The Best of Bova: Volume 1 (38 page)
Read The Best of Bova: Volume 1 Online
Authors: Ben Bova
Vic makes a puzzled frown over that word, “eschew,” but he nods and picks up his thread again.
Okay—Vic says. I’m doing great until my other knee starts aching. I’m going on thirty-two and the aches and pains are what you get. But I figure, if the stem cell treatments helped my one knee so much, how about trying them on my other knee?
Besides, that Swedish doctor was really good-looking and it was an excuse to see her again.
So I got the other knee treated and before the season’s over I’ve got twelve stolen bases and third basemen are playing me inside the bag to protect against bunts. Makes it easier for me to slam the ball past them. I was leading the league in batting average and women were hanging around the clubhouse entrance after games just to see me!
But then I got beaned.
It wasn’t really a beaning, not like I got hit on the head. McGilmore was pitching and I had a single and a triple in two at-bats and he was pretty sore about it. He always was a mean bas—a mean sonofagun. So he whips a sidearm fast ball at me, hard as he can throw. It’s inside and I try to spin away from it but it catches me in my ribs. I never felt such pain. Broke two of my ribs and one of ’em punctured my left lung. I was coughing up blood when they carried me off the field.
So I spent my thirty-second birthday in the hospital, feeling miserable. But the second or third day there, Doc Trurow comes to visit me, and it was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. She’s really pretty, and her smile lit up the whole damned hospital.
Stem cells again. This time they helped my ribs heal and even repaired the rip in my lung. I got back to the team before the end of the season and ran off a four-fifty average on our last home stand. Better yet, Doc Trurow was at every game, sitting right behind our dugout.
So on the last day of the season, I worked up the nerve to ask her out for dinner. And she says yes! Her first name is Olga and we had a great evening together, even though the team finished only in third place.
* * *
“Mr. Caruso,” the commissioner intoned. “Kindly stick to the facts of your physical enhancements.”
Vic looked kind of sheepish and he nodded his head and mumbled, “Yessir.”
Instead of going back to Michigan for the off season, I stayed in Oakland and dated Olga a lot. I even started thinking about marriage, but I didn’t have the nerve to pop the question—
“Mr. Caruso!”
Well, it’s important—Vic said to the commissioner. Olga told me how stem cell treatments could improve my eyesight and make my reflexes sharper. There wasn’t anything in the rules against it, and it was my own cells, not some drug or steroids or anything like that. So I let her jab me here and there and damned if I didn’t feel better. Besides, I worried that if I said no to her she’d stop dating me and I didn’t want to stop seeing her.
So this goes on for a couple seasons and all of a sudden I’m coming up on my thirty-fifth birthday and I can see the big four-oh heading down the road for me. I started to worry about my career ending, even though I was hitting three-twenty-something and doing okay behind the plate. News guys started calling me Iron Man, no kidding.
Danny Daniels looks piss . . . uh, unhappy, but he doesn’t say anything and I figure, what the hell, so he has to sit on the bench for another season or two. But the front office trades him to the Yankees, so it’s okay. I don’t have to see his sour puss in the clubhouse anymore.
Meanwhile we’re in the playoffs again and we’ve got a good chance to take the pennant.
Then I got hurt again. Dancing. No kidding, Olga and I were dancing and I guess I was feeling pretty damned frisky and I tried a fancy move I’d seen in an old Fred Astaire movie and I slipped and went down on my face. Never been so embarrassed in my whole life.
I turned from Vic to take a peek at the commissioner’s face. Instead of interrupting the big lug, the commissioner was listening hard, his eyes focused on Vic, totally intent on the story that was unfolding.
* * *
Something in my hip went blooey—Vic went on. I got to my feet okay, but the hip felt stiff. And the stiffness didn’t go away. It got worse. When I told Olga about it she toted me over to the medical center for a whole lot of tests.
It was nothing serious, the docs decided. The hip would be okay in a couple of months. Just needed rest. And time.
But spring training was due to start in a few weeks and I needed to be able to get around okay, not stiff like Frankenstein’s monster.
“It’s just a factor of your age,” says the therapist Olga sent me to.
“I’m only thirty-six,” I said.
“Maybe so,” says the doc, “but your body’s taken a beating over the years. It’s catching up with you. You’re going to be old before your time, physically.”
I felt pretty low. But when I tell Olga about what the doc said, she says, “Telomerase.”
“Telo-what?” I ask her.
She tells me this telomerase stuff can reverse aging. In mice, at least. They inject the stuff in old, creaky, diabetic lab mice and the little buggers get young and frisky again and their diabetes goes away.
I don’t have diabetes, but I figure if the stuff makes me feel younger then why not try it? Olga tells me that some movie stars and politicians have used it, in secret, and it helped them stay young. A couple of TV news people, too.
So I start taking telomerase injections and by the time I hit the big four-oh I’m still hitting over three hundred and catching more than a hundred games a year. And other guys are starting to use stem cells and telomerase and everything else they can get their hands on. Even Danny Daniels is using, from what I heard.
“That’s what I’ve been telling you!” Bragg yells, jumping up from his seat on the front row of benches. “They’re making a travesty of the game!”
The commissioner frowns at him and Bragg sits back down. Vic Caruso stares at him, looking puzzled.
“Look,” Vic says, “I didn’t do anything that’s prohibited by the rules.”
Bragg seems staggered that Vic can pronounce “prohibited” correctly.
The commissioner says, “The point of this hearing is to decide if the rules should be amended.”
“You make stem cells and telomerase and such illegal,” Vic says, “and half the players in the league’ll have to quit baseball.”
“But is it fair to the players who don’t use such treatments for you to be so . . . so . . . extraordinary?” asks the commissioner.
Vic shakes his head. “I’m not extraordinary. I’m not a superman. I’m just
young
. I’m not better than I was when I was twenty, but I’m just about as good. What’s wrong with that?”
The commissioner doesn’t answer. He just shakes his head and glances at the two league presidents, sitting beside him. Neither of them has an answer, either.
But Bragg does. “Do you realize what this means?” he yells at the commissioner. Pointing at Vic again, he says, “This man will be playing until he’s fifty! Maybe longer! How are we going to bring young players into the league if the veterans are using these treatments to keep themselves young? We’ll have whole teams made up of seventy-year-olds, for God’s sake!”
“Seventy-year-olds who play like twenty-year-olds,” the commissioner mutters.
“Seventy-year-olds who’ll demand salary increases every year,” Bragg snaps back at him.
And suddenly it all becomes clear. Bragg’s not worrying about the purity of the game. The revelations in the news haven’t hurt box office receipts: attendance has been booming. But veteran players demand a lot more money than rookies—and get it. Bragg’s bitching about his pocketbook!
The commissioner looks at the two league presidents again, but they still have nothing to say. They avoid looking at Bragg, though.
To Vic, the commissioner says, in a kindly, almost grandfatherly way, “Mr. Caruso, thank you for your frank and honest testimony. You’ve given us a lot to think about. You may step down now.”
Vic gets up from the chair like a mountain rising. As he heads for the front bench, though, the commissioner says, “By the way, just to satisfy my personal curiosity, did you and Dr. Trurow get married?”
“We’re gonna do that on Christmas day,” says Vic. “In Stockholm, that’s her home town and her family and all her friends’ll be there.”
The commissioner smiles. “Congratulations.”
“We’ll send you an invitation,” Vic says, smiling back.
Glancing at Bragg, the commissioner says, “I’m afraid it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to attend your wedding, Mr. Caruso. But I wish you and your bride much happiness.”
So that’s how it happened. The commissioner and the league presidents and all the owners—including Bragg—put their heads together and came up with the Big Change.
Major League Baseball imposed an age limit on players. Fifty. Nobody over fifty would be allowed to play on a major league team. This made room for the youngsters like Danny Daniels to get into the game—although Daniels was thirty-eight when he finally became the Yankees’ starting catcher.
The guys over fifty were put into a new league, a special league for old-timers. This allowed baseball to expand again, for the first time in the Twenty-First century. Sixteen new teams in sixteen new cities, mostly in the Sun Belt, like Tucson, Mobile, New Orleans and Orlando.
And the best part is that the old timers get a shot at the World Series winner. At the end of October, right around Hallowe’en, the pennant winner from the Old Timers’ League plays the winner of the World Series.
Some wags wrote columns about Hallowe’en being the time when dead ballplayers rise from their graves, but nobody pays much attention to that kind of drivel. The Hallowe’en series draws big crowds—and big TV receipts. Even Bragg admits he likes it, a little.
Last Hallowe’en Vic’s Tucson Tarantulas whipped the New York Yankees in seven games. In the deciding game, Danny Daniels hit a home run for the Yanks, but Vic socked two dingers for Tucson to ice it. He said it was to celebrate the birth of his first son.
Yankee haters all over the country rejoiced.
Asked when he planned to retire, Vic said, “I don’t know. Maybe when my kid gets old enough to play in the Bigs.”
Or maybe not.
THE MAN WHO HATED GRAVITY
The most important advice ever given to a writer is this: Write about what you know.
But how can you do this in science fiction, when the stories tend to be about places and times that no one has yet experienced? How can you write about what you know when you want to write about living in the future or the distant past, on the Moon, or Mars, or some planet that is invented out of your imagination?
There are ways.
To begin with, no matter what time and place in which your story is set, it must deal with people. Oh, sure, the characters in your story may not look like human beings. Science-fiction characters can be robots or alien creatures or smart dolphins or sentient cacti, for that matter. But they must behave like humans. They must have humanly recognizable needs and fears and desires. If they do not, they will either be totally incomprehensible to the reader or—worst sin of all—boring.
I have never been to the Moon. I have never been a circus acrobat. But I know what it is to hate gravity. Several years ago I popped my knee while playing tennis. For weeks I was in a brace, hardly able to walk. I used crutches, and later a cane. For more than a year I could not trust my two legs to support me. Even today that knee feels like there’s a loose collection of rubber bands inside. I know what it is like to be crippled, even though it was only temporary.
And I know, perhaps as well as anyone, what it is like to live on the Moon. I’ve been living there in my imagination for much of my life. My first novel (unpublished) dealt with establishing habitats on the Moon. My 1976 novel
Millennium
(later incorporated into
The Kinsman Saga
) was set mainly on the Moon. In my 1987 nonfiction book
Welcome to Moonbase
, I worked with engineers and illustrators to create a livable, workable industrial base on the Moon’s surface.
While I was hobbling around on crutches, hating every moment of being incapacitated, I kept thinking of how much better off I would be in zero g, or in the gentle gravity of the Moon, one-sixth of Earth’s.
And the Great Rolando took form in my mind. I began to write a short story about him. I don’t write many short stories. Most of my fiction has been novels. When I start a novel, I usually know the major characteristics of the major characters, and that’s about it. I have sketched out the basic conflict between the protagonist and antagonist, but if I try to outline the scenes, schedule the chapters, organize the action, the novel gets turgid and dull. Much better to let the characters fight it out among themselves, day after day, as the work progresses.
Short stories are very different. Most of the short stories I write are rather carefully planned out before I begin putting the words down. I find that, because a short story must necessarily be tightly written, without a spare scene or even an extra sentence, I must work out every detail of the story in my mind before I begin to write.
However,
“The Man Who Hated Gravity”
did not evolve that way. I began with Rolando, a daring acrobat who flouted his disdain for the dangers of his work. I knew he was going to be injured, much more seriously and permanently than I was. From there on in, Rolando and the other characters literally took over the telling of the tale. I did not know, for example, that the scientist who was used to help publicize Rolando would turn out to be the man who headed Moonbase years later.
I do not advise this subconscious method of writing for short-story work. As I said, a short story must be succinct. Instead of relating the tale of a person’s whole life, or a substantial portion of it, a short story can at best reveal a critical incident in that character’s life: a turning point, an episode that illuminates the person’s inner being.
But this subconscious method worked for me in
“The Man Who Hated Gravity.”
See if the story works for you.
* * *
The Great Rolando
had not always hated gravity. As a child growing up in the traveling circus that had been his only home he often frightened his parents by climbing too high, swinging too far, daring more than they could bear to watch.
The son of a clown and a cook, Rolando had yearned for true greatness, and could not rest until he became the most renowned aerialist of them all.
Slim and handsome in his spangled tights, Rolando soared through the empty air thirty feet above the circus’s flimsy safety net. Then fifty feet above it. Then a full hundred feet high, with no net at all.
“See the Great Rolando defy gravity!” shouted the posters and TV advertisements. And the people came to crane their necks and hold their breaths as he performed a split-second ballet in midair high above them. Literally flying from one trapeze to another, triple somersaults were workaday chores for the Great Rolando.
His father feared to watch his son’s performances. With all the superstition born of generations of circus life, he cringed outside the Big Top while the crowds roared deliriously. Behind his clown’s painted grin Rolando’s father trembled. His mother prayed through every performance until the day she died, slumped over a bare wooden pew in a tiny austere church far out in the midwestern prairie.
For no matter how far he flew, no matter how wildly he gyrated in midair, no matter how the crowds below gasped and screamed their delight, the Great Rolando pushed himself farther, higher, more recklessly.
Once, when the circus was playing New York City’s huge Convention Center, the management pulled a public relations coup. They got a brilliant young physicist from Columbia University to pose with Rolando for the media cameras and congratulate him on defying gravity.
Once the camera crews had departed, the physicist said to Rolando, “I’ve always had a secret yearning to be in the circus. I admire what you do very much.”
Rolando accepted the compliment with a condescending smile.
“But no one can
really
defy gravity,” the physicist warned. “It’s a universal force, you know.”
The Great Rolando’s smile vanished.
“I
can defy gravity. And I do. Every day.”
Several years later Rolando’s father died (of a heart seizure, during one of his son’s performances) and Rolando married the brilliant young lion tamer who had joined the circus slightly earlier. She was a petite little thing with golden hair, the loveliest of blue eyes, and so sweet a disposition that no one could say anything about her that was less than praise. Even the great cats purred for her.
She too feared Rolando’s ever-bolder daring, his wilder and wilder reachings on the high trapeze.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of! Gravity can’t hurt me!” And he would laugh at her fears.
“But I
am
afraid,” she would cry.
“The people pay their money to see me defy gravity,” Rolando would tell his tearful wife. “They’ll get bored if I keep doing the same stunts one year after another.”
She loved him dearly and felt terribly frightened for him. It was one thing to master a large cage full of Bengal tigers and tawny lions and snarling black panthers. All you needed was will and nerve. But she knew that gravity was another matter altogether.
“No one can defy gravity forever,” she would say, gently, softly, quietly.
“I can,” boasted the Great Rolando.
But of course he could not. No one could. Not forever. The fall, when it inevitably came, was a matter of a fraction of a second. His young assistant’s hand slipped only slightly in starting out the empty trapeze for Rolando to catch after a quadruple somersault. Rolando almost caught it. In midair he saw that the bar would be too short. He stretched his magnificently trained body to the utmost and his fingers just grazed its tape-wound shaft.
For an instant he hung in the air. The tent went absolutely silent. The crowd drew in its collective breath. The band stopped playing. Then gravity wrapped its invisible tentacles around the Great Rolando and he plummeted, wild-eyed and screaming, to the sawdust a hundred feet below.
“His right leg is completely shattered,” said the famous surgeon to Rolando’s wife. She had stayed calm up to that moment, strong and levelheaded while her husband lay unconscious in an intensive-care unit.
“His other injuries will heal. But the leg . . .” The gray-haired, gray-suited man shook his dignified head sadly. His assistants, gathered behind him like an honor guard, shook their heads in metronome synchrony to their leader.
“His leg?” she asked, trembling.
“He will never be able to walk again,” the famous surgeon pronounced.
The petite blonde lion tamer crumpled and sagged into the sleek leather couch of the hospital waiting room, tears spilling down her cheeks.
“Unless . . .” said the famous surgeon.
“Unless?” she echoed, suddenly wild with hope.
“Unless we replace the shattered leg with a prosthesis.”
“Cut off his leg?”
The famous surgeon promised her that a prosthetic bionic leg would be “just as good as the original—in fact, even better!” It would be a
permanent
prosthesis; it would never have to come off, and its synthetic surface would blend so well with Rolando’s real skin that no one would be able to tell where his natural leg ended and his prosthetic leg began. His assistants nodded in unison.
Frenzied at the thought that her husband would never walk again, alone in the face of coolly assured medical wisdom, she reluctantly gave her assent and signed the necessary papers.
The artificial leg was part lightweight metal, part composite space-manufactured materials, and entirely filled with marvelously tiny electronic devices and miraculously miniaturized motors that moved the prosthesis exactly the way a real leg should move. It was stronger than flesh and bone, or so the doctors confidently assured the Great Rolando’s wife.
The circus manager, a constantly frowning bald man who reported to a board of bankers, lawyers, and MBAs in St. Petersburg, agreed to pay the famous surgeon’s astronomical fee.
“The first aerialist with a bionic leg,” he murmured, dollar signs in his eyes.
Rolando took the news of the amputation and prosthesis with surprising calm. He agreed with his wife: better a strong and reliable artificial leg than a ruined real one.
In two weeks he walked again. But not well. He limped. The leg hurt, with a sullen, stubborn ache that refused to go away.
“It will take a little time to get accustomed to it,” said the physical therapists.
Rolando waited. He exercised. He tried jogging. The leg did not work right. And it ached constantly.
“That’s just not possible,” the doctors assured him. “Perhaps you ought to talk with a psychologist.”
The Great Rolando stormed out of their offices, limping and cursing, never to return. He went back to the circus, but not to his aerial acrobatics. A man who could not walk properly, who had an artificial leg that did not work right, had no business on the high trapeze.
His young assistant took the spotlight now, and duplicated—almost—the Great Rolando’s repertoire of aerial acrobatic feats. Rolando watched him with mounting jealousy, his only satisfaction being that the crowds were noticeably smaller than they had been when he had been the star of the show. The circus manager frowned and asked when Rolando would be ready to work again.
“When the leg works right,” said Rolando.
But it continued to pain him, to make him awkward and invalid.
That is when he began to hate gravity. He hated being pinned down to the ground like a worm, a beetle. He would hobble into the Big Tent and eye the fliers’ platform a hundred feet over his head and know that he could not even climb the ladder to reach it. He grew angrier each day. And clumsy. And obese. The damned false leg
hurt,
no matter what those expensive quacks said. It was
not
psychosomatic. Rolando snorted contempt for their stupidity.
He spent his days bumping into inanimate objects and tripping over tent ropes. He spent his nights grumbling and grousing, fearing to move about in the dark, fearing even that he might roll off his bed. When he managed to sleep the same nightmare gripped him: he was falling, plunging downward eternally while gravity laughed at him and all his screams for help did him no good whatever.
His former assistant grinned at him whenever they met. The circus manager took to growling about Rolando’s weight, and asking how long he expected to be on the payroll when he was not earning his keep.
Rolando limped and ached. And when no one could see him, he cried. He grew bitter and angry, like a proud lion that finds itself caged forever.
Representatives from the bionics company that manufactured the prosthetic leg visited the circus, their faces grave with concern.
“The prosthesis should be working just fine,” they insisted.
Rolando insisted even more staunchly that their claims were fraudulent. “I should sue you and the barbarian who took my leg off.”
The manufacturer’s reps consulted their home office and within the week Rolando was whisked to San Jose in their company jet. For days on end they tested the leg, its electronic innards, the bionic interface where it linked with Rolando’s human nervous system. Everything checked out perfectly. They showed Rolando the results, almost with tears in their eyes.
“It should work fine.”
“It does not.”
In exchange for a written agreement not to sue them, the bionics company gave Rolando a position as a “field consultant,” at a healthy stipend. His only duties were to phone San Jose once a month to report on how the leg felt. Rolando delighted in describing each and every individual twinge, the awkwardness of the leg, how it made him limp.
His wife was the major earner now, despite his monthly consultant’s fee. She worked twice as hard as ever before, and began to draw crowds that held their breaths in vicarious terror as they watched the tiny blonde place herself at the mercy of so many fangs and claws.
Rolando traveled with her as the circus made its tour of North America each year, growing fatter and unhappier day by humiliating, frustrating, painful day.
