How glossily they recover. Yet this joint voice—though doubling between them: “Yes, Dick” and “No—Harry”—is real:
“We’ve just been informed that prior to liftoff an undisclosed number of passengers and ground personnel were overcome by what may have been hydrochloric gas or other fumes leaking into the embarkation corridor while it was undergoing sterilization precautions. There were no casualties. Those more seriously affected are recovering in Walter Reed Hospital. Others are being held for medical check before being returned to their families. All passengers unable to embark have been replaced with stand-by personnel trained for such contingency. Since not all these had undergone complete pre-liftoff biologicals, they have been kept isolated. All these and other passengers aboard are reported in excellent health and spirits, including the mother of the first child likely to be born in space. The substitute personnel are expected to take on living-station duty without hitch and indeed may add to its talent pool, since among last-minute additions is a ballistic expert whose proposals, five years ago put into escrow because of budget, can now be tested under cheaper space-cost, and an astronomer”—a fumble here, Commander who?—“first to study X rays in extra-galactic space…” Whew.
“Finally, one sad note—the dog which apparently slipped through security patrol at liftoff and was consumed in the retro-blast from the launch pad—some of you may have seen that shot—has been identified as escaped from a nearby kennel, probably in search of his owner, a correspondent inside Mission Control at the time.
“We now are about to see the interior of the Courier—live from its own cameras. We remind you that during docking, the Courier will be under manual control and not visible. Docking will be seen from the living-station itself, and relayed. The screening you now see begins forward, or in the nose of the spacecraft, and ends aft, or in the tail. Here goes:
“The flight deck—and technically Cabin One:—”
Is just as it should be, as every boy and girl in the sunny classroom will see it. They may even see the empty seat, not filled even by a substitute.
“The second crew—Cabin Two—”
Though unlike the flight deck they’re in short sleeves, they look less casual. They are not in profile but full-face. If their mouths have gone too sour for whistling, this can’t be seen. Shoulders squared, they are now as hup hup as any town band being West Point on Decoration Day morning.
“Cabins Three and Four, quartering the replacement personnel, isolated for respiratory and other checks during the mission, have had the partitions between removed, to allow freedom of movement during special exercises for circulation, and other drill. You see them together.”
“Do we have them, Harry? Not yet, Dick. Stand by, folks—”
And now an exchange of some of that rubbery filler always kept to hand. The man in the middle is being consulted.
To Wert, who thinks he knows what’s coming—whose professional sense of intrigue has quickened through years of opéra-bouffe coups, attacks on embassies and all the more submerged violences back to a custard apple mistaken for a grenade—the facts when they finally emerge will protrude like extra bones from a skeleton truth already assembled. The true corpus of the story lies in what has been going on in all their imaginations, and will so survive—if it survives. He strains to see what he can of his cabin mates. The facts should be anti-climax to the united vision of these six. Though what’s coming will be the facts.
Until the last moment he looks everywhere but at the screen.
There they are, the substitutes. Later on, as we settle into habitat, will we be able to sort out precisely who was left behind? That paraplegic, whose limb loss was to be so valuable? The two mentals, reclaimed for sanity and sent forth to it with a ceremony Wert had attended in the ward at St. Elizabeth’s? And divers others, to a certain selection. Or even that fell choice of beauty and promise which so often adheres to a true accident? For one may not rule that out.
They are—the forty or so whose folders he guesses were Mulenberg’s empties—in the same fatigue suits from which Cabin Six will shortly be changing. As in the cabin here, they are unhelmeted. They recline similarly, and in every respect except its double size their cabin is identical. Perhaps their hairstyle is more conforming; which of them is male or female is moot. What they share is a quality. As they stand up in a body, this unity, which maybe the authorities didn’t anticipate as so photographically clear, rises with them. They are white, black or other, yet a certain lack of variation supersedes even that. Are they—say it flat out—civilians? What matters, doesn’t it, was that they were ready? And such fine specimens. Bridegrooms of the physical. For he now doubts that any are women. What a sight row by row it is though—the whittled modeling of handsome young men’s mouths!
They are in salute.
“Cabin Five will not be seen. It contains priority payload not storable in the bay.”
“Cabin Six—the last.”
All of whom are surely feeling what Wert does, the admiration one can’t begrudge any event however brutal or mean which has had the nerve to effect itself. And the corresponding tympani in the blood.
“Cabin Six, composed of a prestigious group who are well known to you—”
The camera traverses them one by one, the voices giving each inmate a character, like an offside kick. They have no time to bend their heads, if they think to, in shame. He hears that France is awarding Gilpin, the “controversial environmentalist,” a post-liminary—“not posthumous, Harry”—Legion of Honor. Gilpin’s eyes are lowered. The “beauteous Barbadian journalist” has averted her face. Soraya’s absence is noted, and tenderly explained. Wert does not look at himself, the “diplomat.” Lievering is passed over. Mulenberg smiles to the camera, but does not wave.
And Mole, after a fumble identified as “possibly a translator”—stares straight ahead.
It’s good of time to move on.
“And now, people, Island Five, relayed from the Courier’s own cameras, now sighting it, the world’s first public view:”
—There it is, tilted hexagonal, the side toward them shining, in no cloud. Unlike his old brown ball, it has no hoary striations, can never be allowed them. Yet he feels a pity for it. He is its fauna-to-be, and like any good fox, he knows what those forty men are. They are the unknown, without which no world is a world. He breathes deeper, as he always does, over a map—
Wert waits. The video is now blank again except for its stand-by dream, but the air in Cabin Six is fetid, as if forty more persons than should be are breathing near. Alien lungs, pumping from afar the way propaganda does in wartime, exhausting all the country lanes and city bedchambers of civilian air. He waits hoping for Gilpin’s usual oath, his Elizabethan “S’death, s’death, s’death,” swearing triply agnostic by the death of God. Oaths are like birthmarks; now and then you must show them. Or surely Lievering will evince a holocaust interest in the hydrochloric gas. A monomania can be like an earned oath.
Nothing? He is ashamed before Nosworthy.
“We are in the world’s blood,” the administrator said.
After some thirty minutes Wert begins to feel he has heard all the responses of his congregation. The grudging light is filled with their silences. Gilpin has admitted to having been forewarned. Mulenberg, ever double-voiced, after confiding to his business-heir daughter: Priority Payload, that’s military ordnance; there’s always some, is apologizing to his California one. Honey, I did know Strategic Command had dibs on shuttle-space for forty trips this year; I just didn’t know this was one of them. Lievering is laughing to himself: An unidentified force resisting us—did they think they were going to be able to give it a name? Veronica will have no trouble believing all forces in outer space have national names on them. Wert has solved the riddle of her laugh. She has the cynicism of all those who believe themselves to be corrupt. And Soraya, plashing ruefully in her bath with her eye on his son’s habitat, is already counseling the boy that we are all in public
prisons, of which the Courier is only the latest version, but that she will use her influence. She considers it to be all in the hands of the authorities. Among whom, with loving worldliness, she has always included Wert.
“Well, folks—I’m off. Bye-bye all. And thanks.”
He’s forgotten Mole. That stowaway from youth-time, whom one ought never forget, what’s he been saying?—Sure, we’re the bummers: Us—? That young man who’s having such trouble joining his country, such trouble leaving it; Wert understands him well. But there’s no room for him.
“Mole—” Gilpin says “Godspeed. Be careful.”
“Careful?” Is the boy thinking it’s always unsettling when an agnostic invokes God? He’s answering so gently. “Yes, Tom.”
The hatch opens, admitting the medic. He has Soraya half in his arms.
Wert, rushing toward them, recalling too late one can’t rush here even in partial G-force, slams against the wall. “Soraya, are you all right?”
“Is she ever. Came into the sick bay, to watch the movie with me.” Tuohy’s burns have faded. Another kind of flush is on him. “My wife first felt Mary Agnes in a movie. And Denis slipped her his first poke on the way to one. All fetuses are movie buffs.” He gives her a pat. “Go put your feet up. Later on you can give ’em all a feel.” His face sobers. “Later on.”
“Let me feel.” Mole is debonair again. “For luck.”
“You again, kid? What you up to now?”
“Just a—rendezvous.”
“Zat so. Well, here’s your pill for it.” The medic’s yellow pouch is well known to them. “Here’s everybody’s.” He hands them out.
“Don’t take them!” Gilpin says sharply.
“If it isn’t Mr. Gee. Say, how’s your knee? Listen, I just handed out damn near my whole round.” He flicks the pouch’s dispenser with a smoker’s thumbnail. “Sixty-four of them. What you think I am, a mass-murderer?” He pops a pill into his mouth. “Plus one makes sixty-five. Capacity.” The pouch is empty. “Where’s your WASTAT bin.” He tosses the pouch in.
“Nothing personal. Just think we ought to go in—natural.”
“Go in—?” Tuohy says. “How about that.” His face is abstracted. “Everything we do here is natural. I know what’s eating you, Mr. Gee. You seen those guys.” He feels in a pocket. “Hey, Mole. ’Fore you go, wanna shoot a little crap? There’s time for it.”
“No.” His eyes glow. “Let’s butt.”
They’re on the floor, crouching, thighs spread. The medic, digging into a pocket, ties one of his extra-large Wipes around his head and tosses one to Mole. Both clasp their hands behind their backs. They begin to hop in clumsy footwork.
Wert watches, his hand on Soraya’s belly. So far, he hasn’t felt movement there. Suddenly the medic’s head darts forward. Forehead hits forehead. Mole’s knocked back but recovers. His leg length gives him an edge but Tuohy’s bullet head could be dangerous. The strain on the loins must be terrific. Wert’s own loins clench—and the hand. He uncurls the hand, abashed. Soraya, on her Foget, eyes shut, whispers smiling, “I wish she could know it—that funnybone push.” Brown-eyed and blue, his two wives’ union, chaste and solemn as it is, means as much to them as any they’ve had with him—yet they never mistake the difference.
The two down on the floor are now panting rawly, circling. There’s just enough room for it. “Oh-oh—” Soraya murmurs, “if it would only come again, Wert. It is like having a friend inside me.” A new friend, Wert says. His hand on her is electric, waiting. All’s quiet there. Maybe his son doesn’t like fights.
Yet born of a double marriage, according to his mother he will have a reinforcement, to her entirely literal; he will be “a double boy.” Maybe so, but Wert, listening again to his other wife leave him—for Switzerland, for revolution, for Manoucher?—hears how, with the delicacy of the childless, she has left him to this Soraya. And to the likelihood that from now on he will be monogamous. His hand on the belly, he hears her: If you want to know the future, Wert, pick a life.
Crack! Mole, with a grunting surge of his loins, claps his legs together, catapulting forward. The medic goes over backward. His legs hang in the air. Mole’s head-aim was true.
They both stand up, shakily. “Don’t tell my wife,” Tuohy says, with a leer he can’t hold onto. He pulls up Mole’s right arm. Mole hugs him with his left, on the shoulder of each a head.
“Take it easy.” The medic, removing Mole’s bandanna, pushes him toward the hatch. Darting out of his clutch, Mole leans over Soraya with a sheepish grin at Wert, touching first her cheek, then her belly, and goes.
The medic, taking off his own bandanna, folds both with finicky neatness and stows them away. “You all know he’s had a message? Yeah. He’s on the carpet. They want him up front.” On his way out he pats Gilpin’s knee. “Hang onto that bandage. I’ll rewrap it for you on the Island.”
“I will.”
“And those guys in Three and Four—don’t worry yourself. Maybe they have a fix on Oberth, too, not on the other rocket-man. You never know.”
When he’s gone, Lievering says, “Oberth? Do I know that name?”
“He believed in lie detectors,” Gilpin said.
Mulenberg is contemplating the pill ration in his palm. “Nine for the flight deck, ditto for the second crew, six for us. Plus one makes twenty-five. From sixty-five, leaves forty. Yop. There’s your evidential, Tom.”
“For what?”
“You were never meant to have it. Your constituency of one hundred—civilians. Or any, turns out.”
“Oh, I dunno, Jack.”
“Eh?”
“I’ll settle for six.” Gilpin clears his throat. “Plus one.”
Veronica is staring at some inked markings on her sleeve.
“What are those, Ronchen?”
“Mole was explaining to me. About burnup. How he and his friend Fred maybe got that wrong. Friction heat on orbit reentry? That’s for Earth. Island Five has no surrounding atmosphere. But—we miss the docking, we could still—?” On her sleeve, a small, overlapping circle, drawn in the water-soluble pale-blue tracery of all their pencils, goes round and round. “Overshoot?”
Nobody answers, though they are all standing now, ringed around that sleeve. Nobody knows enough.
Mulenberg has moved in close to her. He hasn’t done that since the Courier lofted. “Balls. We’d have backup. If the computers fail.”
“How? What? Do they build it?”
He is uneasy. “I don’t know of any—existing contracts.”
Bent, their heads almost touch. To Wert, watching them straighten, they appear to climb the ladder of one another, eye to eye. “Fool that I am—” Mulenberg breathes. “Another shuttle, of course. They’d send that.” He lifts a huge fist to touch her earlobe, incredulous. It is a remarkably beautiful ear; Wert, too, has noticed them. “Or else—” His hands shakily bracelet her neck, move on to flatten the breasts under the fatigue suit. “Or they’d pull us in. By Island computers. They’d have to. With the payload we’ve got.”
Lievering is watching, too. “Or we could…detonate.”
Is Mulenberg going to tear her suit? She breaks from him.
Wert, roused from his family cocoon, says: “What you’ve been doing on EVA, Lievering. Tell them.”
“We are shifting payload. Trying to.”
Gilpin, all this time nursing his knee, looks up.
“Oliphant—”
“Yes, Mulenberg?”
His head hangs, defeated, the voice small. “What’s that kid pervert up to? He is one, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know that yet.” When she stretches, she’s the taller. “I don’t yet know him well enough.” She steps past him, which in these quarters takes deliberation. “Soraya? May I feel?”
His wife, long since listening with vibrating eyelids, opens them. “He is quiet now. But try.”
Wert lifts his hand away.
Veronica puts hers in its place. There is reall
y as yet no arc there. “No, nothing. But he’s had a shock. Soraya—you saw them? The new passengers?”
“He did. He does the seeing for me now. In the dark.” She giggles, displacing Veronica’s hand from that hardening belly. “All mens, they were.”
“All men, nuh. Not a woman in the lot.”
“Funny you should mind.”
Veronica is trembling. “I do mind.”
Ah, the harem can insult, Wert reminds himself. She didn’t know.
His wife sits up. His only wife. If she has a bosom friend now, it’s no longer Veronica, and he has a hunch it isn’t going to be him.
Soraya yawns. “Have a son.”
In the drill before docking, a cabin is lit up the way the great liners used to be when crossing the equator. In the same way the passengers in Cabin Six are dressing up for it. A life-support suit is like a small spacecraft—or sailboat. It has to be threaded and rethreaded. The overhead lights, bracing as any ballroom’s, show every shoelace. As each passenger helps another, sentimentalists might think they clumsily embrace. The ceiling camera, when and if got to, will show otherwise. They have been through their group delusions, like any passenger list. It was merely that in preparation for docking the G-force was lowering, causing changes of balance. The mood in Cabin Six, and the attention paid to detail, was as stable as you might ask for, of any on that craft.
5
DOCKING
LIEVERING ON EVA
LIEVERING’S ALONE ON EVA. Consider how. Not literally alone, he has a power beyond most people’s to step outside the vehicle of himself. In those rare seizures, with the eyes of his mind rolled upward, he has savored super-cool moments at that vehicle’s edge. Moving along out here, goggled and visored in the center of a filmy octopus of other lenses, at times he has to quell an impulse to shed all this gear and float out in his nakedness for one moment’s purity against all the hedgings which keep a person alive from the minute born. He sees his body snapped up by the cosmos, can feel the crumpling. But he has his second-rate sanity; he never will.
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