Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  Mulenberg stretched, staring up. Ceiling and walls here are some stuff the lay trade hasn’t got the patents to yet. “So this trip must be of some use.” Mulenberg’s chuckle doesn’t quite make it. He presses a wall slot, closes on the dropped lozenge and pops it in his mouth.

  “Tessa’s the kind one. The Californian. Lives in a Mendocino ravine, runs a commune.” He grins. “No one person’s supposed to run a commune. But Tessa does. With a lovely boy, now and then. Big girl, like her sister. Like me. Both of them with minds like their mother, sort I can talk business to. Miss that. Matter of fact, their college yearbook called them the two Kwan-Yins.” Though Tessa isn’t that neat a dresser, she’s the one you can give presents of value which would horrify Maidie with price-guilt. But now, after years of drouth, he must find a present for Maidie, too. What can it be, from here?

  “As for that lad—I like his spirit. Though that age, I never know what to say to them.” He chuckles. The lozenge has helped. Everything here works as it’s meant to. “Know what he said to Ver—Miss Oliphant? ‘I feel at home with you because you’re like me. By now you’re just a little bit black.’”

  “Smart boy.”

  “Where is she?” After that scene in the corridor he knows his offhandedness fools no one.

  “She has to wander. Reporter habit.” Gilpin smiles—since who can wander here? “My guess is she’s in with Seat Six.” In the Hygiene Unit, one side of which has become the two women’s hangout. He smiles too for that female bonding.

  “So does the Jew wander, eh? Habit.” He’s glad when Gilpin laughs. “Watch myself, eh. Lived too long in Islam.”

  “Ah. You meet Wert there?”

  “I recommended him. But d’ya know, I can’t remember. Whether I actually did meet him.”

  “He blends. It worries him.”

  Mulenberg shuffles his notes, gathered for him in Washington. “Well, better get on with it.” He turned back to the machine. “You know—” he said dreamily, “I’ve been going on the idea, tell the emotional stuff to Maidie, the practical stuff to Tess. Divided like they always were, or trying to be. But maybe that’s what's holding me up.”

  “Lucky—” comes from Gilpin behind him, “That you can tell the difference.”

  There speaks a man who’s settled all that, Mulenberg thinks. Is it because I haven’t yet, that I divide the girls? Gilpin would never humiliate a corpse. Or confuse love and the body. Or be in thrall to any of it? He’s so safely in thrall to the multitude.

  “I’ve read you,” Mulenberg said.

  Behind him, Gilpin writes: “How vulnerable they often are, the men with daughters only. Sometimes they have extra stature because of it, sensitivities they themselves don’t identify. Their loves are often marked by being so much with women—surely this man’s are. But the world can make them feel they’re men without sons, so sometimes they hunt the male life? Bonding with the expense-account bars, the academic or commercial offices. And when they meet the ‘lads’—other men’s sons—are shy with them—”

  “But, too easy for me to see what children are to people, since I have none. Like Wert here, up to now.”

  Otherwise, Wert’s life is so outrun by the past decade that to men like Mulenberg it must read like history. Nothing so outmoded one political framework as the emergence of another. Wert, the foreign service officer, is getting to be the last of a certain kind of national, a man whose responses, geared to Earth politics, are of a kind which, along with the twentieth century, begins to disappear. Decades go faster toward the end of a century. The old politics is now as primitive-sounding as old land-grants. The new century is in the air,

  So far according to what he’s reading, Wert has no children. But unlike Gilpin, he’s thought of it.

  Quickly, Gilpin buries his head. Not before he sees Mulenberg’s newest opener, transcribed on the lighted screen where the processor’s user and any audience may follow his thoughts, reblinked: Dear Kwan-Yins:

  Mulenberg’s going to cheat. His file of space data, executed by research staff at his various offices, is merely a dictionary of heterogeneous fact designed to help him self-orient. He’ll use it whether he understands it or not—as really the more honest reportage on his present condition. And in spite of that salutation, he’ll alternate the two girls as it comes to him to do. As it comes to him! He trembles with communication, holding that abused word in his mouth like a lozenge. He’s naked in this new limbo, with his two communicants. None of the three of them yet a corpse.

  Girls:

  —I’m in a kind of common room and library which we’ve taken to calling the Free Room, because we’re on our own here—not otherwise programmed—and it has gravity. Pseudo of course, made by revolving the room, which is a cylinder, just as will be done in portions of the habitat. Or so I get it. You understand I hope that we’re not en route to another planet. Excuse if I insult your intelligence. I find that notion still prevalent down below. We’re of course en route to a man-made station, only one larger and farther than ever before.

  And for longer inhabitance. No one’s believed, you see, that we’d do it so soon. And perhaps we won’t. When I look over the ordnance, one thing I do know down to the ground—ha, pun, Tessa—I have doubts. And no one’s really said—permanent. But make it or not, the world’ll be changed—already is. Doesn’t take a philosopher to see that (though I’ve got one sitting next to me). For instance, not two weeks out, and we’re already calling you Down Below. Not accurate. But we’re calling you it.

  Let me give you a rundown on our daily routine. So that—

  He pauses to look behind him, as he’d done when he mentioned their philosopher. In sarcasm. Yet it’s a comfort to have that man near. Turning back to the keyboard, Tessa’s last blithe postcard comes to mind: Daddy, I have something to share with you. The dog, Gravy, named for gravitation and Mulenberg’s voyage, had had bon voyage pups.

  —So that I may better share with you two some of our delusions, which I must hope these are. For we begin to have them—

  Yet perhaps it’s Maidie, his worn coin of a girl, milled to the thinnest edge by the normal safeguards against madness, who’ll understand him best. Who’d hung the week’s schedule in her kitchen the morning after the honeymoon, and five years later, on a screen a safe thousand and more miles away from him, looked as if she still hung by it.

  —We rise to a morning meal, sent by mechanical means from the galley, like all intake except dinner. Strictly, there are no mornings here. Our days and nights being of different lengths from each other as well as from yours, also get harder to distinguish—

  As the blaze at a porthole of stars raining like snow will confuse his already shaky inner rhythms. But this he would rather not reveal. They will think it is him.

  —Once at the landing station, we’ll set our own day lengths—

  What’s he saying? On a mainly industrial station already manufacturing crystals to be used in electronic devices, the hours of the cycles must long since have been set.

  Why should he be defensive about that or about any of it? For it now occurs to him that he is.

  —But we maintain. Since we must wear our full life-support suits at all times in the cabin or at drill, the bath hour is welcome. Everything unisex, including a modified Jacuzzi. Privacy, though, can be calculated—

  Scrounged, rather. The two women have more or less been allowed to be alone. Or so it’s working out. Over and above the scheduled life—in this one-way mousehole, as his big body sometimes inveighs at him—there’s always that other overlay. Of things working out.

  —For circulation’s sake, we’re expected to use the massage aids, alone or mutually—

  So far as he knows, nobody’s been mutual, in Cabin Six.

  —All our activities are closed-circuit monitored, the video-auditor being the computer only, of course—

  Of course. But why think otherwise?

  —We’re then left to various drills which familiarize
us with our sector of the ship, including the Sick Bay, the said Galley and Hygiene Units. As well as our sector’s access to the Payload Bay—your daddy’s special interest, heh, heh—and to the forward and aft Avionic Bays, which include—

  Here he has to refer to his notes, which thank God and staff are as organized as a president’s should be, for a minute returning him in delicious pain to what it had been to be one.

  —radar altometers, general purpose computers, mass memories, rendezvous sensor electronics, microwave scan beam landing system, accelerometers and one-way Doppler extractor—all of those forward. Also rate gyros, aeroservice servo-amplifier units, all of these aft except the multiplexer-demultiplexer units, which are located in both. The names are by and large self-explanatory, except for that last one, whose function I confess I haven’t yet learned. What a Doppler reaction is I haven’t time for here, but any aerodynamics manual will explain—

  Pure bluff, Mulenberg, as they’ll know.

  Somehow that cheers him. As a contact with the self which isn’t up here yet.

  That scares him.

  —What we do not see are the passengers other than our own six, each cabin and service area being separate because of atmosphere maintenance. The Free Room has artificial sea-level atmosphere. We go in and out like at a bridge game. In fact, all our alternating arrangements are a damn beautiful cooperative game. Or ballet. Maidie, you’ll know about that—

  In which in the absence of any ballet master, the strangeness of what we do sometimes washes over us. Yet once, when by chance he was the one to dip out of a bay in order to allow Veronica entry—she lifting herself on the handrails with a face clearly ready for glory—he’d caught a sense of what they were here for.

  He’ll have to mention Veronica soon.

  —Otherwise, except for no stewardesses—skyroom too precious—we’re like guests at a dull resort managed by the aeroequivalent of the Cornell School of Hotel Administration. Haven’t seen the other guests yet and haven’t seen the sights. Though they promise us both.

  That is—though we can’t see each other all at once, or in sections, like in a jumbo jet, one hundred strong sipping from paper cups—an open-circuit viewing of all of us by all of us is on the prospectus. For the third week—no specified day. Most of our calendar is set. I understand there’s already an events-calendar for two of your years ahead, on habitat—

  The flow of ordnance requires it. But that three-week turnaround visit to and from earth of the Courier, in time will it come to seem like the visit of the cruise ship to the remote port—everybody down to the dock? Morale activities are to be planned—even Earth sells its opera tickets well ahead. But behind these happy exertions, all the equilibrations of an artificial sphere will have to be kept going. In his New York office, one entire wall-mapped room monitors company operations which span the globe. But no care had to be taken to keep the globe itself going. On the living-station, every inhabitant will spend some portion of time at that. Appointed time. As here.

  Where then do the rumors come from?

  —As for the sights, dear girls, we’re promised EVA. Not any rival of yours. Extra-Vehicular Activity. Planned EVA, they call it, or Unplanned EVA. Until I see it I can’t say for sure, but I think of it as crewmen dancing on the surface of the ship—

  Maybe to pat and inspect that ceramic skin whose spotty resistance to the terrible heat of reentry is always being “confirmed.” An uneasy word, industrially. Did that heat obtain not only at the moment of rendezvous between Courier and Earth as it reenters atmosphere from orbit, but also between Courier and habitat—as the Courier “docks”? He’s never given it any thought. His notes don’t say. But the diagrammed Orbiter, slate-blue on cloud and annotated like a psalm, made the blood surge.

  Though if he’s still talking more or less to Maidie, he won’t point out the sexual naming that NASA goes in for, which he secretly finds jaunty. Planes are asexual, so far as a passenger is aware. But though an Orbiter, with maybe a nod to the plants, carries its propellants in “pods” and has all the old “wing” and “tail” analogies to the birds, it “mates” with its own booster rockets, has “umbilicals” on the fuselage and aspires at all times to the “rendezvous.”

  The bell rang, signaling the first third of the time here. Mulenberg turned around. Gilpin gives him a “hard at work, too?” smile.

  Mulenberg smiles back. No—I can’t separate Maidie. They’ve always complained we didn’t separate them enough. Their mother used to call them “Messa-Taidie.” Calling them in from play. He smells the leaf-smoke of long ago autumn dusks, sharper than any oxygenation within these NOLEX-felted portholes—and hears how he must sound to Gilpin. “I’m an obsessive. Not only on daughters. Most good businessmen are, you know. Dreamers. According to a psychological study done for our personnel department, the best of us don’t even dream in money. Worse than artists, my doctor says. With even less to go on.”

  “You businessmen brought us here.”

  Polite man, if overcompassionate. Mulenberg wonders if Gilpin knows how literally that might be the case. Early on, the “international space effort” for the original long-term gravity-free environment had been mostly an affair of European prime and co-contractors, though he’d worked with them all in a way—Fokker Netherlands on the optical windows and scientific airlock, Alitalia and Micro for module and thermal control, SABCA Belgium for the film vault, INTA Spain and TERMA Denmark and FOKKER Germany for the management system integration and testing. Mulenberg’s company had had paper in all of them. As well as actually collaborating with the United Kingdom on a large instrument pallet-structure which could be controlled from without in some configurations, and finally, on the tunnel-connect between crew-compartment and pressurized modules such as this very one—being the absolute main contractors with NASA itself. On the Courier, of course, all suppliers had had to be USA.

  He’s kept his long since diversified company out of application software, which he regards as pure flea-market and discount-store hell.

  “Nowadays I only know the charts, Gilpin. And the bankers. Not even the engineers. Amazing, isn’t it.”

  “Not to me.”

  “That’s right. Heard you speak once.”

  “Oh? Oh, I’m only in the middle, far as dreaming goes,” Gilpin says hastily. “Wobbly place.”

  “The lad doesn’t think so.”

  In the silver-brown luminescence of the cabin, composed of many muted reflections of metal gone angle-soft under outer shadows which come and go, producing that rotogravure effect which once gave depth to faces in early-century Sunday supplements, they’re all learning to translate facial expressions anew. Gilpin’s face has clouded. But so has the porthole. “Mole? The boy’s pure adventure. Don’t know whether he knows it.”

  Mulenberg stares down at his page of daughters. So are they all—adventure. Sure they know, and hit you with it. But Gilpin, who’s childless, romanticizes. Any confidences are wasted on him. “Guess I’m the only parent in Cabin Six.”

  “So far.”

  When Gilpin doesn’t respond further, he’s moved to personalize himself. Like when the staff used to hold back. “I say ‘lad’ maybe because the head nurseryman at my father’s place used to. Used to call me that.” And maybe because I haven’t got one. “‘A lad is a boy with a nice streak of cussedness,’ Dineen used to say.”

  “Mole’s got that.”

  “Spends a lot of time up front. Forward.”

  “That berth he’s been exchanging with Lievering now and then, yes. But they don’t allow him in the cockpit.”

  “The—? I should think not. Though he gets around like sixty, he lacks a certain—”

  “Training knowledge?” Gilpin seems now to want to swap glances with him.

  “Being pals with Lievering should sure give him the hang of it. But the young ones all take everything once-over easy.” Except Maidie. Who’s like him. It’s Maidie he could tell about following Veronica from that hal
f-craved distance. “Tried to get him to talk about architecture; we’ve built factories around the world. But nix. Sure doesn’t sound like what he is. Or act it. What the devil is a catabolist?”

  Gilpin’s laugh loosens up both of them. “It’s a fancy school of Japanese architectural theory. More mystical than structural. Seems to work. It’s not new. Started in the fifties.”

  These days it’s the young who are the antiquarians of the decades. Falling in love with their grandfather’s era, though not with its real properties. “He says he’s lost interest, in favor of another profession. He tell you?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “‘Reformer, student grade’?”

  “‘Private, first-class.’”

  When Gilpin throws up his hands the second book he’s been reading sprawls—a small, dowdily old one, exotic on a floor which might be metal or grapholite. “We oughtn’t to laugh,” Gilpin says.

  “None of our family has humor,” Mulenberg says shyly. “I wish the girls.”

  They both bury themselves in their “work.”

  Gilpin takes up his pencil:

  “I like Mulenberg, poor chap. What an extraordinary thing—one of Veronica’s one-night stands to come so far. A man of considerable personal resource who is always deprecating that; he knows too well what the world usually thinks of tycoons. ‘Here I’m a man suspended from my money,’ he told me our first hour here, ‘want to see how I do.’ Yet he was clearly that, before. A space-dreamer all his life? Since he suffers from a poor sense of direction he’s provided himself with a large NASA blueprint of the vehicle, which he’s learned by rote. He’s used to being coached by experts. Goddard sent him three to get him through the training, which he then crammed into half the time it took the rest of us, getting a deserved top score—a feat I heard nothing of from Mulenberg himself. Look at him, tending his data like a purist, hoping for the time—vainly I suspect—when he can dispense with it. It bothers him that I call the flight deck a cockpit. Up to now, his forays into self-knowledge have all been one-night stands also. Down beneath them is this other tenacious life of the emotions he’s been taught to be ashamed of—which he’ll peel to the bone to get to. Yes, I like him. He is my opposite.