Dear Friend Mark:

Please accept this small token of my deep friendship for you. In a few days your news media will be filled with stories about Kanagawa Industries’ revolutionary new electronic book. I will tell every reporter I speak to that the idea is just as much yours as mine, which is nothing more than the truth.

As you may know, trade agreements between your government and mine will make it impossible for Japan to sell electronic books in the U.S.A. However, it should be permissible for us to form an American subsidiary of Kanagawa in the United States. Would you consider accepting the position of chief scientist, or a post of similar rank, with this new company? In that way, you can help to produce electronic books for the American market.

Please phone me at your earliest convenience. . .

Mark read no further. He ran to the phone. He did not even bother to check what time it was in Tokyo. As it happened, he interrupted Mitsui’s lunch, but the two exroommates had a happy, laughing talk together, and Mark agreed to become vice president for innovation of the planned Kanagawa-USA subsidiary.

Moral

Victor Hugo was right when he said that no army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come. But if you’re narrow-minded enough, both the time and the idea can pass you by.

VISION

We can talk about the practical benefits of going into space, the fortunes to be made in zero-gravity manufacturing, the benefits of new medicines and materials produced in orbit. But there is the human aspect to consider, also. Don Arnold is a Promethean of a slightly different stripe, a reluctant leader who pioneers into a new domain almost in spite of himself. Philosophers have long argued over whether human history is molded by the daring actions of extraordinary men and women, or whether history responds to implacable, inevitable natural forces which individual human actions can do little to bend or shape. Vision might help you to decide which side of that argument you are on; then again, it might just add a little weight to both sides of the argument.

Vision, by the way, was originally published in Analog magazine’s 50th anniversary issue, and marked my return to that venerable magazine’s pages as a writer. My first sale to Analog was in May 1962, a short story titled The Next Logical Step (see Escape Plus Ten, published by Tor Books in 1983). When John W. Campbell, Jr. died in 1971 and I was tapped to become Analog’s editor, I decided not to write for the science fiction magazines as long as I was an editor of one of them; it would have been too much of a conflict of interest, I felt. Although I continued to write science fiction novels, I also withdrew them from consideration for the Hugo and Nebula awards, for the same reason. Once I left Analog, however, I was pleased to submit stories and articles to the science fiction magazines once again, and was very happy when Stanley Schmidt picked it for Analog’s 50th anniversary.

“But if you live in orbit, you can live forever!”

Don Arnold said it in sheer frustration and immediately regretted opening his mouth.

Picture the situation. Don was sitting under the glaring lights of a TV studio, in a deep fake-leather couch that looked comfortable but wasn’t. His genial talk-show host had ignored him totally since introducing him as “one of NASA’s key scientists.” (Don was a NASA engineer, and pretty far from the top.)

On one side of Don sat a UFOlogist, a balding, owlishly-bespectacled man with a facial tic and a bulging briefcase clutched in his lap, full of Important Documents.

On Don’s other side sat a self-proclaimed Mystic of indeterminate age, a benign smile on his face, his head shaved and a tiny gem in his left earlobe.

They had done all the talking since the show had started, nearly an hour earlier.

“The government has all sorts of data about UFOs,” the UFOlogist was saying, hugging his battered briefcase. “NASA has tons of information about how the saucers are built and where they’re coming from, but they won’t release any of this to the people.”

Before Don could reply, the Mystic raised both his hands, palms outward. The cameras zoomed in on him.

“All of the universe is a single entity, and all of time is the same,” he said in a voice like a snake charmer’s reed flute. “Governments, institutions, all forms of society are merely illusions. The human mind is capable of anything, merely by thinking transcendentally. The soul is immortal—”

That’s when Don burst out, “But if you live in orbit, you can live forever!”

It surprised them all, especially Don. The Mystic blinked, his mouth still silently shaped for his next pronouncement. The UFOlogist seemed to curl around his briefcase even tighter. The studio audience out there beyond the blinding glare of the overhead lights surged forward in their chairs and uttered a collective murmur of wonderment.

Even the talk show’s host seemed stunned for just a moment. He was the best-dressed man on the set, in a deep blue cashmere sports jacket and precisely-creased pearl gray slacks. He was the only man on camera in makeup. His hairpiece gave him a youthful-yet-reliable look.

The host swallowed visibly as Don wished he could call back the words he had just blurted.

“They live forever?” the host asked, so honestly intrigued that he forgot to smile.

How in hell can I backtrack out of this? Don asked himself desperately.

Then the Mystic started to raise his hands again, his cue to the cameras that he wanted their attention on him.

“Our studies have shown that it’s possible,” Don said, leaning forward slightly to stare right into the host’s baby-blue eyes.

“How long have people lived in orbit, anyway?” the host asked.

“The record is held by two Russian cosmonauts, aboard their space station. They were up there for almost nine months. Our Skylab team was up for 83 days, back in ‘73-′74.”

Don could sense the UFOlogist fidgeting beside him, but the host asked, “And they did experiments up there that showed you could live longer if you stayed in space?”

“Lots of experiments have been done,” Don answered before anyone else could upstage him, “both in orbit and on the ground.”

“On. . . immortality.”

“We tend to call it life extension,” he said truthfully. “But it’s quite clear that in orbit, where you can live under conditions of very low gravity, your heart doesn’t have to work so hard, your internal organs are under much less stress. . .”

“But don’t your muscles atrophy? Isn’t there calcium loss from the bones?”

“No,” Don said flatly. All three cameras were aimed squarely at him. Normally he was a shy man, but nearly an hour of listening to the other two making a shambles of organized thought had made him sore enough to be bold.

“It doesn’t?”

“It takes a lot of hard work to move around in low gravity,” Don answered. “With a normal work routine, plus a few minutes of planned exercise each day, there’s no big muscle-tone loss. In fact, you’d probably be in better condition if you lived in a space station than you are here on Earth.”

“Fascinating!” said the host.

“As for calcium loss, that levels off eventually. It’s no real problem.”

“And then you just go on living,” the host said, “forever?”

“For a long, long time,” Don hedged. “In a space station, of course, your air is pure, your water’s pure, the environment is very carefully controlled. There are no carcinogens lousing up the ecology. And you have all the benefits of low gravity.”