Mysteries of Motion Read online

  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.
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br />   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.