“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.”
“I never knew that! Why hasn’t NASA told us about this?”
As Don fished around in his mind for a reply, the host turned on his smile and fixed his gaze on camera one.
“Well, it always seems that we run out of time just when things are really interesting.” Glancing back along his guests on the couch, he said, “Dr. Arnold, that was fascinating. I hope you can come back and talk with us again, real soon.”
Before Don could answer, the host said farewell to the two other guests, mispronouncing both their names.
Don sat up in bed, his back propped by pillows, the sheet pulled up to his navel. It was hot in the upstairs bedroom now that they had to keep the air-conditioner off, but he stayed covered because of the twins. They were nine now, and starting to ask pointed questions.
Judy was putting them into their bunk beds for the night, but they had a habit of wandering around before they finally fell asleep. And Judy, good mother that she was, didn’t have the heart to lock the master bedroom door. Besides, on a sultry night like this, the only way to catch a breath of breeze was to keep all the doors and windows open.
Don played a game as he sat up watching television, the remote-control wand in his sweating hand. He found the situation comedies, police shows, doctor shows, even the science fiction shows, on TV so boring that he couldn’t bear to watch them for their own sake.
But they were tolerable—almost—if he watched to see how much space-inspired technology he could identify in each show. The remote monitors in the surgeon’s intensive-care unit. The sophisticated sensors used by the coroner’s hot-tempered pathologist. The pressure-sensitive switch on the terrorists’ bomb planted in the cargo bay of the threatened 747.
Judy finally came in and began undressing. The bedroom lights were out, but there was plenty of light coming from the TV screen.
“Better close the door, hon,” Don told her as she wriggled her skirt down past her hips. “The twins. . .”
“They’re both knocked out,” she said. “They spent all day in the Cramers’ pool.”
“Still. . .” He clicked off the TV sound and listened for the patter of nine-year-old feet.
His wife’s body still turned him on. Judy was short, a petite dark-haired beauty with flashing deep-brown eyes and a figure that Don thought of as voluptuous. She stripped off her panties and crawled into the bed beside Don.
Grinning at him, she said, “You worry too much.”
“Yeah, maybe I do.”
“I thought you were terrific on the show this afternoon. I got so mad when those other two clowns kept hogging the camera!”
“Maybe I should have let them hog it for the whole show,” he said.
“No you shouldn’t! I sat here for nearly an hour waiting for you to open your mouth.”
“Maybe I should’ve kept it closed.”
“You were terrific,” she said, snuggling closer to him.
“I was lying,” he answered. “Or, at least, stretching the truth until it damn near snapped.”
“You looked so handsome on television.”
“I just hope nobody at Headquarters saw the show.”
“It’s a local talk show,” Judy said. “Nobody watches it but housewives.”
“Yeah. . .”
He started to feel better, especially with Judy cuddling next to him, until almost the very end of the eleven o’clock news. Then they showed a film clip of him staring earnestly into the camera—I thought I was looking at the host, Don thought—and explaining how people who live in orbit will live forever.
Don saw his whole career passing in front of his eyes.
He made sure to get to his office bright and early the next morning, taking a bus that arrived on Independence Avenue before the morning traffic buildup. Don was at his desk, jacket neatly hung behind the door and shirt sleeves rolled up, going over the cost figures for yet another study of possible future options for the Office of Space Transportation Systems, when his phone buzzed.
