“Got a job for you, Harry, if you want it.”
He shook his head. “I’m happy here.”
“It’s a space job.”
He damned near smiled again. “I’m unhappy here.”
“All right, I’ll tell you about it. My guess is a year of design work, three or four years of heavy construction, and then a kind of permanent maintenance job keeping the whole thing running for us.”
“What?” he asked economically.
“I want an orbiting dance studio.”
He held up a hand the size of a baseball glove, cutting me off. He took a minicorder out of his shirt, set the mike for “ambient” and put it on the desk between us. “What do you want it to do?”
Five and a half hours later all three of us were hoarse, and an hour after that Harry handed us a set of sketches. I looked them over with Norrey, we approved his budget, and he told us a year. We all shook hands.
Ten months later I took title.
We spent the next three weeks in and around Skyfac property, while I introduced Norrey and Raoul to life without up and down. Space overawed them both at first. Norrey, like her sister before her, was profoundly moved by the personal confrontation with infinity, spiritually traumatized by the awesome perspective that the Big Deep brings to human values. And unlike her sister before her, she lacked that mysteriously total self-confidence, that secure ego-strength that had helped Shara to adjust so quickly. Few humans have ever been as sure of themselves as Shara was. Raoul, too, was only slightly less affected.
We all get it at first, we who venture out into space. From the earliest days, the most unimaginative and stolid jocks NASA could assemble for astronauts frequently came back down spiritually and emotionally staggered, and some adapted and some didn’t. The ten percent of Skyfac personnel who spend much time EVA, who have any way of knowing they’re not in Waukegan besides the low gee, often have to be replaced, and no worker is depended on until his or her second tour. Norrey and Raoul both came through it—they were able to expand their personal interior universe to encompass that much external universe, and came out of the experience (as Shara and I had) with a new and lasting inner calm.
The spiritual confrontation, however, was only the first step. The major victory was much subtler. It was more than just spiritual malaise that washed out seven out of ten exterior construction workers in their first tour. It was also physiological—or was it psychological?—distress.
Free fall itself they both took to nearly at once. Norrey was much quicker than Raoul to adapt—as a dancer, she knew more about her reflexes, and he was more prone to forget himself and blunder into impossible situations, which he endured with dogged good humor. But both were proficient at “jaunting,” propelling oneself through an enclosed space, by the time we were ready to return to Earth. (I myself was pleasantly astonished at how fast unused dance skills came back to me.)
The real miracle was their equally rapid acclimation to sustained EVA, to extended periods outdoors in free space. Given enough time, nearly anyone can acquire new reflexes. But startlingly few can learn to live without a local vertical.
I was so ignorant at that time that I hadn’t the slightest idea what an incredible stroke of good fortune it was that both Norrey and Raoul could. No wonder the gods smile so seldom—we so often fail to notice. Not until the next year did I realize how narrowly my whole venture—my whole life—had escaped disaster. When it finally dawned on me, I had the shakes for days.
That kind of luck held for the next year.
The first year was spent in getting the ball rolling. Endless millions of aggravations and petty details—have you ever tried to order dancing shoes for hands? With velcro palms? So few of the things we needed could be ordered from the Johnny Brown catalog, or put together out of stock space-hardware. Incredible amounts of imaginary dollars flowed through my and Norrey’s right hands, and but for Tom McGillicuddy the thing simply would not have been possible. He took care of incorporating both the Shara Drummond School of New Modern Dance and the performing company, Star-dancers, Inc., and became business manager of the former and agent for the latter. A highly intelligent and thoroughly honorable man, he had entered Carrington’s service with his eyes—and his ears—wide open. When we waved him like a wand, magic resulted. How many honest men understand high finance?
The second indispensable wizard was, of course, Harry. And bear in mind that during five of those ten months, Harry was on mandatory dirtside leave, readapting his body and bossing the job by extreme long distance phone (God, I hated having phones installed—but the phone company’s rates were fractionally cheaper than buying our own orbit-to-Earth video equipment, and of course it tied the Studio into the global net). Unlike the majority of Skyfac personnel, who rotate dirtside every fourteen months, construction men (those who make it) spend so much time in total weightlessness that six months is the recommended maximum. I figured us Stardancers for the same shift, and Doc Panzella agreed. But the first month and the last four were under Harry’s direct supervision, and he actually turned it in under budget—doubly impressive considering that much of what he was doing had never been done before. He would have beat his original deadline; it wasn’t his fault that we had to move it up on him.
Best of all, Harry turned out (as I’d hoped) to be one of those rare bosses who would rather be working with his hands than bossing. When the job was done he took a month off to collate the first ten inches of copy on his takeup reel into The First Book, sold it for a record-breaking advance and Santa Claus royalties, and then hired back on with us as set-builder, prop man, stage manager, all-around maintenance man, and resident mechanic. Tokugawa’s boys had made astonishingly little fuss when we hired Harry away from them. They simply did not know what they were missing—until it was months too late to do anything about it.
We were able to raid Skyfac so effectively only because it was what it was: a giant, heartless multinational that saw people as interchangeable components. Carrington probably knew better—but the backers he had gotten together and convinced to underwrite his dream knew even less about space than I had as a video man in Toronto. I’m certain they thought of it, most of them, as merely an extremely foreign investment.
I needed all the help I could get. I needed that entire year—and more!—to overhaul and retune an instrument that had not been used in a quarter of a century: my dancer’s body. With Norrey’s support, I managed, but it wasn’t easy.
In retrospect, all of the above strokes of luck were utterly necessary for the Shara Drummond School of New Modern Dance to have become a reality in the first place. After so many interlocking miracles, I guess I should have been expecting a run of bad cards. But it sure didn’t look like one when it came.