“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.
III
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 sledge-hammer 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-support 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).