A Natural History of Hell: Stories (14 page)

“My training started the next day. We had a breakfast that Max prepared—every meal was fruit and meat. I was on the can twice a day. You could set the atomic clock by it. After breakfast, we walked for two hours before the real heat came on. Then it was lunch, downtown at a place called Hoppy’s where we always had a burger, no bun, and the melon bowl. No time to digest, though, ’cause we were off to the Castaways Casino, where we climbed the stairs to the top floor. That took me an hour and was agonizing. Max was patient, though. I’d complain and he’d laugh. ‘Come on, move that gravy,’ he’d say as I gasped on every landing.

“The afternoons were given over to gambling. Max said it would test my stress levels. He made me gamble every day, with my own money. It was exhilarating and depressing, sometimes at the same time. I lost three thousand dollars in the first week and in the second won four thousand. At the end of the two weeks I’d
lost some weight. Actually, considering the time, a good amount, but I was still fifty pounds overweight. My nightly push-up tally had gone from three to fifteen. On our last day in the apartment, Max told me he was going to give me a final exam.

“We were in the living room, our bags packed. He reached into his pocket and took out a crisp bill. He held it out so that I could see it was a fifty. He folded it in half, creasing the fold, and then flipped his two fingers and scaled it toward me so that it landed at my feet. ‘If you can pick that up without bending your knees, you pass,’ he said. ‘And if you do, you can keep it.’

“I sucked my gut in, took a deep breath, stiffened my knees, and swept down on that note like a bald eagle grabbing a salmon out of a stream. Max said, ‘You pass, Werber.’ Then we were in the car, heading out to Groom Lake, what they now call Area Fifty-One.” The old writer took a drink and wiped his face again.

“Did you really go into outer space?” asked Breelyn as she ran around the bar to grab a stool. She brought it back to her spot next to the liquor shelf and sat down.

“One of my personal rules for stories is no foreshadowing,” he said.

In as amiable a tone as possible, I said, “This is getting pretty far-fetched.”

“Patience, my esteemed colleague,” he said. “The best or worst, depending on your point of view, is yet to come. For on that first day at the testing range, out in the middle of absolutely nowhere, I saw the rocket. Now, I knew what a NASA rocket looked like. They were using the Saturn Five at the time. This didn’t look like any rocket I’d ever seen that made it into outer space. It looked way better than that, as if it had been designed by Frank R. Paul, Freas, or Finlay. It was a giant, pointy, silver bullet with four arcing fins at the back. There were three circular portholes lining two sides of the ship, and there was a window near the top in what I assumed was the control cabin. I didn’t detect any stages to it, which meant the whole ship had to lift off into space and return in one piece. This is when I started to get nervous.”

“Who’s Finlay?” asked Breelyn.

“Those guys were magazine cover artists back before you were born. They did great rocket ships and aliens. Beautiful stuff,” I told her.

“The future they drew was always more futuristic than what the future ever became,” said Werber. “It was dreams and nightmares of the future.”

“Still no flying car,” I said.

“Yeah, but the Rocket Club had the money and influence to make it real. Masterson met us at the launch site. As I stood there gaping at what they’d wrought, he said, ‘The name of the ship is the
Icarus
, do you know what that’s from?’

“You mean the Greek myth? I asked.

“ ‘No, last year’s
Planet of the Apes
movie. That was the name of the ship in it. The club, to a man, thought that film spectacular.’

“The
Icarus
didn’t sit well with me under either interpretation.

“ ‘Both a hundred percent operational and a hundred percent sense of wonder,’ said Masterson.

“A long day followed—from the launchpad into the complex, where I met my teachers who would deal with the technical aspects of the mission, and then on to my room. Max helped me bring my bags in from the car. He turned the air conditioner way up and called me into a corner behind the door.

“ ‘What do you think of that rocket?’ he asked in a whisper.

“ ‘I can’t believe it’s for real.’

“ ‘You ever hear of Operation Paperclip?’

“I knew about it, a move by the US to snatch up all the excellent German scientists after the Second World War ended. A lot of the people they brought in were Nazis. I nodded, wondering why he was whispering.

“ ‘One of those guys designed that thing.’

“ ‘Will it fly?’

“ ‘Probably,’ he said.

“ ‘I’m just thinking of the fifty thousand,’ I told him.

“ ‘You need to put that in perspective,’ he said. ‘A good space chimp costs at least a hundred and fifty thousand and gets about a hundred hours more training.’ He shook my hand, and as he went out the door he said over his shoulder, ‘Keep doing those push-ups.’

“The next day I met the other two members of the crew. The musician was a guy who went by the name Owl Parson. He composed for and played the theremin. Small stature and thin limbs, he had a haircut like Moe from The Three Stooges. During our initial conversation he used the word
naturally
a lot, like he was an expert on everything. Eventually he asked me what I wrote and I told him about Pirsute. He shook his head and said he only read pure science fiction like Tom Godwin’s ‘The Cold Equations.’ What could I say? He could read whatever he wanted and strum the air till the cows came home; I just wanted to get paid.

“Anyway, the painter of our trio, Tracy (she had only one name), was a nice woman—a young divorcée from Kansas. ‘I always had an artistic bent,’ she told me. She showed me some of her paintings. She was a big bony woman with a strict jaw and a sweet face. Her voice had a raspy quality to it—too much dust on the Great Plains. She stood, statuesque, in the middle of her room, holding one after another of her works for me to see. With only a couple of minor adjustments, they were all basically the same thing—a flat background of a solid color, with a bare tree forking and branching upward in straight black. That was it. The kind of thing kids do in fourth grade. Really lousy.

“The next day we got into the onsite training. They spun me in a chair at a thousand miles an hour or something and I puked. They took us up in a big plane and made us weightless and I puked. They dropped us into a thirty-foot-deep pool in space suits and my claustrophobia kicked in. I was terrified and stood on the bottom like a statue while Parson and Tracy completed the mission of three laps back and forth across the bottom. As far as the technical stuff went, yawl and pitch, zero gravity, what all the lights and levers on the boards meant, I tried to pay attention but most of it went through me. It was clear that the ultimate mission was for us to experience space flight, four days in orbit around the Earth, and I did make an effort to listen when they told us how to use the toilet and also how to eat the brown toothpaste that passed for astronaut food.”

“How was that stuff?” asked Breelyn.

“It’d say on the packet something along the lines of
Sunday Pot Roast Dinner at Mom’s
, but it tasted like you scraped it off your shoe.”

“Didn’t they care that you did so poorly at all their tasks?” I asked.

“Nah,” said Werber and laughed to himself. “Everything was smooth as snot on a doorknob. They just told me, ‘We’ll get somebody to clean up the mess. You could have done a lot worse.’ ”

“That doesn’t sound like NASA,” I said.

“It wasn’t NASA. They just built the ship. The guys running the tests and teaching the technical stuff were on the Rocket Club’s bankroll.”

“How did the others do?” asked Breelyn.

“Parson was a little less hapless than me. Tracy excelled at everything and seemed to understand everything. She should have been an astronaut instead of a painter.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” said Breelyn and pointed at him with her cigarette between two fingers.

“Let me cut to the chase,” said Werber. “The days passed. I avoided the insufferable Owl Parson and spoke to Tracy when she was free. She was usually busy, though, studying her notes and painting more of her pointless trees. In that time I conceived of an idea for a new book, describing in full the mission we were about to undergo. It was, as far as I knew, the first privately funded project to put astronauts into orbit. What a scoop. I didn’t even have to make it science fiction. I could just tell exactly what happened and make a mint. I daydreamed about that book while the technicians lectured. And then the launch day was there, and they were strapping me into my suit. I woke up, so to speak, in a cold sweat to find the nightmare was real. I was actually going into outer space. It was a shame my old man had passed, ’cause I’d have liked to rub it in.

“The day of the launch we saw the inside of the
Icarus
for the first time. They waited till we were all suited up and ready to go. Somewhere there’s a photo of the three of us with those ridiculous fishbowl helmets on. After that they gave us a walk-through. Suffice it to say things were tight, and I presented a major obstruction when in the one long passageway that made up the ship’s center. The cabins were in two parts, half on one side of that main passage and half on the other. Bed and small closet on one side, and across the open expanse a work station. Both the bedroom and work station had round porthole windows. My writing desk had been set up so that when I sat at it I’d be staring into space.

“Remember now, we were on a ladder. This was prelaunch. The ladder retracted once weightlessness set in. I was seeing everything for the first time at a weird angle. The desk, like everything else welded in place, seemed to be hanging on the wall. They told us that when we were weightless it would all make sense. Parson’s cabin was closest to the back. The only thing beyond it was the crapper. Next came my cabin and after it, Tracy’s. Farther forward there was a storage spot and then the cockpit. They told us to strap into the three seats facing the large, rectangular window. They put Tracy in the middle, so she could handle the controls. All there was to it was a lever—you pushed it forward to go and back to slow down or stop—and a steering wheel that went up and down as well as around. I’d seen more complicated technology on the rides at Coney Island.

“While we were getting strapped into the chairs, I heard Masterson over my headset. He said, ‘Something a little special for our travelers. I will reveal it now. The red button on the console in front of Tracy fires a laser beam. What space mission would be complete without one?’ His wacky laughter crackled, echoing through my helmet, and I thought, behind him, I heard the rest of the Rocket Club applauding.

“The last thing the technicians said to us before they left the ship was that for liftoff we didn’t have to do anything. ‘We’ll light the fuse for you,’ one of them said and the others laughed.

“Parson yelled, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

“ ‘It’s a joke,’ said Tracy, and then we heard the door to the outside clang shut. Instant nausea and trembling. At that moment, I knew the whole thing was a bad idea. Four old codgers with their musty heads full of pulps send a rocket into outer space. I mean, what would they call this in your class? Reality meets fantasy? Something like that? It looked to me like the former was gonna blow the latter to smithereens.”

“We’d call that the unwilling suspension of disbelief,” said Breelyn.

“This really happened?” I asked.

“I’m telling you,” said Werber. “How could I make this shit up? When you get home, look up Project Icarus on the Internet. There’s only two sites that have hearsay info about it. They’re only passing off rumors, but rumors of something that really happened.” Werber pushed his empty glass forward.

Lifting it, Breelyn said, “This’ll be your third and your last. If I send you stumbling out of here and something happens to you, they’ll shut us down.”

“Here’s a deal,” he said. “Pour me that third, and I’ll nurse it through the end of the story. If by then I’m not slurring my words too badly and you’ve enjoyed the story, you will pour me one more. What do you say?”

Breelyn poured his drink and then slid it toward him. “We’ll see,” she said.

“Prepare for liftoff,” he said, and we all took a drink. “When they hit the switch, it felt like the whole damn thing was blowing up. I saw a flash of orange outside the window and then smoke. There was a thunderous rumbling, an infernal shaking, and I passed out. When I opened my eyes, all was silent. I looked over, and Tracy and Parson were gone from their chairs. Outside the window I saw stars. I unhooked my safety straps and was weightless. I drifted out of the command cabin and back down the center passage of the ship, floating like a ghost. Every now and then, I’d bump into the wall, and I learned early on to be careful how hard I pushed off.

“I found my crewmates both back at the crapper, minus their fishbowl helmets unscrewed, taking turns puking into the urination contraption. Upon seeing them, the nausea hit me. In between her bouts, Tracy told us it was SAS, Space Adjustment Syndrome, and it would take a while to get over. I screwed off my helmet and took my turn. We stayed there for an hour straight, and then made our way to our rooms. I was just about able to get out of the space suit and put on my jumpsuit before I had to go back for another round. It was a horrible feeling, like the vertigo I once had from an ear infection, like I’d been on a gin bender for two weeks.

“It’s hard to breathe in space. Your nose gets totally plugged. So not being able to draw a decent breath and feeling sick as a dog with the claustrophobia ever on the verge of pouncing, I was miserable. I floated into my room and sat at the writing desk. There was a pad of paper affixed to the top, and the yellow pages flapped upward. My writing implement was a pencil. It sat in a special holder that kept it continuously, automatically, sharpened. I looked up and there was Earth, like a peeping Tom in my porthole window. I nearly gasped at the sight of it, and the first notes of the theremin drifted through the rocket—creepy, liquid sound. I wrote nothing.

“Sometime later, I’m not sure how long, Tracy floated by and said she was going to get dinner. I left my chair and followed her. Parson was right behind me. At the storage area, we divvied up the packets. I had Aunt Jo’s Chicken and Dumplings—baby shit with streaks of carrot. Parson had Paradise Split-Pea Soup with Bacon and Potato—a pale green mess he pronounced to be ‘Pond Scum.’ Tracy chose the Coconut Shrimp, and I begged her not to eat it. ‘My, it’s tasty,’ she said. Parson shook his head.

“More trips to the crapper followed, to be sure. We got a radio message from mission control, and all gathered in the command cabin to listen in. It was, as far as I could tell, a bunch of static and mumbling. ‘All is well,’ said Tracy. That was it, then they signed off and it was the silence of outer space. Every second, I was thinking, was a second too much. I felt buried alive out there, cramped and wheezing for every breath. The
Icarus
was a tomb as far as I was concerned. I went to my cabin and lay down with the book I’d brought—
The Butterfly Kid
. It had been up for a Hugo Award.