Orbit 18

by Damon Knight

  “I do—”

  “I know. It doesn’t matter. It’s not your fault. Try later.” Edwards lies quietly as she gently caresses him. And peace comes; what a wonder, to have his wife back as she was ten years ago for even these few moments. The darkness grows, and he has visions of space, at once appealing and terrifying. The weight of the world releases him, and he soars transcendent through the firmament. After a while the stars resolve to the grainy darkness of the room and Charlotte is beside him and they talk.

  “What do you want here, Shari?”

  “I don’t know if I can explain. It’s a feeling. It’s as if I’ve spent my whole life inside, in some horrible hospital or rest home. In Teaneck, even outside I feel trapped, like the sky is a giant bowl clamped down on me. I haven’t felt really free since God knows when. I feel sick and pale and bedridden and convalescent. Christ, John, I want to feel healthy again.” He nods. “Do you ever feel that?”

  “Yes. Sometimes I feel the air pressing on me. I feel gravity and I feel the atmosphere like an ocean on my back. And I want —out. I want to be in free fall again. I dream about that sometimes.”

  “This is what NASA is to you?”

  "Was.”

  “Why do you want to resign?”

  “Because it’s over! Didn’t you hear me on that program? It’s over, done, finished!” He groans and rolls away from her. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t yelling at you.”

  “I know.”

  “But it could have been something—and we let it go. We took one step out of the cradle; we put our foot out—and drew it back. What sense does that make? Is that at all sane? I think what it is is that we’re not ready for space, we can’t deal with all that emptiness. We got out there and didn't know what to do, and got scared and came back. But God—! You can’t reenter the womb. That’s all the earth is.” He pauses. “If only we could be happy with things as they are. If only they didn’t have to mean something, or progress to something, or evolve into something … if we could only live moments, just moments, unconnected … I think I could accept that. Be happy with it.”

  “John,” she soothes, holding him. Against the coldness of space, the transcendent spirit of man, her warmth is cloying. She binds him to his body. “John, John … what’s out there, anyway?”

  “Nothing,” he says, and sinks into sleep. o

  On an ocean. Wave mechanics. Harmonic motion. The years cycling back through the seasons. College. His physics professor, strange old man, explaining the motion of the waves: periodic functions, series of crests and troughs, repetitions. Every sort of motion dependent upon harmonic theory. Sine waves, circles, spirals, helixes, orbits, all the same. The same equations apply. Greek letters fly past his sleeping eyes:

  Period of a pendulum. Earth’s a pendulum, you know, two ways: swings around the sun, turns on its axis: complex motion.

  In the middle of the lecture he dropped into philosophic dis

  course, the brilliant mind derailed and rambling as the classroom pitched on the waves: duality in monism, the one wave with the two halves, see? Positive and negative. Every physical concept doubly poetic; mathematics the purest poetry. Ah, the Greeks, such poets. Class grumbling, breaking up and diving off the platform, old fool senile and rambling about sine fucking waves: SIT DOWN! I’m not finished! Edwards alone then; now listen, hissed the teacher, air seething with his hot intense breath, the sea growing long and glassy as if listening, listen: We are all disturbances of the medium. Understand? Disturbances of the medium. Pebbles dropped in a vacuum. Waves. All of us, nothing but a complex collection of sine waves. Heart, lungs, brain, glands, nothing but repetitions, periods, life, life, waves. Frightened, Edwards dove, sank quickly and drowned, and drowning, woke.

  o

  As he enters the kitchen and faces all the members of the commune together for dinner, he feels lines of force in the room, constellations of tensions shifting to accommodate him. Interference patterns. How distant he is from this world; how far Teaneck from the mythical land of Woodstock; the others feel this too, and there is that moment of uneasiness, the lines in flux, reality facing the legend, the two worlds’ images mediated to each other only by Time. The moment passes, though. They sit to dinner.

  Edwards assimilates his impressions: the dinner discussion is light and varied, ranging over topics of literature, music, films, farming. One girl casually mentions her abortion and Edwards suffers a Catholic reaction. Not that he has been at all religious since marrying Charlotte, but a sense of sin, once acquired, is not easily lost. There is none of that in anyone here: sin and grace are not part of the metaphysical baggage of this generation. They speak in terms of yin and yang, complementaries without relative values. He feels at a loss, vulnerable: nothing that upsets him could move any of these people.

  After dinner they sit and talk softly over the littered plates. Byrne starts to roll a cigarette. He has rolled several from tobacco that evening, but now he reaches for a smaller jar, and the flakes are green and Edwards feels a kick of giddy trepidation as he watches Byrne pour the stuff into a rolling machine and pull it into a yellow cigarette. He is acutely aware of everyone, of their casualness and his tension, and he feels Charlotte watching him. Byrne pours more into the machine and rolls another. The first joint moves around, closing on him. Charlotte tokes, smiles at him, and passes it. He shakes his head. She nods and smiles, makes “come on” with her mouth. Afraid of interrupting the casual after-dinner atmosphere, afraid of making a foolish scene over something so minor, afraid perhaps of missing entrance to some new world, and (at bottom) curious, he accepts, sucks, holds, passes. “Keep it in,” Charlotte whispers. He nods secretly. John Edwards, pothead.

  The first few rounds he feels nothing and starts to relax, but after a while a certain detachment slips into his senses. They extend; his eyes, ears, fingers are at the far end of a tunnel, relaying everything to him in delayed echoes. Everything has flattened, taken on the aspect of a screen. Entranced, Edwards watches as he would in a theater. Colors are rich, vivid, the dialogue flows wondrously. How lifelike, he thinks.

  This goes on for some time before Max gets up. Edwards runs the scene back: Byrne has asked how many chickens he can expect for dinner and Max said, “I’ll go out and cull some now. Come on, Barb.” Then he senses Edwards’ gaze. “Want to see how you cull chickens, Colonel?” and Edwards, suffused with good will, says, “Why, shore,” and they are up and out.

  o

  There is a perfect silence outside, a warm still breathless summer silence, with a full moon, orange, just risen. Off on the horizon fireworks burst soundlessly, fast-dying sparks in the night. The Fourth, Edwards suddenly remembers. It is the Fourth of July. America is 199 tonight.

  In the barn is a rich earth shit smell. In the roost the birds flutter and cluck at the flashlight. Max says, “We have a dozen birds but we’re only getting about eight eggs a day. So we must have a couple hens not doing their jobs.” He lifts a brown one which squawks indignantly. Barb takes the light. The hen's eyes gleam yellow and she squirms. “Down,” says Max. “Keep it out of her eyes, Barb.”

  He carries the bird into the adjoining toolshed, away from the others, and snaps on the light. He says to Andrews, “Now the first thing you do is check the claws. If the hen’s not laying, the yellow pigment that should go into the yolk gets into the beak and claws and around the vent.” He turns the hen over and she squawks. “Pretty good. Now you check the vent—” He pushes the tail feathers aside and a pink puckered hole appears. “It should be moist and bleached—no yellow—and this one looks pretty good.” Abruptly Max lays his fingers beside the vent. “Check the pelvic bone for clearance, make sure the eggs have room to get out—” He flips the hen back right-side. “Yeah, she looks like a layer. Give her a white tag, Barb.” The girl has a handful of colored plastic rings—she snaps a white one around the bird’s gnarled leg. Max takes the hen back in, emerges with another. “When they stop laying,” he says, “they start looking a lot bet
ter. The muscles firm up and the feathers get slicker. So I get very suspicious when I see a healthy-looking bird like this one.” He flips her over. The hen thrashes wildly, flaps the air with frantic wings. “Oh, baby,” says Max, “you’re much too active. You’re looking too good to be spending much time in the laying box.” He holds her firmly. “Hm. Vent looks okay, though. Two fingers here . . . Give her a yellow, Barb.”

  After eleven hens there is only one definite cull, one red tag already in a separate cage. Max brings in the last bird. “This is a sex-linked. I would be very surprised if she wasn’t laying. Still, you can never tell. The only way you find out for sure is to kill ’em and check the egg tree. I killed a cull once that had an egg all ready to drop out. Ate the chicken, fried the egg. But we lost a layer. Another thing, they moult in July and they don’t lay while they’re moulting. Every poultry book I’ve ever read says, come July, you can forget about eggs.”

  As soon as Max starts poking in the feathers the bird explodes in frenzy. The claws kick, the wings flail, feathers fly. Max puts a hand on the bird’s neck. If you choke ’em a little, it calms ’em.” The hen does not calm though and Max shifts her further upside down, A claw catches at his shirt. “Ow! Shit!” He drops the hen and Barb grabs her. “You hurt?”

  “No. Just a scratch.” She holds the bird while Max probes. He spreads the feathers to show Edwards the dry tight yellow vent. “Ahh.” Max lifts her, calm now, and drops her in the cage with the other cull. She flutters once and is still.

  He smiles at Edwards. “Dinner.”

  “We’ve got two for tomorrow,” Max shouts, coming in. “One of the sex-links was a cull.” They enter the living room. The group here seems smaller. Byrne says, “You like our chickens, Colonel?”

  Edwards, still high, tries not to laugh. “Fine birds. Very interesting.”

  “Sit down. Let’s talk. I’ve been interested in you a long time, Colonel.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. I saw you on television a few days ago.”

  “Oh.” Edwards shrivels. He remembers Charlotte’s estimation of his performance, which must certainly have come from Byrne.

  “Interesting. Unexpected. You find your hero’s role unsatisfying?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “I ask out of professional interest. As a writer, I’ve been analyzing the roles of the hero in our culture and our literature.” Byrne rolls a cigarette, tobacco. Edwards is still stoned, time is still doing strange things. “It seems to me, Colonel, that outside of sports, the space program is our only source of heroes these days. Politicians are certainly on the outs; since Vietnam we’ve forsaken our military heroes; so what’s left us but our astronauts, our explorers?”

  “What indeed?”

  “And yet it’s a strange heroism, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Yes it is.”

  “How do you find it strange?”

  “Being inside it.”

  Byrne looks at Edwards with sudden intensity, as if to exclude the rest of the group. “I don’t think it’s heroism at all, really. Not in the traditional sense of the word. People talk about exploring frontiers, but we know that’s nonsense. You have your flight plan, your agenda; to call that heroic is … well, picture Ulysses following a triple-A roadmap. That takes no bravery, no excellence, none of the heroic qualities.

  “Now I’m not being derogatory, Colonel. What I see here is an evolution of our heroic archetypes. Heroes arise from drama of course, and the major dramatic periods in history were during Greek and Reformation times. It’s interesting then to consider the difference between the Greek and Christian traditions: the Greeks admired men of action, of heroic deeds. Christianity respects the martyrs, the sufferers. We see a move from the active to the passive, from masculine to feminine.”

  “Watch it, Eric,” said Barb. “Male chauvinism.”

  Byrne looks at her, vaguely annoyed. “Well, no. You must realize that the feminine is separable from the female. What’s called male chauvinism is the equating of the two, the stereotyping of woman into feminine roles; and the implied value judgment. I may speak, for instance, of Barbara having a certain masculinity, or of Robert being somewhat feminine, without offense. We understand that there are certain classical definitions of masculine and feminine, unconnected with sex.

  “Now the Christian iconography”—back to Edwards now, he feels the terminology is intended to intimidate him—“is primarily feminine, in its use of the Virgin, and the apotheosis of the passive—in fact the whole notion of Immaculate Conception rather avoids the issue of male versus female—whereas the more primitive religions were more assertive, dramatic, masculine. The earliest gods were fertility gods. The Greek heroes were men of action. Christians are martyrs. There’s the move from sex to sexlessness, masculinity to femininity.

  “Colonel Edwards, our latest hero, shows that the trend has even reached American culture. America has traditionally been masculine. Frontiers, and all that. It's interesting that the Moon is the first frontier America has drawn back from. And Colonel Edwards, as a hero, I think we must admit, is a bit of a woman.” Edwards stands. The room wavers before him. “Fuck you, Byrne,” he enunciates.

  “I, ah, meant no personal offense, Colonel. As I said . . .”

  “Like hell you didn’t. You thought you could toss some big words around and dazzle the poor dumb Air Force jock. Well, the colonel, Mr. Byrne, is not so dumb. The colonel has a doctorate, among other things, and throwing convoluted insults in the third person at him does not fool him.”

  “I assure you, I was not trying . . .”

  “Shove it! Listen, Byrne, you go through ten years of training, of being whipped and spun and starved into shape, you go out and study tensor calculus until you know how and why every control in a rocket works, and you go through the agonies of waiting to be chosen for a mission and maybe later rejected and having two of your best friends die while they’re training —you go through all of that yourself and then maybe I’ll let you sit there and tell me I’m a bit of a woman, but from where you sit now you’re more of a woman to me than your goddamned kens out there!”

  And then he goes silent; he gets quite cold and distant, and sweeps his eyes slowly around the room. He says, “Where’s my wife?”

  “Your wife. Ah, yes.” Byrne smiles strangely. “You’ll find her in her bedroom, I think.”

  He pauses for only a second as he reaches his wife’s door—the hairs on his wrists move and his hand stops before touching the knob—then he forces it forward, twists, pushes.

  He freezes in the doorway.

  The first kid he met in the barn, Robert, is on his wife. He moves quickly across the room, sees Charlotte clutch at the kid and he is sure she seduced him, he runs the whole scene through his mind instantly, yes, the kid would never take that initiative with the husband in the house, but nonetheless there he is, and he grabs the kid’s shoulders, pulls him back and off, gasping astonishment. Charlotte spits, “Bastard, fautard!” and he whirls the kid, hits him in the stomach, slick against his fist, hits him again higher, the kid squeals, and again, better now, a deep full grunt, he is hurting him, playing him like a drum, he establishes a rhythm of attack, the kid moving only in defense, curling, incapacitated by that incredible shock of extremes, pain like a searing splash of ice water, numbly taking it like a piece of training apparatus, Edwards working the slow easy rhythms as if he were in a simulator, on a flight, keeping up muscle tone, the impartial repetitions of exercises lulling him into lazy introspection, he punches with first one arm then the other, watching the kid collapse with heavy-lidded eyes, the dull dispassionate discharge of energy, they had to do these in space, to burn up calories and drain excess energy, to work their bowels regularly, on schedule, to masturbate and cancel sexual tensions, they had to do it in just this dispassionate systematic way, 0100 commence masturbatory sequence, he saw that in a cartoon once after he got back and it made him sick. . . .

  The Moon was full outs
ide the capsule, you could see all of it, but all was only half because the Moon was locked in orbit with the same face always to the Earth and you could never see the far side, even when it was full, bright, naked to the stars—had they come that far just for a glimpse at the far side?—and Earth, its billions hidden behind its calm placid mask of blue . . .

  … and the kid falls heavily to the bed, and he turns and Byrne is there with the rest behind him, sick faces peering in fear of violence, oh yes he has found their weak spot, in the alien air of conflict. Now is the time for confrontation, now is when Byme steps forward, challenges him to a fight, or simply says between tight-drawn lips, “Out!”

  But Byme does no such thing. He smiles sadly at Edwards and says, he asks—“Do you want to talk about it?”

  o

  Yes, there are climaxes, brief spurts of passion, oscillations from times of greater energy to times of lesser energy, but they resolve nothing, no, resolution is beyond us. The stories do not end neatly, much as we need them to. Our lives are incomprehensibly tangled. Such a demand for climaxes and resolutions drives us to our madnesses, our fictions. For the world is round and nothing but round, there are only the soft risings and fallings, the continual fall of day into night, the endless plummet through space without end or beginning. We drift, we live, we die, but death is not an end because the race goes on building roads and pyramids, launching rockets, and survive or perish, we all fill some evolutionary role. We are a statistical whole.

  He tells himself he is not a hero or a myth. America is not Greece or Olympus. The world has turned round and the universe has closed and we have all been forced to touch one another and know that we are all alone and none of us are alone and that we have precious little time to come to grips with that truth. Night rushes past his car. Far-spaced lights wash him rhythmically. Three billion people on a single planet, together and alone in so much night; while the moon shines with a single dead light from all its craters, myths and heroes.