The Golden Globe

"How may I help you?"

The voice was practically identical to the machine voice at the first bank I'd called.

"Is this the computerized answering service of Hamlet Savings and Loan?"

"Yes, it is."

"I'm searching for accounts in the name of Otis Criblecoblis."

"I'm sorry, we carry no accounts in that name."

"How about J. Cheever Loophole?"

"I'm sorry, we carry no—

"Try Eustace McGargle."

"I'm sorry, we—" I hung up. Two down, about sixty or seventy to go.

Why three names? you may be asking. Why not just read off the list of twenty-five names at each bank you call? There was actually no completely logical reason, since I was pretty sure I was doing nothing illegal. But when you have as many outstanding warrants or persons pursuing you as I do, you learn to be cautious. Asking for nonexistent bank accounts was almost sure to raise a red flag somewhere in the bank computer's programming, the electronic equivalent of a teller calling the bank president over to frown dubiously at the check you're trying to kite. I much prefer wide-eyed i

That, plus the fact that three is my lucky number.

"How may I help you?"

"Bank of Oberon? I'm searching for accounts in the name of Egbert Souse."

"You're out of luck there." Great. A user-friendly program.

"Then surely you've heard of Hugo Z. Hackenbush."

"Not during this lifetime." Did this bank cater to comedians?

"One last try, shithead. A. Pismo Clam."

"Does the A stand for Ambrose, or Albert?" I sat up straighter. Was I getting a bite?

"Which one do you have?" I asked, cautiously.

"Neither one. I have a William Clam, and a Jake's Clams, though."

"Yeah, well, stick it—" I broke the co

Oberon. The Bard's World. My God, what a place.

Just about everything on Oberon is worthy of a postcard. So where does one start? At the begi

What we call Oberon today is not what we called Oberon when I was a boy. Oberon is the most distant of the Uranian moons, and the second largest. It's smaller than Titania by a few dozen miles, and about a hundred thousand miles farther away from Uranus. It used to be an unremarkable little ball of rock, faintly orange in color.

Like all the outer-planet habitats, it didn't have enough gravity to be of much use other than as a nuisance. Not enough gravity to make a curtain fall properly, to stage a decent sword fight, or to perform classical ballet. This was naturally a cause of some concern to the Oberoni, so they set about finding a way to provide enough gravity for the theater.

Actually, they had a few other reasons that may have counted more heavily than falling theater curtains. But I can dream, can't I?

Research has shown, so I'm told, that the healthiest environment for humans and other Earth-evolved animals is somewhere between Luna's one sixth and Mars's one third. Anything lighter caused Lowgrav Syndrome, which wouldn't kill you but could certainly a

There are only four ways of providing a given acceleration of gravity, until some genius finds a way to create it. One is simply to accumulate the necessary mass. Thought was given to altering the orbits of all the five largest Uranian moons, smashing them together. That would have been fun, don't you think? But it wouldn't have provided as much gravity as the engineers were seeking, and besides, it would have taken forever for the resulting mass to cool enough to be useful.

Then there is Pluto's Solution, which I guess is technically Method 1A, since it also involves accumulating mass, but it certainly feels like a different solution. Over a century and a half people have been venturing out into the really distant spaces—so far that Brementon and the sun look like next-door neighbors—bringing back tiny black holes. I mean really tiny. Smaller than atoms, they say, though I find that unlikely. There are now thousands and thousands of those little black holes orbiting near the core of Pluto, through solid rock that presents no more obstacle to them than interstellar space. There's enough of them in there now to provide about one third of a gravity on the surface. Those little suckers pull hard!

One day the black holes will suck all the mass of Pluto into what would be, so I read, a tiny-to-small black hole (the large ones contain whole galaxies, if you can believe that). There's no question this will happen. The debate is about how long it will take. Prevailing opinion is at least a million years, so you may not want to unload your real-estate holdings. Of course, some scientists claim it will happen next Tuesday. Take that into your vacation plans.

It's the sort of predicament that appeals to Plutonians, a fatalistic bunch. They get a kick out of telling newly arrived tourists about the latest catastrophic prediction.

The Oberon engineers rejected the Pluto Solution, mostly because of the almost unimaginable expense and the time it would take. Black holes are very rare, and cost the planetary income of some asteroids. They are not labor-intensive, and one hoped-for side effect of the Gravity Project was putting a lot of people to work, jazzing the economy.

And I suspect they decided to wait a few centuries, see if Pluto did fall into a black hole.

The third and fourth ways are also related, and don't involve actual gravity but the illusion of gravity. If a spaceship accelerates at a steady rate, it will seem just like real gravity to an observer inside the ship. Einstein noted that no experiment done inside the ship could distinguish between "real" gravity and the force of acceleration. If you're wondering how I, a mathematical dunderhead, know all this stuff, it's simply that I had to memorize great swatches of it as dialogue when I played the old windbag in Einstein and Marx, the techo-philosopho-porno extravaganza you've never heard of because it played three times before going to a richly deserved extinction. ("Ken Valentine manages to bring some much-needed humor to the role of Albert. But this will only appeal to communist theoretical-physicist necrophiles. There must be two of them in the system, maybe three. Let them have it.—The Phlegethon Phlogiston)

There are several insurmountable hurdles to using method number three for "residential" gravity. For one thing, your residence would spend most of its time moving like a bat out of Pluto. After a few months (weeks? Do the math yourself), you'd be moving near the speed of light and time contraction would be a problem. Well, then why not accelerate twelve hours out, turn around, and accelerate twelve hours back? Oddly enough, that would work, though the expense would probably be prohibitive. It would avoid the other problem of constant acceleration, though: the fact that we have yet to produce a means of propulsion that can operate indefinitely, at any useful thrust. When you got home, you could refuel.