Mysteries of Motion (57 page)

He pauses to look behind him, as he’d done when he mentioned their philosopher. In sarcasm. Yet it’s a comfort to have that man near. Turning back to the keyboard, Tessa’s last blithe postcard comes to mind:
Daddy, I have something to share with you.
The dog, Gravy, named for gravitation and Mulenberg’s voyage, had had bon voyage pups.

—So that I may better share with you two some of our delusions, which I must hope these are. For we begin to have them—

Yet perhaps it’s Maidie, his worn coin of a girl, milled to the thinnest edge by the normal safeguards against madness, who’ll understand him best. Who’d hung the week’s schedule in her kitchen the morning after the honeymoon, and five years later, on a screen a safe thousand and more miles away from him, looked as if she still hung by it.

—We rise to a morning meal, sent by mechanical means from the galley, like all intake except dinner. Strictly, there are no mornings here. Our days and nights being of different lengths from each other as well as from yours, also get harder to distinguish—

As the blaze at a porthole of stars raining like snow will confuse his already shaky inner rhythms. But this he would rather not reveal. They will think it is him.

—Once at the landing station, we’ll set our own day lengths—

What’s he saying? On a mainly industrial station already manufacturing crystals to be used in electronic devices, the hours of the cycles must long since have been set.

Why should he be defensive about that or about any of it? For it now occurs to him that he is.

—But we maintain. Since we must wear our full life-support suits at all times in the cabin or at drill, the bath hour is welcome. Everything unisex, including a modified Jacuzzi. Privacy, though, can be calculated—

Scrounged, rather. The two women have more or less been allowed to be alone. Or so it’s working out. Over and above the scheduled life—in this one-way mousehole, as his big body sometimes inveighs at him—there’s always that other overlay. Of things working out.

—For circulation’s sake, we’re expected to use the massage aids, alone or mutually—

So far as he knows, nobody’s been mutual, in Cabin Six.

—All our activities are closed-circuit monitored, the video-auditor being the computer only, of course—

Of course. But why think otherwise?

—We’re then left to various drills which familiarize us with our sector of the ship, including the Sick Bay, the said Galley and Hygiene Units. As well as our sector’s access to the Payload Bay—your daddy’s special interest, heh, heh—and to the forward and aft Avionic Bays, which include—

Here he has to refer to his notes, which thank God and staff are as organized as a president’s should be, for a minute returning him in delicious pain to what it had been to be one.

—radar altometers, general purpose computers, mass memories, rendezvous sensor electronics, microwave scan beam landing system, accelerometers and one-way Doppler extractor—all of those forward. Also rate gyros, aeroservice servo-amplifier units, all of these aft except the multiplexer-demultiplexer units, which are located in both. The names are by and large self-explanatory, except for that last one, whose function I confess I haven’t yet learned. What a Doppler reaction is I haven’t time for here, but any aerodynamics manual will explain—

Pure bluff, Mulenberg, as they’ll know.

Somehow that cheers him. As a contact with the self which isn’t up here yet.

That scares him.

—What we do not see are the passengers other than our own six, each cabin and service area being separate because of atmosphere maintenance. The Free Room has artificial sea-level atmosphere. We go in and out like at a bridge game. In fact, all our alternating arrangements are a damn beautiful cooperative game. Or ballet. Maidie, you’ll know about that—

In which in the absence of any ballet master, the strangeness of what we do sometimes washes over us. Yet once, when by chance he was the one to dip out of a bay in order to allow Veronica entry—she lifting herself on the handrails with a face clearly ready for glory—he’d caught a sense of what they were here for.

He’ll have to mention Veronica soon.

—Otherwise, except for no stewardesses—skyroom too precious—we’re like guests at a dull resort managed by the aeroequivalent of the Cornell School of Hotel Administration. Haven’t seen the other guests yet and haven’t seen the sights. Though they promise us both.

That is—though we can’t see each other all at once, or in sections, like in a jumbo jet, one hundred strong sipping from paper cups—an open-circuit viewing of all of us by all of us is on the prospectus. For the third week—no specified day. Most of our calendar is set. I understand there’s already an events-calendar for two of your years ahead, on habitat—

The flow of ordnance requires it. But that three-week turnaround visit to and from earth of the
Courier,
in time will it come to seem like the visit of the cruise ship to the remote port—everybody down to the dock? Morale activities are to be planned—even Earth sells its opera tickets well ahead. But behind these happy exertions, all the equilibrations of an artificial sphere will have to be kept going. In his New York office, one entire wall-mapped room monitors company operations which span the globe. But no care had to be taken to keep the globe itself going. On the living-station, every inhabitant will spend some portion of time at that. Appointed time. As here.

Where then do the rumors come from?

—As for the sights, dear girls, we’re promised EVA. Not any rival of yours. Extra-Vehicular Activity.
Planned EVA,
they call it, or
Unplanned EVA.
Until I see it I can’t say for sure, but I think of it as crewmen dancing on the surface of the ship—

Maybe to pat and inspect that ceramic skin whose spotty resistance to the terrible heat of reentry is always being “confirmed.” An uneasy word, industrially. Did that heat obtain not only at the moment of rendezvous between
Courier
and Earth as it reenters atmosphere from orbit, but also between
Courier
and habitat—as the
Courier
“docks”? He’s never given it any thought. His notes don’t say. But the diagrammed Orbiter, slate-blue on cloud and annotated like a psalm, made the blood surge.

Though if he’s still talking more or less to Maidie, he won’t point out the sexual naming that NASA goes in for, which he secretly finds jaunty. Planes are asexual, so far as a passenger is aware. But though an Orbiter, with maybe a nod to the plants, carries its propellants in “pods” and has all the old “wing” and “tail” analogies to the birds, it “mates” with its own booster rockets, has “umbilicals” on the fuselage and aspires at all times to the “rendezvous.”

The bell rang, signaling the first third of the time here. Mulenberg turned around. Gilpin gives him a “hard at work, too?” smile.

Mulenberg smiles back. No—I can’t separate Maidie. They’ve always complained we didn’t separate them enough. Their mother used to call them “Messa-Taidie.” Calling them in from play. He smells the leaf-smoke of long ago autumn dusks, sharper than any oxygenation within these NOLEX-felted portholes—and hears how he must sound to Gilpin. “I’m an obsessive. Not only on daughters. Most good businessmen are, you know. Dreamers. According to a psychological study done for our personnel department, the best of us don’t even dream in money. Worse than artists, my doctor says. With even less to go on.”

“You businessmen brought us here.”

Polite man, if overcompassionate. Mulenberg wonders if Gilpin knows how literally that might be the case. Early on, the “international space effort” for the original long-term gravity-free environment had been mostly an affair of European prime and co-contractors, though he’d worked with them all in a way—Fokker Netherlands on the optical windows and scientific airlock, Alitalia and Micro for module and thermal control, SABCA Belgium for the film vault, INTA Spain and TERMA Denmark and FOKKER Germany for the management system integration and testing. Mulenberg’s company had had paper in all of them. As well as actually collaborating with the United Kingdom on a large instrument pallet-structure which could be controlled from without in some configurations, and finally, on the tunnel-connect between crew-compartment and pressurized modules such as this very one—being the absolute main contractors with NASA itself. On the
Courier,
of course, all suppliers had had to be USA.

He’s kept his long since diversified company out of application software, which he regards as pure flea-market and discount-store hell.

“Nowadays I only know the charts, Gilpin. And the bankers. Not even the engineers. Amazing, isn’t it.”

“Not to me.”

“That’s right. Heard you speak once.”

“Oh? Oh, I’m only in the middle, far as dreaming goes,” Gilpin says hastily. “Wobbly place.”

“The lad doesn’t think so.”

In the silver-brown luminescence of the cabin, composed of many muted reflections of metal gone angle-soft under outer shadows which come and go, producing that rotogravure effect which once gave depth to faces in early-century Sunday supplements, they’re all learning to translate facial expressions anew. Gilpin’s face has clouded. But so has the porthole. “Mole? The boy’s pure adventure. Don’t know whether he knows it.”

Mulenberg stares down at his page of daughters. So are they all—adventure. Sure they know, and hit you with it. But Gilpin, who’s childless, romanticizes. Any confidences are wasted on him. “Guess I’m the only parent in Cabin Six.”

“So far.”

When Gilpin doesn’t respond further, he’s moved to personalize himself. Like when the staff used to hold back. “I say ‘lad’ maybe because the head nurseryman at my father’s place used to. Used to call
me
that.” And maybe because I haven’t got one. “‘A lad is a boy with a nice streak of cussedness,’ Dineen used to say.”

“Mole’s got that.”

“Spends a lot of time up front. Forward.”

“That berth he’s been exchanging with Lievering now and then, yes. But they don’t allow him in the cockpit.”

“The—? I should think not. Though he gets around like sixty, he lacks a certain—”

“Training knowledge?” Gilpin seems now to want to swap glances with him.

“Being pals with Lievering should sure give him the hang of it. But the young ones all take everything once-over easy.” Except Maidie. Who’s like him. It’s Maidie he could tell about following Veronica from that half-craved distance. “Tried to get him to talk about architecture; we’ve built factories around the world. But nix. Sure doesn’t sound like what he is. Or act it. What the devil is a catabolist?”

Gilpin’s laugh loosens up both of them. “It’s a fancy school of Japanese architectural theory. More mystical than structural. Seems to work. It’s not new. Started in the fifties.”

These days it’s the young who are the antiquarians of the decades. Falling in love with their grandfather’s era, though not with its real properties. “He says he’s lost interest, in favor of another profession. He tell you?”

“Afraid so.”

“‘Reformer, student grade’?”

“‘Private, first-class.’”

When Gilpin throws up his hands the second book he’s been reading sprawls—a small, dowdily old one, exotic on a floor which might be metal or grapholite. “We oughtn’t to laugh,” Gilpin says.

“None of our family has humor,” Mulenberg says shyly. “I wish the girls.”

They both bury themselves in their “work.”

Gilpin takes up his pencil:

“I like Mulenberg, poor chap. What an extraordinary thing—one of Veronica’s one-night stands to come so far. A man of considerable personal resource who is always deprecating that; he knows too well what the world usually thinks of tycoons. ‘Here I’m a man suspended from my money,’ he told me our first hour here, ‘want to see how I do.’ Yet he was clearly that, before. A space-dreamer all his life? Since he suffers from a poor sense of direction he’s provided himself with a large NASA blueprint of the vehicle, which he’s learned by rote. He’s used to being coached by experts. Goddard sent him three to get him through the training, which he then crammed into half the time it took the rest of us, getting a deserved top score—a feat I heard nothing of from Mulenberg himself. Look at him, tending his data like a purist, hoping for the time—vainly I suspect—when he can dispense with it. It bothers him that I call the flight deck a cockpit. Up to now, his forays into self-knowledge have all been one-night stands also. Down beneath them is this other tenacious life of the emotions he’s been taught to be ashamed of—which he’ll peel to the bone to get to. Yes, I like him. He is my opposite.

“I say ‘poor chap’ because of Veronica. Who’s known where she is since she was born, and wants only to go farther. Who maybe is the only true traveler here.”

The pencil drops. Gilpin watches it sway on its chain. The claustrophobia of any space journey adheres not only to the vehicle but to the motion. One’s walled up—in motion. A coffin of it, after a while static as a train at standstill in a station. Past which all eternity wheels.

The pencil crept toward him slightly. Not a delusion. Whatever degree of gravity is here, whatever air mix, Mulenberg will know, or know the place for it in his file. But the idea of the “delusions” Mulenberg alleges he’s beginning to collect on his own is unnerving. “Baby
idées fixes,”
he said yesterday, “can run through an office like wild rabbits.” And journeys with a sense of mission breed abstractions of no more value than imaginary music; people think windily on Everest. What Gilpin wouldn’t give for an old jet-liner crowd of ordinary travelers weaving their to-and-from-the-toilet rhythms. Florida-bound couples in identical vanilla checks and with the irritable lardiness of pensioners. Or one of those men who always sat over the wing, with profiles sharp as their portfolios.

If he and Mulenberg and the others come to share some
idée-fixe
which can pass for real, what then?