The Golden Globe

John Valentine had spotted his son, and his face broke open in that well-remembered, well-loved smile. Sparky felt his knees grow weak. He thought his heart might burst.

"Dodger!" Valentine shouted, and covered the last twenty yards at a run. He lifted Sparky into the air, spun him around, then embraced him. Sparky wrapped his arms around his father's neck. He was determined not to cry.

John Valentine held his son at arm's length, Sparky's feet dangling high above the floor.

"Let me look at you! My god, you look great! Doesn't he, guys?" Everyone murmured how good Sparky looked. Sparky wondered who these people were, and what they had to do with his father. He supposed he'd learn soon enough.

"Great things ahead of us, son," Valentine said, warmly, putting Sparky down again and taking his hand. "Great things. I've got so much to tell you. Come on, let's get out of this damn place."

With that, John Valentine set off. Sparky clung to his father's hand, feeling a little like a balloon on the end of a string. It wasn't a bad feeling, but it wasn't a real secure one, either. There was nothing to be done about it.

Sparky was twenty-nine.

But Sparky is one hundred. He is a lot bigger than he was at eight, at eleven, at twenty-nine, but in many ways he is the same person. We're all that way, I think. We may shift our political ideas here and there, grow more cynical with age, accumulate experience like barnacles, but at our cores there is that same young person. It's the same today, when my apparent age is thirtyish, as it was in the old days, when a centenarian was a mass of leathery skin, rotten teeth, brittle bones, rheumy eyes, and involuntary flatulence. How awful it must have been for the young men and women trapped in such a degenerating hide. I can hear them screaming: "I'm young! Can't you see me?"

I must offer an apology here, and a brief explanation.

My background is in drama, but like any educated person I've read novels, biographies, and autobiographies. My preference is for the old, traditional form of dramatic presentation known as the proscenium theater: three walls, and an imaginary fourth wall between the players and the audience. Over the centuries many methods have been used to break that fourth wall for various reasons. Sometimes it works. From the early days, there was a technique known as the aside, where a cast member pauses and speaks to the audience directly, offers private thoughts, commentary on the action, the author's message.

The written word is different. There are many auctorial voices that may be assumed, but we don't need to get too deeply into that. I have chosen the first person for most of this narrative, for reasons that suit me. I have dropped into third person, as in the preceding pages, for other reasons that make me comfortable. From time to time I have addressed you, the reader, and this is usually considered bad form in a novel. Well, this isn't a novel, of course, but I don't claim it as autobiography, either, though most of it is true. Almost all of it. And it did happen to me. The voice almost never used in prose is the second person. Talking directly to you, the reader. I've never quite been sure why. Maybe it sounds too much like a questio

"Who are you? Are you really Sparky Valentine?"

Chord of ominous music, and bam, the acceleration hits and we cut to seventy years ago, leaving you, the poor reader, to either put up with it or leaf through a few pages to see what the fuck happened next!

I hate that, when a novelist does it to me. It's almost as a

My powers of description have failed me when trying to come up with a way to describe an hour and a half at five gees. One could get a transitory experience of five gees by jumping off a medium-sized building and landing on one's back. A longer version of the same thing would be lying beneath four people your own size for an hour and a half. Neither would really convey the choking, suffocating, bone-breaking and inexorable feeling of panic I endured. Each breath is a labor of Hercules. Lifting a finger is an aerobic workout. The water in my bladder was five times too heavy, like liquid lead. Poly and I both wet ourselves. You don't want to hear the rest.

We're talking five Earth gees here, remember. I grew up in one sixth of an Earth gravity; did that mean what I was feeling was thirty gees? No, because Lunarians are not one sixth as strong as old Earthers. Depending on what sort of shape we're in, we range from about a third, to full one-gee strength. I figure I was perhaps half as strong as an Earthling, so make it an effective ten gees.

The only relief to be found was that after a few minutes, a druggy feeling of lassitude overcame me. Better call it weariness, fatalism, or resigned apathy. I hurt everywhere, I was sure I wouldn't survive this, but I didn't give much of a damn. Dying would be a relief.

There's no mystery as to the source of this druggy feeling. Mechanical arms hovered and darted over us, moving in for the strike from time to time, pumping us full of sweet nepenthe. God knows what it was. I never asked. There were machines to monitor our vital signs, and something that carefully lifted our arms and legs from time to time, moved us around a little. I fancied a bedsore could form in about three seconds at five gees.

It hurt when we were moved. It hurt when I inhaled. Exhaling was no problem. Once I think I stopped inhaling for a while. A dozen needles quickly found veins and started pumping. A mask descended over my face and huffed at me for a while. Oh, all right, I thought, and took another breath.

For a time I could hear Poly moaning. I tried to turn my head to look at her but it was too much trouble. She stopped moaning, and somebody else took it up. Me, I guess. Toby whined for a while, then fell silent, too. If I'd had time I could have estivated him, let him sleep through this nightmare. I wondered if he'd ever forgive me. We had an arrangement: I was in charge of food, navigation, air, and gravity; he was in charge of everything else. I knew he'd regard this as gross negligence.

Perhaps there is a more effective way to show you five gees, but it has nothing to do with descriptive language. Here's what you do: get three or four friends. Rather weird friends would be best. Give them each a baseball bat and have them wrap the business ends with towels; five gees doesn't break bones, it just seems that way. Now pad a hammer in the same way. Start pounding yourself on the head while the friends belabor your body, neck to feet, with the bats. Do this for an hour and a half.

Go ahead. I'll wait.

Now roll yourself out of bed. You'll find you've lost about a foot in height, but that's because you're walking hunched over. It might be better if you fell to your knees. There, now wasn't that an interesting feeling? About now you'll be wishing you could glide like a slug. You feel so slimy you almost feel it's possible.

The bathroom seems the place to go. Please, turn off that goddam light!

When you've made it back to your feet (two hours? three?) you'll probably have enough morbid curiosity to want to see yourself in a mirror. You find you resemble a Picasso from the Black-and-Blue Period. You are twisted in places you didn't used to twist, your head has moved over to one shoulder, both eyes are on one side of your nose. Your skin looks as if it has been tie-dyed, lots of reds and yellows and especially purple blues, in interesting patterns. Your nose is a dipsomaniac's life story. Black golf balls have been rolled under your upper and lower eyelids; the eyeballs themselves are the color of egg yolks laced with lots of Tabasco sauce: huevos rancheros. Your mouth has been stretched into a frozen rictus that almost reaches your ears. Your teeth are dry and coated with sand.