When the eviction order arrived, Fats Jordan was hanging in the center of the Big Glass Balloon, hugging his guitar to his massive black belly above his purple shorts.
The Big Igloo, as the large living-Globe was more often called, was not really made of glass. It was sealingsilk, a cheap flexible material almost as transparent as fused silica and ten thousand times tougher — quite tough enough to hold a breathable pressure of air in the hard vacuum of space.
Beyond the spherical wall loomed the other and somewhat smaller balloons of the Beat Cluster, connected to each other and to the Big Igloo by three-foot-diameter cylindrical tunnels of triple-strength tinted sealingsilk. In them floated or swam about an assemblage of persons of both sexes in informal dress and undress and engaged in activities suitable to freefalclass="underline" sleeping, sunbathing, algae tending (“rocking” spongy cradles of water, fertilizer and the green scummy “guk”), yeast culture (a rather similar business), reading, studying, arguing, stargazing, meditation, space-squash (played inside the globular court of a stripped balloon), dancing, artistic creation in numerous media and the production of sweet sound (few musical instruments except the piano depend in any way on gravity).
Attached to the Beat Cluster by two somewhat larger sealingsilk tunnels and blocking off a good eighth of the inky, star-speckled sky, was the vast trim aluminum bulk of Research Satellite One, dazzling now in the untempered sunlight.
It was mostly this sunlight reflected by the parent satellite, however, that now illuminated Fats Jordan and the other “floaters” of the Beat Cluster. A huge sun-quilt was untidily spread (staying approximately where it was put, like all objects in freefall) against most of the inside of the Big Igloo away from the satellite. The sun-quilt was a patchwork of colors and materials on the inward side, but silvered on the outward side, as turned-over edges and corners showed. Similar “Hollywood Blankets” protected the other igloos from the undesirable heating effects of too much sunlight and, of course, blocked off the sun’s disk from view.
Fats, acting as Big Daddy of the Space Beats, received the eviction order with thoughtful sadness.
“So we all of us gotta go down there?”
He jerked a thumb at the Earth, which looked about as big as a basketball held at arms’ length, poised midway between the different silvers of the sun-quilt margin and the satellite. Dirty old Terra was in half phase: wavery blues and browns toward the sun, black away from it except for the tiny nebulous glows of a few big cities.
“That is correct,” the proctor of the new Resident Civilian Administrator replied through thin lips. The new proctor was a lean man in silvery gray blouse, Bermuda shorts and sockassins. His hair was precision clipped — a quarter-inch blond lawn. He looked almost unbearably neat and hygienic contrasted with the sloppy long-haired floaters around him. He almost added, “and high time, too,” but he remembered that the Administrator had enjoined him to be tactful—”firm, but tactful.” He did not take this suggestion as including his nose, which had been wrinkled ever since he had entered the igloos. It was all he could do not to hold it shut with his fingers. Between the overcrowding and the loathsome Chinese gardening, the Beat Cluster stank.
And it was dirty. Even the satellite’s precipitrons, working over the air withdrawn from the Beat Cluster via the exhaust tunnel, couldn’t keep pace with the new dust. Here and there a film of dirt on the sealingsilk blurred the star-fields. And once the proctor thought he saw the film crawl.
Furthermore, at the moment Fats Jordan was upside-down to the proctor, which added to the latter’s sense of the unfitness of things. Really, he thought, these beat types were the curse of space. The sooner they were out of it the better.
“Man,” Fats said mournfully, “I never thought they were going to enforce those old orders.”
“The new Administrator has made it his first official act,” the proctor said, smiling leanly. He went on, “The supply rocket was due to make the down-jump empty this morning, but the Administrator is holding it. There is room for fifty of your people. We will expect that first contingent at the boarding tube an hour before nightfall.”
Fats shook his head mournfully and said, “Gonna be a pang, leavin’ space.”
His remark was taken up and echoed by various individuals spotted about in the Big Igloo.
“It’s going to be a dark time,” said Knave Grayson, merchant spaceman and sun-worshiper. Red beard and sheath-knife at his belt made him look like a pirate. “Do you realize the nights average twelve hours down there instead of two? And there are days when you never see Sol?”
“Gravity yoga will be a trial after freefall yoga,” Guru Ishpingham opined, shifting from padmasana to a position that put his knees behind his ears in a fashion that made the proctor look away. The tall, though presently much folded and intertwined, Briton was as thin as Fats Jordan was stout. (In space the number of thins and fats tends to increase sharply, as neither overweight nor under-musculature carries the penalties it does on the surface of a planet.)
“And mobiles will be trivial after space stabiles,” Erica Janes threw under her shoulder. The husky sculptress had just put the finishing touches to one of her three-dimensional free montages — an arrangement of gold, blue and red balls — and was snapping a stereophoto of it. “What really hurts,” she added, “is that our kids will have to try to comprehend Newton’s Three Laws of Motion in an environment limited by a gravity field. Elementary physics should never be taught anywhere except in freefall.”
“No more space diving, no more water sculpture, no more vacuum chemistry,” chanted the Brain, fourteen-year-old fugitive from a brilliant but much broken home down below.
“No more space pong, no more space pool,” chimed in the Brainess, his sister. (Space pool, likewise billiards, is played on the inner surface of a stripped balloon. The balls, when properly cued, follow it by reason of centrifugal force.)
“Ah well, we all knew this bubble would someday burst,” Gussy Friml summed up, pinwheeling lazily in her black leotards. (There is something particularly beautiful about girls in space, where gravity doesn’t tug at their curves. Even fat folk don’t sag in freefall. Luscious curves become truly remarkable.)
“Yes!” Knave Grayson agreed savagely. He’d seemed lost in brooding since his first remarks. Now as if he’d abruptly reached conclusions, he whipped out his knife and drove it through the taut sealingsilk at his elbow.
The proctor knew he shouldn’t have winced so convulsively. There was only the briefest whistle of escaping air before the edge-tension in the sealingsilk closed the hole with an audible snap.
Knave smiled wickedly at the proctor. “Just testing,” he explained. “I knew a roustabout who lost a foot stepping through sealingsilk. Edge-tension cut it off clean at the ankle. The foot’s still orbiting around the satellite, in a brown boot with needle-sharp hobnails. This is one spot where a boy’s got to remember not to put his finger in the dike.”
At that moment Fats Jordan, who’d seemed lost in brooding too, struck a chilling but authoritative chord on his guitar.
“Gonna be a pang
Leavin’ space,” (he sang)
“Gonna be a pang!”
The proctor couldn’t help wincing again. “That’s all very well,” he said sharply, “and I’m glad you’re taking this realistically. But hadn’t you better be getting a move on?”