“To the moon?” Rolando asked, incredulous. “Who?”
“The fliers and tightrope acts,” she replied, “and a selection of acrobats and clowns. “
“There’s no gravity up there,” Rolando muttered, suddenly jealous. “Or less gravity. Something like that.”
He slumped back in the sofa without realizing that the wonderful smile on his wife’s face meant that there was more she wanted to tell him.
“We’ve been invited too!” she blurted, and she perched herself on his lap, threw her arms around his thick neck, and kissed him soundly.
“You mean you’ve been invited,” he said darkly, pulling away from her embrace. “You’re the star of the show; I’m a has-been”
She shook her head, still smiling happily. “They haven’t asked me to perform. They can’t bring the cats up into space. The invitation is for the Great Rolando and his wife to spend a month up there as guests of Moonbase Inc.!” Rolando suspected that the bionics company had pulled some corporate strings. They wanted to see how their damnable leg works without gravity, he was certain. Inwardly, he was eager to find out too. But he let no one know that, not even his wife.
To his utter shame and dismay, Rolando was miserably sick all the long three days of the flight from Texas to Moonbase. Immediately after takeoff the spacecraft carrying the circus performers was in zero gravity, weightless, and Rolando found that the absence of gravity was worse for him than gravity itself. His stomach seemed to be falling all the time while, paradoxically, anything he tried to eat crawled upward into his throat and made him violently ill.
In his misery and near delirium, he knew that gravity was laughing at him.
Once on the moon, however, everything became quite fine. Better than fine, as far as Rolando was concerned. While clear-eyed, young Moonbase guides in crisp uniforms of amber and bronze demonstrated the cautious shuffling walk that was needed in the gentle lunar gravity, Rolando realized that his leg no longer hurt.
“I feel fine,” he whispered to his wife, in the middle of the demonstration. Then he startled the guides and his fellow circus folk alike by tossing his cane aside and leaping five meters into the air, shouting at the top of his lungs, “I feel wonderful!”
The circus performers were taken off to special orientation lectures, but Rolando and his wife were escorted by a pert young redhead into the office of Moonbase’s chief administrator.
“Remember me?” asked the administrator as he shook Rolando’s hand and half bowed to his wife. “I was the physicist at Columbia who did that TV commercial with you six or seven years ago.”
Rolando did not, in fact, remember the man’s face at all, although he did recall his warning about gravity. As he sat down in the chair the administrator proffered, he frowned slightly.
The administrator wore zippered coveralls of powder blue. He hiked one hip onto the edge of his desk and beamed happily at the Rolandos. “I can’t tell you how delighted I am to have the circus here, even if it’s just for a month. I really had to sweat blood to get the corporation’s management to okay bringing you up here. Transportation’s still quite expensive, you know.”
Rolando patted his artificial leg. “I imagine the bionics company paid their fair share of the costs.”
The administrator looked slightly startled. “Well, yes, they have picked up the tab for you and Mrs. Rolando.”
“I thought so.”
Rolando’s wife smiled sweetly. “We are delighted that you invited us here.”
They chatted a while longer, and then the administrator personally escorted them to their apartment in Moonbase’s tourist section. “Have a happy stay,” he said, by way of taking his leave.
Although he did not expect to, that is exactly what Rolando did for the next many days. Moonbase was marvelous! There was enough gravity to keep his insides behaving properly, but it was so light and gentle that even his obese body with its false leg felt young and agile again.
Rolando walked the length and breadth of the great Main Plaza, his wife clinging to his arm, and marveled at how the Moonbase people had landscaped the expanse under their dome, planted it with grass and flowering shrubs. The apartment they had been assigned to was deeper underground, in one of the long corridors that had been blasted out of solid rock. But the quarters were no smaller than their mobile home back on Earth, and it had a video screen that took up one entire wall of the sitting room.
“I love it here!” Rolando told his wife. “I could stay forever!”
“It’s only for one month,” she said softly. He ignored it.
Rolando adjusted quickly to walking in the easy lunar gravity, never noticing that his wife adjusted just as quickly (perhaps even a shade faster). He left his cane in their apartment and strolled unaided each day through the shopping arcades and athletic fields of the Main Plaza, walking for hours on end without a bit of pain.
He watched the roustabouts who had come up with him directing their robots to set up a big top in the middle of the plaza, a gaudy blaze of colorful plastic and pennants beneath the great gray dome that soared high overhead.
The moon is marvelous, thought Rolando. There was still gravity lurking, trying to trip him up and make him look ridiculous. But even when he fell, it was so slow and gentle that he could put out his powerful arms and push himself up to a standing position before his body actually hit the ground.
“I love it here!” he said to his wife, dozens of times each day. She smiled and tried to remind him that it was only for three more weeks.
At dinner one evening in Moonbase’s grander restaurant (there were only two, not counting cafeterias) his earthly
