INTRODUCTION
Carlos Abraham in "Las Revistas Argentinas de SF" speculates that Félix Vosalta is a pseudonym, and that the surname is a play on "voz alta" (loud voice). "The Space Clown" appeared in the February 1957 issue of the Argentinian magazine "Más Allá" ("Beyond", #44).
For further information on this era of Argentine science fiction, see Rachel Haywood Ferreira's "Más Allá, El Eternauta, and the Dawn of the Golden Age of Latin American Science Fiction (1953-59)" and "How Latin America Saved the World and Other Forgotten Futures".
For complete scans of Más Allá, including the illustrations, see: https://ahira.com.ar/revistas/mas-alla-de-la-ciencia-y-de-la-fantasia/
THE SPACE CLOWN
Up to this point, the doctor displayed only a cold, professional attitude, entirely devoid of sympathy or cordiality. But his expression slightly changed when he added:
- "Rayburn, I want to tell you something. Medical science alone can do very little in a case like yours. We can examine you, diagnose your illness and prescribe the most appropriate therapy. But if you yourself don't make a supreme effort to rise from the abyss you've sunken into, you'll remain there forever."
Words, words, words, Rayburn thought as he said goodbye to the doctor. How easy it is for him to talk about abysses, about sinking, about rising!...
The door of the office closed behind him. In the waiting room, his friend William La Guardia was expecting him, and stood up when he saw him.
- "What did he say to you?"
Rayburn pulled the card out of the regulation bag, quickly remembering his recommendation from the head physician of the Aeronautical Institute. La Guardia read quickly:
EMERGENCY CARD
Cardholder: Clifford Rayburn
Category: 2 AAA Av. R.
IN CASE OF ACCIDENT:
1. - Leave the injured person in a completely horizontal position, especially their head. In high traffic areas, form a cordon around the area, and do not move them until the attack has passed.
2. - Inform the Medical Headquarters of the Aeronautical Institute by telephone: WA 34-28-36
3. - Note to doctors: Space-related Meniere's disease.
- "At least there's one detail that may serve as consolation for your misfortune," La Guardia commented. "You've been promoted to three 'A's, while I'm still stuck with my modest 'B'. Well, old man, we're going home now, as Ellen must be expecting us for tea."
Rayburn and La Guardia had been friends since childhood, so they had no need to talk much while they walked. The former's attitude was rigid and forced, as if he were expecting a sudden attack from something unknown... or perhaps too familiar. For that reason, he preferred to go on foot: because he feared that any mechanical movement might remind him, even vaguely, of that... that which he must put out of his mind at all cost.
* * *
ELLEN La Guardia was waiting for them in their cottage, with everything ready for tea. The two men sat down at the table, Rayburn however, not at all abandoning his rigidity. Noticing the glances exchanged between the husband and wife, he said in a low, hesitant voice:
- "I don't think I'll have much success being social today; I know that... But I beg you to let me stay here a little while longer. I'm afraid... a terrible fear of being alone. Perhaps I'll have another attack, and..."
- "Come, Clifford," Ellen said, "you very well know you've got your best friends here. Besides, you might as well do me the honour of reminding me that I'm a nurse, and class triple 'T' at that, which means you'll be quite safe in my hands. Besides, I think it would do you good to not be so wrapped up in yourself; to get out of that sort of wall you've shut yourself up in a little."
Get out of myself, Rayburn thought: The same advice as the doctor... when in fact I'd much rather get completely and forever inside myself.
- "You wouldn't like to tell us, just once, what really happened? We know Commander Grierson's report, of course, and the medical report too; but you never wanted to tell us anything. Don't you think that might perhaps give you some relief?"
Rayburn remained silent for a long time. Then he asked, turning to his friend:
- "Do you remember Willy Nilly?"
- "Of course. That clown..."
- "The one who was expelled from the sixth grade because he endangered the seriousness of the profession. And then the clown committed suicide."
Before continuing, Rayburn paused for a pensive moment.
- "You know very well how enthusiastically we worked and studied from a young age. We were chosen to realize the eternal dream of man. We should be worthy of a sacred profession."
- "Well, not all of us considered our profession so sacred. Look at me: I'm in the Space Corps too; but we mathematicians have to keep our feet firmly on the ground. Of course, you space volunteers from class 'A' were instilled with superior ideas..."
- "I still remember how I strutted back from my first official flight to the Moon. It was at the end of the course, and when Grierson announced his trip to Mars, I was the first to volunteer. The other members of the crew were just as excited as I was. Besides us, there were two scientists, a chemist and a geologist, who hardly spoke to us. We couldn't help but admire, however, that they worked with painstaking precision during the few days of our stay on Mars, even though we were offended by their coldness in their usually refusing any offer of help from us. 'Everyone to their own job,' they would say. 'When you have a spare moment, devote it to perfecting yourself in what you're supposed to be doing.'"
- "I can already imagine Myer and Croydon," said La Guardia, smiling. "As dry and chatty as a codfish."
- "Perhaps it would have been better for me to follow his dry advice. But I preferred doing nothing during those days. I didn't leave the ship at all. During the day I spent my time glued to the window, looking at the endless plains of reddish sand that seemed to curl around the few rocky elevations. The sky, greenish, was always clear and cloudless. An unknown feeling began to take hold of me. What am I here for? I asked myself. When the first night came, my anxiety calmed down a little: I could see the same constellations that I had always known. But on the second night I discovered something worse: I began to be afraid - I, one of the chosen ones, one of the volunteers. I don't know if old Grierson had guessed something. On the penultimate day he said to me: "Outside, Rayburn. You need to check the external radar installation. Tomorrow at six we take off." Two hours later I was able to report to him that the entire radar installation was working perfectly, as always. I had walked all over the surface of the rocket and carefully examined every millimeter of the complicated external installation, without finding a fault. Occupied with work, I had no time to think of my anxiety; but as night fell, I suddenly began to sob. I was afraid... I was the chosen one... the volunteer... the shame of the space group..."
* * *
RAYBURN continued to stare at La Guardia with his eyes fixed on them, always in the same strangely rigid attitude.
- "I don't understand why you didn't trust Grierson," his friend said. "The old man is a bear, but sometimes he seems almost human... It was a case of space tension... Well, after half a year of travel, it was understandable... And what were the others doing?"
- "It was precisely because of them that I dared not say anything. They seemed to have wires in place of nerves. I needed to have them too. If they ever noticed my weakness, they would be ashamed of me. So I never said a word to anyone; I stuck to my radar installation, letting myself be relieved only for the prescribed six hours by that Johnson boy. How I dreaded his usual childish greeting! 'Nice little night, buddy!' I began to hate him. Why did he not take pity on me, and leave me to my fear in the solitude of my cabin?... I lost all sense of time. We were already past the asteroid belt when the terrible event happened."
Rayburn stared at a picture on the wall of the room, not seeing it. His face was very pale, his forehead beaded with sweat.
- "One night, the old man's voice roused me from my daze. He didn't seem alarmed, but I was startled to see him in the cabin where I hid during my hours of rest. Of rest... 'I'm sorry,' he said, 'but you'll have to interrupt your nap. Come to the radar chamber.' When we arrived, Johnson burst into a torrent of explanation. The screen was completely dark. It so happened that about an hour earlier, the radar indicated the approach of a cloud of interstellar matter. Informed of such, Grierson immediately changed the course of the spaceship, but despite this, couldn't prevent it from entering the cloud on its lateral side. The radar screen went completely dark, and what's worse, no movement could be detected on it, which indicated that the outer installation was obstructed by particles of the matter we passed through. I knew perfectly well what was going to happen next. I gripped the back of the operator's chair to keep my hands from shaking. 'I'm very sorry,' Grierson said. 'You might not have had the sleep you needed, but it goes without saying that this is very serious. You need to go out and fix the installation.' Johnson started to say something, but Grierson waved him away. 'This is exclusively Rayburn's business.' Of course it was my business, and no one else's. That's what I was there for. And after all, it was simply a matter of routine. Every radar operator performed work of this nature during their training courses. I'd been out in space several times myself to try out such maneuvers. I could see every detail of the complicated external radar installation before me. I thought carefully about the kind of damage that might occur when I examined it, and selected, with my usual precision the instruments to be carried on the hooks and buckles of my 'tuxedo', which I carefully put on."
Rayburn looked at Ellen. She gave him to understand, with a smile, that she knew the name that the students gave to the suit they wore on their incursions into space.
* * *
- "WILLIAM knows the structure of our rockets very well. For you, Ellen, so that you can make sense of what happened, imagine that on the exterior surface of the ship there are a series of ladders and hooks where you can hold and secure your instruments. A child can thus walk along the walls and reach any part of the hull without the slightest effort: there's no need to support the weight of your body, which obeys the slightest muscular contraction. The only thing you feel is the weak gravity exerted by the ship. For greater safety, those who have to do any work on the exterior of the hull are tethered with a thin but strong cable, which is fastened to a hook near the airlock. Even a child, I repeat, could walk the hull's entire length. And I kept telling myself this over and over when I came out of the safety hatch...
"Grierson already carefully examined the space we were passing through: not the slightest trace of the cloud was visible. The stars were as bright as ever, and the sun shone with a dazzling clarity in the blackness of space... I went out. It was child's play, nothing more. I fastened the safety cable to the hook by the airlock. I was on the side opposite the sun, in the deepest darkness, and I cautiously felt my way to the place where the outer radar devices were. They were brightly illuminated by the sun, and I soon noticed that the interstellar matter which we just passed through left them entangled in a kind of light, semifrothing mist. I cleaned everything with infinite care, and tried to put some of the frothy film in one of the bags I was carrying, to show our two experts. All this time I was always instinctively looking towards the ship, like a child looking down when crawling on the ground. As you know, the ship is always down because of the slight force of attraction it exerts. And at no time did I glance up. I was afraid of being afraid... It took me no more than fifteen minutes to do the whole job. And for this the commander had told me that he expected me back within an hour!...
"I was less than ten meters from the airlock, and suddenly a strong feeling of triumph came over me. After so much solitude, so many absurd fears! I had become one of the conquistadors of space again! I felt the wild joy of my student days encroaching upon me. I remembered the flips we used to do then: give the body a slight push with the feet, float a few meters in space and then return in an elegant curve towards the hatch, pulling the safety cable. Willy Nilly, as we had nicknamed him, was always the first to launch himself in a "fatal flip".[Translator's note: The term used here in Spanish is 'salto mortal', which is commonly rendered as just 'flip' (as above) or 'somersault' but doesn't really pun here in English when emphasized in quotes as the term is in the original.] I thought of him in that moment of action. And in that same moment, I saw there were some projectiles were striking the surface of our ship. They were very small fragments, no doubt, but solid. My haughty feeling from a moment before abruptly abandoned me. Enough of these games, I thought; I must return at once. I was already more than ten meters from the hull, floating in the middle of space. The initial impulse made my body rotate slightly, so that I was no longer facing the ship. I began to pull on the safety cable. It ran and ran between my hands protected by the gloves of my space suit... until it came to an end: it was cut. The small shower of fireballs had severed it...
"I did some slow somersaults. I remembered the somersaults we did as children on the slopes. I hope my companions don't see me, I thought. How they would laugh at this absurd clown of a space conquistador! A moment later the sun blinded me. I was rotating around the ship, and I was out of its shadow zone. I'm a little satellite, I thought, laughing mockingly. I think I'm going mad, I told myself later. I must concentrate. Concentrate... center, center; I am the center, I repeated stupidly. I then remembered one time that I went to an amusement park and entered a place called 'The House of Folly.' I sat down in a swing seat, in the middle of a room that had only a few pieces of furniture, with some pictures on the walls and a chandelier hanging from the ceiling. A bell rang, and the seat began to swing higher and higher, until it made a series of complete rotations. I knew that it was only an optical illusion, of course. Surely, at that moment too, I found myself in the middle of an illusion, the horrible illusion of a nightmare, where it would be enough to open my eyes to escape. But I realized that my body didn't believe me. A wave of sickness began to surge from my stomach and culminated in a bilious vomit that left me dizzy and light-headed. The disgusting liquid stained the visor of my helmet and returned to my lips and nose, and I struggled desperately to catch my breath. 'I can't take anymore, I can't take anymore!' I cried between fits of pain.
"But I plunged back into the shadow and out into the light of the sun, again into the shadow and again into the sun, and the stars, the sun and the ship seemed to eternally revolve around me. Why don't my companions see me? I thought. Why doesn't that damn Grierson come out to fetch me? What good are those two experts if they can't even save a poor clown who's doing flips in space, unable to stop himself?... I lost consciousness. I was told later that the whole thing only lasted a few minutes; that Grieson and Johnson came out immediately, seeing me spin around the ship. For me, it was as if time had stopped. I spun and spun, only waking up to vomit and scream that I couldn't take anymore. I was put on tube feeding, and when I came back to Earth, I was sent to a hospital. It's been a year now. But vertigo waits me around every corner. Sometimes I'm taken by surprise, and I have to lie down on the floor to feel it in my entire body that I'm on solid ground. I don't care where I am in that moment, I just throw myself down. They can trample me if they want..."
Rayburn fell silent. He had been staring at the picture on the wall, almost invisible now in the twilight.
- "But you mustn't give up, Rayburn," La Guardia said. "Don't you see that the authorities are interested in you; that they continue to believe that you'll get well again? And besides, no one's ever blamed you for what you call your 'clowning'."
- "I know, I know. People always said it was just the meteorites. And I... I never had the courage to confess the truth. Today was the first time..."
He didn't want to stay any longer. He brusquely declined his friend's offer to accompany him, and said goodbye with the rigid gesture that had become his habit.
* * *
THE road was long, but it did him much good to walk. He also felt more relieved for having told them everything. It was true: the authorities hadn't left him aside. They continued to believe in him; in the possibility that he would be useful to his profession again. They even promoted him!...
The streets of the suburb he was walking through weren't very busy. He walked slowly, with measured step. In the distance he could hear music; it came from an amusement park, set up on a large vacant lot. Again with the amusement park, Rayburn thought bitterly. The drone of the music blaring from the loudspeakers and the violent, wounding lights naturally hadn't attracted many people to this suburban neighborhood. As he passed, he got a fleeting glimpse of the brilliantly illuminated attractions: merry-go-rounds, octopuses, roller coasters, a huge Ferris wheel whose frame stood out against the sky with its innumerable lights...
He had already left the park when he noticed that the bright lighting suddenly went out, and the music and the noise of the mechanical apparatuses ceased. In their place, one could hear shouts, curses, insults and laughter. The electronuclear current had been interrupted, doubtless due to some fault in the autogenerator. Rayburn started to walk back to see what was happening. Apparently the managers gave up any hope of being able to repair the fault, and the crowd was rapidly dispersing.
The streets were completely deserted and silent, Rayburn stood motionless in front of the abandoned amusement park, not thinking about anything.
A wail suddenly broke the silence: a sharp, drawn-out lament, like that of a child who suddenly woke up in the middle of a nightmare, finding themselves alone. The cry came from above. Yes! A child was screaming... crying up there... on the Ferris wheel! Someone had left the little one in one of the cars... probably brought by their older brother, who forgot it there in the confusion brought on by the darkness. The child cried out again, with an even more pitiful wail!
Rayburn acted, almost instinctively. He went to the Ferris wheel's platform and began to climb up the frame. As on the surface of interspace rockets' hulls, he methodically felt his way around the stairs, the hooks, the bars. He mechanically avoided the cars that were rocking with soft creaking sounds. The child's moans were already very near. Rayburn proceeded thus to the highest car, throwing himself onto the bar that supported it. Where was the child?... A small shadow seemed to move in the car. Two eyes stared at him, flashing greenishly; a faint squeal came from an invisible mouth...
Rayburn sank heavily into the car... and the cat, terrified, escaped, jumping over the back of the car and onto the wheel-frame, and was immediately lost in the darkness of the night.
The car he was sitting in began to rock, and Rayburn could not help but burst out laughing, which echoed strangely in the silence. He raised his face to the starry sky. Tears of laughter ran down his cheeks. A child in danger! Rayburn, the savior of a stray cat! Rayburn, the clown!
Suddenly, he realized that he succeeded in freeing himself from the nightmare that was haunting him. He could move his head freely, look up and down, without feeling the pangs of vertigo. Still laughing, he began to descend. His feet found, surely and securely, the points of support; his hands moved firmly, without hesitation. He looked to the left and right, freed forever from the absurd menace that persecuted him for so long...
When he reached the center of the wheel, he remembered the doctor's words. He managed to "rise from the abyss"! He took the emergency card out of his regulation bag, tore it into a thousand pieces, and threw it into the air, jubilant.
The little white squares fell, floating down slowly, spinning around, until they disappeared, swallowed up by the night.
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