Of course, Natasha was not the only one training for that unprecedented match. All over the world young athletes were wondering if they could get themselves fit enough for the flying events. Since the task of training would have to be accomplished within the tyranny of Earth’s uncompromising 1-G gravity, a good deal of ingenuity was going to be required.
There were two lines of approach to the problem of muscle-powered flight. The “balloonatics” believed in employing gas bags of various shapes, so that the athlete was supported in flight, using all his muscle power to crank a propeller without the need of expending any effort simply to stay aloft. The sky-bikers, on the other hand, preferred to do everything by their muscles alone. For them sporting goods manufacturers had rapidly invented a whole array of propeller-driven devices. Thanks to carbon-60 nanotubes, the same molecules that made the Skyhook a working means of transportation instead of an idle dream, these devices were so light that even on Earth they could be lifted with one hand—on the moon, with a single finger!
What none of these ambitious athletes had was a true one-sixth gravity practice arena. They had to do the best they could, usually by using equipment counterweighted to give the equivalent of lunar gravity. All of which meant that it was not only ingenuity that was called for. Also required was quite a lot of money.
That would have exceeded the purchasing capacity of a college professor by a considerable margin, but for those purposes, Natasha’s needs got considerable support from Sri Lankans in high places. Even those who had no particular interest in sporting events enjoyed calling attention to the fact that Sri Lanka had become the world’s doorway to space. So the money was pledged, and a great lunar-gravity gym was built on the outskirts of Colombo. There Natasha practiced sky-biking to her heart’s content.
The gym was only a ten-minute drive from their home, and so Natasha’s family were often present as spectators. Sometimes more than spectators; Robert loved watching his big sister pump her way across the “sky” of the gym—loved even more when at last there was a little bit of open time on the machines. Then Robert, too, got his chance to fly.
Of course it was not only Natasha who was given the use of the lowgrav gym. Hopeful candidates from all over the island begged for the chance to try their own skills on the machines, and more than thirty of them won the opportunity. But it was Natasha Subramanian who consistently outperformed every challenger.
And, on the day when the Sri Lankan team at last assembled at the Skyhook terminal to be elevated to their first experience of space, it was Natasha who carried the island’s hope of victory.
When Myra got a look at the prices the tour companies were advertising for the lunar Olympics, she gasped. “Oh, Ranjit,” she moaned, one hand pressed to her heart. “We can’t let Tashy fly that race without us there, but how can we go?”
Ranjit, who had been expecting no less, was quick to reassure her. Families of contestants received a substantial discount. So did members of the advisory board, himself included, and when you put the two discounts together, the cost of the tickets was no more than outrageous.
Not impossible, though. Accordingly, Myra, Ranjit, and young Robert presented themselves at the terminal. Like everybody else in the world who owned a telescreen—which, to a close approximation, was pretty much everybody in the world—they had seen the rapturous news stories that had accompanied the Skyhook’s evolution to passenger-carrying. They knew how the passenger capsules worked, and what it would feel like to be borne skyward at a steady rate of meters per second.
What they had not entirely appreciated, though, was quite how many seconds, even at that speed, it was going to take to get from Sri Lanka to the Sinus Iridium. This was not a weekend trip.
In the first half dozen days they had got only as far as the lower Van Allen belt, when the Subramanians—along with other families aboard, namely, the Kais, the Kosbas, and the unpronounceably named Norwegians—had to hustle into shelter against the murderous Van Allen radiation. The shelter consisted of the triple-walled sleep-and-sanitation chambers of the capsule. Those contained the toilets, the laughably named “baths,” and twenty—count ’em, twenty—extraordinarily narrow bunks arrayed in ranks of five. When you had to head for the shelter, what you brought with you was the skimpy Skyhook special garments you were wearing (nearly weightless, to save on load, and as close to unsoilable as fabric technology could make them, since there was no hope of laundry), your medications, if any, and yourself. You could bring nothing else. Least of all, modesty.
Robert didn’t care for the shelter. He cried. So did the Kai grandson. Ranjit didn’t much care for it, either. When he was in the shelter, he yearned for the greater (though minimal) freedom of the unsheltered capsule, with its dark corners and its exercise elastics and its windows—long, narrow, and thick ones, but still rewardingly transparent. And, most of all, he yearned for their regular bunks that had their own lights and their own screens and almost as much space to turn around in as an average coffin. Enough, indeed, to allow for having company in them now and then, provided you were on extremely intimate terms with the company.
That first sentence to shelter was only for four days. Then they were in clear space again…for another nine days, until the warning squeals went off once more and it was time to seek shelter from the upper Van Allen.
Space travel had become possible for almost anyone. It certainly had not become easy, though. Or, come to that, particularly pleasant.
A funny thing happened as they came out of the upper Van Allen. Robert had made a dash for his favorite spot, the two-meter-long ribbon of thick plastic that was their main window to the universe outside. Myra was already climbing into the exercise straps and Ranjit was considering heading for his personal bunk and some untroubled sleep, when Robert came bouncing back to them, shrieking in excitement. Excited Robert was even harder to understand than the relaxed one. All either Myra or Ranjit could make out was the one word “fish.” Robert could not, or would not, do much in the way of clarifying, and there was no Natasha on hand to translate. What there was was the three-year-old girl who had come with one of the other families in their capsule. She listened silently to their talk for a moment and then, still silent, took Robert away to learn how to do what Myra recognized as tai chi.
That was little Luo, daughter of the couple from Taipei, who were one fragment of their fellow passengers in the capsule. There were six of the Kais in all, including the elderly mothers of both Mr. and Mrs. Kai, who were in the hotel business. This had made them filthy rich, as they needed to be to afford being among the first of the actual tourists the Olympics people were counting on. So were the family from South Korea, so also the young couple from Kazakhstan. The Norwegians weren’t, particularly, but they were the parents and siblings of one of their nation’s broad jumpers and thus were entitled to the discounted fare.
What was wrong with the seventeen other human beings who shared their capsule was that not one of them spoke English, much less either Tamil or Sinhalese. The younger Mrs. Kai was fluent in French, so Myra had someone to talk to. The others talked to each other in Russian, Chinese, and what Ranjit thought was probably German, none of which were of much use to him.
Not at first, anyway. But what they had a lot of was time. Weeks to the midpoint, weeks more to the far end, where their capsule was whipped off on its lunar trajectory, and then a day or two more until their landing at Sinus Iridium.