Raoul tugged gently on a line, and a large expandable wire loop came to him. He adjusted it to just slightly larger than the bubblejewel, captured that in the loop and expanded the loop rapidly at once. Those who have only seen it masked by gravity have no idea how powerful a force surface tension is. The bubblejewel became a concave lens about three meters in diameter, within which multicolored convex lenses bubbled, each literally perfect. He oriented it toward Harry, added three low-power lasers from the sides, and set the lens spinning like the Wheel of Kali. And we danced.
After a while the knock-knock light went on beside the airlock. That should have startled me—we don’t get much company—but I paid no mind, lost in zero-gee dance and in Raoul’s genius, and a little in my own in hiring him. The lock cycled and opened to admit Tom McGillicuddy—which should have startled hell out of me. I’d had no idea he was thinking of coming up to visit, and since he hadn’t been on the scheduled elevator I’d just put Yeng and DuBois on, he must have taken a very expensive special charter to get here. Which implied disaster.
But I was in a warm fog, lost in the dance, perhaps a little hypnotized by the sparkling of Raoul’s grape-juice, tomato-juice and lime-jello kaleidoscope. I may not even have nodded hello to Tom, and I know I was not even remotely surprised by what he did, then.
He joined us.
With no hesitation, casting away the velcro slippers he’d brought from the airlock’s dressing chamber, he stepped off into thick air and joined us within the sphere, using Raoul’s guy wires to position himself so that our triangle pattern became a square. And then he danced with us, picking up our patterns and the rhythm of the music.
He did a creditable job. He was in damned good shape for someone who’d been doing all our paperwork—but infinitely more important (for terrestrial physical fitness is so useless in space), he was clearly functioning without a local vertical, and enjoying it.
Now I was startled, to my bones, but I kept pokerfaced and continued dancing, trying not to let Tom catch me watching. Across the sphere Norrey did likewise—and Linda, above, seemed genuinely oblivious.
Startled? I was flabbergasted. The single factor that had washed out sixteen students out of seventeen was the same thing that washed out Skyfac construction men, the same thing that had troubled eight of the nine Skylab crewmen back when the first experiments with zero-gee life had been made: inability to live without a local vertical.
If you bring a goldfish into orbit (the Skylab crew did), it will flounder helplessly in its globe of water. Show the fish an apparent point of reference, place a flat surface against its water-sphere (which will then form a perfect hemisphere thereon quite naturally), and the fish will decide that the plane surface is a stream bed, aligning its body perpendicularly. Remove the plate, or add a second plate (no local vertical or too many), and the goldfish will soon die, mortally confused. Skylab was purposely built to have three different local verticals in its three major modules, and eight out of nine crewmen faithfully and chronically adjusted to a module’s local vertical as they entered it, without conscious thought. Traveling all the way through all three in one jaunt gave them headaches; they hated the docking adapter which was designed to have no local vertical at all. It is physically impossible to get dizzy in zero gee, but they said they felt dizzy any time they were prevented from coming into focus with a defined “floor” and “walls.”
All of them except one—described as “one of the most intelligent of the astronauts, as well as one of the most perverse.” He took to the docking adapter—to life with-out up and down—like a duck to water. He was the only one of nine who made the psychological breakthrough. Now Iknew how lucky I had been that Norrey and Raoul had both turned out to be Stardancer material. And how few others ever could be.
But Tom was unquestionably one of them. One of us. His technique was raw as hell, he thought his hands were shovels and his spine was all wrong, but he was trainable. And he had that rare, indefinable something that it takes to maintain equilibrium in an environment that forbids equilibration. He was at home in space.
I should have remembered. He had been ever since I’d known him. It seemed to me in that moment that I perceived all at once the totality of my bloody blind stupidity—but I was wrong.
The impromptu jam session wound down eventually; Raoul’s music frivolously segued into the closing bars of Thus Spake Zarathustra, and as that last chord sustained, he stabbed a rigid hand through his lens, shattering it into a million rainbow drops that dispersed with the eerie grace of an expanding universe.
“Hoover that up,” I said automatically, breaking the spell, and Harry hastened to kick on the air scavenger before Town Hall became sticky with fruit juice and jello. Everyone sighed with it, and Raoul the magician was once again a rabbity little guy with a comic-opera hypo and a hula hoop. And a big wide smile. The tribute of sighs was followed by a tribute of silence; the warm glow was a while in fading. I’ll be damned, I thought, I haven’t made memories this good in twenty years. Then I put my mind back in gear.
“Conference,” I said briefly, and jaunted to Raoul. Harry, Norrey, Linda and Tom met me there, and we grabbed hands and feet at random to form a human snowflake in the center of the sphere. This left our faces every-which-way to each other, of course, but we ignored it, the way a veteran DJ ignores the spinning of a record label he’s reading. Even Tom paid no visible mind to it. We got right down to business.
“Well, Tom,” Norrey said first, “what’s the emergency?”
“Is Skyfac bailing out?” Raoul asked.
“Why didn’t you call first?” I added. Only Linda and Harry were silent.
“Whoa,” Tom said. “No emergency. None at all, everybody relax. Businesswise everything continues to work like a ridiculously overdesigned watch.”
“Then why spring for the chartered elevator? Or were you stowing away in the regular that just left?”
“No, I had a charter, all right—but it was a taxi. I’ve been in free fall almost as long as you have. Over at Skyfac.”
“Over at—” I thought things through, with difficulty. “And you went to the trouble of having your calls and mail relayed so we wouldn’t catch on.”
“That’s right. I’ve spent the last three months working out of our branch office aboard Skyfac.” That branch office was a postal address somewhere in the lower left quadrant of Tokugawa’s new executive secretary’s desk.
“Uh huh,” I said. “Why?”
He looked at Linda, whose left ankle he happened to be holding, and chose his words. “Remember that first week after we met, Linda?” She nodded. “I don’t think I’ve been so exasperated before in my whole life. I thought you were the jackass of the world. That night I blew up at you in Le Maintenant, that last time that we argued religion—remember? I walked out of there that night and took a copter straight to Nova Scotia to that damned commune you grew up in. Landed in the middle of the garden at three in the morning, woke half of ’em up. I raved and swore at them for over an hour, demanding to know how in the hell they could have raised you to be such a misguided idiot. When I was done they blinked and scratched and yawned and then the big one with the really improbable beard said, ‘Well, if there’s that much juice between you, we would recommend that you probably ought to start courting,’ and gave me a sleeping bag.”