The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [118]
“He’s got to practice,” Natasha said. “My own race is tomorrow, but his isn’t till Wednesday. He’ll get your bags and put them in your room, so we can get you something decent to eat.” Holding Robert by the hand, she led the way. With Natasha’s help the child quickly learned a decent approximation of Ron’s gait. Ranjit was less fortunate. He found it was easier, if less graceful, to execute a slow-motion hop from point to point.
They didn’t have far to go, and it was worth their while when they got there. The food was as unlike the extruded fodder of the Skyhook capsule as anyone could have hoped for: a salad; some kind of meat, perhaps ham, chopped and molded into croquettes; fresh fruit for dessert. “Most of it’s shipped up from Earth,” Natasha told them, “although the strawberries and most of the salad stuff are grown in another tube.” It wasn’t the food they wanted to hear about. It was what Natasha had been doing, and how she felt. What Natasha wanted was to hear all about their trip, listening with the somewhat amused patience of the veteran who had done all those things herself already. She paid attention when they told her about Robert’s shrieking the word “fish,” although when she queried Robert himself about it in their own personal dialect, he was more interested in his shortcake than giving her answers. “He just says he saw something out the window that looked like a fish. Funny. Some of the other people here said they saw something on the way up, too.”
Myra yawned. “Probably frozen astronaut urine,” she said drowsily. “Remember those stories about the Apollo crews seeing what they thought were space fireflies? Anyway, did you say we had a room? With a real bed?”
Natasha had said it, and they did have it—not just any bed, either, but a bed that was more than ninety centimeters across, which meant plenty of room for Myra and Ranjit to cuddle up. As soon as they saw it, they couldn’t resist it. Just a nap, Ranjit told himself, one arm around his wife, who was asleep already. Then I’ll get up and explore this fascinating place—oh, I mean after I take one of those real showers.
That was his definite intention. It wasn’t his fault that when he woke it was with his wife gently shaking his shoulder and saying, “Ranj? Do you know you slept for fourteen hours? If you get up now, you’ll have time for a decent breakfast and a look round the tube before we have to get to the race.”
Some Olympic events have been witnessed by crowds in the hundreds of thousands. The in-person audience at these first lunar games, by comparison, was almost invisibly tiny. There were just enough people to fill the eighteen hundred lightweight seats that climbed the walls of the tube, and the Subramanians were lucky enough to have their seats less than a hundred meters from the finish line.
By the time they made their way to them along the footwalk, Ranjit was feeling about as good as he ever had in his life. A good long sleep, a quick shower in real, if reprocessed, water—only thirty seconds of the spray by its timer, but you could get really wet in thirty seconds—and a quick look around had marked the beginning of a good day. He was surprised to find that the living quarters weren’t in the giant stadium tube itself but in a smaller one nearby, connected by a man-made tunnel.
But he was there! On the moon! With his dearly beloved wife and son, and on what might be his dearly beloved daughter’s happiest day ever!
Although the man-made atmosphere in the tunnels was at only about half the pressure of sea-level Earth, it had been considerably oxygen-enriched. That was more important to the balloonatic who was Natasha’s opponent, Piper Dugan, than to herself, although in the moon’s one-sixth gravity he still needed a capacity of less than thirty cubic meters of hydrogen to lift him. He was, as it happened, Australian. As he entered,