Mysteries of Motion (3 page)

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.