MOTT: Not really.
KOLFF: We’re very arrogant tonight, aren’t we?
MOTT: I sure am. My team set out to do something extremely difficult. We chose the one right way to do it. And we succeeded. If you want to do something different, you find your right way. But don’t complain about mine, because for its task it was perfection. Let’s order more beer.
KOLFF: I’m pleased to see that you’re capable of emotion. I’m not. Not when the cause is so spurious.
MOTT: What would you have us do?
KOLFF: Very simple, Stanley. Cancel the rest of the Apollo shots. Fire all the astronauts. Assemble the hundred brightest astrophysicists, give them a minimum budget, and tell them to get on with it.
MOTT: With what?
KOLFF: The study of the universe. If we apply ourselves diligently for the next hundred years, we can solve all the great riddles.
MOTT: Like what?
KOLFF: The origins of the universe. Its probable life history. The specific role of our Sun and its planets. The origins of human life. Even things like when the next ice age will overtake us. You know, of course, that when it comes, fifteen or twenty thousand years from now, the ice will obliterate New York. And later, when it melts, the oceans will ride completely across Florida. It’s matters like that we should be addressing.
MOTT (with some irritation): Dieter, have you ever seen my office? What do you suppose faces me on the wall every time I look up? A marvelous photograph of the Galaxy 4565 … twenty million light-years away. That’s where my imagination lives. That’s where I want to go eventually … in my mind.
KOLFF: Then why are you fooling around with the Moon?
MOTT: Because Senator Glancey taught me that I’ll never get where I want to go unless I take the taxpayers along. We move one step at a time, and the Moon’s our first big one.
KOLFF: And maybe the last. Maybe we’ve done our one great thing tonight. We may have to pass the torch along … Do you have the French word gonfalon? We may have to hand it to others.
MOTT: What others?
KOLFF: Japan? Germany? Russia?
MOTT: Are they capable?
KOLFF: People make themselves capable. (Many minutes of silence followed.) I go to bed tonight sorely worried. I see my adopted nation on the wrong course and I must soon retire from the battle. Goodnight, Stanley, in your hour of erroneous triumph.
A week later, while the world still reverberated with cheering, it was Mott’s turn to be worried, because the mail sent down from Washington included a letter from Alberta, Canada:
Roger and I decided to close our shop in Skycrest and take refuge in Canada. We cannot submit ourselves to the draft for a war that is so terribly wrong and being fought on principles so terribly corrupt. We could both register at the University of Colorado and thus escape the draft, but we cannot avoid danger in that spurious way and watch young men with less money being sent to do our dirty work for us. I hope that my action will not bring discredit on you, at a time when you have a right to savor your triumph.…
MILLARD
The retreat from space which Dieter Kolff predicted occurred more swiftly than even he had expected, and with much greater severity. NASA’s budget was slashed from five billion dollars a year to four and then to a mere three; experts in various fields were laid off; and there was talk of closing down some of the centers where exploratory work was being conducted.
What was even more surprising, trips to the Moon became routine, so that often the general public was not aware that one was under way, and people grumbled about wasting money on the collection of ‘more Moon rocks, when we already have enough.’
Astronaut Randy Claggett, himself from Texas A & M, brightened the gloom by circulating a joke on his alma mater:
‘Seems the geology department at Texas. Aggies was miffed because the University of Texas got Moon rocks to study and they didn’t. So a NASA scientist, thinkin’ to halt the complaints, went into a barnyard, picked up a handful of rocks and give ‘em to the Aggie scientists to analyze. Seven months not a word, then a neatly typed report: “There are many aspects of these rocks we cannot explain, but we can state one thing for certain, that cow really did jump over the Moon.” ’
Randy also reported, in his Texas drawl, the results of the visit of two astronauts to a community in Iowa, an offshoot of one founded in Illinois by Wilbur Glenn Voliva, the apostle of a flat Earth. This group sustained the hopes of people across the country, and in Europe, too, who longed for the simpler world of A.D. 1300. When Randy handed the present leader of the community a series of splendid color photographs showing an Earth as round as an orange with the blue oceans held in place by gravity, the gentleman studied the evidence for a long time, then said, ‘If a man wasn’t a trained observer, he might be deceived by this picture.’ When Randy pressed the true believer, the man growled, ‘I never said it wasn’t a circle.’ Five days later the Iowa community circulated a learned paper explaining why, from a certain distance, the flat Earth might look somewhat rounded: ‘It’s a matter of parallax.’
When Randy took his own flight to the Moon, he provided some much-needed levity by reporting the progress of his Apollo in terms that gave the newsmen some trouble, because when he ran into momentary difficulties, he told Houston: ‘It was pretty ginchy there for a moment.’ When crumbs from the dehydrated meals hung suspended throughout the capsule, he reported: Things are gettin’ pretty grotty up here.’ Another time they were ‘scuzzy,’ but when he said that the fuel problem was getting ‘just a bit grunchy,’ Houston had to warn him to speak English.
When he surveyed the Moon while his two companions were on the surface exploring it, he told the world: ‘It looks like General Sherman marched acrost it with a legion of boll weevils,’ and he irritated some patriots by exclaiming: ‘We ought to send an expedition to the back side of the Moon and find the highest mountain and name it Von Braun, because he put us up here.’
He was refreshing, and when the flight ended, reporters were more interested in him, alone in the capsule, than they were in the other two men who had actually walked on the Moon. When they asked him how he felt, circling the Moon alone, he replied, frankly, ‘It was real scuzzy.’ NASA, recognizing a popular figure when they had one, sent him on various public relations tours, and his face became familiar: a thin, puckish cowboy with an attractive gap between his big front teeth and a propensity for the outrageous statement, as when he told a Denver audience: ‘Travelin’ in a space capsule is no more dangerous than travelin’ Route 85 to Colorado Springs in a car on a Saturday night when the beetpickers is out drunk.’ Statistically, of course, he was correct.
But he could be extremely sharp when required, and he delighted the science community at Boulder with an erudite joke: ‘Seems there was this hotshot geologist at Stanford, great authority on earthquakes. Predicted that all of California west of the San Andreas fault would disappear into the Pacific on 6 June 1966—that’s 6-6-66—and when he woke up that morning he found that everythin’ west of the fault was still standin’, but everythin’ east of it had vanished. Looking at his calculations, he said, “Damn, I got my sign wrong.” ’
When speaking to these same scientists, he said, ‘We’re now moving into fields of constant speculation with experts in all areas acomin’ at us with their theories. Most of them, I find, have a correlation of 1.0 if you take only one instance.’ There was a moment of silence, then some of the audience began to chuckle, and as explanations spread, the whole room began to applaud, for they appreciated his adept statement that if a scientist uses only one cause-and-effect instance, he will invariably produce a correlation of 1.0. Indeed, a gentleman in Boulder had recently been guilty of just that blunder; in an attempt to explain the influence of sunspots, he speculated that they dictated the behavior of the recently discovered Van Allen belt, which was certainly correct, if data from only the year 1968 were studied.
When Claggett met privately with technical experts at the vario
us contractors’ offices, he was a source of much stable information, and three different corporation presidents inquired quietly if he would be interested in joining their firms: ‘The space program is running down, Colonel Claggett. You must see evidence of that. We’ll be moving into fascinating new areas, and we’d be proud to have you aboard.’
He always said, ‘I’m a Marine. I’d never fit in.’ But when he and Debby Dee were alone with John Pope and Penny, they discussed with sharp attention the future of their strange profession.
‘How do you see things, Penny?’ Claggett asked one night in the Dagger Bar.
‘Retrenchment all along the line.’
‘How many more Apollo missions will Congress stand for?’
‘We started with a budget that would cover us through Apollo 20. I’m sure they’re going to knock off two of them. They may even cut us back to Apollo 17.’
‘You think that’ll be the last?’
‘I do.’
‘Damn! I coulda been in line to command 18. Take you along, John, like Gemini.’
‘One thing I know,’ Penny said. ‘The next flights must carry scientist-geologists. The public insists on that. You should see the complaints that hit our office.’
‘Well, the scientist and me, we go down on the Moon. John tends the store upstairs.’
‘Would you accept that?’ Penny asked her husband.
‘I’d walk if I could even get near the Moon.’
‘I have heard one rumor,’ Penny said. ‘Apollo 18 would have a good chance of Congressional support if you landed on the dark side of the Moon.’
‘Don’t say that!’ her husband interrupted with some irritation. ‘Everybody uses the phrase the dark side of the Moon. It isn’t dark at all. It gets exactly as much sunlight as the side we see. It’s just that it never turns that face for us to check.’
‘Everybody in Washington calls it the dark side.’
‘Everybody’s wrong. They often are. And we can’t call it the unseen side, because both we and the Russians have photographed it.’
‘What should we call it?’ Penny asked. ‘The far side?’
‘No! The other side. We must no longer describe everything in the planetary system from our parochial perspective.’
‘Well, however you call it, if you could focus Apollo 18 on what we in Washington still call the dark side, you’d be able to enlist strong support from the scientific community … and from the general public, too.’
‘That’s not a bad idea!’ Claggett cried, opening another beer, but Pope was setting up a diagram with two bowls, one large, one small.
‘There’s one knotty problem. On all previous missions we’ve had direct radio communication. Canaveral is here on Earth. Your men, Randy, were here, on the Moon. If we’d had telescopes strong enough, we could have watched you,” and you us. But,’ and he accented this word so heavily that Randy put down his beer, ‘when we land Apollo 18 on the other side of the Moon, which my wife insists upon calling the dark side, though why I can’t imagine, look what happens.’
He asked for a piece of cellophane, with which he made a lunar landing site on the other side, and now straight-line communication was impossible: ‘Radio waves from this landing site can’t penetrate the solid Moon, that’s for sure. And we know they have to travel in a straight line, so they can’t bend around the edges of the Moon. So, Randy, if you and your scientist do land down here, and let’s say you stay four or five days, which is now possible … during descent, work, ascent, when anything can go wrong, you have no contact with Earth, no support from NASA.’
Claggett reminded the wives of the remarkable job done by Houston when Apollo 13 got into trouble because an oxygen tank ruptured: ‘Only the ground computers and the brilliance of the NASA staff, with an assist from the contractors’ men, got those astronauts back alive. Wonderful orchestration of talent. But without radio contact, three dead ducks.’
‘What excites me about a mission to the other side,’ Pope began, but Penny interrupted: ‘Oh no! You do not spend four or five critical days with no communication.’
‘We can have communication. That’s the beauty of it. Debby Dee, let me have two oranges,’ and when he had placed them in carefully selected orbits about his Moon, he explained: ‘One of the satellites will always be in communication with my capsule, with Claggett, on the surface of the Moon, and with Houston down here on Earth. Beautiful.’
‘Can it be done?’ Penny asked.
‘We’re doing it now, on Earth, with our communications satellites. With these Moon orbiters in position … maybe we’ll need three to assure constant coverage …’
‘How will you get your three oranges into the proper orbit?’ Penny asked.
‘You take them up as baggage, and when the computer gives the signal, you toss them out, one by one. And there they stay, like three good little oranges.’
‘You think we could sell it to Congress?’ Claggett asked.
‘Congress says it’s dead set against anything beyond Apollo 17, but Norman Grant might be attracted to this … a noble swan song … John Pope, a kid from his block.’ She mused on this and said, ‘Randy, I think you have a fighting chance.’
‘That’s all I need.’ He took a deep swig of beer and said, ‘You know why I’d like to make one last trip with your ugly husband? Because the capsule on the Apollo is big enough, we could enjoy the trip. Room to move around. And when you go to the john, you don’t do it eight inches from the face of your partner. You go into a corner. You cannot imagine how refined that would seem after our Gemini flights.’
Tucker Thompson was worried. The Quints, who ran the Bali Hai motel, had warned him that the Life people, who owned the exclusive on all the other astronauts, had been snooping in corners, asking questions about Randy Claggett, Debby Dee and the Korean reporter Miss Rhee, and this could only mean trouble. ‘What do you think they were after?’
‘Well, it’s general knowledge here in Cocoa Beach,’ Mr. Quint said, ‘that Claggett’s been shacked up with this lady for some time. Life must’ve heard it. I suppose they want a scandal to discredit you Folks people.’
‘But why Claggett? Hasn’t she … well … hasn’t she been rather … peripatetic?’ When the Quints looked at each other quizzically, he added, ‘Moving around a bit? From bed to bed?’
‘She’s been studying the field,’ Mrs. Quint broke in to say. ‘I like her. She’s a fine, responsible girl.’
‘She’s thirty-five and I wish I could strangle her.’
‘When a pretty woman pays her bills, doesn’t raise hell in the bar, and attracts customers because she’s so amiable,’ Mrs. Quint said, ‘I can excuse almost anything.’
‘Not meddling around with my boys.’
‘Tucker,’ Mrs. Quint asked, ‘how old are your boys, as you call them?’
He took from his pocket the small card on which his secretary had written in minute script the salient details of the Solid Six. ‘They do run into the later thirties.’
‘And early forties,’ Mrs. Quint said. ‘I was reading an article about John Pope. Intellectual leader of the group, they called him. He’s forty-four.’
‘Has Miss Korea been fooling around with Pope?’
‘Stalwart John? No, while the others are upstairs with her he’s out jogging. Our good seafood cooking, it puts weight on most of them, but good old Pope runs off every extra ounce. You hear the great crack Claggett made about him? “Give Pope a pair of water wings and stick a Roman candle up his ass, he could tow Apollo to the Moon.” ’
‘Claggett is a loud-mouth,’ Thompson said huffily.
‘He’s the first to admit it.’
‘What can we do to avoid a scandal?’ Thompson asked, and when the Quints vacillated, he warned: ‘You know, you could be big losers in this, too, if things go wrong.’
‘A good scandal never hurts a bar. What I’d really appreciate, some Miami gangster come in here and mow down four members of the opposition. This bar would make
money for the next ten years.’
‘NASA could put this joint off limits, Quint. No more astronauts attracting the customers.’
‘I wouldn’t like that,’ Quint said.
‘Then you figure out a way to put a brake on Madame Egg Foo-Yong.’ He had also fallen into the habit of calling his little adversary Madame Fu Manchu, the Dragon Lady and Three from Column B.
‘She’s not an easy woman to discipline,’ Mr. Quint said, and suddenly Mrs. Quint turned to stare at her husband as if he had opened new windows.
‘Maybe you better move her out,’ Tucker suggested.
The Quints did not solve the problem; Tucker himself did by the simple device of getting Claggett and Debby Dee dispatched on a foreign good-will tour, shepherded by a reporter from Folks and a functionary from the State Department, who sent Washington a chain of ecstatic cables:
Recommend you send Claggetts every country in world. He tells jokes to kings and prime ministers. She beams and visits hospitals. Have developed a routine in which he is a Tex-Mex astronaut coming home after eleven months on the Moon, she pregnant. Very ribald, very funny.
Cynthia Rhee stayed behind at the Bali Hai, and when Timothy Bell flew in to Canaveral for some hours on the simulators, she quietly moved in with him, for she needed some specific quotes on how it felt to be the only civilian amidst a group of gung-ho military pilots.
‘Wait a minute!’ he exploded in near-anger. ‘I’m no second-class citizen. Don’t ask me questions like that.’
‘You’re giving me a good answer, right now, Tim.’
‘Well, keep in mind that the first man to step on the Moon was a civilian. Neal Armstrong was no military type. A civilian test pilot just like me. Claggett may have been the first of our group to get to the Moon. I’ll probably be the next.’
‘Rumor says you will be, Tim.’
‘Have you checked out the big brawl between Aldrin and Armstrong over who would be first out of the capsule? Aldrin raised hell when NASA decided it would be best if a non-military type took the big step. Buzz said it denigrated the whole military component. Made them out a bunch of warlike killers.’
Space: A Novel Page 63