Part 31 (1/2)

”I was sure you would be.”

The air was going from around them now. They had told him that Lancelot would provide him with all the air he needed, all the oxygen, to be exact, and he had no real doubt that they were right. Michel still felt perfectly comfortable as, with dropping pressure, the furled stuff of Lancelot around him crackled a little, a sound suggesting stiff paper wings. The fields were almost invisible and impalpable, and he had no sensation of being sealed or encased in anything.

A medical doctor, one of the group of nearby people all watching Michel with tremendous casualness, said, ”You're still breathing.” It was somewhere between a comment and a question.

”Yes,” said Michel, and immediately became self-conscious about the fact. There was still air pressure, or what felt just like air pressure, in his breathing pa.s.sages, and evidently pressure of some kind capping his nose and mouth to keep whatever was in his lungs from bursting out. Earlier he had been given a brief explanation, which he only partly understood, of how Lancelot's fields, through a thousand painless piercings of his skin, could supply his body with what it needed and take its wastes away to be processed and reused. Now he discovered that he could effortlessly cease breathing if he thought about it, and the reflex to start did not take hold.

A moment later, and he forgot about his body. Above, huge doors were opening, and beyond them shone the stars.

On Alpine, it was possible now and then to see a star. There were days, sometimes even weeks when a nebular window opened and a fingernail-sized patch of the galaxy shone through. When that happened, people tended to gather outdoors at night and point.

The more peaceful stretches of Michel's journey from Alpine to Moonbase had afforded him his first real chance to get a look at what was still commonly called the Milky Way. But looking at the stars through a screen or even a cleared port had been seeing them at one remove. It had not been like this. As the elevator now eased to a stop, flush with the lunar surface, Earth and Sun were both below the horizon, and from edge to edge the sky seemed to be filled with stars.

It was not terrifying for one reason only-it was so utterly remote.

Squinting a little, Michel raised his right arm to point. He remembered to draw breath before he spoke, so his words would come out clearly, and what functioned as a radio transmitter in Lancelot would convey them to the others' suit receivers. He asked, pointing, ”What's that?”

”You mean the three stars in a row?” Iyenari responded doubtfully. ”That's the belt of Orion-the Hunter, we call him sometimes. You've heard something about our constellations?”

”Not the three stars.” Michel jabbed the sky with a forefinger trailing parabolic whorls of silver gauze.

”Farther over there.” The thing he saw was almost dazzling, and contained colors that he could not remember having seen before. Words to describe it were not easily come by.

”Taurus? The Bull . . .”

Abruptly Michel realized that the others, looking with normal and unaided eyes, could not see the thing at all. Thedazzlewas all in short wavelengths of radiation that only Lancelot allowed his eyes to see. As preparations for the day's first tests continued, Michel glanced back from time to time at the object in the sky. Gradually he learned how to dim the dazzle reaching his eyes, and at the same time to magnify the source somewhat. A ragged-looking cloud of gases of some kind, a gigantic explosion still in progress but frozen by its own vast scale to seeming immobility. How far away? Some hundreds of light-years, at a guess.

Centered on the platform of the risen elevator there extended a plain of fused basalt several hectares in extent, flat as a parking lot amid a gently rolling sea of lunar regolith whose waves and cups reached in every direction eight or ten kilometers before rising to make the interior rim of a broad impact crater whose name Michel had not been told. Poles had been erected around the platform, in a square a few score meters on a side, roofed and walled by a network of some kind of rope or wire. The holes in the net, Michel noticed, were just too small to allow an object the size of his own body to pa.s.s through. The construction, he thought, might have been borrowed from the court of some game in which a large bouncing ball was used.

Around Michel a hundred suits of s.p.a.ce armor groaned faintly, making adjustments to the topside cold and vacuum. Their wearers, mostly busy with other matters, did not appear to notice. When Michel himself moved, he could hear Lancelot faintly crackling, weak spasms across the audio spectrum.

He asked Dr. Iyenari about the crackling, and tried to absorb an answer completely unintelligible, a few words of physics tied up in math. Maybe someday he would have learned enough in school to understand that. Meanwhile it seemed preferable to try to feel out an answer for himself.

”Ready to give it a try?” Tupelov's tall, suited figure was towering over him. The Secretary always spoke to Michel as to a respected equal.

”Sure.” Below, while Michel was being robed in a tight-fitting gym suit of bright orange and then in Lancelot, they had discussed briefly what was to be tried today, simple free flight in s.p.a.ce. As the thought returned that things were being rushed a bit, bright lights suddenly flooded the basalt area. Michel knew another momentary dazzle before Lancelot scaled down the radiation impinging from the sources directly into his eyes. Rus.h.i.+ng things, but they must have their reasons, good ones, because it was certain that neither Tupelov nor any of the others here wanted their pet subject to get hurt.

Now technicians had surrounded Michel closely, to fit him with additional Lancelot-components. Here came tube-shaped things and egg-shaped things and cubes. All vanished somehow into Lancelot's fields, leaving the gauzy wings and robes no more substantial-looking than before. None of the additions seemed to add up to any more weight or bulk.

Michel let his attention drop away. Four levels below where he stood, and maybe a dozen kilometers to the lunar east, his mother was conversing, brightly and eagerly, with another lady, a vice-president of the Academy. His mother thought it was a coincidence that an Academy official, a real one this time, had just happened to be on Moonbase at this hour with some time available to talk. . . .

Dr. Iyenari was speaking, for the benefit of some recorders. ”Today, we want to begin by using only a simple tidal collector in a forcepower mode. We'll charge with that continuously, while using a pre-stored charge for the maneuvers. Only elementary maneuvers are planned for the first trial with this subject. He will rise from the ground to a height of two or three meters, under the nets, and make a controlled descent. When we have a successful trial up to that point, we'll decide how much farther we want to go today.”

Michel knew that Lancelot had a backup power supply too, a hydrogen lamp that as far as he could guess was several times as large as it needed to be, whatever the designers' reasoning. The lamp rode somewhere in the haze extending for a meter or two to the rear of Michel's shoulder blades. It existed now, the scientists had told him, only in a quasimaterial form, the molecules of its once-solid structure represented by a patterning of forces. What would have been forces in an unmodified lamp were now no more than sketches of something more abstract and subtle still, despite which the hydrogen lamp kept right on working anyway. Of course, as one of the scientists had said, solid matter was itself no more than a patterning, of something that Michel thought he could now almost perceive, at moments, when he reached for it in the proper way with his new senses. . . .

Having run his own check on the power lamp, a check that he himself did not understand very well and could not have explained to an engineer (who would not have understood it either), Michel forgot that it was there. Turning round slowly in place, as was required of him in the last stages of today's fitting, he noticed that the far slopes of the crater wall were turning into a sort of grandstand, acquiring a considerable population of suited humans and their choice machines. Some were scientific observers.

Many, he realized, zooming his perceptions in among them here and there, were guards of one kind and another.

”Step over here now, please, Michel.” They led him to where a great yellow X, micrometrically exact in its dimensions, had been marked on the pavement. His feet in the soft-soled shoes that they had given him were positioned carefully at its center. From somewhere a fragment of his mother's voice, recognizable by tone and breathing pattern, came through the background noise of all kinds. Still four levels down, she was talking with cheerful animation about Art.

What would it be like to hold a piece of wood in his hand, a knife in Lancelot's, and carve? Entrancing as this speculation was, he had only a moment for it before voices were once more demanding his attention.

”All right, Michel?”

”Yes. All right.”

The nearest other person stood some ten meters from the yellow X, the nearest machine a little farther still.

”There'll be no countdown or anything, just whenever you're ready. Can you get off the ground now?

Slowly. Don't worry if nothing moves just at first. . . .”

He never doubted that in Lancelot he would be enabled to move as he had never moved before. There were, though, certain other problems. Just at the moment when his slipper-light shoes were losing their tenure on the pavement, an alarming potential of sideways acceleration threatened to achieve reality and almost did. Michel s.h.i.+ed like a novice bike-rider from an incipient fall. His reaction was just a little too strong. At the moment of rising from the ground, he lurched minutely toward the nets (whose purpose he now thought he understood) that were waiting for him in the opposite direction. Around him, voices muttered, people tried to suppress excitement and triumph so that he should not be distracted by it.

One voice, tense, encouraging, spoke to him openly, but he did not need that voice either and he tuned it out. He needed no encouragement and he realized now that there were no helpful instructions anyone could give him. Probably no one had ever thought this way before. Michel, drifting above the surface gently, experimented, trying to understand that first unexpected sideways surge. It was something, he thought, deriving from the motion of the Moon itself beneath him. Dimly, when he made the effort, he could now begin to feel the great slow harmonies of rotation, of revolution riding revolution as the Moon's track rode that of Earth and the Earth marched with the Sun toward some constellation never to be seen in Alpine's skies.

That one monotonous voice continued to encourage him, as if its owner thought it was a lifting force.

s.p.a.ceborne, Michel turned slowly in the bright lights, close beneath the wide-stretched upper net. Gauze robes swirled from him as he turned, and lifted faces ringed him in. The school play. Never in his life before or since had he been the center of so much attention, until now. Maybe they would all soon applaud. . . .

He raised his right arm, a gesture from the play, and with comfortable and sensitive fingers touched the soft toughness of the net, which someone had told him was three meters from the deck. Avidly following the movement of his arm went the aimings, adjustments, swallowings of cameras and recorders, so different in their working from human eyes and minds.

Join us. Be- Probably the calling did not come from berserkers, or not from berserkers alone. Be. Something.

Something that could perhaps be contained in the wordmachine; there seemed to be no human word that really fit.

No. In the manner of an easy, floating swimmer, he guided himself all the way across the top of the cabled cage. The voice that had been talking to him all along now registered as Tupelov's, and still it went on, excited and encouraging. It was starting to give orders now, and Michel listened to it, enough to get the gist of what it wanted. Obediently he made his way completely across the cage and back, then came down again just where he had started.

As soon as his feet were planted once more on the yellow X, a dozen people closed in upon him with a rush. Frank Marcus was there as soon as anyone, and Michel leaned on one of the rolling boxes, putting a little distance between himself and the suited people who came crowding on his other side. As soon as the first burst of questioning was over, and the leaders had turned away from Michel to confer among themselves, Frank remarked, ”First time I tried it, Michel, I d.a.m.n near went through the net. So did the only other person who's ever got this far with it. We were all more or less expecting you'd do the same.

They said it would be better not to warn you, just to let you find your own way. Maybe they were right.”

”Who was the only other person?”

”Another pilot. He hit the net, and then went crazy.”

Michel said, ”Just when you were starting to take off, something dragged you sideways.”

”Yeah.” Frank's hardware was all utterly motionless, and Michel knew somehow that the man was listening very attentively.

Michel stuttered and fell silent. He didn't know how to begin to tell what he had done to avoid the deflection, how he had managed the steady flight; he didn't know if the right words or even the right language had ever been invented. And it shook him somehow that Frank, an adult well ahead of other adults in this line of business, just stood there waiting patiently to hear.

On that first day of s.p.a.ce trials he made two more successful flights, performing maneuvers of gradually increasing complexity. He wasn't tired when they called a halt.

For the next two days he toured Moonbase with his mother and Ensign Schneider, carved a little, rested when they urged him to, though he still hadn't done anything that made him feel tired. He played, halfheartedly, security guards in view, with children whose parents worked at the base. Meanwhile he was told that the first flight tests were being evaluated, and some minor changes being made in Lancelot.

Then he was once more riding the giant elevator to the surface in his orange gym suit and gauzy immaterial robes. Frank Marcus, riding up beside him once again, had this time been transformed by being put into what he called his own flight suit, a single ovoid box.

On the surface the first thing Michel noticed was that a slow-dawning Sun had fired some distant crater-rims with silver. The second change he saw was that the cabled cage had been removed.