Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  The men kept close watch on Mrs. Grant over the weekend, and saw that by Sunday she was in a state of euphoria, for the old world had only one more complete day to run, and she was preoccupied in planning for the new. She speculated aloud as to who in the Senate and Cabinet would step forward at eleven o’clock EST to reveal himself as having been an agent of the Visitors, and she could think of only a few Republicans worthy of that role and no Democrats. Never for a minute did she consider her husband a possibility: he had condemned himself through his love affair with Mrs. Pope.

  And then, about noon, on the fatal Monday before the changeover, she received a telegram from Dr. Strabismus:

  Reprieve. At a last-minute meeting aboard the spacecraft I and my assistants were able to persuade the Visitors to grant President Eisenhower additional time to get the affairs of this nation organized in accordance with the dictates laid down by the superior planets.

  The Visitors will not repeat not take over at eleven tomorrow. The Visitors working among us will not repeat not reveal themselves. They have agreed to be patient and watch how we handle this extra time. Everything now depends on Washington.

  LEOPOLD STRABISMUS

  Universal Space Associates

  When she showed the telegram to the men they could not believe that she accepted such transparent nonsense, month after month, but after she gave them time to digest the tremendous news, and its implications for the future, she retrieved the message and clutched it to her, smiling gently at her critics as if she were privy to some profound secret denied them.

  Neither John Pope nor Randy Claggett won assignments to Patuxent River with their 1952 applications, and after the Korean War ended they lost contact, Claggett going to a Marine squadron at El Toro in California, Pope to the Navy installation at Jacksonville, on the opposite side of the continent.

  But the Navy command had spotted Pope as one of their most promising straight arrows, and after he had served at Jacksonville for only seven months he received orders to report to the University of Colorado in Boulder to try for a Ph.D. in engineering, with minor attention to astronomy. Naval officers, if they wished to progress in the service, had to have three entries on their record: combat experience if a war was under way, advanced education, and command of a fighting unit. Pope had performed his combat duty with medals, and it was now assumed that he would do the same with his next obligation.

  But when he reported to Colorado’s dean of engineering, that scholar said, ‘They’ve proposed a schedule for you that looks impossible.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of work.’

  ‘Engineering alone’s a full-time program. So’s astronomy.’

  ‘I already know a little of each. I’m ready to try.’

  The dean gave him an impromptu quiz, then telephoned for a professor from the astronomy department to do the same, and Pope rattled off his answers so confidently, not being afraid to say ‘I don’t know anything about that’ when the questions became too difficult, that the men agreed: ‘You can attempt it, if you wish.’

  Like many successful men, Pope believed that whatever was required of him to do at the moment represented the happiest experience of his life. When he was playing football in Clay at age seventeen and first felt the power in his body, he thought: This is the best thing I’ve ever known. The four years at Annapolis, when he was courting Penny, ‘were maybe the happiest years I’ll ever have.’ The flying days at Pensacola, when 45 percent of his associates dropped out because of deficiencies and nine men died because of faulty judgment, ‘were maybe the most exciting days of my life, because it was then that I learned I could fly with the best.’ Korea would be unforgettable because it tested his courage, and no man is entitled to an armchair opinion about that. Of the forty-three fliers most closely associated with him, eleven had perished and three were crippled so badly they had to leave the service. ‘They were precious days,’ he told Penny. ‘Days like that come only once in a lifetime.’ He rarely spoke about his experiences in battle, but one autumn night when he was touring Fremont, he sat in a Webster bar with Finnerty and his wife and said, ‘Got a letter today from this Texan Randy Claggett. When I was downed in North Korea and the Slopes were closing in on me …’

  ‘Don’t use words like that,’ Penny protested.

  ‘Well, the Commies. It was a foot race. The baddies or the goodies. And Claggett spotted me from his Banshee. That’s an airplane. And he vectored in the helicopter. I understand, Finnerty, why you feel attached to Senator Grant. I feel the same way about Claggett.’

  Often at Colorado, when snow dusted the Rockies behind the campus, or elk came down to the lower levels to graze, or the principles of engineering and astronomy began to clarify, Pope would exclaim, ‘These must be the best days a man will ever know!’

  A succession of such judgments did not mean that the speaker was deficient in ability to discriminate; it meant that life was providing a series of graded adventures, each appropriate to its moment, and the recipient sensed this. Or as Claggett once said, ‘I’m growin’ up lucky.’

  For Pope the days grew even better when Penny flew out from Washington to spend a weekend with him at some lodge high in the mountains where snow covered the trails, and where she sat with him before the fire, telling him of battles within the Eisenhower administration.

  Their peculiar pattern of marriage, first with John’s service in Korea causing separation and then her work in Washington keeping them apart, seemed to intensify their love, for they were certainly more dedicated than most military couples. They found each other interesting intellectually and more than pleasing sexually; their long absences built up desires which flamed when they did finally get together, and when they were forced by their demanding schedules to part, they did so with renewed assurance that their next meeting would be even more incandescent.

  They were a fortunate couple, and they knew it, their sharp differences in political opinion merely heightening their sense of individuality. Every bit of evidence John saw strengthened his conviction that only Republicans could be trusted to organize society; every superior officer he had served under had been a Republican; all the men in the Senate who could be trusted to support the military had been so, too; and the few outspoken Democrats among the aviators he knew tended to be troublemakers with limited career possibilities.

  Penny, on the other hand, watched in Congress as tough-minded Democrats like her Senator Glancey did the hard work and initiated the important bills. She felt that the Republicans she knew, even Senator Grant, for whom she had campaigned, tended to be cardboard cutouts of real men, and while they served a useful and precautionary purpose, if they alone were allowed to govern, the country would stagnate.

  They discussed such matters frequently, and John took considerable umbrage at Penny’s downgrading of Senator Grant: ‘If you think so poorly of him, why did you bring me to Fremont to vote for him?’

  ‘Because he’s an honest man, much better than the imbeciles, Republican or Democrat, who ran against him. Besides, we need him on the committees. He does good work there, I will admit.’

  ‘First you drag him down, then you build him up. Make up your mind.’

  ‘Norman Grant is a space-filler. We have forty senators like him, on both sides of the aisle. But he fills his space with dignity.’

  ‘I suppose your Glancey is the true hero?’

  ‘He’s a prime mover.’

  It was amusing the way in which both the military and the politician sought glib phrases to summarize human experience—front runner in aviation, prime mover in politics—and when the phrase was apt, it served as a convenient intellectual shorthand. In the Navy these days the operative word was outstanding, with a long, heavy emphasis on the stand; one no longer used words like excellent, very fine, or first class; everything superior was categorized as outstanding. In Penny’s political world the in-phrase was bottom line, especially when used as a verb: ‘It’s a seductive idea which the voters will like, but first let�
��s bottom-line it,’ which meant that the profit-or-loss summary, which appeared on the bottom line of financial statements, had to be estimated.

  ‘I think Norman Grant is outstanding,’ John Pope said.

  ‘But when you bottom-line what he accomplishes, it isn’t much,’ his wife replied.

  Their love reached its apex in a curious way. John, like all aviators, was infatuated with automobiles, and when a 1949 Mercury convertible crashed on the Boulder-Denver speedway, he bought the wreckage for $75, and with the help of two other officers taking advanced courses at Colorado University, rebuilt it into a fine, sturdy machine with a homemade canvas top weatherproofed by an expensive liquid concocted for the Air Force.

  He used the Mercury primarily to run down to the new Air Force field at Colorado Springs to protect his flight status. If he flew thirteen hours a month, he received $185 extra pay, and he had come to depend on this money. Also, he needed to keep himself proficient in night flying, a demanding skill for which he felt he had a special aptitude.

  He had never flown over terrain that was more exciting: to the east, the vast plains leading to his home state of Fremont; to the west, the mighty Rockies with fifty peaks higher than 14,000 feet and majestic plateaus bigger than some states. On days when the plains basked in sunlight and the mountains stood below him clothed in snow, the contrast was stunning, but on nights when the moon was full and the Earth below resembled the drawing for a fairy tale, he experienced a sensation of grandeur and unlimited national power which caused him to exult. It was a marvelous sky, a majestic land, and he felt himself master of both.

  His studies were going well. As an adult now, with a wife he loved, he was able to avoid the wrenching dislocations which attacked many younger students, so that his unusually heavy burden of classwork became simply another hurdle to overcome. He worked about fifteen hours a day, concentrating on his slide rule in engineering, on the stars in astronomy. Early in his studies he realized that his overriding task was to handle the engineering courses well, and this he did, devoting most of his study hours to them, but he found that his early experiences in astronomy had given him such a solid foundation in that science that every minute devoted to the stars seemed to yield multiple dividends.

  Their identification he had long mastered; now he was learning their mechanics, and every lecture or demonstration revealed new wonders that delighted him. He knew the color, size and distance of most of the major stars and the significance of these measurements. He also knew the peculiarities of certain important stars invisible to the naked eye but of crucial meaning to the structure of the heavens: Barnard’s star, which might be the only one in all the billions in the sky which could one day be proved to have planets like the Sun; Proxima Centauri, closest star to Earth; Epsilon Eridani, the near star most resembling the Sun in its characteristics.

  What pleased him most, however, was his increasing knowledge of the mechanical structure of the Sun’s planetary system, for he now had sufficient mathematics to follow the analyses of the great astronomers. He was especially delighted with the deductions of the French scientist Joseph Louis Lagrange, who, with the simple mathematics available to him in 1780, had deduced that when one massive object orbited another, five points developed in remote space at which very small celestial bodies could find refuge and remain stable despite the pull of the larger bodies. He spent some time calculating the five Lagrangian Points for the Sun and Jupiter, then tried to visualize what tiny heavenly bodies might be lurking there.

  The reason why John’s Mercury convertible became a significant factor in his love for Penny became apparent when spring vacation provided him with nine free days. Calling Penny to be sure she could arrange a brief vacation of her own, he jumped in his car, and with only a few dollars and a Conoco road map, sped eastward—eighteen hours a day, with a little sleep in the back seat when the convertible was parked beside the road with the improvised top up.

  He roared into Washington remarkably fresh and rested, picked Penny up at Senator Glancey’s office, went in to wish Senator Grant well, and headed back to Colorado.

  He and Penny delighted in traveling like this: they rose at 0400 in the morning while it was still dark, dashed a little water over their faces, combed their hair, and zipped into the clothing which they had left piled on the floor when retiring. By 0415 they were on their way westward, watching the stars retreat before them as the Sun came up.

  By 0930 they had covered nearly three hundred miles, for they drove steadily and at top speeds. They were hungry now, so they pulled up at some gas station and asked for directions to the best hash house in the district, and usually they received good advice. They were also tired from the five-hour dash, so they ordered a substantial breakfast and relaxed. John usually slipped into the men’s room to shave while Penny read the local paper to see what this region thought of Washington, and after a leisurely meal of pancakes, scrambled eggs, hash browns, sausage, toast, jam and two glasses of milk, they returned to the rested Mercury and sped westward.

  They followed interesting highways through West Virginia, Ohio and Indiana, where they picked up Route 36, which carried them into St. Joseph on the banks of the Missouri, and from there into Fremont, where they spent the night at their homes in Clay, John sleeping with the Popes, Penny with the Hardestys. From Clay it was an interesting gallop to Boulder and the vacation glories of the Rockies.

  They never stopped for lunch, grabbing a few apples and cookies en route, and expected to cover something like seven hundred miles a day, except that when they hit the free and open spaces of the West they revved the convertible up to ninety miles an hour and sometimes reached eight hundred miles for the day. They stopped at 1930 for a bite of dinner, wherever they happened to be, and finished off the day’s driving beneath the evening stars. At 2200 they stopped at whatever motel was available, kicked off their clothes, and went right to sleep. At 0400 the next morning they were wide awake and eager to be on their way.

  The thing that made such travel rewarding was its cheapness—gas, 31¢; motel, $4.50; breakfast, $1.45—and the fact that they were seeing new aspects of America; it was also spiritually refreshing in that during the long drives they were free to talk. In fact, the best conversations the Popes conducted occurred on these trips, for the car became a cathedral-in-motion in which two worshippers convened to settle family questions of the highest moment.

  ‘Where will the Navy send you after Boulder?’ Penny wanted to know.

  ‘Not overseas, for sure. I’ve done that duty.’ She was relieved. ‘But it could be Germany.’

  For John, overseas consisted of only two things: a war zone like Korea or shipboard duty, especially in the Pacific. Germany was mainland and relatively close to home.

  ‘We could manage Germany,’ Penny said.

  ‘You ever think about leaving Washington?’

  ‘Not really. You know, John, I believe that if an important job opened up …’ She paused, then said, ‘I’ve worked with enough senators now to feel sure they’d confirm me for any job to which I was entitled.’

  ‘The way you talk sometimes, you won’t get an appointment with a Republican President in office—and after Eisenhower has two terms, Nixon’ll have two.’

  ‘Don’t you be too sure of that.’

  ‘Eisenhower’s sure to be reelected. Best president we’ve had in a hundred years, and the voters know it.’

  ‘I suppose he’ll make it,’ Penny said, ‘but I’m not at all sure about Nixon being able to follow on.’

  ‘The men I work with … Colorado … the Air Force …’

  ‘They’re all Republicans, John. But that’s beside the point. What I mean is, I could very well be selected as legal counsel for some influential committee.’

  ‘That would be swell!’ John said with real enthusiasm. ‘You could handle such a job, better than most.’

  ‘None’s on the horizon, you understand, but these things have a way of suddenly popping.’

 
; ‘You ever think about children?’

  ‘All the time. I wish we could have some.’

  ‘You ever think about adopting some?’ When Penny made no reply, her husband said, ‘It’s perplexing how things work out. Of all the men I know in uniform, I think I love my wife more than any of them, but we have no children. I know this skinny ape from Texas …’

  ‘You mean Claggett?’

  ‘Yes. He had this dipsy-doodle wife. College cheerleader or something. He shacked up with any Korean Jo-san who would have him, and I figure from what he told me one night that his wife did the same with anyone at Iwakuni. And they have three children. Beats all.’

  ‘John, if a good job does open up in Germany, grab it. I’ll spend my summers with you.’

  ‘I’m quite sure it’ll be stateside. We’ll have a bundle of opportunities to work things out then. And if a really fine appointment should open up, make Glancey and Grant support you. And I mean really support.’

  ‘I’ll do that. Symington owes me a lot, and so does Mendel Rivers.’

  ‘What do you think it might be, Penny?’

  She sat close to him as the afternoon landscape rolled past, and for some moments she kept her forefingers to her lips. Then she said, ‘Glancey is one of the very brightest men in America. I mean, this Red River hillbilly has radar. He always knows where the money is, where the skeletons are buried. But he also has a fantastic sense of what’s happening in the world, and he’s convinced that stupendous scientific miracles are about to happen. What scares the devil out of him, he believes it’s the Russians who’ll produce them.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like he doesn’t know. But I’m infected with his enthusiasm, if that’s it, or maybe his fear. I think we’re on the verge. Commercial planes flying faster than sound. Some new kind of television. I don’t know. But I do know that throughout world history …’