this essay begins in part 1
We finally go flying
We finally get to the signature image of this story, the one that has made it stick in so many people's memories for years: the vision of being able to fly like a bird. This activity is so different from normal experience that you might think it would require a lot of exposition to set up and justify. Nope. There was one prior indirect reference to Lunar gravity. Now he only adds,
Most of the stuff written about the Bats' Cave gives a wrong impression. It's the air storage tank for the city, just like all the colonies have … We just happen to be lucky enough to have one big enough to fly in. But it never was built, or anything like that; it's just a big volcanic bubble, two miles across, and if it had broken through, way back when, it would have been a crater.
There was once some theorizing that Lunar craters were the result of vulcanism. Now they are all assumed to be from impacts, but you know? For the sake of this story, we can believe there are volcanic "bubbles" under the surface. We don't know there aren't.
Now Holly nerds out over her wings. This is a lovely demonstration of a science fiction technique: if you let a character wax passionate about some feature you need to explain, you build the character and simultaneously get painless, even entertaining, exposition.
I left my shoes and skirt in the locker room and slipped my tail surfaces on my feet, then zipped into my wings and got someone to tighten the shoulder straps. My wings aren't ready-made condors; they are Storer-Gulls, custom-made for my weight distribution and dimensions. I've cost Daddy a pretty penny in wings, outgrowing them so often, but these latest I bought myself with guide fees.
They're lovely! -- titanalloy struts as light and strong as bird bones, tension-compensated wrist-pinion and shoulder joints, natural action in the alula slots, and automatic flap action in stalling. The wing skeleton is dressed in styrene feather-foils with individual quilling of scapulars and primaries. They almost fly themselves.
After that outburst you are ready to believe this is credible. You can check the words, as Heinlein no doubt did:, "alula: the group of three to six small, rather stiff feathers growing on the first digit, or thumb of a bird's wing." Scapulars are short feathers on the shoulder, and primaries are the big feathers along the edge of the wing.
Holly cycles through an air lock into the cave proper.
… I perked up and felt sorry for all groundhogs, tied down by six times proper weight, who never, never, never could fly.
Not even I could, on Earth. My wing loading is less than a pound per square foot, as wings and all I weigh less than twenty pounds. … I spread my wings, ran a few steps, warped for lift and grabbed air -- lifted my feet and was airborne.
Now follows six longish paragraphs of Holly describing flying and various techniques of flight: soaring, gliding, and "stooping like a hawk". She checks the sightseer's gallery for "Jeff and his groundhogess"; then meets a friend, Mary, in mid-air and they agree to perch to talk.
Mary has gossip: Jeff is teaching "that Earthside siren" to fly right now. She goads Holly maliciously, insisting that everybody knows she is "simply simmering with jealousy".
I watched her out of sight, then sneaked my left hand out of the hand slit and got at my hanky -- awkward when you are wearing wings but the floodlights had made my eyes water. … Then I reminded myself that I had been planning to be a spaceship designer like Daddy long before Jeff and I teamed up. I wasn't dependent on anyone; I could stand alone, like Joan of Arc, or Lise Meitner.
It is really interesting that Heinlein chose the name of Lise Meitner as hero for Holly. Meitner, co-discoverer with Otto Hahn of nuclear fission, fled Nazi Germany and spent the war years in Sweden. She lectured in the U.S. in the 1950s and received many official honors around that time, but is little-known today.
An awkward conversation
Jeff flies up.
He landed by me but didn't sidle up. "Hi, Decimal Point."
"Hi, Zero. Uh, stolen much lately?"
"Just the City Bank but they made me put it back." He frowned and added, "Holly, are you mad at me?"
… "Of course not. Why should I be?
… "Uh, that's fine. Look, Test Sample, do me a favor. Help me out with a friend -- a client that is -- well, she's a friend, too. She wants to learn to use glide wings."
So, Jeff actually wants them to get to know each other. Holly would rather eat glass but,
… what I did say was, "OK, Jeff," then gathered the fox to my bosom and dropped off into a glide.
It took a while to chase down the reference to the fox in her bosom. Holly has apparently read Plutarch's Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans. Describing the upbringing of Spartan children, he says "So seriously did the Lacedaemonian children go about their stealing, that a youth, having stolen a young fox and hid it under his coat, suffered it to tear out his very bowels with its teeth and claws, and died upon the place, rather than let it be seen."
So the expression "fox in my bosom" means heroically letting a guilty secret eat your guts rather than admitting to it.
continue in part 7
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