Space

by James A. Michener

  “And for his chance to prove his heroism,” Doris said and Penny, comparing the two widows, thought: How wonderfully American they are. Debby Dee, rock-hard from deepest Texas; Doris Linley, survivor of the Detroit ghettos. Which one made the greater journey to get here? And [649] although she knew it was exhibitionistic, she could not restrain herself; dashing across the room, she embraced them and for just a moment there were tears which could not be contained.

  After the stately ceremonies with the seventeen-gun salutes and the muffled drums, Debbie Dee, a blowzy woman of forty-seven, who had maintained a gracious, solemn posture for Thompson’s cameras during nine heartbreaking days, grabbed Doris Linley’s hand and growled, “Let’s get the hell out of here and find some beer.” They drove in their government limousine to Penny Pope’s Washington apartment, where with John and Cindy Rhee they guzzled beer through the night.

  “Randy Claggett was one of the world’s basic men,” Debby Dee said, “and I was privileged to know him. Good times and bad, he was one hell of a man.”

  “What was it like, Deb, when you were widowed the first time?” Cindy asked, and after this had been explored for more than half an hour, she wanted to know how they had lived at Pax River.

  “Ask them,” Debby Dee said, pointing to the Popes, and for two hours they reminisced about the days at Solomons Island, the old cars, the Pax-Jax-Lax routine, the dogfights above the Chesapeake.

  “What was it like?” Cindy asked Doris. “I mean, his being black and not a military man?”

  “Everything Paul did, and he did so much, he started way behind. Black boys always do. But he caught up fast. At the end he was as good as any of them.” And she looked to Captain Pope for confirmation.

  “In brains he was better than most,” John said. “In courage no one surpassed him.” When he tried to visualize Linley, all he could see was the irrepressible comedian leading cheers for Albuquerque Technological Institution, and he had to subdue a smile, but after a while he said, “For sixty-six hours and seventeen minutes he was my seatmate in space. None better.” Then he walked across the room and kissed Doris.

  When the night was almost gone, Cindy said, “I loved him in a different way. The symbol ...”

  “If there was one thing Claggett wasn’t,” Debby said, “it was a symbol. That sonnombeech was basic.”

  “He was the astronaut,” Cindy said. “Not Glenn, not [650] Shepard, not you, John Pope. He spent more hours in space than any other man, and I watched him. He approached a spacecraft as if he owned it. Once he said as he left for the sixteen-day flight with you, Pope, ‘Well, let’s see how we fly this bucket of bolts.’ ”

  Debby Dee wiped her eyes, and later, in her hotel room, Rhee Soon-Ka started her manuscript about the Solid Six:

  They took a dark stone and stood it in a dark place, publishing to the world that Randy Claggett was dead. But we who knew him were convinced that his spirit still stunned and startled and confused the ribbon clerks, as always.

  MARS

  THE national excitement over John Pope’s heroic odyssey lasted eleven days, and then the nation awakened to the fact that never again in this century would an American walk on the Moon. The enchantment of Apollo vanished, the glory of the astronaut dimmed.

  Dr. Loomis Crandall, the Air Force psychologist who had helped select the various groups of spacemen and who knew more about them than any other official, compiled a condescending summary which infuriated Mott:

  Our sensible astronauts, correctly assessing the national mood, are resigning from the program, seeking employment in business, but most often merely drifting from one public relations job to another for the good reason that they have no basic skills except calculus and astrophysics.

  True, John Glenn has gone to the Senate and Frank Borman to an airline, but the typical astronaut is Ed Cater, who left NASA to front for a real estate developer in Miami, then to an insurance company in New Orleans, and now to a used-car dealership in his hometown of Kosciusko, where his wife has become a partner in a dress shop and earns more than he does.

  [652] Nine of the finest we had are dead. All the living comported themselves with a heroism and dignity of which we can be proud. But, we can also be disappointed, for they produced no national spokesman for space, no poet of the skies like Saint-Exupéry of France. They were in effect red-hot test pilots who transformed themselves into red-hot spacecraft pilots-and nothing more. In this limited response they reflected the national attitude toward space.

  When Mott finished reading, he stormed into headquarters, eyes blazing behind his steel-rimmed glasses, a small, wiry man whose most sensitive nerves had been abused. When he found Crandall in the administrator’s office he bored right in: “Let’s take an equal number of graduate from the Harvard School of Business, from Cal Tech, MIT and Notre Dame and let’s compare records. Glenn a senator. They tell me Schmitt of New Mexico might make it next time. Borman at Eastern Airlines. Anders an ambassador. Young men doing wonderful things way beyond their age qualification. I’ll put my astronauts up against any group you assemble, Crandall, including an equal number of Ph.D.’s in psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychosometric voodoo.”

  “Stanley,” the administrator interrupted, “Crandall’s only writing a report.”

  “Well, I don’t like it. I do not like to see the great work done by this agency denigrated. If our program is grinding to a halt, it’s not because it was a bad program, but because we stopped too soon.”

  In this fighting mood he trudged up to the Capitol to defend NASA in one more public hearing, and normally he would have been the quiet, self-effacing scientist on whom Congress had come to rely. But on this morning a senator from North Dakota had asked why NASA lagged so far behind private industry in certain learned fields, and Mott almost lost his temper:

  “NASA is private industry, Senator. We make nothing. We’re a grandiose procurement agency, one of the best this world has ever seen. We’ve spent more than fifty billion dollars since I came aboard, without a single case of fraud or embezzlement or [653] malfeasance. The nation has never had to apologize for our behavior, and although I can give you a dozen examples where in my opinion we chose the wrong contractor, you cannot give me one where we awarded that contract fraudulently. I would be proud if all government operations could say the same.”

  Yet, even as he defended his agency Mott realized it was beginning to retreat from its days of grandeur, and he told his young assistants, “We ought to be taking bold new steps in space, dispatching spacecraft with and without men to probe the farthest frontiers. When we do this, philosophers will face new complexities and be forced to explain them to the public.” At a conference of astrophysicists at Purdue University he warned:

  “Within the last few years we have made discoveries which stagger the knowing mind. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson have identified the residue reverberations of the original explosion which set our universe in motion. Maarten Schmidt has made brilliant deductions about the speed at which distant galaxies travel. Hawking at Cambridge asks awesome questions about quasars, pulsars and black holes, and I believe we must rethink all our basic concepts.

  “How will the general public react? Three precedents provide some guidance.

  “Copernicus kept his new knowledge largely to himself, and when the Church objected to his conclusions, he stifled them. His immediate impact was nil, but his ultimate effect on morals, theology and individual comprehension was profound.

  “Giordano Bruno flaunted his radical theories, irritating Catholics and Protestants equally. He agitated society by pointing out the consequences of scientific discoveries, and in the end, was burned at the stake to refute his astronomical heresies.

  “Charles Darwin’s work produced so many shattering implications that he was rebutted immediately, and since his theory of evolution abused religious [654] sensibilities, it aroused intense opposition which has not yet abated.

  “I believe that the speculations w
e have awakened regarding the ultimate nature of the universe must disturb our generations as profoundly as Darwin’s theories affected his. Whenever we stand on a threshold, as we do now, we must inescapably bring into question positions held previously, and when such revision involves the origin of the universe, we find ourselves on inflammable ground and must anticipate vigorous rebuttal.”

  Mott had always been a religious man. His father, after all, had been a Methodist minister, and young Mott had been raised with the Bible as a constant presence. At one time he had been able to recite from memory the names of the books of both Testaments, a skill which he found useful in later years when he wished to locate a quotation, but he had also known their content rather thoroughly, and this, too, had been significant, for it prevented him from slipping thoughtlessly into a cliché “scientist-as-atheist” position. When his father’s ministerial friends railed against Darwin’s theory of evolution, he was never contemptuous in his attempts to defend it, and if they pressed, “But do you believe in God?” he was always able to answer without dissembling, “Yes, I do.”

  But he also believed, without even the smallest nagging question, that mankind evolved in much the same way that the Sun had evolved from primordial matter, and he believed this because when he inspected the heart of existing galaxies, including our own, he could watch stars evolving from great clouds of matter. This was fact, not theory, and he could conceive of no alternative. He supposed that when religionists abused Darwin and proposed an instant, godlike creation, they were merely saying what he was saying, but in a more poetic form, and therefore he felt no sense of opposition to his father’s affirmation of his belief.

  But he also believed without any reservation whatever that this universe of which he and his Earth and his Sun were a part had come into being-that is, in its present form-about eighteen billion years ago, with the Earth assuming its existence and shape about four and a half [655] billion years ago. When his father’s friends insisted that the Book of Genesis was the accurate statement, he was able to agree: “It’s a poetic version. It says about the same thing I’ve been saying, except that its word day is best understood to mean a vast geologic era.”

  If debaters tried to make him deny that the billions of years required for the formation of Sun and Earth ever existed, and if they argued that all the magnificent galactic structure came into being a mere six or seven thousand years ago, with geological strata and dinosaur bones hidden in place like some jolly theological treasure hunt, he refused to argue. “Possible but not likely” was all he would respond.

  The real question in this debate had been posed by his father: “If I concede, Stanley, that the universe did begin with your big bang eighteen billion years ago, tell me what set that bang in motion?”

  “Science has no answer to that.”

  “Was it not God?”

  “I think so. Or some force mysteriously like God.” But when his father smiled in philosophical relief, his son insisted upon adding, “The big bang could not have taken place 4004 B.C.”

  “Fair deal,” the elderly minister said. “I’ll give you your billions of years if you’ll give me my God.”

  Once while vacationing between meetings he listened to a park ranger on the rim of the Grand Canyon describing to some tourists how that trivial stream, the Colorado River, had through the ages cut the gorge from one level of rock to another until the masterpiece stood revealed, and after the ranger ended his talk and went back to his office, Mott remained on the rim speculating on the beautiful accident by which the United States had acquired parks like this Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, and he silently congratulated those social pioneers who had fought the battles for succeeding generations: This canyon is totally unspoiled. Somebody deserves a lot of credit. And he could envisage someone like himself, three hundred years from now, standing on the edge of a canyon on Mars and saying, “That NASA gang, whoever they were, who reached here first, they did very little to destroy what they found,” and if he was proud of what his team had done, he was even more proud of what they had not done.

  [656] He had barely formulated such thoughts when a tall, awkward, flaming-eyed man stepped out of the crowd who had been listening to the park ranger’s description of how the canyon had evolved, and shouted for attention:

  “These park rangers, government employees, have been getting away with murder for too long. Standing here on government property and spreading lies that contradict Holy Scripture. Telling us yarns about how that little river down there took a hundred million years to sculpture this magnificent canyon. You know and I know that that’s a lie. That’s a damned lie, and one of these days, mark my words, park rangers like that are going to be held to account.

  “This noble canyon was born about five thousand years ago, no more, when God sent the planet Venus scraping along the edge of the Earth, building mountains and cutting gullies. You can look at that canyon and know in your hearts it can’t be a million years old. And a hundred million? That’s laughable. It was cut down when men like Moses and Jeremiah were living on this Earth, and it is not the handiwork of some puny little river; it is the handiwork of God.”

  He orated with fiery eloquence for nearly half an hour, holding Mott and the other vacationers captivated by his bold assertions, and at the end of his argument he cried, “Let’s have a show of hands. How many of you know in your hearts that I’m right and the park ranger is wrong?” To Mott’s surprise, more than half the listeners voted that the Grand Canyon of the Colorado could not be more than five thousand years old.

  Wherever he went these days the world seemed to be divided into two groups, the few who had followed the deeper researches of the astrophysicists and the many who appeared to long for a simpler universe, one with fewer speculative aspects, and this feeling intensified as the year 1976 approached, for across the land people yearned for a return to the simplicities of 1776.

  His son Millard was a case in point. When President Ford, following his pardon of Richard Nixon, offered a meager and grudging pardon to the young men who had [657] fled to Canada to escape the draft, Millard crept back to the Mott home under the most humiliating circumstances, even though, as he told his father, “everyone now concedes that men like me and Roger were right to protest. America knows that Vietnam was a horrible mistake.”

  Roger had refused to accept, America’s reluctant forgiveness and had elected to remain in Canada. When Millard told his parents of their separation, he burst into tears, and for the first time the older Motts realized what a deep human attachment their son had felt for Roger, and they were surprised the next day to learn that Millard was now living with a young man named Victor, who ran what was known as a “head shop” in Denver. They did a big business in astrology books, tarot cards, the I-Ching, and cheese-and-wine lectures by gurus from India who explained to the college students in the area how society ought to be organized.

  After Millard flew back to Colorado, Rachel Mott studiously tidied the apartment: the Mondrians were straightened on the living-room wall, the classical records were alphabetized again, excess books were placed in a corner to be given to the community college, and various unnecessary things which had accumulated were thrown away. When she finished getting all things in place, she sat on her bed and looked once more at the loving Axel Petersson figures carved in wood, and said to her husband, “Talking with Millard about his Roger and Victor was exactly like listening to a headstrong daughter who has divorced her banker husband and is living with an architect. It’s very difficult to keep values straight.”

  “Especially for people in their late fifties,” Stanley said.

  While brooding about his sons he idly thumbed a science magazine, and came upon a startling proposal by a scientist named Letterkill: “We should position in outer space a gigantic radio telescope whose distance between its two elements would be ten astronomical units. That would give us a base line of 900,000,000 miles.”

  His imagination ablaze, Mott started draw
ing diagrams at top speed, then explained the basic principle to his wife: “It’s magnificent! The problem of parallax carried to the ultimate. You know how a range finder on a battleship works? You have this very long base line, say ninety feet. The longer the better. And they have two small telescopes, [658] one at each end. And the difference in angle between how each looks at the same target can be converted into precise distance. Boom! Your big guns fire, hit the target and sink the enemy, all because you used parallax intelligently.”

  He proceeded to explain that earlier astronomers had determined star distances through clever applications of parallax: “On December 20 they took a photograph of the star Sirius. On June 20, when the Earth had moved halfway through its orbit and was as far away from its December position as possible, they took another photograph of the same star, using the same camera. Parallax revealed that Sirius was 8.6 light-years away.”

  He said that astronomers had already devised a vast radio telescope, one leg in California, the other in Australia, with each taking a “photograph” of some heavenly body at exactly the same moment, so that the differential in angles could determine distance: “But now what this fellow Letterkill proposes is to place a huge radio telescope atop a rocket and fire it a billion miles into space, and lock it there. Then fire the other half of the telescope out into space, a billion miles in the opposite direction. What a fantastic base line we’d have. Rachel, we could see to the outer edges of the universe.”