Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘You won’t shoot me?’ Roger asked.

  ‘Why would you say that?’

  ‘Because if I went home to Indiana, my father would shoot me. Especially if I took your son with me.’

  ‘Four months ago I’d have shot you. But now …’

  ‘What happened?’ Roger asked, boring in.

  ‘My work with the new astronauts. I’m sort of their den mother. They’ve moved me deeply. Made me see that six men could be six radically different human beings, although as you implied a while back, they seem at first like paper cutouts. So different.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I saw human capacities, human variations if you will—I saw the whole ball game in a different light. And I felt driven to tell you so, Millard.’

  ‘This is a very good salad,’ his son said.

  ‘Would you like to hear what my father said in those circumstances?’ Roger asked.

  ‘I would.’

  ‘He’s a minor official at the raceway. Very gung ho. When he heard how I was living he blew a gasket. Said if I ever let anyone at the raceway know what I was doing, he’d kill me. So I laughed and asked him, “Who do you think were the first two men I slept with?” And he damn near fainted when I told him, giving names, “Two of your best drivers.” He screamed, “I’ll kill them,” but they were important figures at the raceway, so he didn’t kill them. Father is very strong on killing people. His father was a leading figure in the days when the Klan ran the state.’

  ‘What do young men like you …’ Mott was embarrassed at having used such a cliché phrase, but he could think of no circumlocution. ‘How do you envisage the future?’

  ‘We don’t,’ Roger said.

  ‘But Millard’s mother and I—we look forward to gainful occupation till I’m sixty-five. Then forced retirement … then a reduced standard of living. Grandchildren to occupy us. One of us dies … we all die. An orderly progression, you might say.’

  ‘A statistical one,’ Roger said.

  ‘Statistics surely govern your situation, too.’

  The young men did not care to discuss the probabilities which dictated their lives, but throughout the remainder of this first evening they talked freely of their jobs at the hospital and of the kinds of work beachboys were able to get. Roger said, The post office employs a lot. If you can pass Civil Service.’

  Stanley Mott spent two fascinating days with his son, discussing things he would never have imagined possible. As a straight arrow he could not approve of any deviation from the norm; indeed, a straight arrow was a man who defined the norm. But as a human being whose parameters of vision and understanding were being expanded by the expanding age in which he played a central role, he could appreciate the tangled drives, so unlike his own, which motivated these two young men.

  ‘Do you find any satisfaction in what you do?’ Roger asked on the last evening.

  ‘Each day is a new beginning, an overwhelming challenge.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘You know, I didn’t take my doctorate—an entirely new field—till I was forty-four. Celestial mechanics. That wakes a man up.’

  ‘So what are you doing with it now?’

  ‘NASA assigns me to one committee after another. Where I can apply what I’ve learned.’

  ‘Like what?’ Roger persisted.

  ‘Would you really want to hear? I mean, listen for about an hour?’

  ‘Test me.’

  So Mott took a large sheet of paper, and with the exquisite line and lettering he had mastered at Georgia Tech in Drafting II, drew a schematic of the solar system, naming the Sun at the left hand and the Earth fairly close in, but not naming what he called ‘the nine other wanderers.’

  ‘Can you tell me how to name them?’ he asked, and neither of his listeners could. So starting close to the Sun he printed the names: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.

  ‘That’s only nine planets,’ Roger said. ‘You just said there were nine besides Earth.’

  ‘I think of the collection of asteroids as a planet,’ Mott said. ‘One that broke into fragments, from one cause or another. They hide between Mars and Jupiter.’

  When the young men finished studying the diagram, Mott said, ‘What I’m engaged in is what we call the “grand tour.” There used to be a time when young Englishmen of good family were not considered educated until they completed a grand tour of Paris, Geneva and Rome, with maybe a stopover in barbarian Germany. Long after the Moon shot is history, we propose to launch a single space vehicle which will take off from Florida, and move purposefully past all the other planets. Its course could be something like this.’

  And with the most careful strokes of his pen, making never a mistake or a strikeover, he sketched a majestic itinerary, twisting and winding among the planets, sometimes turning in unexpected ways and leaping off into unexpected directions. When he finished his diagram he said, simply, ‘If we’re able to start this tour in 1970, we’ll end it with our craft heading past Pluto and out to the remote stars of our Galaxy sometime about 1997. It’ll wander among those near stars for about four million years, then leave for the remote galaxies, and after about two thousand billion years, it may get somewhere important.’

  ‘You speak of it as if it was immortal.’

  ‘It will be. No atmosphere to disturb it. No moisture to rust it. No burning fuel to clog the pipes. Only the perpetual journey.’

  ‘How will you know it’s still on its journey?’

  Mott pointed to the single light that illuminated the cottage and said, ‘It will carry a device which generates electricity from radioactivity. This will activate a radio that will send us messages … one-tenth of the power of that little bulb. But it will penetrate the billion miles separating us from Saturn as if that planet were next door. It’ll require ninety minutes for us to receive the message, of course, and when the grand tour reaches Pluto, nearly five billion miles away, it’ll take nearly four hours … electrical impulses coming to us at the speed of light, and when the craft reaches the edge of our Galaxy its messages will require thousands of years to reach us, but the messages will come.’

  The young men contemplated this for a while, then Millard asked, ‘But how does the spacecraft get its power to keep moving outward?’

  ‘We start it with a good boost at Cape Canaveral. And we head it with great precision, so that every time it encounters a planet, it does so in a way to pick up energy from the rotation of that planet about the Sun—sort of like the last child at the end of a crack-the-whip—and this throws the craft sharply onward to the next planet in line.’

  ‘You can schedule it so exactly?’ Roger asked.

  ‘Almost to the second,’ Mott said. ‘Almost to the mile.’

  ‘And that’s what you’re doing … when you’re not baby-sitting?’

  ‘Yes.’ And on a separate sheet of paper he drew a beautiful depiction of the planet Saturn, with its rings handsomely inclined and its ten known moons depicted, and what he now told the men paved the way for them to tell him things that concerned themselves. ‘My task, and I’m low man on the totem pole working on this, is to bring our craft toward Saturn on this kind of heading on a specified day in, say, August 1981, when the exact location of Saturn and its moons has been determined.’

  ‘You like to use the word exact, don’t you?’

  ‘If data can be known, they should be used.’

  ‘And you know where Saturn will be?’

  ‘Kepler and Newton taught us how to know.’

  ‘And from a distance of a billion miles you’re going to pilot your tiny craft so that it threads its way past the moons and the rings.’

  ‘That’s exactly what we’re going to do.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Newton once said that if he could see great distances, which he could, it was only because he stood on the shoulders of giants—the brilliant men like Kepler who went before him. We can solve the mechanical riddles of the Sun
’s system because some damned good mathematicians completed the basic work before us. We will lead that spacecraft here and here and here and here, and we will make not one damned mistake.’

  He spoke with such fury, such iron-hard determination, that his listeners dared not make snide attacks on his beliefs, and after they had sat for some time in the near-darkness, Mott said, The grand tour requires an infinity of calculations—where every planet and every moon will be down to the minute and the second. Then we must work backward to a specific two-week period, and within each twenty-four hours we will have a launch window of exactly—there’s that word again—four minutes and nine seconds. We’re going to penetrate the remotest corners of the universe, and we have four minutes and nine seconds to do it in.’

  No comment, and then he said, The point is, for Johannes Kepler to calculate the orbit of one planet required mathematical equations and solutions covering papers this high—ten years of solid work. With a good computer we do it in about seven seconds. What I’m doing has nothing to do with the Moon or Saturn. I’m building for the clowns who’ll be trying things in the next century. And there will never be an end.’

  He had no more to say, nor did the young men. The three of them sat there, looking at the incredible diagrams, listening to the noisy surf, and after a long while Roger said, ‘At dinner last night you told us that you and your wife lived in a situation governed by statistics. The mortality tables say you’ll live to age seventy-nine, then kaput. I refused to admit that Millard and I also fall into the middle of statistical predictions. We do.’

  It was approaching midnight, and now Roger wanted to talk. ‘At nineteen you’re a young god. You can handle any breaking wave. Girls stop to look as you pass, and men too. Those are the golden years. Christ, you can do anything, write any rules. The good years are these, twenty to thirty-five. So many opportunities in so many fields, you get dizzy. Beach houses everywhere. Girls with convertibles. Men with high salaries. California sunshine. You cannot imagine how good these years can be. And no responsibility—except to pray that the nuclear bomb doesn’t swoop down to wipe it all away before you’ve finished with your fun.

  ‘From what I’ve watched, the numbers begin to tell at about forty, and at fifty you’re a real statistic. I’ll probably continue lucky and find someone to share a house with, and our salaries, too. Or maybe I’ll escort women without husbands, women who can help me pay my bills. I’ll have a steady job, I suppose, but I don’t look forward to that, and if I’m still as strongly sexed as I am now, I’ll have trouble finding partners, because I know I’ll never be rich. I’m not built that way. But I’ll get along. And at sixty, just like you, the numbers will overwhelm me, and God knows what I’ll do. But I’ll survive. And if I’m lucky enough to have found an excellent person like your son, we’ll live where it’s warm and collect social security. Then our problem becomes identical with yours, Dr. Mott. Find a place to live, enough to eat on, and an orderly burial when we die.’

  To Stanley Mott’s surprise, his son now said with quiet vigor, almost accusingly, ‘Dad, you watch what happens to your godlike astronauts. I’ve seen a lot of retired Army and Navy people in this part of California, and I can tell you with certainty what it’s going to be. You have six under your wing. Two will be killed young. Two will be divorced and marry girls twenty years younger. One of the others will quit the program, go into business, and become an alcoholic. And the other will do something of minor significance, then sit around and show the neighbors his scrapbooks. Why go through all the hassle today to accomplish so little?’

  Mott had an instant response: ‘And of the six, three will probably stand on that Moon. And that makes all the difference. Nothing, not time nor wrinkles nor scars nor divorce nor alcoholism, can erase that. They will have been there, and we will not.’

  In the morning, when he had to return to General Funkhauser’s meetings, he told Millard, ‘The door will always be open. Bring Roger. You’re a bright son-of-a-bitch, Roger. You won’t be satisfied with beach life permanently.’

  ‘Try me,’ Roger said.

  In the spring of 1964 Norman Grant found himself in good shape and his party in chaos: no Republican in the state of Fremont wished to run against him in the senatorial primary, but he could foresee that nationally his party might be sorely weakened if it split down the middle over the candidacy of Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Grant supported Goldwater and prayed that the stubborn Rockefeller liberals might see the light and halt their divisive actions.

  ‘They can only damage us,’ Grant told his long-time assistant, Tim Finnerty, ‘and I’m beginning to think they mean to go through with it.’

  ‘I’m more worried about Lyndon Johnson. That Texas cracker is a tough politician. He could win this thing going away, if we nominate Goldwater.’

  ‘We’re going to nominate him. Give the people a choice, not an echo.’

  ‘Are you happy with that cliché, Senator?’

  ‘We’re going to win with it, if the Rockefeller people don’t do us in.’

  ‘Your problem, Senator, is your own election in Fremont. I think we’re in trouble.’

  ‘Trouble? We don’t even have an opponent in the primary.’

  ‘But we could be vulnerable in November. This could be a big Democrat year.’

  Such talk made sense to Grant, for he had learned that a politician or an admiral should approach every battle as if it were the culminating one; besides, as he said, ‘If I’ve learned anything in the Senate, it’s that Lyndon Johnson is a frightening opponent.’

  So he began campaigning across Fremont in May and hit every major concentration of voters before the end of June. At the Republican convention he was a fortress of strength for Goldwater and a major irritation to the Rockefeller people, and when William Scranton of Pennsylvania made a belated run, spurred on perhaps by Eisenhower, he was remorseless in rejecting him. He spent much of the summer campaigning for Goldwater in other states, then hurried home to defend himself against a very strong Democratic senator from the Fremont legislature.

  After only a few exchanges it became apparent that his early optimism was unfounded; his challenger knew far more about state conditions than he, and during one strategy session with Finnerty and his local aides, the Irishman slammed the cards on the table: ‘Senator, if you go on this way, you’re going to lose. Goldwater is an albatross around your neck. Stop defending him.’

  ‘Barry Goldwater is my man, a fine decent man who could save this country.’

  ‘Look at Hugh Scott in Pennsylvania. Faces the same race you do. He’s smart enough never to mention Goldwater’s name. Listening to him, you’d never know there was a presidential race on. Look at this literature. “No matter who else you vote for, pull the lever for Hugh Scott, a great American.” Can I print up some of them for you, in the tough districts in Webster?’

  ‘You cannot. Barry Goldwater is my candidate. I sink or swim with Goldwater.’

  ‘I was afraid you’d say that, so I’ve been restructuring the last eight weeks. Hanley is killing you on local issues, and my polls show that you’re barely holding your own. You can’t match him where he’s strong, so you’ve got to club him down where you’re strong. National leadership. Patriotism. Space. Do you think you can get John Pope to campaign for you?’

  ‘NASA forbids it. Absolutely.’

  ‘That’s what I was afraid of. So we bring Penny Pope back here. She’s worked for you three times before. Strictly legitimate, and everyone in the state will remember that she’s John Pope’s wife.’

  ‘Will Glancey permit it? Presidential election and all that?’

  ‘I took the liberty of speaking with Glancey, and he and I both know that Goldwater’s going to lose by a landslide, but without saying so, he let me know that he’d be happy having you back in the Senate. Penny’s free.’

  Penny Pope was proud to work for Norman Grant’s reelection, for she had watched him at close quarters for more than a dozen years and had
never found him doing a dishonest thing. ‘He’s straight out of the Ark, an antediluvian, the poor man’s Barry Goldwater, but he has a backbone of steel. I love the man and want to see him get six more years.’

  Finnerty asked her to appear with the senator in public as often as possible so that he might introduce her as ‘that brave daughter of Our Fair State who helps run Washington while her brave husband, a brave son of Our Fair State, heads for the Moon.’ No mention was ever made of the fact that the only thing John Pope had flown so far was the Cape Canaveral simulator and a borrowed T-38. But when Grant did finagle orders allowing Pope to land his T-38, with Randy Claggett in the back seat, at the new NASA air base near Clay, Finnerty had photographers present, and after the two astronauts were shown strapped into their seats, Penny was brought forward to hand them flowers.

  She was also given the delicate task of explaining to the press why the senator’s wife and daughter were not campaigning for him this year: ‘Elinor Grant has had severe nervous headaches which quite incapacitate her, and Marcia, as you know, is busy with her work as dean of faculty at the university out West.’ When one enterprising newsman flew to California to inspect the university and the nonexistent faculty, his exposé ran in several Eastern newspapers but appeared in no major paper west of the Missouri River and in none at all in Fremont.

  ‘We got home free on that one,’ Penny told Finnerty. ‘Thanks for having muzzled the jackals.’

  ‘I didn’t threaten the press, just reasoned with them.’

  To keep the lid on the Elinor Grant story, however, was much more difficult; Penny had to give sworn assurances that the problem was not acute alcoholism, as certain Washington papers had intimated when trying to explain her absences from the capital, but beyond that, Penny was not willing to perjure herself.

  Mrs. Grant was drinking, but she was far from being a dipsomaniac; her problem was that the little men from outer space threatened more seriously than ever before to take over control of the country, and when Penny went to reason with her she found the woman as ‘spaced out’ as if she had been taking drugs. Her first question to Elinor Grant was: ‘When did you first correspond with Dr. Strabismus?’