Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘The difficulty is,’ the personnel man said, ‘that what we want you to specialize in is the most arduous field they have, celestial mechanics, what holds the universe together and makes it run.’ He stopped to allow this startling assignment to sink in, but as soon as he heard the phrase celestial mechanics Mott’s heart skipped a series of beats, for this was precisely the field in which in his spare time he had been educating himself. It seemed to him that this was the highest external field of knowledge to which a man could aspire; internally there was gene structure, of equal import and about to reveal secrets just as noble as those of the outer universe, but his mind had always soared outward, so it was inevitable that he would be preoccupied with the mechanics of the universe.

  To be allowed to grapple with those secrets! To be one of the handful who comprehended the structure of a galaxy or the behavior of atoms at the outer edges of space!

  ‘I’d volunteer to spend the three years for that,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Maybe there’s no need.’

  ‘Oh, but I’d like to try!’

  ‘We’ve had substantial discussions with them … emergency and all that … national interest … and they’re willing to make a concession. If you work hard and are able to maintain the level of studies you’ve already done with us …’

  ‘I will.’ He was a learned man, one of the best in his field, forty-one years old, but he was pleading like a Boy Scout who wanted to attend summer camp. ‘I can work, you know.’

  ‘They say that perhaps you could handle the material in two years.’

  ‘Oh!’ Mott had nothing else to say. He was being offered a belated chance to catch up with the most advanced thinking of his age, and all that was asked of him was that he apply himself. When the personnel man waited for an answer, Mott mumbled, ‘They’ll have to redefine the word.’

  ‘What?’

  Mott laughed, the hearty guffaw of a man released from tension. ‘I said that when I get through, they’ll have to redefine the verb work.’

  Rachel was enchanted by the news that her husband was going to get his doctorate; she had often felt that he was far more learned than most men who had the degree, but her brief time at NACA had demonstrated how even a good man could find himself at a disadvantage because he lacked the doctorate. The two boys were delighted at the prospect of living in California and studied maps to see how far Cal Tech was from the beach; they were disappointed.

  Real disappointment, however, was voiced by Rachel’s mother, Mrs. Saltonstall Lindquist, in Worcester, Massachusetts. It was the custom in American social circles for women who were divorced, but who preferred keeping the family name of the former husband, to use as their first name not their given name, Mary or Esther, but their own family name. To refer to one’s self as Mrs. Armstrong Cheney was much more polished than to appear in the social columns as Mrs. Mary Cheney.

  Rachel’s mother, being a widow rather than a divorcee, really had no right to adopt this pleasing convention, but with a family name like Saltonstall, she could not withstand the temptation, and as Mrs. Saltonstall Lindquist she retained the social prestige to which she felt herself entitled. When she heard of her son-in-law’s implied promotion to become one of NASA’s senior scholars, she told the social leaders of her city:

  ‘Rachel tells me that NASA realized it needed some of its own men to be trained in celestial mechanics … what holds the Sun in place, and wouldn’t we be in a fix if it lost its place and dragged us around the universe in its fiery tail?

  ‘Well, it’s a relief to me, I can tell you. I mean Stanley, not the Sun. It’s not pleasant to have to admit you have a son-in-law who went to Georgia and Louisiana. But I do wish he was taking his doctorate at a school of real distinction, like Harvard or MIT. Who ever heard of Cal Tech?’

  The second group of NASA leaders identified by the inspection committee comprised those older men of undoubted brilliance who could use the title Doctor with good effect when testifying before Congress, but who had neither the time nor the energy to go back to the study halls of some university. NASA solved their problem rather neatly by quietly suggesting to the universities from which they had graduated that it might be rewarding to the academic community if So-and-So, a pillar of the space community and a brilliant scientist, could be invited back to give the graduation address and receive an honorary doctorate as compensation. Some very good men were decorated in this manner.

  That left eight or ten able Europeans, including Dieter Kolff, who had no American university which could be gently blackmailed, but their special situation was resolved rather neatly by a NASA administrator at Ames in California: ‘We have this new institution in Los Angeles, the University of Space and Aviation, which was properly licensed by the state of California to provide a college education, but which now issues spurious mail-order doctorates in any imaginable subject for a fee of five hundred dollars, whether the recipient has ever set foot in California or not.’ It would have proved embarrassing if NASA had tried to send its engineers like Kolff to that campus, for until the new building was completed, there was no campus, no faculty, no library and no classrooms. There was, however, still that excellent printing press on the side street producing a catalogue much superior to that of the Sorbonne and an engraved diploma more impressive than that of Oxford, Yale or Louisiana State.

  The diploma was signed, just under the eagle, by the provost of the new university, Dr. Leopold Strabismus, who also offered the M.A. at $300 and the ordinary B.A. at $200.

  When Dieter proudly showed his diploma, and his admiring family saw that their father was a full-fledged doctor, just like Wernher von Braun, a rousing celebration was launched, and although everyone present knew that something quite preposterous had happened, no one knew quite what, and it was assumed that if Americans placed even more emphasis upon a doctorate than did the Germans of 1933, and if Kolff was demonstrably brighter than most of the Americans who held one, it was only appropriate that he be given his.

  Word spread that Dieter’s was an honorary degree, awarded for his outstanding contributions to the space program. He accepted with grace, referring to himself as Herr Doktor Kolff and intimating to his associates that they might prefer to address him by his new title, too. In his testimony before Congress he was now Dr. Kolff and his words were listened to with added attention.

  Stanley Mott and John Pope were alike in three respects: each was a straight arrow, each loved space and the stars, and each tended to believe that whatever he was doing at the moment represented a highlight in his life and possibly the maximum excitement that he would know. Leonardo, Immanuel Kant and Albert Einstein had probably felt the same way, and none of them had ever felt any necessity to apologize for his enthusiasm.

  For Mott to enroll at Cal Tech, to walk the olive-lined brick paths, to meet with the top analytical professors in the world, and to pore at night over the reports of theorists from Cambridge in England and Pulkovo in Russia was the most demanding intellectual exercise he had ever engaged in. At the end of six months he understood exactly where he stood, as he reported to his superiors at Langley:

  Up to my neck in things I don’t comprehend. Only one eye and one nostril above the waves. I’ve been asked to participate in a gripping problem. Once every 175 years the planets arrange themselves in a formation which permits us to launch a spacecraft that could wander among the planets, picking up propulsive energy from the gravity of each in turn. We could go to Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, each planet whipping us along to the next.

  This alignment occurs in the period 1980-1982. We calculate that if we launch in 1977, we could reach Saturn in 1981 and Neptune in 1989. I’m not yet equal to the task of helping to plot this journey, but I’m certainly sweating to catch up.

  During the next six months, with the assistance of professors who lived among the planets as if the professors, and not some primal force, controlled their motion, he began to grasp the laws which governed even the tiniest parti
cle of dust in the farthest reaches of the universe. Mars and Jupiter became merely the outriders of the massive galaxies that dominated both the remote distances and man’s imagination.

  As he worked he began to wish that his assignment to Cal Tech had indeed been for three full years, for there were many minor avenues he wished to explore, but NASA kept quietly prodding him to attend to what the directors assumed would be their priority for the next decades: ‘Remember that your major concern is not wandering among planets, but how to plot the course of a manned satellite on its journey from Cape Canaveral to the Moon and back to some kind of splashdown in the western Pacific.’

  Accordingly, he turned his back on OQ-172, the farthest object, 117,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles distant, and began to focus sharply on the Moon, a mean of only 238,890 miles away (nearest 226,000; farthest 252,000). In fact, that distance seemed so abbreviated when compared to those he had been studying, he came to think of the Moon in familiar terms, as if it rested over the next farm. He was assisted in this thinking by the scientific shorthand he had mastered at Georgia Tech: for example, the large number, representing the distance in miles to OQ-172, could be stated in powers of 10, in this case 1.17 × 1023, the superscription 23 designating the number of figures following the decimal. The distance to the Moon was a simple 2.38 89 × 105, and the frequently used million was 1 × 106. The beauty of the system was that if one wished to multiply two huge numbers, say three trillion (3 × 1012) by two billion (2 × 109), one simply multiplied the 3×2 and then added the superscriptions 12 + 9 for the answer 6 × 1021, which meant 6 followed by 21 zeros. The universe was organized in powers of 10.

  One peculiarity of the system delighted him. It was difficult for even an astronomer to remember how many miles light traveled in a year, yet this was a measurement fundamental to space. The figure was easily obtained: seconds in a minute, times minutes in an hour, times hours in a day, times days in a year (60 × 60 × 24 × 365 = 31,536,000 seconds in a year), which you would then multiply by the speed of light, 186,000 mps. Some early student had realized that the total number of seconds, 3.1536 × 107, was practically identical with Pi, 3.14159265 × 107, so that astronomers often said that the miles in a light-year were Pi × 107 × C, the last letter being the symbol for the speed of light. This produced a rough approximation, which caused the astronomers to joke: ‘Close enough for use in NASA,’ which customarily carried tolerances to seven decimal places.

  That rockets could cover the relatively brief distance to the Moon, 2.3889 × 105, Mott never doubted, and now he began to construct those magnificent charts which showed how it could be done. A rocket would lift off from the Cape, enter low Earth orbit, stay there for several revolutions to confirm orbital data, then fire another set of engines and take off for the Moon. Of course, both the Earth and the Moon would be engaged in following their own orbits, so that the relative relationship between the two would be changing from second to second; the trick would be to aim the rocket not at where the Moon was, but at where the Moon was going to be in the number of days, hours, minutes and seconds it would require the rocket to traverse the 238,890 miles. It was an elegant problem regarding the motion of a body with six degrees of freedom, but one that could be solved, and he directed all his attention to it.

  However, when the brain of an individual is fiercely concentrated on a given problem, it is sometimes diverted by accident into an unexpected channel, which proves more significant than the one being followed, and this now happened to Stanley Mott. He was attending a night seminar at the great telescope on Mount Wilson east of Cal Tech when he chanced to see an amazing photographic plate which showed one of the most distant galaxies, invisible to the unaided eye and to most telescopes, but absolutely perfect when caught in a giant telescope and held in focus on the photographic emulsion for eight hours.

  The galaxy was seen edge-on, a thin, beautiful sliver of stars innumerable and clouds of primordial dust, but in the dead center, as in our own Galaxy, there stood a gigantic ball of generating fire from which the energy which informed the galaxy had originated and was still originating, and Mott realized that when he studied this remarkable plate, he was being vouchsafed a glimpse of his own Galaxy. This was what the universe was like, this incomparable beauty, this inconceivable multiplicity.

  As photographed from Earth, this epic galaxy, this poem of the heavens, stood at an angle of forty-five degrees from the horizontal, the most effective possible presentation, as if an artist had positioned it for maximum effect. But it was the implications of the photograph which enraptured Mott: That band of shadow along the near edge, what could it be, cosmic dust? The spicules of flame leaping from the rim, how high into the perpetual darkness did they fly, a billion miles, five billion? The wonderfully tapering tips so far from the central bulge, what would the life of a star be at that remote point? And finally the thing itself, this collection of a hundred billion separate stars, perhaps two hundred billion, this unity, this diversity, this terrible fracturing violence, this serene loveliness, this image of mortality which was surely destined for flaming destruction, what did the thing itself signify?

  Like any sensible man who is suddenly struck by a vision ten times greater than any he had anticipated, Stanley dropped all his work on the Moon and spent three weeks trying to understand this photograph, one of the most completely successful ever made, one worthy of his digression.

  He learned that because it was invisible and not discovered till late, the galaxy bore no name. It was referred to simply as NGC-4565 (New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Star Clusters, compiled by a Danish astronomer and published in 1888). It lay along an edge of the constellation Coma Berenices and was about twenty million light-years distant, which meant that what Mott was seeing in 1961 was what the galaxy had looked like 2 × 107 years ago, and it awed him to realize that in the multiplex of years since that moment, the galaxy could have modified totally, or moved into conflict with another galaxy, or vanished altogether. He was seeing an echo of some great thing that had once existed, and wherever he looked in the outer universe he was seeing the same type of thing: evidence that greatness had once been, but no proof whatever that it still was.

  NGC-4565 held him captive for three long weeks, as if its gravitational pull were asserting itself over the 117 billion billion miles that separated it from Earth, and he was bedazzled when he learned that it was traveling through space at a speed of almost three million miles an hour. When he finished his study and returned to his work on the Moon, he knew that he had directed his intellect permanently into orbits so vast, so infinitely far beyond the Sun’s planetary system, that he would be forced to spend the remainder of his life not on Earth, not on target Moon, not on Mars or Saturn and not even in his own Galaxy, inexhaustible as it was, but out in the infinitely cold, the infinitely remote distances of the farthest galaxies. He acknowledged that as a faithful servant of NASA, which paid his bills, he would have to perform his routine duties and make the mundane calculations for the Moon trip—note how he brought the Moon down to Earth by describing its distance as mundane—but his mind and his imagination would be elsewhere.

  Rachel Mott was not liking California. Her severe New England upbringing had not prepared her to accept the free-and-easy life of the Pacific coast; even her disciplined hairdo, each strand in its assigned place, seemed to protest the windblown excesses of the West. And she was not at all happy about the reactions of her sons to their more relaxed environment.

  Millard, now eighteen, with a slim, blond, athletic figure, was spending most of his time on the beach, learning to surf; his shins were scarred from losing battles with the board, his face was tanned and his hair windblown. He had associated himself with a group of handsome young men much like himself, and they seemed well behaved, but the two or three girls in the gang, as Rachel called it, were a rougher type, and she often wondered how any of these young people succeeded in school, since their sole preoccupation appeared to be surfing.

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p; One morning she asked one of the girls, ‘How are you doing in school?’ and the girl replied, accurately, Rachel thought, ‘It’s a bore.’ When she inquired among the boys, she was surprised to learn that two of them were already in college, and when she tried to check on how difficult the studies were in a Western university, the boys replied, ‘The professors are all jerks.’ She was tempted to dismiss these replies as the shorthand of youth, but when she probed deeper she found that Millard really did consider his teachers jerks and their lectures a bore.

  Rachel’s upper lip grew tense at such moments, not in anger but in regret that these fine young people were missing what had been so important to her and Stanley: the challenge of new ideas. When her upper lip tightened her lower lip protruded somewhat, lending her an air of hardness which she did not have, really, and when the surfers saw this, they retreated, for they did not care to waste their golden hours on anyone over thirty who might hassle them.

  Rachel’s displeasure with California did not extend to the university where Stanley had immured himself. As she wrote to her mother:

  Your last letter was far too harsh, Mother. Cal Tech is a fine school and in certain limited areas it would approach either Harvard or MIT, but it hardly has the refined scholarship of either of those outstanding universities. Stanley seems to thrive on his heavy workload and Christopher grows browner each day. I sometimes worry about Millard, as he has apparently surrendered completely to California life, and I do not appreciate its slovenly ways. I’ll be delighted to leave here and return to the relative sanity of Virginia, and I’m assured by visitors from headquarters that when Stanley lands his Ph.D. he’ll be in line for an important promotion in the burgeoning NASA. Brains do pay off, though not apparently in the case of women.