Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  It’s much like a human life, Mott reflected as Mariner drew ever closer to Mars. A man spends his youth accumulating data, billions of bits, and some he must handle in real time, some he stores in his computer for later inspection. And balance in life consists of handling in real time those problems which cannot be delayed, then recalling more significant data during periods of reflection, when long-term decisions can be developed. And as we grow older we recall great segments of experience, deriving such lessons from them as our personal computers are able to decipher.

  He built an imposing analogy, quite beautiful really, until he almost broke into tears: But what in the name of mercy had happened to Christopher? That he failed to accumulate the data? Or lacked the skill to recall and reorganize it when needed?

  In his grief he compared Chris with his other son, Millard, a fugitive in Canada: Very confusing data had flooded in upon Millard, but damn it all, he had organized it, and concluded: ‘I’m thus and so and that’s it’—and he’s handled himself as well as I have. But then his thoughts reverted to Chris, and he was sitting with his hands over his eyes when Template, about the age of his sons and already the master of profound knowledge, asked, ‘Are you sick, Dr. Mott?’ and Stanley wanted to cry out, ‘I am sick at heart,’ but he merely shook his head, so Template said, ‘I want to show you what else we can do … quite miraculous,’ and he took Mott to a new machine:

  ‘This one works with a special scanner that sends us three distinct indications of value for every pixel. That means, for a complete picture, it sends us 13,977,600 bits in about 5.2 minutes.

  ‘What it’s doing is sending us a color picture, but we can’t be sure what color. So we say that one of the sets represents the red portion of the spectrum, one the yellow, and one the green. We could use any three other colors, but these give us good results. And when we print the three color sheets and combine them … “Voilà!” ’

  He showed Mott a dazzling color picture of the Earth as seen through the eye of a scanner and corrected by Template in his game of What if? It was so majestic, so much a sphere whirling in distant space that no one could see it without acquiring a deeper reverence for his planet, and he recalled Claggett’s experience with the flat-worlders in Iowa: ‘If a man wasn’t a trained observer, he might be deceived by this picture.’

  Template said, ‘The colors we finally select aren’t arbitrary. We look at the object visually through our telescopes to determine what the color seems to be. We use the spectroscope to establish an objective definition.’ He hesitated, then chuckled. ‘And we guess a lot. But in the end we balance out the three sets of values, and as I said, “Voilà!” ’

  When Mariner 9 reached Mars on 13 November 1972, the NASA men were appalled by what the incoming photographs revealed, for they revealed nothing. Mars was engulfed in a vast planet-wide dust storm which obscured everything. The fragile little craft had negotiated millions of miles, only to be defeated by howling storms more comprehensive than any the Earth knew. For nearly two months Mariner obediently kept watch on its obscured planet, producing nothing, but in mid-January the dust began to settle and it looked as if this flight might produce results.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Mott assured the press, and when they reminded him, ‘You said that before,’ he said, This time Mars will cooperate. It’s calling in its storm clouds.’ And next day men watched in awe as the data began to filter in and the top row of pixels assumed their designated shades of gray.

  Volcanoes began to emerge, three times higher than any mountain on Earth, and great deep canyons that could have reached from Boston to San Diego, hiding the Earth’s Grand Canyon in one shallow rift. The scarred face showed where asteroidal fragments had bombarded the surface in times past, and the desolate, cruel beauty of the vast plains reinforced Mott’s doubt that anyone in recent times had lived there, or grown vegetables or tended cattle.

  The pictures that mysteriously effloresced from the pixels were forbidding yet magnificent, and as they glowed from the machines the planet Mars seemed to enter the laboratory, and the enchanting speculations of the Italian Schiaparelli with his canali and the American Lowell with his canals vanished the way dew departs with morning sunlight. Long shelves of romances dealing with Martian kings and battles slipped into honorable retirement, making way for the detailed maps and geological surveys of actual rocks and strata that would now replace them. The old Mars was dead, a splendid new one was being born.

  The effect on Mott could not have been predicted. He had taken man’s exploration of the Moon in stride, because his long speculative apprenticeship at Langley had prepared him for its reality, and the other events of the 1960s had borne no surprises, since he had anticipated such accomplishments back in the 1950s. He had come within a few weeks of being the first to throw a satellite into orbit, and everything after that followed inevitably. ‘Of course men will walk on the Moon,’ he had assured Rachel years ago, so that when it happened it was an aftermath. Besides, the Moon was only a few hundred thousand miles away.

  But to travel to Mars, 75,000,000 miles distant, to penetrate its secrets with a scanner, and then perhaps to go to Saturn, nearly a billion miles more distant, and see its surface, too, and its many moons, was so grand an accomplishment that he was awestruck. This was man knocking on the door of infinity, and he was honored that he had been allowed to be even a humble part of it.

  Unhappiness over his sons, the deaths of the two astronauts with whom he had been associated—even these defeats could not diminish the triumph of sending that small messenger to Mars and receiving in return such a wealth of mind-shattering information. On his way back from the JPL to the motel he looked at the stars and felt them to be infinitely closer; they were no longer dots of light gleaming at immense distances; they were now real burning entities, incandescent torches scattered through the Galaxy, and some, like the Sun, perhaps had planets, and of those random planets—billions of them in space—one or two, or a million or two million, might have sentient beings living on them.

  ‘You out there!’ Mott called to the stars. ‘We have taken our first steps!’

  In later years Dr. Strabismus often referred to the moment when he first caught a clear vision of the path ahead, and he spoke of it in the exaggerated rural illiterate lingo he had cultivated beginning in 1976:

  ‘It was a misty day in December 1972. I was a-drivin’ home from visitin’ the sick and the road was long and dusty, so I turned on my radd-eeo and there I hear this voice a-comin’ at me and it was the voice of God, speakin’ through the agency of a ministerman from Georgia, and it spoke of revelation and salvation, and I knowed then it was a-speakin’ personally to me.’

  What Leopold Strabismus, president of the University of Space and Aviation, heard that morning was the syndicated broadcast of a radio minister who spoke with fantastic speed for his allotted time, during which he solicited funds four times, and the man was so effective, so overwhelmingly convincing in his sincerity, that Strabismus was captivated. For several weeks thereafter he sought out these religious services on the radio, studied the charismatic ministers on television, and even drove long distances across Los Angeles to hear the better local evangelists in person.

  He would sit in the back of their mean storefront churches and mutter to himself, ‘With proper management, this man could have himself a temple,’ and he would devise the strategies whereby this could be accomplished. What impressed him most, however, was the fanatic loyalty he witnessed in the congregations; these people, hungry for leadership and moral direction, gave not only their money but their whole affection to the ministers, and Strabismus realized that the two forces taken in union—pastor and flock—represented a burgeoning power in American life of which he had been ignorant.

  He had known, of course, that established religions like Methodism and Catholicism exercised power in the American system, just as the Orthodox rabbis of his mother’s religion exerted leadership among the Jews of New York, but he had not realized that
congruent with these known religions ran this substratum of storefront belief, and of the two types he suspected that the latter was the stronger.

  In later days he would tell his congregations that his conversion occurred on that dusty road from San Bernardino; it actually took place in a religious palace on the edge of the Watts section of Los Angeles, for after some weeks of exploring the alleys of California religion he wanted to see the glittering highways, and this search took him to those varied temples and basilicas and grand pantheons built by the clergymen who knew how to collect major tithings from their congregations. He was stunned by the grandeur of some of these temples, but the one that commanded his attention over the longest span was this affair near Watts.

  It was administered by a tall, thin, very attractive black man who called himself the Mighty Spirit and who preached while clothed in a long ermine robe paid for by the ladies of his congregation. He was a powerful orator specializing in the Books of Daniel and Revelation, but he attracted Leopold’s attention and even affection because of the lawsuit which the government had brought against him. As the story unfolded, it concerned two middle-aged black women schoolteachers who claimed they had been defrauded by the Mighty Spirit, and they had a persuasive case, Strabismus thought, as he sat in court, listening to the charges:

  ‘Our mother is seventy-nine years old, stricken with arthritis. She can’t walk easily and putting on her clothes is a misery. The Mighty Spirit told her that he could cure her, so she gave him all her money and he wrote out the directions for what she must do to be saved: “Go to the Greyhound Bus Station in Los Angeles. Take an even-numbered bus to Long Beach. Enter the Greyhound Station there and drink water from three different fountains, saying the Lord’s Prayer after each drink. Come home on a bus with an uneven number. Go to bed. Pray before you fall asleep, and in the morning you will be cured.” ’

  Strabismus whispered to Marcia Grant, who had accompanied him to the courthouse, ‘They may get him because he put it in writing?’ and she replied, ‘It’s damned ingenious, whatever.’

  The judge explored in some detail the minister’s behavior in this case, the amount of money taken from the mother of the schoolteachers, and the degree to which the old woman had obeyed the prescription. Satisfied that here was a case of most palpable fraud, Strabismus sat silent as the defense attorneys, one white, one black, called Mrs. Carter to the stand.

  ‘Did you follow the instructions given you by the Mighty Spirit?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I did.’

  ‘You got on the bus going to Long Beach.’

  ‘Yes, sir, even-numbered.’

  ‘And you drank from three different fountains.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I did.’

  ‘And you got aboard another bus and came back to Los Angeles.’

  ‘Yes, sir, odd-numbered.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘When I woke up next morning I could walk, just like he said.’ And when she pointed to the Mighty Spirit sitting in court in his white ermine robe, the minister’s supporters broke into cheers which the bailiff could not silence. The Mighty Spirit rose from the accused’s chair, spread his arms wide, and shouted, ‘I forgive them, for they know not what they do.’

  ‘That was some trial,’ Strabismus said as he drove Marcia back to their university, and from the manner in which he returned to it again and again in subsequent days, it was clear to Marcia that he had been deeply moved.

  He was forty-seven, about two hundred and ninety pounds, handsomely bearded, deep of voice, and he could visualize himself in robes, bringing direction and meaning to the lives of others. In ermine? No, that was for blacks, who handled the wilder manifestations with an aplomb no white man could muster. In red, perhaps? No, the best was still solid black. But wait! In an Episcopal church once, at the funeral of a friend of Marcia’s, he had seen an elderly minister in a robe of beautifully tailored wool, not black, not brown, but rather, a delicate tan-gray.

  ‘What color do you call that?’ he had asked Marcia.

  ‘I think the stores call it fawn.’

  ‘It’s quite effective.’ Yes, he could imagine himself in a fawn robe.

  He was so disturbed about the present and the future—so confused might be a better description, he thought—that when he reached the university he asked Elizondo Ramirez to report to him on the finances of their various USA operations, and the Mexican assistant placed the figures before him:

  ‘Universal Space Associates is plugging along. Normal subscriptions stay high. Special gifts have tailed off since you don’t travel so much, but we’re making a steady $185,000 a year and could do better if we applied ourselves. But, Dr. Strabismus, all I can do is service new mail subscriptions. Only you can bring in the special gifts.

  ‘The University of Space and Aviation? Maybe we’ve reached a plateau. We do very well with our Ph.D.’s at the new price of $750, but only average with our M.A.’s at $400. I’ve tried pricing them at different levels and $400 seems about right. I don’t think we can take it any higher.

  ‘What I did not anticipate was the very good business we’ve been doing in selling copies of UCLA, Southern Cal and Stanford diplomas, with a very nice business in University of California at Berkeley. We just print them, fill them in, and sell them, no granting of degrees or anything else.’

  Ramirez did not consider himself a forger. He referred to himself as a printer with imagination, but this was not accurate either, for he himself did none of the printing; he simply knew where to get it done. He had discovered that a good many practitioners of one kind or other, even doctors and dentists, liked to have an extra certificate on their walls, and he had uncovered this excellent printer in the valley who could copy anything. Together they had located four diplomas from the four most prestigious universities in the region, and by blanking out the names of the recipients, they had a stack of fine-looking pieces of paper on which a woman with a smooth handwriting could inscribe the names of purchasers. The diplomas were priced at twenty-five dollars each, thirty for Stanford, and sold about two hundred a year, which, as Ramirez said, ‘gives us some extra pin money.’

  His genius manifested itself in an operation about which Strabismus had been ignorant until it began to pour in the money; modestly Ramirez credited the idea to pure luck:

  ‘I love basketball, especially at UCLA with those great teams John Wooden turns out, and one night I read in the paper about how this fine colored center was ineligible because of his grades and it occurred to me, “Why don’t he take make-up classes at USA?” And before the year was out we had more than two hundred fine university athletes enrolled in special classes, Oregon to New Mexico. We never saw them. They never saw us. Their coaches just sent us the papers and we signed them. But I’ll tell you this, Strabismus, if we could of had half those cats on our campus at the same time, we could of won the NCAA going away.’

  The various operations, Ramirez concluded, were bringing in about $255,000 yearly, ‘and with this big building paid for, we have the space to branch out and do much better.’

  It was interesting that not one of the principals in this operation sought money for himself. Neither the space report nor the university was ever used to collect funds for the personal gratification of Strabismus, Marcia or Ramirez. They lived simply, drove modest cars, avoided expensive clothes, and usually ate in the restaurants of the lower middle class. Each year they saved more than 60 percent of what they took in, holding it in banks against the day when they might want to make some major move, and even their most jaundiced critic could not accuse them of personal cupidity. To look at Elizondo Ramirez on the street you would have thought that he worked at some taco stand, and it would have been inconceivable to picture Marcia Grant as the daughter of a well-to-do United States senator. They were marking time, all of them.

  But when Elizondo and his ledgers departed, Strabismus addressed the real problem which agitated him: ‘Marcia, I’ve made up my mind. You’ve got to get the abortion
.’

  She was thirty-three and not likely to become pregnant again if she allowed herself to be robbed of this child, and she loved Leopold, big, conniving fraud that he was. For five painful weeks she had argued against the abortion, citing one good reason after another, and he had countered with reasons of his own: ‘Marcia, I have this persistent feeling. Something big is going to turn up. We mustn’t be saddled with an illegitimate child.’

  ‘You could easily marry me.’

  ‘I don’t see that, either. Look, Marsh, we’re not the marrying kind. We’re gauged to a much different track.’

  ‘Home and children aren’t so different. Millions of people are able to handle homes and children.’

  ‘It’s not for us, Marsh. I want us to simplify our lives. Get things organized for whatever’s going to happen.’

  He was so insistent, and upon principles which he could not explain or she understand, that in the end she consented to the abortion. Assuring her that this was a simple operation without risk, he drove her to the home of a man known in the community as Dr. Himmelright, and there she met one of the most despicable men of her experience. It was not his ghoulish profession which annoyed her; it was his manner.

  Himmelright had been born in England, and whether he had ever graduated from anywhere could not be ascertained. On his wall he displayed diplomas, but she recognized two as the handiwork of Elizondo Ramirez. He spoke in an Oxford accent, quite charmingly, and apparently did a good business, for Leopold had had to accept whatever appointment Himmelright had free.

  He tried to put Marcia at ease: ‘We call this little deal, quite painless, you know, “Knocking Little Willie off the wall.” ’ He chuckled at his joke, then showed Marcia how she must lie down. ‘What we’re doing,’ he said in a professional whisper, ‘is taking out the crib but leaving in the playpen.’ This joke pleased him immensely, and he laughed for nearly a minute.