«But if you live in orbit, you can live forever!»
Don Arnold said it in sheer frustration and immediately regretted opening his mouth.
Picture the situation. Don was sitting under the glaring lights of a TV studio, in a deep fake-leather couch that looked comfortable but wasn’t. His genial talk-show host had ignored him totally since introducing him as «one of NASA’s key scientists.» (Don was a NASA engineer, and pretty far from the top.)
On one side of Don sat a UFOlogist, a balding, owlishly-bespectacled man with a facial tic and a bulging briefcase clutched in his lap, full of Important Documents.
On Don’s other side sat a self-proclaimed Mystic of indeterminate age, a benign smile on his face, his head shaved and a tiny gem in his left earlobe.
They had done all the talking since the show had started, nearly an hour earlier.
«The government has all sorts of data about UFOs,» the UFOlogist was saying, hugging his battered briefcase. «NASA has tons of information about how the saucers are built and where they’re coming from, but they won’t release any of this to the people.»
Before Don could reply, the Mystic raised both his hands, palms outward. The cameras zoomed in on him.
«All of the universe is a single entity, and all of time is the same,» he said in a voice like a snake charmer’s reed flute. «Governments, institutions, all forms of society are merely illusions. The human mind is capable of anything, merely by thinking transcendentally. The soul is immortal—»
That’s when Don burst out, «But if you live in orbit, you can live forever!»
It surprised them all, especially Don. The Mystic blinked, his mouth still silently shaped for his next pronouncement. The UFOlogist seemed to curl around his briefcase even tighter. The studio audience out there beyond the blinding glare of the overhead lights surged forward in their chairs and uttered a collective murmur of wonderment.
Even the talk show’s host seemed stunned for just a moment. He was the best-dressed man on the set, in a deep blue cashmere sports jacket and precisely-creased pearl gray slacks. He was the only man on camera in makeup. His hairpiece gave him a youthful-yet-reliable look.
The host swallowed visibly as Don wished he could call back the words he had just blurted.
«They live forever?» the host asked, so honestly intrigued that he forgot to smile.
How in hell can I backtrack out of this? Don asked himself desperately.
Then the Mystic started to raise his hands again, his cue to the cameras that he wanted their attention on him.
«Our studies have shown that it’s possible,» Don said, leaning forward slightly to stare right into the host’s baby-blue eyes.
«How long have people lived in orbit, anyway?» the host asked.
«The record is held by two Russian cosmonauts, aboard their space station. They were up there for almost nine months. Our Skylab team was up for 83 days, back in ’73-74.»
Don could sense the UFOlogist fidgeting beside him, but the host asked, «And they did experiments up there that showed you could live longer if you stayed in space?»
«Lots of experiments have been done,» Don answered before anyone else could upstage him, «both in orbit and on the ground.»
«On… immortality.»
«We tend to call it life extension,» he said truthfully. «But it’s quite clear that in orbit, where you can live under conditions of very low gravity, your heart doesn’t have to work so hard, your internal organs are under much less stress…»
«But don’t your muscles atrophy? Isn’t there calcium loss from the bones?»
«No,» Don said flatly. All three cameras were aimed squarely at him. Normally he was a shy man, but nearly an hour of listening to the other two making a shambles of organized thought had made him sore enough to be bold.
«It doesn’t?»
«It takes a lot of hard work to move around in low gravity,» Don answered. «With a normal work routine, plus a few minutes of planned exercise each day, there’s no big muscle-tone loss. In fact, you’d probably be in better condition if you lived in a space station than you are here on Earth.»
«Fascinating!» said the host.
«As for calcium loss, that levels off eventually. It’s no real problem.»
«And then you just go on living,» the host said, «forever?»
«For a long, long time,» Don hedged. «In a space station, of course, your air is pure, your water’s pure, the environment is very carefully controlled. There are no carcinogens lousing up the ecology. And you have all the benefits of low gravity.»
«I never knew that! Why hasn’t NASA told us about this?»
As Don fished around in his mind for a reply, the host turned on his smile and fixed his gaze on camera one.
«Well, it always seems that we run out of time just when things are really interesting.» Glancing back along his guests on the couch, he said, «Dr. Arnold, that was fascinating. I hope you can come back and talk with us again, real soon.»
Before Don could answer, the host said farewell to the two other guests, mispronouncing both their names.
Don sat up in bed, his back propped by pillows, the sheet pulled up to his navel. It was hot in the upstairs bedroom now that they had to keep the air-conditioner off, but he stayed covered because of the twins. They were nine now, and starting to ask pointed questions.
Judy was putting them into their bunk beds for the night, but they had a habit of wandering around before they finally fell asleep. And Judy, good mother that she was, didn’t have the heart to lock the master bedroom door. Besides, on a sultry night like this, the only way to catch a breath of breeze was to keep all the doors and windows open.
Don played a game as he sat up watching television, the remote-control wand in his sweating hand. He found the situation comedies, police shows, doctor shows, even the science fiction shows, on TV so boring that he couldn’t bear to watch them for their own sake.
But they were tolerable—almost—if he watched to see how much space-inspired technology he could identify in each show. The remote monitors in the surgeon’s intensive-care unit. The sophisticated sensors used by the coroner’s hot-tempered pathologist. The pressure-sensitive switch on the terrorists’ bomb planted in the cargo bay of the threatened 747.
Judy finally came in and began undressing. The bedroom lights were out, but there was plenty of light coming from the TV screen.
«Better close the door, hon,» Don told her as she wriggled her skirt down past her hips. «The twins…»
«They’re both knocked out,» she said. «They spent all day in the Cramers’ pool.»
«Still…» He clicked off the TV sound and listened for the patter of nine-year-old feet.
His wife’s body still turned him on. Judy was short, a petite dark-haired beauty with flashing deep-brown eyes and a figure that Don thought of as voluptuous. She stripped off her panties and crawled into the bed beside Don.
Grinning at him, she said, «You worry too much.»
«Yeah, maybe I do.»
«I thought you were terrific on the show this afternoon. I got so mad when those other two clowns kept hogging the camera!»
«Maybe I should have let them hog it for the whole show,» he said.
«No you shouldn’t! I sat here for nearly an hour waiting for you to open your mouth.»
«Maybe I should’ve kept it closed.»
«You were terrific,» she said, snuggling closer to him.
«I was lying,» he answered. «Or, at least, stretching the truth until it damn near snapped.»
«You looked so handsome on television.»
«I just hope nobody at Headquarters saw the show.»
«It’s a local talk show,» Judy said. «Nobody watches it but housewives.»