Dancing With Myself

by Charles Sheffield

  After five minutes’ rest I had recovered enough to move and speak. I unbuckled my harness, cracked the seals, and climbed slowly out of my bike. As usual at the end of a Stage, my legs felt as though they had never been designed for walking. I did a couple of deep knee-bends in the half-gee field, then straightened up and staggered over to Muldoon. He had also flipped back the top of his bike and was slowly levering himself free.

  “Tomas was lucky,” I said. “And he cheated!”

  Muldoon looked at me with eyes sunk back in his head. He was even more dehydrated than I was. “Old Persian proverb,” he said. “Tuck is infatuated with the efficient.”

  “You don’t think he cheated?”

  “No. And he wasn’t lucky, he was smart. He bent the rules, but he can’t get called on it. Therefore, he didn’t cheat. He was just a bit smarter than the rest of us. Admit it, Trace, you’d have done it too if you’d thought of it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe, schmaybe. Come on. I’ve been cramped in this bike for too long. Let’s beat the crowd to the showers.”

  He was right, the others were streaming in now, one every few seconds. As we left the docking area a whole bunch zoomed in together in practically a blanket finish. I saw five riders from Adidas, so close I was sure they’d been slip-streaming for a sixth member of their team. That was outside the rules, and they were bound to be caught. Five years ago, slipstreaming had been worth doing. Today, it was marginal. The teams did it anyway—because the man who benefited from the slipstreaming was not the one doing anything illegal. The rider who had given the momentum boost would be disqualified, but that would be some no-hoper in the team. Illogical? Sure. The Tour had a crazy set of rules in the first place, and as more and more riders became part of the big teams, the rules became harder to apply. Ernie Muldoon and I were two of the last independents racing the Grand Tour. Ernie, because he was famous before the team idea caught on; me, because I was stubborn enough to want to win on my own.

  Tomas was already sitting in the cafeteria as we walked through it, surrounded by the microphones and cameras. He was enjoying himself. I felt angry for a moment, then decided that it was fair enough. We waved to the media and went on to the showers. Let Tomas have his day of glory. He was so far down in the overall ratings that there was no way he could be the outright Tour de Système winner, even if he won tomorrow’s and the final Stages by big margins.

  Ernie Muldoon thought that the overall Grand Tour winner was going to be old and wily Ernest Muldoon, who had already won the Tour de Système an unprecedented five times; and I thought it was going to be me, Tracy Collins, already identified in the media coverage as the Young Challenger; or maybe, as Ernest put it, the Young Pretender. Which made him, as I pointed out, the Old Pretender.

  I had modelled my whole approach to the Tour on Ernie Muldoon, and now it was paying off. This was only my third year, but unless I were disqualified I was certain to be in the top five. My cumulative time for all the Stages actually placed me in the top three, but I hate to count them little chickens too soon.

  The shower facilities were as crummy as we’ve grown to expect. You’ve got one of the premier athletic events of the Solar System, with coverage Earth-wide and Moon-wide, and still the showers at the end of each Stage are primitive. No blown air, no suction, no spin. All you get are soap, not-warm-enough water, and drying-cloths. It must be because we don’t attract top video coverage. People are interested in us, but what sort of TV program can you build out of an event where each Stage runs anything up to thirty-six hours, and the competitors are just seen as little dots for most of the time? Maybe what the media need are a few deaths to spice things up, but so far the Tour has been lucky (or unlucky) that way.

  Muldoon slapped me on the back as we were coming out of the shower area. “Three quarts of beer, three quarts of milk, thirty ounces of rare beef, and half a dozen potatoes from the original Owld Sod, and you’ll not even notice that leg of yours. Are you with me, lad?”

  “I’m with you—but not this minute. Don’t you want to get a weather report first, for tomorrow?”

  “A quick look, now. But I doubt if we’ll see anything special. The wind forecasts for tomorrow have all been quiet. It’s my bet we’ll see stronger winds for the final Stage. Maybe a big flare-up.”

  Muldoon was casual, but he didn’t really fool me. He had told me, a dozen times, that the solar wind forecast was the most important piece of a rider’s knowledge—more relevant than local gravity anomalies or super-accurate trajectory calculations. We went over to the weather center and looked at the forty-eight hour forecast. It was pretty calm. Unless there were a sudden and dramatic change, all the riders could get away with minimal radiation shielding.

  That wasn’t always the case. Two years ago, the second half of the Tour had taken place when there was a massive solar flare. The solar wind of energetic charged particles had been up by a factor of a hundred, and every rider added another two hundred kilos of radiation shielding. If you think that doesn’t make a man groan, when every ounce of shielding has to be carried around with you like a snail carrying its shell—well, then you’ve never ridden the Tour.

  Of course, you don’t have to carry the shielding. That’s a rider’s choice. Four years ago, on the eleventh Stage of the Tour, Crazy-legs Gerhart had done his own calculation of flare activity, and decided that the radiation level would drop nearly to zero a few minutes after the Stage began. When everybody else crawled away from Stage-start loaded down with extra shielding, Crazy-legs zoomed off with a minimal load. He won the Stage by over two hours, but he just about glowed in the dark. The wind level hadn’t become low at all. He docked so hot with radiation that no one wanted to touch him, and he was penalized a hundred and fifty minutes for exceeding the permissible dosage per Stage by ninety-two rads. Worse than that, they dumped him in the hospital to flush him out. He missed the rest of the Tour.

  Every rider had his own cookbook method for guessing the optimal shielding load, just as everyone had his own private trajectory program and his own preferred way of pacing the race. There were as many methods as there were riders in the Tour.

  Muldoon and I made notes of the wind—we’d check again, last thing at night—and then went back to the cafeteria. A few of the media people were still there. Without looking as though we were avoiding them, we loaded our trays and went off to a quiet corner. We didn’t want the Newsies tonight. The next-to-last Stage was coming up tomorrow morning, and it was a toughie. We had to ride nearly twenty-five thousand kilometers, dropping in from synchronous station, where we had docked today, to the big Sports Central station in six-hour orbit.

  Some people complain because we call it the “Tour de Système” when the only part of the Solar System we travel is Earth-Moon space. But they’ve never ridden the Tour. When you have, the six-hundred-thousand kilometer course seems quite long enough. And the standards of competition get tougher every year. All the original Stage records have been broken, then broken again. In a few years’ time it will be a million-kilometer Tour, and then we’ll zip way out past the Moon before we start the inbound Stages.

  Muldoon and I stuffed ourselves with food and drink—you can’t overfeed a Tour rider, no matter what you give him—then went off quietly to bed. Two more days, I told myself; then I’ll raise more Hell than the Devil’s salvage party.

  Next morning my first worry was my left thigh. It felt fine—as it ought to, I’d spent an hour last night rubbing a foul green embrocation into the muscles. I dressed and headed for breakfast, wanting to beat the rush again.

  “Well, Tracy, me boyo.” It was Muldoon, appearing out of nowhere and walking by my side. “An’ are you still thinking ye have the Divil’s own chanst of beating me?”

  He can speak English as well as I can, but when he senses there are media people around he turns into the most dreadful blarney-waffling stage-irishman you could f
ind.

  “Easily.” I nudged him in the ribs. “You’re a tough man, Muldoon, but your time has come. The bells will be pealing out this time for handsome young Tracy Collins, overall winner of the Grand Tour de Système.” (So maybe I respond to the media, too; I sounded confident, but Muldoon couldn’t see my fingers, crossed on the side away from him.)

  “Not while there’s breath in this breast, me boy,” he said. “An ’tis time we was over an’ havin’ a word here with the grand Machiavellian Stage winner himself.”

  Muldoon stopped by Tomas Lili’s table, where a couple of press who must have missed the Stage winner the previous night were sitting and interviewing. “Nice work, Tomas me boy,” Muldoon said, patting the yellow jersey. “An’ where’d you be getting the idea of doin’ that what yer did?”

  A couple of media people switched their recorders back on. Tomas shrugged. “From you, Ernesto, where we all get our ideas. You were the one who decided that it was easier—and legal—to switch the ion drive around on the bike at midpoint, rather than fight all the angular momentum you’d already built up in your wheels if you tried to turn the bike through a hundred and eighty degrees. I just built from there.”

  “Fair enough. But your trick won’t work more than once, Tomas. We’ll be ready.”

  Tomas grinned. He had won a Stage, and that’s more than his Arianespace sponsors had expected of him. “What trick ever did work more than once, Ernesto? Once is enough.”

  The media rats at the table looked puzzled, and now one of them turned to Ernest Muldoon. “I don’t understand you. What ‘trick’ is this you’re talking about?”

  Muldoon stared at the woman, noted she was young and pretty, and gestured at her to sit down. He poured everyone a liter of orange juice. We competitors sweat away seven or eight kilos, pedaling a Stage, and we have to make sure we start out flush-full with liquids. Tomas took the opportunity to slide away while Muldoon was pouring. He’d had his juice, and some of the other competitors who were still straggling in might have a less enlightened attitude towards Tomas’ innovation of the previous Stage.

  “D’you understand how we change directions round in the middle of each Stage?” Muldoon asked the reporter. One reason Ernie is so popular with the Press is that he’s never too busy to talk to them and explain to them. I noticed that now he had her hooked he had dropped the stage-Irish accent.

  “I guess so. But I don’t understand why. You’re out in empty space, between the Stage points, and you’ve pedaled hard to get the wheels rotating as fast as you can. And then you shift everything around!”

  “Right. An’ here’s the why. Suppose the rider—say, Trace here, the likely lad—hasn’t reached halfway point yet, and let’s for the moment ignore any fancy maneuvers at Stage turn points. So he’s pedaling like a madman—the only way he knows—and the wheels are whizzing round, and he’s built up a voltage of something respectable on the rotating Wimshurst disks—say, a couple of million volts. That voltage goes into accelerating the ion stream out of the back of the bike, eh? The faster he pedals, the higher the voltage, the better the exhaust velocity on the ion drive, and so the faster goes our lad Tracy. And he’s got to get that exhaust velocity as high as he can, because he’s only allowed fifty kilos of fuel per Stage, total. All right?”

  “Oh, yes.” The lady looked into Muldoon’s slightly squinty eyes and seemed ready to swoon with admiration. He beamed at her fondly. I was never sure that Ernie Muldoon followed through with a woman while we were riding the Tour—but I’m damned sure if he didn’t have them between Stages, he saved up credits and used them all when the Tour was over.

  “All right.” Muldoon ran his hand out along the table top. “Here’s Trace. He’s been zooming along in a straight line, faster and faster. But now he gets to the halfway point of the Stage, an’ now he’s got to worry about how he’ll get to the finish. See, it’s no good arriving at the final docking and zooming right on through—you have to stop, or you’re disqualified. So now Trace has a different problem. He has to worry about how he’s going to decelerate for the rest of the run, and finish at a standstill, or close to it, when the bike gets to the docking point. The old-fashioned way—that means up to seven years ago—was pretty simple. Trace here would have turned the whole bike round, so that the ion drive was pointing the other way, towards the place he wanted to get to, and he’d keep on pedaling like the dickens. And if he’d planned well, or was just dumb lucky, he’d be slowed down by the drive just the right amount when he got the final docking, so he could hit slap against the buffers at the maximum permitted speed. Sounds good?”

  She nodded “Fine.” I didn’t know if she was talking about the explanation, or Ernie-the-Letch Muldoon’s hand resting lightly across hers. “But what’s wrong with that way of doing it?” she went on. “It sounds all right to me.”

  Someday they’re going to assign reporters to the Tour de Système who are more than twenty-two years old and who have some faint idea before they begin of the event they are supposed to be covering. It will ruin Muldoon’s sex-life, but it will stop me feeling like an antique myself. All the young press people ask the same damned questions, and they all nod in the same half-witted way when they get the answers.

  I wanted to see how Ernest handled the next bit. Somehow he was going to have to get across to Sweet Young Thing the concept of angular momentum.

  “Problem is,” he said, “while the wheels are spinning fast the bike don’t want to turn. Those wheels are heavy glassite discs, rubbing against each other, and they’re like flywheels, and so the bike wants to stay lined up just the way it is. So in the old days, the biker would have to stop the wheels—or at least slow ’em down a whole lot—then turn the bike around, and start pedaling again to get the wheels going. All the time that was happening, there was no potential difference on them Wimshurst’s, no ion drive, and no acceleration. Big waste of time, and also for the second half of the Stage you were flying ass-backwards. So I did the obvious thing. I mounted a double ion drive on my bike, one facing forward, one facing back—turned out that the rules don’t quite say you can’t have more than one drive. They only say you can’t have more than one ion drive on your bike in use at one time. They don’t say you can’t have two, and switch ’em in the middle of the Stage. Which is what I did. And won, for about two Stages, until everybody else did the same thing.”

  “But what was it that Tomas Lili did? He seemed to have come up with something new.”

  “He installed an ion drive that had more than just the two positions, fore and aft. His can be directed in pretty much any way he wants to. So, first thing that Tomas did on the last Stage, he went off far too fast—at a crazy speed, we all thought. And naturally he got ahead of all of us. Then what he did was to direct his ion beam at whoever was close behind him. The ions hit whoever he was pointing at—me, or Trace, or one of the others—and just about canceled out our own drives completely. We were throwing a couple of tenths of a gram of ion propellant out the back of the bike at better than ten kilometers a second, but we were being hit on the front by the same amount, traveling at the same speed. Net result: no forward acceleration for us. It didn’t hurt us, physically, ’cause we’re all radiation shielded. But it slowed us. By the time we realized why we were doing so badly, he was gone. Naturally, Tomas wasn’t affected, except for the tiny bit he sacrificed because his exhaust jet wasn’t pointing exactly aft.” Muldoon shrugged. “Neat trick. Works once—next time we’ll stay so far out of his wake he’ll lose more forward acceleration turning off-axis to hit us than he’ll gain.”

  “You explain everything so clearly!” Their hands were still touching.

  “Always try to help. But we’ve got to get ready for the Stage now. Will you be there at the finish?”

  “Of course! I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

  Muldoon patted her hand possessively. “Then why don’t we get together after it,
and we can go over the action together? Next to last Stage, there ought to be fireworks.”

  “Oh, yes! Please.”

  As we left for the start dock, I shook my head at Muldoon. “I don’t expect any particular fireworks today. No tricky course change, no solar flares—it should be the tamest leg of the Tour.”

  He stared back at me, owl-eyed. “And did I say the action would be on the course, boyo?”

  We walked side by side to the main staging area. In twenty minutes we would be on our way. I could feel the curious internal tension that told me it was Tour-time again—more than that, it was the final Stages of the Tour. Something in my belly was winding me up like an old-fashioned watch. That was fine. I wanted to hang there in that start space all ready to explode to action. I touched Muldoon lightly on the shoulder—good luck, Muldoon, it meant; but don’t beat me—then I went on to my station.

  There was already a strange atmosphere in the preparation chamber. As the Tour progresses, that strangeness grows and grows. I had noticed it years ago and never understood it, until little Alberto Maimonides, who is probably the best sports writer living (my assessment) or ever (his own assessment) sampled that changing atmosphere before the Stages, and explained it better than I ever could. Either one of Muldoon’s tree-trunk thighs has far more muscle on it than Maimonides’ whole body, but the little man understood the name of the game. “At the beginning of the Tour,” he said to me one day, “there are favorites, but everyone may be said to have an equal chance of winning. As the Tour progresses, the cumulative time and penalties of each rider are slowly established. And so two groups emerge: those with the potential to win the whole thing, and those with no such potential. Those two different potentials polarize the groups more and more, building tension in one, releasing tension in the other. Like the Wimshurst disks that you drive as you turn the pedals, the competitors build up their own massive potential difference. Beyond the halfway mark in the Tour, I can tell you into which group a competitor falls—without speaking a word to him! If a rider has a chance of winning, it is seen in the tension in neck and shoulders, in the obsessive attention to weather data, in the faraway look in the man’s eyes. I can tell you at once which group a rider is in.”