But instead we use speed: orbital speed. That takes us back to the ball on the string—centrifugal force. It is actually easier to climb into a shallow orbit and then increase your orbital speed to escape Earth* s gravitational clutches than it is to climb straight up. Because when you increase your orbital speed—which is pretty easy, because you’re traveling more or less sideways to the gravitational pull, rather than against it—centrifugal force throws you out, into a higher orbit. Your actual path is a spiral.
That was what I intended to do. I was going to climb up one hundred miles, roughly, by going forward several thousand miles—and by increasing my orbital speed as I did so. My path should then curve upward toward the Station’s orbit.
The complications arose from the fact that, as I said, this was not a bodies-at-rest problem, but a two-bodies-in-motion problem. I had to time my pace so that when I arrived in the Station’s orbit, I would not be too much ahead or behind the Station itself.
This I would have to do by actually jetting myself above or below the proper path of my spiraling orbit. As I figured it, a straight climb from increased orbital velocity would put me too far ahead of the Station. At midpoint, I would have to make a sighting on the Station, and then apply a correction that, while not decreasing my velocity, would push me down again, holding me back for the necessary amount of time for the Station to “catch up" with me.
Tricky? You better believe it. It would all have to be done line-of-sight, seat-of-my-pants. No instruments, no computers, to calculate the proper intervals of thrust. Just me: Paul Williams, whose brain is more complexly structured than any computer ever built, if somewhat less reliable. I would have to rely upon my intuitive abilities, my space legs—that natural “feel” for it that Hoffman' had pointed out to me.
I checked again, to be sure. No rescue tug. I couldn’t help wondering, why? Why hadn’t they done something by now?
But they hadn’t. I was on my own. It was time I got started.
First I took off the backpack. I tied my tug’s lifeline cable to it, to be safe, because it was necessary to check something. I had to have a look at my fuel gauges. I had to know exactly how much useful thrust I had left.
It’s too bad they didn’t think to put the fuel gauges out on the control arms, where a person could easily see them, but I suppose the figuring was supposed to be that you checked them when fueling up, before strapping the pack on. So I took the thing off and checked them.
I had about three-quarters fuel capacity. At full thrust, that was about sixteen minutes’ worth; fifteen minutes and forty-some seconds, to be as exact as I cared to be. I didn’t have a magic slate aboard to do my figuring on; I had to use my head.
I put the backpack on again, and unhooked from the tug. I crawled forward, over the dead control panel, until I was squatting against the nose. I measured with my eyes, seeking the true orbital plane (if that isn’t a contradiction in terms), and then kicked off, jumping directly along it.
I was now slightly accelerating my orbital velocity, but not much. I opened up the thrusters.
I timed them, my eyes on my chronometer. I used a full eight minutes.
I turned to look behind me, once the thrusters were off again. I couldn’t see the tug any longer, it and the Titan unit were lost to sight. I felt a pang of sadness; it was a mission uncompleted—a responsibility failed.
Then I glanced up at the faint star of the Station. It was no longer directly above, but somewhat behind. I would have to be extremely careful, I knew, in calculating the proper time at which to fire my thrusters again, to bring me within the Station’s reach. A miscalculation of only minutes would mean my permanent exile, out here in open space.
A shiver passed over me. I felt naked and alone— terribly alone. I pulled my legs up under me, my knees against my chest, my arms around my legs, and tried to hug myself into a ball. I missed the tug already, useless as it was. It had been something solid under me, an object bigger than I was, to which I could transfer some feelings of security. It had been something real, something to hold on to.
I missed it. '
It seemed to me that I had always missed it: that necessary something to hold on to. What was it Bix had called me once? The cat that walks alone. That was me, all right. The other guys looked up to me as a “self-reliant type.” They should only have known how I envied them their safe dependencies upon families and friends.
Me, I’d never had many friends—I didn’t make friends easily, and sooner or later I usually managed to alienate the ones I had—and my family, well...
Bix had asked me why l never went home.
Home. The word—the image—called up strange associations in my mind. Home for me was never like home for other kids. I knew; I watched TV, movies. I read books. I knew all the Great American Cliches. The red brick house with the white picket fence, flowers in the front yard, the sounds of children playing out back, and a friendly little dog yipping with pleasure as Pop comes home from work and a smiling Mom greets him at the door.
It must really exist, I guess. Even in my darkest, most paranoid moments, I’ve never thought the whole world was a sham—that everyone lived lives as empty and distorted as mine. I don’t know whether I could even accept the idea, if it was actually true. But it isn’t, of course. Other guys have doting families; the Mary Cramers of the world have their proud fathers. It’s just me who’s different.
I don’t know when I first became aware of the difference. For the first five or six years of my life, I must’ve accepted it without quarrel. I don’t know; I can’t remember. But I must have, because I had no standard of comparison. I knew no one else outside my family.
My father objected to putting me in a school; I remember that. He wanted a tutor. We were living in Munich that year, and he didn’t want me attending a German school and adopting German as my first language. I knew some German, of course—kids pick up languages very easily, and I was always bright at it—but English was always spoken within the house. My contact with the outside world was meager.
Mother knew of a private school, for American and English children. The classes were all in English, the snobs. She didn’t think hiring a tutor was wise; it would be better to return to the States.
“Back to the States? Why?" My father’s voice always held a vaguely petulant, whining note. “Just for the kid’s education? We could ship him back, if that’s what you want.’’
“And to whom would you suggest we send him? Your folks, or mine?”
“Now, that’s an asinine question. You know quite well my folks are out of the question.”
"Well, since you choose to put it that way, so are mine. You know they’ve never approved of you. If they got their hands on Paul, we’d never see him again.”
“That’s bad?”
“Roger!”
At that point they discovered I was listening, and put me back to bed. I spent three months in Mr. Bridgewood’s School for English-speaking Children, in Munich.
That’s where I found out about other children’s families. I was driven to school each day by our cook’s husband. Some of the other kids were chauffeured to school too, but most were brought by mothers or fathers.
Then there was the day someone asked me what my father did.
“I don’t know. He’s just my father.”
“Well, silly, he has to do something. My father’s a doctor!”
When I got home that evening, I asked my mother what my father did. “He drinks, mostly,” my mother said tartly. I was fairly certain, even at that age, that this was not an answer to be used at school.
It took me a long time to find out what my father did do. We returned to Boston that winter, where we stayed for two school-free months in a hotel, while my parents feuded with my father’s parents, and then we moved into a borrowed house in San Francisco, in which we stayed until we rented one across the bay in Berkeley, up in the hills.
It developed, from what I could overhear during my parents�
� low-pitched and intense conversations when they thought I wasn’t around, in that hotel in Boston, that my father lived by clipping coupons. For a long time I thought that meant the sort of coupons you see in newspaper and magazine ads, or on cereal box tops. It struck me as fascinating and quite mysterious, especially since I’d never seen my father doing it. I wondered how one made a living (I’d learned about earning money then; in fact, I was voraciously reading all the recent paperback reissues of Horatio Alger I could get my hands on at the hotel lobby newsstand) out of coupons of that sort, and it wasn’t until years later that I discovered that the coupons were stock-option coupons,-and that my father lived on investments left in trust for him by his grandparents.
Those were the Swinging Sixties and Smashed Seventies—the era of the Jet Set, and the widespread use of psychedelic drugs. It was a period of violent transition, according to my history books—although from where I sit the Eighties haven’t calmed down much, and things seem as much in transition as ever.
Put simply, my parents were part of the Jet Set. They were the Swingers of their era. And maybe it looked glamorous and wonderful from the outside—some of my later classmates thought so, anyway—but it wasn’t. It was lousy.
It was waking up in the middle of the night to the blare of loud music, drunken laughter, and a haze of cigarette smoke that penetrated through three closed doors— probably via the central air-conditioning system—and made a nonsmoker out of me for life. It was the Morning After, when “Mommie has a headache, dear. Suppose you could find your own way around the kitchen?” and the living room area looked like a ruined battlefield— sometimes the furniture itself in pieces. It was low-pitched battles, usually on topics over my head, which broke off suddenly when I stepped into a room.
Mostly it was a mother and a father who were strangers to me.
I was eleven when they decided on a divorce. “You’re old enough to accept the idea now, Paul, " my mother told me. “We might’ve done it years ago, darling, but we felt you were too young. You needed a stable homelife.”
I sure did. It’s too bad they never provided one.
“We’re going to be terribly civilized about it,” she told me. “You’ll stay with your father for half the year— during the summers, I think, when you’re out of school —and with me the other half.’ ’
“But, Mother, that’s not half and half. Summer is only a quarter of the year.”
"Paul. Don’t quibble with your mother. We can’t have your schooling disturbed by hauling you all the way across the country every six months. Your father realizes that.”
“Across the country?” I echoed.
“Your father is moving to New York. He has decided to take an apartment there. I’m sure he won’t be without companions.” Her mouth turned up in a bitter smile. “He never has been.”
I didn’t want to hear it; I didn’t want to know about it. Already she was trying to make me choose sides.
It soon developed into a small war, earnestly fought by their lawyers. I was a pawn, a symbol, prized for its symbolic value, and nothing more. Neither of them really wanted me. Each wanted simply to keep the other from having me. I solved the whole problem for them by going to Space School.
If I’ve been self-reliant, it’s been for a very simple reason: there’s never been anyone else to rely upon. If I’ve been a loner, it’s because I’ve always, as long as I can remember, been alone. Old habits die hard. Old patterns are hard to escape.
Home? Home was security I never had. Home was love I never received and never felt. Home was a word. I was a stranger in my own home.
Now, I sensed that my life was changing. I was beginning to develop a sense of security, of identification. I had a staunch friend, and the respect of people who mattered to me. Home was beginning to be a personal thing for me, a word with meaning, a place wherein I would fit.
Home was a tiny pinprick of light, hanging above and behind me, in cold and empty space, orbiting hundreds of miles above the Earth’s surface, at thousands of miles an hour.
Home was a place I might never see again.
You’re reading this; you know I lived to write it. So I can’t pretend to a suspense that doesn’t exist. Bix thought I should write all this down—not just My Adventure, but my whole, well, story of myself—as another kind of therapy. Self-revelation, he calls it, and he says that in writing about myself I should learn a great deal about myself. And I guess I have, to some extent. Of course, Bix’s theories have a way of falling a bit short of reality; they’re too tidy for real life, where nothing ever really gets tied up into a neat bundle and stamped finished—cured. Each of his ideas has a germ of value to it, and I’m grateful to him for each of them. His little “therapies” have done me a lot of good, when you total them up. But I think that even in sum, they were and are less important than the simple fact of his friendship—of his caring enough to try to make a “case” out of me for him to “cure.” He’s been like a brother to me, a brother I never had. That’s why I’m most grateful to him.
But when you come right down to it, Bix furnished me impetus and confidence; encouragement and little more. The rest was up to me. It always is. Nobody else can make of you what you don’t want to be. It was as Bix said to me that first night we talked. If you’re a paranoid—and who isn’t, in this age of depersonalization and alienation— nobody can work a cure on you until you decide you don’t want to be a paranoid. Then, it doesn’t take much help.
Me, I hadn’t ever really tried to figure it out, but way down deep inside, I’d wanted to remain the way I was. It wasn’t the most comfortable of lives, and it got me into trouble I didn’t want sometimes, but it was familiar. It was my own rut of existence; it was comfortable. If Bix’s therapies did anything for me, they prodded me from that rut. They made the rut a little less comfortable, and they made me a little more critically self-aware.
Basically, I didn’t trust other people. I never had; I’d hardly been given any reason to. My mother would ignore me for weeks at a time, and then suddenly shower me with gifts I didn’t want and a show of affection which I couldn’t believe in and couldn’t accept. My father was more consistent: he just ignored me. From the time I learned to read, my world was Books. I had devoured every book I could get my hands on, fiction and nonfiction alike. When I discovered that I could actually learn things in school, there was no stopping me. I lived in an intellectual world. You could trust facts. It was people you had to look out for.
I developed a shell of competency, of self-reliance. But inside, I was alone and afraid. I knew I was different. I knew I was missing something—missing out on a vital aspect of life.
Sometimes at night, while I waited for sleep to come, I would create monstrous fantasies about myself. They usually involved torture and ill-treatment at the hands of others. I was a Horatio Alger kid-hero, mistreated by everyone around him, yet somehow winning through. Sometimes I won through, and came back to either sneer at my former tormentors, or to forgive them in a burst of Christian magnanimity. On other, blacker occasions, I did not win through. I would lose an arm, or leg, or both, and haunt those who’d done it to me with their own shame.
The symbolism of it is obvious to me now, as I write this. I wanted to get back at my parents—shame them— for the way they had amputated a part of my life; my emotional security.
It was a sick kind of fantasying, and all the more terrible to me now for the way in which I then accepted its normalcy. A part of myself churned with self-pity. “They don’t understand me; no one does,” I told myself. It was easy to fall into the pattern of doing things that could be misinterpreted and held against me. “They don’t understand me,” I could say to myself, a familiar chant that always comforted me, and in so doing, reinforced the wall that formed my emotional prison. It was a lousy way to live, but it was my "way of living. I clung to it.
You can do a lot of thinking when you are hurtling through space, hours between destinations, no chores to distract yo
ur preoccupations.
It wouldn’t be true to say that in that long and fearful period after I launched myself into a higher orbit, my life actually passed before my eyes. But it did, in a sense, pass in review.
I realized that in what I was doing, I was gambling everything I had, on one roll of the dice. I was betting with my life. And that forced me to do some serious thinking about it. It forced me to realize that my life was too precious to throw away half used, tightly clenched within my shell of defenses, remaining a loner. I’d had tastes of what human companionship, friendship—and maybe even someday love—were, and could be like. As I hugged myself to myself up there, high in orbit over Mother Earth, I realized that life was too precious a gift to waste as I had been wasting it. Living meant taking responsibilities for myself, sure—I had been doing that to some degree— but it also meant taking responsibilities for others as well. Bix, he was concerned about me. To that extent, he had assumed a certain responsibility for me. It was a lesson I needed to learn. I needed to learn to care about people.
I resolved that if I ever returned safely to the Station, it would be a lesson I would learn.
Chapter 13
I CHECKED MY CHRONOMETER. Two hours had passed.
I was taking the Slow Route; a tug, with its vastly greater thrusting power, could’ve made the trip half a dozen times. I had only my lightweight backpack jets.
And now it was time to use them again.
The dot of reflected sunlight that was the Station was far behind me. It took a careful search to pick it out against the dotted velvet backdrop of stars.
I angled myself until I was pointing down, toward Earth. The Pacific Ocean yawned invitingly below.
Again timing myself with my chronometer, I fired my thrusters.
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