Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘Roger,’ one of the policemen said, and they entered the little town in silence; but knowing persons could guess that some tragedy had occurred, and wives started telephoning to be sure it wasn’t their husband.

  Pope signaled for the escort to leave him when he approached the lane on which the Bell cottage stood, and he parked his car some distance from it. Leaving the convertible, he walked slowly toward the front door, saying to himself, ‘Pull it together, buster.’ And he tightened his gut.

  He knocked on the door, and when he heard sounds inside—children playing and the movement of feet—he wanted to flee in terror, but he muttered again, ‘Not now, you bastard.’

  The door opened. Cluny, with curlers in her blond hair and an apron about her waist, took one despairing look at Pope, then asked, ‘Is it Tim?’

  ‘It is, Cluny.’

  For one endless moment she stood there, no expression on her face. Then she slowly collapsed, as if all the muscles and joints of her body had been removed. Pope caught her, and for a few seconds she rested in his arms.

  ‘Mommy, Mommy? What is it?’ a child asked.

  John felt her strength returning, and he watched as she left him and went to her three children. Gathering them to her, she started to speak, but no words came, and she turned pitifully to Pope, who took the children from her. When she saw them leave, as if they were permanently departing, she realized what a terrible blow had struck these little ones and she uttered a penetrating scream.

  At this moment Tucker Thompson walked into the room, and with a sensitivity and control that amazed Pope, took over. Quietly he assured Cluny that everything would be handled as she directed; he helped her to a sofa and asked if she wanted some brandy, which he had brought with him. He then attended to the children, telling them honestly, ‘Your father will not be here. You must take great care of your mother,’ and he placed them beside her.

  ‘Pope,’ he snapped at John, who stood bewildered, ‘we’ve got to get her out of here before the press gets the word. Is your wife down here?’

  ‘She isn’t. But Debby Dee is three blocks down the road.’

  ‘Walk. Don’t run. Have Deb prepare everything, and I’ll be there with Cluny in five minutes.’ When John left, Tucker was gathering the children’s clothes.

  Penny flew down, of course, and so did the other husbands and wives. It was a somber funeral, with the four young astronauts in their military uniforms and medals. General Funkhauser came to pay tribute to Allied Aviation’s finest test pilot, and administrators from NASA paid their astronaut high honor. Tucker Thompson irritated some of the press by keeping them away from Cluny Bell and the children, but he was in no way obtrusive, insisting that even the Folks photographers operate from a distance; since he had provided them with high-powered Japanese telephoto lenses, they had no difficulties.

  And when the funeral was over, and the lease on the cottage terminated, and the wreckage of the T-38 removed from the field at Cincinnati, the same miracle that had embraced Inger Jensen when her husband died came consolingly to Cluny Bell. Divorced test pilots and widowed military aviators started dropping by Houston to see how Tim Bell’s three kids were doing, and after one such visit Debby Dee Claggett had a long talk with Cluny: ‘Marry the sonnombeech. Don’t be like Inger, wasting your life in a library somewheres. You got a lot more to take care of than books.’

  Cluny was vulnerable, and alone, and very beautiful, and it did not matter if she was flighty and could not read a map or a bank statement. She and her children needed help and they needed it now. Not six months had passed before she took Debby Dee’s advice and told an Air Force major she would marry him. The family moved back to Edwards, where she remembered many people from the days when Tim Bell had tested planes there, and where her new husband would be doing similar work for the next four years.

  The essence of any NASA job was travel, and Stanley Mott was working with Boeing in Seattle when he received urgent instructions to fly immediately to Miami, where Mrs. Mott would meet him in the public terminal. When he hurried up to her she was in the company of a tall man in his fifties, who said, ‘Hello, Mott. I’m Harry Conable, lawyer.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For your son Christopher. He’s been caught with a very unsavory group. Almost a ton of marijuana.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ Mott had been aware for some years of the ugly drift into which his younger son’s life had fallen, one damaging incident after another, starting in grammar school and continuing through the unsatisfactory half-year he was in college. There had never been any one act which by itself indicated criminality, but taken together they gave evidence of a young man sadly disoriented and heading for big trouble. During one miserable four-month period he had associated himself with a neo-Nazi group in Maryland and had been photographed in white robes without a hood, burning a cross on the lawn of a Jewish residence near the university, and from that escapade he disappeared into the desert in Arizona, where he underwent paramilitary training for soldier-of-fortune recruitment against the new black governments of Africa.

  In all of this sorry rebellion against his parents and their society Chris had avoided serious confrontation with the police, but now a prison sentence loomed, as Conable explained: The magnitude of this operation can’t be ignored. The government thinks the marijuana came into Florida by small speedboat from Mexico. At any rate, it found its way to Miami, probably brought here by your son and two others, and now it’s in a federal warehouse.’

  ‘Is it considered a drug? I mean in Florida?’

  ‘It sure is.’

  Mott retrieved his baggage from the conveyor and walked soberly to Conable’s car, listening attentively as the lawyer spelled out his plans for the trial: ‘I can’t advise your son to plead guilty, although I’m sure he is.’

  ‘Why not?’ Mott asked. ‘If Christopher has done this criminal thing …’

  ‘Because I believe his relative youth—he’s only twenty-one Mrs. Mott tells me.’

  ‘Twenty-two,’ Mott said.

  ‘I think we can prove something like stupid involvement with older men.’

  ‘Was that the case?’ Mott asked.

  Mr. Conable was driving, his eyes straight ahead, watching for the turnoff from the airport where he would deposit the ten-cent toll. ‘Your son is a very difficult type, Dr. Mott. Two more years of this, he’s going to be a criminal.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘In the long run it might be best if we let him go to jail now. I could arrange a short term, I’m sure. Might scare the hell out of him.’ The Motts did not respond to this, so he added, ‘But I have a low opinion of Florida jails. I think we must get him off if we possibly can.’

  Next morning he took them to see Christopher in the lawyer’s room at the jail, and when the Motts saw their handsome son and visualized him as a young instructor in some good college, tall and straight and clean, they lowered their heads. Chris was not repentant: ‘Mary-Jane’s no drug. This country is off its rocker.’ He would make no concessions, refused to cooperate in his own defense. Stanley Mott wanted to shake him, Rachel Mott longed to take him in her arms—but seeing the anger in his father’s eyes, the love in his mother’s, he rebuffed them both.

  The judge, witnessing the same recalcitrant behavior in court, listened patiently to the arguments of Mr. Conable, then sentenced the young man to six months in jail.

  The Motts rented a car and drove north to the Bali Hai at Cocoa Beach, where they sought consolation with their NASA friends. Mr. and Mrs. Quint said that they saw a good many families in Florida with sons like Christopher: ‘And there isn’t a hell of a lot you can do about them.’ They told of friends of theirs who had a son who began to steal cars at the age of nine. Couldn’t keep his hands off them. Parents tried and tried to reason with him, so did the judges. One morning at six he came to this motel, stole the car of a man from Wisconsin, drove up the highway at a hundred and ten, and killed himself.

  ‘And you know,�
�� Mrs. Quint said, ‘not a soul in this town mourned that boy’s passing, not even his own parents. We were just glad he didn’t take some innocent person to death with him.’

  The Motts were hiding in the Bali Hai, trying to comprehend what had happened to Christopher, when NASA called from Washington with news of an assignment that would determine the general emphasis of Dr. Mott’s obligations for his remaining years with the agency: ‘We want you to familiarize yourself with the Mars project and become our contact with the media.’ Mott was elated, for this was a logical step toward his permanent interests, the outer galaxies. For some years NASA scientists had been endeavoring to photograph the planet, and no mission evoked a deeper emotional response among professional astrophysicists. From the days of the Assyrians the somber red planet had tantalized astronomers, and Mott could recall vividly how as a boy he had devoured Percival Lowell’s remarkable 1906 book Mars and Its Canals.

  ‘You know that Professor Lowell is the brother of Amy, the one who wrote poetry and smoked cigars?’ his mother had said when she found him reading the advanced book.

  Mott had been no child genius; like his astronauts, he had matured slowly but with great sturdiness, but as soon as he saw Lowell’s intricate maps of what he called ‘the canals’ he began to suspect that the whole design was nonsense. Later, when he learned that Lowell had mistranslated the Italian astronomer Schiaparelli’s word canali (which the latter had used to mean channels that might have been cut by rivers or casual floodwaters) into the much stronger word canals, which would have had to be cut purposefully by sentient beings of some kind, he knew that Lowell was spouting nonsense.

  Nevertheless, he asked the Newton librarian to borrow Lowell’s later book from the Harvard library, Mars as the Abode of Life, and read with disbelief as the author constructed a fantasy world of agriculture and oases and cities and canals thousands of miles long bringing water down from the melting polar ice caps. He decided then, on the basis of everything else he read, that Mars was probably uninhabited, and when he found a chance to look at the red planet through a Harvard telescope, he was satisfied that his first judgment was correct. Mars was a dead planet, and when his schoolboy friends offered him their copies of the Edgar Rice Burroughs yarn about the beautiful princesses who inhabited Mars, he said, ‘No, thanks.’

  He had been amused, that time in the hospital, to find that about half the science-fiction tales brought by Claggett dealt with missions to Mars, the ones most worthy of study being those by Jules Verne and Arthur C. Clarke. Most of them had described the beings living on Mars, even the poetic masterpieces of Stanley G. Weinbaum, but the dazzling photographs from Mariner 4 showed him a bleak and barren terrain, and he concluded that the writers had been indulging in the lovely, forgivable dreams of childhood.

  He was excited when the NASA high command told him: ‘Mariner 4 did brilliant work, but it was merely a fly-by. Took only what shots it could catch on the wing. Mariner 9 will be an orbiter. Photograph the entire planet in high resolution.’ And when he reported to the launch pad at Canaveral and saw the sleek, powerful rocket with the rather small spacecraft perched atop, he wondered at the skill of his associates in building a device which could transmit photographs over a vast distance. Depending upon where Mars and Earth were in their respective orbits, this distance could vary from as much as 249,000,000 miles to as little as 34,000,000. For this shot the mileage would be 75,000,000.

  It was a hot morning at the end of May when the rocket fired and the Mariner soared high over the Atlantic to a trajectory that would carry it, after one hundred and sixty-eight days, to Mars, and as it disappeared high in the heavens, its trail still blazing, Mott thought: Our astronauts are rather glib in stating they’re ready to take the next Apollo to Mars. I wonder if they make adequate calculations? For a trip to Mars the spacecraft would have to be bigger, but that presents no problems, because in space an object weighing fifty tons moves at the same speed as one weighing fifty ounces. But up and back at the present state of the art, plus time to explore the surface, might take as long as three years, and I wonder if three men could survive with only dehydrated food and a bungee cord to exercise their legs?

  While the Mariner was on its lonely way to the planet, he had more than five months to acquaint himself with the elegant system whereby the photographs would be returned to Earth, and when he dug in at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena he found that he had to unlearn a great deal of what he thought he knew. Marvin Template, a twenty-three-year-old bearded wizard in blue jeans, became his teacher:

  ‘Knock the words camera and photograph out of your mind. I don’t like to use either because they confuse thinking. With us it’s scanner and picture. The scanner bears little relation to a camera. It’s a device which points at a subject, breaks it down into little squares. They’re called pixels, from picture elements. The scanner detects with its magic eye the relative value from perfect black to perfect white of each pixel.

  ‘It can differentiate 256 gradations of grayness from 000, which is total black, to 255, total white. And how does the scanner send its judgment to us down here on Earth? In binary computer language, each “word” consisting of eight bits, 0 or 1. Thus a pixel might be reported as having a gray value of 227, and we would receive something like 11100011.

  ‘At top speed the scanner can send us 44,800 of these bits every second. Yes, I said second. During its entire stay aloft it’ll send us 350 billion bits of information at the relaxed rate of 29,900 bits a second, day and night.’

  Mott, having learned a great deal about computers at Cal Tech, was prepared to accept Template’s bizarre figures, but he did want to see a mock-up of the scanner that could perform these miracles, and when he had one in his hands he could scarcely believe that an instrument so small and so insignificant in appearance could do so much. It resembled a tiny one-gun turret on a battleship; a protruding eye, a traverse gearing, a lot of connecting wires, and it could be activated by radio over a distance of 75,000,000 miles. After he had taken the practice scanner apart and reassembled it, he felt that he had a preliminary knowledge of what was about to take place.

  But it was what happened to the flood of information when it reached California that enchanted him, and he spent the better part of four months receiving data from other spacecraft and transmuting the bytes (groups of eight bits) into pictures, always under the meticulous supervision of Marvin Template. Once Mott said to him, ‘Considering what you do, Template, somebody gave you a most appropriate name.’

  ‘That’s just what we do down here. We set up a template, 832 pixels by 700 and this becomes the base on which we construct our picture, 582,400 pixels in all.’ With a battery of sophisticated machines he demonstrated the miracles he could perform using these data:

  ‘As each byte for this pixel arrives from Mars, the machine will apply the appropriate amount of grayness. And watch! As we fill in the empty spaces, the picture begins to grow, like a flower coming into bloom at the edge of a marsh.’

  The process was quiet, mysterious and wonderful, a blank sheet of paper springing to life as if some master artist were slowly applying his brush in the creation of a masterpiece, but what Template could do with the finished work astounded Mott:

  ‘Now the wonder-working begins! We have this completed picture, but if we find that our scanner has not used very frequently the dark degrees 000 to 048, or the light ones from 241 to 255, we can direct it to ignore those outer edges and redistribute the remaining 193 good numbers along the entire scale of 000 to 255. This makes the central values much more discriminative.

  ‘But that’s only the beginning. With the purified data stored in our system, we can play the game of What if? What if the scanner was tilted to one side so that all values above 55 were skewed toward the dark end of the palette? We command the computer to unskew them, and we get this improved result.

  ‘What if the scanner saw everything three levels too bright? We tell the computer to make the correction.
What if the right-hand edge of the scanner consistently gave darker values than proper? We lighten up only that edge. And best of all, what if we are interested only in the central block of 40 pixels by 40? We can direct the computer to hold those values, ignore all others, and distribute these 1,600 little squares across the entire 000-255 spectrum, and we get a close-up that really shows something.’

  When Mott made himself familiar with what this amazing device, half in the heavens, half in California, could produce, he spent hours at the receiving console, playing God with the data being sent in by different satellites, and he became quite proficient at the game of What if?, cutting away unwanted pixels, intensifying others, and rebuilding whatever portion of the universe the scanner had been studying.

  And just when he had convinced himself that he understood what was about to happen at Mars, the JPL men reminded him of a phrase he had often heard but never really comprehended: ‘You can’t play What if? if you’re operating in real time.’ He asked what the men meant by real time, and they explained:

  ‘We’ll get data from Mars in two forms. When it comes directly to us as the scanner picks it up, that’s real time. Or the scanner can acquire such a flood of information, it can’t possibly transmit it instantaneously, so it puts it on tape and later on, when we’re not so busy, we signal the tape to unload what it’s accumulated. That’s delayed time. Handling a project becomes a nice problem in adjusting our use of real time and delayed time.’

  Mott saw the fallacy in this: ‘But if it takes a message from Mars six minutes and forty-four seconds to reach us, we can never operate in real time.’

  ‘Wrong. Real time means that you handle the data as soon as it comes under your control. You’re not expected to be a psychic genius, anticipating what’s going to arrive. If we ever get to Saturn, the time required for receiving data will be about ninety minutes, but if we go right to work, we’ll still be in real time.’