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by Ben Bova

“There’s nothing to be afraid of! Gravity can’t hurt me!” And he would laugh at her fears.

  “But I am afraid,” she would cry.

  “The people pay their money to see me defy gravity,” Rolando would tell his tearful wife. “They’ll get bored if I keep doing the same stunts one year after another.”

  She loved him dearly and felt terribly frightened for him. It was one thing to master a large cage full of Bengal tigers and tawny lions and snarling black panthers. All you needed was will and nerve. But she knew that gravity was another matter altogether.

  “No one can defy gravity forever,” she would say, gently, softly, quietly.

  “I can,” boasted the Great Rolando.

  But of course, he could not. No one could. Not forever. The fall, when it inevitably came, was a matter of a fraction of a second. His young assistant’s hand slipped only slightly in starting out the empty trapeze for Rolando to catch after a quadruple somersault. Rolando almost caught it. In midair he saw that the bar would be too short. He stretched his magnificently trained body to the utmost, and his fingers just grazed its tape-wound shaft.

  For an instant he hung in the air. The tent went absolutely silent. The crowd drew in its collective breath. The band stopped playing. Then gravity wrapped its invisible tentacles around the Great Rolando, and he plummeted, wild-eyed and screaming, to the sawdust a hundred feet below.

  “His right leg is completely shattered,” said the famous surgeon to Rolando’s wife. She had stayed calm up to that moment, strong and levelheaded while her husband lay unconscious in an intensive care unit.

  “His other injuries will heal. But the leg . . .” The gray-haired, gray-suited man shook his dignified head sadly. His assistants, gathered behind him like an honor guard, shook their heads in metronome synchrony to their leader.

  “His leg?” she asked, trembling.

  “He will never be able to walk again,” the famous surgeon pronounced.

  The petite, blond lion tamer crumpled and sagged into the sleek leather couch of the hospital waiting room, tears spilling down her cheeks.

  “Unless . . .” said the famous surgeon.

  “Unless?” she echoed, suddenly wild with hope.

  “Unless we replace the shattered leg with a prosthesis.”

  “Cut off his leg?”

  The famous surgeon promised her that a prosthetic bionic leg would be “just as good as the original—in fact, even better!” It would be a permanent prosthesis; it would never have to come off, and its synthetic surface would blend so well with Rolando’s real skin that no one would be able to tell where his natural leg ended, and his prosthetic leg began. His assistants nodded in unison.

  Frenzied at the thought that her husband would never walk again, alone in the face of coolly assured medical wisdom, she reluctantly gave her assent and signed the necessary papers.

  The artificial leg was part lightweight metal, part composite space-manufactured materials, and entirely filled with marvelously tiny electronic devices and miraculously miniaturized motors that moved the prosthesis exactly the way a real leg should move. It was stronger than flesh and bone, or so the doctors confidently assured the Great Rolando’s wife.

  The circus manager, a constantly frowning bald man who reported to a board of bankers, lawyers, and MBAs in St. Petersburg, agreed to pay the famous surgeon’s astronomical fee.

  “The first aerialist with a bionic leg,” he murmured, dollar signs in his eyes.

  Rolando took the news of the amputation and prostheses with surprising calm. He agreed with his wife: better a strong and reliable artificial leg than a ruined real one.

  In two weeks, he walked again. But not well. He limped. The leg hurt, with a sullen, stubborn ache that refused to go away.

  “It will take a little time to get accustomed to it,” said the physical therapists.

  Rolando waited. He exercised. He tried jogging. The leg did not work right. And it ached constantly.

  “That’s just not possible,” the doctors assured him. “Perhaps you ought to talk with a psychologist.”

  The Great Rolando stormed out of their offices, limping and cursing, never to return. He went back to the circus, but not to his aerial acrobatics. A man who could not walk properly, who had an artificial leg that did not work right, had no business on the high trapeze.

  His young assistant took the spotlight now and duplicated—almost—the Great Rolando’s repertoire of aerial acrobatic feats. Rolando watched him with mounting jealousy, his only satisfaction being that the crowds were noticeably smaller than they had been when he had been the star of the show. The circus manager frowned and asked when Rolando would be ready to work again.

  “When the leg works right,” said Rolando.

  But it continued to pain him, to make him awkward and invalid.

  That is when he began to hate gravity. He hated being pinned down to the ground like a worm, a beetle. He would hobble into the big tent and eye the fliers platform a hundred feet over his head and know that he could not even climb the ladder to reach it. He grew angrier each day. And clumsy. And obese. The damned false leg hurt, no matter what those expensive quacks said. It was not psychosomatic. Rolando snorted contempt for their stupidity.

  He spent his days bumping into inanimate objects and tripping over tent ropes. He spent his nights grumbling and grousing, fearing to move about in the dark, fearing even that he might roll off his bed. When he managed to sleep, the same nightmare gripped him: he was falling, plunging downward eternally while gravity laughed at him, and all his screams for help did him no good whatever.

  His former assistant grinned at him whenever they met. The circus manager took to growling about Rolando’s weight and asking how long he expected to be on the payroll when he was not earning his keep.

  Rolando limped and ached. And when no one could see him, he cried. He grew bitter and angry, like a proud lion that finds himself caged forever.

  Representatives from the bionics company that manufactured the prosthetic leg visited the circus, their faces grave with concern.

  “The prosthesis should be working just fine,” they insisted.

  Rolando insisted even more staunchly that their claims were fraudulent. “I should sue you and the barbarian who took my leg off.”

  The manufacturer’s reps consulted their home office, and within the week Rolando was whisked to San Jose in their company jet. For days on end, they tested the leg, its electronic innards, the bionic interface where it linked with Rolando’s human nervous system. Everything checked out perfectly. They showed Rolando the results, almost with tears in their eyes.

  “It should work fine.”

  “It does not.”

  In exchange for a written agreement not to sue them, the bionics company gave Rolando a position as a field consultant, at a healthy stipend. His only duties were to phone San Jose once a month to report on how the leg felt. Rolando delighted in describing each and every individual twinge, the awkwardness of the leg, how it made him limp.

  His wife was the major earner now, despite his monthly consultant’s fee. She worked twice as hard as ever before and began to draw crowds that held their breaths in vicarious terror as they watched the tiny blond place herself at the mercy of so many fangs and claws.

  Rolando traveled with her as the circus made its tour of North America each year, growing fatter and unhappier day by humiliating, frustrating, painful day.

  Gravity defeated him every hour, in a thousand small ways. He would read a magazine in their cramped mobile home until, bored, he tossed it onto the table. Gravity would slyly tug at its pages until the magazine slipped over the table’s edge and fell to the floor. He would shower laboriously, hating the bulging fat that now encumbered his once-sleek body. The soap would slide from his hands while he was half-blinded with suds. Inevitably he would slip on it and bang
himself painfully against the shower wall.

  If there was a carpet spread on the floor, gravity would contrive to have it entangle his feet and pull him into a humiliating fall. Stairs tripped him. His silverware clattered noisily to the floor in restaurants.

  He shunned the big top altogether, where the people who had once paid to see him soar through the air could see how heavy and clumsy he had become—even though a nasty voice in his mind told him that no one would recognize the fat old man he now was as the once magnificent Great Rolando.

  As the years stretched past, Rolando grew grayer and heavier and angrier. Furious at gravity. Bellowing, screaming, howling with impotent rage at the hateful tricks gravity played on him every day, every hour. He took to leaning on a cane and stumping around their mobile home, roaring helplessly against gravity and the fate that was killing him by inches.

  His darling wife remained steadfast and supportive all through those terrible years. Other circus folk shook their heads in wonder at her. “She spends all day with the big cats and then goes home to more roaring and spitting,” they told each other.

  Then one winter afternoon, as the sun threw long shadows across the Houston Astrodome parking lot, where the circus was camped for the week, Rolando’s wife came into their mobile home, her sky-blue workout suit dark with perspiration, and announced that a small contingent of performers had been invited to Moonbase for a month.

  “To the moon?” Rolando asked, incredulous. “Who?”

  “The fliers and tightrope acts,” she replied, “and a selection of acrobats and clowns. “

  “There’s no gravity up there,” Rolando muttered, suddenly jealous. “Or less gravity. Something like that.”

  He slumped back in the sofa without realizing that the wonderful smile on his wife’s face meant that there was more she wanted to tell him.

  “We’ve been invited too!” she blurted, and she perched herself on his lap, threw her arms around his thick neck, and kissed him soundly.

  “You mean you’ve been invited,” he said darkly, pulling away from her embrace. “You’re the star of the show; I’m a has-been”

  She shook her head, still smiling happily. “They haven’t asked me to perform. They can’t bring the cats up into space. The invitation is for the Great Rolando and his wife to spend a month up there as guests of Moonbase Inc.!” Rolando suspected that the bionics company had pulled some corporate strings. They wanted to see how their damnable leg works without gravity, he was certain. Inwardly, he was eager to find out too. But he let no one know that, not even his wife.

  To his utter shame and dismay, Rolando was miserably sick all the long three days of the flight from Texas to Moonbase. Immediately after takeoff the spacecraft carrying the circus performers was in zero gravity, weightless, and Rolando found that the absence of gravity was worse for him than gravity itself. His stomach seemed to be falling all the time while, paradoxically, anything he tried to eat crawled upward into his throat and made him violently ill.

  In his misery and near delirium, he knew that gravity was laughing at him.

  Once on the moon, however, everything became quite fine. Better than fine, as far as Rolando was concerned. While clear-eyed, young Moonbase guides in crisp uniforms of amber and bronze demonstrated the cautious shuffling walk that was needed in the gentle lunar gravity, Rolando realized that his leg no longer hurt.

  “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 cheer
ed 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 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?”