“Mister Singh—your academic record is satisfactory, though not brilliant. But I don’t want to talk to you about that.
“You may not be aware of the fact, but according to the medical readouts, you have an unusually good mass/energy ratio. So we’d like you to go into training for the upcoming Olympics.”
Singh was startled and not particularly pleased. His first reaction was “How will I ever find the time?” But almost at once a second thought flashed through his mind. Any deficiencies in his academic record might well be overlooked if there were compensating athletic achievements. There was a long and honorable tradition to this effect.
“Thank you, sir—I’m very flattered. I suppose I’ll have to move to the Astrodome.”
The three-kilometer-wide roof over a crater near the eastern wall of Plato enclosed the largest single airspace on the Moon, and had become a popular venue for human-powered flight. There had been talk for some years of making this an Olympics event, but the IOC had not been able to decide whether contestants should use wings or props. Singh would be happy with either—he had tried both, briefly, on a visit to the Astrodome complex.
He was due for another surprise.
“You won’t be flying, Mister Singh. You’ll be running. On the open moonscape. Probably across the Sinus Iridum.”
Freyda Carroll had been on the moon for only a few weeks, and now that the novelty had worn off, she wished she were back on Earth.
In the first place, she could not become accustomed to the one-sixth gravity. Some visitors never did grow used to it—they either hopped like kangaroos, occasionally hitting the ceiling, and making little forward progress—or shuffled cautiously along, pausing between each step before they took the next. No wonder that the locals called them “Earthworms.”
As a geology student, Freyda also found the Moon a disappointment. Oh, it had geology—well, selenology—enough to occupy anyone for a hundred lifetimes. But the interesting bits of the Moon were hard to get at; you couldn’t go wandering round with hammer and pocket mass-spectrometer as you did on Earth, but had to put on spacesuits (which Freyda hated) or sit in a rover and control Remotes—which was almost as bad.
She had hoped that the endless tunnels and underground facilities of Arri Tech would provide cross-sections of the Moon’s upper hundred meters, but no such luck. The high-powered lasers that had done the excavating had fused rock and regolith to give a featureless, mirror-smooth finish. No wonder it was easy to get lost in the dull uniformity of tunnels and corridors; myriads of signs like
NO ADMISSION UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!
ROBOTS CLASS 2 ONLY!
CLOSED FOR REPAIRS
CAUTION—BAD AIR—USE RESPIRATOR
did not encourage the sort of exploration that Freyda enjoyed on Earth.
She was lost—as usual—when she pushed open a door which promised access to MAIN SUBBASEMENT #3, and launched herself cautiously through it. But not cautiously enough.
Almost at once she was hit by a large, rapidly moving object, and sent spinning to one side of the wide corridor she had just entered. For a moment she was completely disoriented, and it was several seconds before she picked herself up and checked for injuries.
Nothing seemed broken, but she suspected that there would very soon be a painful bruise on her left side. Then, more angry than alarmed, she looked around for the projectile that had caused the damage.
An entity that might have escaped from an ancient comic strip was coming slowly toward her. It was obviously human, and encased in a glittering silver suit as closely fitting as a ballet dancer’s leotard. The wearer’s head was concealed in a bubble that looked disproportionately large: Freyda could see only her own distorted figure in its mirror surface.
She waited for an explanation or apology (but, on second thought, perhaps she should have been a little more careful…). As the figure approached her, holding out its arms in a supplicating manner, she heard a muffled and barely intelligible male voice say:
“I’m very sorry—hope you weren’t hurt. I thought no one ever came here.”
Freyda tried to see into the helmet, but it completely concealed the wearer’s face.
“I’m all right—I think.”
The voice from the spacesuit (for what else could it be, though she had never seen one remotely like it?) sounded rather attractive as well as contrite, and her annoyance quickly evaporated.
“I hope I’ve not injured you—or damaged your equipment.”
Now Mr. X was so close that his suit was almost touching her, and Freyda could tell that he was studying her intently. It seemed unfair that he could see her, while she had no idea what he looked like. She suddenly realized that she very much wished to know….
…In the Arri Tech cafeteria a few hours later, she was not disappointed. Bob Singh still seemed embarrassed by the incident, though not entirely for the reason that might have been expected. As soon as Freyda had assured him that she was probably going to survive, he turned to a subject that was obviously of more immediate importance.
“We’re still experimenting with the suit,” he explained, “and running tests on the life-support system—indoors, where it’s safe! Next week, if everything works, we’ll try it outside. But we have a problem with—ah—security. Clavius is definitely entering a team, and Tsiolkovski on Farside is thinking about it. So are MIT and CalTech and Gagarin—but no one takes them seriously. They don’t have the know-how—and how could they do any proper training on Earth?”
Freyda’s interest in athletics was almost zero, but she was rapidly warming to the subject. Or at least to Robert Singh.
“You’re afraid that someone will copy your design?”
“Exactly. And if it’s as successful as we hope, it may cause a revolution in EVA gear—at least for short-duration missions. We’d like Arri Tech to get the credit. After more than a hundred years, spacesuits are still clumsy and uncomfortable. You know the old joke ‘I wouldn’t be seen dead in one.’”
The joke was indeed an old one, but Freyda laughed dutifully. Then she became serious, and looked straight into her new friend’s eyes.
“I hope,” she said, “you’re not going to take any risks.”
It was then that she knew that for only the second or third time in her life, she had fallen in love.
The Dean of Astronautics, already somewhat despondent because his spy at MIT had just been ceremonially dumped in the Charles River, was not too happy about Robert Singh’s new roommate.
“I’ll make sure she’s sent on a field trip at least three days before the race,” he threatened.
But on further thought, he relented. In determining an athlete’s performance, psychological factors were just as important as physiological ones.
Freyda would not be banished before the Marathon.
9
BAY OF RAINBOWS
THE GRACEFUL ARC OF THE BAY OF RAINBOWS IS ONE OF THE loveliest of all lunar formations. Three hundred kilometers across, it is the surviving half of a typical crater-plain, whose entire northern wall was washed away three billion years ago by a flood of lava sweeping down from the Sea of Rains. The remaining semicircle, which the lava could not breach, is terminated at its western end by the kilometer-high Promontory Heraclides, a group of hills that at certain times creates a brief and beautiful illusion. When the Moon is ten days old, waxing toward full, Promontory Heraclides greets the dawn, and even in the smallest of Earth-based telescopes it appears for a few hours like the profile of a young woman, hair streaming toward the west. Then, as the sun rises higher, the pattern of shadows changes, and the Moon Maiden disappears.
But there was no sun now, as the contestants for the first Lunar Marathon gathered at the foothills of the Promontory. Indeed, it was almost local midnight: the Full Earth hung halfway down the southern sky, flooding all this land with an electric-blue radiance fifty times more brilliant than the Full Moon can ever cast upon the Earth. It also drove the stars from the sky; only
Jupiter was palely visible low in the west, if one looked for it carefully.
Robert Singh had never been in the public eye before, yet even knowing that three worlds and a dozen satellites were watching did not make him feel particularly nervous. As he had told Freyda twenty-four hours earlier, he had complete confidence in his equipment.
“Well, you’ve just demonstrated that,” she said dreamily.
“Thank you. But I’ve promised the dean it’s the last time until after the race.”
“You haven’t!”
“Not really; let’s say it was—well, an unspoken gentleman’s agreement.”
Freyda became suddenly serious.
“I hope you win, of course—but I’m more worried that something may go wrong. You can’t have had enough time to test that suit properly.”
That was perfectly true, but Singh was not going to alarm Freyda by admitting it. Yet even if there was a systems failure—always possible, no matter how much testing one did in advance—there would be no real danger. A small armada of lunar rovers was accompanying them—observation cars containing media people, moonjeeps with cheerleaders and coaches. Most important of all, an ambulance crew, with recompression chamber, would never be more than a few hundred meters away.
As he was being kitted up in the Arri Tech van, Singh wondered which competitor would need to be rescued first. Most of them had met only a few hours earlier, and had exchanged the usual insincere good-luck greetings. There had been eleven entrants originally, but four had dropped out, leaving Arri Tech, Gagarin, Clavius, Tsiolkovski, Goddard, CalTech, and MIT. The runner from MIT—a dark horse named Robert Steel—had not yet arrived, and would be disqualified if he did not turn up within the next ten minutes. That might be a piece of deliberate gamesmanship designed to confuse the competition, or to prevent too close an examination of his space gear—not that it would make much difference at this late stage.
“How’s your breathing?” asked Singh’s coach when the helmet had been sealed.
“Quite normal.”
“Well, you’re not exerting yourself at the moment—the regulator can increase O2 flow up to ten times, if you need it. Now, let’s get you into the airlock, and check your mobility….”
“The team from MIT has just arrived,” announced the Interplanetary Olympics Committee’s observer over the public circuit. “The Marathon will begin in fifteen minutes.”
“Please confirm all systems go,” the starter’s voice whispered in Robert Singh’s ear. “Number One?”
“OK.”
“Number Two?”
“Yes.”
“Number Three?”
“No problem.”
But there was no response from CalTech’s Number Four. She was walking, very clumsily, away from the starting line.
That leaves only six of us, thought Singh, feeling a brief flash of sympathy. What bad luck to have come all the way from Earth, only to have an equipment failure at the last moment! But proper testing would have been impossible down there; no simulator would have been large enough. Here it was only necessary to step out through the airlock to find enough vacuum to satisfy anyone.
“Beginning the countdown. Ten, nine, eight…”
This was not one of those events that could be won or lost at the starting line. Singh waited until well after “zero,” carefully estimating his launch angle, before taking off.
A lot of mathematics had gone into this; almost a millisecond of Arri Tech computer time had been devoted to the problem. The Moon’s one-sixth gravity was the most important factor, but by no means the only one. The stiffness of his suit—optimum rate of oxygen intake—heat load—fatigue—all these had to be taken into consideration. And it had first been necessary to settle a long-standing debate, going back to the days of the very first men on the Moon: which was better, hopping or long-jumping?
Both worked quite well, but there was no precedent for what he was attempting now. Until today, all spacesuits had been bulky affairs that restricted mobility and added so much mass to the wearer that it required an effort to start moving, and sometimes an equal effort to stop. But this suit was very different.
Robert Singh had tried to explain those differences—without giving away any trade secrets—during one of the inevitable media interviews before the race.
“How could we make it so light?” he had answered to the first question. “Well, it’s not designed for use in daytime.”
“Why does that matter?”
“It doesn’t need a heat-rejection system. The sun can pump more than a kilowatt into you. That’s why we’re racing at night.”
“Oh. I was wondering about that. But won’t you get too cold? Doesn’t the lunar night get a couple of hundred degrees below zero?”
Singh managed to avoid smiling at such a simple-minded question.
“Your body generates all the heat you need, even on the Moon. And if you’re running a marathon—much more than you need.”
“But can you really run, wrapped up like a mummy?”
“Just wait and see!”
He had spoken confidently enough in the security of the studio. But now, standing out on the barren lunar plain, that phrase “like a mummy” came back to haunt him. It was not the most cheerful of comparisons.
He consoled himself with the thought that it was not really very accurate; he was not wrapped up in bandages, but sheathed in two body-tight garments—one active, one passive. The inner one, made of cotton, enclosed him from neck to ankle, and carried a closely packed network of narrow, porous tubes, to carry away perspiration and excess heat. Over that was the tough but extremely flexible protective outer suit, made of a rubberlike material, and fastened by a ring-seal to a helmet that gave 180-degree visibility. When Singh had asked “Why not all-around vision?” he was told firmly “When you’re running—never look back.”
Well, now was the moment of truth. Using both legs together, he launched himself upward at a shallow angle, deliberately making as little effort as possible. Yet within two seconds he had reached the apex of his trajectory and was traveling parallel to the lunar surface, about four meters above it. That would be a new record on Earth, where the high jump had been stuck at just under three meters for half a century.
For a moment time slowed down to a crawl. He was aware of the great, glowing plain stretching out to the unbroken curve of the horizon: the Earthlight slanting over his right shoulder gave the extraordinary illusion that the Sinus Iridum was covered with snow. All the other runners were ahead of him, some rising, some falling along their shallow parabolas. And one was going to come down headfirst; at least he had not made that embarrassing miscalculation.
He landed feetfirst, throwing up a small cloud of dust. Letting his momentum pivot him forward, he waited until his body had swung through a right angle before bounding upward again.
The secret of lunar racing, he quickly discovered, was not to jump so high that you came down too steeply and lost momentum on impact. After several minutes of experimenting he found the right compromise, and settled down to a steady rhythm. How fast was he moving? There was no way of telling in this featureless terrain, but he was more than halfway to the first one-kilometer marker.
More important—he had overtaken all the others; no one else was within a hundred meters of him. Despite the “never look back” advice, he could afford the luxury of checking on the competition. He was not in the least surprised to find that there were now only three others in the race.
“Getting lonely out here,” he said. “What’s happened?”
This was supposed to be a private circuit, but he doubted it. The other teams and the news media would almost certainly be monitoring him.
“Goddard had a slow leak. What’s your status?”
“Condition 7.”
Any listeners might well guess what this meant; no matter. Seven was supposed to be a lucky number, and Singh hoped that he could keep using it until the end of the race.
“Just
passing one klick,” said the voice in his ear. “Elapsed time four minutes ten seconds. Number Two is fifty meters behind you, keeping his distance.”
I ought to do better than that, thought Singh. Even on Earth, anyone can do a four-minute kilometer. But I’m just getting into my stride.
At the second kilometer, he had established a steady, comfortable rhythm, and covered the distance in just under four minutes. If he could keep it up—though of course that was impossible—he would reach the finishing line in about three hours. No one really knew how long it would take to run the Marathon’s traditional forty-two kilometers on the Moon; guesses had ranged from a highly optimistic two hours up to ten. Singh hoped he could manage in five.
The suit seemed to be working as advertised; it did not restrict his movements unduly, and the oxygen regulator kept up with the demands made on it by his lungs. He was beginning to enjoy himself; this was not merely a race. It was something novel in human experience, opening up wholly new horizons in athletics, and perhaps much else.
Fifty minutes later, at the ten-kilometer mark, he received a message of congratulations.
“You’re doing fine—and there’s another dropout—Tsiolkovski’s.”
“What happened to her?”
“Never mind. Tell you later. But she’s okay.”
Singh could hazard a guess. Once, in the early days of his training, he had almost been sick while wearing a spacesuit. That was no trifling matter, as it could result in a very unpleasant death. He remembered the horrible clammy-cold sensation that had preceded the attack, which he had warded off by turning up the oxygen flow and the suit thermostat. He had never discovered the cause of the symptoms: it could have been nerves, or something in his last meal—a bland, high-calorie but low-residue one, since few spacesuits were equipped with full sanitary facilities.
In a deliberate attempt to divert his mind from this very unprofitable line of thought, Singh called his coach.