The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [116]
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