Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Senator Grant had been ordered by President Nixon to be in Florida for the launch and now in Texas for the landing, and for a very solid reason. As one White House staffer pointed out: ‘The damned Democrats have been trying to steal this show for years. Kennedy, Johnson, Glancey. You’re our top Republican in the program, Norman, and the President wants you to be damned visible.’ The young man had added, They’ll make it a highly social affair, with lots of photography and television. Be sure to take your wife.’

  On the Florida trip Grant had been unable to persuade Elinor to come along; she insisted upon staying home, and for a very good reason: on the Monday before lift-off she had received from Dr. Strabismus an urgent telegram informing her, and a select handful of other $72 subscribers, exactly what was happening:

  Do not be alarmed if the tottering American government tries to place a man on the Moon. This has been orchestrated by those Visitors who infiltrated NASA seven years ago, as I warned you at the time. Ordinary American scientists could not possibly have solved the difficult problems involved in a Moon shot. The Visitors could.

  Our informants within the Visitor ranks assure us that very secure colonies have been established by them on the dark side of the Moon, away from our telescopes, and that when our men try to land, every assistance will be given. This will ensure that the attempt will be successful, because the Visitors want us to be preoccupied with the Moon while they finalize their assumption of power in Washington. These are critical days, but do not be deceived by the Moon landing. The really important event will be the impending takeover in Washington, London, Rome and Tokyo.

  Elinor had felt that she could probably help the nation most by staying in Clay to cooperate with the Visitors, so she missed the excitement of the lift-off, viewed by more than a million people lining the Florida roads, but when the White House itself telephoned to urge her to attend the celebrations in Houston which would accompany a successful Moon landing, she had to listen. Calling the headquarters of USA in Los Angeles, she asked Dr. Strabismus whether in his opinion it would be permissible for her to leave home on the eve of the Visitors’ takeover, and he said it would be all right, for they had assured him that it would be peaceful. So she joined her husband at the Longhorn Motel.

  Rachel Mott was still shepherding the wives of her astronauts, but since the emphasis would now be on the families of the men about to attack the Moon, she had free time to be with her husband, and she needed the semi-vacation. She had been spending long hours with her son Christopher, who seemed to thrive under the relaxing Florida sun. He had been suspended from the University of Maryland for grades that were abominably low, but she felt sure that the stabilizing influence of family life would enable him to resume his studies. She wanted him to accompany her to Houston, but he had preferred staying in Florida, where he would be attending anti-Vietnam rallies in Miami.

  When Penny Pope brought her senators back to Washington after the hugely successful launch of Apollo II, tough-minded Mike Glancey took her aside. This is top secret, but President Nixon’s insisting that Elinor Grant attend the Moon-landing celebration at Houston. She’s as crazy as a bedbug and it’s your job to see she stays undercover.’ When Penny protested that she was not a babysitter, Glancey growled, This time you are. There would be hell to pay if European newspapers got hold of the fact that a leading member of our Space Committee had a fruitcake wife who was peddling state secrets to little green men.’ It would be Penny’s job to keep Mrs. Grant isolated until either the shot succeeded or the little men took over.

  At half past eleven on this dramatic day, when the temperature outside was a boiling ninety-six, the four couples sat down to lunch in a reserved corner of the Longhorn bar. Two televisions had been brought in at Senator Grant’s request so that he and his guests could listen to both Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor, and after two rounds of cocktails, which John Pope and Liesl Kolff refused, the euphoric lunch began with large plates of Louisiana oysters. Liesl refused these, too, having been indoctrinated from her earliest days in El Paso with the belief that one could eat oysters safely only in months containing an r.

  Liesl Kolff was in some ways the most interesting of the group, for with a stubborn peasant sense of destiny, she had allowed a varied experience to modify her very little. As a girl she had been destined to be fat, and she was, a roly-poly woman in her early fifties composed of three rather shapeless globes: a large head with fat cheeks, a very large torso ill hidden by an inexpensive flowered dress, and an extremely large bottom which protruded strikingly. She wore heavy-rimmed glasses that accented the fullness of her face; she had been told often that if she chose glasses with no rims, she would look better, and she had tried this, but she was essentially clumsy and after she had broken the rimless glasses twice she threw them away: ‘Chust one trick by the doctors to get our money.’ She confessed to her son Magnus that in the rimless glasses she had looked better, ‘but I got no time for vanity. These other glasses, you could chump on them, they don’t break.’

  ‘I understand you didn’t want to come,’ Senator Grant said as they waited for the chicken salad.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Liesl said.

  ‘But this is a triumph for your husband.’

  ‘He has many triumphs. Today is also a triumph for my son. His first.’

  ‘And what has he done?’

  ‘Tonight he plays the Stradella, a trumpet concerto, with the Boston Symphony.’

  ‘Your son? How old is he?’

  ‘Twenty-two.’

  ‘Isn’t that delightful! Elinor, Mrs. Kolff’s son is only twenty-two and he’s playing trumpet with a famous orchestra.’

  Elinor smiled indulgently without making any comment; she felt quite detached from this assembly, for she faced problems that they could not remotely be aware of, and furthermore, she had learned that whenever the senator praised some young person who was behaving well, he intended it as a rebuke to her for having allowed their daughter Marcia to behave, as he always put it, ‘so poorly.’ As for herself, she considered Marcia an outstanding success, to be dean of a major university at such a young age. She nodded slightly to Mrs. Kolff, as if to say, ‘I’m pleased that you’ve found some satisfaction in this country. You look as if you needed it.’

  Despite her aloofness, Mrs. Grant did now and then steal a glance at Mrs. Pope to see if this brazen creature would betray in any manner the fact that she was sleeping with the senator, but the adventuress was a wily one who disclosed nothing. Mrs. Grant deemed it outrageous that her husband would have the effrontery to bring this woman to Houston, and she felt sorry for Commander Pope, who seemed a fairly decent young man, which was to be expected, since he was the son of Dr. Pope the druggist. Penny Pope, she never forgot, came from one of the poorer Clay families, one without distinction, so her immoral behavior was no surprise.

  At about the time the salad was served, excitement on the television stations began to escalate, for it was apparent that the astronauts were preparing the dangerous and thrilling descent to the Moon, so the diners ignored their food, except for Mrs. Kolff, who was hungry, not having had the oysters, and talk turned to the miracle of receiving television signals across a space of 238,000 miles.

  ‘They could come from 238,000,000 miles,’ Kolff said simply. ‘As long as it’s a straight line, no mountains, no planet to interfere, an electrical signal will go forever.’

  When Senator Grant challenged this, Kolff put down his fork and asked, ‘How much electrical power to send a radio message, Moon to Earth?’ Everyone but Mott and Pope made extravagant guesses, whereupon he went to a bridge lamp and turned on a sixty-watt bulb, which competed poorly with the light from the two televisions. ‘One twentieth of that bulb will do it well,’ he said.

  Discussion raged about this claim, and Kolff had to bring in Dr. Mott for assistance: ‘Yes, one of these days we’ll have a radio at Saturn, more than a billion miles away. With power much less than that light bulb, it will send us messages, quit
e easily. It’s like Kolff says, if a straight line is uninterrupted by mountains or other interjections, the signal goes on forever.’

  ‘Is what we’re seeing from the Moon instantaneous?’ Grant asked.

  ‘Not at all,’ Mott said. ‘When Pope here speaks to the man in the capsule, 238,000 miles separate the two men. And since an electrical impulse travels at the speed of light, it requires 1.3 seconds for Pope’s voice to reach the Moon. When Mike Collins up there replies, it takes another 1.3 seconds for his voice to come back to us.’

  ‘And if we ever go to Mars, like they keep telling us, what time lag?’

  ‘I don’t have the exact distance to Mars …’

  ‘About two hundred million miles in the most likely configuration of orbits,’ Kolff interjected, and Mott bowed in his direction.

  ‘That’ll require eighteen minutes up and eighteen back down.’

  ‘Can we send men to Mars?’ Grant asked Mott, but before the latter could respond, Kolff broke in: ‘Of course! I could build a rocket which would carry a man safely to Mars. Next year.’

  Grant, who knew that some 450,000 different Americans were engaged in supporting today’s Moon shot, did not appreciate the German’s saying that he could get to Mars; it would require more than half a million men, more than twenty billion new dollars.

  But such calculations were made meaningless by events at the Moon itself, for the astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin were preparing to break loose from their mother ship and drop down to the surface of the dead minor target.

  ‘I still can’t believe it,’ Grant said. He was fifty-five now, a handsome older man with a grave worried countenance, graying hair and the stable professional look that one acquires after long years of service in Washington. He had been very close to the space program, one of its pillars, but he had usually been required to provide vast sums of money for projects he did not really understand, and now he was faced by a moment of triumph which was totally incomprehensible, with Dieter Kolff telling him that soon other men would be on Mars. He was almost as confused as his wife, except that her adventures cost thousands of dollars; his, billions.

  Seven of the eight people picked at their food while Liesl Kolff asked the waiter for a second helping of salad. ‘You can have mine,’ Elinor Grant said generously. ‘I haven’t touched it.’

  It was two o’clock, Central Standard Time, 20 July 1969 when the dishes were cleared away and an ice bucket filled with bottles of beer was brought in. Dieter Kolff took the caps off two bottles, handing one to his wife, but she refused: ‘The Americans make their beer too weak, too sweet.’ Grant summoned the waiter to see if he could fetch any German beer. ‘Mexican is good,’ Liesl said. ‘Or Filipino. Or even Danish.’ The motel had some Tuborg and she was content.

  Penny Pope was on the telephone to Senator Glancey’s office in Washington, and between long pauses she shared information with the people in the room: ‘Things look unbelievably good. Maybe within the hour.’

  Now the tension mounted, and Grant kept revolving an empty ginger ale bottle in his two hands, staring at first one television screen, then the other. The images were excellent and he said, ‘Damn, we do some things right. Look at that.’

  As the landing module began its descent, the actual approach to the Moon after all these years of travail, Penny Pope went to stand with her husband, who better than the others could understand the significance of the moment, and she took his hand. Mrs. Kolff did the same with her husband, recalling the years when his optimism alone seemed to keep the Peenemünde men working on their great dream. Mrs. Mott wanted to go to her husband, too, but she could not, for Mrs. Grant held her by the hand, assuring her in a low voice that what was happening on the television screens, which she refused to look at, was trivial compared to what was about to happen in the world generally. ‘You have no idea, my dear, but I feel assured that men like your husband who know so much will be of extra value when it all happens.’

  ‘When what happens?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  Mott stood beside Senator Grant’s chair, sipping idly at a beer that was growing increasingly warm. ‘This is almost unbearable. I helped plot the trajectories, and to see them come alive. You know, this is really quite extraordinary. Those men will land precisely where we planned three years ago.’

  ‘This is a great day for America,’ Grant said, and before his eyes flashed the other days that he remembered: the Japanese fleet bursting out of the dawn to destroy MacArthur; Gawain Butler, that gallant man fighting off the sharks; the morning when Senator Taft led him into the well of the Senate to be sworn in, his own senior senator having been called away by death; death, yes, the assassination of John Kennedy, a man he had never much liked, a dilettante but one who caused little harm; the resounding triumph of Richard Nixon over Hubert Humphrey, a clown really, the latter, a man in no way entitled to be President; and often among the images the face of good old Mike Glancey of Red River, a Democrat but a man you could trust and not at all like Lyndon Johnson, whose Presidency had been such a mishmash.

  ‘This nation has its great days,’ Grant said, clasping Mott’s hand.

  Now silence filled the afternoon. Even the televisions seemed to halt out of respect for the tremendous moment at hand, and then came the news that reassured the world: ‘Houston. Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.’ For just a second no one spoke, then two of the men, Grant and Mott, showed tears of exultation, and to everyone’s surprise Dieter Kolff leaped up and down like a maniac, shouting first in German, then English, ‘It is done!’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Grant mumbled. The risks we took.’ He pointed to one of the televisions and asked no one in particular, ‘Do you realize the risks we took? The whole world watching?’

  John Pope started the real celebration by kissing Penny, who had tears in her eyes, and she turned to kiss Senator Grant, whose fortitude she had so often witnessed. ‘We did it,’ she cried. ‘In our bumbling way we did it.’

  It would be six and a half hours before the astronauts actually left their module to step upon the Moon, and everyone was prepared to wait for the historic moment, so the dishes were cleared away and fresh drinks brought in, with three bottles of Tuborg for Liesl Kolff. Many telephone calls were placed by Penny Pope, with the senator saying, ‘Charge them to the committee. This is one day in a century.’

  One call was to Skycrest, Colorado, where Millard Mott and his friend Roger were running a health-food store, which would scarcely have survived except that the young men had two profitable sidelines, cheese-and-wine parties and a fine selection of classical records. They were elated with the Moon shot and Roger told the senior Motts, ‘You’ll never know how proud of you Millard is. He’s a champion, you know.’

  Penny reached Magnus Kolff in Boston just before he was about to go on stage, and he told his parents that he was a celebrity this night, because the other musicians knew that his father had helped build the rocket that did the trick. ‘When the doorman called me to the phone he said, “Houston Spacecraft Center calling” loud enough for the others to hear. I am so happy for you, Father.’ He spoke in English, his parents in German.

  Mrs. Grant placed only one call, to Dr. Strabismus, who told her, ‘Everything is stable. Our colony on the dark side of the Moon is standing by to give every assistance. They’ll see that our men succeed.’

  John Pope spoke frequently to Mission Control, where excitement crackled on the telephone; it was a triumph for so many men, and one of them said, ‘Tell that old son-of-a-bitch Stanley Mott that he was on the beam when he sponsored lunar-orbit rendezvous.’ And when Pope relayed this message, Mott asked Penny if she could get the NASA base at Langley in Virginia. When she did, he talked with the engineers there who had inducted him into the world of space and thanked them.

  Grant took a dozen calls, one from President Nixon but none from his own daughter in Los Angeles, and when the furor quieted he asked the Kolffs, ‘How did your son learn the trumpet … so yo
ung?’

  Liesl Kolff answered, eagerly, ‘In America you want people to learn. Mrs. Mott, here, she taught us English at El Paso. No charge. When we move to Huntsville, first day they give out band instruments. How old was Magnus? Four maybe, he took one.’

  ‘But we had trouble,’ Dieter said. ‘You might say the big decision, when he wanted to do funnies with the football band. I put my foot down. “You do not do funnies with Beethoven.” He wanted to cry.’

  ‘How were you able to make him see things your way?’ Rachel Mott broke in.

  ‘You tell him once, he don’t listen,’ Liesl said. ‘You tell him twice, he shouts at you. So you don’t tell him a third time. You get a hammer and smash his trumpet.’

  Dieter laughed. ‘It belonged to the school. We had to pay for it. Magnus was so ashamed, he said a truck ran over it, his fault.’

  ‘We got him a better one, and with it he joined our little orchestra. Then University of Alabama. Then Munich for one year. Now Boston, maybe forever.’

  ‘You must be very proud,’ Rachel said.

  ‘We are,’ Liesl replied.

  Grant turned to the Motts. ‘Weren’t you having a little trouble with your son?’

  ‘Both of them,’ Rachel said. ‘And not just a little.’