Mysteries of Motion (66 page)

“Stand me up
straight,”
Mole said.

“Me, too.” Gilpin enters. He and Mole smile shyly. Since Mole’s apprenticeship to Wolf they haven’t more than greeted during the routines, often taking their places silent throughout, well-drilled pupils with nothing more to exchange. Since that time in the Free Room, everybody’s doing it.

“Bad knee again, Frank,” Gilpin says. “What I need’s a space walking-stick. I dream of what it could be. An electric grip, like a baseball glove for buttocks only, that follows after you like a nanny does a toddler. Or a crystal cane, really an elongated ray, that springs from your palm. Both palms. Or a floating walker, with ball-bearings that react weightfully.” He groans. “Dear, dear weight, remember how steady it was? I would like to eat some—like chocolate.”

“I’m your nanny,” Frank said. “Strip.”

In order to have his knee examined, Gilpin has to. “Jump suits. Rightly named. Always jumping from them to get in touch with yourself all at once.” He hangs his canvas fatigue suit on a hook where it slowly reshapes itself. Ditto his thermal underwear. His anatomy is solid and much younger than his face, whose skin, even in their short time aloft crinkled further by the dryness, has begun to distance itself from its own features, a much used atlas showing these valleys and peaks.

“You have a Maine skeleton.”

“So I do. How’d you know that, Mole?”

“We used to classify ourselves, at school.”

“What were you?”

“Ibo aristocrat from the Niger. Mixed with Silesian cattle-dealer, from the mountains of Glatz.” His and Gilpin’s laugh chime together. It’s a relief to talk on his own level. He suddenly feels great.

Frank removes a clear plastic bracket from Gilpin’s left knee. He holds it dangling. “NASA aeromedical brace.” Shrugging, he opened a drawer full of other lustrous shapes—my moonbeam drawer, he calls it—and tosses the brace in. He pokes a greenish area just below Gilpin’s kneecap. “Old synavitis, looks like.”

“Had that since I was sixteen. Wave smashed me on the dory once, lobstering.”

“Oh? Catholics love lobster,” Frank says glumly. “My wife.”

“So do Silesians,” Mole grins. “But aren’t stinkpots used for lobster runs now?”

“Outboards, sure. But there are still the waves.” Gilpin sighs. “The January sea.”

“Golly, I could use a real swim.”

Both older men look at him silently.

Gilpin breaks it. “Where’d you get that sunburn, Frank?”

Frank, poking in other drawers, ignores them.

“Bartendering,” Mole says. “On the flight deck. Tom—you know a word—psychopannychy?”

“You’ve been talking to Lievering,” Gilpin says sharply. “Mole—you’d better understand about him. Everybody’s head is—plagued with symbols. Look at me. Look at Frank here. Look at you. But Wolf lives by them. He’s like a man brought up on wine instead of water—or in his glass everything turns to it.”

“He’s some man to put on EVA then.”

“Maybe that extra coordination comes of it. Of being all of a piece.” Tom is bent to the striations left by the brace on his knee, smoothing them.

“They have a little cart travels along the surface of the ship, to examine it.”

“Oh?”

“He doesn’t like carts.”

“Why not?”

“Hitler took away the Jews in them.”

Tom’s hand stops. “There you are.”

“So—it’s not just—brave of him?”

“What’s brave? Sure, admire him. Pushing his little diagnostic hut along, like that old Geiger counter he brought with him. Testing what we’ve put into the universe. Meanwhile, the universe is streaming past him. The others, they’ll be intent on the job. But Lievering, he can’t admit that this trip’s in the end like any other—just travel. He’s looking ahead.”

“To death?”

“Farther than that. To legend. He’ll tell you it.”

“He did.”

“The unknown in the tomb? Waiting for us? No matter how far we go? And when we get there already there?”

“You take any stock in it?”

“Sure I do.”

Frank has lifted his head out of the drawer.

“The one who goes before?” Gilpin says it lightly but like Scripture. “Sure. But I’m a popularist. Look in any grave.”

Frank’s ready to impart information. He always does it with pomp. “In the erect position, Mr. Gilpin, a vertical line from the center of gravity passes in front of the knee.”

“Hear that. And me with my center now so—moot.” He looks down himself, shaking his head.

Mole looks shyly away from the distinguished pubis.

“Not Mole’s. His runs straight down the middle, eh, Mole?” Frank’s brought out a small packet he’s tossing from hand to hand. “Why’ncha try the Jacuzzi, Mole, maybe it’ll run cold for you. Or maybe one of the girls’ll let you in. Watch out though for that feisty Iranian.”

“Lay off him, Frank. Remember your youth.”

“I prefer to remember my middle age. My early middle age. On a Sunday afternoon, a nap with the wife. With the kids at the rink. You know—I believe this is Sunday afternoon.”

“Where?” Gilpin says.

“Here,” Mole says passionately. It has welled in his throat. “Here, too. Anyplace, you can always feel the Sunday molecules gathering.” Around Washington, about 1
A.M.
Saturday night. “According to a friend.” His live-in girl, that was.

“So this is already a place to you, then,” Gilpin said.

“I have a present for you, Mr. Gilpin. Rare, very rare. Only one within a million miles far’s I know. I brought two.”

“Why, Frank, that’s very kind of you. What is it?”

Frank unrolls it slowly. “An Ace bandage.”

“An Ace bandage. My dear Frank.”

Slowly, firmly, the homely stretch of pinkish cloth is bound in overlapping circles around the swollen joint. Mole, kneeling to watch, can smell the menthols of the locker room after track.

The bandaging is done with art. Gilpin’s knee is scarcely thicker. “God it feels good.” He extends the leg. “Hermann Oberth couldn’t have designed it better.”

“Those little metal Ace fasteners shaped like dog pads—what about them?” Mole says huskily. He’s been waiting for them.

“Can’t risk those in heat; this cloth self-locks,” the medic says absently. He’s staring joyously at Gilpin. “Never knew you were a rocket-buff. Oberth—wasn’t he a fast man though? And how about Wernher von Braun?”

“Still have a spot of resistance to those other Teutons. Okay, Von Braun—even though he wanted metal space suits, like armor.” They all laugh. “But the ghouls like Krafft-Ehricke—ever hear his Extra-Terrestrial Imperative? No? Heard him give it in Alabama, once.” Gilpin half-closes his eyes. He is lecturing. “Confi-
denz
in a soaring future is the
essenz
uff our techno-scientific civilization. Und Vestern Mann’s greatest message to
Mann
kind.” He opens an eye to wink at Mole. “Erosion uff ziss confi-
denz,
threatens—zee Vahlue Sys-tem.” He opens both.

Mole’s clocking their two faces, his and Tuohy’s, like a boy in a bar, waiting to be asked to drink.

Gilpin’s arm is quickly around his shoulder. “Well, here we are. Three—buffs.” He unhooks his suit and eases in the game leg. “Good old ACE.”

“Brought ’em along for my own varicose.” Frank gives him a hand with the suit. They all do it for each other without a thought, the women, too. “In non-G, liquid pools in the lower extremities. Then I go and spend most of my time in artificial G. Does the job, good enough.”

Gilpin is dressed. “Cheap candy. Not the real stuff. But we’ll get used to it.”

“R-r—right. Trouble is, too many people round here have too much imagination.” Frank has a prop cigarette he sticks in his lip now and then. He reaches for it. “Extra-Terrestrial Imperative. My God, I never heard it better said.”

“Nor worse.”

“Ah, come on, Mr. Gilpin. Your bark’s worse’n your bite.”

“So it is, alas.” Gilpin prepares to leave.

“Well, ta-ta. Any trouble, come by and I’ll rewind that for you. Or we’ll shoot a little crap.” The medic winks at Mole, or tries to, reaches for the grease, slaps some on, stows the tube in its drawer and takes up his pencil again, all in one go.

“Your hands are your imagination, Frank, but they won’t let you know. What was it on the flight deck? What’s going on?”

The pause now hasn’t the comfort of a bar’s or a Sunday’s. Mole steps in. “The other bandage, Frank, where’s that one?”

“Why? Want me to save it for you? Ah, come on, both of you. Off me.” He twiddles his pencil. “I’ll tell you where. It’s on that gutsy Iranian gal’s back. The posture changes here are rotten for it. Some nights she can’t sleep, I bind it for her. I couldn’t see how they qualified her, till she told me. She really comes in here to talk to me. Midwife stuff.”

“Seat Six?”

“Seat Six to you, boy. A princess born—and she is one. You know they’re gonna do half the parturition out there in non-G, to see if there’s pain or isn’t there—a test case? Why’d she agree to it? It’s not the pain is it, I said; it’s not the limelight.” He chuckles. “She answers, ‘Mr. Tuohy—did your babies breast-feed?’” Over his saw-toothed red eyelid the forehead itself is now a faint pink. “So. Time for my sleep-shift. You guys never gonna eat?” He makes for the cot, tapping a pill-dispenser, tearing open the packet, popping the pill in his mouth and flinging the empty in the bin all the way, a soda-jerk ballet.

“Frank—whistle something first. I get hungry for live music.” Mole knows he really is hungry for the friends whose secret image of themselves comes out in the music they cluster to. It’s the kind of key to yourself you can safely hand around, a form of comradeship.

But Frank’s whistling is a form of speech. An ironic commentary on his thoughts.

This time it’s a medley, bits of anthems thrown together. There’s the “Marseillaise.” Then something German. Then the “Volga Boat Song.” Through them the “Star-Spangled Banner” rides triumphant, giving in to a marine-band drill style catch for some bars, rising in a virtuoso trilling toward the awful high note of “Fre-ee” and flattening just as the voice always does, to the not quite lame “ah-ah of—the brave.”

“I always like that sour ending,” Mole says. “After that impossible high.” Bringing back those shrieking school periods in postures of Attention warm with body-smell, and the imminent release onto the grass of recess—always with the same large sense of belonging to a great if bumbling nation. Not one too neat, like the French.

“Doesn’t do to save from war to war,” Gilpin says. “The glory never quite fits.”

Frank’s already snoozing, braced against his moonbeam drawer whose contents he sometimes toys with, shifting the prosthetics there like instructive playthings, cannily estimating their non-performance. The dummy cigarette is lax between his fingers. Though his eyes are shut the flashburns make them seem open in a secondary mask of fright.

Gilpin, bending to slip the cigarette into the sleeper’s breastpocket, nicks in his head at the sight. “Or the rocket’s red glare.”

It has grown cold in the Sick Bay. The Auxiliary Environment maybe takes a while to come up to scratch. Mole unsnaps the thermal coverlet from the base of the cot and draws it over the sleeper to protect his body defenses.

“People when they sleep—they look so—Unknown.”

Outside in the general corridor he and Gilpin part. Gilpin eats in the cabin’s galley. Mole eats with the second crew, where he also sleeps. Though now and then—he suspects, when something hush-hush is going on there, they let him sleep in Cabin Six, for which they’ve given him a super hang-style sleeping bag. They’ve been nice to him.

During liftoff this corridor was in total non-G. as it will be again during docking. Meanwhile, a kind of limbo gravity is maintained here, not as forceful as in the main rooms of their section of the ship but sufficient to allow for “ground” walking, and freeing them to wear their fatigues. If it weren’t for the gymnastics in the drill room, where he and Lievering nose-dive and float like giddy Wordsworths in daffodil light—“Which poem are we walking to, today?” Lievering will shout in the gaiety that overtakes him only in non-G—Mole might altogether forget the altered world they’re going to.

This corridor’s also the least demanding part of the vehicle, having none of the labelings which define and instruct everywhere else. There are even no handrails, though the manual showed them. Perhaps an economy. No one will be here anyway in the crucial times of ascent or descent—or entry and reentry, as he must learn to think of it. Now its long bare limbo is soothing. He’s standing in a cylinder slightly more than man-high, flattened enough at its base to accommodate his in-flight passenger-sandal, or even—he can imagine it—the soles of men soon to be walking into a new century. Or riding.

It’s a kind of log cabin of the mind, here. A small, unadorned place, of the sort minds have gone to since the beginning of mind, hoping for clarity.

What’s the medic so afraid of? What frightened him on the flight deck, that he almost certainly knew of, well before? That he saw in extension, in the weird shine of the star-screen? Or in the unexpected flame from behind it? Against which he’d carried in his kit.

“I-Ching, a-ching, ching,” Mole says, tapping the no-color almost soft wall with the nails he’s let grow long here, imitating Lievering. That is what he and his live-in girl—the one no one knew about, not even Fred—used to say, tossing the omen-sticks onto the counterpane or his drawing table, or flinging sticks of kindling onto the open fire of the apartment he’d moved to because of her, refusing to occupy hers. She, transferred back now by the consular office she worked for, had sometimes chanted in Finnish along with the sticks. She wasn’t too old for him, her sticks had always foretold. But whenever he tossed them, he was too young. I-Ching. A-ching, ching.

She’d been the most diagnostic of his girls. In glimpses, he still likes to talk to her.

This is a glimpse. Loopholes are fine and necessary, like the bedtime-past one scrutinizes, but they don’t move you on. A glimpse is wet with the future, like the foal Chape once sent all the senior form to watch get born, saying: Should have done it when you first came.

In it he can see what scared Frank. The robot vehicle itself, moving on. Not a true robot, the
Courier.
Nothing like the goofy single-task satellites that seeded earth’s almost suburban belt of them, one or more at this moment reporting the
Courier
into the homes of civilians who may or may not look at it. Seeable in Finland, too, she’d said. No, the
Courier,
half-rocket, half-plane, is also a hybrid in brain. Humans cached somewhere on Canaveral or elsewhere are breathing over it as they can. To those cached here. On the not quite robotomized, yet less than autonomous
Courier.
That’s what Frank saw.