“I may be able to finish in a walk, if this keeps up. Three down already—and we’ve barely started.”
“Don’t get overconfident, Bob. Remember the tortoise and the hare.”
“Never heard of them. But I see your point.”
He saw it a little more clearly at the fifteen-kilometer mark. For some time he had been aware of an increasing stiffness in his left leg; it was getting harder to flex it when he landed, and the subsequent takeoff tended to be lopsided. He was definitely getting tired, but that was only to be expected. The suit itself still appeared to be working perfectly, so he had no real problems. It might be a good idea to stop and rest for a while: there was nothing in the rules against it.
He came to a full stop and surveyed the scene. Little had changed, except that the peaks of Heraclides were slightly lower in the east. The retinue of moonjeeps, ambulance, and observation car still kept a respectful distance behind the racers—now down to only three….
He was not surprised to see that Clavius Industries, the other lunar entry, was still in the race. What was quite unexpected was the performance the Earthworm from MIT was putting up. Robert Steel—what an odd coincidence that they had the same first name and initials—was actually ahead of Clavius. Yet he could never have had any realistic practice: did MIT’s engineers know something that the locals didn’t?
“You all right, Bob?” his coach asked anxiously.
“Still 7. Just taking a break. But I’m wondering about MIT. He’s doing very well.”
“Yes, for an Earthie. But remember what I said about not looking back. We’ll keep an eye on him.”
Concerned but not worried, Singh concentrated briefly on some exercises that would have been totally impossible in a conventional suit. He even lay down in the soft regolith—the lunar topsoil, plowed by eons of meteor bombardment—and pedaled briskly for a few minutes, as if riding an invisible bicycle. Here was another first for the Moon; he hoped the spectators appreciated it.
When he got to his feet again he could not resist a quick glance backward. Clavius was a good three hundred meters behind, weaving from side to side in a manner that almost certainly indicated fatigue. Your suit designers aren’t as good as mine, Singh told himself; I don’t think I’ll have your company for much longer.
That was certainly not true of Mister Robert from MIT. If anything, he seemed to be getting closer.
Singh decided to change his mode of locomotion, to exercise a new set of muscles and reduce the risk of cramp—another danger that his coach had warned him against. The kangaroo hop was efficient and fast, but a bounding stride was more comfortable and less tiring, simply because it was more natural.
By the twenty-kilometer mark, however, he switched back to kangaroo mode to give all his muscles an equal chance. He was also becoming thirsty, and sucked a few cc’s of fruit juice from the nipple conveniently placed in his helmet.
Twenty-two kilometers to go—and now there was only one other contestant. Clavius had finally given up; in this first Lunar Marathon, there would be no bronze. It was a straight fight between Moon and Earth.
“Congratulations, Bob,” chuckled his coach a few kilometers later. “You’ve just made exactly two thousand giant leaps for mankind. Neil Armstrong would have been proud of you.”
“I don’t believe you’ve been counting them, but it’s nice to know. I’m having a small problem.”
“What is it?”
“Sounds funny—but my feet are getting cold.”
There was such a long silence that he repeated his complaint.
“Just checking, Bob. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.”
“I hope so.”
It did indeed seem a trivial matter, but there are no trivial problems in space. For the last ten or fifteen minutes Singh had been aware of a mild discomfort; he felt that he was walking in snow, wearing shoes or boots that were failing to insulate him from the cold. And it was getting worse.
Well, there was certainly no snow on the Bay of Rainbows, though the Earthlight often gave that illusion. But here at local midnight, the regolith was much colder even than the snow of the Antarctic winter—at least a hundred degrees colder.
It should not have mattered; the regolith was a very poor conductor of heat, and the insulation on his footwear should have given him ample protection. Obviously, it was failing to do so.
An apologetic cough echoed around the inside of his helmet.
“Sorry about this, Bob. I guess those boots should have had thicker soles.”
“Now you’re telling me. Well, I can put up with it.”
He was not so sure twenty minutes later. Discomfort was beginning to escalate to pain; his feet were starting to freeze. He had never been in a really cold climate, and this was a novel experience; he was not sure how to handle it, or when the symptoms might become dangerous. Didn’t polar explorers risk losing toes—even whole limbs? Quite apart from the discomfort it would involve, Singh did not want to waste time in a regeneration ward. It took a whole week to regrow a foot….
“What’s wrong?” queried the anxious voice of his coach. “You seem to be in trouble.”
He wasn’t in trouble: he was in agony. It took all his willpower not to cry out in pain every time he hit the surface, and plowed into the deadly dirt that was sucking his life away.
“I’ve got to rest for a few minutes and think this over.”
Singh lowered himself carefully onto the gently yielding ground, wondering if the chill would strike instantly through the upper part of his suit. But there was no sign of it, and he relaxed: he was probably safe for a few minutes, and would receive plenty of warning before the Moon tried to freeze his torso.
He raised both legs and flexed his toes. At least he could feel them, and they were obeying instructions.
Now what? The media people in the observation truck must think he was crazy, or performing some obscure religious ritual—presenting the soles of his feet to the stars. He wondered what they were telling their far-flung audiences.
Already he felt a little more comfortable; his blood circulation was winning the battle against heat-loss now that he was no longer in contact. (But was that imagination—or did he feel a slight chill in the small of his back?)
He was suddenly struck by another disquieting thought. I’m warming my feet against the night-sky—the Universe itself. And as every schoolboy knows, that’s at three degrees above absolute zero. By comparison, the lunar regolith is hotter than boiling water.
So am I doing the right thing? Certainly my feet don’t seem to be losing the battle against the cosmic heat-sink.
Lying almost prone on the Bay of Rainbows, holding his legs at a ridiculous angle toward the barely visible stars and the brilliant Earth, Robert Singh mulled over this little problem in physics. There were perhaps too many factors involved for an easy answer, but this one would do for a first approximation….
It was a question of conduction versus radiation. The material of his space-boots was better at the first than the second. They lost his body heat faster than he could generate it when they were in physical contact with the lunar regolith. But the situation was reversed when they were radiating into the empty sky. Luckily for him.
“MIT is catching up on you, Bob. Better get moving.”
Singh had to admire his persistent follower. He deserved a Silver. But damned if I’ll let him win the Gold. So here we go again. Only another ten kilometers—let’s say a couple of thousand hops.
The first three or four were not so bad, but then the cold began to seep through once more. Singh knew that if he stopped again, he would not be able to continue. The only thing to do was to grit his teeth and pretend that pain was merely an illusion that could be banished by an effort of will. Where had he seen a perfect example of that? He had covered another agonizing kilometer before he could locate it in his memory.
Years ago he had seen a century-old video of fire-walking, performed in some religious ceremony o
n Earth. A long pit had been dug, filled with red-hot embers—and the devotees had walked quite slowly and casually from one end to the other in bare feet, showing little more concern than if they were strolling on sand. Even if it proved nothing about the power of any deity, it was an astonishing demonstration of courage and self-confidence. Surely he could do as well; it was now only too easy to imagine that he was walking on fire….
Fire-walking on the Moon! He could not help laughing at the concept, and for a moment the pain almost disappeared. So “mind over matter” did work—at least for a few seconds.
“Only five klicks—you’re doing fine. But MIT is overtaking you—don’t relax.”
Relax! How Singh wished that he could. Because the biting pain in his feet had dominated all else, he had almost overlooked the increasing fatigue that was making it more and more difficult to move forward. He had abandoned jumping, and had compromised with a slow, swinging stride that would have been impressive enough on Earth, but was pitiful on the Moon.
At three kilometers he was about to give up and call for the ambulance; perhaps it was already too late to save his feet. And then, just as he felt that he was at the end of his tether, he noticed something that he would certainly have seen before had he not been concentrating all his senses on the ground immediately ahead.
The far horizon was no longer a dead straight line dividing the glowing landscape from the black night of space: he was approaching the western limits of the Bay of Rainbows, and the gently rounded peaks of Promontory Laplace were rising above the curve of the Moon. The sight—and the knowledge that his own efforts had lifted those mountains into view—gave Singh a final burst of strength.
And now nothing else in the Universe existed but the finish line. He was only a few meters from it when his tenacious opponent streaked ahead of him in an apparently effortless burst of speed.
When Robert Singh recovered consciousness, he was lying inside the ambulance, aching all over but with no pain at all.
“You’re not going to do much walking for a while,” he heard a voice say, light-years distant. “Worst case of frostbite I ever saw. But I’ve given you a local anesthetic—and you won’t have to buy a new set of feet.”
That was some consolation, but it hardly compensated for the bitterness of knowing that he had failed, despite all his efforts, when victory seemed so close at hand. Who was it had said: “Winning isn’t the most important thing—it’s the only thing”? He wondered if he would even bother to collect his silver medal.
“Your pulse is back to normal—how do you feel?”
“Terrible.”
“Then this may cheer you up. Are you ready for a shock—a pleasant one?”
“Try me.”
“You’re the winner—no, don’t try to get up!”
“How-what??”
“The IOC’s furious, but MIT is laughing its head off. As soon as the race was over, they confessed that their Robert was really Robot—General Purpose Homiform Mark 9. No wonder he—it—came in first! So your performance was all the more impressive. The congratulations are pouring in. You’re famous—whether you like it or not.”
Though the fame did not last, the gold medal was one of Robert Singh’s most valued possessions for the rest of his life. Yet he did not realize what he had started until the Third Lunar Olympics, eight years later. By then the space medics had borrowed the deep-sea divers’ technique of “liquid breathing,” flooding the lungs with oxygen-saturated fluid.
And so the winner of the first Moon Marathon, together with most of the scattered human species, watched in awed admiration as the vacuum-proofed Karl Gregorios made his record two-minute, one-kilometer dash across the Bay of Rainbows—as naked as his Greek ancestors in the very first Olympics, three thousand years earlier.
10
A MACHINE FOR LIVING IN
AFTER HE HAD GRADUATED FROM ARRI TECH WITH SUSpiciously high marks, Astro Specialist Robert Singh had no difficulty in securing a position as assistant engineer (propulsion) on one of the regular Earth-Moon shuttles—popularly known, for some now-forgotten reason, as milk runs. This suited him admirably because, to her surprise, Freyda had now discovered that the Moon was an interesting place after all: she decided to spend a few years there, specializing in the lunar equivalent of the gold rushes that had once taken place on Earth. But what prospectors had long sought on the Moon was something much more valuable than that now-commonplace metal.
It was water—or, to be more accurate, ice. Although the eons of bombardment and occasional vulcanism that had churned up the upper few hundred meters of the Moon’s surface had long ago removed all traces of water—liquid, solid, or gaseous—there was still a hope that deep underground, near the poles, where the temperature was always far below freezing, there might be layers of fossil ice left over from the days when the Moon condensed out of the Solar System’s primordial debris.
Most selenologists thought this was pure fantasy, but there had been enough tantalizing hints to keep the dream alive. Freyda was lucky enough to be one of the team that discovered the first of the South Polar Ice Mines. Not only would this ultimately transform the economy of the Moon, but it had an immediate and highly beneficial impact upon the Singh-Carroll economy. Between them, they now had enough credit to rent a Fullerhome, and live anywhere on Earth they pleased.
On Earth. They still expected to spend much of their lives elsewhere, but they were eager to have a son. If he was born on the Moon, he would never have the strength to visit the world of his parents. A one-gee pregnancy, on the other hand, would give him the freedom of the Solar System.
They also agreed that their home’s first location should be the Arizona desert. Though it was now becoming rather crowded, there was still plenty of pristine geology for Freyda to clamber over. And it was the nearest analogue to Mars, which they were both determined to visit someday—“before it’s spoilt,” as Freyda commented, only half joking.
The more difficult problem was deciding which model Fullerhome they should choose from the many varieties available. Named after the great Twentieth-Century engineer-architect Buckminster Fuller, and using technologies he had dreamed of but never lived to see, they were virtually self-contained and could sustain their occupants almost indefinitely.
Power was provided by a hundred-kilowatt sealed fusor unit, which required topping-up with enriched water every few years. Such a modest energy level was quite adequate for any well-designed home, and ninety-six volts DC could electrocute only the most determined suicide.
To technically minded clients who asked “Why ninety-six volts?” the Fuller Consortium explained patiently that engineers were creatures of habit: only a couple of centuries ago twelve- and twenty-four-volt systems had been standard, and arithmetic would have been much easier if humans had twelve fingers instead of ten.
It had required almost a century to gain general public acceptance of the Fullerhome’s most controversial feature—the food-recycling system. Doubtless it had taken even longer, at the beginning of the agricultural era, before hunter-gatherers had overcome their revulsion at spreading animal dung over their future food. For thousands of years the pragmatic Chinese had gone even further, using their own wastes to fertilize their rice fields.
But food prejudices and taboos are among the strongest that control human behavior, and logic is often not enough to overcome them. Recycling excrement out in the fields, with the help of good clean sunlight, was one thing: to do it in one’s own home with mysterious electrical devices was quite another. For a long time the Fuller Consortium argued in vain: “Not even God can tell the difference between one carbon atom and another.” Most members of the public were convinced that they could.
In the end, economics won, as is usually the case. Never having to worry about food bills again and having a virtually unlimited range of menus available in the memory of the Homebrain was a temptation few could resist. Any remaining qualms were overcome by a transparently simple but effective
device: a small garden could be supplied, as an optional extra. Though the recycling system could work just as well without it, the sight of beautiful flowers turning their faces to the sun helped to settle many queasy stomachs.
There had been only two previous owners of the Fullerhome that Freyda and Robert rented (the Consortium never sold them) and the guaranteed Mean Time to Failure of its major units was fifteen years. By then they would need another model, large enough to accommodate an energetic teenager also.
Somehow, they never did get around to asking the Brain for the usual greetings left by the earlier occupants. Both of them had their thoughts and dreams too firmly fixed upon a future, which, like all young couples, they could not believe would ever come to an end.
11
FAREWELL TO EARTH
TOBY CARROLL SINGH WAS BORN IN ARIZONA, AS HIS PARENTS had planned. Robert continued to serve on the Earth-Moon shuttle, rising to the position of senior engineer and even turning down a chance of going to Mars, as he did not wish to be away from his infant son for months at a time.
Freyda remained on Earth, and in fact seldom left the American Commonwealth. Though she had given up field trips, she was able to continue her researches unabated, and in considerably more comfort, via data banks and satellite imagery. It was now an old joke that geology had ceased to be a profession for husky he-men, since image-processing algorithms had replaced hammers.
Toby was three years old when his parents decided that friendly robot playmates were not enough. A dog was the obvious choice, and they had almost acquired a mutated Scottie (canine IQ guaranteed 120) when the first minitiger kittens became available. It was love at first sight.
The Bengal tiger is the most beautiful of all the big cats—and perhaps of all mammals. By the early Twenty-first Century it had become extinct in its natural habitat, shortly before the habitat itself had vanished. But several hundred of the magnificent creatures still led pampered lives in zoos and reservations: even if every one of these died, their DNA had of course been completely sequenced and it would be a fairly straightforward job to re-create them.