Mysteries of Motion (36 page)

“What kind of grass you on?” Mole said.

Where Mole is now, locked and floating, Fred’s answer comes back to him. “Grass?” Fred said.

Inside the museum, Fred no longer looked high but inward, like a person who had some body condition he was monitoring. He kept hunching his shoulders in, squaring them out. Dead center in the lobby was the mammoth walk-in model of the
Courier,
bristling black and silver but empty, and only one kid leaning over the railing to read about it. “‘Actual rocket size thirty-six stories high.’ Something!” the kid said.

Mole nodded. “The important thing is to be identifiable in space.”

Fred didn’t laugh. Fred, who was never rude, moved on, not choosing to notice that Mole’s limp was real. But in an empty room halfway to their destination he stopped. “Your ankle?”

“You should see my belly.” He still hadn’t washed off the crayons. Why should he be whispering? “Fred—there’s no backup system for that thing. None at all. What’s that mean?”

His friend moved on again, Mole dithering after him. “Oh, I know in a way, Fred—if that thing starts falling in the drink, say. Like the oldest Skylab, only sooner. Or say it misses its rendezvous with the platform. Habitat. Docking the ship, say they miss, yes. But the alternatives, what do they mean? Like—what about burn-up?” He knew he was only playing the idiot so that it would be like old times. Having seen at once that it never again would be.

Fred’s experience had changed him. He was grave. Was he grounded for good? “There’s no backup for burn-up, Mole.” The dickey phrase didn’t make him smile. Or say smart-ass: You just burn, Mo’. In a jagged orange line.

But yes, there were other ways to miss orbit, he said. He detailed them.

“I don’t believe it,” Mole said, this time for real. “I just don’t. Overshoot. Yes of course I know what it is.” It was an orbit like any other, only drawn in purple indelible. “You mean you can just be kept circling? For how long?” He stopped Fred by the elbow: “How long, Fred?
Fred.
For forever?”

It was an off-day for the Goddard and the room they reached was also empty, except for the guard. The glass case with Fred’s exhibit, a model for a civic center in a lunar colony at the site of the St. George crater, was still there.
A multilevel structure for two hundred inhabitants,
the card said.
With features to influence minds to new sensitivities toward the environment, during the colonists’ leisure time away from normal routine. Access to the lunar surface being possible through airlocks.

“I wouldn’t do it like that now,” Fred said softly. He continued to stare into the glass cage. “Forever? Well, that would depend. On the supply of what they call—‘consumables.’” They waited for each other to laugh.

“Now that you’ve explained it,” Mole said carefully, “I go for the backup.”

Fred swept a finger across the glass case and inspected it. “So does the Eminent Kim. Computers alone can’t always manage, he says.” He thrust his thumbs in his armpits and “did” his father. “Much cost, yes, Fred. In proportion to time. A backup has to be on the ready. To build this one, maybe two years. But they could have. The
Courier
itself took ten. This pushy admiral, who gets his billions for NASA and does what he wants with them—why didn’t he push for one? So, Fred, I fear this mission is too special for us. No, we don’t go. Not this time.”

Mole, too, stared into the glass case, leaning against it. You were not supposed to. Behind him the guard approached.

“Pity—” the Freddie image in the glass said to the Mole one. “Gilpin’s still going.” The name rang through the glass between the two images. They had discovered each other through him.

“Pity—” Mole said. It was one thing to doubt your father like any green boy, another to grow up to it. And still another, to realize in the same instant that you had inherited some of his tendencies—say a talent for plot. “Pity, Fred. That I can’t go instead of you.” “Pity.” He almost screamed it.

It was then that the guard had to speak to them—men almost, shame on them—screaming “Instead of me,” “Instead of you,” to each other, wrestling in laughter—or was it laughter?—on the museum floor.

He can now read the
ON COURSE
perfectly well. Maybe he’d dozed, or dreamed not being able to. Nothing else is dream. He’s here. The part of the panel he’s to check for ongoing instruction now lights up in smaller letters: Water Intake. He’s practiced anything to do with food or drink. He presses the armrest. A nozzle inches up. Wrapping his mouth around it, he doesn’t need to suck. The water rises in tendrils, filling him. He doesn’t stop. The nozzle has done it for him; it’s timed. Here each encounter with an element has to be. The elements are fierce and sacred here. He breathes deep. What marvel. To be in a place where this is so.

They’ve put him in the cabin nearest the flight deck, with all his second thoughts. When he came aboard, the crew who’d settled him in seemed to be having some; maybe they’d figured he wouldn’t show. Two had shown up at the motel to check on his nerves; he’d bought them Jack Daniels at the bar, joshing on his own with the bartender, for his being under-age. The two who in the corridor had picked him out of a clutch of other Class A passengers—that elite whose existence Gilpin had predicted—and had seated him, had then drilled him on what they called “the courtesies of the house.” If ever in deep trouble, for instance, there were flanges he and others could activate with their breath. He didn’t ask what trouble. “Not until we’ve cleared the launching tower,” one said, grinning. “And never come near the flight deck,” his buddy said. “We shoot.” “Comprehendo,” Mole said. His father’s word—popped. Such a glister on them all of a sudden. He felt too young to interpret it. “We’ll remember you to him,” they said. “If the time comes.”

The ship’s commander or captain and co-pilot had remained invisible, though they must have been informed he’s here. Though all these men who’ve been picked for the
Courier
seem to travel in pairs and to think in the same style, there’s some other unity about them, nothing to do with their insignia or even their profession. Pilots and navigators, they’re the active crew who in shifts must run this ship—and after a while it comes to him what else they are—the ones so far known to him.

Charlie Dove, Arthur Shefflin, Ervin something, and two or three others who are merely faces—they’re men of a sort rarely glimpsed in that combined top sector of Air Force and NASA operations known as The Joint, which is his father’s baby, though they sometimes figure in his father’s irritable home-comments. These are the ones who never appear at the Perdue house, in that inner circle which swapped its laser-powered calculations across his mother’s punchwork tablecloth, or lifted glasses white or umber with cosmic change. These are the staff who’ve made it to seniorship by every dogged effort and road of circumstance from honest to dirty, except—top competence. Or have it, but narrowly, without that extra flare of—comprehendo. Government was full of them, his father said. Life must be. His parents have a house-name for them: Grade A Dummyville. In a pinch they could be Comprehendo’s burden, or could outnumber him. Or he could make use of them, with their flaws in mind. His father has staffed the
Courier
with them.

“Graduation’s such a paranoid time,” his mother had sighed, on that day very full of her noble ancestor. “You think everybody’s at you to settle your values. When really, nobody’s bothering except yourself.” She took snapshots of him, her careful substitute for indecent kissing and mothering. “I was the same.” The phrase which at once spoils all parental advice.

“But we listen to them. How we listen to them,” Fred said, on the second-class train ambling through the Japanese dusk toward Fukuoka, and toward the summer jobs his father had got for them. “My head is all echo. Of course, I never let on.” They were passing through frail paper villages, the houses like lanterns in the woods strung along the train windows. “Eminent Perdue never lets on about his values, he only acts on them,” Mole said. “Then you deduce. What’s that smell?” Hair pomade. The whole car reeked of it. “Have some.” Freddie handed him a tin of it. “Put on a local value. Then you won’t notice it.” But they were already laughing more genteelly. The snares had begun.

Maybe nobody ever really plotted. There were merely marshes of obligation, campaign promises to one’s friends and family, election gains and losses against one’s competitors—who, short of the national defense, were the only enemy—and suitable expropriations of performance and inertia from time to time. While the wind debates over the stage-lit domes as intended, his father and Dummysville greet every morning, the Chinese property man distributes the sunsets and removes them, a Gilpin rises on the national scene on a cockleshell wave and a modern general crosses the Delaware to forestall him—and the oysters come back to the Chesapeake.

And out on his porch watching the skies for weather, some oyster dredger remarks to his wife: “See they’ve floated that
Courier
on billions of scrip. Rocketed it to the far atriums. So’s that Perdue kid could stowaway on it. So’s he can see that life is only Washington as seen from a hill. And so’s he can deduce his father.” The wife, maybe already pregnant with what may someday be another Gilpin, does not reply.

Maybe nobody’s plotted except Mole. He knows what that means. An excellent schooling in Shakespeare, Aeschylus and all the other great comic books, has taught him it. Plus the headmaster’s required course in Greek and common doom. The plotter is always alone with his crime. In a nimbus of further crime-need. He has Mr. Chape’s own word for it. The class hadn’t yet found out what Chape considered his own personal crime to be, but they knew the feeling. Mole Perdue, who so early on had deduced his father, has no choice but to go on with it, even from half a million miles away.

What Perdue, his father, loves about his wife is that she never messes up from too much of the same talent that keeps them socially above the ruck. Perdue knows too many high civil servants and “militicos”—a word his son has coined for him—to whose dinner parties people go already drearily certain that all the conventions of such parties will be observed. The real powers—that is, the admitted and known ones—rarely appear at such houses beyond the once-a-year obligatory showing. They come regularly to Elsa’s because she has their own tone and self-confidence—more verve and racier conversation—yet her evenings or summer garden-do’s never lose control. Those paper fans of hers are known all over Washington, and once or twice have made the newspapers beyond, after which she’d pulled in a little, without a word from him. Even their menus receded for a while, below their usual Viennese excellence. It isn’t his job to be known.

Not nationally, and not even late in career, like such “character admirals”—his son’s phrase again—as say, Rickover was. The Navy, being the sentimental part of the military, is different. Even the Army is, since an army, even one using weapons so rarefied as to be almost things of the spirit, has to be visible. Yet Perdue can’t keep a free press from asking questions on the military or political aspects of such a mammoth effort as the space one. What he can do, and has, is to keep that side of it constantly forgettable. Just because of such a press, and such a public, rapacious for daily news and weekly features but over the long run indolent, it can be done amazingly well. Unlike the socialist world, his government doesn’t have to issue calendared White Papers, or Five Year Plans.

His best contribution has been never to have one open season for congressional appropriation. Lots of small ones, rather, in which NASA can raise its “progress uncertain” or “timetable delayed” skinny palm, yet rarely make the front page. While even the tremendous commerciality of aeroresearch is not the biggest bell struck—nor even the profusion of watch parts and other micro-hardware you could manufacture cheaper in space. For every time NASA asks for more, it does so in a comforting sea of flash aeromedical news. Give an American a better heart monitor for hospitals and henceforth you have a hold on the heart itself.

Admiral Perdue’s own father had been the first black Hollywood director to make it big, though even by Gramp’s time the family had been cocoa-color to wash-pink. “The American public wants to be aesthetic,” he always said. “Just you keep telling them they are—in wanting what you want to give them. You’ll reap from it. But that’s not the
hull
story.” He always came down folksy on a word or two; only time you could see the Hollywood in him. “We still let in dissidents, remember? After any war. During some other people’s. What people here want—ancestrally if you please”—he always said that for the gallery—“is to be let in. To anything. From art to politics. Even to killing—you ask it the right way. Everybody
want
to be let in, remember that. Everybody except those few at the top who already are. You don’t really have to do it, o’ course. Just give the look of it. I don’t make art movies, except by mistake.”

So—the civilians’ shuttle plane,
Courier,
and its goal, the so-called habitat for civilians. Still a space station really, enlarged suburbanly. A mobile home, trying to look like a real house.

Who could anticipate that a Gilpin would train such high-class philosophy on it? Who could anticipate a Gilpin? Perdue, his father, shivers, stepping up the walk to his house over the little red hands of the Japanese maples, which always fell prematurely. The garden is the only place where to his taste Elsa goes wrong. Mole, in one of his unfathomable switches, likes the stiff flower rows, too many of them red. “Like jelly jars. A jelly garden. Goes with the house.” Whose “expression,” however, Mole dislikes, adding that too many of the Georgetown fronts have it. “Like a Pekinese the husband walks. Sour Ming.”

Warmth chortled in Perdue. Son-warmth. Nothing shows in his face. The best of sons have to flout what their fathers do. He’d done the same. A father has to take his chances with it. Fred and Mole lolling with their knees sky-high the way boys do, saying, “We don’t want to be just drop-ins, you know. Into college.” Still he, Perdue, has done what he can to make old Kim keep young Fred at home. Off the
Courier,
that is, without making a point of it. Offering Fred a post even, to make further space environments. The best good deeds have to go unnoticed, when not of the sort to be told to sons. These days, when Perdue passes old Kim on the tow path where men like them jog, Perdue with his bodyguard discreetly jogging behind, old Kim’s nod is maybe a mite cool. Perdue can tell. Men of their mixed bloods have an advantage. Their faces, not being of the dominant race, are not as interpretable. Except to each other. Must gall Kim that Mole has elected to go to Japan again, on last-summer contacts Fred had blithely shared with him. When it was Kim’s boy had won the prize.