Short Stories by Robert A. Heinlein Vol 2 Part 55

'Now?'

'Suits.'

'Call your office.'

'Are you ready to leave right now? It would suit me. As far as the front office is concerned, I'm on vacation; nevertheless, I've got this on my mind. I want to get at it.'

'Quit talking and git.'

They went topside to where their cars were parked.

Grimes headed towards his, a big-bodied, old-fashioned

Boeing family landau. Stevens checked him.

'You aren't planning to go in that? It 'u'd take us the rest of the day.'

"Why not? She's got an auxiliary s.p.a.ce drive, and she's tight. You could fly from here to the Moon and back.'

'Yes, but she's so infernal slow. We'll use my "broomstick".

Grimes let his eyes run over his friend's fusiformed little speedster. Its body was as nearly invisible as the plastic industry could achieve. A surface layer, two molecules thick, gave it a refractive index sensibly identical with that of air. When perfectly clean it was very difficult to see.

At the moment it had picked up enough casual dust and water vapour to be faintly seen - a ghost of a soap bubble of a ship.

Running down the middle, clearly visible through the walls, was the only metal part of the ship - the shaft, or, more properly, the axis core, and the spreading sheaf of deKalb receptors at its terminus. The appearance was enough like a giant witch's broom to justify the nickname. Since the saddles, of transparent plastic, were mounted tandem oven the shaft so that the metal rod pa.s.sed between the legs of the pilot and pa.s.sengers, the nickname was doubly apt.

'Son,' Grimes remarked, 'I know I ain't pretty, nor am I graceful. Nevertheless, I retain a certain residuum of self- respect and some shreds of dignity. I am not going to tuck that thing between my shanks and go scooting through the air on it.

'Oh, rats! You're old-fashioned.'

'I may be. Nevertheless, any peculiarities I have managed to retain to my present age I plan to hang on to. No.'

'Look - I'll polarize the hull before we raise. How about it?'

'Opaque?'

'Opaque.'

Grimes slid a regretful glance at his own frumpish boat, but a.s.sented by fumbling for the barely visible port of the speedster. Stevens a.s.sisted him; they climbed in and straddled the stick.

'Atta boy, Doc,' Stevens commended, 'I'll have you there in three shakes. That tub of yours probably won't do over five hundred, and Wheelchair must be all of twenty-five thousand miles up.'

'I'm never in a hurry,' Grimes commented, 'and don't call Waldo's house "Wheelchair" - not to his face.'

'I'll remember,' Stevens promised. He fumbled, apparently in empty air; the hull suddenly became dead black, concealing them. It changed as suddenly to mirror bright; the car quivered, then shot up out of sight.

Waldo F. Jones seemed to be floating in thin air at the centre of a spherical room. The appearance was caused by the fact that he was indeed floating in air. His house lay in a free orbit, with a period of just over twenty-four hours. No spin had been impressed on his home; the pseudo gravity of centrifugal force was the thing he wanted least. He had left

Earth to get away from its gravitational field; he had not been down to the surface once in the seventeen years since his house was built and towed into her orbit; he never intended to do so for any purpose whatsoever.

Here, floating free in s.p.a.ce in his own air-conditioned sh.e.l.l, he was almost free of the unbearable lifelong slavery to his impotent muscles. What little strength he had he could spend economically, in movement, rather than in fighting against the tearing, tiring weight of the Earth's thick field.

Waldo had been acutely interested in s.p.a.ce flight since early boyhood, not from any desire to explore the depths, but because his boyish, overtrained mind had seen the enormous advantage, to him, in weightlessness. While still in his teens he had helped the early experimenters in s.p.a.ce flight over a hump by supplying them with a control system which a pilot could handle delicately while under the strain of two or three gravities.

Such an invention was no trouble at all to him; he had simply adapted manipulating devices which he himself used in combating the overpowering weight of one gravity. The first successful and safe rocket ship contained relays which had once aided Waldo in moving himself from bed to wheelchair.

The deceleration tanks, which are now standard equipment for the lunar mail ships, traced their parentage to a flotation tank in which Waldo habitually had eaten and slept up to the time when he left the home of his parents for his present, somewhat unique home. Most of his basic inventions had originally been conceived for his personal convenience, and only later adapted for commercial exploitation. Even the ubiquitous and grotesquely humanoid gadgets known universally as 'waldocs' - Waldo F. Jones's Synchronous

Reduplicating Pantograph, Pat #296,001,437, new series, et al - pa.s.sed through several generations of development and private use in Waldo's machine shop before he redesigned them for ma.s.s production. The first of them, a primitive gadget compared with the waldoes now to be found in every shop, factory, plant, and warehouse in the country, had been designed to enable Waldo to operate a metal lathe.

Waldo had resented the nickname the public had fastened on them-.I It struck him as overly familiar, but he had coldly recognized the business advantage to himself in having the public identify him verbally with a gadget so useful and important.

When the newscasters tagged his s.p.a.cehouse

'Wheelchair', one might have expected him to regard it as more useful publicity. That he did not so regard it, that he resented it and tried to put a stop to it, arose from another and peculiarly Waldo-ish fact: Waldo did not think of himself as a cripple.

He saw himself not as a crippled human being, but as something higher than human, the next step up, a being so superior as not to need the coa.r.s.e, brutal strength of the smooth apes. Hairy apes, smooth apes, then Waldo - so the progression ran in his mind. A chimpanzee, with muscles that hardly bulge at all, can tug as high as fifteen hundred pounds with one hand. This Waldo had proved by obtaining one and patiently enraging it into full effort. A well- developed man can grip one hundred and fifty pounds with one hand. Waldo's own grip, straining until the sweat sprang out, had never reached fifteen pounds.

Whether the obvious inference were fallacious or true, Waldo believed in it, evaluated by it. Men were overmuscled canaille, smooth chimps. He felt himself at least ten times superior to them.

He had much to go on.

Though floating in air, he was busy, quite busy. Although be never went to the surface of the Earth his business was there.

Aside from managing his many properties he was in regular practice as a consulting engineer, specializing in motion a.n.a.lysis. Hanging close to him in the room were the paraphernalia necessary to the practice of his profession.

Facing him was a four-by-five colour-stereo television receptor.

Two sets of coordinates, rectilinear and polar, crosshatched it.

Another smaller receptor hung above it and to the right. Both receptors were fully recording, by means of parallel circuits conveniently out of the way in another compartment.

The smaller receptor showed the faces of two men watching him.

The larger showed a scene inside a large shop, hangar-like in its proportions. In the immediate foreground, almost full size, was a grinder in which was being machined a large casting of some sort. A workman stood beside it, a look of controlled exasperation on his face.

'He's the best you've got,' Waldo stated to the two men in the smaller screen. 'To be sure, he is clumsy and does not have the touch for fine work, but he is superior to the other morons you call machinists.'

The workman looked around, as if trying to locate the voice.

It was evident that he could hear Waldo, but that no vision receptor had been provided for him.

'Did you mean that crack for me?' he said harshly.

'You misunderstand me, my good man,' Waldo said sweetly. 'I was complimenting you. I actually have hopes of being able to teach you the rudiments of precision work. Then we shall expect you to teach those b.u.t.ter-brained oafs around you. The gloves, please.'

Near the man, mounted on the usual stand, were a pair of primary waldoes, elbow length and human digited. They were floating on the line, in parallel with a similar pair physically in front of