Led by Jordy’s drums, the band worked into the Blue Ox theme from the Paul Bunyan Suite.
“Tough the same way the hemlock tents and sod huts of the American settlers were tough. We got out into space, a lot of us did, the same way the Irish and Finns got west. They built the long railroads. We built the big satellites.”
Here the band shifted to the Axe theme.
“I was a welder myself. I came into space with a bunch of other galoots to help stitch together Research Satellite One. I didn’t like the barracks they put us in, so I made myself a little private home of sealingsilk, a material which then was used only for storing liquids and gases — nobody’d even thought of it for human habitation. I started to meditate there in my bubble and I came to grips with a few half-ultimates and I got to like it real well in space. Same thing happened to a few of the others. You know, folks, a guy who’s wacky enough to wrestle sheet aluminum in vacuum in a spider suit may very well be wacky enough to get to really like stars and weightlessness and all the rest of it.
“When the construction job was done and the big research outfits moved in, we balloon men stayed on. It took some wangling but we managed. We weren’t costing the Government much. And it was mighty convenient for them to have us around for odd jobs.
“That was the nucleus of our squatter cluster. The space roustabouts and roughnecks came first. The artists and oddballs, who have a different kind of toughness, followed. They got wind of what our life was like and they bought, bummed or conned their way up here. Some got space research jobs and shifted over to us at the ends of their stints. Others came up on awards trips and managed to get lost from their parties and accidentally find us. They brought their tapes and instruments with them, their sketchbooks and typers; some even smuggled up their own balloons. Most of them learned to do some sort of space work — it’s good insurance on staying aloft. But don’t get me wrong. We’re none of us work-crazy. Actually we’re the laziest cats in the cosmos: the ones who couldn’t bear the thought of carrying their own weight around every day of their lives! We mostly only toil when we have to have money for extras or when there’s a job that’s just got to be done. We’re the dreamers and funsters, the singers and studiers. We leave the ‘to the stars by hard ways’ business to our friends the space marines. When we use the ‘ad astra per aspera’ motto (was it your high school’s too?) we change the last word to asparagus — maybe partly to honor the green guk we grow to get us oxygen (so we won’t be chiseling too much gas from the Government) and to commemorate the food-yeasts and the other stuff we grow from our garbage.
“What sort of life do we have up here? How can we stand it cooped up in a lot of stinking balloons? Man, we’re free out here, really free for the first time. We’re floating, literally. Gravity can’t bow our backs or break our arches or tame our ideas. You know, it’s only out here that stupid people like us can really think. The weightlessness gets our thoughts and we can sort them. Ideas grow out here like nowhere else — it’s the right environment for them.
“Anybody can get into space if he wants to hard enough. The ticket is a dream.
“That’s our story, folks. We took the space road because it was the only frontier left. We had to come out, just because space was here, like the man who climbed the mountain, like the first man who skin-dove into the green deeps. Like the first man who envied a bird or a shooting star.”
The music had softly soared with Fats’ words. Now it died with them and when he spoke again it was without accompaniment, just a flat lonely voice.
“But that isn’t quite the end of the story, folks. I told you I had something serious to impart — serious to us anyway. It looks like we’re not going to be able to stay in space, folks. We’ve been told to get out. Because we’re the wrong sort of people. Because we don’t have the legal right to stay here, only the right that’s conveyed by a dream.
“Maybe there’s real justice in it. Maybe we’ve sat too long in the starbird seat. Maybe the beat generation doesn’t belong in space. Maybe space belongs to soldiers and the civil service, with a slice of it for the research boys. Maybe there’s somebody who wants to be in space more than we do. Maybe we deserve our comedownance. I wouldn’t know.
“So get ready for a jolt, folks. We’re coming back! If you don’t want to see us, or if you think we ought to be kept safely cooped up here for any reason, you just might let the President know.
“This is the Beat Cluster, folks, signing off.”
As Fats and the band pushed away from each other, Fats saw that the little local audience in the sending balloon had grown and that not all new arrivals were fellow floaters.
“Fats, what’s this nonsense about you people privatizing your activities and excluding research personnel?” a grizzle-haired stringbean demanded. “You can’t cut off recreation that way. I depend on the Cluster to keep my electron bugs happily abnormal. We even mention it downside in recruiting personnel — though we don’t put it in print.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Thoms,” Fats said. “No offense meant to you or to General Electric. But I got no time to explain. Ask somebody else.”
“Whatdya mean, no offense?” the other demanded, grabbing at the purple shorts. “What are you trying to do, segregate the squares in space? What’s wrong with research? Aren’t we good enough for you?”
“Yes,” put in Rumpleman of Convair, “and while you’re doing that would you kindly throw some light on this directive we just received from the new A — that the Cluster’s off-bounds to us and that all dating between research personnel and Cluster girls must stop? Did you put the new A up to that, Fats?”
“Not exactly,” Fats said. “Look, boys, let up on me. I got work to do.”
“Work!” Rumpleman snorted.
“Don’t think you’re going to get away with it,” Thorns warned Fats. “We’re going to protest. Why, the Old Man is frantic about the 3D chess tournament. He says the Brain’s the only real competition he has up here.” (The Old Man was Hubert Willis, guiding genius of the open bevatron on the other side of the satellite.)
“The other research outfits are kicking up a fuss too,” Trace Davis put in. “We spread the news like you said, and they say we can’t walk out on them this way.”
“Allied Microbiotics,” Gussy Friml said, “wants to know who’s going to take over the experiments on unshielded guk societies in freefall that we’ve been running for them in the Cluster.”
Two of the newcomers had slightly more confidential messages for Fats.
Allison of Convair said, “I wouldn’t tell you, except I think you’ve guessed, that I’ve been using the Beat Cluster as a pilot study in the psychology of anarchic human societies in freefall. If you cut yourself off from us, I’m in a hole.”
“It’s mighty friendly of you to feel that way,” Fats said, “but right now I got to rush.”
Space Marines Sergeant Gombert, satellite police chief, drew Fats aside and said, “I don’t know why you’re giving research a false impression of what’s happening, but they’ll find out the truth soon enough and I suppose you have your own sweet insidious reasons. Meanwhile I’m here to tell you that I can’t spare the men to police your exodus. As you know, you old corner-cutter, this place is run more like a national park than a military post, in spite of its theoretical high security status. I’m going to have to ask you to handle the show yourself, using your best judgment.”
“We’ll certainly work hard at it, Chief,” Fats said. “Hey, everybody, get cracking!”
“Understand,” Gombert continued, his expression very fierce, “I’m wholly on the side of officialdom. I’ll be officially overjoyed to see the last of you floaters. It just so happens that at the moment I’m short-handed.”