Mysteries of Motion (73 page)

STAND BY          STAND BY          STAND BY

“I confess I am eager to see them,” Gilpin said. “Our constituency.”

But it’s Dove. Full-face, a patch of plaster on his cheek, he speaks slowly, at some length. They can’t hear a word he says. He continues, unaware. A final phrase they catch in mime.

Veronica says it dreamily, “‘Is that clear?’”

“Not yet,” Mole says. But not smart-alecky. What makes the boy this sad? It’s plain that Veronica will take him on. Already has? Wert thinks not; where could they? But Mole’s not one to wait to be asked. What a marvelous, complicated kid—would he want one like him?

Wert’s shaken by the answering physical rush, swelling his chest, opening his hands. How the empathy rises, tumid as sex. When you have a son.

“Get…on…with…it,” Mulenberg says to the blank screen. That gray voice must have a separate pipeline through his easy, floppy bulk.

The screen, a vapid, uneasy mauve, activates in white script, agitated but obedient.

WE HAVE PARTIAL VIDEO FAILURE             PICTURE AND SOUND    DO         NOT      SYNCH WE HAVE JUST RECEIVED JOINT COMMAND’S REPORT WHICH FOLLOWS      THEY ARE TRACKING US LIVE

When the screen blanks again, Mulenberg’s fist rears up and comes down with a crack. His knuckles? Or the couch.

With the new seating, Wert is right behind him. In his head he reviews the two arrangements, not sure why. What had been Mulenberg, Oliphant, Lievering, Gilpin, himself, and Soraya, is now: Mulenberg, himself, Lievering, Gilpin, Oliphant—and Mole. In emergency, their deployment can make only accidental difference. But he can hear Mulenberg’s heavy breathing, feel the balked energy, always so evasively sexual. They all have some of that now, though nothing like Jack. Gilpin shows it least, but one too-sharp twit from him, or one more twinned whisper from the two end-seats, and that raw intake in front of Wert could blow. Wert’s in the right place, if anyone has to take charge.

In front of him, he sees a descending moisture, falling slowly, in accordance with G-force. From Mulenberg’s couch.

Dove here.
The screen is blank.
Can you hear me?
The voice clears its throat.
All cabins attend.
The voice has already shrunk.
Cabins Three and Four in particular stand by for command report. Followed by film if we can pick it up. They have us on world satellite.
The voice fades, replaced by a flash of the flight deck. Dove is reading from a panel, in clogged static, blurred with squeals. They hear a blurted
One eighty-five
and what may be a
Please God.
The flight deck vanishes.

“What are the wild waves saying, Dove?” Mole’s voice from the rear. “Give us the script.”

Mulenberg, with a growl, leaps from his seat.

“Hold it, Jack. He’s using the intercom on my seat.” Wert’s just realized it.

“Give us the screen alone, please. The audio has a glitch in it.” Mole has the pebble-smooth space-command voice down to perfection. But shouldn’t he identify them, Cabin Six to Flight Deck? Maybe they know.

They do. The cabin is irradiated by a large white message, in caps moving left to right:
NASA JOINT COMMAND TO COURIER: ACCORDING TO ATTITUDE INFORMATION COURSE DEFLECTION DUE TO UNIDENTIFIED RESISTANCE NOW MODERATING…INERTIAL MEASURING UNITS NOW PROVIDING CORRECT NAVIGATIONAL REFERENCE…VECTOR UPDATE INITIALIZATION AND EXTRAPOLATION NOW PROCEEDING…TACAN INTERROGATOR ON FORWARD AVIONIC BAY WAS KNOCKED OUT NOW FUNCTIONING…PAYLOAD S-BAND INTERROGATOR WAS OFF…NOW IN ORDER…YOU ARE NOW OPERATIONAL…BUT KEEP CHECKING MSBLS

YOU ARE NOW TOO FAR OFF POSITION FOR DOCKING PLAN ALPHA BUT WILL ATTAIN CAPABILITY FOR CONTINGENCY TERMINAL RENDEZVOUS IN 185 MINUTES…WE HAD EXPECTED TO INITIATE A POINTING VECTOR TOWARD TARGET WITHIN AN ACCURACY OF PLUS-MINUS ZERO POINT 5 DEGREES HOWEVER YOU SHOWING PAYLOAD MISALIGNMENT ERROR AS REPORTED PREVIOUSLY…CHECK PRIORITY PAYLOAD VIA PLANNED EVA…ALL CABINS STAND BY FOR ACTIVE RENDEZVOUS DRILL…REPEAT…YOU ARE TOO FAR…

They watch it through twice. There is no PLEASE GOD. The cabin is dark.

“Software—” Mulenberg says then. “The muddy software. I told them.”

“What’s MSBLS?” Gilpin says. “Look in your pocket, Jack.” For the diagram he carries everywhere.

“Don’t have to. Microwave Scan Beam Landing System. Know the company who makes it. I told Quality Control, might as well depend on extra-sensory perception.”

“But you still—came aboard.”

“Yes, Oliphant. I’m aboard.”

“But, Mr. Mulenberg—Jack.” Lievering has never before called him that. “Are we not depending on that all the time? When I am on EVA I feel it especially.” He waits, a man used to hostility. “Not just for me, please. A force.”

“You never said. When we were out there.”

“But you felt it, yes, Mole? You felt it.”

“For you, Vulfie,” Mole said.

After a pause, Veronica says, “That force, Lievering. Are you for it? Or against.”

No answer is expected. None comes.

“Soraya—” Wert says. “I must go to her. If it’s going to be this dark.”

“Hush—” Gilpin says. “All of you. They’re tracking us. They’ll be showing us. Live. Us
now.”

He’s so humbled here, by the physical. They’ve forgotten who he is—the most public man here. And the passenger with the longest expertise—in comradeship.

It grows hot in the cabin. Or seems so, as closets do. Are all their temples pounding as Wert’s are? Pleading to be found?

“Jesus God—” the seat in front of him mutters, “pick us up, will you!”

To estimate time in the dark is an acquired faculty. In prison, Soraya did it. You travel on your breath, she said once—like in sex. And whom do you copulate with, then—God? Wert hadn’t asked. Her first month pregnant she lost the power anyway. I cannot even estimate my child, she’ll say, laughing. That’s so my son will have all the time he wants, in his dark. She has the sudden humor of the submissive. His other wife, who bends in his arms like a rod which understands everything and denies it, has none. She is like Lievering.

All these indemnifying and subtracting powers, how they swirl around him. In the computing dark.

Dove’s voice comes, through the keyhole.
They have us.

On the screen a white dot, growing larger. Is it nearing, or are we nearing it? Child-in-the-dark, how absurd. We are it.

The voice comes again, shakily.
This is us, folks.

There we are. That white fly, long since shed of its hard sheath. In shape exactly like the deerfly which haunts a scroungy stable, or will settle for a man’s scalp.

They stare, deep in their own marvelous continuity.

“Soar on!” Somebody says it aloud. The civil administrator.

Soar. Soar. Soar. Soar. It comes in a Gregorian rumble, from all.

Oh we float, the administrator says, deep within himself. Freed of nations or not—we float.

“Keep seeing us as we are, Down Below,” Gilpin says shakily.

“Oh, Tom—” Oliphant cries, “there we go.”

The fly’s becoming a dot again. They watch it recede. Dying is like this, some Tractarians say. The soul hangs over the body, watching it.

“We are still here,
Ronchen.
In our chariot.” Lately, Lievering has a way of returning her to seriousness he plainly thinks she has missed. Lately, she tolerates it.

Wert no longer sees the frivolous or stark as that divisible. In the constant assemblage of light and dark which is the mind here, even a shoelace he has to bend to becomes part of all capability. Space invades the being from any crack. Words are merely Lievering’s crack. And he’s always hunting words for brotherhood. But the ancient Britons had a chariot whose wheels, mounted with sickle-blades, cut to pieces whatever came its way. Lievering’s words—like those of a woman too deep in emotion, are often over-apposite.

Like Wert’s other wife, for instance, who is forever leaving, and puts all her life on her tongue tip when she says good-bye.

“Yes, Veronica.” Gilpin always gives her her full name. “Gone.”

How many of the 185 minutes have passed? Wert can’t recall what a rendezvous drill is. All instruction has oozed from him, like the trickle from the couch in front. He wishes he could see the face of his watch. Though strictly it has no face. Like so much made on Island Five.

COURIER YOU ARE NOW GOING OUT OF RANGE

Of whose? Canaveral’s? And is that good or bad? Where are we now?

Passengers who attempt the other expertise create their own suspense. In the eddying vacuum Wert feels for what his black nurse used to call his mind-truths. Two weeks ago, knowing very well where he was, he’d turned his back on the gawpers scanning his mare before the handicap, off-track bettors who came one day a year, armed with tip sheets just as Cabin Six had been, and in the same state of demi-ignorance. To whom he could have said: at the sale the mare looked to me for all the world like that old engraving of Blink Bonny, the great runner and a good dam—one of whose foals was brought to this very county a century and a half ago, and lost sight of. Got her cheap, because of the native curl in her tail. He yearns unbearably—for that dot.

U.S. NASA JOINT SPACE COMMAND

WE HAVE COURIER

The screen-shine of this Mission Control, wherever it is, is bright. The sectored room looks much as any space command. High above its winking panels one may glimpse though not quite read that blazon now on every NASA facility, the living-station as well:
MAN IS BOTH THE WEAKEST AND MOST IMPORTANT LINK IN THE CHAIN

The men working at the many panels have their backs to the viewers. Those on a short uniformed line of five men in front do not. One officer in the center is capless. Like the legend, he is too far for details, but not for outline. A tall, frizzed head on its long Mole-neck. Surely that’s Perdue. All the officers have their right arms raised in the familiar space gesture. They are in salute.

Mulenberg bursts into song.
“Morte-e—”
His voice cracks on it. Standing to face the screen, he bawls on anyway. He has the old Italianate pronunciation, the vowels long. High syllables, linking Wert to old Sundays. He finishes head bowed.

“That a prayer?” Gilpin says, not harshly.

“Only one I know.”

“What’s it say?”

He turns, red-faced. “I never knew.”

“I used to know Latin,” Wert said. “But no prayers.”

“Sorry. If I blocked the screen for anyone.” Mulenberg sank into his seat.

“You didn’t,” Mole said.

If we could—Wert feels—we should swivel to look at Mole, show some kind of faith in him. To swear to his worth. But the whole cabin’s now bathed in the video’s alternate flashes, brown to white.

EARTH TO COURIER      COURIER TO EARTH

L-5 VIA ALL SATELLITES

STAND BY

“Veronica—” Gilpin says, “your tidy pals at Peenemünde must have briefed you on this. Do us the honor.”

“They briefed me, nuh. But not on what you think. Sure we’ll watch you, Peenemünde said.
Und auch Der L-Fünf. Will we watch them to the
Ode of Joy?…Our cargo shuttles lift off and dock to it, you know…Beethoven belongs to the world, I told them. Ah, but you people—they said—
Sie wunschen die Ganze Welt haüslich machen.
You wish to domesticate the whole world.”

“Germans,” Lievering said.

“No—everywhere. That’s what they brief you. That they won’t disappear.”

“We lack tact,” Wert said. It was always said to him.

“The English, too,
Ronchen.
Before I leave I get letter from a poet friend. They are shocked the
Courier
is not international.”

“Space is any man’s glory. We’ll do it for them.” But suddenly Mulenberg makes the squeezed sound which comes from that other plexus in him, involuntary.

There it is on the screen, the Earth. Colorless but charged with silver, like all video. Moving at the pace of the tears of things, that imperceptible motion. It is as they think; it is everything they think. Have they escaped it? More than half of its population will be looking at them. Wert feels—not homesickness. The malaise of the linked.

“Superfly,” Mole whispers. “Here comes Superfly.”

The
Courier
is now flying on full camera, so close that they might be looking at it from an escort plane. They can see that queer, proud embossment on the wings—NASA—as other worlds might see it. Two plane points. Or missiles. Or pyramids.

And as it vanishes, in replacement the
Courier
’s passengers see its own interior for the first time in entirety, spread out cockpit to tail, aft to forward as seen from above, like some diagram an even huger Mulenberg might have in his pocket. Is it a model? Or what interpenetrated slide-magic has imaged all those tiny figures slumped forward in their couches?

“One hundred of us? By God, there are.” Behind Wert, Tom Gilpin must have risen to his feet. In the long, opened-up belly of the
Courier
—like an alligator slit from snout to toe, the top half laid back and all its organs plain, do they almost see a tiny figure rise?

“Look, Veronica,” Mulenberg babbles, “here we are again. On television. That’s how we met. But on the street. You had a gun in my back. Or nearly.” He speaks in a lover’s voice.

The diagram regards them steadily. Will it never leave? Perhaps they’re to see themselves so until docking—a page from a magic manual. Wert puts his head in his hands. To rest his eyes? His hands tremble; they know he’s kidding. His body feels Soraya’s absence like a guilt; he’s let her stay away; he admits it. And the other in Switzerland, he’s let her stay away, too—or go. You are maybe a man who should only be in public life she’d said, shrewdly unfair. For this was their kinship, yet she would be leaving him to the more private one. He has come away, or been led, rather than decided.

But it’s public service that rests him, in the profound relief which adherence to early precept always brings. As if his right hand had early been sewn to his breast in a certain posture. So armed, he can sleep at night in face of the bloodiest event. He has his village, which he cannot get away from—sometimes behind him, sometimes before.