiled and nodded and said urbanely witty things and answered the rudest questions with good humor and by the time we could get a cab I was fuming mad. Raoul and Linda had indeed gone ahead, and Tom had found our luggage; we left at high speed.
“Bleeding Christ, Tom,” I said as the cab pulled away, “next time schedule a press conference for the next day, will you?”
“God damn it,” he blazed, “you can have this job back any time you want it!”
His volume startled even the cabbie. Norrey grabbed his hands and forced him to look at her.
“Tom,” she said gently, “we’re your friends. We don’t want to yell at you; we don’t want you to yell at us. Okay?”
He took an extra deep breath, held it, let it out in one great sigh and nodded. “Okay.”
“Now I know that reporters can be hard to deal with. I understand that, Tom. But I’m tired and hungry and my feet hurt like hell and my body’s convinced it weighs three hundred and thirteen kilos and next time could we maybe just lie to them a little?”
He paused before replying, and his voice came out calm. “Norrey, I am really not an idiot. All that madness to the contrary, I did schedule a press conference for tomorrow, and I did tell everybody to have a heart and leave you alone today. Those jerks back there were the ones who ignored me, the sons of—”
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “Then why the hell did we give them a command performance?”
“Do you think I wanted to?” Tom growled. “What the hell am I going to say tomorrow to the honorable ones who got scooped? But I had no choice, Charlie. That dizzy bitch left me no choice. I had to give those crumbs something, or they’d have run what they had already.”
“Tom, what on earth are you talking about?”
“Linda Parsons, that’s what I’m talking about, your new wonder discovery. Christ, Norrey, the way you went on about her over the phone, I was expecting…I don’t know, anyway a professional.”
“You two, uh, didn’t hit it off?” I suggested.
Tom snorted. “First she calls me a tight-ass. Practically the first words out of her mouth. Then she says I’m ignorant, and I’m not treating her right. Treating her right, for Christ’s sake. Then she chews me out for having reporters there—Charlie, I’ll take that from you and Norrey, I should’ve had those jerks thrown out, but I don’t have to take that crap from a rookie. So I start to explain about the reporters, and then she says I’m being defensive. Christ on the pogie, if there’s anything I hate it’s somebody that comes on aggressive and then says you’re being defensive, smiling and looking you right in the eye and trying to rub my fucking neck!”
I figured he’d let off enough steam by now, and I was losing count of the grains of salt. “So Norrey and I made nice for the newsies because they taped you two squabbling in public?”
“No!”
We got the story out of him eventually. It was the old Linda magic at work again, and I can offer you no more typical example. Somehow a seventeen-year-old girl had threaded her way through the hundreds of people in the spaceport terminal straight to Linda and collapsed in her arms, sobbing that she was tripping and losing control and would Linda please make it all stop? It was at that point that the mob of reporters had spotted Linda as a Stardancer and closed in. Even considering that she weighed six times normal, had just been poked full of holes by Medical and insulted by Immigration, and was striking large sparks off of Tom, I’m inclined to doubt that Linda lost her temper; I think she abandoned it. Whatever, she apparently scorched a large hole through that pack of ghouls, bundled the poor girl into it and got her a cab. While they were getting in, some clown stuck a camera in the girl’s face and Linda decked him.
“Hell, Tom, I might have done the same thing myself,” I said when I got it straight.
“God’s teeth, Charlie!” he began; then with a superhuman effort he got control of his voice (at least). “Look. Listen. This is not some four-bit kids’ game we are playing here. Megabucks pass through my fingers, Charlie, megabucks! You are not a bum any more, you don’t have the privileges of a bum. Do you—”
“Tom,” Norrey said, shocked.
“—have any idea how fickle the public has become in the last twenty years? Maybe I’ve got to tell you how much public opinion has to do with the existence of that orbiting junkheap you just left? Or maybe you’re going to tell me that those tapes in your suitcase are as good as the Stardance, that you’ve got something so hot you can beat up reporters and get away with it. Oh Jesus, what a mess!”
He had me there. All the choreography plans we had brought into orbit with us had been based on the assumption that we would have between eight and twelve dancers. We had thought we were being pessimistic. We had to junk everything and start from scratch. The resulting tapes relied heavily on solos—our weakest area at that point—and while I was confident that I could do a lot with editing, well…
“It’s okay, Tom. Those bums got something their editors’ll like better than a five-foot lady making gorillas look like gorillas—they worry a little about public opinion, too.”
“And what do I tell Westbrook tomorrow? And Mortie and Barbara Frum and UPI and AP and—”
“Tom,” Norrey interrupted gently, “it’ll be all right.”
“All right? How it is all right? Tell me how it’s all right.”
I saw where she was going. “Hell, yeah. I never thought of that, hon, of course. That pack o’ jackals drove it clean out of my mind. Serves ’em right.” I began to chuckle. “Serves
’em bloody right.”
“If you don’t mind, darling.”
“Huh? Oh. No…no, I don’t mind.” I grinned. “It’s been long enough coming. Let’s do it up.”
“Will somebody please tell me what the hell is—”
“Tom,” I said expansively, “don’t worry about a thing. I’ll tell your scooped friends the same thing I told my father at the age of thirteen, when he caught me in the cellar with the mailman’s daughter.”
“What the hell is that?” he snapped, beginning to grin in spite of himself and unsure why.
I put an arm around Norrey. “It’s okay, Pa. We’re gettin’ married tomorrow.”
He stared at us blankly for several seconds, the grin fading, and then it returned full force.
“Well I’ll be dipped in shit,” he cried. “Congratulations! That’s terrific, Charlie, Norrey, oh congratulations you two—it’s about time.” He tried to hug us both, but at that moment the cabbie had to dodge a psychopath and Tom was flung backwards, arms outstretched. “That’s tremendous, that’s…you know, I think that’ll do it—I think it’ll work.” He had the grace to blush. “I mean, the hell with the reporters, I just—I mean—”
“You may always,” Norrey said gravely, “leave these little things to us.”
The desk phoned me when Linda checked in, as I had asked them to. I grunted, hung the phone up on thin air, stepped out of bed and into a hotel wastebasket, cannoned into the bedside table destroying table and accompanying lamp, and ended up prone on the floor with my chin sunk deep into the pile rug and my nose a couple of centimeters from a glowing clockface that said it was 4:42. In the morning. At the moment that I came completely awake, the clock expired and its glow went out.
Now it was pitch dark.
Incredibly, Norrey still had not awakened. I got up, dressed in the dark, and left, leaving the wreckage for the morning. Fortunately the good leg had sustained most of the damage; I could walk, albeit with a kind of double limp.
“Linda? It’s me, Charlie.”
She opened up at once. “Charlie, I’m sorry—”
“Skip it. You done good. How’s the girl?” I stepped in.
She closed the door behind me and made a face. “Not terrific. But her people are with her now. I think she’s going to be okay.”
“That’s good. I remember the first time a trip went sour on me.”
She nodded. “You know it’s going to stop in eight hours, but that doesn’t help; your time rate’s gone eternal.”
“Yeah. Look, about Tom—”
She made another face. “Boy, Charlie, what a jerk.”
“You two, uh, didn’t hit it off?”
“I just tried to tell him that he was being too uptight, and he came on like he couldn’t imagine what I was talking about. So I told him he wasn’t as ignorant as he gave himself credit for, and asked him to treat me like a friend instead of a stranger—from all you told me about him, that seemed right. ‘Okay,’ he says, so I ask him as a friend to try and keep those reporters off of us for a day or so and he blows right up at me. He was so defensive, Charlie.”
“Look, Linda,” I began, “there was this screwup that—”
“Honestly, Charlie, I tried to calm him down, I tried to show him I wasn’t blaming him. I—I was rubbing his neck and shoulders, trying to loosen him up, and he, he pushed me away. I mean, really, Charlie, you and Norrey said he was so nice and what a creep.”
“Linda, I’m sorry you didn’t get along. Tom is a nice guy, it’s just—”
“I think he wanted me to just tell Sandra to get lost, just let Security take her away and—”
I gave up. “I’ll see you in the mor…in the afternoon, Linda. Get some sleep; there’s a press conference in the Something-or-other Room at two.”
“Sure. I’m sorry, it must be late, huh?”
I met Raoul in the corridor—the desk had called him right after me, but he woke up slower. I told him that Linda and patient were doing as well as could be expected, and he was relieved. “Cripes, Charlie, her and Tom, you shoulda seen ’em. Cats and dogs, I never would have believed it.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes your best friends just can’t stand each other.”
“Yeah, life’s funny that way.”
On that profundity I went back to bed. Norrey was still out cold when I entered, but as I climbed under the covers and snuggled up against her back she snorted like a horse and said, “Awright?”
“All right,” I whispered, “but I think we’re going to have to keep those two separated for a while.”
She rolled over, opened one eye and found me with it. “Darl’n,” she mumbled, smiling with that side of her mouth, “there’s hope for you yet.”
And then she rolled over and went back to sleep, leaving me smug and fatuous and wondering what the hell she was talking about.
Chapter 3
Those first-semester tapes sold like hell anyway, and the critics were more than kind, for the most part. Also, we rereleased Mass Is A Verb with Raoul’s soundtrack at that time, and finished our first fiscal year well in the black.
By the second year our Studio was taking shape.
We settled on a highly elongated orbit. At perigee the Studio came as close as 3200 kilometers to Earth (not very close—Skylab was up less than 450 klicks), and at apogee it swung way out to about 80,000 klicks. The point of this was to keep Earth from hogging half the sky in every tape; at apogee Terra was about fist-sized (subtending a little more than 9° of arc), and we spent most of our time far away from it (Kepler’s Second Law: the closer a satellite to its primary, the faster it swings around). Since we made a complete orbit almost twice a day, that gave two possible taping periods of almost eight hours apiece in every twenty-four hours. We simply adjusted our “inner clocks,” our biological cycle, so that one of these two periods came between “nine” and “five” subjective. (If we fudged a shot, we had to come back and reshoot some multiple of eleven hours later to get a background Earth of the proper apparent size.)
As to the Studio complex itself:
The largest single structure, of course, is the Fish-bowl, an enormous sphere for inside work, without p-suits. It is effectively transparent when correctly lit, but can be fitted with opaque foil surfaces in case you don’t want the whole universe for a backdrop. Six very small and very good camera mounts are built into it at various places, and it is fitted to accept plastic panels which convert it into a cube within a sphere, although we only used them a few times and probably won’t again.
Next largest is the informal structure we came to call Fibber McGee’s Closet. The Closet itself is only a long “stationary” pole studded with stanchions and line-dispensing reels, but it is always covered with junk, tethered to it for safekeeping. Props, pieces of sets, camera units and spare parts, lighting paraphernalia, control consoles and auxiliary systems, canisters and cans and boxes and slabs and bundles and clusters and loops and coils and assorted disorderly packages of whatever anyone thought it might be handy to have for free fall dance and the taping thereof, all cling to Fibber McGee’s Closet like interplanetary barnacles. The size and shape of the ungainly mass change with use, and the individual components shift lazily back and forth like schizophrenic seaweed at all times.
We had to do it that way, for it is not at all convenient to reenter and exit the living quarters frequently.
Imagine a sledgehammer. A big old roustabout’s stake pounder, with a large, barrel-shaped head. Imagine a much smaller head, coke-can size, at the butt end of the handle. That’s my house. That’s where I live with my wife when I’m at home in space, in a three-and-a-half room walkdown with bath. Try to balance that sledgehammer horizontally across one finger. You’ll want to lay that finger right up near the other end, just short of the much massier hammerhead. That’s the point around which my house pivots, and the countermass pivots, in chasing concentric circles, to provide a net effect of one-sixth gee at home. The countermass includes life-su
pport equipment and supplies, power supply, medical telemetry, home computer and phone hardware, and some damn big gyros. The “hammer handle” is quite long: it takes a shaft of about 135 meters to give one-sixth gee at a rotation rate of one minute. That slow a rate makes the Coriolis differential minimal, as imperceptible as it is on a torus the size of Skyfac’s Ring One but without a torus’s vast cubic and inherently inefficient layout (Skyfac axiom: anywhere you want to go will turn out to be all the way round the bend; as, in short order, will you).
Since only a Tokugawa can afford the energies required to start and stop spinning masses in space on a whim, there are only two ways to leave the house. The axis of spin aims toward Fibber McGee’s Closet and Town Hall (about which more later); one can merely go out the “down” airlock (“the back door”) and let go at the proper time. If you’re not an experienced enough spacehand, or if you’re going somewhere on a tangent to the axis of rotation, you go out the “up” lock or front door, climb up the runged hammer handle to the no-weight point and step off, then jet to where you want to go. You always come home by the front door; that’s why it’s a walkdown. The plumbing is simplicity itself, and habitual attention must be paid to keep the Closet and Hall from being peppered with freeze-dried dung.
(No, we don’t save it to grow food on, or any such ecological wizardry. A closed system the size of ours would be too small to be efficient. Oh, we reclaim most of the moisture, but we give the rest to space, and buy our food and air and water from Luna like everybody else. In a pinch we could haul ’em up from Terra.)
We went through all those hoops, obviously, to provide a sixth-gee home environment. After you’ve been in space for long enough, you find zero gee much more comfortable and convenient. Any gravity at all seems like an arbitrary bias, a censorship of motion—like a pulp writer being required to write only happy endings, or a musician being restricted to a single meter.
