Short fiction complete, p.156
Short Fiction Complete, page 156
“Never,” I said. And I meant it. To do what he asked would mean working against my own nation, my own people, my own government. If the KGB ever found out!
I personally ushered Sam back to the docking compartment and off the station. And never allowed him back on Mir 5 again, no matter how he pleaded and wheedled us over the radio.
After several weeks, he finally realized that I would not deal with him—that when I said “never,” that was exactly what I meant.
“O.K., friends,” his radio voice said, the last time he tried to contact us. “Guess I’ll just have to find some other way to make my first million. So long, Greg. Enjoy the worker’s paradise, pal.”
The old man’s tone had grown distinctly wistful. He stopped, made a deep wheezing sigh, and ran a liver-spotted hand over his wrinkled pate.
The reporter had forgotten the chill of the big lunar dome. Leaning slightly closer to Prokov, she asked:
“And that’s the last you saw or heard of Sam Gunn?”
“Yes,” said the Russian. “And good riddance, too.”
“But what happened after that?”
Prokov’s aged face twisted unhappily. “What happened? Everything went exactly as he said it would. The conference in Geneva started up again, and East and West reached a new understanding. My crew achieved its mission goal; we spent two full years in Mir 5 and then went home. The USSR became a partner in the international diamond cartel.”
“And you went to Mars,” the reporter prompted.
Prokov’s wrinkled face became bitter. “No. I was not picked to command the Mars expedition. Zworkin never denounced me, never admitted his own involvement with Sam, but his report on me was damning enough to knock me out of the Mars mission. The closest I got to Mars was a weather observation station in Antarctica!”
“Wasn’t the general secretary at that time the one who—”
“The one who retired to Switzerland after he stepped down from leading the Party. Yes. He is living there still, like a capitalist millionnaire.”
“And you never dealt with Sam Gunn again?”
“Never! I told him never, and that is exactly what I meant. Never.”
“Just that brief contact with him was enough to wreck your career.” Prokov nodded stonily.
“Yet,” the reporter mused, “in a way it was you who got the USSR into partnership with the diamond cartel. That must be worth hundreds of millions each year to your government.”
The old man’s only reply was a bitter, “Pah!”
“What happened to your Swiss bank account? The one Sam started for you?”
Prokov waved a hand in a gesture that swept the lunar dome and asked, “How do you think I can afford to live here?”
The puzzled reporter frowned. “I thought the Leonov Center was free. . . .”
“Yes, of course it is. A retirement center for Heroes of the Soviet Union. Absolutely free! Unless you want some real beef in your Stroganoff. That costs extra. Or an electric blanket for your bed. Or chocolates—chocolates from Switzerland are the best of all, you know.”
“You mean that Swiss bank account . . .
“It is an annuity,” said Prokov. “Not much money, but a nice little annuity to pay for some of the extra frills. The money sits there in the bank, and every month the faithful Swiss gnomes send me the interest by radiophone. Compared to the other Heroes living here, I am a well-to-do man. I can even buy vodka for them.”
The reporter suppressed a smile. “So Sam’s bank deposit is helping you, even after all those years.”
Slowly, the old man nodded. “Yes, he is helping me even after his death.” His voice sank lower. “And I never thanked him. Never. Never spoke a kind word to him.”
“He was a difficult man to deal with,” said the reporter. “A very difficult personality.”
“A thief,” Prokov replied. But his voice was so soft that it sounded almost like a blessing. “A blackmailer. A scoundrel.”
There were tears in his weary eyes. “How I wish he were here. I knew him for only a few months. He frightened me half to death and nearly caused a nuclear war. He disrupted my crew and ruined my chance to lead the Mars expedition. He tricked me and used me shamefully. . . .”
The reporter made a sympathetic noise.
“Yet even after all these years, the memory of him makes me smile. He made life exciting, vibrant. How I miss him!”
1989
The Man Who Hated Gravity
People are constantly at the mercy of forces both internal and external—and it’s not always clear which is which.
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’ 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 adversitements. 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. “Z 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.
She, too, feared Rolando’s ever-bolder daring, his wilder and wilder Teachings on the high trapeze.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of! Gravity can’t hurt me!” And he would laugh at her fears.
“But I am afraid,” she would cry.
“The people pay their money to see me defy gravity,” Rolando would tell his tearful wife. “They’ll get bored if I keep doing the same stunts one year after another.”
She loved him dearly, and felt terribly frightened for him. It was one thing to master a large cage full of Bengal tigers and tawny lions and snarling black panthers. All you needed was will and nerve. But she knew that gravity was another matter altogether.
“No one can defy gravity forever,” she would say, gently, softly, quietly.
“I can,” boasted the Great Rolando.
But of course he could not. No one could. Not forever.
The fall, when it inevitably came, was a matter of a fraction of a second. His young assistant’s hand slipped only slightly in starting out the empty trapeze for Rolando to catch after a quadruple somersault. Rolando almost caught it. In midair he saw that the bar would be too short. He stretched his magnificently trained body to the utmost and his fingers just grazed its tape-wound shaft.
For an instant he hung in the air. The tent went absolutely silent. The crowd drew in its collective breath. The band stopped playing. Then gravity wrapped its invisible tentacles around the Great Rolando and he plummeted, wild-eyed and screaming, to the sawdust a hundred feet below.
“His right leg is completely shattered,” said the famous surgeon to his wife. She had stayed calm up to that moment, strong and levelheaded while her husband lay unconscious in an intensive care unit.
“His other injuries will heal. But the leg . . .” The gray-haired, gray-suited man shook his dignified head sadly. His assistants, gathered behind him like an honor guard, shook their heads in metronome synchrony to their leader.
“His leg?” she asked, trembling.
“He will never be able to walk again,” the famous surgeon pronounced.
The petite blonde lion tamer crumpled and sagged into the sleek leather couch of the hospital waiting room, tears spilling down her cheeks.
“Unless . . .” said the famous surgeon.
“Unless?” she echoed, suddenly wild with hope.
“Unless we replace the shattered leg with a prosthesis.”
“Cut off his leg?”
The famous surgeon promised her that a prosthetic bionic leg would be “just as good as the original—in fact, even better!” It would be a permanent prosthesis; it would never have to come off, and its synthetic surface would blend so well with Rolando’s real skin that no one would be able to tell where his natural leg ended and his prosthetic leg began. His assistants nodded in unison.
Frenzied at the thought that her husband would never walk again, alone in the face of coolly assured medical wisdom, she reluctantly gave her assent and signed the necessary papers.
The artificial leg was part lightweight metal, part composite space-manufactured materials, and entirely filled with marvelously tiny electronic devices and miraculously miniaturized motors that moved the prosthesis exactly the way a real leg should move. It was stronger than flesh and bone, or so the doctors confidently assured the Great Rolando and his wife.
The circus manager, a constantly frowning bald man who reported to a board of bankers, lawyers, and MBAs in St. Petersburg, agreed to pay the famous surgeon’s astronomical fee. “The first aerialist with a bionic leg,” he murmured, dollar signs in his eyes.
Rolando took the news of the amputation and prosthesis with surprising calm. He agreed with his wife: better a strong and reliable artificial leg than a ruined real one.
In two weeks he walked again. But not well. He limped. The leg hurt, with a sullen stubborn ache that refused to go away.
“It will take a little time to get accustomed to it,” said the physical therapists.
Rolando waited. He exercised. He tried jogging. The leg did not work right. And it ached constantly.
“That’s just not possible,” the doctors assured him. “Perhaps you ought to talk with a psychologist.”
The Great Rolando stormed out of their offices, limping and cursing, never to return. He went back to the circus, but not to his aerial acrobatics. A man who could not walk properly, who had an artificial leg that did not work right, had no business on the high trapeze.
His young assistant took the spotlight now, and duplicated—almost—the Great Rolando’s repertoire of aerial acrobatic feats. Rolando watched him with mounting jealousy, his only satisfaction being that the crowds were noticeably smaller than when he had been the star of the show. The circus manager frowned and asked when Rolando would be ready to work again.
“When the leg works right,” said Rolando.
But it continued to pain him, to make him awkward and invalid.
That is when he began to hate gravity. He hated being pinned down to the ground like a worm, a beetle. He would hobble into the Big Top and eye the fliers’ platform a hundred feet over his head and know that he could not even climb the ladder to reach it. He grew angrier each day. And clumsy. And obese. The damned false leg hurt, no matter what those expensive quacks said. It was not psychosomatic. Rolando snorted contempt for their stupidity.
He spent his days bumping into inanimate objects and tripping over tent ropes. He spent his nights grumbling and grousing, fearing to move about in the dark, fearing even that he might roll off his bed. Whenever he managed to sleep the same nightmare gripped him: he was falling, plunging downward eternally while gravity laughed at him, and all his screams for help did him no good whatsoever.
His former assistant grinned at him whenever they met. The circus manager took to growling about Rolando’s weight, and asking how long he expected to be on the payroll when he was not earning his keep.
Rolando limped and ached. And when no one could see him, he cried. He grew bitter and angry, like a proud lion that finds itself caged forever.
Representatives from the bionics company that manufactured the prosthetic leg visited the circus, their faces grave with concern.
“The prosthesis should be working just fine,” they insisted.
Rolando insisted even more staunchly that their claims were fraudulent. “I should sue you and the barbarian who took my leg off.”
The manufacturer’s reps consulted their home office and within the week Rolando was whisked to San Jose in their company jet. For days on end they tested the leg, its electronic innards, the bionic interface where it linked with Rolando’s human nervous system. Everything checked out perfectly. They showed Rolando the results, almost with tears in their eyes.
“It should work fine.”
“It does not.”
In exchange for a written agreement not to sue them, the bionics company gave Rolando a position as a “field consultant,” at a healthy stipend. His only duties were to phone San Jose once a month to report on how the leg felt. Rolando delighted in describing each and every individual twinge, the awkwardness of the leg, how it made him limp.
His wife was the major earner now, despite his monthly consultant’s fee. She worked twice as hard as ever before, and began to draw crowds that held their breaths in vicarious terror as they watched the tiny blonde place herself at the mercy of so many fangs and claws.
Rolando traveled with her as the circus made its tour of North America each year, growing fatter and unhappier day by humiliating, frustrating, painful day.
Gravity defeated him every hour, in a thousand small ways. He would read a magazine in their cramped mobile home until, bored, he tossed it onto the table. Gravity would slyly tug at its pages until the magazine slipped over the table’s edge and fell to the floor. He would shower laboriously, hating the bulging fat that now encumbered his once-sleek body. The soap would slide from his hands while he was halfblinded with suds. Inevitably he would slip on it and bang himself painfully against the shower wall.
If there was a carpet spread on the floor, gravity would contrive to have it entangle his feet and pull him into a humiliating fall. Stairs tripped him. His silverware clattered noisily to the floor in restaurants.
He shunned the Big Top altogether, where the people who had once paid to see him soar through the air could see how heavy and clumsy he had become. Even though a nasty voice in his mind told him that no one would recognize the fat old man he now was as the once-magnificent Great Rolando.
As the years stretched past Rolando grew grayer and heavier and angrier. Furious at gravity. Bellowing, screaming, howling with impotent rage at the hateful tricks gravity played on him every day, every hour. He took to leaning on a cane and stumping around their mobile home, roaring helplessly against gravity and the fate that was killing him by inches.
His darling wife remained steadfast and supportive all through those terrible years. Other circus folk shook their heads in wonder at her. “She spends all day with the big cats and then goes home to more roaring and spitting,” they told each other.
Then one winter afternoon, as the sun threw long shadows across the Houston Astrodome parking lot, where the circus was camped for the week, Rolando’s wife came into their mobile home, her sky-blue workout suit dark with perspiration, and announced that a small contingent of performers had been invited to Moonbase for a month.
“To the Moon?” Rolando asked, incredulous. “Who?”
The fliers and tightrope acts, she replied, and a selection of acrobats and clowns.
“There’s no gravity up there,” Rolando muttered, suddenly jealous. “Or less gravity. Something like that.”
He slumped back in the sofa without realizing that the wonderful smile on his wife’s face meant that there was more she wanted to tell him.
“We’ve been invited, too!” she blurted, and she perched herself on his lap, threw her arms around his thick neck, and kissed him soundly.
“You mean you’ve been invited,” he said darkly, pulling away from her embrace. “You’re the star of the show; I’m a has-been.”
She shook her head, still smiling happily. “They haven’t asked me to perform. They can’t bring the cats up into space. The invitation is for the Great Rolando and his wife to spend a month up there as guests of Moonbase Inc.!”
Rolando suspected that the bionics company had pulled some corporate strings. They want to see how their damnable leg works without gravity, he was certain. Inwardly, he was eager to find out, too. But he let no one know that, not even his wife.
To his utter shame and dismay, Rolando was miserably sick all the long three days of the flight from Texas to Moonbase. Immediately after takeoff the spacecraft carrying the circus performers was in zero gravity, weightless, and Rolando found that the absence of gravity was worse for him than gravity itself. His stomach seemed to be falling all the time while, paradoxically, anything he tried to eat crawled upward into his throat and made him violently ill.
