Mysteries of Motion: A Novel

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Mysteries of Motion

A Novel

Hortense Calisher

Contents

1 GILPIN’S RIDE

On Canaveral

Mulenberg’s Interval

The Exploit

The Corridor

Liftoff

2 THE COUNTRY BEHIND HIM

I.

II.

III.

3 THE MYSTERIES OF MOTION

The Free Room

The Sick Bay

In the Galley

The Documents Box

The Hygiene Unit

4 THE VIEWING

5 DOCKING

Lievering on EVA

Mole’s Rendezvous

Holdings

6 ORBITING SOME ETERNITY

About the Author

1

GILPIN’S RIDE

READER, I’M GILPIN. This is our ride.

Strictly speaking there’s no evening here in orbit but we keep to schedule. Lately, always at this hour, we feel a soft lensing-in gain on us—one more of the body’s circadian rhythms for which there is no medicine. Our bodies seem to hope that some of you may now be watching us on satellite. The day salon, which has intermediate gravity, comes to seem to us more limbo than real. Passengers who were not in our cabin return to it. We six are in the non-gravity cabin closest to the tail.

You find us then exactly as we left you—how long ago? The positions for entering this life or leaving it resemble one another, just as with life anywhere. Once again each of us lies strapped to the Foget couch, which will allow maximum acceptance of G-force. We’re ready. One of us has helped in the other five, taking his or her turn at being left to do this alone. Not recommended, but unavoidable. Each of us now lies suited up from visor bubble to box toe. A space suit is in effect a small spacecraft in the shape of a human being. Or so they insist. Inside, a life-support system pressurizes, humidifies and sucks wastes, to small limits. Smallness has great meaning here. The identity badges on our breast pockets, turned on in more active hours, are once again unlit. At the moment you catch us a lack of friction is all-important. Or perhaps a moment ago was. If we are not dead—we are forestalled.

I identify us:

On the first couch, left to right of your screens, is Mulenberg, longest of bone. At times he sings, but not now. Second comes Oliphant, a woman, and almost as long as he. Next should come the man Lievering, also known as Jacques Cohen, but his couch may be empty; this has happened before. He has the lightest foot in space—or spirit—of any of us. After me comes Wert, shortest of the men, who even when rigid has an air of looking behind him. The suit on the sixth couch keeps its gauntlets crossed where its belly must be; it is some months with child.

There’s an extra person in our cabin, who should not have been here. Off center, in the shadow behind us, can you see a suit that hangs from the cabin wall, anchored only at its nape? Its arms float. We called him Mole. That suit can’t look younger than the rest; I only imagine it.

I am the man in the fourth couch. A book is in front of me, clamped at eye level. Drop an object in non-gravity and it’s lost to you. The book is the Decameron of Boccaccio. I have been reading aloud from it. One hundred tales to while away the time, as first told to each other by some nice young people in flight to the countryside from the Black Death. Boccaccio himself died well over six hundred years ago in 1375. Gentle Reader is what you and I would have been called then. In tribute to our noble birth, since we could read at all, and to our hopefully amiable temperament.

One hundred lives are believed to be aboard this vehicle. I offer you the private logbook of six, along with sketches of whoever else may wander in. Sometimes I may be Gilpin there; sometimes I can even bear to be I. You understand that; this is a dilemma you and we share. It’s in the spirit of the times, this twisting to avoid being a publicly machined shadow. The others here feel the same. Take us as we are, in the broken cinema of our souls.

In return we ask a favor. Be gentle no longer. Let your birth be what it may, but for whatever you hold dear give up the temperament. Listen to us with claws open as well as hearts. Cross steel in front of your own vitals, for whatever grace period this has given ours. Get up ever earlier in your mind to study the voyage we make.

Reader—ride with us. Not for our sake alone, not for yours, though soon you may be making your own decamerons into our blue. For the sake of that once gentle brown humus from which we all come.

Where the journey begins.

ON CANAVERAL

ON CAPE CANAVERAL, on Gantry Row, sea birds wheel above old space machines abandoned on that shoreline to rust in the sticky salt air, sometimes coming to perch on forked cornices and broken parallelograms no odder than those they might find on a forest floor. Vines creep over pitted metals once forged to absolute specification. On Gantry Row the birds and the jungle fernery are the space-age’s sole archivists.

Here engineers from the great inland installations come to loot these old rocket shapes for a spare part or idea still usable, or to sit on the beached sawhorse of some module once smartly vertical and stare at that quiet line where sea meets sky—the obsolete old horizon which any child these days taken aloft on school trips to witness the first truths can tell you is merely the old shoulder curve of a planet he or she may someday leave. Or a couple of men who’ve already been in space as non-operating personnel, lodged by day shift in the roomier white gantry of the lab but maybe sleeping by night in those constraint bags in which a body hangs in non-gravity as on a butcher’s hook, will be playing at toss with one of the small rubber balls which out in weightlessness help keep the muscle tone in the hands. They may play until the sun goes down, none of the spots of its eon-slow death here visible. Or they might simply jog the water’s edge, shouting to each other at the lovely downpull of gravity in the legs—according to the aeromedics not the best deal for the veins of bodies evolved from the non-erect, but still what they were born to. This day a pair have brought a bottle, congratulating the whisky as they pour it for not flying out. Clearly they are veterans of the way matter behaves when it is not at home.

Farther down the beach, a man seated on a triangular shooting stick and balancing a briefcase on one knee watches them with a freshman’s envy. Weightless travel could be tolerated, and like jet travel soon would be by all but the few made markedly sick by it, but it took learning and could be curiously tiring. In plain language, it was still a strain for humans to be in an environment where they couldn’t fall.

Nobody stayed on Gantry Row late enough to watch the moon come up. Or bothered to bring a man or a girl. The moon is business now. Like most heavenly bodies, it has suffered the decline in personality and charisma which comes, as in old love affairs, from accumulated familiarity and even the most special handling. Those beachcombers on furlough probably work on it, or on a materials-processing station nearby. For the five nights Gilpin has stayed on here after dark, playing hooky from the fancy government motel up the road where all passengers for his flight are quartered, he and those busted old rocket shapes have had Diana LaLuna to themselves in all her phases, and it’s been a quiet affair. The moon no longer has much of a sex. On Canaveral maybe even the dogs don’t bay at it.

On the long-ago night of the Apollo moon shot, Gilpin had been a student on work holiday, gorging himself on boar during end-of-summer festival week in a small mountain town in Tuscany. That night, as all there agreed, she had lost her virginity—though a clutch of roisterers, dirty old men clapping their hands to their wine-soaked crotches, had kept shouting that the old man up there had lost his balls, until the matrons serving the tables in the straw tents set up all along the town’s central strada had had them thrown out. After which the women, tightening their downy mustachios with a ripple that ran from one headshake to the next—Aie, la Luna poverina, aie! had handed all the rest of them in the tent a free extra plate of meat. Mouth full, gazing up through the starry, straw-rimmed tent hole as if he were watching a rape from a manger, Gilpin had quoted Sir Philip Sidney’s address to the moon. Only the first line of it, which was all a sophomore could recall, but aloud, for hell, this was Italy: With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climbst the skies! Telling himself he was participating in the death of a portion of the world’s poetry and was possibly the only person in the world to feel this. Next morning every columnist in the Italian newspapers had felt the same.

The following day he sat in a different stall with his real feelings. Here the wine drinkers were the younger men for whom babies were beginning to spill out—not onto the floors of their grandfathers’ farms, sold now to foreigners, but into the new apartment villas on the edge of town, which the government had had built out of the local tufa stone. Tonight they were drinking grappa, which cost more than their own wine, but maybe because they knew him as the boy who since spring had lived on an absentee inglesi’s farm, trucking in the olives to the press like any of them, they wouldn’t let him pay. He’d have to hang along until sundown when they’d all go off to the cafe where perhaps he could treat. The sky he saw through the straw hole was a bright, hard Tuscan blue, and empty. He had no quote for it. Now and then one of the men shook his clenched fist at it admiringly. Once a man let his thumb slide slowly through his other four fingers, two on a side, and everybody laughed. In the tent hole the sky dimmed to mountain’s breath, as the dusk was called here, then to a soft ripe-olive black.

Later, in the cafe that was the village’s grange and heart, he and they trooped past the grannies and mothers who sat with the children at tables near the entrance, past the confectionery counter where girls clustered to talk with the two young daughters-of-the-house from whom he bought his ration of one mouth-filling inch of custard pastry with his after-work cappuccino every midmorning—all the way to the bar at the far end, served by the padrone himself. Among the gathered men he recognized the butcher, his cheeks as yellow as the tallow he worked with, who could be glimpsed every Friday through the bead curtain of the barbershop, confronting the mirror with a hair net on his head. The barber himself, that pink-cuticled Aesop, saluted him. Well apart from these townsmen there stood or leaned the town’s portion of granite-wrinkled old men, in pants of stone also and boots cast by time, who every evening were maybe let out of the vaults of the Etruscan museum across the valley. There was one ancient who never got past the café entrance, standing inarticulate for whole evenings in front of the tinseled, glassed-in Motta chocolate display, staring in with dazed other-era eyes.

Gilpin had ducked through all of them, into the communal pisshole at the back. When he came out they were all on their feet, even the mothers guarding the pointy-lashed teen-gigglers whose baby-ready breasts poked at him from their blouses. The slim doe from the town’s gas pump, who bent her valentine-shaped jeaned hips under his nose to feed the inglesi’s car when he brought it in but wouldn’t let herself be spoken to, now smiled at him. Each and all had a glass in hand, holding these out to him. Moona-shot—Moona-shot-Americani!

That long, classically segmented room, lantern-shadowed yet lit with candy-paper frolic, smelling of after-work wine and ice cream, coffee and field stink and talcum powder, murmuring with three-generational tales whose nuances of wit and death he would never get to the bottom of, and underfoot with children treated like everybody’s saints, had all summer seemed to him a bright parable of the world—and still does. He understood that they were making the ritual their rightfully developed sense of occasion demanded of them, and that they felt extra-lucky to have a real American on hand for it. A drink was thrust into his hand. And no, they still wouldn’t let him pay. A-pol-lo-o! a man shouted from the back—Viv’il machina A-pol-lo! The old man transfixed in front of the glassy display mouthed it—A-pol-lo.

Dice Moona-chut! one brash kid in knee pants heckled him, but was hushed from behind. The old man stared in at the chocolate, as he had all summer. A mother detached herself plumply from a table to go behind the counter to remove the largest bar of chocolate, nodding to the owner, who nodded her credit or extended his own. She slipped the bar into the old man’s stone hand and ankled self-consciously back to her corner. A-pol-lo the tables murmured, and crossed themselves. Together, Tom Gilpin and the old man wept.

All this time the padrone had said nothing. A large man a cut above all his customers except the banker and the pharmacist, he dispensed an air of refinement and benevolence combined, the first maybe from the pastry, the second from the wine. Whenever he chose to speak in his cleanly, Jesuit-schooled speech he was listened to. We must hope— he said. He hadn’t crossed himself. Instead, he pointed to the rafters. We must hope they do things decently, up there.

So, as a result of that night, here’s Tom Gilpin out on Gantry Row waiting for the moon to come up. On his next-to-last-night on earth, for an indefinite time. As it is for the woman he is waiting for.

The two beach players are gone. The alternate pock of their ball still echoes. One of the men had thrown from a heavy crouch, the other with a baseball windup. Low tide has left their departing tracks indented, the oddly feminine footprints of men in Texas boots. The two sets of tracks narrow up the beach toward the weed line and converge there as if the two had lifted off, bounding up with cells suddenly light. A man newly returned from the world of non-gravity might well be excused for momentarily thinking so. A man about to go might do worse than take an image of those imprints with him.

His old Brownie camera, normally carried though seldom used (a person with a camera is noticed less, and that’s his preference), will go to the one-room historical museum in the disused lighthouse of his island birthplace, a still functioning rarity of the sort the islanders prize. They generously feel that he is something of the same. His briefcase, made from a sharkskin his father once spent a whole winter’s after-lobstering hours curing, must go through tomorrow’s documentation procedures or else be left behind; he hasn’t decided which. Where he comes from, the past has always had to earn its keep through use.

In the pocket of his T-shirt there’s a pad and pencil picked up in the motel room. Shirt and trousers are of the loose kind he’s worn for years; he’ll miss their brownish maroon and round-the-world weight. The pad has a legend on it in Old English print: Compliments of the L-5 Society of Tucson, a group of space-habitant enthusiasts from years back. Their joy must now be high. The childish, peanut-shaped footprints he’s now drawing lead straight into that legend. The white page itself looks like air to him. But even for an artist, which he’s not, it isn’t easy to project weight.

Thrusting the pad into the briefcase now stuck into the sand at his feet, Gilpin stares out at the once multitudinous sea.

Until that night at the Porchetta festival he’d had absolutely no interest in what was going on in the heavens, nor had any of his college crowd. He’d gone back and quietly tacked onto his art history major a raft of courses barely squeezed through, mainly intended to lead to astrophysics. The winter company of physicists could be wonderful, especially in Boston, where the cold nights gave an Early Cantabrigian cast to thought, and the good wives of those who still bothered to have them served up Early Revolutionary meals which cleansed the bowel accordingly. Yet one of the impurer sciences—aeromechanics, say—which soared as greedily as those others but maybe unfortunately got there, might have served him better by far. Meanwhile, he never did abandon his own much scruffier crowd.

The weekly opinion sheet he still owns, begun as a graduate-student journal, hand-set by two others and himself in the gilded but otherwise bare ballroom of a Housatonic River mansion inherited too soon by one of them, has at one time or another probed many antitheses without plumping for any. During the early years it kept wickedly changing its name to suit, under the impression that no respectable idea ever stayed the same. The end result was that their faithful subscribers, at first young like themselves, then aging along with them into the merely young-minded, could always trust it to be the same.

Now that Gilpin is notable, one of his partners of that long-ago ballroom has just written him, in what can be taken for congratulation if read hastily. Don’t you think, dear Tom, that like most radical journals we were only hoarding up our mutual angers for our friends? Have to hand it to you: yours have been more consistent than most. Effective, he really meant, but a power in the International Monetary Fund deserved to be answered truthfully. No, Gilpin wrote back, my milder fate is I’ve always been able to be too lively about what I believe. Which is what makes me a superficial person.

One just anger, unhumorously hung on to, better unified a life. In private, each shift had been painful, while he waited for a true commitment to appear. No one had been more surprised when it had, bringing along with it for the paper the underground name a popular success could now let itself be known by—The Sheet.

Life’s been easy on him. His father and mother bought out his other partners so they could back him themselves, which hadn’t mattered since he and they already knew how well they’d indoctrinated him. His mother, a moneyed Boston girl, had married herself to a Maine lobster-man during one of those ever-recurring periods in American history when such doctrines as Save the Sea, Screw War, Up the Rich, and Know Your Natural Body had all seemed to render one happy savage sense. Absolutists both, they’d reared him to believe that what you did daily, you did both within and to the cosmos.

In bad moods, he now sees his inherited categorizing of all people as a kind of cheaply moral packaging, of which his reforming madness may be the very slightly nobler side. Down at the bottom though, all the Gilpins were popularists, notoriously in love with that whole-flesh collective, mankind. Who on rainy days, his self-taught father would say gloomily, "is only poor bloody Pithecanthropuserectus beating the children to stand up straight." But who, on moonlit nights when the catch was running—same old silver but new shoals—was surely the Fisherman, eyes intent.

The moon on Canaveral is now high enough for Gilpin to see that long before Italy his life’s tone had been elected for him, by his having been brought up on almost the smallest of habitable islands: three quarters of a mile wide by one and a half long, highest headlands in the North Atlantic, and the farthest out to sea. Visitors compared it to the Grand Corniche, and as a boy he’d thought maybe this was so, if that place also had a thick central wood in which one could wander as in the Black Forest, and a crabbed lower coastline on which a visitor could either miss footing and not be found among the bayberry bushes until the following year, or else turn from walking out on the flats for clams to find the sea a solid rip tide between him and shore—which some dudes did every season, since no native would warn them. And if that Corniche place was also separated from the mainland by a moody packet boat called the Winnie Mae.

The island had once been a commonwealth, like those slightly larger sectors of the union, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Kentucky. So when the boy thought of ideal government, a commonwealth was what he thought of first. However, a disproportionate amount of the island’s scant land, and with it a controlling vote in all matters of principle, was held by one man said to be an heir of Thomas Edison, who appeared on island for such meetings only. It had been this man’s habit to acquire more land when he could, preferably a plot with one of the island’s scarce old houses on it, which he would then raze in the interests of the wilderness. Since he was also opposed to the islanders’ having any of the ugly electric cables with which his ancestor had civilized civilization, this left them either to propane gas cylinders always overdue from the mainland, or Aladdin lamps whose tendency to flare up and blacken made for uneasy book study, or to the occasional illegal generator whose noise ruined both conscience and peace. So, when Gilpin thinks of what elective power can do, he thinks of this man.

There’d been little hardship, except for a lack of company if you didn’t either drink or go to church. Garden season was two months, with no pasture for livestock, barring the few deer which the summer residents sentimentalized and the islanders shot at after Labor Day. There’d never been small fauna, and by agreement no rabbits which might overrun. In compensation, the wildflowers grew extra-foxy-faced and lone. Tourist summers were overpeopled and the comforts they brought effeminate—a time of foreign occupation with the sea still the only way out. Winter or summer, if you wanted whisky, which the islanders drank but didn’t sell, or schooling, for which there’d been no teacher until Gilpin’s tenth year, by which time three other mainland girls had married fishermen—you went across for it. When they needed a doctor, the Coast Guard flew one in by hydroplane, telephoned for at the only store. Conversely, one season when new wells were wanted, the tall well rigs had come across the watery plain, shuddering off the boats like totems come to tower over each backyard in turn, in order to divine its spring. Then the rigs had lifted themselves up with a shake of smart metal and had lumbered off again. At fifteen, he felt the humiliation.

One summer twilight that same year, just as he was taking the garbage downhill to dump it into the harbor, with the whole island spread beneath him in the glittering light and a buoy lowing like the island’s one cow, a three-masted schooner—which, unknown to the island, a mainland agent had had restored and was running a cruise on—had sailed out of the Grand Banks of cloud to vanish and reappear behind one headland after another, her sails bellied pink with sunset—a paper ship with a dark hull borne on by all the ghosts of travel, above its mizzenmast a star. The blood drained to his feet and he felt gravity, that mother quicksand. Dreamstruck, he carried the garbage back up the hill. It wasn’t the ship he’d wanted to be on—not those old ropes—but the star.

His boyhood has deeded him that transportational dream which moves nations and every so often ground-shifts the world. At those times the world is half spirit, though its goods might seem to be all that is marching, or its flags.

The dream in the bone is of migration. Scratch below the supposed goal and every man, every nation, is an islander like him: One day—a farther shore. It sounded like a religious antiphonal because it was one—the hymn that all the boyhoods and girlhoods sang: One day—the mainland. Once upon a time his own country had founded itself on a radical twist put to that refrain: One day, yes—and for all. What he’s done—subversively, some say—is to have reminded them of it.

The moon looks stationary now, in a fleece of moving cloud. The heavens are being sucked clean by the vacuum attendant on the great wind drifts. This part of the shoreline is a bay really, with a bay’s muted climacterics. The hurricane winds from the West Indies, among the highest in the Beaufort scale, are usually diverted, as they had been from Gilpin’s small island. What he’d had there was talk of them, giants treading near his father’s thumb while it traced a nor’easter in terms of Ferrel’s law. Any moving object on the surface of the earth, Tom, is deflected by the earth’s rotation, to the right in the northern hemisphere, to the left in the southern. On their dining table there was often a small cylindrical cheese with green flecks in it, called sapsago. The moon’s made of green cheese, his mother said. Have some.

Stomachs remember. In his, now, comes that veiny flash which had irradiated it on first reading Goddard—a short article, drawings and print elegantly faded, entitled A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. On his return from Italy it had been his conceit to read from early space history on rather than back, so that he might pass historically through any ordinary citizen’s amaze—for in his innocence he supposed that all educated citizens, and to a degree even all those in the simple soda parlors of the world, were keeping up with it. He’d begun in the dark ages, with the legends of spaceships in the records of Tiajuanaco. Passing from Leonardo’s notebooks to the eighteenth-century Turkish admiral Piri Reis’s atlases from the Topkapi Palace, said to delineate topography only now observable from aerial photographs, he’d lingered on such nineteenth-century curiosa as Joseph Atterley’s A Voyage to the Moon. Goddard, writing diffidently of how to prove a rocket could go as far as the moon, had been his first modern.

That terse prose, learned by heart as Gilpin had once learned tags from Emerson, came to seem of the same order, colorless as a Maine landscape and as full of astral light. A powerful special pleading rose from its few pages, elusive under its author’s reserve. Gilpin was often to encounter during his long private education the scene and sound of a mind ahead of its time, but this was his first brush with it. Leafing through the volume in which Goddard’s article had appeared, he found much the same number of pages devoted to the discovery of a new species of Piper bird from Panama. Goddard himself had at the time guardedly advocated rockets merely for meteorological and solar physics findings. The only reliable procedure would be to send the smallest mass of flash powder possible to the dark surface of the moon when in conjunction (i.e. the ‘new moon’) in such a way that it would be ignited on impact. The light would then be visible in a powerful telescope. On the moon, distant 220,000 mi., with a telescope of 1 ft. aperture…we should need a mass of 2.67 lbs. to be just visible and 13.82 lbs. or less to be strikingly visible. Larger telescopes would reduce mass. (At sea-level…we need 602 lbs. for every lb. that is to be sent to ‘infinity.’) In the library of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ostensibly silent, but like all libraries burring with brain sounds as the past ran in front of dozens of pairs of eyes, whispering its counsel and its devilment, the younger Gilpin’s eyes had smarted, learning their true dimension. Robert Hutchings Goddard, he’d said slowly, aloud. Rows of faces fish-gawped or monkey-giggled behind the paw. A librarian had ejected him. For pranks.

Two days later he’d been reading in bed, his buttocks warmed by a girl—in those days there had been time for girls. But it was Hermann Oberth, onetime doctoral student whose rejected thesis had become one of the bases of modern rocketry, who was really in bed with him. Even Oberth’s equations seem to him clearer than other people’s. If the acceleration due to gravity were less—for instance only 12½ ft. per second as on Mars—a man could stand like a ballerina on his big toe. His fairly clean 1957 drawing of the elbow joint of a space suit hadn’t been too far from what Gilpin will insert himself into tomorrow morning. Yet this same finicker Oberth, when he came to speak of psychological man, could suffer the most terrifying lapses of the critical sense, hazarding in a chapter on the future, and after he’d set forth entire space-station projections in perfect, trustworthy and prophetic order: Further hope for more righteous times to come is encouraged by the invention of the lie detector.

When young Gilpin the grad student came to that fool pronouncement, he rolled onto the floor, kicking out his heels and inadvertently hitting the girl in the eye. Apologizing, I’m trying to stand on my brain. Like on a big toe. To console her further, he’d clawed among his scattered books and read the passage to her.

They all have these last chapters. Just say Utopia, and they all go slavering. Without a shred of evidence like they’ll spend pages accumulating, on, say, how a water-glycol system acts in space. Or with none of the hardnose they’ll give you on, say, what makes a gyroscope go crazy just at the last. He quoted Oberth again: ‘The gyroscope is a mysterious object for minds romantically inclined.’ Meanwhile patting her purpling eye. You know, it’s as if man is not an evidential creature. Or not to them. She wasn’t consoled and huffily requested a cold compress. In bed again, he suddenly shot up on the pillow to cry, I’ve got it! It’s sainthood they’re after. Like in any new world—and you can at least trust them to know it’ll be that—sainthood has to be involved. Oh, not for them. For mankind. And that means you and me, Madge. She’d crawled out the other side of the bed, and being already in her cuddly fake-fur jacket for warmth, grabbed up her sandals and left.

He hadn’t detained her. He’d found his vocation. Or its practical application. His intellectual friends knew of course that outer space was getting nearer all the time. Galaxy—a puzzled Spenser specialist had remarked, "you don’t see words like that used poetically anymore." They knew too, of course, that the planet was very careworn.

But even if he could woo them to a space museum, to join the hoi polloi who were there for the wide-lens movie and any fantasy they could get, their eyes skewed and wandered. It had nothing to do with them. They hadn’t yet made the connection. All the while those silvery vortices were drawing near.

Later it would be the hoi polloi, so mournfully willing to shift the line between fantasy and what they know will be foisted on them, and still so graceful with animal trust, who first listened to him. Plus the young, who like Gilpin once had no track record to risk. Or of course, to wield. Though once, early on, he would be listened to by a couple of stock manipulators keen on the commercial possibilities of space mining. Other hallucinations of theirs, not so soon to be corroborated, meanwhile sent them to jail.

He has a classmate (a novelist whose books concern themselves with the Colorado wilderness, and why not, of course?) who for years has spoken of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (learned of from a UN Christmas card Gilpin had once sent him) as a Yuletide joke. Later, the space shuttle had passed him by like a rude bee not native to the West. More recently, hearing that permanent space habitats must apparently be confronted, since his friend Gilpin is going to one, he’d smiled the old science fiction smile, exactly as if offered a blind date with the robot girl who lived under the rainbow. I still go in for the human quotient.

So do I, Gilpin thinks. Don’t I? Under the moonlight, the waves of the Atlantic for as far as Gilpin can see repeat themselves like the border of a Greek vase, flat black ripples raising evenly their small hatchet heads. Grampus waves, his father had called them, for their resemblance to that blunt-headed cetacean. And because they mean a blow. Fishermen, like other technicians, taught the particularity of things. His father would have done better than he with the finicky threadings and built-ins of a space suit. Though, since laughter was the only stimulant he ever indulged in, his having to pee into 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 vegetable soup with the same backsweep of the hand.

His last week in Washington, going to the dime store, he marked how the girls there still wetted a finger and sleeked a brow. In a New York men’s room, old Captain Stanley’s double groaned with pleasure as he urinated from Gilpin’s father’s scow. Outside later, truckmen at a loading entrance cocked their brogues like early balloonists. Here at the motel, the cashier, desked like Gilpin’s banker in front of a high window, continually polished the sun from both their bald heads. And last night, waking from height dreams of a house he’d once owned high on a cliff over the Mohawk River, where a contractor, come to estimate a retainer fence, had once stepped back fatally far, Gilpin saw him again in midair, hands spread in apology.

He’s looking at the still grounded people here with the same embarrassment which during his travel-slumming young years used to crawl in him at the sight of primitive peoples—even when they were still speciously safe in their rain forests or on the hot Kalahari sands where they carried pure water with them in their own buttocks. He knew too much about their future. Now he’s staring that way at his own kind. Professors with fine teeth and solid families, who jogged the parks displaying both, or vagrants with winter-rheumed noses and feet clotted into their shoes past hope of ever shedding them—it’s all the same. He’s standing on the borders of their innocence, which is gravitation. That dower-right of their bodies was about to be corrupted in a way which taking to the air within the stratosphere had never done. In a plane, no matter at what speed, a human body still pulled its own weight. The machine intervened for it, bargaining with Earth for motion. But now we desert into an element where the body can never be quite natural again.

A sudden bulbul murmur from birds nested somewhere in this dark machinery jungle makes him shift on his own perch, his worn black leather-and-chrome shooting stick. From Allahabad to the Moscow subway, on ski lifts and in the outback, its cup and his bottom had developed such a comfortable triangular relationship that on his own three-week test trip in to orbit a few months ago he’d sorely missed its reassuring pressure, which wherever he and it go has meant You and I—and gravity—are meditating. Taking it all in. He’d even begun to wonder whether that rounding of the face which, due to downward pull on the facial features, so alters the physiognomy during orbital insertion mightn’t already be taking place, perhaps permanently, in his backside—and during the intensive checkups on return had even asked them to measure its radius.

He’s certainly carried back to earth with him that squared-off position which shoulders tend to assume during the first liftoff sensation of hanging upside down. The flight doctors can’t understand why he should have retained it. He could have told them. Fright. Three weeks in cosmic fright. True, he hadn’t vomited like some. Nor had any serious arrhythmia as a result of the changes in total body water from induced electrolytic charge during weightlessness. And yes, he’d taken the wee pills for sleeplessness, plus those yellow gobbets designed to offset other abnormal responses to interruption of his body’s preferences. Which medication had worked optimally, allowing him an eight-hour shift of perfect fright-sleep, and a functional fright-shift by day.

So he’s come through with a perfect record except for one slip, due merely to a minor astigmatism interacting with faulty design—when he’d defecated into the Water Distillator instead of the Hydro John. Which had been taken note of as a viable criticism.

Even his question about his backside had to be taken seriously, for aeromedical research, they told him, had turned up some dandy commercial by-products from even odder observations. "No, his er, coccyx-to-buttocks periphery seems normal. Left cheek, that is. Let’s measure the right. Behind him the murmuring of the doctors in the return room went on happily. Decline in red cell mass, median on allowable scale. Muscular-cellular deterioration—hah! They spun him round to the front on that one. Slight change in vertebral alignment—murmur, murmur—no, no aberration in the right cheek either. But aha, look at that leg. And this one. Yep. Considerable decrease in the girth of each calf. Smiling at him when they saw his apprehension. Everybody does it. Just as you’ve almost totally lost the antibacterial immunization given you before going. That red-cell loss will have to be taken care of. Weight loss, eight pounds, which is about average too—but pick up on it, fella, you don’t have that much to spare. You may have to wear a neck brace for a couple weeks, and your Eustachian tubes may be blocked fuller than you’re used to. It’s all absolutely normal. Watch your balance of course—lo—ook at that guy over there trying to negotiate the staircase. For God’s sake, don’t jump off anything in a fit of absent-mindedness. You won’t float."

One doctor had remarked on a change in the occlusion of his teeth. No surprise to Gilpin, after three weeks of trying to keep their chattering from notice in an environment where every human being, the minute unhelmeted, hungrily scrutinized every other: You all right, Jack? Then I’m all right.

What you been doing? this doctor says. Grinding them?

Gilpin sticks out his jaw at the pair of them. He feels heavy again, healthy heavy enough for anything. Gravity is laving his feet. The trend in these halls is to discredit it, whenever possible. Birth pains, for instance, are now blamed on G-pull. One of the docs is a woman. He thrusts out his lower lip at her. Grit, he answers. Sheer grit.

So he’d passed. Certified for the first civilian flight of the first passenger space shuttle, the Citizen Courier. Only a last-minute outcry had kept NASA from naming it the Mayflower. Space humor was analogous to sailors’, and from the same tensions. The habitat they’re going to, until then referred to as the L-5 after its position in space, has been rechristened Island U.S.—pronounced Us. Still, he’s going. He’s already a guaranteed aristocrat. And barring certain enthralling considerations—like, would any children born on habitat be non-G inured, or would some of them do so badly in non-gravity that they’d have to be sent back here?—so will be all his heirs.

The waves are now becoming those individual ones the eye vainly keeps trying to hang on to. He hears a few more birds being unhappy, or alert. A sure sign of weather, and before morning. At the launching only the reporters might get wet, stationed in an open reviewing stand a mile and a half away. All the active button pushers will be in underground shelter, with the instruments. He and other passengers will board via a germproof corridor. Test flights like the one he’d taken weren’t launched from the Cape but from other round-the-nation installations which had no such corridors, maybe on the theory that passengers who didn’t disembark in space wouldn’t contaminate it. Was it possible to taint space just by being there? He supposed they were doing their best and would only find out for sure later—possibly when large, catarrhal clouds surround later colonists with their own grandfathers’ germs, or some little lice creature, of the hard-shelled sort that survives eons of non-atmosphere, arrives on habitats now projected to be in the dozens internationally, in perhaps thirty years. Human ecology didn’t change; its neighborhoods always went downhill. Then its best people moved on.

They were saying the whole planet might eventually have to. Move on. The whole population even, piece by piece. Fleeing the scrap-heap Earth cities that still burned so beautifully at night, the countryside that still loped green and tree-frothed at the transportation window but had lost its cow-dung innocence to canals of fetus-deforming scum, and the air which was a nimbus of cancerous fire invisible, so that we were all fire-eaters now. While our children would grow old and diseased.

It seemed to him, no expert, that there was a curious ignoring here. Your child would grow old and diseased in any case, in what used to be called the fullness of time. If when you first saw the little greased eel when it was expelled, bright with red energy or washed candy-pink in the calm arms of a nurse, you were also shown projections of the mumbling, warted bag of dropsy which age might make it, arriving to die maybe in this same hospital or one like it—what then? You’d perhaps blind your eyes with spread palms or shout, I don’t expect us to be immortal! Secretly thinking, "Though perhaps, by the time he grows…Meanwhile, I’ll do something for him, along the way."

In the fullness of time. That was what had been lost.

The solution had seemed to him simple and ark-like. He shifts the briefcase stuck in the sand at his feet; the tide’s nibbling in. The case contains his master set of those issues of The Sheet which have had a humble place in history, dating from a front-page opening blast seven years ago—the day after NASA’s plans for the present habitat had been ratified, with a dainty absence of hoorah. They knew all the implications far better than the laity. On the left-hand side of the page he’d used the Bible: St. Paul’s injunction that we must be members of one another, and on the right the Statue of Liberty’s injunction: Give me your tired, your poor, etc. Both under a wartime-size double head: EVERYBODY MUST GO—WE HAVE THE RIGHT. Subhead: To Go or To Stay. It looks very amateurish now.

He dislikes the Atlantic down here. A northern sea by rights, where it goes warm it also goes glum and sly, with none of the Pacific’s jade openness. Still, on reentry from test flight they had all been whelmed to see it, even in its great reversal. As mariners of the non-air, an element which by now seems to him the very color of equations, and in a descending rocket plane, the sudden sea below, that heaving known, became a giant lily pad whose domestic dangers would have to be relearned. In a queer way they had returned newly vulnerable, having to be careful not to slip in the bathtub, like the old astronaut, Glenn. But the sea mystery, once dominant in his life and the planet’s, could not be relearned. The mystery of the planet itself, was it burned out? Or like St. Elmo’s fire—the sailor’s false beacon, that luminous electric discharge into atmosphere from projecting or elevated objects—merely gone on ahead?

That flight had been eight days and return—and only in orbit. This one will be twenty-one days, and will touch down. The Courier itself would be returning here, not with their crowd but with technicians previously delivered to the habitat in batches, by smaller shuttle units, analogous to the huge Courier somewhat as the older DC planes had been to the wide-bodied jets. He’s resisted knowing more of either general operations or technical detail. If he’s to go, then let him be a passenger as the airplanes or the oceangoing steamships had known them—thousands of us, committing ourselves to the air in a delicately preserved myopia, or to the sea.

During his training trip, the whispering headphones had prophesied continually. Island U.S., though as yet only a commercial installation, was located at one of the more suitable Lagrange points. There had followed a short vita of Lagrange himself and an explanation of his discoveries, of the sort Gilpin is learning to tune out. For his instinct to remain passenger-passive was proving right; if you listen too hard to the technology, your ear goes deaf to its implications.

Tonight there are no stars. He’s tired of stars and no longer ashamed of it. In orbit there’d been a fixed rain of them, curving and recurving again, so that he’d seemed to himself imprisoned in a kind of star torture, trapped inside one of the exhibits at the old Hayden Planetarium. And in the window of his future quarters there was promised him a view of the firmament, traveling with him and the flat’s perhaps every-two-minute revolutions. What was the atmospheric mix prescribed for habitat?—he’s been told but has forgotten it.

On-Island, as the phrase had been on his small one, his dependency will increase a hundredfold. Sunsets and sunrises to be arranged. He thinks he can tolerate that. His own planet in its decline has already inured him to much. What he doubts he can take is to be dependent on an elect few for all the tastes of life. For, far as he could tell, these new worlds which their planners spoke of so blandly weren’t to be worlds of grandeur, but merely virtuously free of both dirt and spontaneity and subscribing to their creators’ ideals of comfyness.

His travels have taught him that middle-grade scientists tend to have petit-bourgeois tastes; it is the rich or the poor who are inventively grandiose. It’s just possible he can take Utopia. It’s foregone that he won’t be able to take Utopians.

O Tom Gilpin, keep looking up. Layers of ozone blackened only by solar absence, grubby-warm ocean on a pre-storm night, as you need no satellite to tell you. A damaged moon shining on the rusted molybdenums and non-biodegradable plastics of migration-first-stage from a planet which has lost all its physical unknowns except the wherewithal of the first act of creation. Then why is it still all—choose your words carefully—what it is? Which seizes the throat and no adjective can describe—or only all of them in all languages. Which tears at our vitals as if these were made to be its abacus. The one mystery left to Earth is now leaving it—us. Then let it be us in toto. No other way are we dignifiable. No one part of us, no one person, is completely dignifiable alone.

A stentorian blast blows suddenly from inland—Mmmmmm-ah-ah-ah—mmmmmmm. Birds shoot up and past him on its trajectory, circling in wide agitations to get above the sound’s crescendo, returning in downward swoops tuned to its decrease. This nine o’clock siren has taught even the night birds its musical phrase. A creature like him has to stand in its volume, letting the decibels drain down. Yet he’ll remember Canaveral as a white, even silent place. So much of what it builds is reared behind muffled walls, components assembled in hangars whose vastness makes even the hammers go tick-tock. From these hangars, big enough to house pyramids, constructions are wheeled like huge geometric dreams, which afterward swim like colloidal shapes on the eyeball. Someday masters and apprentices both may be moved in entirety to Outer, where metals have no weight and the cold amalgams can be fused at low temperatures untenable on earth. By that time, in the improved skyworks of a later era, even average personnel should suffer no pangs of transferal. Or so he’s told.

A chill shivers his bones, in spite of air so hot and close that the waves appear blunted. These days there’s a subliminal thrill that comes of already being half able to look back at oneself from up ahead—at one’s old former planet, that spent cannonball. Some here work under that condition constantly; they come out of their labs and projections dazed by the time thrill, the space thrill, frozen into weird concentrations from which they have to be won back. These are the ones who tonight, as on many nights, would be flown to other cities, to the brothels or opera houses of their choice. Those are the lighter cases, the more conventional ones. One brilliantly indispensable woman, whenever at the end of her brain tether, is flown to Finland, where she does time in a center for autistic children, being fed and serviced like one of them, beginning to babble and fling herself about the minute she enters. Though there are such centers here now, she’d refused them. Finland’s staying, she’d said. Nobody’s going yet, from there.

Contrarily, one man, a mathematician, goes only eight miles, to a health spa whose attendants have instructions to cocoon him in wet blanketings, rolls of bandage-thin ones from which every half hour they are to unwrap one only, with nursery endearments. Once this is done he emerges silent but warmed mentally, and goes home to his wife. There are those who have to be whipped, and neither claim nor evince sexual excitement—unless the return of the terrestrial time sense can be termed sensual. Epileptics, whose brain explosions dislocated them temporarily from internal time sense, were said to be able to work in these future-chill-prone environments without need of other release, their own intermittent attacks, if courted and unmedicated, taking care of it. Means to guard them while under attack were being pursued, for the possession of that other resistance, especially when present in high-caliber brainworkers, would give them top priority.

The wind’s rapping at the loose flaplock of his briefcase, stuck there in the sand like a secretary displaying the boss’s importance to the other board members here: Sky, Moon, Sea, Attendant Galaxies—and an expectantly wired world. He’s spent a third of his life in all the slots of influence, from the walnut miles of government offices to the veiled, holy white of its installations, at one moment gossiping away in anarchic little cafes, at another lolling in a press lord’s yacht. Through the sexes too, he’s gone, and out the other side—as can happen to a man really spermed only to an idea. In the shape of history, persons like him are maybe merely that—one motile cell, moving like any sperm, under one enormous general purpose and one very small autonomy. The papers in the briefcase contain his message. Everyone must go, if the world is going to leave the world.

He’d expected to be laughed at and had been—hugely. Receiving letters, however, from a couple of men at the Goddard Space Center, some half dozen from university centers, and a bid to testify before a Senate committee neither he nor the country had yet known to exist.

Nowadays, he sometimes sees his old second broadside—the one with a picture of the Ark, captioned Two by Two—The Elite Is Everybody—framed in a union hall or cartooned in some Christmas annual, and marvels at what a curious progression the advance of any idea is. He himself had been the quietest of rabble-rousers, intending only to start little avalanches of concern here and there, to tickle awake those whom the globe’s anarchy still surprised.

So at last he has reached that middle mass which can assure an idea that everybody knows it exists. His has even been heard to tremble in that pale underground where anemia keeps the sights low—among the socialized poor. One constituency he has had with him utterly—the fierce young. In their company, he keeps to himself how transitory he knows their help must be—on their way, as they are, to all the other categories.

Now he is better known in Washington and the country at large than he ever wanted to be. Two years ago, via a behind-his-back campaign of a former employee retired to the life of sentiment, scotch, and long-distance telephone calls which old newspaper people so often fell into, he had been nominated for the Nobel. Rhoda, always excessive, had had public contacts unfortunately wide. More seriously, he’d been investigated as a lobbyist and cleared, again publicly. He had emerged from between those two prongs as from an Iron Maiden, purer in reputation than the innocent, and to some conservatives more dangerous than the humbly criminal.

From there he could watch with a certain arrogance. His hooted-at insistence that none must be disqualified, none favored—by then a great sticky orb of controversy and study—had rolled on without him. As long as the reformer is merely maligned he is safe. But once his words have been acted upon in his favor, what then? He has to be sure as a god then, that the arrow thrown was the rightful one. He has to be proud as a lord, of his own life. Gilpin is not. Should everybody go; should everybody even want to? Why should he bother, how dared he? What is—natural selection?

Then he’ll see something to humble him, perhaps the gulping smile a very small child makes, as if it’s sipping life. And he’ll be out of that bramble, a man with his eyesight scratched in again. I love, I love, I love.

That too can be publicly dangerous. But that he will risk.

You’ll want to go yourself, of course, Mr. Gilpin. As if this man wouldn’t know otherwise. In space matters, walnut offices are for those who still dealt in tycoonism; when you get to steel and enamel like this, and one beady model instrument neither a clock nor a Cellini, then you know you are in the white gantry of the Ship of State. And Miss Oliphant. See by that article she wrote she’s passed as a candidate also. This man has a face like an almond with the skin still on, the husk having been ground up to make his smooth-to-gravelly voice. My wife and girls so admire her.

In the desk picture the wife is white, the daughters and their light-haired brother not so brown as their father, who is nowhere near so dark as Veronica Oliphant—who likes to wear white fur against her black, and has her own place in the public eye.

"Ah, you two’ll make a fine couple for