When Rachel Mott was informed, she was sure it was a heart attack, but after NASA doctors had examined him they assured her that it was mere exhaustion: ‘Even geniuses have to rest some time. Keep him in bed. Don’t let him worry.’
As soon as word of his collapse circulated among the Solid Six, now Five, each of the astronauts wrote personally to Mott, attesting to their appreciation of what he had done for them, from the days of the selection committee to his supportive work at the time of Claggett’s flight, and the five wives did the same with Mrs. Mott, but the most surprising outcome was a personal visit to the sickroom by Cynthia Rhee: ‘I’m here for two reasons, Dr. Mott. To express my hopes for your speedy recovery, for you are a good man and you’re needed, and to see firsthand what penalties a scientist pays for his dedication to space.’
‘How can you afford to spend so much time on one story?’
‘I submit something almost every week. The paper gets good return on my modest expense account, believe me.’
‘Am I your story this week?’
‘You are. “Overworked Scientist Collapses on Way to Moon.” Everyone in Japan will be able to visualize that.’
‘Engineer, not scientist.’
‘So there we have the first conflict. Since you always resented your below-the-salt status as an engineer, now that you’ve become a real scientist, you refuse the title. Out of intellectual pique?’
Wrapped in his bathrobe, Mott adjusted his eyeglasses and smiled. ‘You may be right, but I’m an engineer, always will be.’ He laughed outright. ‘Know what a really fine engineer told me when I came to work for the old NACA? “Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them.” ’
It was surprising how men of all caliber, and many women, were willing to talk freely with this remarkable Korean woman. She was almost thirty now, ‘all nonsense flushed away’ as she once said to Rachel Mott, and everything about her seemed to disqualify her for the arduous task she had undertaken: she was too small to wrestle with the crowds that surrounded the astronauts, too pretty to be taken seriously. Her English was delightful to hear, with its occasional mispronunciation of l, r and f, and she had never learned to control her fiery temper; but she had a charming way of throwing herself upon the mercy of listeners, a woman without sham or pretense who wanted to delve into problems of intense mutual concern. Nothing derailed her, not abuse or scorn or outright refusal to answer her intrusive questions. As she had told Rachel one night at the Bali Hai: ‘Gigantic things are under way, supervised by little men, and the world requires to know all aspects.’
‘I should like to tabulate the forces that brought you down,’ she said as she sat beside Mott’s bed. ‘Jensen’s death. I think you were like all of us. We saw that heavenly boy with his fairy-tale princess of a wife as the perpetual youth, gallant … so goddamned gallant.’ After pausing to bite her lip and keep back the tears, she continued to bore in. ‘So you must have seen Jensen as the son you never had …’
‘I have two sons.’
Without altering in any way her tone of voice, she said, ‘Of course. But one is a California homosexual, the other a Washington drug pusher.’
Mott did not attempt to fight back. On these two difficult confrontations he had made his peace, but he did ask, ‘Is it necessary to print that?’
‘To print it? Maybe not. To know it? Absolutely,’ and she digressed to explain her attitude toward data. ‘Have you ever studied the ceramics of Korea? Probably the greatest in the world. Our potters never try to make a perfect vase, flawless in all dimensions. They allow the clay to manifest itself, to work out its own destiny. And how do they achieve that unmatched celadon finish? They don’t apply it as a celadon color. They underglaze, one subtle shade after another. Pale colors you are never allowed to see. And they follow this patient ritual because they learned that if they go in some bright morning, all eager to create a masterpiece, and simply brush onto their vase the celadon color, it will always remain just that, as long as the vase exists. But if they start way back and apply first a slight gray, then a green, then a shadowy brown and finally the pale yellow, when the time comes to place the real yellow, it rests upon a pulsating base which will enable it through the next five hundred years to become whatever shade of exquisite celadon the passing fancy requires. That way you get a piece of crockery that dances and breathes and lives its own life.
‘I work like a Korean potter. I underpaint, ridiculously. I must know how you felt about Jensen’s death, and a thousand other things, so that when in my book I present you as my scientist—forgive me, my engineer—the underpainting will be so generous that your portrait will vibrate for five hundred years.’
‘You have a long perspective.’
‘No, a very long perception. You seem sometimes to forget that you and your glorious young men are engaged in an adventure that will command public interest for at least five centuries. You’re not in America in 1965. You’re in the books of world history in 2465. And if dedicated people like me do not tell your story accurately today, do you know how the books of 2465 are going to tell it? “On 12 April 1961 the heroic Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to enter space. Much later some Americans followed.” And that will be the summary of your whole ambitious program unless writers like me engrave the real story honestly.’
‘Must you speak of my sons?’
‘Millard and Roger had no restraints when I interviewed them on Malibu Beach.’
‘You went to that trouble?’
‘And I have the statements of the three major policemen in Christopher’s case. I never cared much for you, Dr. Mott, till I saw for myself how much you love your sons.’
‘Why was I repulsive?’
‘Because in my little world I saw you always in your companionship with Tucker Thompson, and that is a very shabby setting for an honest gem.’
‘I read your story in the German papers about the death of Jensen. It wasn’t much different from what Thompson wrote for his rag, except his pictures were better.’
‘Wait! Wait, Dr. Mott! For current publication I can write pure bullshit with the best of them. To pay the rent. But I certainly shall keep the B.Q. very low when I write my book.’
‘B.Q.?’
‘Bullshit Quotient. We try to keep it as low as humanly possible.’
‘Then it’s true, you are writing a book?’
‘All newspaper people are writing books. Mine will be short, and I hope poetic, and I believe it’ll be the one that will move into the next century, because my underpainting will be very solid. The old Korean potters will be proud of me for observing their rules so rigorously.’ Then, in a preamble to the penetrating questions she was about to ask Mott, she did some revealing underpainting on herself: ‘Did you ever stop to think, Dr. Mott, that for really great ceramics, the ones that sing, you must go to Korea. Japanese work is heavy, uninspired, often very ordinary. Because they don’t know how to sing, and we Koreans do.’
His second visitors from the Bali Hai were equally surprising. Randy Claggett and John Pope came cautiously into the sickroom, obviously bursting with pride and carrying a heavy bundle stuffed into a paper shopping bag.
‘How you doin’, Doc?’ Randy asked.
‘No strain, no pain.’
‘What happened? Everything hit you at once?’
‘You could not possibly explain it better. Let it be a warning, you young tigers. Everybody has a limit.’
‘We came to buck you up, Doctor. Deke Slayton told us yesterday and we hopped a T-38 to come up and give you the good news.’
‘I can see it in your faces. You fly the next Gemini?’
‘Two down the line, but we get the one heavy with science, a lot of extravehicular activity.’
‘The man in the right-hand seat is the one who leaves the capsule and walks in space?’
‘Yep,’ Claggett said. Tope goes out, and if I still like the look on his ugly face, I let him back in.’
�
��And if you don’t?’
‘We’re paintin’ his ass in radioactive fluorescent, and for the next hundred years amateur astronomers will be able to follow him orbit after orbit.’
Mott was as excited as they were about the projected flight, the first in which the entire crew would be composed of the astronauts for whom he was responsible, and then he had to laugh. ‘I’ll bet Tucker Thompson is going ape.’
‘That he is,’ Claggett said. ‘Has his men photographing Debby Dee and Penny like mad, in hopes we’ll crash and he can play up their heroic sorrow the way he did with Inger Jensen. Christ, did you see what he did with that one?’
The three men discussed Inger for some moments, and Mott learned that she had arrived in Oregon, where she could escape memories of NASA. ‘She won’t be single long,’ Claggett said. ‘I warned Debby Dee last night. “If that Swede is still around next autumn, out you go, babe, and in she comes.” ’
Now Pope broke in. ‘Tucker’s in a state of schizophrenia, and you better get out of bed real soon to straighten him up, Dr. Mott.’
‘What’s the problem? I should think he’d be overjoyed, an entire trip controlled by two men on his payroll.’
‘That part’s fine. Last night he told everyone at the Bali Hai, “We’ll teach Life how to cover a space flight.” But what eats him is the fact that of the six available wives—five, now that Inger’s out—he gets for his exclusive the two he likes least.’ And Pope counted on his fingers: ‘He’d love to have Gloria Cater and that Mississippi charm. Or Cluny Bell and her sultry come-at-me, tiger. Or everybody’s favorite rags-to-riches hillbilly, Sandy Lee. He could do wonders with any two of them. But what does he get? Debby Dee, who calls NASA brass “them stupid sonnombeeches,” and Penny Pope, who insists on staying in Washington with no white fence and no kids.’
Claggett was laughing. ‘I heard him tell Cater last night, “Well, we have to work with what we got.” But we came on a different mission, Doc,’ and he began to fumble with the shopping bag, taking from it a stack of books whose covers were lurid and torn. ‘You take space too seriously, Doc. That’s why you’re flat on your ass and we’re up and about. Now, the proper trainin’ for an astronaut, or for someone like you who works with astronauts, is not all that calculus shit you bother your brains with, but some good old science fiction of the kind that got me and Pope started.’
‘I never wasted my youth on that crap,’ Pope protested.
Mott pointed out that of all the engineers he had known, practically none had bothered with science fiction, whereas almost all the scientists had. ‘Why is that?’ he asked his two visitors.
‘I think you were always preoccupied with how to do it,’ Pope suggested. The scientists were always far out, setting goals to try next.’
‘How did you get hooked, Randy?’ Mott asked.
‘Those wonderful sexy covers. I didn’t give a damn about science fiction, but I always hoped that the gorillas from outer space were gonna rip the rest of the clothes off and go at it. Month after month I longed for the miracle, but it never happened, and after about six years I was bright enough to see that they were connin’ me, so I began to read the stories for the content. And they were very good.’
He had brought eight books, three anthologies with sexy covers, five full-length novels with covers featuring the anomalies of outer space, and as he passed them over to Mott, he spread the sexy items on the bed and said, ‘It’s always perplexed me. We speak of women as the weaker sex. But have you noticed these covers and the ads in the magazines? The men are always dressed to the hilt to protect them from the sun and the dust and the frozen snow, and the women are nearly naked. Look at these cosmonauts! Every inch of their body covered to ward off radiation. The women, hardly a stitch on.’ With his hands on the anthologies he said, ‘When I first joined my Marine squadron I thought, “These must be the brightest officers in the world. They all read the Sunday New York Times,” and I was a dumb stiff from Texas, so I figured that if I wanted to keep up, I’d better read the Times too, but then I found that all they read was the glossy magazine section, to see the naked women in the ads. Fifty science-fiction magazines don’t give you half the naked women that a good issue of the Sunday Times does.’
‘How am I supposed to read these?’ Mott asked. ‘Any special order?’
‘There sure is, and I have ‘em marked. Please read ‘em in order, because then you’ll get the drift. But I’m gonna read the first one aloud, so that you get started right.’ And from one of the anthologies he began to read in his strong Texas voice a story much loved by sci-fi fans.
It was called To Serve Man,’ and dealt with porcine visitors from outer space who arrive mysteriously on Earth with two inestimable boons: a way to neutralize all weaponry, so that perpetual peace can reign, and an unlimited free food supply, so that want will be eradicated. They also introduce better systems of government and one gentle innovation after another for the betterment of man.
The Earth is ecstatic, all except one suspicious computer expert who keeps trying to decipher a handbook one of the Earth’s defensive men has acquired surreptitiously from the spacecraft. Day after day, as the rest of the world applauds the swinelike intruders, he labors at his task of breaking their code, and after many futile leads he succeeds in at least interpreting the title of the manual, To Serve Man, and with this reassurance the Earthlings accept the benevolent visitors at face value, realizing that a millennium has arrived.
But just as the hero of the story and his associates are entering the spacecraft for an exploratory trip to the distant planet from which the strangers came, the computer expert rushes out to warn them: ‘It’s a cookbook.’
‘I like that!’ Mott cried, and Claggett said, ‘I thought you would.’
‘Who wrote it?’ Mott asked, and Claggett said, ‘A favorite of mine. Damon Knight. You’ll find other yarns by him in the anthologies.’
In the ensuing days Mott made his acquaintance with that gleaning of elegant stories crafted by men like Asimov, Bradbury and Leiber. Two of the shortest stories illustrated why their authors were deemed masters of the genre. The first was by Robert Heinlein and depicted a loud-mouthed drunk in a sleazy bar near a field from which a spacecraft is about to take off for some far planet. The man has suspicions about this particular experiment and a generally jaundiced view about exploration in general. ‘Columbus Was a Dope’ was the name of the tale.
The bore rambles on and on, reciting the pitfalls of space and the senselessness of further adventures, and nothing much seems to be happening until two glowing paragraphs at the end. The bartender throws one of his glasses into the air and watches approvingly as it drifts very slowly downward. Then he tells his listeners that working in one-sixth gravity has done wonders for his bunions, which had been killing him on Earth. The bar is on the Moon.
Mott was enchanted by the skill displayed in such stories, but the one which made the most lasting impression was by an Englishman living in Ceylon, Arthur C. Clarke, of whom even the astronauts who did not like sci-fi spoke highly. It was most adroitly told: a Jesuit priest is on an interplanetary probe in what appears to be A.D. 2534, and he is much perplexed by the impact of science on his religion, but at last he reaches the environs of the Phoenix Nebula, whose central star exploded about 3500 B.C., becoming a mighty nova.
Of course, several planets near the star were consumed by fire, but at the far edges of what had been the star’s planetary system—as far away as Pluto is from our Sun—one small planet had survived extinction. All life on it had been burned away, as life on Earth must some day be, but the rocky structure of the planet had survived, and when the exploring team reached the surface, they found that the people who had lived there thousands of years before, and had foreseen the extinction of their society, had compiled a record of what life had been like on their especially congenial planet. By means of tapes and maps and diagrams buried deep where fire could not touch them, they explained to those who they were
sure would visit their homeland one day what a splendid, vibrant life they had enjoyed: the great cities, the accumulated knowledge, the happy lives. And the picture of their society was so enviable that the Jesuit wondered why God, in order to send His planet Earth a signal in the year 4 B.C., had set ablaze this great nova so that its light might guide three wise men to Bethlehem, while this remote planet with a civilization much more advanced than Earth’s had had all of its living forms of life scorched away.
With real avidity Mott read Claggett’s recommendations, and almost never was he disappointed, for the chaff had been winnowed away, leaving a core of stories that would have graced any imaginative literature. He was especially impressed by the writing of a man whose name he had never heard before, Stanley G. Weinbaum, who during the 1930s had produced a small collection of stories which had lifted science fiction out of the swamp of little green men and naked ladies.
He wrote of the impending exploration of Mars with subtlety and almost love, populating the planet with creatures facing the real problems their inhospitable climate would create; these were stories in the great tradition of Petronius and Boccaccio, and Mott wanted to know more about him. He had started writing, the brief notes said, only when an inescapable death loomed, and he was allowed only eighteen months in which to report his vision.
When Mott read this his eyes filled with tears, and since he was alone he made no effort to halt them; he was thinking of Harry Jensen, that golden child who had been so carefully nurtured by his society for some great task and who had been struck down so senselessly by one of the worst manifestations of that society. He calculated the investment society had made in Jensen from the day he entered the University of Minnesota, through the airplanes he cracked up in flight training, to the heavy cost of his work at Edwards and on to the millions spent on him in NASA. But the greatest loss was what he might have contributed to the NASA program—he would have been one of the best—or to the American society later, because he and Inger stood for something. He could be a rowdy child, this Jensen, and he was not above ducking out for a quick weekend with Cindy Rhee in an Oklahoma motel, but he was a man and his loss was inconsolable.
Space: A Novel Page 57