So Sam became the manager and part owner of the human race’s first extraterrestrial tourist facility. I was his partner and, the way things worked out, a major shareholder in the project. Rockledge got some rent money out of it. Actually, so many people enjoyed their vacations and honeymoons aboard the Big Wheel that a market eventually opened up for low-gravity retirement homes. Sam beat Rockledge on that, too. But that’s another story.
Malone was hanging weightlessly near the curving transparent dome of his chamber, staring out at the distant Moon and cold unblinking stars.
Jade had almost forgotten her fear of weightlessness. The black man’s story seemed finished. She blinked and turned her attention to here and now. Drifting slightly closer to him, she turned off the recorder with an audible click, then thought better of it and turned it on again.
“So that’s how this hotel came into being,” she said.
Malone nodded, turning in midair to face her. “Yep. Sam got it started and then lost interest in it. He had other things on his mind, bigger fish to fry. He went into the advertising business, you know.”
“Oh yes, everybody knows about that,” she replied. “But what happened to the woman, the Beryllium Blonde? And why didn’t Sam ever return to Earth again?”
“Two parts of the same answer,” Malone said tiredly. “Miss Beryllium thought she was playing Sam for a fish, using his Casanova complex to literally screw him out of his hotel deal. Once she realized that he was playing her, fighting a delaying action until his partners got their lawyers into action, she got damned mad. Powerfully mad. By the time it finally became clear back at Phoenix that Sam was going to beat them, she took her revenge.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sam wasn’t the only one who could riffle through old safety regulations and use them for his own benefit. She found a few early NASA regs, then got some bureaucrats in Washington—from the Office of Safety and Health, I think—to rewrite them so that anybody who’d been living in zero-gee for a year or more had to undertake six months’ worth of retraining and exercise before he could return to Earth.”
“Six months? That’s ridiculous!”
“Is it?” Malone smiled with humor. “That regulation is still on the books, lady. Nobody pays attention to it anymore, but it’s still there.”
“She did that to spite Sam?”
“And she made sure Rockledge put all its weight behind enforcing it. Made people think twice before signing an employment contract to work up here. Stuck Sam, but good. He wasn’t going to spend no six months retraining! He just never bothered going back to Earth again.”
“Did he want to go back?”
“Sure he did. He wasn’t like me. He liked it back there. There were billions of women on Earth! Sam wanted to return but he just could never take six months out of his life to do it.”
“That must have hurt him terribly.”
“Yeah, I guess. Hard to tell with Sam. He didn’t like to bleed where other people could watch.”
“And you never went back to Earth.”
“No,” Malone said. “Thanks to Sam I stayed up here. He made me manager of the hotel, and once Sam bought the rest of this Big Wheel from Rockledge, I became manager of the whole Alpha Station.”
“And you’ve never had the slightest yearning to see Earth again?”
Malone gazed at her solemnly for long moments before answering. “Sure I get the itch. But when I do I go down to the one-g section of the Wheel here. I sit in a wheelchair and try to get around with these crippled legs of mine. The itch goes away then.”
“But they have prosthetic legs that you can’t tell from the real thing,” she said. “Lots of paraplegics …”
“Maybe you can’t tell them from the real thing, but I guarantee you that any paraplegic who uses those legs can tell.” Malone shook his head stubbornly. “Naw, once you’ve spent some time up here in zero-gee you realize that you don’t need legs to get around. You can live a good and useful life here instead of being a cripple down there.”
“I see,” Jade said softly.
“Yeah. Sure you do.”
“Sure I do,” Jade said softly. “I can never go to Earth, either.”
“Never?” Malone sounded skeptical.
“Bone disease. I was born with it.”
An uncomfortable silence rose between them. She turned off the recorder in her belt buckle, for good this time.
Finally Malone softened. “Hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve been nasty with you. It’s just that… thinking about Sam again. He was a great guy, you know. And now he’s dead and everybody thinks he was just a troublemaking bastard.”
“I don’t,” she said. “A womanizing sonofabitch, like you said. A male chauvinist of the first order. But after listening to you tell it, even at that he doesn’t seem so awful.”
The black man smiled at her. “Look at the time! No wonder I’m hungry! Can I take you down to the dining room for some supper?”
“The dining room in the lunar-gravity section?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Won’t you be uncomfortable there? Isn’t there a galley in the micro-gravity section?”
“Sure, but won’t you be uncomfortable there?”
She laughed. “I think I can handle it.”
“Really?”
“I can try. And maybe you can tell me how Sam got himself into the retirement home business.”
“All right. I’ll do that.”
As she turned she caught sight of the immense beauty of Earth sliding past the observation dome; the Indian Ocean a breathtaking swirl of deep blues and greens, the subcontinent of India decked with purest white clouds. The people who lived there, she thought. All those people. And the two, in particular, who were hiding away from her.
“But…” She looked at Malone, then asked in a whisper, “Do you ever miss being home, being on Earth? Don’t you feel isolated here, away from …”
His booming laughter shocked her. “Isolated? Up here?” Malone pitched himself forward into a weightless somersault, then pirouetted in midair. He pointed toward the ponderous bulk of the planet and said, “They’re the ones who’re isolated. Up here, I’m free!”
Then he offered his arm to her and they floated together toward the gleaming metal hatch, their feet a good eight inches above the chamber’s floor.
Still, Jade glanced back over her shoulder at the gleaming expanse of cloud-decked blue. She thought of the two women who lived among the billions down there, the two women who would never see her, whom she could never see. There are many kinds of isolation, Jade thought. Many kinds.
Lagrange Habitat Jefferson
The dining room in Alpha’s zero-gravity section was actually a self-service galley. Malone helped Jade to fill her tray with prepackaged courses, then they fit their slippered feet into loop restraints on the spindly legs of a table, Jade using the highest level of the plastic loops, long-legged Malone the lowest.
Their dinner together was relaxed and pleasant. Malone recommended for dessert what he called “the Skylab bomb”: a paper-thin shell of vanilla ice cream filled with strawberries.
“You can only make it this thin in zero-gee,” he pointed out.
As they finished their squeezebulbs of coffee, Malone said, “Y’know, there’s a guy over in the new habitat at L-5, the one they’ve named Jefferson. You’d do well to talk to him.”
Jade turned on her belt recorder to get the man’s name and location.
“Yeah. Spence Johansen,” Malone continued. “He knew Sam when they were both astronauts with the old NASA. Then they went into business together.”