Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Schumpeter summarized the tests: ‘This is a wonderful material. Perfect in every requirement, except one. It weighs five times too much per cubic inch.’ And when he placed his calculations on the board they supported his objection: ‘You’ve given me an excellent material for protecting Mack trucks on their way through Arizona. Now let’s find something for a spaceship.’ So Mott’s team went back to work.

  In many ways Mott epitomized his nation and his culture. Despite the fact that he had ignored the pioneering work of Robert Goddard, he had been forced by German successes in World War II to take rocketry seriously, and this had led him into making advanced studies of the upper atmosphere, and once he comprehended the nature of that mystical ocean he was driven to master it with rocket vehicles and imaginative instruments to measure the heating rate which would have to be neutralized before man could venture upward through the atmosphere, break loose from it, and then return through its fiery heat. His two most recent publications indicated the intensity of his study:

  Schumpeter, Karl and Mott, Stanley: Controlled Rocket Experiments, Three Stages Up, Two Stages Down, Testing the Ablative Characteristics of Eight Alternative Configurations. 1957.

  Mott, Stanley: Nineteen Ablative Coefficients of Seventeen Fabricated Materials. 1958. (Secret)

  His speculation about the future had started with his innocent question on the beach at Wallops: If we’d used those last two rockets to maintain our upward velocity …’ He had known the answer before he framed it; if his studies helped men to penetrate the atmosphere and return safely through it, the next step must be to shoot them into brief orbit, and after that to send them on sustained orbits, and from that platform to challenge the Moon, then Mars, then Jupiter, then the Galaxy, and on to the very edges of the universe.

  How simple his first steps along this path had been: algebra in grammar school, trigonometry in high school, calculus in college, and now the majestic problem: If we should ever want to send a rocket to the Moon, what trajectory would we use? The questions, the possibilities were endless, and although he could not yet chart specific solutions, he saw with great clarity that the proper approach was to apply to each chance assignment his complete brain power, trusting that other men like himself were applying their power to their contributory tasks.

  He worked nine weeks, incessantly, his glasses blurring from perspiration and from the fumes of his testing, and in the end he helped produce a master ablative material, light as soft wood, sturdy as hardened steel, quick to evaporate and carry away heat, but stubbornly averse to burning. When Schumpeter put these figures on his board he cried, ‘We have it!’ and one more step in the infinite process of commanding space was completed.

  Funds for the kind of experimentation Stanley Mott was engaged in were provided by a grudging Congress, which often masked the purpose of the work by allocating the money not to NACA but to the military, for Schumpeter’s studies of reentry applied equally to a ballistic missile of the Army, a rocket of the Navy, and a putative spacecraft of NACA.

  NACA now had a staff of about 7,000, and with branch centers like Ames and Wallops Island, it controlled research facilities worth more than $400,000,000, so funding became a major problem. Fortunately, Lyndon Johnson, the power in the Senate, supported the aviation program and its ramifications in space, but he had to assign the difficult task of shepherding the necessary bills through Congress to the two Western senators, Glancey and Grant, and it was for this reason that Senator Grant saw less and less of his fragile wife, Elinor, who often stayed behind in Clay when he attended the sessions in Washington. As for visiting the NACA bases, which her husband had to do with increasing frequency, this she refused to do, whether she was in Clay or in Washington, yet she continued to protest whenever she saw a photograph or news story which indicated that Mrs. Pope had accompanied the committee.

  Her principal concern, however, was not her husband’s probable infidelity with the secretary of his committee, but the ominous fact that little men from outer space had been visiting Earth for some time and were about to make themselves generally known prior to assuming control of world government.

  She had come upon her knowledge of impending invasion in a curious way. While waiting in her hairdresser’s salon in her hometown city of Clay, she had idly picked up one of the lurid magazines provided the clients, but was repelled by the crime and sex it reported and was about to put it aside when toward the back a well-prepared advertisement caught her eye.

  It featured the photograph of a world-famous scientist, Dr. Leopold Strabismus of Uppsala, a distinguished-looking man with large head, neatly trimmed black beard, and penetrating eyes which transfixed the reader. Mrs. Grant immediately liked this learned man, for he radiated assurance and knowledge, and she could almost hear him speaking his message:

  WILL YOU BE READY WHEN THEY COME?

  President Eisenhower knows about them. So do his Joint Chiefs of Staff. So does the Airlines Pilots Association. So does J. Edgar Hoover, and it is his job to keep this dramatic knowledge from the public.

  Who are they? The Visitors from Outer Space. The little men behind the Flying Saucers you’ve heard about. You know, of course, that they have already landed at numerous places in America, but what you don’t know is that they have organized a program for taking over our government and bringing sanity to our troubled world.

  The advertisement went on to promise that if the reader joined Universal Space Associates—in California, of course—and paid its modest yearly dues, she or he would receive monthly reports on the activities of the Visitors and advance information on their future plans: ‘You will be saved and the others won’t.’

  When Mrs. Grant returned to her home, her hair neatly arranged after her weekly visit, she was so haunted by the memorable features of Dr. Strabismus, and so concerned about his warning, that when she rose the next morning she hurried back to her hairdresser’s with pad and pencil to take down the California address. When she wrote to USA she not only asked for information about the little men in their space machines, but also confided her abiding fears to Dr. Strabismus, hoping that he might give consolation.

  I am a woman with a college education who endeavors to keep abreast of what is happening in my world. My husband is engaged in some kind of mysterious work with the government, and I am certain it concerns the Visitors from Outer Space that you speak of.

  He refuses to tell me what his business is, and I am growing fearful that very bad things are about to happen to us and would appreciate hearing from you.

  When the letter reached headquarters in a suburb of Los Angeles, a young woman, who represented one-third of USA, was about to address an envelope and mail back the glossy promotional literature that showed the actual landing of a flying saucer, when the name of the correspondent in Fremont caused her to hesitate. ‘Dr. Strabismus, you’d better look at this! I think this woman’s husband could be a senator on the Space Committee.’

  From the second of the two rooms which constituted USA a tall, heavy, youngish man with a beard came to inspect the suspicious letter, which he held to the light at various angles. He asked to see the envelope, which his secretary retrieved from the wastebasket, and then he telephoned the reference desk at the local library. Elinor Grant, of Clay, Fremont, was indeed the wife of Senator Norman Grant, a leading member of the Space Committee, and the letter was obviously a transparent attempt to entrap USA. Dr. Strabismus was too clever to be caught in that bind. ‘You haven’t mailed her anything?’

  ‘I was just about to.’

  ‘Do nothing. Let me keep this.’ And he took the suspicious correspondence into his office, where he placed it on his desk—to be studied gingerly as if it were a triggered bomb.

  From his early days in Mount Vernon, New York, when he was Martin Scorcella—Jewish mother, Italian Catholic father—he had kept running only a few steps ahead of the police, and at one of the universities enlarged by the state of New York to accommodate the flood of World War II vete
rans, he had actually been arrested by campus security forces for retrieving the discarded mimeograph forms from which examinations for large classes had been printed, and had escaped punishment by brazenly confronting the university’s authorities: ‘Can you afford a scandal? Do you want the papers to know how many students bought copies of my exams?’

  ‘Exams?’ the dean of instruction had asked.

  ‘Yes, exams. I’ve been doing it for three terms.’

  The university calculated that young Scorcella had earned some $9,000 from his stolen pages and sent him flying. He landed in a small room in New Haven, Connecticut, where he wrote term papers for Yale undergraduates and sometimes graduates, an easy task, for he had a wide acquaintance with scholarly literature and a facile pen for adapting it. ‘Creative plagiarism,’ he called it.

  He was never arrested by the New Haven authorities, for they could think of no local ordinance on which to charge him, but after he had composed some ninety different papers and theses, he awakened to the fact that he was working very long hours to help brainless young men compile the grades that would enable them to earn a great deal of money without working half as diligently as he, and he became quite irritated by the unfairness of such a system.

  His numerous papers in physics and geology, including three doctoral theses, had generated a sincere interest in science and an appreciation of its limitations. When excitement over flying saucers became a national fever, he foresaw that with the intellectual climate in such turmoil any bright young man capable of manipulating it was going to earn himself a fortune, so he grew a beard, which lent force to his powerful face, took down his sign DIPLOMA BY YALE/EDUCATION BY SCORCELLA, and awarded himself the name Leopold Strabismus, borrowing the first from Leopold Stokowski, whose Bach transcriptions he liked, and the second from a medical term he had used in a thesis.

  For about five months he brooded in Mount Vernon, trying to visualize some operation that would place him at the center of the scientific revolution which he knew was coming, and consistently his mind reverted to the word space as used in the popular newspaper stories about ‘the little men from outer space.’ He saw that this was going to be the charismatic word which would unlock enormous possibilities, but his first attempts to capitalize upon it in New York were unproductive; he then realized that the really effective manipulators of such projects were headquartered in California: ‘They have an unlimited supply of whackos out there.’ He kissed his mother goodbye, moved to Los Angeles, and hired a secretary who loved the nonsense of life and an adroit Mexican-American named Elizondo Ramirez, who was exceptional in handling both minor forgeries and major business deals.

  He spent three months preparing the advertisements that would appear in the cheaper magazines, choosing each word to achieve major appeal, but at the end it was Ramirez who gave him the most effective ideas: ‘Chief, the best ads in this field I’ve ever seen, you standing in front of a wall containing six or seven framed diplomas, only the name of the university showing and best if it’s in Europe.’ Ramirez visited offices throughout the area, taking surreptitious photographs of surreptitious diplomas, which he delivered to an ingenious printer for copying. When the handsome documents were stood along the wall, and the time came to select Leopold’s major degree, the one to be featured in the ads, the two men vacillated between Utrecht, the Sorbonne, Vienna and Uppsala. Strabismus inclined toward the middle pair, but Ramirez warned: ‘Chief, half the quacks out here use either Sorbonne or Vienna. Stay away from them.’ In the end they chose Uppsala because its double pp produced a fine scientific ring.

  When it came to naming the great research center, Strabismus found that he was not happy with any proposed so far and started over. Ramirez applauded this decision: ‘Everything depends on the right name, like a story I saw the other day,’ and he produced a clipping about an elderly lady who had given UCLA three million dollars. When asked how she had accumulated so much, she said, ‘I knew I knew nothing about stocks, so I just ordered Merrill Lynch to put all my husband’s insurance money into Americans and Generals.’ When the reporter said he was still confused, she explained: ‘I knew that any company that was allowed to have American or General in its name had to be good.’

  The problem was solved by the secretary: ‘So what are the best initials in the country? USA.’ And Strabismus cried, ‘The S could stand for Space. What are the others?’ The three conspirators tried many solutions, but again it was the girl who produced the winner: ‘Universal Space Associates. I like the Universal because it sounds big and out there. And Associates gives the sense you’re in the middle of the operation.’

  Many of the agency’s most effective financial devices were contrived in these group brainstorming sessions. ‘Chief, best trick I ever saw, a doctor doing the cancer bit in Long Beach. Had a cure, seafood and walnuts, which brought him a lot of dough, but then we organized a circle of subscribers all across the country, and for seventy dollars extra a year we’d send them four personal telegrams reporting on last-minute breakthroughs. You’d be amazed how much extra those telegrams brought in.’

  USA proved much more profitable than Strabismus had anticipated, and he could have moved into more spacious quarters, with another four or five secretaries, but he took delight in running the research institute from the two cramped offices and with only his two original helpers: ‘I love the power of words. I get a real thrill out of sitting here and drafting the material that’s going to bring us millions one of these days.’

  The approach, as perfected by Ramirez, was simple: ‘Send us $44 and we’ll share with you our secret discoveries.’ For an additional $52, anyone really interested in the future of the world would receive every month an urgent letter signed by Dr. Strabismus himself, advising on recent activities of the little visitors. And for $76 more a year, one could receive telegraphic communication when events of shattering importance were about to happen.

  The three scientific investigators garnered over $80,000 that first year, aided by the flurry of flying saucers landing across the country, and when a hungry press invented the name Unidentified Flying Objects, Strabismus grabbed onto the acronym UFO and used it in all his advertisements, which made him a world authority on UFOs. It was then that his oratorical and television notoriety began to blossom.

  He learned that the United States contained several centers which could always be relied upon to produce major paid attendance for any symposium on UFOs: Boulder and the Denver area were very reliable; Dallas and Houston were high on the list; Miami was reliable and for some reason Seattle was good; New York was unreliable and cities like Philadelphia and Washington were disasters, showing little real interest in serious scientific experimentation; but the best of all was Boston, because meetings held there could be depended upon to attract skeptical professors from Harvard and MIT and also bright young men from Route 128, the Highway of Genius on which many of the nation’s major scientific firms were located, and these men sensed that they must be attentive to all ideas circulating in their society, no matter how abstruse or downright crazy. Many of their most effective discoveries had begun with ideas no less insane than those promulgated by Leopold Strabismus.

  In four years the outfit, still consisting of only three people, was clearing $190,000 a year, with unlimited possibilities, and it was therefore no trivial investment that Strabismus sought to protect against the danger represented by Mrs. Grant’s letter. When he discussed the matter with his associates he warned: ‘This is probably masterminded by her husband. Tempting us to commit fraud through the mails. Let’s sit tight on it.’ But three weeks later USA received an even more urgent letter from the senator’s wife, begging for assistance because her husband still refused to divulge what he was up to.

  ‘When am I scheduled into Boulder?’ Strabismus asked his secretary, and when she said that he had a major speech at the university four weeks hence, he directed her to send Mrs. Grant a carefully couched letter informing her that unfortunately the doctor was
absent for consultations with leading scientists from Europe, but that he would be in Boulder on April 16 and would be most happy to consult with her, should she care to make the short trip from her home in Clay.

  She attended the speech, listened with intense interest as he fended off critics from the Denver scientific community, and realized that she had at last come into contact with a man who understood what was happening in the world. She surprised him by suggesting that he drive back to Clay with her in her car, and when she heard the secret details of how little men had already landed, assumed human form, and infiltrated the highest levels of government, she was terrified by the danger not only to the United States but to humanity in general.

  ‘Ah, no!’ Strabismus reassured her. ‘We have every reason to believe that these visitors are amicable. With their superior intellect and technology, we should expect only the most beneficent assistance … if we listen to what they say.’

  ‘Are we listening? I mean, men like my husband, in positions of power?’

  ‘No, we are not.’ As he stared at the empty plains, overpowering to one raised as he had been in crowded New York, he confided: ‘These plains remind me of what the little men told me about parts of their planet.’

  ‘You’ve seen them?’

  ‘Of course! My first contact with them launched my dedication to research on other worlds.’

  ‘Were they indeed kindly, the ones you met?’

  He explained how they had sought him out because of his advanced work on extraterrestrial societies. It was in a valley north of San Francisco … well authenticated in the literature. They landed about three hundred yards from the highway and signaled me to join them.’