Penelope took Tim’s hand. “Come on, show me where the popcorn is. I’ll shake. You get the bowls.”
“But—”
“They’ll find their own drinks.” She led him to the kitchen. “Let them talk about you while you’re out here. They’ll admire you even more. After all, you’re the star tonight.”
“Think so?” He looked into her eyes. “I can never tell when you’re putting me on.”
“There’s luck. Where’s the butter?”
The show was great. Tim knew that when he saw his family watching it, watching him on television.
Randall had gone all over the world, showing amateur astronomers staring at the sky. “Most comets are discovered by amateurs,” Randall said. “The public rarely appreciates how much these sky-watchers aid the big observatories. Of course, some amateurs aren’t amateur at all.” The scene cut to Tim Hamner showing off his mountain observatory, and his assistant, Marty, demonstrating equipment. Tim had thought the sequence would be too short, but when he watched his family watching him and it ended with them eager for more, he realized that Harv Randall had been right. Always leave them wanting a little more…
“And,” Randall’s voice said, “some are more amateur than others.” The camera zoomed in on a smiling teenage boy with a telescope. The instrument looked competent, but it was obviously home-built. “Gavin Brown, of Centerville, Iowa. Gavin, how did you happen to be looking for comets at the right time and place?”
“I wasn’t.” Brown’s voice was not pleasant. He was young, and shy, and he talked too loud. “I made some adjustments to the setting circles because I wanted to look at Mercury in the daytime, only you have to have everything adjusted right to find Mercury because it’s so close to the Sun, and—”
“So you found Hamner-Brown by accident,” Harvey Randall said.
Greg McCleve laughed. Jill gave her husband a sharp look.
“Tell me, Gavin,” Randall said. “Since you didn’t see the comet until well after Mr. Hamner did, but you reported it almost at the same instant—how did you know it was a new comet?”
“It was something that didn’t belong there.”
“You mean you know everything that does belong there?” Randall said. The screen showed a photograph of the sky around Hamner-Brown. It was full of stars.
“Sure. Doesn’t everybody?”
“He does, too,” Tim said. “He stayed here a week, and I swear, he can draw star maps from memory.”
“He stayed here?” Tim’s mother asked.
“Sure. In the spare room.”
“Oh.” Tim’s mother stared very hard at the set.
“Where’s George tonight?” Jill asked. “Another date? Mother, did you know that Tim’s houseboy has been dating Linda Gillray?”
“Pass the popcorn,” Penelope Joyce said. “Where is Brown now, Tim?”
“Back in Iowa.”
“Those commercials sell much soap?” Greg asked. He pointed at the set.
“Kalva does all right,” Tim said. “Twenty-six point four percent of the market last year—”
“Jeez, they must be better than I thought,” Greg said. “Who’s your advertising man?”
Then the program was on again. There wasn’t much more about Tim Hamner. Once discovered, Hamner-Brown Comet was the world’s. Now the star was Charles Sharps, who talked about comets and the importance of knowing the Sun and planets and stars. Tim wasn’t disappointed, but he thought the others were. Except for Pat, who watched Sharps and kept nodding. Once, Pat looked up and said, “If I’d had a science professor like him in my freshman year, I might have discovered a comet myself. Do you know him very well?”
“Sharps? Never met him. But I’ve got more of him on the video recordings,” Tim said. “There’s more of me, too.”
Greg pointedly glanced at his watch. “Got to be in the office at five A.M.,” he said. “The market’s going crazy. And after that show, it will be worse.”
“Huh?” Tim frowned. “Why?”
“Comets,” Greg said. “Signs in the sky. Portents of evil change. You’d be surprised how many investors take things like that seriously. Not to mention that diagram the professor drew. The one that showed the comet hitting Earth.”
“But it didn’t,” Pat protested.
“Tim! Could it?” his mother demanded.
“Of course not! Didn’t you listen? Sharps said it was billions to one,” Tim said.
“I saw it,” Greg said. “And he said comets did hit the Earth, sometimes. And this one will be close.”
“But he didn’t mean it that way,” Tim protested.
Greg shrugged. “I know the market. I’m going to be in the office when the big board opens—”
The phone rang. Tim looked puzzled. Before he could get up, Jill answered it. She listened for a moment, then looked puzzled as well. “It’s your answering service. They want to know whether they should put through a call from New York.”
“Eh?” Tim got up to take the phone. He listened. On the TV a NASA official was explaining how they might, just might, be able to get up a probe to study the comet. Tim put the phone down.
“You look dazed,” Penelope Joyce said.
“I am dazed. That was one of the producers. They want me to be a guest on the ‘Tonight Show.’ With Dr. Sharps, Pat, so I’ll meet him after all.”
“I watch Johnny every night,” Tim’s mother said. She said it admiringly. People who got on the “Tonight Show” were important.
Randall’s documentary ended in a blaze of glory, with photographs of the Sun and stars taken by Skylab, and a strong plea for a manned probe to explore Hamner-Brown Comet. Then came the last commercial, and Tim’s audience was leaving. Tim realized, not for the first time, just how far apart they’d grown. He really didn’t have much to say to the head of a stockbroker firm, or to a man who built town houses, even if they were his brother-in-law and his brother. He found himself mixing drinks for himself and Penelope (Joyce!) alone.
“It felt like opening night of a bad play,” Tim said.
“In Boston with an allegory and the Shriners are in town,” Joyce teased.
He laughed. “Hah. Haven’t seen Light Up the Sky since…by golly, since you were in that summer drama thing. And you’re right. That’s what it was like.”
“Poo.”
“Poo?”
“Poo. You always did think like that, and there never was any reason to, and there isn’t one now. You can be proud, Tim. What’s next? Another comet?”
“No, I don’t think so.” He squeezed lime into her gin and tonic and handed it to her. “I don’t know. I’m not strong enough on theory to do what I really want.”
“So learn the theory.”
“Maybe.” He came around and sat next to her. “But anyway, I made the history books. Skoal.”
She lifted her drink in salute. She wasn’t mocking him. “Skoal.”
He sipped at his drink. “I’ll follow it as far as it goes, whatever else I do. Randall wants another documentary, and we’ll do it, if the ratings aren’t too bad.”
“Ratings? You worry about ratings?”
“You’re teasing me again.”
“Not this time.”
“Hmm. All right. I’ll back another documentary. Because I want it. We’ll go heavy on the space probe. With enough publicity we might get the probe up, and somebody like Sharps really will understand comets. Thanks.”
She put a hand on his arm. “You’re welcome. Run with it, Tim. Nobody else here tonight has done half of what they want to do. You’ve already got three-quarters, and a shot at the rest.”
He looked at her and thought, If I married her, Mom would heave a great sigh of relief. She was in that limited class of women. They all seemed to know his sister Jill; they’d gone east to college, and to New York during vacations; they’d broken the same rules; they were not afraid of their mothers; they were beautiful and frightening. The sex urge in a teenage boy was too powerful, too easily
twisted and repressed. It made the beauty of a young woman into a flame, and when that flame was coupled to total self-confidence…a girl like any of Jill’s friends could be a fearsome thing, to a boy who had never believed in himself.
Joyce wasn’t fearsome. She wasn’t pretty enough.
She frowned. “What are you thinking?”
God, no! He couldn’t answer that one! “I was remembering a lot.” Had he been deliberately left alone with Joyce? Certainly she had stayed after the others had left. If he made a pass now…
But he didn’t have the courage. Or, he told himself, the kindness. She was elegant, yes, but you don’t go to bed with a Steuben crystal vase. He got up and went to the video recorder. “Want to watch some of the other clips?”
For a moment she hesitated. She looked at him carefully, then just as carefully drained her glass and set it on the coffee table, “Thanks, Tim, but I’d better get some sleep. There’s a buyer coming in tomorrow.”
She was still smiling when she left. Tim thought it a bit forced. Or, he wondered, am I just flattering myself?
■
The maelstrom was intolerably crowded. Masses of all sizes whirled past each other, warping space into a complex topology that changed endlessly. The inner moons and planets were all scar tissue, worn craters beneath the atmospheres of Earth and Venus, naked ring walls and frozen lakes of magma spread across the faces of Mars, Mercury, Earth’s Moon.
Here was even the chance of escape. The gravity fields around Saturn and Jupiter could fling a comet back out into the cold and the dark. But Saturn and Jupiter were wrongly placed, and the comet continued to fall, accelerating, boiling.
Boiling! Pockets of volatile chemicals burst and spurted away in puffs of dust and ice crystals. Now the comet moved in a cloud of glowing fog that might have shielded it from the heat, but didn’t. Instead the fog caught the sunlight across thousands of cubic miles and reflected it back to the comet head from every direction.
Heat at the surface of the nucleus seeped inward. More pockets of gas ruptured and fired like attitude jets on a spacecraft, tossing the comet head this way and that. Masses tugged at it as it passed. Lost and blind and falling. The dying comet dropped past Mars, invisible within a cloud of dust and ice crystals the size of Mars itself.
A telescope on Earth found it as a blurred point near Neptune.
March: Interludes
None of the astronauts ever walked on solid lunar rock, because everywhere they have gone there was “soil” underfoot. This powdery layer is present because the Moon has been bombarded by meteorites throughout geologic time. The unceasing barrage has so pulverized the surface that it has created a residual layer of rocky debris several meters thick.
Dr. John A. Wood, Smithsonian Institution
Fred Lauren made delicate adjustments to the telescope. It was a big instrument, a four-inch refractor on a heavy tripod. The apartment cost him too much money, but he had to have it for the location. His only furniture was a cheap couch, a few cushions on the floor, and the big telescope.
Fred watched a darkened window a quarter-mile away. She had to come home soon. She always did. What could she be doing? She’d left alone. No one had come for her. The thought frightened him, then made him sick. Suppose she had met a man somewhere? Had they gone for dinner, and then to his apartment? Even now he might be putting his filthy hands on her breasts. He would have hairy hands, rough, like a mechanic’s, and they would be sliding downward, caressingly down across the flat curve of her belly.
No! She wasn’t that kind. She wouldn’t let anyone do that to her. She wouldn’t.
But all women did. Even his mother. Fred Lauren shuddered. Unwanted, the memory came back, when he was just nine, when he’d gone in to ask his mother to say his prayers, and she’d been lying on the bed with the man he called Uncle Jack on top of her. She was moaning and writhing, and Uncle Jack had leaped from the bed.
“You little bastard, I’ll cut your goddam balls off! You want to watch? You’ll sure to God watch. Stand there and if you say one word, I’ll cut your prick off!”
He’d watched. And his mother had let that man—
The window came alight. She was home! Fred held his breath. Was she alone? Was she?
She was carrying a big bag of groceries, which she took to the kitchen. Now she’ll have her drink, Fred thought. I wish she wouldn’t drink so much. She looks tired. He watched as the girl mixed a martini. She carried the pitcher with her to the kitchen. Fred didn’t follow with the telescope, although he could have. Instead he teased himself, waiting.
Her face was triangular, with high cheekbones and a small mouth and big dark eyes. Her long, flowing blonde hair was tinted; her pubic hair was very dark. Fred had forgiven her that small deception, but he’d been shocked.
She came back with the pitcher and a glass spoon. There was a silver-handled martini spoon in the gift shop down the street, and Fred had often stared at it, trying to get up the nerve to buy it for her. Maybe she’d invite him to her apartment. Only she wouldn’t until he’d given her gifts, and he couldn’t do that because he knew what she liked and she’d want to know how he knew that. Fred Lauren reached out to touch her through the magic mirror of his telescope…but only in his mind, only in his hopeless yearning.
Now. Now she’d do it. She didn’t have many dresses good enough to wear to work. She worked in a bank, and although the banks let the girls wear trousers and all the ugly things girls were wearing lately, she didn’t. Not Colleen. He knew her name. He wanted to keep his money in her bank, but he didn’t dare. She dressed well to win promotions, and she’d been promoted to New Accounts, and Fred couldn’t talk to her there. He was proud of her promotion, but he wished she’d stayed a teller, because then he could come in and go to her window and…
She took off the blue frock and carefully hung it in the only closet. Her apartment was very small, only one room with a bathroom and kitchen alcove. She slept on the couch.
Her slip was frayed. He’d watched her mending the straps at night. Under the slip she wore lacy black underpants. He could see the color through the slip. Sometimes she wore pink ones with black stripes.
Soon she’d be taking her bath. Colleen took long baths; Fred could be knocking at her door before she finished. She’d open the door. She trusted people. Once she’d opened the door wearing nothing but a towel, and the man outside had been a telephone man, and another time it was the building superintendent, and Fred knew he could imitate the super’s voice. He’d followed the super to a bar and listened to him. She would open the door…
But he couldn’t do it. He knew what he’d do if she opened her door to him. He knew what would happen afterward. This would be his third time. Third sex offense. They’d lock him up with those men, those animals. Fred remembered what the caged men had called him and how they had used him; he whimpered, throttling the sound as if she might hear.
She put on her robe. Her dinner was in the oven, and she sat in the robe and turned on the TV set. Fred scurried across the room to turn on his own set and tune it to the same channel, then moved quickly back to the telescope. Now he could watch over her shoulder, watch her own TV, and hear the sound, and it was as if Fred and his girl were watching TV together.
It was a program about a comet.
■
The stocky man’s hands were large and smooth, slender, stronger than they looked. They moved over Maureen, knowingly, cunningly. “Purr,” said Maureen. She pulled him suddenly against her, and arched sideways, wrapping him in her long legs.
He gently pushed her away and continued to stroke her, playing her like…the attitude jets on a Lunar Lander. The bizarre image stuck in her mind, jarring. His lips moved against her breast, his tongue darting. Then it was time, and she could lose herself in him. She had no thought of technique now. But he had; he was always in control. He wouldn’t be finished until she was, and she could depend on it, and now there was no time for thought, only the waves of shuddering
feeling…
She came home from a long way away.
They lay together, breathing each other’s breath. Finally he stirred against her. She caught a handful of curly hair and tilted his face up. Standing, he was just her height; astronauts are generally short. Lying above her, his head reached her throat. She lifted herself to kiss him, and sighed contentment.
But now her mind was turned on again. I wish I loved him, she said to herself. Why don’t I? Because he’s too invulnerable? “Johnny? Does your mind ever turn off?”
He thought it through before answering. “There’s a story they tell about John Glenn…” He rolled onto an elbow. “The space medicine boys were trying to find out what we could go through and still function. They had John Glenn wired with widgets so they could watch his heartbeat and perspiration while he went through a program on the Gemini flight simulator. Right in the middle of it they dropped a shitload of scrap iron onto a tilted iron plate, right behind him. The whole room rang with it, and it went on and on. Glenn’s heartbeat went blip!” Johnny’s finger sketched a tepee shape. “He never even twitched. He went through the whole sequence, and then he said, ‘You sons of bitches…’”
He watched her laugh, and then he said a bit sadly, “We can’t get distracted.” He sat up. “If we’re going to watch your program we ought to be getting up.”
“Yes. I suppose. You first.”
“Right.” He bent to kiss her again, then left the bed. She heard the shower running and thought of joining him. But he wouldn’t be interested now. She’d said the wrong thing, and now he’d be remembering his ruined career; ruined not by any mistake of his, but by America’s retreat from space.
She found his robe where he’d left it for her. Forethought. We can’t get distracted. One thing at a time, and do that perfectly. Whether it was crawling along a ruined Skylab and repairing it in orbit, or conducting a love affair, he did it right. And he was never in a hurry.
When they met, Baker had been in the Astronaut Office in Houston and was assigned as liaison to Senator Jellison and party. Johnny Baker had a wife and two teenage kids, and had been a perfect gentleman, taking Maureen to dinner when the Senator was called away, keeping her company for the week the Senator was in Washington, taking her to the launch in Florida…
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