Orbit 18

by Damon Knight

  The watchbird is a simple paper poster in pulp tricolor, frayed at the edges from being taken down and put up so many times. The real watchbird is in the ceiling, but it could be anywhere, under the bed or in your dolly or peering up at you from a tiny camera in your dexie pill or in the Bowers in the garden or down in the potty.

  Her brow furrows as she thinks of how to be good. She hasn’t learned yet to act without thinking, without worrying about it. She hasn’t yet internalized her controls sufficiently. What comes as easy as spitting for the other children is a painful process of chewing on a dry tongue for Theresa.

  Dam it. She wants to be good so she’ll get plenty of M&Ms.

  She lies on her bunk and looks up at the ceiling, wipes at pink-rimmed eyes small and piggy from crying all day.

  “Relax, Theresa,” Murray has told her earlier that evening. Poor Murray. He has a kinship for Theresa that feels all wrong, somehow. Not natural. It weighs down the buoyant dimples in his cheeks. “Relax,” he repeats, stroking poor Theresa to show her he loves her, just like it says in the comics.

  (Hugging: Put your arms around the client while standing or sitting beside him or her. Pull client close, rumple client’s hair or loosely tweak client’s nose between thumb and forefinger. Smile. Tell client that you love him or her.)

  “Good behavior will come to you naturally when you wait,” he says. “You don’t have to try for it. You don’t have to fight it. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but it’s because I love you. Lobey will be coming to see you this week, and he loves you, but I wish you could start showing good behavior without his help. You’re seven years old tonight, Theresa. I love you.”

  For an instant he holds her fiercely, scaring her some, but not much because it feels so good. Don’t cry, don’t cry, he’ll stop if you cry.

  So she lies in her bed with the lights off and looks up at the faint red light in the ceiling. She lets her mind go blank. What’s all the fuss about, Theresa? Why can’t you relax and be a good citizen like the others? Don’t think about it, darling. Don’t use your head at all if you can get away with it, they don’t want the front part of your head, anyway, sweetheart, they want you to listen to the back of your head where they planted all the bombs which are waiting to go off if you’d only stop struggling. Lobey is not happy with the front part of your head, he’s thinking of dipping into it and seeing if he can’t set things right with his sharp stainless needles and scalpels. See Lobey? He’s almost frowning. Poor, poor Lobey for you to have made him so unhappy.

  So don't think about it, don’t think at all. Don't think about pink clouds in the sky at sunset and singing dreams that keep you awake long after the others are snoring. Let your mind be a pretty blank slate for others to write on. Think of cows, Theresa. Cows are the happiest animals in the world. Just look at them. Think about candy. Think about B.T. the skinner with his pigeons and comics and sweets. Think about M&Ms.

  The fuse bums down to the tight bundle of newsprint and silver powder in the hot, firecrackerjack core of all those M&Ms, the fission heart beating in Theresa explodes and sets off the deuterium layer in the hard candy coating and zowie!

  Nothing has happened. Nothing has changed. She feels the same, but she is smiling. She wipes away the last tear and sits up, smiling, smiling wider than a three-day-dead corpse.

  And the door bursts open and who do you think it is but B.T. the skinner, all decked out in his finest party suit and his hands are full of presents and candy and the M&Ms are actually spilling out of his pockets. And . . . what? For me? Yes, for you, darling, it’s your birthday and we’re having a party because we love you, me and Murray and Lobey and everybody here at Behavior Tech. You’re a good girl, smiling so bright and pretty that we just had to make your seventh birthday a very special party day with all the candy you can eat.

  “Oh, I’ll be good, I’ll be good, I’ll be so very, very good that you’ll forget you ever called me Terrible Theresa and you’ll feed me M&Ms every day. How I love you, B.T. How I do love you. And how I do love M&Ms.”

  Have a nice day.

  THE EVE OF THE LAST APOLLO

  One small step for a man—one giant stumble for mankind.

  Carter Scholz

  * * *

  MILESTONES

  Died. Colonel John Christie Edwards, 64, U.S. Air Force (retired); of a heart attack; in Teaneck, N.J. In 1970, under the auspices of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Edwards became the first man to walk on the moon. He is survived by a wife and son.

  —No. I don’t like that dream.

  The dream-magazine faded and he was back in 1975, tentatively at least, until sleep plucked him again to a land beyond life where his existence could be reduced to those two magazine appearances: his achievement and his death.

  His sweat stained the sheets.

  He slept alone, his wife in her own bedroom.

  Restless, the curtains ballooned inward on a light breeze. He caught at them, and sat up, and saw the moon standing alone in the sky, so far and meaningless. It was gibbous, bloated past half but less than full. He hated it like that, the lopsided incompletion of it. Half or full or crescent he could almost look at some nights, but gibbous, no, there was nothing redeeming in a gibbous moon. He stared at it, its geography forgotten. Craters were ciphers. He could not pick out within five hundred miles the place on its surface where he had walked, just five years ago. At times now it seemed so improbable that he felt sure the rocket had been turned around midway and had landed on an Arizona mesa or a Siberian desert, or in a Houston simulator.

  Below the moon State Street glowed in unconcern. No cars passed this late; the moon might have been another of the cold glaring street lamps. From his present vantage point in Teaneck, New Jersey, it seemed impossible that he had ever been there.

  o

  The Lunar Exposi:

  Time, August 2, 1987. The article explained that the Moon landing had been a hoax, since the Moon itself was a hoax. It explained how simple it had been for unknown forces to simulate the Moon for unscrupulous purposes; a conspiracy of poets and scientists was intimated. Mass hypnosis was mentioned. Further on was a capsule summary of his mission with a drawing of the flight path, the complicated loops and curves, the projected hyperbolas and multiple spirals that had taken them there and back, straight-line flight being impossible in space, and further still was an inset map of the splashdown area. He remembered it and was suddenly in the capsule with a lurch as it splashed, sank, and bobbed to the surface. He wanted to fling the hatch open and yell in triumph, be dazzled by the spray and brilliant blue Pacific sky—but of course he couldn’t do that, there was no telling what germs they had brought back, what germs had survived the billion-year killing lunar cold and void there was no telling, and the helicopters droned down and netted them and swung them to the carrier and into quarantine and for three weeks they had seen people only through glass; and that must have been the beginning of the isolation he felt now, just as his first time in space had been the beginning of the emptiness. After that he drove to the Cape on business, and then to his new home in New Jersey. When he had reached the Cape after all those weeks and miles and loops and backtracks, the trip was finally over, and he yielded to an impulse; he walked out to the launching pad and bent to put his hand on the scorched ground—but he had an attack of vertigo and a terrible intimation: the Earth itself had moved. If he went to the Cape exactly a year after the liftoff, the Earth would be in position again, the circle would be closed—but then there was the motion of the solar system through the galaxy to consider, and the sweep of the galaxy through the universe, and the universe’s own pulsations—and he saw there was no way for him ever to find the place he started from. Driving back to Teaneck with the road behind him spiraling off through space as the Earth moved and the Sun moved and the galaxy moved, he got violently ill with a complex vertigo and had to pull off the road. Only when it grew dark was he able to drive again, slowly.

  The dream,
the memory, dissolved.

  By the time he woke next morning his wife had already left to spend the weekend with friends at a commune upstate. He made breakfast for himself and his son and went outside in the Saturday-morning heat to garden. He was almost forty.

  o

  Days he worked in an over-airconditioned building adjacent to the Teaneck Armory. On one wall of his office was a maroon and red square of geometrically patterned fabric framed like a painting. On another was an autographed photo of the President and another photo of himself on the Moon, the landing module and his crewmate Jim Cooper reflected in his face mask. Because the photograph had come off a stack of NASA publicity photos, his autograph was on it. He felt silly about that and had always meant to replace it, but where he worked now there were no NASA photos.

  His work was paperwork related to the National Guard. After he had walked on the Moon and declined to command an Air Force base in Nevada, they seemed to have run out of things quite as definite for him to do. He had a plastic wood-grained desk that was generally clean and empty. On the floor was a cheap red carpet, the nap of which he was always carrying home on his shoes.

  After the mission his spare time had been filled with interviews and tours and banquets and inconveniences, but with time and other missions, his fame dwindled. At first he welcomed this escape from the public eye; then the pressure of emptiness began to weigh on him, like a column of air on his shoulders. The time he could now spend with his wife and son passed uneasily. He learned to play golf and tennis and spent more time at them than he enjoyed. He started a diary and grew depressed with the banality of his life.

  So he took a week off in the early summer of 1975 to sort the drifting fragments of his life; his wife’s departure, the imminent end of his fourth four-year term of service in the Air Force, the dead undying image of the Moon that haunted his dreams, the book he had long planned to write, the mystery of his son, his dwindling fame, the possibility of a life ahead without a wife or son or career or public image… without every base he had come to rely on. He felt he had to consider what he was, what he had been, and what he might become.

  When it grew too hot to work in the late morning, and after Kevin had left, Edwards went back into the silent empty house to rest.

  o

  The friends he made in NASA had drifted away. The small, manageable sense of community he got from the program lost strength with NASA itself. The lunar astronauts, the dozen or so people he considered friends drifted slowly away from the magnet of Houston, until the terrible clean emptiness of the city compelled Edwards to move too. The city had grown up around the space program, and like most children was just reaching its prime as its father declined. It depressed him terribly. Texas no longer felt like home.

  In 1971 Harrison Baker, the command module pilot on Edwards’ mission, moved to New Jersey with his family to become a vice-president in a large oil company, and the Edwardses followed shortly. It was a somewhat irrational impulse that prompted the move—the prospect of friends nearby, and of New York, where each had once wanted to live, and Kevin’s enthusiasm for leaving Texas—all these poor random factors pulled them to the sterile suburb of Teaneck as surely as the most inexorable of destinies. As it turned out, they lived over forty miles from the Bakers, the city lost its appeal after three months, and Kevin talked of going back to Texas for college.

  Baker had written a bad book on what it was like to orbit the Moon while his fellow astronauts got all the glory. The book was called Group Effort. It was a humble book by a man who was basically conceited, written with the aid of a hungry young journalist. Edwards had the impression, reading it, that Baker was somehow unconvinced of the Moon’s reality, or at least of its importance, since he himself had not walked there. Edwards disliked the book, or more precisely he disliked the feelings the book aroused in him: he felt he could have done it better if only he had taken the time.

  Nonetheless he called Baker one day while he was alone in the house and desperate for company; he called him as he might summon the ghost of old confidence from his past.

  “Chris! How are you, you old son of a bitch?” Baker’s voice was hard and distant on the wire. Edwards had quite forgotten that at NASA that had been his nickname.

  “Hello, Hank. How are you?”

  “Great, just great! Listen, I’ve been meaning to call you, to invite you and Shari up for a weekend.”

  “Fine. I’ll keep it in mind, Hank. Actually Charlotte and I haven’t been getting on too well recently.”

  “Oh? I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s just one of those things. We’re thinking of separating.”

  “That’s a shame, Chris. That’s a damn shame. Francie and I always said you were such a good couple.”

  “Well, we’ve both been doing some changing. I don’t know, I think it’s for the best. Hell, I didn’t call to cry on your shoulder, Hank. I wanted to ask you something. I’ve been thinking of writing that book that Doubleday asked me to, remember—?”

  “Oh, yeah. That sounds like a fine idea. They’re still interested, huh?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I should call them, I guess. I assumed they would be.”

  “Hm. That’s rough, Chris. I don’t know. The royalties on my book aren’t all they could be. The hardcover’s out of print and the paperback sales are so slow they’re not going to reprint it. Which is too bad, I think. Not that I need the money—we’re getting along fine on my pension, and this job, hell, it’s a real tit job, you know? But the way I feel is, the book’s a kind of historical document and it ought to stay in print, you know, to keep it available for people who want it. But those publishers—they say that people aren’t interested in the Moon anymore. People just don’t care.”

  “Well, look at the whole NASA program.”

  “Yes. Well. I don’t keep up on it too closely, but I know they’re in trouble.”

  Oh, you bastard, Edwards thought. In trouble—’ “The manned program has been discontinued, Hank, that’s the trouble they’re in. No more money, no more flights.”

  “That so?”

  “Yes, that’s so.” There was silence. Static moved on the line, reminding him of the last time Baker’s voice had reached him this way, distant, distorted, on the radio, the Moon. “Hank, I can’t help thinking we did it wrong.”

  “Wrong? What do you mean?”

  “The landing. We planted the American flag, we left a plaque … It seems we’re always leaving things, flags or garbage, empty film cans and burned-out rockets . . . The planting of the flag is what really bothered me.”

  “Why? What should we have planted? Petunias?” Baker laughed, a short cold sound in the receiver.

  “I don’t know. Once I thought the United Nations flag might have been a nice gesture.”

  “Oh, shit. Come on, Chris, what’s the UN done for you lately? They sit on their asses and argue and maybe pass a couple of resolutions that say wars are bad. Big fucking deal. We put that rocket on the moon, the United States of America, so why shouldn’t we get the credit for it? Good God, Chris, I thought you of all people would see that, the hero of the fucking mission. What’s the matter with you, son?”

  “Nothing. I tell you, I’m just questioning it. Wondering if maybe I did something wrong without thinking about it. I certainly didn’t think about it very much.” The image of such a mistake chilled him, bright and arresting and irrevocable in a barren landscape a quarter million miles away. The flag would not stay unfurled in vacuum so they had braced it with wire.

  “Yeah, well, take my word for it, Chris old boy, we did right. I mean, this is off the record, this isn’t a fucking NASA press release, but it’s gonna be a long time before we’re able to walk hand in hand with the Russkies through the tulip patch, I don’t care what they said about coining in peace for all mankind.”

  “What do you think about the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission coming up?”

  “Shit, it’s all political haymaking. That mealy-mo
uthed bastard in Washington thinks he can score brownie points in the next election by cozying up to ’em. He’ll do anything for votes. I mean, answer me this: NASA was ready to get cut off without a cent, right?”

  “They still are.”

  “Yeah, but I’ll bet my butt-behind they wouldn’t have got the money for this one if it wasn’t that somebody in Washington stood to make points off it, am I right?

  “Probably, Hank. You’re quite probably right.”

  “You know I am. Well. Listen, Chris, I’d love to talk all day, but if some big cheese walks in here and finds me jawing, I’m liable to be out on that same butt-behind I was betting you. Seriously, they’ve been drifting rumors down to me that I’m not as valuable as I used to be, back when NASA’S name was good.”

  “I don’t wonder.”

  “What?”

  “I say I wonder why.”

  “Well, so do I. But seriously now, I’m gonna have to get off. That invitation still goes for you and your kid, and for Charlotte if you two get back together. Any time at all, you know that.”

  “Sure, Hank, I know.”

  “And I’m sorry as hell to hear what happened. I hope it all works out.”

  “I’m sure it will. I’ll let you go now, Hank. Good talking to you.”

  “You too. We’ll see you around, huh?”

  "You bet.” He hung up. He felt very tired. The living room trembled just outside his field of vision. He sat for a few minutes, and abruptly decided to spend the day in New York, in noise and smog and slow-moving traffic.

  o

  Through the magazine where she worked as a secretary, his wife had met an author who ran a commune in upstate New York. The author had submitted an article on communal life-styles to the magazine at a time when such things were attracting the interest of the dissatisfied sophisticates who comprised the magazine’s audience. The article circulated in the office for two days; one evening Charlotte brought home a Xerox copy, which Edwards read with disdain. Some months later the author submitted another article in person and talked to Charlotte all afternoon. She came home excited, with an invitation to the commune for both of them, which, after a week of bitter arguments, she accepted alone. She slept with the author of course; of that he was sure; that had been implicit in his invitation and her decision to go alone. And when she came home Edwards said, stupidly, regret stinging him even as he spoke, “Was he any good?”