Mysteries of Motion (59 page)

But just at that time also, Gilpin’s father was applying neat’s-foot oil to a sharkskin, his boy watching. Gilpin has brought along the portfolio made from it. Deep in the hold with his other document, a bit of the shark, at first sophisticated to him, is once again mariner. The fish house would not be surprised.

Gilpin opens his eyes. The sun in their space path is on the left. The buzzer attached to the time clock here—which doesn’t always work although Mulenberg says the system comes from the highest bidder—now beeps. He notes his place in the book clamped again to his lap desk. Sure, we’re all climbing. He did hear what his cabinmate said. From a fish house where men hang out after catch, it hadn’t seemed worth answering.

He sees that Mulenberg has set up a long accordion folder all across the panel in front of him and even over the screen of the word processor. A flattened dollhouse version of the
Courier
with three-dimensional fretworks which rise out of the pages, it must have been made for him. To help him find himself.

“Nobody’s at home in the universe,” Gilpin says. “But we’re all busy at it.” On his island the housewives curtained their windows, putting ruffles around the North Star. All the way back to the Ptolemies building their pyramids—give us any strong idea of future enclosure and we’ll suffer up the stairs by the thousands.

Mulenberg sits back. “There. Look at this model…I can take off the rocket boosters. We’ve used them. But here’re the external tanks. Look at how the slosh baffles are mounted in the oxidizer tank. Five interfaces, between the tank and the—the
Courier.
All of them insulated, except one…Wonder why—well…” He shrugs. “And here’re the main propulsion engines. Here’s a diagram of the structure systems—and there’s the thermal-protection one…And I still haven’t touched auxiliary power control, environmental control, communication. Tracking-data process, navigation, operational flight.” His words come trippingly, with too rational a gleam of eye. “You seen how they deploy and retrieve payloads? Not just lights on booms and sidewalls. Remote-control television for
depth
perception.” He closes the folder reverently, starts to put it back into its case and then into the storage bin but it won’t go. He’s refolded it wrong. Guiltily he slides it into the long stashpocket in his suit.

“I could fancy a slosh baffle,” Gilpin says. “Is it to drink tea with? Only got as far as the azimuth on a mariner’s compass, myself. Come on, Jack. We can’t beat it, we can’t join it, either. Not all the way. Not that way.”

“Come on yourself. You were the smartest man your year, M.I.T. I never got beyond the Colorado School of Mines.”

“You got to the mines.”

“Ah, that’s the rub, is it. The money.”

“You know it isn’t,” Gilpin said. How quick his own hostility swells, after all the monkish years. Like love, that other tumor?

“Anyway—I’m staying, understand? At the station.” This is the way Mulenberg’s face must be when it’s on the heights of negotiation—irradiated and chill. Or when at the edge of sex? “I just found out, writing to the girls. Thing to do is—leave them the business.”

Gilpin widens his eyes. He has to force them. They feel sleepier than when closed. Mulenberg, sitting back, cracks the folder. They both sit up, straighter. At the window the stars rain.

“Stuffy in here.” Mulenberg passes a palm over his face as if to wipe the violence from it.

“The absence of weather.” With an effort Gilpin adds, “Should it worry us?” Funny—to consult one’s opposite—or sensible? Impossible to think of Mulenberg as enemy. Though there ought to be one in every decent man’s life. “People are colored by weather.” Or were. “There’ll be flowers up there, anyway. Hydroponic. And vegetables.”

“No fauna.”

“We’ll—see ghosts of them.”

“When I’m anxious,” Mulenberg says, “I dream of deer. Don’t know why. Except that we had them.”

“I never dream of fish. When I dream. Haven’t dreamed yet here. You?”

“No.”

There’s a pause. Real pauses are hard come by here. Fruitful ones. The journey is all one long pause, under which the itch of destination nags.

“I’m not a man of imagination,” Mulenberg says.

That’s what people say who think it shameful because they are, Gilpin thinks. Or who want to confess something. “What about those delusions you mentioned? In the galley, yesterday.” If they hadn’t been in that almost humdrum sector of bright ovens and lockers of trays attesting to a home-handling they were meant to visualize, Mulenberg, dipping a corpse of asparagus into a pink pouch of what appeared to be lava and swallowing it with a muttered prayer, might never have said: “Not gossip, you know.” It was then he’d spoken of the little group-paranoias which could sweep an office. And the rabbits. They’d have had a lot of fauna on the Mulenberg ranch.

“Mirages, I’ve been thinking, Gilpin. More like mirages, that people share.” Or could start to. Think of those streaked waterlines on American highways, which dried as one approached. Or out in the Saudi desert, what the driver has to tell you isn’t a palm fringe with water plain as a jewel at its core. There were those who had seen whole architectures hanging from myth-rock. And all natural phenomena.

“Like what?”

“Well—like that boy, Mole. Acts like he has inside info. But like he can’t help it. I could begin to think he was a spy. If I couldn’t see he was just a lad.”

Gilpin half-rises from the easy chair. His damn legs seemed to have ankylosed into one. “For who?”

“Say. Our space effort been that internationally cooperative lately?”

“Hasn’t it?”

Mulenberg punches the side of his head—and misses. “Not since the first shuttle. Even my girls know that.”

“The volume of what people don’t know extends even to me.” Gilpin coughs. “Where are those lozenges?” His hand is guided to them. “Thanks. But the boy knows more than he says, yes. More than he—is. I can’t elaborate. But I vouch for him.” He sucks gratefully. “God, my throat’s dry. And my legs—”

“The air
is—”

They both check the video, but it’s blank. Perhaps it’s only that now they’re talking, air moves again in the old comfortable earthbound way.

“Particulars don’t count with me enough, Gilpin. That’s why I’m always checking them. I’m going to Telex the girls. And the office. Make it all shipshape.”

“Telex?”

“Well, whatever. They’ll have something.”

“What confidence.” But so they will, of course. And whatever it’s called, Mulenberg will have access to it. “You ever—imagine—this crew has contempt for us?” Must have. At times Gilpin has felt it, seeping into Cabin Six from that flight deck. Or even from the vehicle itself, laughing at what it was carrying.

“Sure, they have it. For passengers. You gotta—” His thumb goes up, for all their asses.

“For that you have to see them. Why don’t they show?”

“Beyond the call of duty. Keeping us safe is enough—and they are. Never saw a first-class in the tail before, where it belongs.”

First? Well, why not? Hadn’t he himself warned of it? “Shhh—” Gilpin says. “Hear anything?”

“You talking,” Mulenberg spurts childishly. He sits up. Where’s that sixth-grade giggle come from, him or his vis-à-vis? “Are we getting too
much
oxygen?” Turning, he blusters among his papers. “What’s the mix here? I know they gave it to me. It’s here somewhere.”

He needs a subordinate, Gilpin hears his own thoughts voice thinly. I’m no good to him.

Mulenberg’s found it. “Here. Environmental Control: Cabin temperature, pressure, humidity, carbon-dioxide level and odor…controlled by heat-exchanger and…associated equipment. Temp. between 61 and 90 Fahrenheit. Oxygen—
here!
Partial pressure of—” 22 065
±
725 N/ m
²
(3. 20 ± 25 psi) is maintained and nitrogen added to achieve total pressure of 101 355 Nm
²
(14.7 psl). He couldn’t read this correctly—and what if he could? “‘Cabin controlled by air ducted through cabin heat exch. ges.—’ What’s ges.?”

“Gauges? Are none for passengers anyway.” Why would there be? “It’s a classic situation.” First-class. Because they can’t open the door outward, which is computer-released. “Thirty minutes to the door,” Gilpin said.

Or press an alarm? Warning plates, gamboge circled in black, are everywhere throughout.

Mulenberg sniffs upward, blond eyelashes batting like a cook tasting. “Little too much maybe. Oxygen. Not serious. Tough it out, eh?”

“Watch each other. In case we turn blue.” Would it be blue?

They are both smiling wide.

“Gravity remains.” Gilpin’s feet are on the floor but another giggle isn’t far. He swallows it. “You ever—fantasize—somebody might have it in for this whole ship?”

“I have had that delusion.” Mulenberg hiccoughs. “Seeing the list of successful suppliers. But then I always want all the machines to stop. Always have. Especially any vehicle I’m on.”

Funny stuff from a captain of industry. Where’d he get it?

“From a horse,” Mulenberg answers, as if Gilpin has spoken aloud—perhaps he has. “Used to bolt whenever I had her out. And then lead me home, when I couldn’t. That filly sent me East.”

Now they’re certainly laughing.

“And when it stops—in your head, I mean. When all the—prairie schooners, and the horses, and the—jets—all the tra
sh
portation—stops.” Gilpin’s hand leans out from him on its own. “Where d’you go? Where’re you then, I mean? In your head.”

Mulenberg has his eyes closed, breathing lightly. He opens them. One eyebrow goes up, but not at Gilpin. Mulenberg is in his head. “In the family room at the ranch. The home ranch.”

But with the person one mustn’t name. Or to the greenhouse, Mulenberg says to himself—to lie down there with the plants. But the person you mustn’t name—the forbidden one—is always behind everything. For everyone. Until found. Watch the clerks in our office. The girls who still marry and give shower-parties for one another. Or those who loll in the “permanent relationship,” now and then shifting it. Or even the jolly staff-golfers, who’ve done it out of the stud-book. All marrying certain masks, certain significances. The person you follow is always with you, whether or not. The one you can’t name.

“Not for me, I guess. The family. I’m the one who stopped that rhythm, in ours.” How old-fashioned of Mulenberg, though, to say “machine” for what we’re in now, for this whole fusion of processes we’ve started and can’t see the end of. “You know, I don’t think we were the machine age,” Gilpin said. Or thought he said. “We were just the over-symbolized one. Had a little rag myself, called
The Sheet.
Maybe you know it.” Who really were the people he’d gathered there? The revolutionaries of what? Anti what? The people who
inhabit
revolution, Veronica said in awe when she first met them. A race he recognizes, yes, whenever he sees one of them—but which maybe dies in almost everyone by age forty. A race that only inhabits people for a while.

Soon he must mention Veronica. Again.

“Yes, I know
The Sheet.”

“Well—we did that. Oversymbolized. Oh, I wouldn’t go back on it. See it better that’s all. From here.” Here? Looking down, Gilpin plants his foot on it, a shagless, fire-retarded something. “Maybe it’s never too safe to describe the machine, huh? Not the one you’re on.”

Mulenberg gets up, in sections. Leaning on the processor, he begins to ready his papers for tomorrow. “No? Then what am I going to tell the girls?”

Gilpin lies back, his eyes slitting and reopening. His chair seems easier now. More—receptive. Unless my buttocks are growing squarer. And the man does have humor. Or is growing it?

“That the bell? No.” Mulenberg feels the gaucherie of looking for a kind ear. Of finding one. “You believe in the glory of this trip. Or don’t you?”

“I was sure trained to. But then you have to believe in the delusions, too.”

“Looked at any of those background folders yet?”

The wall of them looks ready, each dossier alphabetized large in white on black, each on magnetic hold. On a sidewall are the instructions for releasing one. At home in Gilpin’s sold apartment, his beloved edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica waits respectfully for its new owner, even at its great age so green of cover that chlorophyll might still be seeping from all the freshets of expectation enclosed there in 1911. “No.” I believe in—something more.

“Lot of ’em are here because of
you.”

Shocked, Gilpin half sits up. “I suppose that is—my small autonomy. Never thought of it that way.” So the ball falls on my side. If anything could fall, in this place I’ve immured myself. Is the man grinning?

“Maybe whoever brought you here will take it on. The responsibility.”

“I brought myself,” Gilpin shot out. “That I’ll take on.”

Immediately he hears all the great episcopals of time asserting how impossible that is, given our entanglement with one another. Plus the twang of the borrowed minister from the mainland who took the island chapel on once-a-month Sundays, his nose tweaked with drink.

Mulenberg gets up. His movements are often his answers. Standing in these close quarters, his bulk grows, suggesting how often he must have imposed it. He’s worried at how lax the usually sharp Gilpin is. The oxygen mix may affect men according to size. By his own watch, they should be out of here by now. The watch, which has a chip that adjusts to their journey in a series of infinitesimal responses, was presented him by three grave men in a salon in Geneva, along with a little speech in which it was referred to as a Nuremberg egg. When he asked what that was, the head of the firm replied, The first watch. As yours will be. Out there.

He doesn’t trust the time clock. “Who comes in here next?”

Gilpin is picking up his book, slowly. “Mulenberg—I can’t raise my arm.”

“Get down flat on the floor. Pronto.” But that’s for heat. Mulenberg had been a volunteer fireman once. His lips move soundlessly, missing his beard.
Oxygen is supplied from the cryogenic tanks which also supply the fuel tanks. Nitrogen from pressure vessels mounted in mid-fuselage. For normal purposes,
his notes say.
Central-nervous system toxicity, from inhalation of hyperbaric oxygen, which at pressure over 5 ATA (atmospheres absolute) induces strychnine-like convulsions, however has its tempered uses in cases of carbon-monoxide poisoning and gas-gangrene tetanus.