Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  “Very much.” Wert has a used face, but not a guarded one. “Don’t see how you did it for the price.”

  “Cost.” Mr. Kim’s face clouds over. “The next highest bidder—too low to be safe. We know his ways. Wouldn’t like to see it. Not for this. Fraid they were going along with it…Mr. Wert’s to be the civil administrator on the living station, Mole. He’s going on the Courier.”

  “But it was a plus for Kimco anyway, wasn’t it, sir? Even at cost?” He’s relieved when Fred’s father, tossing back his Buddha head with an amused gape, admits it. He so wants him not to be a hypocrite. He doesn’t see his own father anywhere.

  “I like your hospital wing particularly,” Wert’s saying. “Hope we won’t have to use it much.”

  “How many times have you been out there?”

  “Once. It’s no ordinary shuttle trip, you know. I do okay. Dull when you get there, though. With just a skeleton crew. Like a big empty stage set waiting for people. They’re right to send that many. If they are.”

  “I heard eighty only, Bill. For your empire. I heard—sixty.”

  “Still a tussle going on,” Wert said.

  “They asked us to do the sick bay for the Courier as well. But we bowed out. Couldn’t stick putting the body lockers damn under it. Some of my Korean ancestors buried their dead under the bed they expired in—but still. Hear they finally used an old Raymond Loewy design, modified. Very nice tambour. Though small.”

  “Body lockers, sir?” Mole said.

  “I assume they don’t bury—in that sea.”

  “Wouldn’t be too sure what they do—hear about those satellites that keep disappearing?” Wert said. “No sign of them. Luckily none of that’s my beat. For the living station, each passenger signs a cremation release.”

  “Not for the training.” Mole shot a quick look at Kim. Freddie had left for that the day before.

  Kim ignores it. “How’d you get the job, Bill?”

  “Fellow named Mulenberg proposed me. Met him in Saudi, few years back. I had a—connection there then. With Ordoobadi International, their branch there. After I met you in Seoul. He’s the project’s civilian for ordnance. He said they didn’t need a scientific chap for administrator, or want one—their military would take care of that.”

  “We have to assume they will.” Kim’s eyelids are as good as fans. “Mr. Wert helped me get Fred out of Seoul that time, Mole.”

  Wert twiddled each smoky bead as if it was a year. “Well, maybe this’ll be the ultimate country, Ultima Thule. Actually, I’d turned down the job. Funny thing—Gilpin sold me on it. And certain—family matters.”

  “You know Tom Gilpin, sir?” Mole said.

  “No, wrote him, though, after he spoke once. To a huge crowd in Boston, mostly your age.”

  “Fred, too—” the Kim said. “Is of the faith. So, Bill, you too think well of him?”

  “Salt of the earth. Like his constituency.” Wert bowed to Mole. “But like all reformers, sometimes inaccurate. The way he talks of the—habitat—you’d think that a living station was already a piece of Tivoli. When it’s only—Paramus, New Jersey? Steubenville, Ohio? Haven’t been back home long enough to know whether Gilpin’ll be the salt of space—hmm. But his principles are as solid as—whatever’s solid.” Wert’s manner was so knowledgeably tired you kept wanting to inquire of what. “He reminds me of Cobbett, or Jean Jaurès. You feel you could put his face on a stamp.”

  “Close yours, Mole,” Fred’s father says. “Or use that fan. Here comes your dad.”

  His father, embracing him in his complex way, which is never cold physically, scolds him for not coming home oftener, scrutinizes the full drink Mole still held in his hand—“Regular party rounder, eh?” and sends him off toward an army bigwig who’d unaccountably brought his pretty daughter; Mole knows why. Since he and Linda left school he hasn’t dated her.

  The general is evidently here for some info. Mole watches him operate. Of medium height, he works both up and down, sticking his short muzzle first at a succession of important wives, including his hostess. Getting nothing from Mole’s mother because his father “never tells her business.” Mole grins at his mother, who knows as much of it as anybody here.

  When his mother leaves him to the general and four of the general’s kind, plus a couple of under-secretaries and a covey from the UN—all anti-NASA either for good-and-fearful reason or good power ones—the paper fans really ploy. Mouths that are hidden can leak. No “that man Gilpin” talk is bothered with. The oddity of the passenger list is passed over as negligible, except for one snide reference to the choice of Wert. “It all figures,” they keep saying. Something else is at stake. Linda’s father leaves early, looking as if he may have caught a rat. Leaving her behind.

  Mole, dragging Linda by the pinkie, says good-bye to Kim, who’s now alone.

  “Your mother’s been so good to Fred, Mole. So good. I like watching her.” Kim’s snake-wife, Fred said, had cured his earlier geisha tastes; they now have a middle-aged Chinese housekeeper with cold flab cheeks and gold teeth.

  Kim’s really watching the admiral. Wert is being talked to. “Is Wert State Department, sir?” His father doesn’t think much of Wert; Mole can tell.

  “Not—quite. Or not any more. He has a past. Maybe an inch too honorable. For modern tastes.” Wert, now edging toward the front door, caught their eyes on him, nodded ruefully, and edged his way out. “But he has his compensations. Evenings at seven, he goes home to them.”

  “Kim’s keen,” Linda said, leaving with Mole. She’d waved off her father the general, who isn’t much but all she has. In revenge she makes use of him in his own style. “Where’s Fred? In training? In Courier training? Gee.” She looks frightened. “Gee.”

  Two days later, he had everything he or anybody could find out, short of espionage. If the dissident children of Washington were ever recognized by a foreign power as the prime source of info that they covertly were—the headmaster had once warned at Parents’ Day—it could mean the collapse of government. “Space is heavy, isn’t it,” Linda sighed. “Gee, I love your place.”

  Two weeks later, biking off to the Smithsonian to meet Fred, who was having his picture taken there as a member of the training group which had come down from space Saturday and been released from post-training checkup yesterday, Mole feels heavy. What kind of torch is being passed to him, Linda and Fred?

  “Oh—you know the Army,” Linda’d said, picking fluff from his new electric blanket out of her long hair. They hadn’t had to use the electric part. You know my father, she’d meant. Just as her pal Adrienne is Air Force and he, Mole, is NASA. Only the navy kids at school banded together, a breed apart, to take their fathers’ side on things; when the sea no longer counts except to dunk spacecraft in, that’s what you have to do. But everyone at school knew the echelons. By family, Adrienne was Mole’s day-in, day-out rival for control of space, though in a pinch the Army—and Linda’s pa the general—if here hand-in-glove with Adrienne’s pa—was top-cousin, Army and Air being entrusted with that biggest hush-hush ambition: the big W. In Germany der big K, in France la big G. Krieg. Guerre. Mole doesn’t know the Chinese or Russki or other names for it.

  After that came what Tom Gilpin called the big ruck and muddle, “the best of whom always write their names lower case.” The civilians. Had Mole’s father, the honorary admiral, forgotten that he was once one of them? No, it’s cuckoo reverse. He can’t.

  “They don’t want civilians on the platform,” Linda said, lying on her elbow, as Mole was. She put the ball of red fluff she’d collected in Mole’s navel. “I don’t know why.” This last was a fib, but they all had certain loyalties. Platform was what the general called the living-station. His father called it the NASA station, or now and then, depending on context, the L-5. “Why should he call it that?”

  She leaned back admiring. “You have a deep belly button—Oh, I dunno. Maybe they want to mail things from it. Or load…’s what platforms are
for, aren’t they? What’s your father built it for?”

  For glory. But that was understood.

  “To be able to build more of them,” he said. “Because we’re already ahead.” She was broody, the way he’d found her when he’d picked her up at home the night before. When the general was between women his aides had to come play poker with him, with deuces and shop-talk wild and Linda serving them beer after beer.

  “I don’t ever want to get ahead, do you, Mole?” She was a neat math student—and by remembering the details of her childhood’s banging around the world had won the geography-and-civics prize—but was otherwise simple. Any depth she had came from the broodiness. “Why do they hate civilians? Why does the admiral?”

  He sat up, staring at his belly button. “Because they mess things up. You think they’re counting on them to?”

  She lay back, tracing a forefinger down his nose. “Oh, not my father. Not him. He’s counting on yours. Any chestnuts to be pulled out of the fire, he says—he’s counting on him.”

  “Very old chestnut, that idea,” Mole said.

  She said: “You have such a sense of style.” He tickled her ear. They rolled over, sweating. “Look—” she said afterward, “it’s still there. Your red belly button.”

  Then she’d reached over to the arm of his drawing board, where he’d set a jar of colored pens and pencils, in his first taste of domestic joy. With another girl. Carefully choosing, she bent to his belly, tracing a circle of dark blue around his navel. He knew it for an orbit at once. Next she drew an outer concentric one, in purple. For the largest, the yellow crayon she picked wouldn’t show. She drew over it in orange instead, blurring the outline to make it a jagged one, with a flourish of her forefinger. Finally she dotted a black pen line from its arrowed end at the navel, down across the three orbits on his belly and into his pubic hair. “Where’s that?”

  She patted the curls. “Canaveral. Where the computer blocks are.”

  He’d had to laugh, even while concentrating on what she was telling him. “Now draw the Courier.”

  Fussing at already having used the black, she chose a thicker felt pen for it, first lightly flipping its point through a pubic curl. Her coquetry wasn’t crude in itself; all girls used the material at hand. She’d got it from being slapped on the buttock for listening, as she trundled back and forth to the fridge for the beer. It was no odder than having an aunt.

  She’d put the small black Courier-fly where he’d thought she might—not on the goal line to the L-5, the dark blue, but in the links between the jagged orange orbit and the undefined purple indelible. Where he’d been afraid she would. Then she slammed the pen and pencils back in the jar. “Game fini.” He knew she wouldn’t tell him more.

  “Right over my appendix,” he’d said, quickly clowning. “Will I have to have it out?”

  But when they kissed good-bye at his door she clung a little, puzzling up at him. “We’re civilians. Aren’t we?”

  The minute she was gone he’d rushed to the Goddard. Homework you did on your own was the kind that stuck. Days after, biking to meet Fred, it was still so much in his head that he plowed right into another rider parked at the bike rack. “Sorry,” Mole had apologized, “—wrong orbit.” He’d had to limp up to Fred, who began smiling at the sight of him and couldn’t seem to stop; was Fred a little high? “Dangerous, down here,” Mole said. They loaded his bike onto Fred’s graduation present, a bug-car painted iridescent lime, and drove off to say farewell to Fred’s exhibit at the Goddard, now in its last days. Mole didn’t say he'd been there in the interim.

  Fred had enjoyed himself, he said—though only intellectually. “That universe. Wow.” But the going had been tough; he’d just barely qualified. He really shouldn’t have. “But you know, Mole—they let me through like a breeze.” Stopped at a light, they looked at each other greenishly, until the car behind tooted. Fred was driving. “Now tell me about your research,” Fred said.

  When they parked, Mole still hadn’t spoken. “Ooh, the Goddard’s an airy site,” Fred said, walking up the inclined approach. “But I know airier.” Suddenly he’d jackknifed into a running stance and galloped a big circle, halting again at Mole’s side. Some tourists stopped to stare, but when he kissed the ground they half applauded. He wiped the gravel from his lips.

  “What kind of grass you on?” Mole said.

  Where Mole is now, locked and floating, Fred’s answer comes back to him. “Grass?” Fred said.

  Inside the museum, Fred no longer looked high but inward, like a person who had some body condition he was monitoring. He kept hunching his shoulders in, squaring them out. Dead center in the lobby was the mammoth walk-in model of the Courier, bristling black and silver but empty, and only one kid leaning over the railing to read about it. “‘Actual rocket size thirty-six stories high.’ Something!” the kid said.

  Mole nodded. “The important thing is to be identifiable in space.”

  Fred didn’t laugh. Fred, who was never rude, moved on, not choosing to notice that Mole’s limp was real. But in an empty room halfway to their destination he stopped. “Your ankle?”

  “You should see my belly.” He still hadn’t washed off the crayons. Why should he be whispering? “Fred—there’s no backup system for that thing. None at all. What’s that mean?”

  His friend moved on again, Mole dithering after him. “Oh, I know in a way, Fred—if that thing starts falling in the drink, say. Like the oldest Skylab, only sooner. Or say it misses its rendezvous with the platform. Habitat. Docking the ship, say they miss, yes. But the alternatives, what do they mean? Like—what about burn-up?” He knew he was only playing the idiot so that it would be like old times. Having seen at once that it never again would be.

  Fred’s experience had changed him. He was grave. Was he grounded for good? “There’s no backup for burn-up, Mole.” The dickey phrase didn’t make him smile. Or say smart-ass: You just burn, Mo’. In a jagged orange line.

  But yes, there were other ways to miss orbit, he said. He detailed them.

  “I don’t believe it,” Mole said, this time for real. “I just don’t. Overshoot. Yes of course I know what it is.” It was an orbit like any other, only drawn in purple indelible. “You mean you can just be kept circling? For how long?” He stopped Fred by the elbow: “How long, Fred? Fred. For forever?”

  It was an off-day for the Goddard and the room they reached was also empty, except for the guard. The glass case with Fred’s exhibit, a model for a civic center in a lunar colony at the site of the St. George crater, was still there. A multilevel structure for two hundred inhabitants, the card said. With features to influence minds to new sensitivities toward the environment, during the colonists’ leisure time away from normal routine. Access to the lunar surface being possible through airlocks.

  “I wouldn’t do it like that now,” Fred said softly. He continued to stare into the glass cage. “Forever? Well, that would depend. On the supply of what they call—‘consumables.’” They waited for each other to laugh.

  “Now that you’ve explained it,” Mole said carefully, “I go for the backup.”

  Fred swept a finger across the glass case and inspected it. “So does the Eminent Kim. Computers alone can’t always manage, he says.” He thrust his thumbs in his armpits and “did” his father. “Much cost, yes, Fred. In proportion to time. A backup has to be on the ready. To build this one, maybe two years. But they could have. The Courier itself took ten. This pushy admiral, who gets his billions for NASA and does what he wants with them—why didn’t he push for one? So, Fred, I fear this mission is too special for us. No, we don’t go. Not this time.”

  Mole, too, stared into the glass case, leaning against it. You were not supposed to. Behind him the guard approached.

  “Pity—” the Freddie image in the glass said to the Mole one. “Gilpin’s still going.” The name rang through the glass between the two images. They had discovered each other through him.

  “Pity�
�” Mole said. It was one thing to doubt your father like any green boy, another to grow up to it. And still another, to realize in the same instant that you had inherited some of his tendencies—say a talent for plot. “Pity, Fred. That I can’t go instead of you.” “Pity.” He almost screamed it.

  It was then that the guard had to speak to them—men almost, shame on them—screaming “Instead of me,” “Instead of you,” to each other, wrestling in laughter—or was it laughter?—on the museum floor.

  He can now read the ON COURSE perfectly well. Maybe he’d dozed, or dreamed not being able to. Nothing else is dream. He’s here. The part of the panel he’s to check for ongoing instruction now lights up in smaller letters: Water Intake. He’s practiced anything to do with food or drink. He presses the armrest. A nozzle inches up. Wrapping his mouth around it, he doesn’t need to suck. The water rises in tendrils, filling him. He doesn’t stop. The nozzle has done it for him; it’s timed. Here each encounter with an element has to be. The elements are fierce and sacred here. He breathes deep. What marvel. To be in a place where this is so.

  They’ve put him in the cabin nearest the flight deck, with all his second thoughts. When he came aboard, the crew who’d settled him in seemed to be having some; maybe they’d figured he wouldn’t show. Two had shown up at the motel to check on his nerves; he’d bought them Jack Daniels at the bar, joshing on his own with the bartender, for his being under-age. The two who in the corridor had picked him out of a clutch of other Class A passengers—that elite whose existence Gilpin had predicted—and had seated him, had then drilled him on what they called “the courtesies of the house.” If ever in deep trouble, for instance, there were flanges he and others could activate with their breath. He didn’t ask what trouble. “Not until we’ve cleared the launching tower,” one said, grinning. “And never come near the flight deck,” his buddy said. “We shoot.” “Comprehendo,” Mole said. His father’s word—popped. Such a glister on them all of a sudden. He felt too young to interpret it. “We’ll remember you to him,” they said. “If the time comes.”