Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘That’s why I asked the question, Tim. I wanted to hear your gut responses. Not the ones you recite so glibly at press conferences.’

  He became so agitated that he left the bed and stalked about the motel room naked. Then he stormed back, climbed in, and grabbed her by the shoulders. ‘Of course I feel the difference sometimes. They form a kind of gang that I can never enter. The fact that I earned so much more than they do because I was a civilian test pilot, that gigs them, too.’

  ‘Do you feel any difference in … shall we say … competence?’

  ‘I could fly any one of them right into the ground.’ He hesitated. ‘Any one but John Pope. I suppose you know he’s the best.’

  ‘NASA thinks Claggett is.’

  ‘And so do you, I suppose.’

  ‘I don’t evaluate. I thought maybe young Jensen was the best of your lot.’

  ‘But not rock-hard like Pope. Not inspired like Claggett.’

  ‘How do you locate yourself, Tim?’

  ‘I’ll make two flights. Sensationally good. And I’ll become president of some company building airplanes.’

  ‘Allied Aviation, maybe?’

  ‘You said it. I didn’t.’

  ‘Is that your ambition, Tim?’

  ‘It’s my training. When I’m through with NASA—Wait a minute. Put it that when NASA is through with me, I’ll have had an education that not forty men in this world have had. Frank Borman, John Pope, a handful of Russians. I have been taught everything. Six Ph.D.’s, seven. I’d have to have an IQ of 31 not to have mastered a universe of knowledge. I’ll put it to some constructive use.’

  ‘And Cluny? What happens with her?’

  ‘She has three wonderful children. She fits in anywhere. Test flying, business, NASA—whatever I do, she blends in. She’d be sensational as the wife of a corporate president.’

  ‘Do you love her?’

  Timothy Bell reflected on this for a long time, not as to the facts, but as how properly to present them. ‘I was a junior at the University of Arkansas. Spring of the year. Heavy schedule of laboratory work because I took all the hard courses. It was about quarter to six and I was kind of soul-bleary coming out of the lab, and I saw this girl in a pale blue-and-white dress, like Southern girls favored before the Civil War, and I was knocked dumb. I just stood there as she went by, then I started running after her, and she said her name was Cluny, and my three laboratory courses, they went straight to hell. And after a while she said, “Tim, we must do things right. Tend to your grades first,” and I did and we were married that summer. And when I think of her now she’s always in that pale blue-and-white dress.’

  ‘And she’s still that little girl?’

  ‘Yes. She’ll always be.’

  In Washington, Penny Pope campaigned furiously for the money to fund one more Apollo mission, and she had the full support of NASA, which commissioned Dr. Stanley Mott to help in the lobbying, but thoughtful senators like Proxmire of Wisconsin could find no justification for redundant visits to well-known terrain, and the appeals failed. The House was even more opposed to an Apollo 18 because the NASA scientists were unable to demonstrate what new truths might be unfolded, so Dr. Mott retreated, leaving the aborted mission in Penny’s care.

  When she sat before her committee, reporting her failure, she gained no sympathy, and even Senator Glancey, a tired old man now, said, ‘I think we’ve run our course. It’s been an honorable one and let’s let it stand at that.’ But she was persistent, and introduced a new idea which attracted strong support from a few senators and respectful attention from all:

  ‘It would be pusillanimous of us to terminate these explorations without seeing the far side of the Moon. If we explore only the easy near side, we leave the job half done. We can go to the other side, make comparisons, and lay the groundwork for everything that will follow later on. I believe we have a moral imperative to finish the job.’

  When her own Senator Grant objected that any such expedition would have to do its work without radio communication with Earth, a fact which condemned her proposal, Penny borrowed two water carafes and duplicated the demonstration her husband had devised:

  ‘You’re entirely correct, Senator Grant, radio communication in a straight line from the far side of the Moon is an impossibility. We remember that from Frank Borman’s tremendously exciting Christmas flight around the Moon when we had that painful radio silence. But what we can now do is this. Take three devices with us into lunar orbit … these three glasses … and drop them out here … here … and here. They will relay radio messages exactly the way Comsat relays messages now from one part of the Earth to another.’

  When one of the senators asked, ‘If you need three radio stations at the Moon, will you be asking us to fund an extra Apollo to carry them there?’ she apologized: ‘I’m so sorry, Senator. Sometimes I don’t explain things well. The kind of satellite I’m talking about will be little larger than a volleyball.’

  ‘But if every inch of space is already taken, where will you be able to store three of them?’

  ‘That’s easy. In the lunar module.’

  ‘And how will you launch them?’

  ‘We’ll have an explosive bolt. At the proper signal it blows open a hatch cover. The satellites will be spring-loaded, and at the proper signal they’ll leap out and be on their way.’

  ‘How can such little things have their own propulsion?’

  ‘They won’t need it. They pick up the same propulsive speed as the Apollo from which they’re launched.’

  ‘How do you know so much about these things, Mrs. Pope?’

  ‘Because it’s my job to know,’ she said with a smile. ‘And remember, I’ve been working with this committee since 1949,’ and the senator asked, ‘Are you a Republican or Democrat? I mean, how have you been able to hold on through all the changes?’

  ‘By my fingernails,’ she said.

  ‘But what you just said, it’ll work?’

  ‘I’m assured it will.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘By the best brains in this country,’ and in subsequent meetings she brought before the committee a succession of excited scientists who explained how they were only on the verge of comprehending the Moon and its place in the celestial system.

  ‘Won’t that always be the case?’ one of Senator Proxmire’s supporters asked. ‘Won’t you forever be coming before us and begging for just one more exploration. Will it ever end?’

  ‘No, sir. Because the pursuit of knowledge never ends.’

  ‘Then why should we …’

  ‘Because we Earthlings are in the position that Europe was in 1491. They knew half the globe—Europe and Asia—but nothing about the other half, the Americas. It would have been perilous and craven to have stopped there, when the richness of the Americas—’

  ‘There’s no richness on the Moon. We know that.’

  ‘In understandings, it’s a gold mine. And we’ve only begun to exploit it.’

  The scientist, an astrophysicist from the University of Chicago, asked an assistant to bring before the committee a rather large globe sixteen inches in diameter, unlike any they had ever seen before. Indeed, only within the last few years had the making of such a globe become possible:

  ‘I helped Denoyer-Geppert in Chicago put this together. It shows the complete Moon, both hemispheres. And I want to assure you that if you were to authorize a mission that landed on this unexplored side, its intellectual returns could be tremendous. Let’s look at this well-defined area of maximum interest.

  ‘Here we have the Sea of Moscow 30° north of the lunar equator. On the equator we have the fascinating crater Mendeleev. Down here the beautiful medium crater Tsiolkovsky and over here, forming a handsome triangle, Gagarin …’

  ‘They’re all Russian names!’ one of the senators said.

  ‘That’s the whole point,’ Penny broke in. ‘We have much work to do to catch up.’

  This was not entirely true, even though
it was a sensible reason to place before the senators. Starting in 1962, the Americans had launched four Rangers in rapid succession to photograph the Moon, and all failed miserably: on one, the command system went haywire; on another, the television system broke down; and in two instances, the craft missed the Moon entirely, for they never left Earth orbit.

  The Russians, in the meantime, had succeeded in sending their Luna spacecraft behind the Moon and photographing it in some detail, once in 1959, later in 1965, and again in 1966. It was they who uncovered for the world a vision of what the other side was like, and because of their priority, it was they who had the right to name the features.

  But the Russian photographs were of poor quality and haphazard siting; it was really the later American orbiters which had provided the serious photographic mapping of the other side, so that the Chicago professor’s new globe showed Russian names on American photographs. It had been a good joint exploration, but because of American tardiness, the other side of the Moon would be forever Russian.

  ‘We scientists believe that if an Apollo 18 could land within that triangle of Mendeleev, Tsiolkovsky and Gagarin— [‘Who in hell was Tsiolkovsky?’ a senator asked. The father of us all,’ the Chicago man said. ‘He established the scientific principles of space flight in 1883.’] If we could land in that triangle, we could produce miracles.’

  Penny lined up fifteen scientists to testify that an Apollo 18 flight to the other side was not only practical but obligatory, and gradually the senators began to agree with her that to leave a major exploration of the universe half-completed was imprudent. Dr. Mott, testifying for NASA, assured them that an Apollo 18 would be no more expensive than any of the preceding flights: ‘Less so, really, because the exploratory work on the instruments we would want to use has already been done.’

  ‘How much would the three orbiting satellites for radio transmission cost?’

  ‘About ten million dollars each. They’d have to be foolproof, you know.’

  Now a fire of enthusiasm swept the scientific community, and support for a shot to the far side began to pour in, until Congress was forced seriously to consider what Penny Pope, the counsel for the Senate committee, called ‘our magnificent farewell to the Moon.’ In April 1971 the final launch was authorized and some eight thousand men and women across the nation rushed to resuscitate earlier plans which had been lying dormant, and in Houston, Deke Slayton informed the press that Apollo 18 would be crewed by one of the most interesting three-man teams in the history of flight: ‘Flight Commander Randy Claggett of the Marines. Command module Pilot John Pope of the Navy. Lunar module Pilot Dr. Paul Linley, Professor of Geology, University of New Mexico, with a civilian pilot’s license. Dr. Linley, a graduate of DePaul and Indiana with a doctorate from Purdue, is our first black astronaut.’

  NASA, relying upon the 17,000 close-up photographs taken by lunar orbiters, drafted a large-scale map of the Mendeleev-Tsiolkovsky-Gagarin triangle, from which technicians constructed small papier-mǎché mock-ups which the three astronauts could carry with them until they were as familiar with that portion of the Moon as they were with their own backyards. The simulator chief, Dracula, instructed his clever photographers and lighting experts to make television shots of the area as the astronauts would see it from their spacecraft, and these he fitted into the cameras of his landing simulators, encouraging the men to fly mission after mission into this arid rocky area.

  One curious technological device enabled Dracula to produce simulations of striking effect: when a good camera had taken a well-resolved photograph of hilly terrain, or even slightly bumpy land, a computer could look at that photograph and imagine how another camera might have photographed the identical scene if it had been stereo-scopically placed in relation to the first. When the two photographs were developed and placed side by side in a stereopticon viewer, almost identical with the ones that had enchanted tea parties in the 1890s, features leaped from the flat surface, and one could see Moon rocks looming up ahead and craters and rilles.

  ‘Watch what happens when we make a movie that way,’ Dracula said with an evil leer to his assistants, and without warning the astronauts, he cranked his stereoscopic films into the Moon-landing simulator just before Claggett and Linley entered it to run through their landing one more time. Suddenly, as they approached the crater Gagarin, they saw ahead not a photograph of rocks but the actual strewn surface coming up to meet them with boulders and giant depressions. It was uncanny.

  Claggett and Pope took an instant liking to Paul Linley. He was younger than they and slightly smaller, but he was lean and wonderfully coordinated. He had starred as play-making guard on DePaul’s championship five, going head-to-head with men almost a foot and a half taller. As a black he had run into some rough experiences when he served as a geologist in the Texas oil fields, but his obvious willingness to mix it up with all comers quickly established his integrity, and during NASA field trips to the arid wastes of Arizona, which had always been used to familiarize astronauts with the probable surface of the Moon, he demonstrated more raw endurance than either of his mates. NASA at last had a black man, and everyone was proud of him.

  But he had much background information on the lunar module to catch up on, and his study hours tended to keep him up night after night till eleven at least. He was married, had three children, but his wife realized that his obligations were too intense to permit much family life, so she stayed in Houston with the children while he thundered about the United States from one simulator to the next: in Houston, landing; at Canaveral, taking off; at MIT, managing computers. He wrote his wife: ‘I’m spending so much of my life in simulators at Allied Aviation, I won’t know what real living is when I see it. But I’ll always recognize your ham and lima beans, and by damn I wish I had some now.’

  For Claggett and Pope, on whom the heavy burden of managing this unique flight would rest, the last months of 1971 and all of 1972 formed a period of the most intense concentration. Day after day they analyzed the terrain south of the Sea of Moscow, naming objects as small as a tennis court, constructing road maps that Pope could follow from aloft while Claggett and Linley pursued them on the surface, and gradually, as directed by a team of nineteen lunar specialists convened from NASA staff and fourteen major universities, they focused upon the exact site on which the module would land—

  ‘You got a name for your craft yet?’ Mott asked.

  Claggett pointed to Pope. ‘He’s fly in’ it alone when we’re down on the Moon. It’s his baby.’

  ‘Altair,’ Pope said without hesitation. It had been Altair since that October night in 1944 when he first saw that perfect star in his borrowed binoculars. It was Altair when he followed that star over the night skies in Korea. It had been Altair during indoctrination in the planetarium at Fremont State. He and the star were one, and now he would take Altair aloft among the stars.

  The NASA people were astounded when they asked Claggett what he would be naming the lunar module. ‘Luna,’ he said. “The Russians got there first with their Luna, let’s pay them respect.’

  Considerable opposition was voiced to this radical selection, but Mott and the other NASA types found that Claggett was immovable: ‘I’m riskin’ my ass in it. I’ll name it.’ Pope supported him, but gave the NASA people an easy escape: ‘Luna’s always been the poetic name for the Moon. We don’t have to mention Russia.’

  ‘That’s okay with me,’ Claggett said. ‘I’ll know and you’ll know and nobody else needs give a damn.’

  Rachel Mott found an appropriate quotation from Virgil, Through the friendly silence of the Moon,’ and Claggett said that’s exactly what he had in mind. Soon the press was handed the details: ‘Apollo 18 composed of the command module Altair and the lunar module Luna will take off for a landing near the crater Gagarin in early 1973 with the crew Claggett, Pope, Linley.’ The astronauts named were studying eighteen hours a day.

  Whenever the astronauts relaxed in the Dagger Bar, they called upon P
aul Linley to perform a vaudeville act, which delighted the customers and even caused the newsmen to applaud. With the most beguiling body movements he walked into a space between the tables and announced himself as the head cheerleader of the Albuquerque Technological Institution, and with a riotous zoot-suit vocabulary, explained how there had been racial tension at good old ATI, where the eleven basketball players were black and the twelve cheerleaders white:

  ‘Problem solved by our pres-ee-dent, Lucullus Beauregard of South Carolina, a wily cat who suggested that I be assigned to the cheerleading squad and his nephew Robert E. Lee Beauregard to the basketball team.’

  He then gave a demonstration of how Robert E. Lee, five feet ten, defended against Kareem Jabbar, seven feet two, but quickly he turned to his own performance as cheerleader, at the end of which he enlisted everyone in the bar to help him spell out the victory howl of Albuquerque Technological Institution.

  He started briskly with ‘Gimme an A’—at which everyone bellowed ‘A.’ ‘Gimme an L.’

  By the time he reached the spelling of Technological, he lost all control, throwing in frenzied K’s and Q’s. Abruptly he stopped to tell his audience, ‘President Beauregard warned me that I had to spell it right at least one time in four, and when I asked why, he said, “Because my faculty can’t spell it either, and I want ’em to learn.” ’ When he launched into Institution he quietly transformed himself into a wizened old man, calling feebly, ‘Gimme another of those damned T’s,’ until toward the end he slipped out a white wig, jammed it on his palsied head, sank to the floor, and whispered, ‘Gimme that good old final N.’

  When he rose exhausted, he gasped, ‘Next time I’m gonna be cheerleader at Yale.’

  CBS wanted to televise the whole performance, but Tucker Thompson vetoed that in a hurry: ‘Can’t you see his act has racial overtones?’ And Linley said with a straight face, ‘I often wondered about that.’