Mysteries of Motion (75 page)

Yet born of a double marriage, according to his mother he will have a reinforcement, to her entirely literal; he will be “a double boy.” Maybe so, but Wert, listening again to his other wife leave him—for Switzerland, for revolution, for Manoucher?—hears how, with the delicacy of the childless, she has left him to this Soraya. And to the likelihood that from now on he will be monogamous. His hand on the belly, he hears her: If you want to know the future, Wert, pick a life.

Crack! Mole, with a grunting surge of his loins, claps his legs together, catapulting forward. The medic goes over backward. His legs hang in the air. Mole’s head-aim was true.

They both stand up, shakily. “Don’t tell my wife,” Tuohy says, with a leer he can’t hold onto. He pulls up Mole’s right arm. Mole hugs him with his left, on the shoulder of each a head.

“Take it easy.” The medic, removing Mole’s bandanna, pushes him toward the hatch. Darting out of his clutch, Mole leans over Soraya with a sheepish grin at Wert, touching first her cheek, then her belly, and goes.

The medic, taking off his own bandanna, folds both with finicky neatness and stows them away. “You all know he’s had a message? Yeah. He’s on the carpet. They want him up front.” On his way out he pats Gilpin’s knee. “Hang onto that bandage. I’ll rewrap it for you on the Island.”

“I will.”

“And those guys in Three and Four—don’t worry yourself. Maybe they have a fix on Oberth, too, not on the other rocket-man. You never know.”

When he’s gone, Lievering says, “Oberth? Do I know that name?”

“He believed in lie detectors,” Gilpin said.

Mulenberg is contemplating the pill ration in his palm. “Nine for the flight deck, ditto for the second crew, six for us. Plus one makes twenty-five. From sixty-five, leaves forty. Yop. There’s your evidential, Tom.”

“For what?”

“You were never meant to have it. Your constituency of one hundred—civilians. Or any, turns out.”

“Oh, I dunno, Jack.”

“Eh?”

“I’ll settle for six.” Gilpin clears his throat. “Plus one.”

Veronica is staring at some inked markings on her sleeve.

“What are those, Ronchen?”

“Mole was explaining to me. About burnup. How he and his friend Fred maybe got that wrong. Friction heat on orbit reentry? That’s for Earth. Island Five has no surrounding atmosphere. But—we miss the docking, we could still—?” On her sleeve, a small, overlapping circle, drawn in the water-soluble pale-blue tracery of all their pencils, goes round and round. “Overshoot?”

Nobody answers, though they are all standing now, ringed around that sleeve. Nobody knows enough.

Mulenberg has moved in close to her. He hasn’t done that since the
Courier
lofted. “Balls. We’d have backup. If the computers fail.”

“How? What? Do they build it?”

He is uneasy. “I don’t know of any—existing contracts.”

Bent, their heads almost touch. To Wert, watching them straighten, they appear to climb the ladder of one another, eye to eye. “Fool that I am—” Mulenberg breathes. “Another shuttle, of course. They’d send that.” He lifts a huge fist to touch her earlobe, incredulous. It is a remarkably beautiful ear; Wert, too, has noticed them. “Or else—” His hands shakily bracelet her neck, move on to flatten the breasts under the fatigue suit. “Or they’d pull us in. By Island computers. They’d have to. With the payload we’ve got.”

Lievering is watching, too. “Or we could…detonate.”

Is Mulenberg going to tear her suit? She breaks from him.

Wert, roused from his family cocoon, says: “What you’ve been doing on EVA, Lievering. Tell them.”

“We are shifting payload. Trying to.”

Gilpin, all this time nursing his knee, looks up.

“Oliphant—”

“Yes, Mulenberg?”

His head hangs, defeated, the voice small. “What’s that kid pervert up to? He is one, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know that yet.” When she stretches, she’s the taller. “I don’t yet know him well enough.” She steps past him, which in these quarters takes deliberation. “Soraya? May I feel?”

His wife, long since listening with vibrating eyelids, opens them. “He is quiet now. But try.”

Wert lifts his hand away.

Veronica puts hers in its place. There is really as yet no arc there. “No, nothing. But he’s had a shock. Soraya—you saw them? The new passengers?”

“He
did. He does the seeing for me now. In the dark.” She giggles, displacing Veronica’s hand from that hardening belly. “All mens, they were.”

“All men, nuh. Not a woman in the lot.”

“Funny you should mind.”

Veronica is trembling. “I do mind.”

Ah, the harem can insult, Wert reminds himself. She didn’t know.

His wife sits up. His only wife. If she has a bosom friend now, it’s no longer Veronica, and he has a hunch it isn’t going to be him.

Soraya yawns. “Have a son.”

In the drill before docking, a cabin is lit up the way the great liners used to be when crossing the equator. In the same way the passengers in Cabin Six are dressing up for it. A life-support suit is like a small spacecraft—or sailboat. It has to be threaded and rethreaded. The overhead lights, bracing as any ballroom’s, show every shoelace. As each passenger helps another, sentimentalists might think they clumsily embrace. The ceiling camera, when and if got to, will show otherwise. They have been through their group delusions, like any passenger list. It was merely that in preparation for docking the G-force was lowering, causing changes of balance. The mood in Cabin Six, and the attention paid to detail, was as stable as you might ask for, of any on that craft.

L
IEVERING’S ALONE ON EVA.
Consider how. Not literally alone, he has a power beyond most people’s to step outside the vehicle of himself. In those rare seizures, with the eyes of his mind rolled upward, he has savored super-cool moments at that vehicle’s edge. Moving along out here, goggled and visored in the center of a filmy octopus of other lenses, at times he has to quell an impulse to shed all this gear and float out in his nakedness for one moment’s purity against all the hedgings which keep a person alive from the minute born. He sees his body snapped up by the cosmos, can feel the crumpling. But he has his second-rate sanity; he never will.

Downstairs he savors the danger of the work to come, hopes for it. In grammar school he had once immediately eaten a couple of stinging liqueur-chocolates which a malicious boy with a father in Intelligence had told him were “spy-savers,” for use when cornered. He had wanted that cornering; it was not to be. He still craves it. But the rhythm of fearlessness, which one can neither fake nor avoid, takes care of him—and does his work.

Tonight three other payload specialists are strung out along the mid-fuselage structure of the bay, which stretches for 120 feet. One man is at the payload-handling station, facing aft. This man can open and close the Payload Bay’s door, deploy the manipulator arms and control the lights and cameras mounted inside the bay. Four closed-circuit television monitors are displaying video from those cameras, to check all maneuvers. The second of the three other men stands there. The whole system is known as a “remote” one. It reminds Lievering of his own. Remote, but demanding men in chariotry.

Long ago, when the space push was still quasi-international, the first such manipulator system had been designed by Canadians. They did well. In those days one manipulator arm used to be standard, a second one optional. Now he doesn’t know how many there are. What he and the others are about to do—135 minutes before docking—is not standard. They are going to retrieve a package unfortunately misaligned—in order to deploy it for more stringent pointing and stability accuracy.

He thinks of this process as akin to what was done to him in the British hospital, so long ago. For, this payload item, like him requiring such special handling, has too its own controls for what is termed in technical space language, “its particular experiment.” Like a man’s life. But “since structural deformation error sources always exist between the sensors”—one can never point a payload as exactly as a vehicle. For vehicle, translate: the world.

To be able to get outside one’s world even if only when contingency calls—how marvelous. He’s been out here twice before. The first time he actively assisted in the inspection of photographs, against a possible manual override of certain components. Next time, he merely watched repairs and calibrations of antennae and other instrumentation, to whose vibrations he tremored as to an opened brain. That time, he’d been stationed at an airlock outside the cabin on the aft bulkhead. This time he’s nearer the docking module itself. During docking, this module, should they still be on EVA, must serve as their EVA airlock. If they are no longer on EVA it will mean they have performed their mission well. Or as well as can be.

What he hopes one day to see is the launching of a satellite into orbit—the Island’s orbit, he assumes that to be, no longer the Earth’s. A
Courier,
they say, can deliver as many as ten on a single mission. First, the satellite would be serviced, checked out and loaded—they would have done all that in the ship. On reaching the orbit desired—and after further predeployment checks—the satellite will lift from the cargo-bay retention structures, then extend away from whatever Orbiter—and release!

Its final activation would of course be by radio command.

To recover a satellite, one would rendezvous with it, maneuver close and grab it with one of those “remote” arms. After that—simply deactivate, stow in the bay and lock it up for further use.

He laughs when he thinks of this process, both in theory and execution so resembling the ingenious laundry pullies, much envied by the English, which his mother had had installed between house and tool shed at their London residence, after a design carried in her head all the way from Berlin.

The item they are handling now would be launched in much the same way. Retrieval, he suspects, might be moot. Though it is obviously a deep-space item, and requires a propulsion stage of its own, he doesn’t know its precise function. What he does know is that the
Courier
’s retention structure is not quite what it should be—yet they’re carrying two of what the head crewman calls “the little beauties.” Lievering has heard no other name for them. But feeling his way with words, as always, he has put together enough syllables dropped like crumbs during the last two repair jobs, and one fringe ejaculation—“If I knew the activation phrase for this thing I wouldn’t even think it”—to surmise the blinker word going on and off in all heads during tonight’s operation. Detonate.

They like to fool about, and then deny. Unless a vehicle itself goes all to blazes—they’ve declared to him—a little beauty is utterly safe. And maybe even then. It cannot self-detonate. “Unlike a man—” he said to them. They hadn’t replied. He had expected none. But he expects to see the item shortly.

The fourth man, the head crewman himself, is inside the bay, next to it.

The airlock hatch to the bay is D-shaped. In shuttles to date, the flat side of the
D
had a minimum clearance of thirty-six inches, the inside diameter of the airlock being sixty-three and its length eighty-three. For the
Courier
—triple it. Men haven’t magnified since the old days. But loads in order to pay off may have to. The same thing used to happen to his father’s library in Berlin—ever being outmoded, and ever more books. Though there, “the old days” had meant more than a decade or so. Still to Lievering rejoicing here, his whole life seems to have deployed and prepared him toward this securely threatened edge.

He’s not anything like a real specialist. Yet
Pass me the Nijinsky,
they’ll say of him—and down or up or sideways he’ll go for them. Just so the Paris brothel would have gambled on his face to make do for the ordinary rest of him. That wouldn’t happen to his face now, and he is glad. Only a woman may offer to the fate she craves a mere face.

What he’s so far done on EVA is minor compared with what he may be used for now—depending on word from the bay. Last time, while he never touched the radiator panels being installed for increased heat rejection—for what reason they hadn’t said—he was there in time when one of the others, in spite of foot restraints, slipped in the matter of space judgment, and might have soared wide. At present he’s keeping watch at the handrails which extend along the aft bulkhead, down the hinge line of the hatch door and into the bay—and though he has nothing to do with the transfer of the equipment itself, if he has a suggestion for body-handling, the men will follow it. Down in the bay itself are what are called “translation-aids,” for moving about. He is their translation-aid out here.

Tonight he also has charge of the mission kit of life-support expendables. Since their two previous six-hour stints out here have depleted these, the kit now contains only a supply for the remaining emergency EVA allowed them—so in one way his load is light.

The other half of his responsibility is an informal one, like him, not in any manual. As they are aligning the beauties down there in the bay, should there come a spot too tight for normal agility, he’ll fill in for them. While—hopefully or foolishly, they post themselves well away. He is their life-expendable. They may think he isn’t aware of it. They can’t know he relishes it. Or perhaps they may. He doesn’t crave absolutes the way Gilpin does—to help nourish the world. He wants to be one. This is hard to conceal. It would never occur to him to try.

Or to wonder why all his life the idea of rank for himself has horrified him, and the menial task has calmed him best. Down at the bottom of the rich London households—once even a royal one—to which refugee children of his class had now and then been bid, there might still be encountered a man-of-all-work and no one trade, Victorian in job and name, who performed any task the other help had no time or will for, from running to the post to scrubbing out a grate. This man, serving the servants themselves but outdoing them all in randomness, had a shuffling, kitchen-grub freedom they never caught onto. His title was “the useful man,” and the young Wolf, when once teased at his father’s club to tell his ambition, had elected to be one—to veiled smiles from the merchandisers who disliked his father’s airs, and a chorus of praise from the Fabians. A day after, the agonized years of word-memorizing and list-reading had begun, done in their skylighted attic at home, with his father shouting
Recite to the Gods.