Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

Mott did not need to be reminded by Grant of the added value NASA received from a launch when men were aboard, and he conceded that years ago when he championed Kolff too strongly, NASA had been correct in disciplining him. Man is the measure of all things, he admitted to himself, but it matters greatly what he measures.

  He worried about such matters because he had been nominated to receive the gold medal awarded occasionally by the three major scientific societies of the nation, and this obligated him to make a speech of some significance at the acceptance ceremonies. His whole thrust was toward the immaculate nature of science, especially since certain groups in many states were trying to outlaw it in their schools, and he knew well what he wanted to say in that respect, but he was deterred by things that Senator Grant and Reverend Strabismus were preaching: that man can absorb only so much abstract science, after which he reverts to a kind of childhood simplicity in which he rejects everything.

  Are we the ones who are at fault? he asked himself. Have we failed to bring the world along with us? Why did Mrs. Grant retreat into her cocoon, denying everything that her husband stood for? Why does Strabismus receive such thundering approval when he turns the clock back? Stanley felt that the answer lay not in Mrs. Grant or Reverend Strabismus, but in men like himself who had blindly pursued their own narrowly defined interests while ignoring the vast, sloppy, stumbling universe of people who could not keep pace with the discoveries.

  But he would make only limited concessions. The brilliant men and women of his age were pushing back the frontiers of knowledge, and if the general public was unable to keep up, that was a political matter; it must not be allowed to be an intellectual damper on the exploration itself. The Church had muzzled Copernicus, threatened Galileo and burned Bruno, but the truth about the position of the Earth in the planetary system had not been stifled. Today in America the television Ayatollahs and the Neanderthals in the Senate could force states to deny the palpable truths of science, and they could force that knowledge underground in some quarters, but they could not destroy the facts themselves. The Earth did revolve about the Sun; it was created about four and a half billion years ago; and dinosaurs had roamed the Earth in the periods cited.

  More important to the present day, quasars and black holes did exist and they commanded the mind to explain them. As Mott said tentatively in the opening paragraphs of the speech he was preparing:

  I am satisfied by all the evidence that reaches me that the mind of man stands now in much the position it stood at the beginning of the Copernican age. Ahead of us lies one of the world’s major explosions of knowledge. Year by year the frontiers of the universe will be pushed ever outward by discoveries and interpretations which will dazzle the mind and force it to fashion new interpretations.

  What our recent developments will produce in their train, not even the boldest of us can predict, but I am impressed by the fact that in 1938 President Roosevelt assembled the brightest scientists in America to the White House to help him envisage the things he might have to adjust to in the future.

  ‘I want you to tell me what to expect,’ he begged, and after three days of intense speculation these men, whose job it was to anticipate the future and who commanded more keys to that future than any other group, failed to predict atomic power, radar, rockets, jet aircraft, computers, xerography and penicillin, all of which were to burst upon the world within the next few years. They knew about the exploratory research, of course, but they could not believe it would produce functional products so soon. I assure you that if tonight you assembled an equal group of our most learned men, they would not anticipate the simple wonders which will engulf us by the year 2000.

  His speculations were brought down to Earth when he learned, in his Washington office, that the Reverend Strabismus, in conjunction with several other religious leaders, had decided to launch a major campaign against homosexuality in American life and especially in public office. ‘God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve’ became the battle cry, and they had decided to test their power in the Colorado ski community of Skycrest, which had just elected a notorious homosexual as mayor.

  They would dispose of him, they said, as a warning to San Francisco, and they would do so by means of a recall referendum, an agency of policy they were finding to be of great value, since with television coverage they could persuade the American electorate to ratify anything. Mott felt obligated to fly out and assist his son, but he was little prepared for the vilification he would face. The campaign was horrible, with much citation of Leviticus 18 and 20, especially verse 13 of the latter. When Mott first heard Strabismus thunder on these texts he was shaken, for his father had taught him to take the Bible seriously:

  ‘If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death.’

  He pondered this for some days during the fiery debates when the clergymen tried to purify American politics, and he was so perplexed that he retired from the struggle, unsure of his moral position. His son Millard seemed a fine man in all respects save his sexual orientation, and Stanley had almost persuaded himself that a decent public life of service and the good report of one’s neighbors counted more than an arbitrary condemnation by men like Reverend Strabismus, but this bald statement in the Bible lent great force to their preaching, and he was confused. Perhaps Millard was as evil as they claimed.

  Sorely troubled, Mott borrowed a Bible and studied the whole of Leviticus carefully, and when he was finished he knew what he must do. He carried the Bible with him to the big meeting at which all five of the charismatic ministers were arrayed on the platform, and after several vain attempts he reached a microphone where the television cameras focused on him:

  ‘Each of you clergymen has preached against my son, Mayor Mott, and I want to ask if you indeed support the teaching of Leviticus 20, verse 13, in which homosexual men are condemned to death. [Two of the ministers said yes, it was an abomination. Strabismus hedged.] Well, gentlemen, are you aware that this same chapter of Leviticus says that anyone who curses his father shall be put to death? Are you prepared to execute that sentence?

  ‘Are you familiar with the last verse of your chapter? It says that anyone who appears to be a witch shall be put to death. Are you prepared to relight the fires of Salem? To resume burning old women who mumble?

  ‘Are you aware that the same chapter directs you to execute every man and woman who has committed adultery? Has any one of you committed adultery? Are you ready to be executed? Do you honestly believe that everyone in the state of Colorado who has committed adultery should be stoned to death? How many in this audience tonight have committed adultery? Should you all be killed?’

  His words created a firestorm in the hall, with Strabismus shouting that it was unfair to quote partially from the Bible, and members of the audience shouting back that it was just as unfair for him to quote it partially in support of his harsh ideas. The affair got out of hand when three college girls got to the microphones and said that they had committed adultery with leaders of the Skycrest community and were prepared, if pressed, to reveal names.

  Next day several citizens appeared on the streets with big A’s emblazoned on their chests and the challenge Execute me. One girl carried a sign: I AM A KNOWN WITCH. BURN ME.

  The ministers ended their crusade with a huge meeting at which they announced that Skycrest was the new Sodom and Gomorrah, which surprised no one in Colorado, but which did send a ripple of altered vacation plans through the rest of the nation. The referendum to unseat Mayor Mott failed, but even so, the ministers considered their expedition a valuable experience. In their much larger campaign in California they would not stress Leviticus, Chapter 20, so heavily, for they had found that it could be turned against them.

  When he returned, battle-fatigued, to Washington, Mott spent some days with his wife just listening to music, and one afternoon, at the end of Verdi’s Requiem, he said, ‘Of all the couples we knew—the Peenemün
de gang, the NASA people and even our Solid Six—I think you and I were the happiest. Thanks to you, we kept our lives simple, cleaned up. I appreciate that, Rachel.’ They sat in silence for some time and then he broke into laughter. ‘Guess what I’m going to play next?’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare!’ It was the String Quartet in A Major by Luigi Boccherini, and whenever her husband forced her to hear it she blushed. But now as the limpid, formless notes came tumbling out, as if from a mechanical hurdy-gurdy, she had to laugh at herself.

  At Wellesley she had fallen under the spell of a forceful woman teacher of music history who believed that the only European music worth listening to started with Palestrina and Purcell and ended with Handel. Vivaldi had been her special love, and a whole generation of Rachel’s contemporaries had considered this amiable composer’s The Four Seasons somewhat superior to Beethoven’s Ninth and infinitely more elevated than Tchaikovsky, who did not even figure in the professor’s syllabus.

  Rachel had always kept with her a handful of Vivaldi records, which she cherished, and even when her husband discovered in program notes from the Boston Symphony that Vivaldi had dashed off some four hundred and twenty concerti, composing them sometimes of an afternoon, she refused to admit that much of the man’s work was trivial or even tedious: ‘The best of Vivaldi is the best of European music.’

  Somehow she conceived the erroneous idea that Luigi Boccherini had been a contemporary of Vivaldi’s and therefore commendable; in a record store she had chanced to see an album containing the String Quartet and had bought it eagerly. To tell the truth, when she got it home she found it somewhat banal, but since it came from a composer of the approved period, she forced herself to like it and endeavored to make her husband do the same, but as always, he looked things up in his encyclopedias and found that Boccherini was not an early composer at all, but a man who worked side by side with Joseph Haydn and was considered even then a facile hack: ‘ “Haydn’s wife,” the critics of that day called him, Rachel. Here, look at it for yourself.’

  She had been outraged, first by her husband’s unkindness in disclosing the fraud, then by her own gullibility. Boccherini became an ugly word in the Mott household and the cause for much hilarity, and it was used to puncture Rachel’s Wellesley pretensions. But one Christmas, Stanley gave his wife as a present a magnificent German recording of the flawless minuet from the Boccherini Quintet in E Major, and it became one of their favorites: ‘Our sentimental masterpiece. We play it to each other when we think we’re in love.’

  In retirement, Stanley also suggested that they bring that wonderful woodcarving by Axel Petersson in from the bedroom to the living room, where it could establish the humanity of the Mott household, and whenever Stanley saw that little wooden man with the jutting jaw and the low-brimmed hat dancing with his wooden wife he felt good, and he loved Rachel a little more.

  Rachel agreed that their marriage was perhaps the most satisfactory in their group, but she had a high regard for John and Penny Pope: ‘I’d almost say they were the best, except that they had no children. The joy and the anguish of having sons and daughters …’ She never once allowed even a fugitive thought to stray across her mind that perhaps it would have been better if doomed Chris had not been born: ‘We had years of delight with that boy. Where he got off the track, who can say?’ She never went to his grave in Florida, but he was in her thoughts constantly; as for Millard, she chortled when he beat back the attempt to unseat him. ‘My son the Mayor,’ she called him when she spoke with her friends, and she was happy that he was back with Roger, if that’s what gave him contentment.

  She was pleased when Stanley read portions of his science speech to her, for she realized that he was endeavoring to summarize a lifetime of experience and she applauded his conclusions:

  ‘When the mind of man ceases to thrust outward, it begins to contract and wither. So with civilizations. In the fifteenth century Spain and Portugal established new worlds and divided continents between them, but in the sixteenth century they faltered in their willingness to pursue vast goals, and one might say they withered intellectually and even economically. They allowed other nations to take up the joyous burden of developing new ideas, and from this decline they never recovered.

  ‘I am terribly afraid that in America’s reluctance to proceed with the exploration of space we are making the Portugal-Spain error. It is not enough to initiate an action. One must also develop it to its ultimate capabilities.’

  She was delighted with his adept use of postwar Japan and Germany as case histories of defeated nations which had been almost destroyed but which by clever application of scientific advances had emerged rather stronger than the victors.

  ‘What’s the secret, Stanley?’

  ‘When you rebuild starting from scratch, you adopt only the most modern concepts. This means those countries whose factories weren’t dynamited are burdened with old-fashioned ways. They must fall behind.’

  ‘Would you recommend that countries like England and the United States blow up their factories every thirty years?’

  ‘The world would be a much better place if we did … periodically.’

  ‘Why don’t we?’

  ‘We wouldn’t have to blow them up, actually. Not if we had the courage to gut them and start over. But we’d never be able to persuade our people to do that. So we wallow along with our outmoded ways and watch the defeated nations surge past us—in dozens of aspects.’

  ‘Who would lose if we did revolutionize production, our way of doing things?’

  ‘It’s uncanny. You can see a hundred examples in history of nations that were destroyed, almost wiped out, who came storming back with renewed vigor. It’s like pruning a tree. The novice never believes that you improve the tree by cutting it savagely back.’

  ‘Yes, but who suffers?’

  ‘The middle class. You, me. The very rich rarely suffer. The poor go on as usual. But when a currency goes sour, it’s people like us who suffer. People on retirement pay. People who own a little property or goods. In fact, our class can be wiped out.’

  She thought about this for some time, then asked, ‘Is it proper to wipe out a whole class? So that the larger welfare can be helped?’

  ‘I can’t answer that. All I know is that nations which have allowed their middle class to be wiped out haven’t suffered much at the time and have come back stronger than ever as a consequence.’

  ‘You believe in the integrity of an idea, don’t you?’

  ‘I suppose that’s all I believe in.’

  ‘How about religion? As an idea, that is?’

  ‘Quite necessary. As the adjudicator. It was the best-educated nation in the world, Germany, that lost its way most completely. It had brains galore, but no one to blow the whistle and cry, “This is wrong.” Science could serve that role, but it never does. Politics certainly never does. Society requires some agency larger than itself to blow the whistle. My father taught me that.’

  ‘Granted, but then what do you do about Reverend Strabismus and his ilk?’

  ‘I think you bear with them. Admit that if society did not yearn for them, they wouldn’t achieve the power they do. And hope that like Savonarola, they pass quickly without doing too much damage.’

  ‘When will the present crop halt its damage?’ she asked.

  Mott left his writing desk and paced about the room. ‘Giving it to you cold turkey, as the astronauts say, I think we’re in for a very bad time for the rest of this century. I expect to be called before the Senate one of these days for having been subversive—’

  ‘Good God, on what grounds?’

  ‘Any they see fit to legislate. I expect to see book burnings one of these days. And families might begin to think like the Kolffs. Sneak their children out to some foreign country to learn forbidden subjects, then sneak them back in to keep learning alive.’

  ‘When I told Dieter that, you said I was hysterical.’

  ‘I’ve been wondering if maybe
you weren’t right. And if I think so, I’m morally obligated to say so. While I’m still allowed free speech.’

  ‘I want to read your talk before you deliver it. To discuss possibilities in private is one thing. To do so in a public speech, quite another. I don’t want my husband to sound the damned fool.’

  ‘I’m not really concerned about what people in 1982 think. How an individual reacts to any stimulus is his own problem. I want this to be on the record for 2002. I want men and women then to know that I was scared silly by the nonsense and that I tried to do something about it.’

  As shadows fell they played Vivaldi, looked lovingly at the Axel Petersson dancers, saw their patron saint Mondrian on the uncluttered walls, and tried to decide which of the good Washington restaurants they would dine in that night, for it was their fortieth wedding anniversary.

  And just when Mott had adjusted to his retirement, conceding that the productive period of his life was past, he received two short-term assignments which gave him joy, for they enabled him to rush back into the heart of the great adventure. The first invitation came from Fremont State University, where Professor John Pope was doing final editing on the first eleven chapters of an important treatise he was writing on aviation and space:

  I’d be honored, Stanley, if you would take in hand the final three chapters. They need the expertise and understanding which only you can provide. Please say yes.

  When the heavy package arrived at the Mott apartment in Washington, Stanley opened it with the keenest anticipation, for it obviously represented an intellectual out-flow from the space program, and this was important.

  Mott had never been one to justify the vast NASA program because it had provided stick-free Teflon frying pans to housewives or Velcro hold-fast fabrics to vaudeville performers, enabling them to appear in funny break-away costumes. Again and again he refrained from testifying to the Senate that our explorations in space were vindicated by things like telecommunication satellites or the miniaturization of medical devices. He deemed it cheap to retreat to such sophistry when the noble adventure could be justified within its own terms: man had thrown back the perimeters of ignorance and darkness by quintillions of miles and centuries of years, and that was adequate justification.