Departures (42 page)

He admitted it. She insisted on buying him a drink. Not much happened in the controlled environment of Luna, so stereovision
was even more popular there than it was on Earth. “I’m just a media addict,” she said.

“Nonsense,” he said gallantly. “How could you get into that kind of shape sitting in front of a set all the time?” He bought the next round himself, and the one after that; he was sure his expense account was stretchier than hers.

He glanced over and saw Rannveig deep in conversation with a big man as blond as she was.
Another Scandinavian
, was his first thought, but then he noticed the fellow was wearing the eye-searing blue, red, and green of Eastern Europe. They did not seem to be having any problems getting along, though.

Nor was he, with the girl he had met.
A promising evening all the way around
, he thought.

“And now,” Rannveig said, “I’d like to introduce our expert analyst, Angus Cavendish, bronze medalist for United Europe in the five-kilometer ski jump in the 2192 Winter Games.”

“I thank ye very much,” Cavendish said. He was a small, dapper man in his early forties, just beginning to gray at the temples and on his cheeks. The Scots burr with which he flavored his French should have given his voice an air of impressive deliberation. It probably would have, too, if he spoke a little slower, but he was too excitable for that. He always reminded Bennett of a tape recorded at eight centimeters a second and played back at sixteen.

“Tell us, Angus, what’s the most difficult thing about this event?” Bennett asked. He had the slightly too good feeling hangover pills always brought.

“The training for it,” Cavendish said at once. “For where d’ye find the like conditions in the inner solar system? It’s only the rich countries can afford to ship their skiers out here for the sake o’ the exercise: the Arab World, Luna, Japan, Siberia.”

“Then how do you account for your own medal?” Rannveig asked.

“Me, lass? I was assistant engineer on a supply ship to the Mimas Saturn station and borrowed my skis from a computer tech there. You look down the rosters of the teams and you’ll find a great lot of spacers among ’em. We’re the ones who come to Mimas on our own business and learn a bit while we’re here.”

Following the script they had roughed out, Bennett said, “Why don’t athletes from nations that can’t afford to send them here train on the moons of Mars? Those have an even lower surface gravity than Mimas.”

“So they do, but they don’t have Arthur; they’re too puny. Look here, now.” The screen behind the broadcasters displayed the trademark image of Mimas. Cavendish used a pointer. “The crater is a hundred thirty kilometers across and ten deep, with the central peak six kilometers high. The body that struck Mimas to make it must have been ten kilometers across (almost the size of Deimos, mind); if it had been any bigger, it would’ve cracked the moon apart.”

“From what you’ve told us, then, I take it the technique for jumping on Mimas is quite different from the one skiers use back on Earth,” Rannveig said.

The screen showed the ninety-meter jump at Klagenfurt. A skier appeared at the top of the slope, pushed off, and went into her tuck. “There’s the first difference already!” Cavendish cried. “You can’t simply tuck and run here or you’re done for in the jump. At .008g, you see, you don’t build up the velocity even in five kilometers that you do in the ninety meters on Earth. You have to use poles all the way down.”

“But there are risks in that too, aren’t there?” Bennett asked.

“That there are. In the low gravity, each push sends you off the slope. The more you bounce about, y’see, the less time there is to be pushing. You have to dig in at just the right angle to come down again quick as you can. If you’ve done it right, you spring off at the end with about the same speed as off the ninety-meter hill back home—near a hundred kilometers an hour.”

As if on cue, the jumper in the monitor screen launched herself into space. “With the local gravity so low, you’d think you’d almost be able to jump clean off Mimas,” Rannveig said.

“ ’Tisn’t so,” Cavendish snorted. “The escape velocity’s over a hundred seventy meters a second; you scarcely reach the sixth part of that. Nay, with the ramp angled up at forty-five degrees, you take about four minutes to sail up two and a half kilometers—three and a half over the floor of Arthur. Then it’s down again. Overall, you’re flying between nine and ten minutes.”

“It must be a marvelous view,” Bennett said.

“That it is.” The line was planned, but Cavendish’s eyes went genuinely misty. “You think you can see forever; in fact, it’s about thirty-five kilometers.”

The screen behind the Scotsman showed the jumbled vista of the crater floor. Small pits and mounds of ice began lazily flowing out of the picture at the edges; what remained grew larger
and larger. “Of course, eventually you have to think about landing,” Bennett said.

“So you do,” Cavendish said dryly. “There’s the rub. You hit the slope at more than a hundred and ten kilometers an hour, and you don’t dare tumble. They have subsurface pipes to heat—if that’s the word I want—the landing zone a hundred degrees or so, up to -30° centigrade, same as the runway. Still, rip your suit and you’re gone. Almost every games, it seems, they add a name or two to the memorial plaque at the peak of Arthur.”

“Is it worth it, then?” Bennett asked. That line was in the script, too, but he meant it. Risking one’s life unnecessarily struck him as insane.

Cavendish’s reply caught him by surprise. It came from the man, not the commentator: “Lad, for the feeling you get when you’re up there, why, dying’d be a small price to pay.”

There was a moment of dead air before Rannveig took up the slack, saying quietly, “All the athletes here today would agree with you, Angus.”

The broadcast going back to Earth cut away from the studio to the pressurized lodge at the top of the runway. Like the Olympic village complex below, it rested on pylons sunk in the ice. The camera focused on the airlock door, which opened to let out the first contestant.

She wore the deep blue of the Anzac Federation; her clear faceplate showed intense concentration on her features. “This is Marge Olbert,” Rannveig said. “She’s twenty-six, from Canberra, a junior ecology officer aboard the
Wirraway
, one of the Anzac Line’s asteroid-belt freighters.”

“Ah, then she’ll have some work at very low gravity,” Cavendish said. “A plus for her.”

The starting light went from red to green. Marge Olbert dug her poles into the ice. “A good push-off!” Cavendish cried. “See, she’s still low enough to take a second shove. That’s the way to do it—keep the polework as near parallel to the runway as you can!”

The ski jumper landed, pushed, flew; landed, pushed, flew. Each thrust of the ski poles added to her velocity; so, little by little, did Mimas’ weak pull. “Oh, excellent form—she’ll be close to that hundred-kilometer-an-hour mark,” Cavendish said.

Marge Olbert was rocketing down the slope now. “A shame we’re in vacuum,” Bennett said. “The wind shrieking by Ms. Olbert would give the audience an added sense of her speed.”

Cavendish chuckled. “They can tell she’s going fast, never fear.”

She used her poles powerfully on the short upslope at the end of the run, gave a last great spring, and launched herself into the void. Red numbers appeared on the monitor: 97.43.

“A splendid takeoff velocity,” Cavendish said. He unobtrusively checked a chart he was holding in his lap. “She’ll be out past ten and a quarter kilometers. The women’s record only 10.6. Could well be the longest women’s jump of the first day. She’ll give the other lassies something to think on.”

The flick of a switch brought the transmission from Olbert’s suit radio into the studio. “Oh, my,” she was saying again and again. “Oh, my.” A reminiscent grin spread over Cavendish’s face.

Marge Olbert was soaring up toward her maximum altitude when coverage cut back to the slope, where another jumper had already begun his run. “They’ll be going about every five minutes,” Bennett explained, “so one will be landing, another just past high point, and a third jumping at about the same time.”

“That’s right, Bill,” Rannveig said. “On the runway now is Jozef Jablonski of Eastern Europe.” Bennett wondered at the sudden warmth in her voice until a close-up showed the face of the man she had been with the night before. She went on, “He’s twenty-nine, an air force captain from Gdynia; his hobbies include basketball, chess, and wargaming.”

Not all of that was on Jablonski’s personal data sheet. Bennett smiled a little.

“He’s a strong-looking brute,” Cavendish said. Rannveig jerked her head, whether in agreement or indignation Bennett could not tell. The Scotsman carried the narration: “Good form into the upslope—aye, a mighty push there, and now the leap … 101.74 kilometers an hour! A fine first jump; it’ll go well past eleven kilometers.”

A tight telephoto showed the expression of almost religious awe that Jablonski was wearing as he sailed high over the frozen surface of Mimas. “With a shot like that, you don’t need words,” Cavendish murmured.

The monitor split into thirds, simultaneously tracking Marge Olbert hurtling down toward her landing, Jablonski nearing apogee, and the next contestant on the runway, a Siberian woman who crossed herself before she began her descent.

Dream-smooth, the girl from the Anzac Federation touched down, steadying herself with her ski poles. “Here’s her dis
tance, now,” Cavendish said. “It’s 10,290 meters—a splendid opening jump.” As Marge Olbert killed her momentum on the reverse slope beyond the landing zone, a crawler came out to pick her up and take her back to the Olympic village. Her raised fist said she knew what she had done.

Then Jozef Jablonski was landing, not as gracefully as his predecessor but safe enough. Red numbers superimposed on his image gave the length of his jump: 11,149 meters. “Astonishing that only a four-kilometer-an-hour difference in takeoff velocity will produce so much extra distance,” Rannveig said. She did not sound astonished; she sounded proud.

“It’s enough to send Jablonski over two hundred meters higher than Marge Olbert, and keep him over the ice twenty seconds longer,” Bennett said, echoing the quick calculations one of the technical people was feeding into his earphone.

One after another, the jumpers flew through their parabolas. With sixty-eight competitors in all, the first round was scheduled to last nearly six hours. As Cavendish had guessed, Marge Olbert’s distance kept holding up, though the girl from the United States, making her first jump off Earth, startled everyone by coming within seventeen meters of it. On the men’s side, Jozef Jablonski stayed in solid contention, if not among the very leaders.

They were down to the last half dozen competitors when Bennett remarked, “So far we’ve had one of the safest first days ever for the Mimas venue—only a couple of minor spills and no serious injuries. What do you think accounts for our good fortune, Angus?”

“Nothing but luck, so far,” Cavendish said. “If we’re as well off after all three days of jumping are done, then we’ll have something to brag about.”

The dismissal irritated Bennett, but at that moment another jumper soared off the ramp. His annoyance instantly turned to excitement. “Look at that!” he exclaimed. “We’ll have a new leader if Shukri al-Kuwatly lands safely!”

“He was a favorite, aye,” Cavendish said, “but who would’ve thought he’d have a takeoff velocity of 103.81 kilometers an hour? That comes to a jump of over 11,580 meters, enough to put him in front by more than 40 meters. Watching his form, I own I didn’t think he’d be off so strong.”

Back at the top of the runway, a Muscovite in red and gold waited for the starting light. Rannveig said, “It has to be disheartening
for Dmitri Shepilov to stand up there knowing what his predecessor has just done.”

“I suspect he’s been through worse,” Bennett commented, reading from Shepilov’s data sheet. “He comes from a guards regiment of Muscovite ski troops, and he saw combat against the Siberians in the Ural skirmishes a couple of years ago. After that, a ski jump should be small potatoes.”

“I wonder,” Angus Cavendish said with a grin. “Then it was only the eye of his sergeant on him, not the whole of Earth and Luna.”

Shepilov’s speed down the ramp was slower than al-Kuwatly’s at every checkpoint, but still respectable. He launched himself at just over a hundred kilometers an hour, a jump that projected out close to an even eleven kilometers.

Coverage of the next athlete, a man from United Europe, was brief; attention switched away to al-Kuwatly, who was heading down toward his landing. “I don’t look for any trouble from him,” Cavendish said. “He’s still half a kilometer up, almost two minutes away from putting his skis to the ice, but already he’s in good position, as he should be. Nothing’ll go wrong here.”

The slow-motion shots of what happened next would be replayed endlessly. Seeing everything live, Bennett was chiefly conscious of how fast sportcasting banality turned to horror. He had actually been laughing at Cavendish, for no sooner were the Scotsman’s words out of his mouth than they were all watching al-Kuwatly’s hands open and his ski poles drift away.

Everyone in the studio stared in consternation at the sudden misty globe around al-Kuwatly’s head, the rime forming on his faceplate and the sides of his helmet. “His suit’s failed!” Rannveig cried, a split second ahead of Bennett and Cavendish.

They could do nothing but watch. Had it been he up there, Bennett knew he would have been thrashing wildly, clawing at his helmet to try somehow to maintain the pressure. But the jumper from the Arab World held the posture he had been in at the moment of disaster. Only very slowly did his bent arms begin to straighten and slump to his sides.

As a veteran spacer, Cavendish was the first to recognize what that meant. “Murder!” he shouted. “That’s a killed man up there, else he’d be making shift to save himself.” He might have been reading Bennett’s mind, but he generalized where the younger broadcaster had not.

Al-Kuwatly’s flight path did not, could not change. Trailing
vapor, he plunged toward the landing slope. He hit the ice like a thrown cloth doll, then bounced and tumbled bonelessly. If he had not been dead already, the impact would have killed him.