“Tom,” I said solemnly, “I assure you that that is the diametric opposite of a loss.”
“Well, the world does look pretty rotten these days, I’ll grant you that. There isn’t a lot ofit I’ll miss.”
“You miss my point.”
“So explain.”
“I talked about this with Doc Panzella some, before we left. What is the normal lifespan for a Space Man?”
He started to speak twice, stopped trying.
“Right. There’s no way to frame a guess—it’s a completely new ball game. ‘We’re the first. I asked Panzella, and he told me to come back when two or three of us had died. We may all die within a month, because fatigue products refuse to collect in our feet or our corns migrate to our brains or something. But Panzella’s guess is that free fall is going to add at least forty years to our lifespans. I asked him how sure he was and he offered to bet cash.”
Everyone started talking at once, which doesn’t work on radio. The consensus was, “Say what?” The last to shut up and drop out was Tom. “—possibly know a thing like that, yet?” he finished, embarrassed.
“Exactly,” I said. “We won’t know ’til it’s too late. But it’s reasonable. Your heart has less work to do, arterial deposits seem to diminish—”
“So it won’t be heart trouble that gets us,” Tom stipulated, “assuming that lowering the work load drastically turns out to be good for a heart. But that’s one organ out of many.”
“Think it through, Tom. Space is a sterile environment. With reasonable care it always will be. Your immune system becomes almost as superfluous as your semicircular canals—and do you have any idea how much energy fighting off thousands of wandering infections drains from your life system? That might have been used for maintenance and repair? Or don’t you notice your energy level drop when you go dirtside?”
“Well sure,” he said, “but that’s just....”
“—the gravity, you were gonna say? See what I mean? We’re healthier, physically and mentally, than we ever were on Earth. When did you ever have a cold in space? For that matter, when was the last time you got deeply depressed, morose? How come we hardly ever, any of us, have dog days, black depressions and sulks and the like? Hell, the word depression is tied to gravity. You can’t depress something in space, you can only move it. And the very word gravity has come to be a synonym for humorlessness. If there’s two things that’ll kill you early it’s depression and lack of a sense of humor.”
In a vivid rush came the memory of what it had felt like to live with a defective leg under one gravity. Depression, and an atrophying sense of humor. It seemed so long ago, so very far away. Had I ever really been that despairing?
“Anyway,” I went on, “Panzella says that people who spend a lot of time in free fall—and even the people in Luna who stay in one-sixth gee, those exiled miners—show a lower incidence of heart and lung trouble, naturally. But he also says they show a much lower incidence of cancers of all kinds than the statistical norm.”
“Even with the higher radiation levels?” Tom asked skeptically. Whenever there’s a solar flare, we all see green polliwogs for a while, as the extra radiation impacts our eyeballs—and it doesn’t make any difference whether we’re indoors or out.
“Yep,” I assured him. “Coming out from under the atmosphere blanket was the main health hazard we all gambled on in living in space—but it seems to’ve paid off. It seemed there should have been ahigher risk of cancer, but it just doesn’t seem to be turning out that way. Go ask why. And the lower lung trouble is obvious—we breath real air, better filtered than the Prime Minister’s, dust free and zero pollen count. Hell, if you had all the money on Earth, you couldn’t have a healthier environment tailor-made. How about old Mrs. Murphy on Skyfac? What is she, sixty-five?”
“Sixty-six,” Raoul said. “And free-fall handball champ. She whipped my ass, three games running.”
“It’s almost as though we were designed to live in space,” Linda said wonderingly.
“All right,” Tom cried in exasperation. “All right, I give up. I’m sold. We’re all going to live to a hundred and twenty. Assuming that the aliens don’t decide we’re delicious. But I still say that this ‘new species’ nonsense is muddy thinking, delusions of grandeur. For one thing, there’s no guarantee we’ll breed true—or, as Charlie pointed out, at all. But more important, homo novis isa ‘species’ without a natural habitat! We’re not self-sustaining, friends! We’re utterly dependent on Homo sapiens, unless and until we learn how to make our own air, water, food, metals, plastics, tools, cameras—”
“What are you so pissed off about?” Harry asked.
“I’m not pissed off!” Tom yelled.
We all broke up, then, and Tom was honest enough to join us after a while.
“All right,” he said. “I am angry. I’m honestly not sure why. Linda, do you have any handles on it?”
“Well,” she said thoughtfully, “ ‘anger’ and ‘fear’ are damned close to synonyms…”
Tom started.
Raoul spoke up, his voice strained. “If it will help any, I will be glad to confess that our pending appointment with these super-fireflies has me, for one, scared shitless. And I haven’t met ’em personally like you and Charlie have. I mean, this little caper could cost us a lot more than just Earth.”
That was such an odd sentence that we just let it sit there a while. “I know what you mean,” Norrey said slowly. “Our job is to establish telepathic rapport with what seems to be a group-mind. I’m almost… almost afraid I might succeed.”
“Afraid you might get lost, darling?” I said. “Forget it—I wouldn’t let go of you long enough. I didn’t wait twenty years to be a widower.” She squeezed my hand.
“That’s the point,” Linda said. “The worst we’re facing is death, in one form or another. And we always have been under sentence of death, all of us, for being human. That’s the ticket price for this show. Norrey, you and Charlie looked death right in the eye a week ago. Sure as hell you will again some day. It might turn out to be a year from now, at Saturn: so what?”
“That’s the trouble,” Tom said, shaking his head. “Fear doesn’t go away just because it’s illogical.”
“No,” Linda agreed, “but there are methods for dealing with it—and repressing it until it comes out as anger is not one of them. Now that we’re down to the root, though, I can teach you techniques of self-discipline that’ll at least help a lot.”
“Teach me too,” Raoul said, almost inaudibly.
Harry reached out and took his hand. “We’ll learn together,” he said.
“We’ll all learn together,” I said. “Maybe we are other than human, but we’re not that different. But I would like to say that you are about the bravest folks I know, all of you. If anybody—wups! There goes the alarm again. Let’s get some real dancing done, so we come home sweaty. We’ll do this again in a couple of days. Harry, take that heavy-breathing tape out of circuit and we’ll boost our signal strength together at three, two, one, mark.”
I repeat the above conversation in its entirety partly because it is one of the few events in this chronicle of which I possess a complete audio recording. But also partly because it contains most of the significant information you need to know about that one-year trip to Saturn. There is no point in describing the interior of Siegfried, or the day-to-day schedules or the month-by-month objectives or the interpersonal frictions that filled up one of the most busy, boring years of my life.