Space

by James A. Michener

  “I was told,” Mott said, “The chance that Voyager would get from launch in working order ... 90.3 positive. What’s your prediction that the cameras will work if they do get there?”

  “I still prefer the word scanner. My guess-97, 98 percent you’ll get a batch of the world’s greatest photographs, and some we’ll convert to color.”

  With such assurances from men who knew what they were talking about, Mott proceeded to supervise arrangements for the hundreds of press people who would soon be flooding JPL, for realization had spread that this might well be the last close-up the Earth was going to have of the nearer planets during this century. All major foreign countries were sending observers: fifty-two different foreign newspapers, seventy-one magazines, nine television crews from Germany, Japan, Great Britain and France, plus all the regulars from the United States. Many of the world’s leading astronomers were planning to attend, and Mott saw with pleasure that John Pope’s name was among them.

  As the days neared when Voyager 2 would make its closest approach to Saturn, Pasadena became the intellectual capital of the world, for men and women were about to see a close view of this magnificently complex planet. Excitement was intense and debate heated, for this was one of the great moments in man’s speculative history, when he would stand face-to-face with a celestial object which had captivated his imagination from that night more than a million years ago when someone cried in awe, “It moves among the fixed stars!” and which had tantalized him even more when telescopes revealed that it was surrounded by a congregation of exquisitely beautiful rings.

  Soon it would be revealed. There would be a brief hello, a respectful nod there in the timeless freezing wastes, then a photographic salute, and the endless departure. Fragile moment in time, hallowed by those hesitant guesses of Galileo-“It seems to have horns, but my scope was not powerful enough to make sure”-this would be an instant of supreme importance to the scientists gathered here, but [747] of little significance to the majority of the world. One astronomer well into his seventies said,

  “Don’t worry about that, Mott. I had my graduate students look into the experience of Copernicus, Kepler and Newton. Now, you’ve got to admit those men changed the history of the world. But when they were doing their work and announcing their discoveries ... how many of their contemporaries even knew it was being done? How many could comprehend its significance?

  “My bright young men concluded that perhaps three percent of the citizens living in their towns knew they were doing something that might be important. One-fiftieth of one percent could have understood what it signified.

  “With television and our good magazines, a few people will know about our visit to Saturn, but of one thing you can be sure. As in the case of Copernicus and Newton, everyone who ought to know will know, and the reverberations of these next few days will echo through eternity, reappearing from time to time in manifestations that would astonish you.”

  The final two days of waiting were as pleasant as any that Mott had known, for scores of his honored associates flew in to exchange greetings of great warmth. Carl Sagan was there in the flush of his enormous success; Bradford Smith, with his cool assessment of the images that were already arriving; John Pope, keeping somewhat to himself-the masters of this little world of knowing men and women.

  “Here’s a close-up of Titan, men, and what a hell of a lot of speculation goes down the drain with this one.” Titan, largest of the Saturn moons, was the only one in the entire solar system with an atmosphere comparable in any way to Earth’s and of a size sufficiently large and solid to warrant speculation that living beings might inhabit it. In science fiction it was already a populated center of extreme sophistication; in reality it was a gaseous concentration not much denser than water, and as one disgruntled astronomer said, “If people are living there, they’ve [748] got gills that can handle methane-hydrogen.”

  A flood of color pictures was constructed, and even men who knew Saturn well gasped at the beauty of those heavenly rings, perhaps the most stunning sight in the planetary system; inherent in whatever force created that intricate halo was the artistry of a Michelangelo or a Picasso, for it was a work of art, as Mott explained in his briefing:

  “The rings are very wide, but extremely thin, perhaps not more than half a mile. They’re composed of ice chunks varying in size from BB shot to cubes as large as a boxcar. They’re kept in place by gravity, of course. Saturn is an immense giant who draws things to him, but they’re also kept in line by disciplining satellites which patrol the edges.

  “How did the ice form? Speculation is infinite, but I incline to support the theory that elements which should have coalesced into a moon failed to do so, but you’ll hear more about that at the roundtable tomorrow. I will give you one piece of reassuring news. We’ve run Saturn through the most advanced computers available to us, and we find that chunks of ice in varying sizes circulating around a planet like this will remain ice, in stable condition, for not less than five billion years, which covers the probable age of Saturn. You see, there is nothing to sublimate them, nothing to abrade them. They just circulate for five billion years.”

  The part of the fly-by that Mott enjoyed most came when the newest pictures, corrected and enhanced by Template’s wizards, were flashed on a large screen while a panel of the world’s greatest astronomers made their original, free-wheeling guesses as to what these new data signified. Now these cautious scholars could not spend months in their laboratories running checks and eliminating ideas that were physically impractical. Now they stood alone on the frontier of thought, parading their ignorance, illuminating the room with their intuitive brilliance. For a brief, beautiful moment in time they and Saturn were co-conspirators regarding the great mysteries of the universe, [749] and sometimes the room became electric with ideas that would reverberate for years to come; a few would prove accurate; others would be knocked quickly apart; none would have been useless.

  Great Saturn, wreathed in icy glory, seemed to move majestically through the room, but not in awe-filled aloofness. These men were living with the planet, wrestling with its secrets, and once when Template posted a peculiarly mottled view of one of the moons, Brad Smith blurted out: “I’ve seen a pizza that looked better than that.”

  On the last afternoon as Mott was leaving Von Karaman Hall, where the convocations were held, he was accosted by a group of astronomy students from nearby universities who had come with their professors to participate in the fly-by. “Are you the Dr. Mott who did those four seminal papers back in the late 1950s on the nature of the upper atmosphere?” Mott was delighted that young “people should remember who he was: “You know, I did those papers long before I had my Ph.D.”

  This surprised the young people, who asked if they could talk with him, and after a while he was joined by an elderly professor from Stanford. Then the students spotted John Pope as he was leaving the hall; they cornered him, and there they sat in the fading sunlight, three older men of proved reputation, some sixteen young scholars beginning their careers, all abrim with excitement about a massive planet and a little spacecraft a billion miles away.

  “If I were a teacher, how could I explain to my students that although Saturn has a density much less than that of water and only a gaseous structure, it doesn’t just drain away?”

  Some of the students laughed, but the old professor stopped them. “That’s one of the profoundest questions in astronomy, and unless your students appreciate its complexity, they’ll never comprehend the easier difficulties. Start this way. Look at a globe of the Earth in good colors, and spend about a week trying to understand why the oceans do not, as you say, “just drain away.” It’s not easy to answer that question.”

  “How do you answer it?”

  “You know, I’m familiar with every equation in the book, and I know all about gravity and the tides caused [750] by the Moon, but I’m damned if I can give you an articulate explanation.”

  “How do you handle it?
”

  “Years ago I told myself, ‘You idiot! Anyone can see they do stay in place.’ And I accepted that.”

  John Pope volunteered: “In the Navy when we tried to identify men who had the capacity to become really good navigators-we needed hundreds of them-we’d put them all in a room and show them a globe, just like the professor said. And we pointed to where they were at that time, that meridian, and we said, “You know it’s four o’clock here. Look at your watches. And we also know it’s only three o’clock in the next time zone, and two o’clock in Denver. and one o’clock in Los Angeles and eleven o’clock in Hawaii.” We took them all around the globe and showed them that we were ahead of every other place. But then we said, “But you know from news broadcasts that London is actually five hours ahead of us. Yet we just proved we’re nineteen hours ahead of London. How can those two contradictory things be true?” We let them stew in this for a while, the way we had stewed when we began, until one of us said, “Isn’t it clear that somewhere you have to institute an international date line?” When you reach there, this silly round robin ends and you start with new definitions.”

  “That’s brilliant,” one of the students said enthusiastically, taking mental notes.

  “You haven’t heard my point,” Pope said. “We would stand at the front of the room and watch the faces of the plebes. Some of them, when their minds grasped this magnificently simple solution, lit up like light bulbs. They could become navigators. Others sat in absolute perplexity. They would never make it. They could become good gunners, or aviation experts, but they’d never make navigators, because you either understand the international date line or you don’t, and if you don’t, I’m powerless to explain it to you.”

  Lights went on in several faces. “Why didn’t someone explain it that way before?”

  They asked Pope what he had experienced in space for which he had been intellectually unprepared, and without hesitation he said, “Gravity was nothing. We were [751] prepared for that. And we expected the reimposition of gravity when we neared the Moon. But what blew my mind was the fact that when we left the shadow of the Earth and before we reached the shadow of the Moon, we had sunlight twenty-four hours a day on one side of our trajectory and perpetual night on the other side. I had somewhat anticipated this, but even so, I had not realized that almost all the stars in the sky would be permanently visible. There they were, an entire sphere, except for a region around the Sun. It was quite awesome to me, but when I pointed it out to Claggett, he said, ‘The Galaxy would be in poor shape if they weren’t there.’ ”

  “How did you occupy yourself? Coming back down to Earth?”

  The old professor would not permit this question. “You must break the habit, in your thought if not in your speech, of saying “up to the Moon” or “back down to Earth” or “up to the stars.” There is no up or down, no above or below. There is only out to and back from in reference to the center of the Earth. If you use the plane of the Galaxy as reference, we’re clearly off the central axis, but whether we’re up or down, who knows? I don’t even like the phrase out to the edge of the universe. We may be the edge, so that everything we see exists between us and the opposite edge. More likely, the edge is everywhere, for I think that space is without direction or definition. You can’t express it in words, I suppose, but you must induce that concept among your students, for otherwise they can never become astronomers.”

  “Look!” one of the girl students cried. “Saturn itself!” And there in the sky in close conjunction with blazing Jupiter and Venus, the ancient planet appeared, its magical rings not visible to the unaided eye, but its mysterious beauty magisterial. The old men who would be quitting their studies soon and the young who would be taking over stared at the planet with only a little more comprehension than that possessed by the Assyrians four thousand years earlier.

  “Bits of ice no larger than those you use in a cocktail shaker. They don’t melt in five billion years. We could use some down here.”

  “Over here,” the old professor corrected.

  ¯

  [751] His last big job for NASA completed, Mott slept that night without nightmares, and while shaving next morning he understood why: The Space Shuttle carried men, and that made us cautious. Voyager 2 carried only the minds of men, and they can be adventurous. A ray of sunlight coming through the window and throwing a shadow across his bed made a rude cross, and he cried, “How profound the legend of Jesus is. His body died on the Cross, and that signified little, either to Him or His world. But His mind, what He thought, triumphed and reverberated forever.”

  When he turned on the news he got instead an early-morning religious program, and a man he knew well was orating: “This is Reverend Leopold Strabismus of your United Scripture Alliance.” Mott listened with attention as the preacher spelled out a splendid theory of salvation and the restructuring of a broken life; it was generous, loving and curiously reassuring. In exaggerated Southern accent Strabismus offered a sounder doctrine than most psychiatrists, and he did so with a personal conviction that won even Dr. Mott, for some of the things he said about the love that parents ought to feel for their children were directly applicable to the Mott family.

  He spoiled his sermon, Mott thought, by two errors: he appealed four times for contributions, which Mott’s father would never have dared, and in his peroration he shouted that what his listeners must do to attain salvation was to turn their backs on godless science and atheistic humanism and come back to the clear, simple teachings of Jesus. He then repeated three times the addresses of those California legislators who would be voting on his bill to drive the teaching of evolution and geology from state-supported schools.

  Since Mott had some hours before his plane left, he thought it might be profitable to inspect what Strabismus called his United Scripture Alliance. Remembering roughly where it was, he reached the building once occupied by the University of Space and Aviation. He discovered it to be occupied by Mexicans, who explained: “Reverend Strabismus sold us the building. We use it as our Chicano Center.” When Mott asked where Strabismus functioned, [753] the pretty Mexican secretary said, “He has a big church out in the country,” and she handed him a nicely printed map showing the route to the United Scripture Alliance and a message: “All who seek the Light of God will be welcome.”

  The map led him to a handsome mesa north of Pasadena, where Strabismus, with the large funds contributed by his radio and television audience, had built a series of structures which delighted the eye, for he had chosen the best architects in the region and had urged them to be daring and inventive. Dominating the area was the Temple of USA, a bold and comprehensive designation, and around it stood eleven low, strong buildings of the University of Spiritual Americans. The first building, however, which one encountered on entering the grounds, pertained to both the temple and the university: the Office of Perpetual Giving.

  Mott went in and asked the very attractive young woman serving as hostess whether he might speak with Reverend Strabismus.

  “I’m so sorry, sir, but he’s not in California.”

  “I just heard him on television.”

  “That was taped. He leaves us eight pre-recordings whenever he goes on a trip.”

  “Where is he? If that’s not secret information.”

  “Heavens, no!” the woman said with a disarming smile. He’s meeting with the President today, then flying to the big campaign in the state of Fremont.”

  “What’s the campaign about?”

  “A group of determined atheistic humanists is trying to overturn the law we passed some years ago.”

  “The one that outlawed the teaching of evolution?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m a school-board member, and I have reason to think hat we have on our staff teachers who are humanists ... who are teaching evolution subversively, as it were. Have you any literature that might provide me with ammunition?”

  “We have indeed!” and she led him to a library room
in which some dozen pamphlets and three more-substantial books were available to the inquiring public. Mott chose three pamphlets explaining how to launch local campaigns against teachers, elected officials and college [754] professors suspected of being humanists, and a book called How to Detect a Humanist.

  “That will be four dollars,” the hostess said.

  “I thought the pamphlets were free.”

  “Nothing is free.”

  “How’s the campaign in Fremont going?”

  “It’s a real struggle. They’ve done a disgraceful thing. Dredged up a former professor named Anderssen, so old they have to lift him onto the platform, and he rants about freedom of the mind.”

  “They’ll do anything,” Mott said, and as he left he reflected on the sardonic fact that the Temple grounds lay in an area marked by the historic observatory on Mount Wilson, from which the early photographs of galaxies had come to set minds ablaze; the California Institute of Technology, where some of the most unorthodox thinking in the world had taken place (speculation on the nature of the universe); and those centers of error, UCLA and USC. And he thought: Strabismus ought to cleanse his own backyard. All those scientific humanists down there staring at Saturn.

  Stanley Mott was in for a shock when he watched Reverend Strabismus in action during the agitated campaign in Fremont, for the popular clergyman was even more rotund than before, a bearded three hundred pounds, and certainly more urbane and relaxed. He did not shout like some Old Testament prophet, nor did he display any animosity toward the atheistic humanists he was striving to eliminate from public life. He was reasonable, intelligent and persuasive, with uncanny skill in touching exposed nerves of national life. And he was remorseless in his hammer blows against science: