Mysteries of Motion Read Online Free Page A

an inside catheter, meanwhile pedaling for exercise on a bicycle ergometer, might have been too much for him. “Your mother’s the one for concepts, son.” Meaning that her money had made her vague. “I have trouble with them.”
    So had Gilpin the grad student. But reading back after his girl Madge had gone, he began to tally why even ordinary citizens still relegated so much of what was happening in the world to science fiction. They themselves were fiction, to the scientists. You and me, Madge; this is our revenge. On the bed, she’d left some scrap notes he’d hoped might be for their class in thermodynamics where she was the better student, which had however turned out to be three separate ways of making piña colada. He’d saved them tenderly. They’re in his archive yet. You and me, Madge, you and me. Those of us who in this migration, not being military enough, or technical enough, or even “healthy” enough, might someday have to go in steerage, or even be left behind.
    For he had just that day come across a chilling passage of a different order. A “hypothetical letter” from a space colonist describing the voyage out, as imagined in the 1970s by a Princeton physicist named Gerard O’Neill, it dealt with those who were to be the new saints. “The three-week trial period is to sort out cases of severe space sickness and to find out whether you are among those who can adapt to commuting each day between normal gravity and zero. That’s important because our homes are in gravity obtained by rotation, and many of us work in the construction industry, with no gravity at all. Those who can adapt to rapid change qualify for higher-paying jobs.”
    He’d sat in his wicker chair with the book-crammed side arms; then he’d gone into the kitchenette to make that piña colada. Not enough. Never enough for all the civilians who were going to be di-di-diddled, once again. Oh, Madge, where will you be, in your funny, cuddly coat? In which crowd? Who will catalogue us, people of the earth? Who will lobby for us?
    So he’d resolved to. While finishing off all three batches of the colada. By family tradition he was heir to a long line of public defenders. The family mailbox, snowed in year-round with severely black-and-white begging envelopes and his parents’ doughty return-mail checks, had been his chore. Because of this and perhaps the island postmistress’s glare, he’d foreseen a certain style for himself. He would keep in touch with all the crowds he could, but by needling influence, not being it, his own modest role to be held to minimum in hope of retaining sense and compassion enough always to recall what the human quotient was. That presumption was to give him recurrent twinges. Last year, pushed by fame-guilt as well, he’d at last taken his own gravitational training. Only to empathize, never intending to make use of it. On that score he’d intended to be that darling of the syllogicians, the last man on earth. He’d never meant to go.
    Tomorrow. To the first public habitat in space. Current winds at Canaveral launching site being roughly north at 10 miles per hr., waves 1 ft. every 10 seconds when he came out on the beach, but within the last hour increasing rapidly to perhaps wind NE at 14, waves 2 ft. every 4 sec.
    Human gesture has been swarming toward him these last days, growing like British pennies in the pocket when you are on the way to France. That summer of the schooner, a woman who’d been in school with his mother had visited them on island—by then a haggard unisex redhead in meager-hipped corduroys and crunchy sweaters planing her breast points, who smelled of alcohol and perfume, had gelid, perfect skin, eyes that picked off men, and a vague, unlipsticked mouth, inner-shaded to mutton, which couldn’t eat without smear. Yesterday in the motel’s coffeeshop he’d seen her double. Staring at him instead of his father, she’d wiped off the orange mustache of his mother’s