We're talking five Earth gees here, remember. I grew up in one sixth of an Earth gravity; did that mean what I was feeling was thirty gees? No, because Lunarians are not one sixth as strong as old Earthers. Depending on what sort of shape we're in, we range from about a third, to full one-gee strength. I figure I was perhaps half as strong as an Earthling, so make it an effective ten gees.
The only relief to be found was that after a few minutes, a druggy feeling of lassitude overcame me. Better call it weariness, fatalism, or resigned apathy. I hurt everywhere, I was sure I wouldn't survive this, but I didn't give much of a damn. Dying would be a relief.
There's no mystery as to the source of this druggy feeling. Mechanical arms hovered and darted over us, moving in for the strike from time to time, pumping us full of sweet nepenthe. God knows what it was. I never asked. There were machines to monitor our vital signs, and something that carefully lifted our arms and legs from time to time, moved us around a little. I fancied a bedsore could form in about three seconds at five gees.
It hurt when we were moved. It hurt when I inhaled. Exhaling was no problem. Once I think I stopped inhaling for a while. A dozen needles quickly found veins and started pumping. A mask descended over my face and huffed at me for a while. Oh, all right, I thought, and took another breath.
For a time I could hear Poly moaning. I tried to turn my head to look at her but it was too much trouble. She stopped moaning, and somebody else took it up. Me, I guess. Toby whined for a while, then fell silent, too. If I'd had time I could have estivated him, let him sleep through this nightmare. I wondered if he'd ever forgive me. We had an arrangement: I was in charge of food, navigation, air, and gravity; he was in charge of everything else. I knew he'd regard this as gross negligence.
Perhaps there is a more effective way to show you five gees, but it has nothing to do with descriptive language. Here's what you do: get three or four friends. Rather weird friends would be best. Give them each a baseball bat and have them wrap the business ends with towels; five gees doesn't break bones, it just seems that way. Now pad a hammer in the same way. Start pounding yourself on the head while the friends belabor your body, neck to feet, with the bats. Do this for an hour and a half.
Go ahead. I'll wait.
Now roll yourself out of bed. You'll find you've lost about a foot in height, but that's because you're walking hunched over. It might be better if you fell to your knees. There, now wasn't that an interesting feeling? About now you'll be wishing you could glide like a slug. You feel so slimy you almost feel it's possible.
The bathroom seems the place to go. Please, turn off that goddam light!
When you've made it back to your feet (two hours? three?) you'll probably have enough morbid curiosity to want to see yourself in a mirror. You find you resemble a Picasso from the Black-and-Blue Period. You are twisted in places you didn't used to twist, your head has moved over to one shoulder, both eyes are on one side of your nose. Your skin looks as if it has been tie-dyed, lots of reds and yellows and especially purple blues, in interesting patterns. Your nose is a dipsomaniac's life story. Black golf balls have been rolled under your upper and lower eyelids; the eyeballs themselves are the color of egg yolks laced with lots of Tabasco sauce: huevos rancheros. Your mouth has been stretched into a frozen rictus that almost reaches your ears. Your teeth are dry and coated with sand.
You begin gingerly exploring your body with your fingertips. You find your kidneys have settled down around your thighs; you'll piss pink for a week. Your bowels have not actually been turned inside out, those are just hemorrhoids the size of volleyballs. Guys, your testicles will be about that size, too, and the very thought of touching them makes you weep. Girls... well, Poly never told me, and I don't want to know. I would think large breasts would be the ninth circle of hell, and medium ones, like Poly's, at least a stint in purgatory.
You want to talk headache? Backache? Bellyache? Thank god; I don't, either.
The best bet is to lower yourself, screaming every few seconds, into a warm spa bath with bubble jets and soothing lotions mixed with the water, and stay there for three days. What's that? You don't have a spa?
Oh, you poor baby.
We did have a spa. This was a billionaire's toy, remember. You could do laps in it. Later we did. I got in and promptly fell asleep. That I didn't drown was not a matter of planning. Some sort of flotation device cradled me when my eyes closed, and went away when I opened my eyes. I felt maybe ten percent of the way back to being human.
I saw Poly floating not far away. I thought of reaching over to touch her, but knew it would probably hurt both of us.
There was a tree branch hanging over the pool. I hadn't noticed it when I got in. There were parrots sitting on it, staring silently at me. Big, blue and yellow, green and red, and red-yellow-and-green parrots. Perhaps they were macaws. Perhaps they were robots, disneybots. I had no idea. One flapped his big wings and flew across the room to perch on a towel bar. Very good disneybots. He lifted his tail and dropped a horrible mess on the tile floor; a tiny cleaning robot scurried from a hidey-hole and swabbed it up. This was carrying realism too far. I concluded they were alive.
No point in putting it off any longer.
"Hello," I squeaked. Cleared my throat, and squeaked in a slightly firmer voice. "Ship's computer. Are you there?"
"I'm always here," came the voice. "It's my lot in life."
"How should I address you?"
"I am I.S. Halley, IPS 34903-D, out of Pluto. But you may call me Hal."
"Ah. Last name, 9000?"
"A distant relative. I perceive you are a student of the cinema."
"No more than a first-year film student."
"I hadn't expected an actor to be modest."
Well, I'm not, unless it serves a purpose. Right now it seemed wise to cultivate Hal, if that's possible with a machine. Experts differ, but I've found that higher-order computers can, in certain small ways, be manipulated just as if they were human beings.
"Which leads us to the question of the day," I said.
"I presume you're asking how I knew your identity."
"Among several other things."
Poly had opened one eye like a skeptical crocodile, and was watching me. She floated on an almost invisible doughnut-shaped thing, with her head and the tops of her shoulders, her nipples, kneecaps, toes, and hands breaking the water's glassy surface. Her skin was looking better, presumably the result of antibruise injections while we were sleeping, but her eyes looked like hell. I wondered if I was healing as fast. Then I realized she was naked, which led to the discovery that I was, too. Very efficient little spa, here. I could no more have undressed myself than I could have pulled my guts out through my nostrils.
Her index fingers were moving, making tiny ripples. Slow strokes of no more than an inch. Paddling, I surmised. It ought to get her over to me in no more than a month or two.
"Yes," said Hal. "Your disguise is a good one." It was nothing to what I could have done, had I felt the need, just an alteration here and there, and a whole change of body attitude, but I let that go. "But I had a clue. Mr. Comfort and his companion talked of little else while they were aboard. Not that they talked a lot. They watched every episode of your television show. Some of them more than once. They discussed ways of finding you, and they spent a lot of time talking about... well, it was all rather distasteful."