Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

by Michael Bishop

  Air Force Major Gordon Vear, selenologist and ferry-shuttle pilot, stood in the rear of the lounge watching the tired ‘dozer jockies watching their huge video screen. Spock, who for the past three seasons had been wearing a Vulcan earclip on his right ear, told Kirk that unless their new engineer, an eight-foot-tall Alpha Crucian by the name of Traz, coaxed more power from their engines, their refitted starship would probably stall in its unprecedented attempt to traverse the outer layers of the gas giant into which a Klingon amphibian craft had already plunged.

  “What utter rot,” Vear murmured. When I was nineteen, I used to think ol’ Spock was truly hot stuff. The episodes—once in a while—had something to do with real philosophical issues or social concerns. For the past twelve years, though, it’s all been space opera, melodrama, and half-assed Hollywood mysticism. Getting to the Moon ruined Star Trek. I mean, ruined it. Getting to the Moon and the goddamn Board of Media Censorship.

  Making his way to the door, Vear collided with Dan Franciscus, a ferry-shuttle copilot and selenonaut.

  “Where you off to?” Franciscus asked.

  “Out for some fresh vacuum, Daniel. I can’t take much more of this hokey argle-bargle.” He nodded at the screen.

  “Come on, Gordo, it’s a gas. You just gotta sit back and let it knock you into warp-speed mindlessness. Then everything’s A-OK, you’re cruising hyperspace.” The lieutenant looked more closely at the major. “ ‘Fresh vacuum’? You gonna suit up?”

  Vear smiled. “Thought I would, Daniel. Don’t intend to take an unsupported hike the way Nyby did.”

  “Did you know I was on the up-flight to the transfer ship that hauled that poor bastard back to Kennedy Port?” NASA had concealed word of the week-old suicide until just a few hours ago.

  “I’d heard, Daniel. You and Colonel Hoffman.”

  “Did you also know that Von Braunville’s got a slump-pit cavern whose only purpose is to warehouse coffins? Fifty of ‘em in there, one for every manjack and jillfem assigned here. Forty-nine, now. NASA’s lifted the Boy Scout motto: ‘Be Prepared’. But if we’re bombed by a meteorite, who the hell’s gonna peel himself out of the plagioclase to put everybody else in their boxes?”

  “No idea, Daniel. No idea.” Vear wanted only to escape. One of the ‘dozer jockies kept casting irritated looks at Franciscus. He’d seen this Trek a dozen times; still, he was anticipating the moment when the Enterprise split the surface of the gas giant and began plowing through its murk in pursuit of the renegade Klingons who had murdered Chief Engineer Traz’s brood-sibling.

  Heedless of the annoyed man, Franciscus said, “And it’s no damn fun finagling a coffin from one airlock to another in lunar orbit, either. I don’t ever want to do that again. Spooky.”

  “I’ve done it, too, Daniel.”

  “Yeah, that’s right, you have. You pulled a tour here in ‘78, didn’t you?”

  “Could you guys hold it down?” the ‘dozer jockey asked. Vear could tell that although he was trying to be polite, he would have liked to punch the lieutenant’s lights out.

  Franciscus ignored him. “You’re not supposed to suit up after a work period, Gordo. Commander Logan frowns on ECA”—ECA was a jocular selenonaut acronym for Extra-Curricular Activity—“that ‘one, needlessly depletes our oxygen reserves; two, puts expensive NASA equipment at risk; and three, endangers the lives or health of anybody—one’s self included—working at Von Braunville.’ Besides, Gordo, you can get to your dormitory unit through a tunnel.”

  “Have you ever tried to see the stars in a tunnel, Daniel?”

  “Can’t say that—”

  “If you have, you’re probably blessed with X-ray vision. I’m not so blessed. If Logan or anybody else wants me, tell ‘em I’ll be in when I’m in. Catch you later.”

  Franciscus, detecting the major’s impatience, said, “Yes, sir,” and shut up. Vear went around the narrow hall to a suiting room, pulled on his vacuum gear, affixed the portable life-support system (PLSS) that would sustain him outside, and single-handedly worked the air lock releasing him to the surface. In the old days, these procedures would have required at least two sets of hands, but now, thanks to advances in both suit design and moonbase architecture, a guy could accomplish them—fairly easily—solo.

  Of course, as Vear exited, an alarm sounded throughout the dome, and a computer in the headquarters hemisphere halfway around the bleached lunacrete of the O2 plant also noted his departure. Vear knew about, and approved of, this precaution. He was a small amber light on a safety technician’s console and would continue to gleam there until his mortal body came back inside.

  Unearthly, thinks Gordon Vear, taking in Von Braunville from the floor of the Censorinus crater. Despite its name, the base looks less like a city than it does a construction site in a great monochrome desert. During the fourteen-day sunlit period, moondozers operate round the clock, gouging shovelsful of anorthosite out of the crater’s floor to feed the oxygen plant. One ‘dozer is working now, moving like a spindly balloon-tired stegosaurus so that the plant can process about five tons of lunar dirt every twenty-four hours, turning it into O2 not only as a component of the breathable air both here and in the earth-orbiting station known as Kennedy Port, but also as a fuel for the three different types of ships required for Earth-Moon voyages.

  Of course it’s unearthly, you dummikins, Vear rebukes himself. Where do you think you are anyway? Las Vegas?

  Inside his helmet, the major laughs. Because Nixon’s Travel Restrictions Act puts such a cramp in casino business, the military services allow their personnel to use acquired leave to visit Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and the Miami Strip. In fact, you can fly to one of those places, space available, for nada, and in ‘79, after returning from his first lunar tour, Vear made an eager pilgrimage to Vegas. The fact is, some neon lights and a few one-stop wedding chapels would make Von Braunville look an awful lot like that down-on-its-luck Nevada city.

  So our moonbase isn’t that unearthly, he thinks, smiling. Not if you compare it to the most desolate terrestrial outposts you know. It’s just hellfire hot or damnation cold, and so implacably deadly either way that it’s little wonder Logan doesn’t want us to go out alone. On the other hand, how else would I ever find any solitude on this slaggy lump of basalt, KREEP norite, and jumbled breccias if I didn’t go out alone?

  Raised a Catholic in Louisville, Kentucky, Vear also sometimes finds himself comparing Von Braunville to Gethsemani, the monastery near Bardstown, Kentucky where the Trappist writer and monk Thomas Merton spent most of his adult life.

  Make up your mind, Gordon. Is your moonbase a gambling casino or a monastery? Well, a little of both. Depends on your point of view. Just being up here’s a gamble, of course, but the monastic aspect of our life comes through in the fact that we’re crammed together in a finite amount of life-supporting space and have to adjust to one another’s omnipresent bodies—and to one another’s annoying quirks—to keep from going nuts and committing actionable mayhem. Isolated as we are, 240,000 miles from Earth, we almost never—paradoxically—get any privacy. And rejuvenating privacy is what most of us need.

  Vear, seeking privacy, climbs a rugged natural pathway on the eastern flank of the crater. Von Braunville nestles below. The slope, mercifully, is not severe, and slowly he gains height on the base and blessed distance on its regs and recriminations. He has air for four hours; his suit’s cooling system will keep his blood—praise God and NASA—from boiling; and despite the sweat gathering on his brow, under his arms, and behind his knees, Vear is enjoying this … well, couldn’t he legitimately call it a ‘star trek”?

  The stars shine scattershot, fiercer and more numerous than he ever experienced them in Kentucky, and although officially he is off duty, he can also, in his role as selenologist, look down at the rocks—powdery, glassy, crystalline—through which he treks and later justify his outing as “research”.

  Privacy, Vear reflects, is what Nyby needed, even if Logan and some of t
he NASA boys believe that it was our isolation—a mistaken sense of cosmic estrangement—that goaded him to kill himself. To hell with that, Vear thinks grimly. What pushed Nyby over was the fact that there was almost always somebody in his face, telling him what duty to do, and how to tackle it, and when to get it done by. It was Nyby’s sense of enforced association, with no real intimacy, and his awareness that true control of his life lay elsewhere that walked him down the plank to suicide. Maybe somebody should have talked to him—by way of confessing him, I mean—but as it was, everybody was always talking at poor Roland, commanding, coercing, constricting.

  A twinge of guilt afflicts Vear, and he halts in a spot with a fine view of both Von Braunville and the eastern crater rim, beyond which—if you grab yourself a flyer and ride it a good hundred and fifty miles—lies the near shore of the Sea of Fertility. I wish I were there now, the major thinks. More privacy, more solitude, and more room to mull my guilt over Nyby, a specialist in materials science who dropped out of our lives—precipitated himself out, I guess you could say—by taking a short walk.

  Vear’s guilt arises from a memory of a conversation with Nyby two weeks before he took this walk. The major saw him at chow one day and, noticing his depression, approached him afterward to ask if he were all right.

  “I feel like people are sitting on me, sir.”

  The “sir” was obligatory, not mere politeness. Although part of the official scientific contingent, Nyby was also a commissioned naval officer and a selenonaut. Commander Logan had insisted—not unreasonably—that he, like others, pull double duty.

  “What do you mean, sitting on you?”

  At the door to the chow hall, they had to whisper to maintain the confidentiality of their exchange.

  “I’m covered over,” the kid said. “I can’t breathe.”

  “You need to get away. I know the feeling.”

  “I can’t get away. I barely have time to eat and sleep. And when I’m awake and working, I’m at somebody else’s beck and call. Everything I do, Major Vear, is other-willed.”

  “How long’ve you been up here now?”

  “Four months. Nearly five.”

  “Well, that means seven more to go. That’s a long time for a young person, Roland, but you can stick it out.”

  “You’re assuming that going home will take care of my problem. But it’s just more of the same, Major. In some ways, considering the way things used to be, it’s even worse.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Forgive me, sir, but I’m probably lucky that you’re not. All I can say is that up here there’s a built-in, ecological rationale for tyranny. Pardon me, I mean authoritarianism.”

  “And back home … ?”

  “Excuse me. I’m two minutes late for my shift.” Nyby brushed past Vear into the corridor.

  “Damn your shift. I’ll answer for your tardiness. Let’s sit down and hash this business out.”

  Nyby hesitated. “Do you really want to take this on, sir? I mean, really.”

  And what did you say? Vear admonishes himself. Nothing. You hesitated, and Nyby, bright boy that he was, picked up on it.

  “That’s what I thought. I don’t blame you, either. Thanks for being concerned, but I’ve got resources of my own, Major.” And he broke off their talk and reported for his shift.

  Although Vear bumped into Nyby on several occasions over the next two weeks, neither alluded to their brief colloquy in the chow hall. And then, of course, time in which to allude to it ran out. Completely.

  Please, dear God, Vear prays, forgive me. And Roland, wherever you are—you forgive me, too, okay? I don’t think you believed in anything but your work, and in your ability to use the lunar vacuum and its low gravity to create strangely unique crystals, but if you committed mortal sins either by not believing or by renouncing the gift of life, both you and God must forgive the one whose hesitancy may have greased your slide to … well, to hell.

  This thought, suit or no suit, PLSS or no PLSS, scalds Vear to the marrow. PLSS, God, PLSS, Roland, he prays: forgive.

  After a time, a kind of uneasy calm settles on the major. He studies the stars. He bathes in cold, blue Earthlight. He looks out into Censorinus at the solar dishes planted to the northwest of Von Braunville like a huge garden of mirrors on stilts. Suggesting a collaboration between Lewis Carroll and H. G. Wells, they provide power for the domes and the power that enables the O2 factory to convert plagioclase—CaAl2Si2Ox—into usable oxygen.

  Up here, though, Vear is exhilaratingly alone. “I vahnt to be alone!” he shouts, deafening himself. Alone to expiate my guilt. Alone to commune with God. He wishes that he could have given Nyby some of this solitude, some of this privacy. Maybe that would have helped the kid. If, of course, the kid had had a faith that made his solitary moments something other than deadfalls for loneliness, snares for his sense of futility.

  Because you can carry being alone and unknown too far. And the same goes for the desire for privacy.

  What was it that Thomas Merton had said on this point? Another acute observation. Vear finally recalls it: “And to be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy.” Exactly. You want solitude, a chance to reflect, but you don’t want your retreat from others to deprive you of the company of God. That’s not privacy, that’s the ultimate loneliness, absolute desolation. And, unfortunately, it may have been exactly what Nyby achieved in the enmiring press and hubbub of Von Braunville. If not long before.

  Everything went off the rails in 1968, Vear concludes. Oh, yeah, we won the war in Vietnam, and we’re colonizing the Moon well ahead of anybody’s expectations, given the budget cuts that NASA was about to absorb between 1969 and 1971, when that friggin’ mess in ‘Nam nearly forced us to shut down Saturn V production and my brother almost lost his job in the Michoud Plant in New Orleans—but what have we gained but an ice-cream rasher of international prestige and steady employment for a few thousand people building rocket stages and guidance and control units?

  Star Trek started going downhill in ‘68, it stank on ice in ‘69, and it’s been an embarrassment to humanity ever since. Our Constitution’s been shredded, our civil liberties have been stomped on, and we’ve got a president who dresses up the White House guards like Ruritanian dragoons. You can get by okay, I guess, if you’re working for the government, especially the services, or if you’re a business person with the proper contacts, or if you’re a celebrity who’s made a right-minded mint or whom King Richard has invited to a command performance. Otherwise, you’d better grub and kiss ass, or else hide away in the country and stay deep in the weeds praying that the No-Knocks never find you.

  Praying. That’s what I came out here to do, Vear thinks, not to rile myself up reflecting on Nyby’s fatal weltschmerz and the way I’ve avoided common hardships by going to the Air Force Academy and taking flight to the Moon. Still, ‘68 was the year that it all went off the rails, and that was the year that Thomas Merton died, too. In December. After the national elections. He accidentally electrocuted himself with a fan after taking a shower in a cottage near Bangkok; he’d been touring the Far East discussing monasticism and meditation with the Dalai Lama and other Buddhists.

  Vear has always considered Merton’s death—for so searching and holy a man—ludicrous, a vaudeville jape unworthy of God. But here above Von Braunville, he begins to regard it as a mercy. Maybe the Holy Spirit had been whirling in the blades of that defective fan, breathing grace upon Merton even as the fan—a fan, for Christ’s sake!— shocked him to the roots of his being. How a mercy? How a gift of grace?

  Well, Merton had fought the good fight—for justice, for peace, for the greater glory of God—and his death, at the painfully early age of fifty-three, spared him the necessity of witnessing either Nixon’s gutting of the Bill of Rights or the American people’s lamblike complicity in their own slaughter. Vear remembers that in Merton’s Asian Journal, circulated posthumously in samizdat copies among many Catholics, the man expres
sed satisfaction that Kentucky had not voted for George Wallace in the ‘68 election but tremendous disappointment that Nixon had beaten Herbert Humphrey.

  “Our new president is depressing,” he declared in his journal. “What can one expect of him?”

  Well, thinks Vear, I’m glad you didn’t have to live through the early years of his administration to find out. If an electric fan hadn’t killed you, that would have, and you deserved the mercy of your slapstick electrocution in Thailand. And what a breathtaking mercy—literally—it was. Breathgiving, too.

  Vear shakes his head, no easy thing to do in the TV-like box of his helmet. You’ve got to stop worrying about these matters, Gordon, and commune with your God. That’s what you came out here to do.

  So the major climbs farther up the “path” on the jumbled slope of the crater rim and finds a refrigerator-sized boulder, capsized, on which to lower his butt and rest. Seated on it, he says a psalm from memory and later the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be …”

  He mumbles on, eventually concluding, “… the glory forever. Amen.” He feels a little calmer, but not much. And so he swings into prayers for his family, his city, his state, his nation, the planet, the entire cosmos. Even though wonders surround him, his eyes close, and he goes into a kind of trance in the chapel of his suit and the cathedral of Censorinus.

  “Give me some sign of Your presence,” Air Force Major Gordon Vear pleads. “Some small sign that You hear me…”

  Opening his eyes, he detected movement above him on the eastern rim of the crater. The movement startled him. His stomach dropped and his scalp tingled. You weren’t supposed to see movement on the Moon—not unless it derived from human activity at Von Braunville, the random impact of meteorites, or maybe the effects of some rare, residual volcanism.

  In this case, meteorites and volcanism had nothing to do with it, and, squinting, Vear saw through his grimy faceplate that a human figure was staring down on him—indeed, on the entire base—from the rampart of Censorinus. The figure seemed to be either a child or dwarf; a black child or dwarf. It was framed by rugged fractures of lunar rock, wedged between them on the rampart like a medieval soldier in the notch of a castle wall. The most startling thing about the figure, even more startling than its size or its race, was that it had no protection against the lunar vacuum. No suit. No PLSS. In fact, it was wearing—if Vear’s eyes were not deceiving him—blue jeans and a white dress shirt.