Mysteries of Motion (6 page)

Palm holding is certainly stretching it. Those things weigh four pounds. He’d been reminded at once of Hermann Oberth’s lie detector. Openness is trust. Without further character delineation.

“I’d forgotten,” he wrote to Colorado, “that only island amateurs like me could dream of modestly doling out the crumbs of justice; my century returns them to us on the double—as boxed cake.”

He stares at Veronica Oliphant’s forefinger, painfully tracking down that list of names. Behind each of which now waits the four-pound box. His little idea of equal opportunity in the new New World may have boomeranged. Governments have to be founded on ideas—yet what government can be trusted to execute them? “Who could have dreamed we were all to become members of the members-of-one-another gang so quickly? Hope St. Paul will be pleased.”

The finger pauses.

“Find the name?” He averts his head, not to pry.

“No. Another man I knew once. Not too long ago.”

He knows her sexual style. Or suspects it.

“Fancy
him
being along. Mulenberg.” She seems amused.

The forefinger isn’t. At last it stops. The hand drops to her side.

“Not there? The other one?”

“No. But I saw him.”

One man, out of her many? He’s sure of it.

The battered gold locket she always wore—she isn’t wearing it. He turns out the flashlight.

“Turn it back on,” the voice beside him says.

When he does, she’s holding out the locket. “It’s what I was going to throw away.” The long arm goes up. She throws, not with a woman’s wristy toss, but like a basketball player. They watch a sparkle arc upward and silently down, too small for sound. They might have been watching through a telescope the fall of a spacecraft eons away. He thought of the gold oval, so recently on skin, twisting now in the salt wrack, a whole portion of meaning. For a second, the power of the sea is returned to him. Then he recalls where they are going, how far.

“Was there a face in it?” He’d always wondered.

“Not—so you could see.”

“You saw
his
face, though? The man under the tree?”

“Maybe I only thought I did. That’s what I’m afraid of. Because then it would mean that I still—” She spat her disgust into the sand.

“You?” One of the unique reporters of the world, the world said. “You saw. What you saw.”

Her body planes are always interchanging the way a good dancer’s do, hoarding their own secret central motion under the body’s legerdemain. “His every feature is the same. The same. Only—it’s a face that doesn’t startle you anymore.”

He’s known beauties, male and female both, who’ve aged that way. Just gone ordinary.

Her face never moves much. That’s what makes it such a lens catcher. “He didn’t know me. He didn’t—even know me.”

“That’s impossible.” No one could ever not know her, once seen. There are age marks. Yet, under forty still, it’s as if she’d had irremediable spiritual surgery at seventeen and done nothing since—except not ripen.

“We were right underneath one of those torches.”

Twenty-nine of them there are, one to each nonignitable totem-high palm, making a gigantic flaming avenue suitable to the scale in these parts, and to the intention. No expense has been spared so that this gateway to the cosmos, from which will go forth this first journey of the new aristocrats, might look as much as possible like a Chicago steakhouse. He could see her standing there, a movie girl no one could miss.

“He was checking his watch by the clock on the tower.”

A huge digital one, well lighted, which gave calendar and weather information as well. So the man she’d seen wouldn’t have been the blind passenger. Merely an anonymous one, who somehow carried the mark printed on each of them four days ago.

He isn’t happy about that wrist mark. This one isn’t a tattoo, but more like those purplish proofs of payment rubber-stamped on the back of one’s hand at the ticket doors of conventions or benefit parties. Early on, NASA had proposed an invisibly permanent heraldry. “Some census mark will be necessary to distinguish between Earth and habitat residents,
as between any borders.”

The whole fourth estate had reacted magnificently, especially television, whose voracious news maw, needing to be fed every hour on the hour, had found itself to be, like all “open” news, the unwitting ally of a sort of liberalism. “Invisible!” had come its roar. “In
vis
ible?” So all passengers have these highly photogenic, two-year-durable, allegedly non-counterfeitable rosettes.

“So he had the mark,” he says, and sees her shiver. But not for the mark, he thinks. For the man.

He feels the removal he always does, from all those still down there in the hot sexual morass, swinging by their genitalia to the ancient reproductive current however they mind-alter it, and therefore, in spite of all other marvels of brain, ever slightly blunted in their face-up to the rest of the cosmos. Yet who would think of this world traveler in terms of that old melée? Or with her narrow rib cage against a child’s cheek.

“What were you doing, Tom, when I came along the beach?”

“Baying.”

“At the moon?” She stretches her long neck at it.

“At everything.”

She opens her mouth, a small orifice but more expansible than most. A curdling sound pours from it—more than a scream, not a shriek—long and idling. Not a bird flies up. Too late for it. Saluting the moon, she shrugs at him. “That my old friend you’re leaning on?”

It’s the old piece of hardware said to belong to the ill-fated Apollo which had blown up and burned on pad, immolating the three astronauts, Virgil Grissom and—who were the other two?—its fused horror now no more than an iron grimace on the air. She’d once written an article about it. Some said this wasn’t the real relic; there was none. Who’d been the others of the trio? For the life of him he can’t remember. In the space museums now, there isn’t too much space devoted to failure.

“After your story came out, they came to get this. But they must have got the wrong one.” And no wonder. Far as the eye can see, the ever-accumulating old shapes litter the shore.

She strips off her sweater, draping it there. “Bye. Bye-bye.” Underneath, her bikini is wet; she swims and swims here, with that other restlessness which must keep her young. Athletes have the same—a constant need to make muscle patterns in space.

“Where’s your white fur?”

“I was going to leave it. Finally I packed it. So—it’s being documented.”

Everything on the ship has its own document as to its chemical composition and reactivity in any spatial situation. There are to be no accidents this time, though the rocket plane will contain some paraphernalia left over from equipment specifications well back in space history, which if one thinks a minute are far funnier than that fur. Shark chasers, for instance, and pocketknives, and seawater desalting gear, all for use in the event of what was marked on each:
JETTISON.
Odd stuff, for those who could not possibly ever again land by themselves on that fleck, the sea. Had someone forgotten to eliminate old checklists? Someone always forgets something. Why does that warm him suddenly, instead of chill? Out there, where a bit of the wrong friction could send them all to blazes, there’ll be no margin for endearing human clumsiness.

“I had a girl with a fur once.” He smiles at the puppy thought of her, of the real girl. Except as Madge the symbol, he hasn’t thought of her nor heard from her since the day she left.

“In the days when you had girls?—Or boys. According to the office.”

“Ah, the office.”

She stretches, preparing to swim, then hangs back.

“No, don’t go in that. I don’t like the look of it.”

They both accept what the other knows. Sliding to the sand, she puts her head on her knees. Often they share these pleasantly collapsed silences. They free us, he’s thinking—though not to the same things. In our separate ways we suffer from the same dualism. Or enjoy it. Neither of us cares to confuse mind with body. Or body with mind.

And he likes to guard people, from a distance. Though those high-jutting knees of hers, meeting the shoulders in one limber furl, seem not to need it. On the other hand, those silver boots always scuff.

His attention goes from her to the sky and its portents. That’s dawn over there, not to break for hours yet, only a hectic itch in the sky, like an irritation in old skin. He’d found himself watching nature signs more too these last days in the motel, as if at the last moment these might still tether him.

Under his feet is the scruffy, barrier-island loam which privately he can never admit to the same company as the kneaded brown humus of his New England island, chastely containing itself as if for conscience’ sake, behind the harsh salt rock. We’re going to detach ourselves from the Earth pull, whatever else happens. We’re really going to do it. The draw of the Earth, all the way down to its fiery, quaking bowels, will no longer be the strongest part of our ken.
Oh, only a slight detachment of the feet, lovey,
they’ll say—they’re saying.
You won’t miss it that much, ducky, that heavy deadness in the soles of your feet, in your limbs. Think, now, of lifting a steel T-bar with your fingertips in the nice dustless factory
—where dust, they don’t say, can be a bombardment.
Or of pedaling out into the late afternoon like a Nijinsky
—with a paramour chosen for the same metatarsal tolerances?
Oh there’ll be gravity, dear,
false of course, and maybe not quite so forceful in the psychology; ethically we may even in the future wish to float rather than to weigh. But there'll be enough candy-gravitation to keep us all sane.

But the trek that starts with the feet always rises in time to the head. There had never been any of mankind's that didn’t. We’re going to float out of Earth’s ken—and out of our bodies, as we now live and breathe. That’s the real import beneath all the glory-talk.

“I’ve been a fool,” he said to her. “No matter how many times they say they’ll ferry us back, in our heads we’re going for good, aren’t we?” Forevermore. “No matter how long it takes.”

“Never takes as long as they first think. After the first time. The shuttles didn’t.” Leaning back against the scabbed metal of the old module, she stretched her long arms in joy he could see well enough. “Yes of course, in the long run. Haven’t you been saying it?”

“It’s just getting to me. Look out there.” The heavens are all fleece now, and stirring. The rising wind would be whipping her garments and hair if these hadn’t been pared down in the style that even at seventeen had made her seem a world traveler, all silhouette bone. “Must be blowing fifteen, twenty knots. There’s going to be a storm—and it won’t matter in the least.”

Smiling, she moves her head from side to side against the module. Except for its rust, she fits it, and into it or its newer versions, as well as any flesh could—a Jeanne d’Arc with the fire well behind her, ready to assumpt to heaven in her silver hip boots. “And you don’t mind it in the least. Do you.”

The wind’s bristling at his T-shirt like an animal held back. A reverse wind—that means a vacuum deadness somewhere. This, though, is no hurricane blow—that hollow roar as if the longest freight car in the world were pounding along sixteen feet up in the air. He wets a finger to test the wind, sees it in front of his nose—and bursts out laughing at the sight. Freight cars!

“Tom.” She pats not him but the shooting stick.

“Oh—I know. I don’t expect Allahabads up there.
Out
there. Or Chicago either.”

“You saw the drawings. The models.”

“Whose greatest concern—if I get it right—is whether our habitat’s to be wheel-shaped or cylindrical? Oh, I saw.”

“You won’t be looking at the outside shape. We’ll be living inside.”

“All the time. Yop—it’s getting to me.” There was an acid taste in his mouth. His father had always claimed one could taste lightning, in the yallery-greenery charged air before an electrical storm. This wasn’t going to be merely one of those. Shrubs were flattening. The blunted waves could have come from a child’s drawing.

“Poor Tom. You just belong to the old gravity generation.”

“You old—hang-glider.” He’d watched her at it more than once with his head back, teetering sickly. Though he’d often flown in the plane owned by the office, which she sometimes piloted.

“You
talk
free-fall, Tom. You’ve got the head for it. But not the feet.”

“Nonsense. I just have a hypersensitive middle ear.” But he knows he must seem like those thirty-year-olds who kid themselves they’re doing all right at the teenagers’ disco—and he’s not thirty anymore. In the space museums the crowds of young people saunter without surprise, chewing computer gab like gum, swapping old mission names—Saturn, Vanguard—like batting averages, and forever emitting their weakly hiccuped
“you
know, y’know?” between the snappiest logistics. Coming up to him shyly, in a museum or on a street, to say,
You Tom?

He’s that, yes. Their hero. Whose muscles creak doing their dance. “So you really want to go more than anything. Down deep in your cells even, you buy the glory of it. You really want to go.”

She hesitated, looking out to sea, “Not more than—anything. There’s something else I—” She shrugs that off. “But yeah. Down deep. It’s my kind of unknown, you see. You and I, we don’t have the same unknowns. I almost don’t have the same as the young ones. But somehow, I make it. I slip along in.”

And he’ll be tagging along because some joker wants to see the reformer swallow his own medicine? He can think about that on the way out.

“We met on a plane,” he said. “Seems appropriate we should be ending up on one.”

“Even if it isn’t a plane but a two-stage rocket.” She shakes her head at him fondly. “And not an end—Ah, Tom! Look at you.”

His fear of heights is anticipatory, as much for others as for himself. Worst when those he loves lean over the high railing. He never gets sick at sea. But these days no credit’s given for that.

Once in a while there’s mother in her, though not especially for him, perhaps not for any man. She mothers dramatic old women, or sick ones, in lieu of the stepmother she adored. As once in a while there’s still sex in him, though for no one in particular. He tends to let the impulse pass. As Rhoda, the office manager, has said with the bitterness of the unrequited: Being, like Jesus, too busy for it.