Suddenly, in perfect unison, eighteen of the twenty d’Alemberts then performing swung to their perches, secured their apparatuses, and stood motionless, each with his or her right arm pointing upward at the highest part of the Big Top.
As all those arms pointed up at her, Yvette d’Alembert moved swiftly and gracefully out to the middle of her high wire-and that wire was high indeed, being forty-one meters above the floor of the ring. She carried not even so much as a fan for balance, maintaining her equilibrium by almost imperceptible movements of her hands, feet and body. Reaching the center of the span, she stopped and posed. As far as the audience could tell, she was as motionless as a statue.
Like all the other d’Alemberts, she was dressed in a silver spangled leotard and tights that clung to every delicious curve of her body, neck to toes, like a second skin. Thus, while she was too short – one hundred and sixty-three centimeters – and too wide and too thick – massing a hefty seventy kilos – to be acceptable as an Earthly fashion model, the sleek lines of her flamboyantly female figure made a very striking and attractive picture – at a distance. Close up, however, that picture changed.
Although her face was lovely enough to tempt any portrait painter, her ankles were much larger than any Earthwoman’s should have been. Her wrists were those of a two meter, hundred and ten kilo lumberjack.
Her musculature, from toenails to ears to fingertips, would have made any beefcake film or sensable star turn instantly green with envy. For all her weight, she had not a gram of flab any where on her body. She looked for all the universe like that incredibly ancient Greek ideal of solid womanhood.
After a few seconds of posing – she knew exactly how long she could get away with hamming it – she turned her head and looked down at her brother. Jules d’Alembert, wearing the identical outfit to those of his compatriots, was but ten centimeters taller than his sister, though thirty kilograms heavier. The tightness of his costume accentuated rather than hid the bulges’ of his powerful muscles. A stone wall would have been soft by comparison, yet his face was handsome enough to melt the hardest of female hearts.
Jules stood on a perch nineteen meters below his sister’s level and an ‘impossible’ twenty meters off to one side. The siblings’ eyes locked on one another. The audience knew this was to be a feat requiring the utmost in concentration and, as the two d’Alemberts focused all their attentions on themselves, the spectators hushed to a deathly stillness.
Flexing her knees slowly, Yvette began swinging her outstretched arms horizontally. As the limbs moved in ever increasing arcs, she put more and more stress into the tautly stretched steel wire beneath her feet.
Jules, meanwhile, reached out his left hand almost casually and grasped a flying ring. His gaze never wavering from the body of his sister so far above him, he began to flex his own knees and move his body in precise synchronization with the swaying motion of the girl-wire system over his head.
The crowd was quiet, frozen in tense anticipation. Yvette’s body swayed on its wire, preparatory to her fantastic leap, building ever-increasing increments of momentum. Finally, in the last cycle through which she could hold the wire, Yvette squatted and drove both powerful legs downward and to her right. But in that ultimate moment, something snapped. The harsh metallic report, loud as a pistol shot, was like a physical blow to the nerves of the audience that had been sitting so anxiously silent.
Several things happened at once
The wire on which Yvette had stood, no longer being anchored at one end, immediately had all its tension released. Whipping through the air like an infuriated serpent, the thin steel cable dropped toward the ground, coiling in upon itself with loud metallic whinings and slitherings.
Yvette d’Alembert herself, premiere aerialiste of the entire Galaxy, was deprived of her push-off spot at the very moment she needed it the most. As her support vanished beneath her, she sprawled helplessly in midair and began her long fall to the ground.
The eighteen d’Alemberts who had been merely watching the trick came instantly to life on their perches. With the reflexes of the skilled acrobats that they were, they seized all the ropes, rings and trapezes within reach and hurled them in the direction of the falling girl, hoping beyond hope that at least one of the pieces would approach within her grasp and save her from a fatal fall.
Yvette flailed out frantically as she tumbled. One of her fingertips barely touched the bar of a swing, and the spectators gasped and dug their fingernails deeper into their armrests. But the trapeze was just out of reach, and none of the other apparatus even came close. Yvette’s fall continued unchecked.
Jules d’Alembert was in the lowest position, and consequently had more time to act than did any of the others; but even he didn’t have a millisecond to spare. His every iota of concentration had been upon his sister even before the wire snapped, though, so he was mentally prepared to do what had to be done. At the very instant of the break, he pushed himself outward and downward along the arc of the thirty meter radius of his top-hung flying ring. As he flashed through the air, a glittery white blur, it became readily apparent that his aim was true and the force of his launching had been precisely right.
Yvette was falling face down, flat and horizontal, presenting the maximum surface area to the updrafts in an attempt to retard her fall by even so much as a fraction of a second more. As she neared the point of intersection with Jules’ arc, her downward speed was greater than twenty one meters per second. Jules, his body rigidly vertical, was moving almost half that fast as his ring reached the nadir of its prodigious arc.
In the instant before a right-angle collision occurred a collision that would have smashed any two ordinary athletes into shapeless masses of bloody flesh – two strong right hands smacked together in the practically unbreakable handover-wrist grip of the aerialist. At the same time, Yvette did what she could to help her brother with his difficult rescue attempt. Spinning and twisting like a cat – except much faster – she pinioned both her feet against his hard, flat belly. Her hard-sprung knees and powerful leg muscles absorbed most of the momentum of his mass and speed, cushioning the impact his sturdy body would otherwise have had on her. Then, at the last possible instant, her legs went around his waist and locked behind his back. This gave him his right hand free once again, and it flashed upward to join his left in gripping the ring that was all that kept them from seemingly certain death below.
That took care of the horizontal component of the momentum in the two-person system, but the vertical component was worse. Much worse, almost twice as great. Its magnitude pulled at their locked bodies, yanking them downward and into a small but vicious arc. The violent wrenching they received was so savage it would have broken any ordinary man’s back in a fraction of a second. But Jules d’Alembert, although only a hundred and seventy-three centimeters in height, had all of his one hundred kilo mass in his favor to absorb the enormous strain. The muscles that were barely concealed beneath his leotard were super-hard and super-reactive. His skeleton was composed of dense, strong, king-sized bones, held together by resilient, unbreakable gristle. His arms were as thick as, and immensely stronger than – an ordinary Earthman’s legs.
The two bodies were now unstressed relative to one another, but the danger was far from over. They now began to hurtle downward at an angle of thirty degrees from the vertical, toward the edge of the ring facing the reserved-seat and box section of the stands. The people in those sections cringed instinctively and braced themselves for the possible upcoming impact.
Attention now focused on the weakest point in the whole system, namely Jules’ grip on that leather covered steel ring. Could he hold it? Could he possibly hold it? Not one person in all that immense audience moved a muscle; not one of them even breathed. Hands clenched involuntarily, trying by some unknown psychic connection to add their comparatively puny strength to that of Jules in order to help him hold on.
The man on the high ring held his grip for just under half a second; held it while that two-centimeter-thick, superstrength car-long cable stretched more than two meters; held it while the entire supporting framework creaked and groaned under the unaccustomed strain. Then, the merest moment before that frightful fall would have been arrested and both would have been safe, Jules’ hands slipped from the ring.