“I could fancy a slosh baffle,” Gilpin says. “Is it to drink tea with? Only got as far as the azimuth on a mariner’s compass, myself. Come on, Jack. We can’t beat it, we can’t join it, either. Not all the way. Not that way.”
“Come on yourself. You were the smartest man your year, M.I.T. I never got beyond the Colorado School of Mines.”
“You got to the mines.”
“Ah, that’s the rub, is it. The money.”
“You know it isn’t,” Gilpin said. How quick his own hostility swells, after all the monkish years. Like love, that other tumor?
“Anyway—I’m staying, understand? At the station.” This is the way Mulenberg’s face must be when it’s on the heights of negotiation—irradiated and chill. Or when at the edge of sex? “I just found out, writing to the girls. Thing to do is—leave them the business.”
Gilpin widens his eyes. He has to force them. They feel sleepier than when closed. Mulenberg, sitting back, cracks the folder. They both sit up, straighter. At the window the stars rain.
“Stuffy in here.” Mulenberg passes a palm over his face as if to wipe the violence from it.
“The absence of weather.” With an effort Gilpin adds, “Should it worry us?” Funny—to consult one’s opposite—or sensible? Impossible to think of Mulenberg as enemy. Though there ought to be one in every decent man’s life. “People are colored by weather.” Or were. “There’ll be flowers up there, anyway. Hydroponic. And vegetables.”
“No fauna.”
“We’ll—see ghosts of them.”
“When I’m anxious,” Mulenberg says, “I dream of deer. Don’t know why. Except that we had them.”
“I never dream of fish. When I dream. Haven’t dreamed yet here. You?”
“No.”
There’s a pause. Real pauses are hard come by here. Fruitful ones. The journey is all one long pause, under which the itch of destination nags.
“I’m not a man of imagination,” Mulenberg says.
That’s what people say who think it shameful because they are, Gilpin thinks. Or who want to confess something. “What about those delusions you mentioned? In the galley, yesterday.” If they hadn’t been in that almost humdrum sector of bright ovens and lockers of trays attesting to a home-handling they were meant to visualize, Mulenberg, dipping a corpse of asparagus into a pink pouch of what appeared to be lava and swallowing it with a muttered prayer, might never have said: “Not gossip, you know.” It was then he’d spoken of the little group-paranoias which could sweep an office. And the rabbits. They’d have had a lot of fauna on the Mulenberg ranch.
“Mirages, I’ve been thinking, Gilpin. More like mirages, that people share.” Or could start to. Think of those streaked waterlines on American highways, which dried as one approached. Or out in the Saudi desert, what the driver has to tell you isn’t a palm fringe with water plain as a jewel at its core. There were those who had seen whole architectures hanging from myth-rock. And all natural phenomena.
“Like what?”
“Well—like that boy, Mole. Acts like he has inside info. But like he can’t help it. I could begin to think he was a spy. If I couldn’t see he was just a lad.”
Gilpin half-rises from the easy chair. His damn legs seemed to have ankylosed into one. “For who?”
“Say. Our space effort been that internationally cooperative lately?”
“Hasn’t it?”
Mulenberg punches the side of his head—and misses. “Not since the first shuttle. Even my girls know that.”
“The volume of what people don’t know extends even to me.” Gilpin coughs. “Where are those lozenges?” His hand is guided to them. “Thanks. But the boy knows more than he says, yes. More than he—is. I can’t elaborate. But I vouch for him.” He sucks gratefully. “God, my throat’s dry. And my legs—”
“The air is—”
They both check the video, but it’s blank. Perhaps it’s only that now they’re talking, air moves again in the old comfortable earthbound way.
“Particulars don’t count with me enough, Gilpin. That’s why I’m always checking them. I’m going to Telex the girls. And the office. Make it all shipshape.”
“Telex?”
“Well, whatever. They’ll have something.”
“What confidence.” But so they will, of course. And whatever it’s called, Mulenberg will have access to it. “You ever—imagine—this crew has contempt for us?” Must have. At times Gilpin has felt it, seeping into Cabin Six from that flight deck. Or even from the vehicle itself, laughing at what it was carrying.
“Sure, they have it. For passengers. You gotta—” His thumb goes up, for all their asses.
“For that you have to see them. Why don’t they show?”
“Beyond the call of duty. Keeping us safe is enough—and they are. Never saw a first-class in the tail before, where it belongs.”
First? Well, why not? Hadn’t he himself warned of it? “Shhh—” Gilpin says. “Hear anything?”
“You talking,” Mulenberg spurts childishly. He sits up. Where’s that sixth-grade giggle come from, him or his vis-à-vis? “Are we getting too much oxygen?” Turning, he blusters among his papers. “What’s the mix here? I know they gave it to me. It’s here somewhere.”
He needs a subordinate, Gilpin hears his own thoughts voice thinly. I’m no good to him.
Mulenberg’s found it. “Here. Environmental Control: Cabin temperature, pressure, humidity, carbon-dioxide level and odor…controlled by heat-exchanger and…associated equipment. Temp. between 61 and 90 Fahrenheit. Oxygen—here! Partial pressure of—” 22 065 ± 725 N/ m2 (3. 20 ± 25 psi) is maintained and nitrogen added to achieve total pressure of 101 355 Nm2 (14.7 psl). He couldn’t read this correctly—and what if he could? “‘Cabin controlled by air ducted through cabin heat exch. ges.—’ What’s ges.?”
“Gauges? Are none for passengers anyway.” Why would there be? “It’s a classic situation.” First-class. Because they can’t open the door outward, which is computer-released. “Thirty minutes to the door,” Gilpin said.
Or press an alarm? Warning plates, gamboge circled in black, are everywhere throughout.
Mulenberg sniffs upward, blond eyelashes batting like a cook tasting. “Little too much maybe. Oxygen. Not serious. Tough it out, eh?”
“Watch each other. In case we turn blue.” Would it be blue?
They are both smiling wide.
“Gravity remains.” Gilpin’s feet are on the floor but another giggle isn’t far. He swallows it. “You ever—fantasize—somebody might have it in for this whole ship?”
“I have had that delusion.” Mulenberg hiccoughs. “Seeing the list of successful suppliers. But then I always want all the machines to stop. Always have. Especially any vehicle I’m on.”
Funny stuff from a captain of industry. Where’d he get it?
“From a horse,” Mulenberg answers, as if Gilpin has spoken aloud—perhaps he has. “Used to bolt whenever I had her out. And then lead me home, when I couldn’t. That filly sent me East.”
Now they’re certainly laughing.
“And when it stops—in your head, I mean. When all the—prairie schooners, and the horses, and the—jets—all the trashportation—stops.” Gilpin’s hand leans out from him on its own. “Where d’you go? Where’re you then, I mean? In your head.”
Mulenberg has his eyes closed, breathing lightly. He opens them. One eyebrow goes up, but not at Gilpin. Mulenberg is in his head. “In the family room at the ranch. The home ranch.”
But with the person one mustn’t name. Or to the greenhouse, Mulenberg says to himself—to lie down there with the plants. But the person you mustn’t name—the forbidden one—is always behind everything. For everyone. Until found. Watch the clerks in our office. The girls who still marry and give shower-parties for one another. Or those who loll in the “permanent relationship,” now and then shifting it. Or even the jolly staff-golfers, who’ve done it out of the stud-book. All marrying
certain masks, certain significances. The person you follow is always with you, whether or not. The one you can’t name.
“Not for me, I guess. The family. I’m the one who stopped that rhythm, in ours.” How old-fashioned of Mulenberg, though, to say “machine” for what we’re in now, for this whole fusion of processes we’ve started and can’t see the end of. “You know, I don’t think we were the machine age,” Gilpin said. Or thought he said. “We were just the over-symbolized one. Had a little rag myself, called The Sheet. Maybe you know it.” Who really were the people he’d gathered there? The revolutionaries of what? Anti what? The people who inhabit revolution, Veronica said in awe when she first met them. A race he recognizes, yes, whenever he sees one of them—but which maybe dies in almost everyone by age forty. A race that only inhabits people for a while.
Soon he must mention Veronica. Again.
“Yes, I know The Sheet.”
“Well—we did that. Oversymbolized. Oh, I wouldn’t go back on it. See it better that’s all. From here.” Here? Looking down, Gilpin plants his foot on it, a shagless, fire-retarded something. “Maybe it’s never too safe to describe the machine, huh? Not the one you’re on.”
Mulenberg gets up, in sections. Leaning on the processor, he begins to ready his papers for tomorrow. “No? Then what am I going to tell the girls?”
Gilpin lies back, his eyes slitting and reopening. His chair seems easier now. More—receptive. Unless my buttocks are growing squarer. And the man does have humor. Or is growing it?
“That the bell? No.” Mulenberg feels the gaucherie of looking for a kind ear. Of finding one. “You believe in the glory of this trip. Or don’t you?”
“I was sure trained to. But then you have to believe in the delusions, too.”
“Looked at any of those background folders yet?”
The wall of them looks ready, each dossier alphabetized large in white on black, each on magnetic hold. On a sidewall are the instructions for releasing one. At home in Gilpin’s sold apartment, his beloved edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica waits respectfully for its new owner, even at its great age so green of cover that chlorophyll might still be seeping from all the freshets of expectation enclosed there in 1911. “No.” I believe in—something more.
“Lot of ’em are here because of you.”
Shocked, Gilpin half sits up. “I suppose that is—my small autonomy. Never thought of it that way.” So the ball falls on my side. If anything could fall, in this place I’ve immured myself. Is the man grinning?
“Maybe whoever brought you here will take it on. The responsibility.”
“I brought myself,” Gilpin shot out. “That I’ll take on.”
Immediately he hears all the great episcopals of time asserting how impossible that is, given our entanglement with one another. Plus the twang of the borrowed minister from the mainland who took the island chapel on once-a-month Sundays, his nose tweaked with drink.
Mulenberg gets up. His movements are often his answers. Standing in these close quarters, his bulk grows, suggesting how often he must have imposed it. He’s worried at how lax the usually sharp Gilpin is. The oxygen mix may affect men according to size. By his own watch, they should be out of here by now. The watch, which has a chip that adjusts to their journey in a series of infinitesimal responses, was presented him by three grave men in a salon in Geneva, along with a little speech in which it was referred to as a Nuremberg egg. When he asked what that was, the head of the firm replied, The first watch. As yours will be. Out there.
He doesn’t trust the time clock. “Who comes in here next?”
Gilpin is picking up his book, slowly. “Mulenberg—I can’t raise my arm.”
“Get down flat on the floor. Pronto.” But that’s for heat. Mulenberg had been a volunteer fireman once. His lips move soundlessly, missing his beard. Oxygen is supplied from the cryogenic tanks which also supply the fuel tanks. Nitrogen from pressure vessels mounted in mid-fuselage. For normal purposes, his notes say. Central-nervous system toxicity, from inhalation of hyperbaric oxygen, which at pressure over 5 ATA (atmospheres absolute) induces strychnine-like convulsions, however has its tempered uses in cases of carbon-monoxide poisoning and gas-gangrene tetanus.
“One up for St. Paul,” Gilpin murmurs, not moving.
Mulenberg has a blinding image of his two girls, united again, each flown from her coast to stand somewhere in the middle of his and their United States, maybe O’Hare Airport, looking up at him. Daddy will explain.
In the same minute he pulls Gilpin to the floor with him. Feeling along the wall of locked folders, he finds the warning plate above, and decides against warning them. Below, in a column of control boxes and stats, all talking to their computers, is one marked H. Ex. The inner gauge had three positions. He stretches to flick to the middle one: Norm., and slides to the floor again. What kind of floor is it has no smell, neither plastic nor dust? Breathe in, slowly. Fac me cruce, custodieri—his voice box sings silently. Morte Christi, prae-mu-ni—
“That isn’t us laughing,” Gilpin mumbles, his face close to Mulenberg’s. “Is it the ship marvelous?”
Listen to its laughter, brewing between multifold wirings from which only satire can twang. In this ark carrying to the new world enough electronic chips of info to alert a small galaxy or regulate that gross watch of Mulenberg’s, is a personality igniting—and are they hearing its first cry? In Italy once, he’d been present in a house where a baby was being born. He was in that sala now as the message-cry came from that odorous bedroom, twining the air with honeysuckle birth. A soul is ignited, the priest said.
The woman in Seat Six, Veronica told him yesterday, is making one.
High in the heavens its sala waits.
And this complex we’re in, trusting it to bear us on and on into the non-weather, along comprehensions known to no one telegrapher, is laughing. That is my alluzinacione, illusione.
“And that is my dee-lu-zhee-on,” Gilpin says aloud, sleepily. But the Free Room doesn’t smell of Tuscany. He opens his eyes. Mulenberg’s already are. Gilpin’s had no reclining face that near his for years, male or female. He sees the attraction of it, animal and kin. Pillow talk, while life-as-usual hangs by a thread. The collapsed closeness of those who’ve already extorted each others’ private images. All that part of sex which isn’t sexual per se but which people bring there, because—where else? Two men lying on the floor in forced eye-contact, breathing the oxygen which in a hospital would be called intensive care.
Mulenberg’s remembering Ventura, those deathwatch eyes. Long-vanished eyeballs which had seen Veronica. Ventura’s son has been given a trust fund to which Mulenberg adds annually, though he’s never seen the boy; the shipment of Saudi crude never became possible. On account of that night he’s here—and she is—and the man opposite.
“I’ll eat with you—” she’d said, in the corridor. Hope seeped into him, simply because she remembered that last detail of their night. Though the nether side of obsession is that black hole down which all belief falls. In the corridor they of course couldn’t eat, but while they perambulated—a word her mouth spat out in scorn—she fed him tidbit histories of herself and the other two men, in sketches so sharp they scratched on the air the outline of any person talked about. “Lievering?” she’d said, to his suggestion that the man might be aboard because of his connection with her. No, Lievering’s pure chance. That’s his way. We’d better be afraid of him.
He’d asked her about Gilpin point-blank. Not a brother to me, she’d said. No, I had a brother. I don’t hear from him. I once thought my problem was to lose him. But we lose no one. Especially those. She’d seemed to Mulenberg to want to throw away every reticence, and to have him see why. He saw. Because she’s so open with him, there’s no hope for him. He doesn’t loom with her as a lover must.
No, not my brother, she’d repeated. There were tonal changes to her repeats. He noted that like a husband. But Tom’s more than a friend, even a heavy friend,
she’d said. Put what I am with what he is—and together we might make a third sex. I’ve often thought of it. At the end of one of their turns on the parallelogram their path was tracing, she lifted a boxed foot. Out there—as sex gives me up—she shook the square boot—I’m fancying he’ll come to it. Mulenberg planted his boot next to hers.
“He looms with you, doesn’t he? I know why you’re telling me all this. Because I don’t.” Pshaw, you’re smart, she said. He’d stamped his own great boot, thinking of his first Indian-slender ones, in which he’d dreamed for hours before putting them in muck. “Not as I’d want to loom. But maybe—as an extra man?” He meant her to know any share would be acceptable. “Ah, I often thought of it,” she said. “How with you, I could almost repeat a man.” Her outline came clearer to him, a woman more often among her own thoughts. “What I did with women,” he said, “you have done with me.” “You’re smart,” she said, softer. “Know what, Mulenberg—” The office way she said his name smote him. “I’ve never met a man again—to talk with. That I slept with before.”
When it came time to enter the vehicle he’d managed to be behind her. “You’re in Cabin Six too?” she’d said. “Yes—I arranged it.” If she’d slapped him, he’d have still hoped. She smiled. “Down below, Mulenberg. Maybe as extra man. But not—out there. It’s not what I’m going for. What I’m going for—” The line in front of them was held up, as if waiting for her to declare. Her features were small for the strains and powers within. To one side of the hangar door where they waited there was a basket of roses. She touched one, shuddered back—and touched it again. “I’m going for the—the glass planet. Yes, that must be it. What I’m going for.” She stared straight through him, seeing it.
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