Orbit 18

by Damon Knight

  And she said, “He was great,” and what had been a bitterness became a war. Kevin was fourteen then, and when in a lull they heard him sobbing through the wall, they were stricken with what had happened to them all unknown.

  “My God,” said Charlotte, “what’s wrong with us?” And together they went to their son, that ineluctable symbol of their love, and the three of them held to each other and wept until very late.

  The next month was perhaps the best in their marriage; they were all kind and deferential to each other, as if unwilling to test the strength of the frayed fabric. But such violence does not come from or dissolve into nothing. The next time Charlotte left it was for a week, unannounced. Again there was a fight. Again there were tears. But after that, the reconciliations had less and less meaning, and Edwards felt the marriage become weak and brittle, emulsion cracking on an old photograph.

  o

  The photograph in the den held them both against a bright but faded Texas sky. Edwards stood stiff and crewcut in his uniform, Charlotte in her crisp white dress, four months pregnant but not yet showing it. They stood in front of the small brick chapel in the hot Texas afternoon, the smaller pasts they had each known then printed on their minds as their images were printed in the silver bromides. Edwards had entered the Air Force from college, blank enough to be a soldier, smart enough to be an officer. He had a uniform and a sheaf of diplomas and awards and citations and his name on a plastic wood-grained prism on his desk at Sheppard Air Force Base, and $213.75 plus expenses, which was more than he would have known what to do with if he hadn’t got married. So then he had a wife and his commission and in a few years a master’s degree and a mortgage, and then a son and a doctorate, and oak leaves and his name on a fistful of credit cards and ID plates and he had his existence recorded in so many cross-indexed files that there was no chance of his ever accidentally losing himself, so he thought.

  And then the space program started, and Lieutenant Colonel Edwards being a local boy of fine repute, a good soldier and engineer, and an asset to any organization, it said on his recommendations, he was accepted. He got his colonelcy and a sense of purpose that truly humbled him; he had never been religious but space made him feel as he imagined God might make other people feel. He was a successful man, and his life was a fine, balanced and counter-weighted thing.

  Then they put him in a rocket and shot him at the Moon.

  o

  Abenezra, Abulfeda, Agatharchides, Agrippa, Albategnius, Alexander, Aliacensus, Almanon, Alpetragius, Alphonsus, Apia-nus, Apollonius, Agago, Archimedes, Aristarchus, Aristillus, Aristoteles, Ascelpi, Atlas . . .

  The craters, the names, rolled past. A tiny motor ground to turn the four-foot sphere, front and back sides both sculpted in wondrous close detail thanks to his and other missions, thanks to the automatic cameras mounted on the outside of the capsule. Tiny American flags marked all the Apollo landing sites, silly bright dime-store gaudies against the gray.

  John Christie Edwards, first man on the Moon, stood in the planetarium at the end of a hall lined with names like Icarus, da Vinci, Montgolfier, Wright, Goddard … a mural of the history of flight, the individual dreamers down time’s long corridor. Each had had a vision of man transcending his world, his prison of gravity, and Edwards felt small in their presence. Of them all, only he could have been replaced by anyone else. His achievement had been a matter of training, not vision.

  But they had told him he was a hero; that he had done something no one had ever done before, that it was the grandest achievement of the human race. It was, he believed that, and for the parades and accolades he’d had, he was grateful. He had every reason to be proud, to be as content, no, more content than Baker. Why, then, did that terrible emptiness come to him at night? In the dark his fame was no consolation; his achievement no part of his life. For it would have happened anyway, without him. Of what classical hero was that true? He felt cut off from the history he had made, isolated from time.

  Flanking the lunar globe were photographs: himself, Baker, Cooper, Nixon, Von Braun. Some children recognized him from the photo and crowded around anxiously, seeking mementos, autographs. One asked where he had landed; again he suffered the doubts of last night and finally stabbed a finger vaguely at one of the larger maria. Gratefully he heard the loudspeaker announce the start of the sky show.

  The sky show was absorbing, much more so than the night sky usually was for him, even the clear country sky he could see for two weeks every year at his brother’s summer cottage on Lake Hopatcong; he was enchanted by the flitting arrows on the sky, the narrator’s calm clear explanations, the wonderful control of time the projector had over the universe. Stars rose, set, went forward, back. They could be spun at almost any rate or acceleration, moving in ever-faster circles.

  o

  In the past year Edwards had acquired the notion that he would like to write poetry. That was not unreasonable; in his present depression it seemed that only such an intensely personal act as writing could give him back to himself.

  So after the Planetarium, shortly after noon, he finally gave in, seduced by the stars, and drove downtown to buy some anthologies of verse. Byron, Yeats, Eliot, Pound… all the names vaguely remembered from college. While getting pleasantly cramped reading in the aisle, he found a comment by Frost to the effect that the most important element of poetry is its dramatic content. So after some consideration he also picked up Freytag’s Technique of the Drama. He had learned to pursue things in an orderly fashion. Then he tore himself away, before he bought more than he could carry. It was years since he had read anything but newspapers; he was drunk with the limitless neglected mysteries of books. In this fine giddy mood he felt himself approaching the edge of a change, the crest of an oscillation, the start of a new phase; he felt charged with the energy of the unpredictable.

  At home he dipped into his package, the sharp-cornered paperbacks and stiff-spined hardcovers smelling of glue and new paper. He read single pages, fragments, the shortest poems, skimming in an excited random fashion. From MacLeish’s Streets in the Moon he read, “No lamp has ever shown us where to look. Neither the promiscuous and every-touching moon, nor stars…”

  “The moon is dead, you lovers! … I have seen her face.

  .. . Her face was dead. It was a woman’s face but dead as stone. And leper white and withered to the bone. It was a woman’s skull the shriveling cold out there among the stars had withered dry. . . .”

  He saw Charlotte’s face deflagrate before him, burn without fire. Touched by the void, it turned into a death’s-head moon, attained, unattainable, glowing with the stark stripped brilliance of reflected sun, grim reminder of day through the night. Of all the astronauts, only Edwards had had the dimmest chance of understanding the Moon, only he had even a circumstantial reason for wanting to understand it. He needed to know why he had made history.

  o

  “Dad? You busy?”

  He started. “Oh, no. Come on in, son.” Immediately annoyed at himself; how had he ever started calling Kevin son?

  The boy drifted in. Tall, pale; his son, brought out of a hot union years past, and already faded, but for this phantom, this stranger in the house. His son.

  “Are you and Mom going to stay together until September?”

  “Sure. Until you’re at school.”

  “Oh.” The room was silent. Somewhere an air-conditioner hummed.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Things are getting worse between you, aren’t they?”

  “Don’t worry about it, Kevin.”

  “If you’re staying together just for my sake, I wish you wouldn’t. I mean, I don’t want you to. I think you should separate now if that’s the case.”

  Edwards looked at his son. A troubled sixteen, his emotions already burnt brittle into a fragile, ashen maturity. And Edwards himself moving back along a rocket wake into a second adolescence, a time of self-consciousness, self-discovery. When had he first touched this boy with h
is fire, in what way shaped him? “I’ll think about it. I’ll talk to your mother. Listen, Kevin—?”

  “Yeah, Dad.”

  “This business with your mother and me—it hasn’t affected you too badly, has it?” His memory stung him brutally with the image of a woman he had once brought to the house, out of spite for Charlotte and her author, and Kevin finding them … “I mean, just because things aren’t working out for us, I don’t want you to think . . .”

  “I don’t think about it anymore. It’s just one of those things that happen.”

  “Because it would be a terrible thing if this were to turn you against marriage, or against women . . .”

  “Don’t worry about it, Dad. I’ll think what I think. I’m not sad about you and Mom—I think it’s better this way. Really. I think it might even be better for you if you split up sooner.”

  “Well, thanks, Kev.” Then, because he was less afraid of being embarrassed than of being untouchable, he hugged his son. Kevin held still for this, and Edwards let go soon enough to make both of them grateful.

  “Okay if I stay out late tonight?” Kevin asked, leaving. “I have a date.”

  “How late?” Pleased, but their late sentiment demanded a strict return to formality. The balance was too delicate to threaten.

  “One o’clock?”

  “Make it twelve-thirty.”

  “Okay.”

  “Who’s the girl?”

  “Nobody you know.”

  “Oh. Well . . . have fun . . .”

  Kevin left. Later, Edwards opened the Freytag and read: Poetry must bring forth its characters as speaking, singing, gesticulating. This is the nature of the hero.

  It was not the first time the thought had occurred to him that if he was a national hero, the nation must be in very bad shape.

  o

  Drama possesses—if one may symbolize its arrangement by lines—a pyramidal structure. It rises from the introduction with the entrance of exciting forces to the climax and falls from here to the resolution.

  —Gustav Freytag, Technique of the Drama

  His obligations as a national monument took him the next day to a half-hour talk show with a state senator, a NASA administrator, and an ABC newsman. The topic was the discontinuation of the manned space program, made topical by the upcoming Apollo-Soyuz mission. As they set him up and gimballed the lights his way and adjusted his microphone, he felt very used. He felt bronzed and shat upon and tarnished a flaking green, like some Civil War general in the corner of some park, passed and never noticed.

  The show started with the senator asserting, no doubt to mollify Edwards, so strong was the hostility he radiated to the senator, that the space program was by no means ending but was merely being cut back in favor of more pressing domestic issues. The senator said that the magnitude of our problems at home far surpassed those of space. The senator said that space exploration could be done far more cheaply and efficiently and safely by machines than by men. Edwards asked if perhaps other areas of the national budget might be better cut—defense, for instance, which consumed one hundred times as much money as NASA. Edwards went so far as to suggest that what the Pentagon wasted yearly in staples and paper clips could support NASA. He compared the senator’s personal convictions to a bowl of tapioca. No one knew how to react; Edwards thought the NASA man might be smiling, off-camera.

  Then the commentator pleasantly directed the conversation elsewhere, toward the hopeful symbolism of the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission. The senator, recovered, called it a magnificent extension of the successful detente that his party had already, et cetera. Edwards started to ask why, if the detente was so successful, the defense budget was not being cut, but as he leaned forward to speak, the commentator forestalled him, speaking in a rapid gabble, his eye glazed with panic, and Edwards realized that his microphone was off. This so enraged him that he began to tremble. He leaned over into the camera’s eye and began to speak into the senator’s microphone.

  “I’d like to read something, if you don’t mind.”

  Everyone was speechless. Belligerent guests were nothing new, but Air Force colonels were supposed to be better trained. Edwards shifted himself further into the picture. The lights blazed and blinded him. He felt a little drunk with their heat, but below it, calm and composed.

  “This is a poem by Lord Byron. It’s very short. It sums up my feelings about the end of the program better than I could myself.”

  The audience was silent; the cameras were captive. The paper trembled in his hand, in the hot and blazing dark. The studio whirled beneath him. It was a strange surreal moment in the chatter and rhythmless gabble of television, a moment of silence he suspended before starting to speak:

  “So, we’ll go no more a roving So late into the night.

  Though the heart be still as loving, And the moon be still as bright.

  “For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe, And love itself have rest.

  “Though the night was made for loving.

  And the day returns too soon, Yet we’ll go no more a roving By the light of the moon.”

  Electrons made a chaos of snow on the monitors. Offstage a man with horn-rimmed glasses waved frantically. The moderator cleared his throat.

  “Thank you, Colonel Edwards. We have to pause here, but we’ll be back in a moment.” The red eyes of the monitors blinked off.

  Edwards sank back into his chair. The senator fumed. The moderator leaned over to Edwards and said, “Please, Colonel, we can’t take you off the air now, but stick to the subject at hand.”

  “Wasn’t I?”

  “Colonel . . . please. You know what I mean.”

  “My microphone was turned off. It made me mad.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll see it doesn’t happen again. But please—”

  “Just say what I’m supposed to, right?”

  “Don’t make things difficult.”

  “No more poetry?”

  “No more poetry. Please.”

  He had gained a large amount of ground; he felt good, in control. But now he was losing—he didn’t know where to go next. He turned to the NASA man, his silent ally, who said, “This isn’t helping us, Colonel,” and all Edwards’ certainty and composure vanished. He had a terrible intuition then: NASA itself did not care. It made no difference to anyone involved how they made their money, in this branch of civil service or another. Of all those in NASA, only Edwards had reason to want to understand what they were doing. He was alone in his concern.

  “All right,” he breathed. “All right, you bastards.” He felt a clear sense of climax. He saw what he must do: leave, walk off, dissociate himself from all of them. But at the thought all his strength went from him: he was not conditioned to function alone. And he sat in his weakness, and the monitors came back on, and for the rest of the show he was trapped there, silent, outwardly serene: he saw himself as a small hard circle swimming alone and untouched in a limitless sea of static.

  Tuesday his wife returned. The car pulled up and he heard Kevin go down and out the back door, fast and light, as if he had been going anyway. The screen door sighed on its hinge and in the second before she entered the den he knew that today she would finally ask for a divorce. He had been determined not to be the one to mention it. Now with a sick premonition he knew the end was near anyway. Her first words, though, catching him off balance, were, “My God, John, do you have any idea how embarrassing that was?”

  “Hello, Charlotte. What was embarrassing?” He considered the woman before him with an objectivity he would never have thought possible.

  “The TV show. The poetry. Eric practically dragged the whole commune in to watch you quoting Lord Byron on the Today show. Christ, if you knew what you looked like.”

  “Really. I didn’t know you had TV up there in the pristine wilderness.”

  “Oh, go screw.”

  “All right, let’s have it, what was wrong with quoti
ng Byron?”

  “It was, let us say, out of character.”

  “So? Did it ever occur to you that I get tired of playing the role of the dumb hero?”

  She looked at him. “You think you can get out of it that easily?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How little you know.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  She went to her bedroom and took down a suitcase from the closet. He followed her and sat on the bed with his eyes closed and his fingertips touching at the bridge of his nose. He sat as if in another world and listened to the angry rustlings of clothes as she hurled them about.

  “Tell me, John, do you have any idea the kind of crap I have had to put up with these past ten years?”

  “Yes.” It had once been a joke between them.

  “Did you see the goddamned forty-page manual NASA gave us all on how to be an astronaut’s wife? Did you get a good look at that?”

  “Charlotte, don’t start.”

  She gave a brutal little half-laugh. “‘An astronaut’s wife dresses in clothes out of last year’s McCall's and does her own decorating. She is active in church and social functions. She believes in equal pay for equal work but thinks that most women’s libbers are just too far out. She never never raises her voice to reporters. And she drinks eight glasses of Tang a day.’”

  He smiled under his tented fingers; she took it for amusement and grew furious. “But mostly an astronaut’s wife sits around the house drinking and masturbating and hoping the reporters don’t come around to ask her why she’s not smiling or baking a cake or going to the PTA, for fear she might break down and tell the bastards why!”