Mysteries of Motion (2 page)

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.”