Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  When her husband landed at National Airport with two suitcases of medals and mementos, Penny was there to greet him. On the tarmac he said, ‘I’m sorry, Pen, if I caused you embarrassment. But I had to talk. It was important that I get it on the record with someone who understood.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you have talked with me?’ she asked, tears of joy filling her eyes.

  ‘You were always so busy.’ He corrected that: ‘I was always so occupied with things that didn’t really matter.’ Arm in arm they walked toward the waiting cameras.

  Like an ultra-sensitive barometer that monitors the atmosphere, predicting when the hurricanes will strike, Leopold Strabismus followed every nuance of the national mood, and long before Senator Grant realized that the space age had stumbled to a conclusion, he had detected the change, and with the termination of the Apollo program, he realized that he must alter his strategies or suffer loss. Accordingly, one morning in the summer of 1976 he woke, pulled down the bedcovers, pulled up the nightgown of his sleeping partner, slapped her roundly on the bottom, and said, ‘Out of bed, Marcia! We’re getting married!’

  She was thirty-seven that year, still slim and beautiful with her pouting look and her feline skills, and she had about given up on the possibility that Strabismus would ever marry her. Still, she had a good life. They continued to make substantial profit from the menace of little green men and a small, steady income from the sale of diplomas, so that she had her own Mercedes and a secretary to look after her affairs. Ramirez still ran the general office with imagination and things were prospering, which made this sudden proposal of marriage a shock.

  ‘What’s eating you?’ she asked.

  ‘The handwriting is on the wall, my lovely.’

  ‘Investigation? Police?’

  ‘No, the turn of the wheel. The awakening of the public.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’ve had a kind of vision, Marcia. The kind I had at Yale when I saw as if in revelation that California was the promised land.’

  ‘I don’t want to leave California.’ She shuddered. ‘Could you imagine us living in Fremont or Nebraska?’

  ‘We get married today. And we make California twice the home it ever was before.’ When he jumped out of bed and grabbed the trousers of a business suit reserved for trips to wealthy donors back East, Marcia saw that his eyes were aflame with enthusiasm.

  ‘What is it, Leopold?’

  ‘Goddammit, get your clothes on. This is for real.’ And when they were dressed, he led her outside to a roadway from which she could see all of the fine building that housed their university, and she could feel him almost trembling as he divulged his plans: ‘We have enough money right now to build the two wings I used to speak about. One here. One there. Not little wings, big ones.’

  ‘To what purpose, please tell?’

  ‘Religion.’

  She said nothing, but in the protracted silence she could imagine what her brilliant companion could do with this volatile subject. She imagined him behind a pulpit—big face, beard, huge imposing body draped in a robe of some kind, thundering voice—and she knew instinctively that he would excel. She could visualize the university building expanded into a cathedral, with hundreds of cars parked in front, and devoted followers, and the money rolling in even more generously than before. It was quite clear, given the nature of her man and the nature of California, but it had to be done correctly, because the competition was terrific. Running a bogus university was easy, because not many manipulators sought to operate in that specialized field, but the religious arena was brutal, and unless one could invent some special allure, success was not assured.

  ‘What religion?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that for the last two months. I’d like to keep USA. It’s a good set of initials. How about Universal Spiritual Association?’

  ‘Every word is wrong. The U must be United. Start from there.’

  ‘You may be right. What’s wrong with Spiritual?’

  ‘Sounds too much like spiritualism. Too restricted.’

  ‘You may be right again. How about Salvation? I plan to hit very hard on salvation.’

  ‘I like that. I like it, Leopold. Hold on to that.’

  After discussing for some time the appropriate word for A they could agree on nothing, so they drove to one of the storefront churches where the seedy minister was willing to forgo the legal waiting period and predate the marriage certificate to 1973, which he said a clerk at the courthouse would register as of that year for an extra ten dollars. They then returned home and telephoned the Red River Bible University: ‘Reverend Hosea Kellog? This is Dr. Leopold Strabismus, president of the University of Space and Aviation in Los Angeles. I’ve heard of your good work, Reverend Kellog, and my university would like to award you with a Doctor of Laws if you would give me a Doctor of Divinity. This is extremely important to me, and I’d appreciate it if the date could read 1973.’

  It was arranged, and Strabismus asked Ramirez to prepare an especially ornate diploma for Dr. Kellog, and with the same plate but different lettering, to print up one for Strabismus from the University of Western Dakota in the fields of Hebrew, Greek and Latin. With these and other impressive documents framed on the wall behind his head, he was qualified to decide what branch of theology his new church would sponsor, but before he printed up any materials, he had long discussions with his wife.

  ‘We had to get married,’ he said, ‘because I plan to stress morality. This country is hungry for a revival of the old-time spirit, Marcia.’

  ‘Hadn’t you better send those two girls from Texas packing?’

  ‘That’s a possibility, but the important thing was to have you up front for people to see. I plan to use you extensively. Senator Grant’s daughter. Play up his heroism in World War II.’

  ‘And what else?’

  ‘A rejection of scientific atheism—Darwin’s evolution from apes, geology. All that rot.’

  ‘But we’ve done very well with science. The pamphlets …’

  ‘That’s all finished. We’ll keep the university, that’s a gold mine. But we’ll let someone else handle the little men, because flying saucers have run their course. Believe me, Marcia, the new field is old-time religion.’

  He told her that he had been much impressed by a Southern television preacher who had mounted a campaign against what he called ‘atheistic humanism,’ and although neither Strabismus nor the minister seemed to have a very clear concept of what this was, it made a splendid target, and when Leopold reached home he took four or five books from the Los Angeles Public Library and within a week made himself an expert on atheistic humanism.

  ‘It’s the mind-set of smart-ass librarians who corrupt our young people with their immoral books. It’s the beliefs of college professors who seek to destroy this nation. It’s what makes the editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post soft on Communism. It’s what’s wrong with this fine country, and people who subscribe to it have got to be rooted out of our national life. A lot of generals in our Army are secret humanists, and they’ve got to be identified before they destroy our armed forces.’

  In the days when the two wings of his temple were being erected he began to speak like an illiterate Southern farmhand, using phrases like: ‘Nukelar warfare,’ ‘Old Tessamint religion,’ ‘Socialist subsidation of infamy,’ ‘Dimnunition of our power to defend ourself,’ and ‘Irrevelant big-city argaments.’

  At New Haven he had twice written Ph.D. theses for laggard scholars in English literature; now he habitually used ‘Jesus wants you and I …’ and ‘We wuz lost in the wilderness of sin.’ But what made his oratory especially effective was his new pronunciation of old words; for example, it was always ‘God’s luuuv’ in three long-drawn syllables. It was hisse’f, and shouldn’t auter, and evoluushun.

  He adopted this usage because he knew that people who craved an old-time doctrine were intuitively suspicious of university types a
nd big-city editors and hotshot television announcers; they yearned for the simplicities of rural life and believed that only a man who was close to the untutored farmlands of their remembered youth could be trusted. They thus became not only a part of the national swing away from learning; they became with their cash contributions a leading factor in the movement. The nation, as if surfeited with the marvels of space and medicine and science and sophisticated social analysis, seemed hungry for anti-intellectual preachment, and Leopold Strabismus was eager to provide it.

  He saw immediately that to’ be effective he must have access to television, but he knew he should move cautiously. ‘Marcia, I want you and Ramirez to scout every corner of this area and find a radio station that we can buy cheap. I don’t care where it is or what its power. Buy us a station.’

  They found a fifty-watter, a dawn-to-dusk affair in the hills back of Los Angeles, and because the Reverend Dr. Strabismus spoke from it with great passion during all daylight hours, using the same taped sermons over and over, with no apologies, it became a sensation: ‘Why do I have to stop deliverin’ God’s message at sunset? Why am I forbidden to bring you the word of the Lord when the sun goes down? Because the atheistic humanists who run our State Department have entered into a corrupt deal with Mexico …’ He heaped special scorn on Yale University and Stanford as centers of the humanism that was destroying our nation.

  With sizable funds collected from his radio ministry, he was able to acquire a real twenty-four-hour radio station, which he threw open to the electronic ministers across the nation, and through the cooperation of these gifted orators he at last found an opening on television, where his bulk, his beard and his fiery oratory gained immediate approval. His income, after only twenty months of his ministry, was $300,000 a year.

  Marcia, who was one of the factors in his success—for she sat beside the pulpit whenever he preached, giving testimony when called upon—identified the one weakness which might destroy his effectiveness: ‘Leopold, one of these days the newspapers have got to discover that your real name is Martin Scorcella and that you’re Jewish. That could create quite a scandal.’

  ‘Half-Jewish,’ he corrected. ‘And I’ll handle it the way Fiorella La Guardia handled his problem, which was just like mine, Italian father, Jewish mother. He said nothing about it during six elections. Let all the voters think he was Catholic. When he was finally challenged and some smart-ass newspaperman asked, “Why did you hide the fact that you were half-Jewish?” he said, “Half-Jewish ain’t enough to brag about.” When they find out about me six or eight years from now, I’ll be so firmly established they can’t touch me.’

  ‘People who take religion seriously, they could be very disturbed. The way the Jews crucified Jesus and all that.’

  ‘I’ve thought about it, Marcia, and I think I have the perfect answer. I’ll say, “Yes indeed, I was born a Jew, like St. Peter and St. James and Jesus Christ Hisse’f. But like them, I seen the true way, hallelujah, and became a Christian, and I will not rest until every Jew on this earth acknowledges his error and, like me and St. Paul, converts to Christianity.” And you can bet that’ll hold ‘em.’

  He first attracted statewide attention because of his television program Chimp-Champ-Chump, in which he savagely attacked the theory of evolution. He was especially effective because in his New Haven days he had produced three graduate theses on the Darwinian theory which had required him to master the details of this controversial subject. He was, indeed, better informed on the theory than most of the professors who defended it, and when he poured his scorn on Darwin and his atheistic humanism, he was more amusing than the average vaudeville show.

  He asked Marcia and Ramirez to scout the animal trainers in Hollywood for a likable monkey, and they came up with a chimpanzee named Oliver, whom they dressed in short satin pants and big white shoes. He appeared with Reverend Strabismus seated at a desk under the handsomely lettered sign CHIMP-CHAMP-CHUMP, and he took a liking to Leopold’s beard, which he pulled frequently. He had the attractive gift of listening attentively and smiling when Strabismus talked to him, and of nodding aggressively whenever the Reverend made a telling point. He was a delightful animal, and viewers up and down the state applauded whenever he appeared.

  ‘I love this little animule,’ Strabismus bellowed. ‘Look at him, he’s as cute as a button. It’s a privilege to call him my friend, but I do not want to call him my grandfather. There ain’t a shred of evydence in ever’thin’ that Charles Darwin ever wrote that proves to me or to any sensible man or woman that this here monkey was my ancestor, and there is ever’ evydence in the Bible that he was created as an animule and me as a human bein’ with God-given intelligence and immortality.’

  Chimp-Champ-Chump became such a popular show that it led the movement in California to ban the teaching of evolution outright, or at least to require the parallel teaching of Biblical genesis. Wise science teachers, sensing the shift in public opinion, accorded more time and emphasis to creationism, as they called it, than to the much-ridiculed theory of evolution, and a generation of California students was beginning to believe that Darwinism was a fraud perpetrated by atheistic humanists, because Reverend Strabismus and the other preachers who shared his television show said so.

  Strabismus muscled his way onto the national scene by his imaginative campaign to force rangers in national parks to stop saying in their lectures that places like the Grand Canyon had evolved through billions of years, when it was known from the Book of Genesis that they had been created within the passage of one week. Whenever listeners reported that federal employees were supporting evolution during their public talks in national parks like Yellow stone and Glacier, he moved in furiously to combat their heresies.

  But now the nation’s leading scientists began to take his attacks seriously, and there was a countereffort. Men at Harvard, Chicago and UCLA felt obligated to inform the people that America was going to make an ass of itself in the eyes of the world if it engaged in a know-nothing persecution of science, and they had begun to make some headway when Strabismus and a score of his associates launched a frontal assault, charging the professors with being atheistic humanists and Communists.

  The confrontation became ugly when Reverend Strabismus, in a widely repeated harangue, invited his listeners to join him in a great crusade: ‘It ain’t my doin’. It’s the work of devoted Christians back East. They call theirselves the Righteous Rulers, and under their inspired leadership we are gonna drive the money changers outa the Temple. We are gonna defeat ever’ United States senator who supports the atheistic humanists. We are gonna drive from ever’ campus in this nation perfessers who teach Communistic evolution. We are gonna cleanse our library shelves of ever’ book that contains filth and un-American teachings. And we are not gonna halt until we bring this nation back to God.’

  When the response exceeded his hopes—hundreds of thousands of dollars streaming in through the mail—he told Marcia, ‘I think we got somethin’ important started, somethin’ much bigger than you and me foresaw.’ He was now talking rural illiterate, even in his private life.

  Senator Grant suffered no ambivalence about his role in space. He had bombarded NASA with the credentials of Gawain Butler’s nephew and had watched with pride as that young man became the nation’s first black astronaut. He had delighted in the early behavior of Captain John Pope, a lad from his hometown who had become rather difficult after his historic solo flight. Nevertheless, he had gone personally to President Nixon, urging that Pope be sent around the world as an ambassador of good will and ‘to remind the Russians who’s still ahead.’

  But as for any future NASA spectaculars, or for providing federal funds for such escapades, he was rigorously opposed: ‘We had three men who fought this battle when the honor of our nation was exposed, Lyndon Johnson, Michael Glancey and me. The first two did their work honorably, and are now dead. I feel myself to be their surrogate, and I am satisfied that if they were still living, they would vot
e with me against any enlargement of the NASA commitment.’

  He never ranted against NASA, nor did he attempt to lead any kind of open crusade; he merely voted consistently in favor of cutting the budget for space, telling anyone who asked about his activity, ‘We’ve proved that we can do anything we put our minds to, and now we must address more serious problems.’

  Much of his attitude stemmed from the fact that he was up for reelection in 1976, and like a cautious politician, he endeavored to sense the national mood, which had shifted markedly and now opposed any further adventures in space. As one farmer said during a campaign meeting in Calhoun, ‘There’s damned little plowing to be done on the Moon and a great deal down here.’ Blacks objected to further expenditures; young people who had opposed the war in Vietnam now turned their animosity toward science in general, so that when Grant surveyed his electorate he found almost no constituency for space.

  ‘It’s a dead issue,’ he told Finnerty. ‘Let’s take credit for everything we’ve done so far but avoid questions about the future.’ He asked Finnerty to schedule John Pope, as a local hero, for meetings across the state, knowing that the astronaut would not be able to speak out publicly in his behalf, but would consent to being photographed with him.

  What worried Grant in this campaign was not space, but the deplorable spiritual condition of the American people: ‘Here it is, the two hundredth anniversary of our republic and we find ourselves powerless even to mount a national birthday celebration.’ The grand designs which had been discussed since 1969 for a world fair, immense parades, exhibitions and innovative enterprises in theater, sports, publishing and television had all collapsed; a great nation, one of the gleaming hopes of mankind, was celebrating its triumphs in virtual silence, as if it were ashamed of itself.

  ‘The reason,’ Grant mourned, ‘is that 1976 happens to be an election year, and we Republicans started out trying to make capital of the celebration, as a kind of jubilee honoring Richard Nixon’s eight years in the White House and paving the way for Spiro Agnew’s eight years to come. Well, that part of the plan collapsed with Watergate, so we decided to make the Bicentennial a celebration of the new Republican leadership. Totally the wrong thing to do.