Major League Baseball imposed an age limit on players. Fifty. Nobody over fifty would be allowed to play on a major league team. This made room for the youngsters like Danny Daniels to get into the game—although Daniels was thirty-eight when he finally became the Yankees’ starting catcher.
The guys over fifty were put into a new league, a special league for old-timers. This allowed baseball to expand again, for the first time in the Twenty-First century. Sixteen new teams in sixteen new cities, mostly in the Sun Belt, like Tucson, Mobile, New Orleans and Orlando.
And the best part is that the old timers get a shot at the World Series winner. At the end of October, right around Hallowe’en, the pennant winner from the Old Timers’ League plays the winner of the World Series.
Some wags wrote columns about Hallowe’en being the time when dead ballplayers rise from their graves, but nobody pays much attention to that kind of drivel. The Hallowe’en series draws big crowds—and big TV receipts. Even Bragg admits he likes it, a little.
Last Hallowe’en Vic’s Tucson Tarantulas whipped the New York Yankees in seven games. In the deciding game, Danny Daniels hit a home run for the Yanks, but Vic socked two dingers for Tucson to ice it. He said it was to celebrate the birth of his first son.
Yankee haters all over the country rejoiced.
Asked when he planned to retire, Vic said, «I don’t know. Maybe when my kid gets old enough to play in the Bigs.»
Or maybe not.
THE MAN WHO HATED GRAVITY
The most important advice ever given to a writer is this: Write about what you know.
But how can you do this in science fiction, when the stories tend to be about places and times that no one has yet experienced? How can you write about what you know when you want to write about living in the future or the distant past, on the Moon, or Mars, or some planet that is invented out of your imagination?
There are ways.
To begin with, no matter what time and place in which your story is set, it must deal with people. Oh, sure, the characters in your story may not look like human beings. Science-fiction characters can be robots or alien creatures or smart dolphins or sentient cacti, for that matter. But they must behave like humans. They must have humanly recognizable needs and fears and desires. If they do not, they will either be totally incomprehensible to the reader or—worst sin of all—boring.
I have never been to the Moon. I have never been a circus acrobat. But I know what it is to hate gravity. Several years ago I popped my knee while playing tennis. For weeks I was in a brace, hardly able to walk. I used crutches, and later a cane. For more than a year I could not trust my two legs to support me. Even today that knee feels like there’s a loose collection of rubber bands inside. I know what it is like to be crippled, even though it was only temporary.
And I know, perhaps as well as anyone, what it is like to live on the Moon. I’ve been living there in my imagination for much of my life. My first novel (unpublished) dealt with establishing habitats on the Moon. My 1976 novel Millennium (later incorporated into The Kinsman Saga) was set mainly on the Moon. In my 1987 nonfiction book Welcome to Moonbase, I worked with engineers and illustrators to create a livable, workable industrial base on the Moon’s surface.
While I was hobbling around on crutches, hating every moment of being incapacitated, I kept thinking of how much better off I would be in zero g, or in the gentle gravity of the Moon, one-sixth of Earth’s.
And the Great Rolando took form in my mind. I began to write a short story about him. I don’t write many short stories. Most of my fiction has been novels. When I start a novel, I usually know the major characteristics of the major characters, and that’s about it. I have sketched out the basic conflict between the protagonist and antagonist, but if I try to outline the scenes, schedule the chapters, organize the action, the novel gets turgid and dull. Much better to let the characters fight it out among themselves, day after day, as the work progresses.
Short stories are very different. Most of the short stories I write are rather carefully planned out before I begin putting the words down. I find that, because a short story must necessarily be tightly written, without a spare scene or even an extra sentence, I must work out every detail of the story in my mind before I begin to write.
However, «The Man Who Hated Gravity» did not evolve that way. I began with Rolando, a daring acrobat who flouted his disdain for the dangers of his work. I knew he was going to be injured, much more seriously and permanently than I was. From there on in, Rolando and the other characters literally took over the telling of the tale. I did not know, for example, that the scientist who was used to help publicize Rolando would turn out to be the man who headed Moonbase years later.
I do not advise this subconscious method of writing for short-story work. As I said, a short story must be succinct. Instead of relating the tale of a person’s whole life, or a substantial portion of it, a short story can at best reveal a critical incident in that character’s life: a turning point, an episode that illuminates the person’s inner being.
But this subconscious method worked for me in «The Man Who Hated Gravity.» See if the story works for you.
The Great Rolando had not always hated gravity. As a child growing up in the traveling circus that had been his only home he often frightened his parents by climbing too high, swinging too far, daring more than they could bear to watch.
The son of a clown and a cook, Rolando had yearned for true greatness, and could not rest until he became the most renowned aerialist of them all.
Slim and handsome in his spangled tights, Rolando soared through the empty air thirty feet above the circus’s flimsy safety net. Then fifty feet above it. Then a full hundred feet high, with no net at all.
«See the Great Rolando defy gravity!» shouted the posters and TV advertisements. And the people came to crane their necks and hold their breaths as he performed a split-second ballet in midair high above them. Literally flying from one trapeze to another, triple somersaults were workaday chores for the Great Rolando.
His father feared to watch his son’s performances. With all the superstition born of generations of circus life, he cringed outside the Big Top while the crowds roared deliriously. Behind his clown’s painted grin Rolando’s father trembled. His mother prayed through every performance until the day she died, slumped over a bare wooden pew in a tiny austere church far out in the midwestern prairie.
For no matter how far he flew, no matter how wildly he gyrated in midair, no matter how the crowds below gasped and screamed their delight, the Great Rolando pushed himself farther, higher, more recklessly.
Once, when the circus was playing New York City’s huge Convention Center, the management pulled a public relations coup. They got a brilliant young physicist from Columbia University to pose with Rolando for the media cameras and congratulate him on defying gravity.
Once the camera crews had departed, the physicist said to Rolando, «I’ve always had a secret yearning to be in the circus. I admire what you do very much.»
Rolando accepted the compliment with a condescending smile.
«But no one can really defy gravity,» the physicist warned. «It’s a universal force, you know.»
The Great Rolando’s smile vanished. «I can defy gravity. And I do. Every day.»
Several years later Rolando’s father died (of a heart seizure, during one of his son’s performances) and Rolando married the brilliant young lion tamer who had joined the circus slightly earlier. She was a petite little thing with golden hair, the loveliest of blue eyes, and so sweet a disposition that no one could say anything about her that was less than praise. Even the great cats purred for her.