Space

by James A. Michener

  At first Rachel was unable to interpret this jargon, but when patrons in other booths began to stand in order to see the wronged child and the boy who had committed this sexual assault, she realized with horror that they were staring at her son Christopher, who had slipped back into the sandwich shop, his face red with confusion and shame.

  “Goddamned degenerate,” a woman snarled at Chris as he slinked past.

  “Mummy!” the little girl continued to scream, not unpleased with the commotion she was causing. “He showed me his you-know-what.”

  On the fourth repetition of this unfortunate phrase, Rachel wanted to sink into the floor, just disappear, die maybe, and she thought that if the child uttered that stupid sentence once more, she, Rachel, would strangle her. But then, in the agonizing pause while the flustered waitress tried to add her check, Rachel thought of another man in her family, Uncle Donald, who had never been able to [358] control himself where women were concerned. He loved them, respected them, but never discovered a sensible procedure for living with them. There was the awful scandal when as the happily married father of three he ran off with a pretty clerk in the drugstore, and the worse affair when he exposed himself to four little girls, not forgetting the time he was horsewhipped outside a bank.

  Rachel, her face beet-red, thought of Uncle Donald and wondered if young Chris was destined to follow in his flamboyant steps, and she could hear her mother informing all the neighbors: “Donald’s not a Saltonstall, thank God.”

  For the fifth time the little girl explained to the patrons what Chris had done, and then mercifully the check arrived. Rachel paid it and was about to stalk out of the restaurant when she instinctively stopped, reached for her son’s hand, and brought him to her.

  “You ought to take that one to a good psychiatrist,” a customer snarled, and it was this that infuriated Rachel most. In the street, beside the shrubbery in which the crime had occurred, she thought: In California they think they can solve everything with a good psychiatrist. And she was about to apply the simpler cure of Massachusetts and swat her son, right there in the street, when he said, not in self-pity, “She asked me to.”

  “I’m sure she did,” Rachel said eagerly, embracing her son in sight of the customers.

  At home that afternoon she sat in a darkened room, trying unhysterically to sort out not only this messy affair but also the general relationships within her family. She was bored with her mother’s simplistic, social-climbing ways and felt little rapport with her; the decades had passed too swiftly and Mrs. Saltonstall Lindquist had not kept up. She was relieved that Uncle Donald had scuttled away after one of his episodes and was now living in Minneapolis, where the colder climate seemed to have defused him. She was deeply in love with Stanley and appreciated increasingly the intelligence and judgment of this bespectacled wizard; curiously, she enjoyed trying to follow him in his abstruse exploration of the stars and she understood when he asked her to frame the glossy photograph of NGC-4565 which he now kept over his desk. From time [359] to time she had intimations that Stanley might even be a genius, not in the Einstein class, of course, but at least the equal of any of the professors at MIT, for whom she had enormous regard.

  But now she could think only of their sons, and her feeling that they were heading into deep trouble. And she realized that it had been Stanley’s weakness, and hers, too: over the years, as her husband had become increasingly immersed in his work, he had drawn further away from his children, and she had made little effort to challenge this.

  Millard’s surfing friends were, well, dubious. They were bronzed and trim, but they weren’t what one might call healthy, and this was proved by the weird assortment of girls they seemed to prefer. In thinking of these strange girls, she used one of the California words she disliked most heartily: None of them are cuddly. She couldn’t help laughing: You’ve got to hand it to California. Sometimes it does come up with the right word. And not one of those girls is cuddly.

  She wondered if she had been. She wondered if any living human being ever saw herself as she presented herself, sexually, to the world. She was quite sure that the little girl gorging her Fritter Fries and ketchup now thought of herself as a prim, reserved child who had been wronged; her mother thought of her as a virgin angel; and Rachel thought of her as a little degenerate in training to become a prostitute.

  And then she had a really ugly thought: I would rather that Millard be mixed up with that pitiful little girl, when she gets a few years older, than with the sterile things Millard’s been bringing here. And finally she saw clearly the corroding situation that faced her family: Millard’s a homosexual. I think he’ll always be.

  At last the composure fled, and in the darkened room she wept. She had said, long ago, that the measure of a woman was how she organized her space, and she had accomplished miracles: the neat rooms, the Mondrians on the wall to establish the standards; her unflinching support of her husband regardless of what luck he was in; her repeated work with others less fortunate; and her constant concern with political problems. All these had given [360] evidence of her good intentions. How, then, could her sons be stumbling into so much trouble?

  Christopher’s escapade with the Fritter Fries girl, as Rachel was already calling her, was no light matter; it bespoke a young lad who gave multiple signs of becoming just like his great-uncle Donald, an unstable, bewildered male who fell prey to anything in skirts. And it wasn’t only the sexual problem that caused Rachel’s apprehension about her younger son; like his older brother, the boy seemed absolutely drawn to the weaker members of his class in school, and he had already been detected twice in doubtful performances, not the rowdy exhibitionism of young males but the sneaky destruction of property and the flouting of authority.

  This time she would speak sternly to her husband about these matters and demand that no matter how urgent his work at Cal Tech, he must become more concerned with his sons and take steps to try to ensure that they developed into responsible persons. There’s time, she assured herself. Even the Fritter Fries girl could be rescued if someone snatched her away from that impossible mother. Millard and Christopher can both be saved.

  So when Stanley Mott returned to his rented rooms that afternoon, 25 May 1961, his attention should have been concentrated on what young Chris had done at noon, but instead he burst into the apartment aflame with excitement. “Have you heard the news? Where’s Millard? We must all listen to the television.”

  Millard was spending the night with one of his surfing buddies, but the rest of the family gathered for the six o’clock news to hear a replay of President Kennedy’s message to Congress:

  “Now is the time to take longer strides-time for a great new American enterprise-time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth.

  “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth. No single space project in this period will be more [361] impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

  When the President finished speaking, Stanley leaped out of his chair. “They told us at the laboratory, but I couldn’t believe it. “Before this decade is out.” That’s only nine years. Rachel, do you realize the work that will have to be done!”

  She tried repeatedly to divert his attention to their sons, but she could see that he was inflamed by wild visions of what impended, and once she was even foolish enough to allow herself to be momentarily distracted from her mission. “If it happens, what role would you have?”

  This allowed him to speculate, all through dinner, on the possible channels into which his career might flow. “Thanks to Cal Tech, I know about as much about the Moon as anyone else on board. But if we accomplish what the President outlined ... Don’t you see? As soon as we reach the Moon we’ll be drawn irresistibly
to Mars and Jupiter. Inevitably. And that’s where I’ll really be able to contribute.”

  When his enthusiasm had spent itself, and he returned from Saturn windblown and bearing the dust of stars, she sent Christopher to bed and asked her husband to turn off the news program and sit attentively while she said something of considerable importance. Whenever she spoke like this, perhaps twice a year, Stanley dropped whatever he was doing and said, “Yes?” for he knew that his wife was not a frivolous woman.

  She was forty-one that night, a handsome, disciplined woman who had tended herself and who looked sternly competent as she said, “Your older son is spending the night with that dreadful Clarendon boy, who I know is a homosexual. Your younger son distinguished himself in a public restaurant by exposing himself to a ten-year-old girl who had been gormandizing on greasy Fritter Fries. Stanley, you have a problem with your sons. We have a problem.”

  It was unfair to drag a man down off the stars, and on a night like this, to make him survey the condition of his sons’ lives, and Stanley Mott was not equal to the [362] challenge. “Ten-year-olds! Rachel, didn’t you ever play doctor when you were young?”

  The last six months of Mott’s residence at Cal Tech would be remembered as the most difficult period of his life, because he was deeply engaged in completing his doctorate-Theoretical Treatment of Several Multibody Influences on Procedures for Launching a Manned Flight to the Moon and Returning Its Passengers Safely-and he allowed nothing to divert him. But when NASA realized how directly his doctorate impinged on the challenge thrown out by President Kennedy, it was inevitable that he be asked to participate in some of the most crucial debates ever engaged in by America’s scientific community. Great scholars of the most exalted reputation, two with Nobel Prizes, were scrapping with one another, not over some erudite refinement of a concept but over a practical matter on which depended the reputation of the United States: What strategy should be adopted to land a man on the Moon and get him back safely ... now?

  The administrator himself stopped by Cal Tech to impress upon Mott the gravity of this debate. “Everything hangs on our making the right choice. Your field of expertise qualifies you to join the committee.”

  “I’m honored, sir, but I have my thesis to complete.”

  “If you help us get our men on the Moon, you’ll have a real-life doctorate any man would envy.”

  “Could I do your work, and finish my work here at Cal Tech at the same time?”

  “A superman could. I’d probably have tried in my day and fallen flat.”

  “Can I try? I mean, may I try?”

  “You may.”

  He would never forget those months. In the heat of committee debate he would boldly oppose two revered academicians, knocking down their recommendations with his new-found knowledge, then return to the campus, where he would listen meekly as the Cal Tech professors lambasted the analytical procedures in his thesis. It was a game of such vivid intellection, such cyclonic changes of concept that he could scarcely keep all the facets in view, and sometimes he feared that his brain might simply call a halt and cease to work, but then some completely wild [363] suggestion would be made, forcing him to reorganize all his data and speculative ability, and just as he had taken three weeks off to digest that immortal photograph of NGC-4565, he would quit whatever he was doing and attack this new problem.

  Such a digression now arose. A group of distinguished astronomers presented NASA and, by means of a press conference, the nation, with grave doubts about the feasibility of actually landing a man on the Moon; they did not mean the engineering difficulty of getting him there or the scientific mystery of enabling him to find his way without a compass; they meant the terrible dangers that might arise when a man tried to step down upon the Moon.

  “There is a strong likelihood that the surface is composed of lunar dust about fifteen feet thick into which the man would disappear,” argued three of the experts.

  “Judging from preliminary analyses, the surface might be composed of materials in such delicate balance that they could well ignite or even explode when subjected to pressure from a human foot,” another group said.

  “The real danger will be the heat beneath the lunar surface, enough when agitated to melt metal,” submitted one man.

  “No,” said another, “what photographs we have indicate the possibility of deep crevices into which machine and men alike will tumble.”

  One scientist, whose self-imposed task it was to keep conversant with European studies, informed the committee that an Italian astrophysicist of impeccable reputation had conducted experiments which proved conclusively that a human being could not walk-could not manipulate his body joints-in any ambience with gravity less than one-fifth of that on Earth. “And you’re proposing that our man walk in gravity as low as one-sixth, on the Moon. It can’t be done.” This confused even Mott.

  And the medical men whom the dissidents consulted identified the real fear: “There is a strong probability that the Moon contains diseases unknown on Earth. They will either strike down the humans who land among them, or attach themselves to those humans and run riot if brought to Earth where no counterstrains are known.”

  These fears became so pervasive that NASA had to 3 institute a commission to confront them, and Mott, as a [364] leading selenologist, was invited to participate; so for some months his major attention, when not completing his doctorate, was focused on these challenging problems, and it was he who drew up the conclusions which would govern procedures until the moment when men actually stepped upon the lunar surface:

  We are entitled to operate on the principle that the Moon has a solid crust which will support the weight of a man. Crevices may well exist, but the principal part of the surface, especially in the belt which most concerns us, appears to be free of them. The risk of stumbling into an undetected one is so small that it can be taken. We find no evidence that the surface is or will become inflammable. We have no experience with one-sixth gravity, but experiments are under way to simulate it. With our present knowledge, we see no impediment to free movement.

  We are aware of the Italian studies which prove that man cannot walk in a gravity of less than one-fifth, but we are loath to accept these findings and shall conduct our own investigations immediately.

  Speculation that the Moon may harbor virulent strains of unknown viruses must be taken seriously, and our medical team is going to recommend three weeks of quarantine for any human or object returning from the Moon.

  Setting aside all other matters, including even work on his doctorate and speculation about farthest space, Mott concentrated on this practical question of whether a mar could control his joints and body movements in one-sixth gravity, and the place he turned to for instruction way Langley, where he found two men who had anticipated this curiosity, attacking it in a way that illustrated the inventiveness of the human mind. As the senior investigator said, “The problem was forthright. How do you place a man in one-sixth gravity? The solution was simple.”

  What they had done was go to a very high gantry, already in existence, from which a cable 155 feet long could be suspended. At the ground ingenious body [365] supports were attached to the supposed astronaut’s head, shoulders, hips and legs. A wall was leaned back 9.5° off the vertical, and when the astronaut, suspended by the cable so that five-sixths of his weight was carried by the wires, walked against this inclined board, he experienced only one-sixth gravity. It was imaginative and perfect.

  Mott insisted that he be placed in the gear, and as soon as he was suspended and allowed to stand against the inclined wall, he understood the mathematical principle. If the wall was inclined 90° to the ground, his entire weight would be held by the cable and he would experience null gravity. If the wall was laid flat on the ground, the cable would carry none of his weight, and he would experience the normal gravity of Earth. At 9.5° off the vertical the geometry was such that he discovered what one-sixth gravity meant.

  In this condition he
ran, jumped, bent down, twisted, climbed a ladder, leaped from a height of thirty feet, and fell slowly, comfortably back to the wall, and then, running as best he could in the dreamlike ambience, he marshaled all his strength and leaped right over a twenty-foot fence-an astonishing feat. The experience was so exhilarating that he wanted to remain in the gear long after the experiment ended, and watchers took photographs of this slender man in steel-rimmed glasses, forty-three years old, running like a gooney bird on Wake Island and leaping great fences like Aladdin or Buck Rogers.

  When he submitted his final report, conceding only that there might be malignant viruses, which, however, he felt could be controlled, he was attacked on all sides, but he stubbornly refused to make any concessions: the Moon was approachable, it was not deadly, and men could walk upon it. For three weeks following the release of his conclusions he was required to defend them before scientific bodies, groups of reporters and television cameras, and with every recitation of his findings he became more obdurate in his support of them. He became NASA’s Moon man, and having cleared the way intellectually for the great experiment, he now worked assiduously to make it succeed. All his daylight hours and many of his dinners were devoted to Moon problems, and often it was not till eleven at night that he found time to work on his doctoral thesis, and he [366] would sit hunched over his desk till two or three in the morning, when Rachel made him come to bed.

  As a member of the Moon Committee, Mott was told that five major solutions to the problem of lunar landing had been proposed, and it was impressed upon him that if a landing were to be accomplished by 1969, as Kennedy had promised, a choice among them had to be made quickly and correctly. “I can never determine which obligation is the more important,” one scientist said, “speed or accuracy.”