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.
But we spent as much time at home as we could manage. Any gravity at all will slow your body’s mindless attempt to adapt irrevocably to zero gee, and a sixth-gee is a reasonable compromise. Since it is local normal for both Lunar surface and Skyfac, the physiological parameters are standard knowledge. The more time spent at home, the longer we could stay up—and our schedule was fixed. None of us wanted to be marooned in space. That’s how we thought of it in those days.
If we slipped, if physicals showed one of us adapting too rapidly, we could compensate to some degree. You go out the back door, climb into the exercise yoke dangling from the power winch, and strap yourself in. It looks a little like one of those Jolly Jumpers for infants, or a modified bosun’s chair. You ease off the brake, and the yoke begins to “descend,” on a line with the hammer handle since there’s no atmospheric friction to drag you to one side. You lower away, effectively increasing the length of your hammer handle and thus your gee force. When you’re “down” far enough, say at a half gee (about 400 meters of line), you set the brake and exercise on the yoke, which is designed to provide a whole-body workout. You can even, if you want, use the built-in bicycle pedals to pedal yourself back up the line, with a built-in “parking brake” effect so that if it gets too much for you and you lose a stroke, you don’t break your legs and go sliding down to the end of your tether. From low-enough gee zones you can even hand-over-hand your way up, with safety line firmly snubbed—but below half-gee level you do not unstrap from the yoke for any reason. Imagine hanging by your hands at, say, one gravity overall infinity, wearing a snug plastic bag with three hours’ air.
We all got pretty conscientious about… er… watching our weight.
The big temptation was Town Hall, a sphere slightly smaller than the Goldfish Bowl. It was essentially our communal living room, the place where we could all hang out together and chew the fat in person. Play cards, teach each other songs, argue choreography, quarrel choreography (two different things), play 3-D handball, or just appreciate the luxury of free fall without a p-suit or a job to do. If a couple happened to find themselves alone in Town Hall, and were so inclined, they could switch off half the external navigation lights—signifying “Do Not Disturb”—and make love.
(One-sixth gee sex is nice, too—but zero gee is different. Nobody’s on top. It’s a wholehearted cooperative effort or it just doesn’t happen [I can’t imagine a free-fall rape]. You get to use both hands, instead of just the one you’re not lying on. And while a good half of the Kama Sutra goes right out the airlock, there are compensations. I have never cared for simultaneous oral sex, the classic “69,” because of the discomfort and distraction. Free fall makes it not only convenient, but logical, inevitable. End of second inevitable digression.)
For one reason and another, then, it was tempting to hang out overlong at Town Hall—and so many standard daily chores must be done there that the temptation had to be sharply curbed. Extensive physiological readouts on all of us were sent twice daily to Doc Panzella’s medical computer aboard Skyfac: as with air, food, and water, I was prepared to deal elsewhere if Skyfac ever lost its smile, but while I could have them I wanted Panzella’s brains. He was to space medicine what Harry was to space construction, and he kept us firmly in line, blistering us by radio when we goofed, handing out exercise sessions on the Jolly Jumper like a tough priest assigning novenas for penance.
We originally intended to build five sledge hammers, for a maximum comfortable population of fifteen. But we had rushed Harry, that first year; when the first group of students got off the elevator, it was, a miracle that as many as three units were operational. We had to dismiss Harry’s crew early with thanks and a bonus: we needed the cubic they were using. Ten students, Norrey, Raoul, Harry, and me totals fourteen bodies. Three units totals nine rooms. It was a hell of a courtship… but Norrey and I came out of it married; the ceremony was only a formality.
By the second season we had completed one more three-room home, and we took up only seven new students, and everybody had a door they could close and crouch behind when they needed to, and all seven of them washed out. The fifth hammer never got built.
It was that run of bad cards I mentioned earlier, extending itself through our second season.
Look, I was just beginning to become a Name in dance, and rather young for it, when the burglar’s bullet smashed my hip joint. It’s been a long time, but I remember myself as having been pretty damn good. I’ll never be that good again, even with the use of my leg back. A few of the people we washed out were better dancers than I used to be—in dirtside terms. I had believed that a really good dancer almost automatically had the necessary ingredients to learn to think spherically.
The first season’s dismal results had shown me my error, and so for the second semester we used different criteria. We tried to select for free-thinking minds, unconventional minds, minds unchained by preconception and consistency. Raoul described them as “science-fiction-reader types.” The results were ghastly. In the first place, it turns out that people who can question even their most basic assumptions intellectually can not necessarily do so physically—they could imagine what needed doing, but couldn’t do it. Worse, the free-thinkers could not cooperate with other free-thinkers, could not work with anyone’s preconception consistently. What we wanted was a choreographer’s commune, and what we got was the classic commune where no one wanted to do the dishes. One chap would have made a terrific solo artist—when I let him go, I recommended to the Betamax people that they finance him to a Studio of his own—but we couldn’t work with him.