Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘And the Democrats were just as venal. Publicly they gave lip service to a grand national holiday, but since we would manage it, they wouldn’t vote a dime. So because of election politics, we’re celebrating one of the noblest days of our history in craven silence. How contemptible.’

  He was also deterred from taking any major stance that might attract too much attention by his wife Elinor’s sad deterioration, and only the kindness of the local press prevented her behavior from becoming an election scandal. She had given her entire personal inheritance to Dr. Strabismus to support the good work he was doing in California, and if the senator’s staff had not stopped payment on certain checks and recovered others she had forged, the Grant name would have been badly sullied.

  Elinor, far better informed on the perils facing the nation than her husband, had complained to reporters that Norman was starving her and keeping her imprisoned: ‘It’s very much like Bluebeard. Here I am a captive in a castle.’

  ‘But we were free to come here to see you,’ a woman reporter said.

  ‘Yes, but you can’t imagine what would happen if I tried to leave when you do.’

  ‘Let’s try. Let’s the five of us go downtown for lunch.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dare. There are spies everywhere.’

  ‘You mean, the senator employs spies …’

  ‘Not only the senator,’ she said darkly.

  When the editors read such reports they decided that Norman Grant was stuck with a whacko, and out of respect for his heroism in the war and the good work he had done subsequently, they decided to suppress the story, but they continued to express interest in the deportment of the senator’s daughter out in California. In news reports written with extreme delicacy and utilizing all kinds of ingenious innuendo, they referred to her association with the notorious fraud Leopold Strabismus and his diploma mill:

  Marcia Grant, daughter of Senator Norman Grant (Republican—Fremont), longtime personal friend of Strabismus and now his wife, serves as his dean of faculty with the degree of Ph.D. conferred upon her by her own institution. What her role is other than the collection of fees is difficult to ascertain, since the university appears to have no faculty. Repeated demands to meet with at least one professor have been rejected by Dean Grant on the grounds that her staff was far too busy correcting examination papers, written presumably by students who also do not exist.

  Careful investigations in Sacramento have revealed that the state of California accredits several degree mills like the Strabismus USA on the grounds that ‘They do very little real harm and everyone knows their degrees are spurious.’ When we asked why the state condoned such open fraud, we were told, ‘If we attempted to discipline the fake universities, then we’d be expected to do the same with the bogus churches, and defenders of the First Amendment would climb all over us. In this state you can have any religion you like, any university, and this office can do nothing about it.’

  It was curious, really, that in the heat of a senatorial campaign the Democrats made so few attacks on Norman Grant’s private life, but as Tim Finnerty told his staff one night, ‘In the American system everyone knows that men are incapable of disciplining their wives, their daughters or their sons. If you start to raise hell with Grant, where do you stop?’

  The senator was grateful for this courtesy, but the deportment of his women caused him deep concern, for he believed that if he had been a better husband and father, Elinor and Marcia would have developed more normally, and never was this feeling more intense than when Penny Pope flew west to help in his campaign, for then he saw a local girl, much like his daughter, who with far fewer advantages had become a leading Washington figure. At forty-nine she was tough-minded in committee meetings, self-directed in her personal life, and a most attractive wife to a national hero. Grant had seen the reports submitted by State Department people who had chaperoned John and Penny Pope on their triumphal tours to foreign countries:

  John Pope is a winner wherever he goes, modest, self-effacing, a most likable hero. He meets kings and presidents with an attractive reserve and addresses public gatherings with skill and good sense. A winner all the way. But wherever we go, Penny Pope steals the show. She dresses immaculately, tends her appearance and is refreshingly frank in whatever she says. In diplomacy, she’s worth ten battleships.

  Penny was never loath to heckle Grant about his retreat on space, but she did so only in private, and was especially careful never to speak as John Pope’s wife but only as counsel to the committee: ‘To hear you talk, Senator, one would think that America had quit the space race. Look it up. How many satellites do you think we have up there right now? Year after year? Going round and round and sending us billions of messages?’

  ‘I know from our committee that a lot of work keeps going on. But we have no Apollos. Skylab’s ended, so we have nothing big up there.’

  From her briefcase she took a NASA publication, Satellite Situation Report, and with a delicate finger pointed to a line of figures: ‘Every item that has ever been shot into space has been given a serial number, starting with 1. What do you think the Russian Cosmos that went up the other day was numbered?’ And she showed him—9,509.

  ‘Good God! Why don’t they bump into each other?’

  ‘Different altitudes. Different orbits.’

  ‘Who put them up there?’ he asked, and she reminded him of the wild variety of nations that had the capacity to do so: ‘Spain, India, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Netherlands and, of course, the United States and Russia.’

  ‘We have 2,116 American objects sending signals right now,’ she said. ‘Russia has 1,205.’

  When the senator borrowed the report he spotted an ominous column: ‘What’s this “Inanimate Objects—6,078” and most of them Russian?’

  ‘They’ve run out of electrical power. Send no messages. Just go round and round in timeless beauty.’ She pointed to Catalogue Number 4041: ‘That’s the little craft that carried Armstrong and Aldrin down to the Moon in 1969. When they came back to Apollo 11 they jettisoned it. Read Footnote 9.’ And Grant read: ‘A manned spacecraft which successfully landed on the Moon, after which it went into perpetual selenocentric orbit.’

  ‘What’s selenocentric?’ he asked.

  ‘Selene was the Greek goddess of the Moon. Around the moon forever.’ She laughed. ‘Senator, the other night in Webster you spoke as if we’d abandoned space. We’re just beginning to use it.’

  When Penny spoke with such authority, Grant could not help speculating on what his life might have been had he married such a woman, one who was stable and judicious. There had been talk in Nixon’s first administration of bringing Grant into the Cabinet in one of the really good positions, perhaps even Defense, and because of his winning margins in Fremont, there had even been suggestions that he go on the ticket as Vice-President to forestall Rockefeller, but he had been painfully aware of his vulnerability because of his wife and daughter, and when he confided his fears to the Nixon advisers they quickly saw that he was prudent, and talk of any high-visibility position evaporated. As one of the California mafia said, ‘We have hundreds of men in this country who would make damned fine senators but lousy national leaders. And Norman Grant of Fremont is perhaps the outstanding example.’

  With a wife like Penny Pope, he mused, anything would have been possible.

  But whenever she campaigned on behalf of Senator Grant and listened to his oratory, Penny realized what a soggy, pathetic politician this particular Republican had become. He stood for nothing. He represented no vital force. He had no vision of the future. And he ran on the simple program of patriotism and the fact that he answered his constituents’ mail within forty-eight hours.

  His life had known two apexes: when he steered his destroyer escort right at the heart of the Japanese fleet, and when he lined up with Lyndon Johnson and Michael Glancey to lead America into the space age. Everything since had been downhill, and now he presumed to ask the voters of his state to return him for a
nother six years of futility. Penny was ashamed to be part of his team.

  ‘Now wait,’ Finnerty said one night in June after they had arranged a rousing campaign rally in Calhoun. ‘Norman Grant represents this state almost ideally. Look at the federal funds he’s brought in—the installations we’d never have had otherwise. And the service he gives his constituents.’

  ‘I’ll grant the last. No senator takes more visitors to the Senate dining room. But his ideas …’

  They’re adequate. Look at what happened to Fulbright. Rhodes scholar, wonderful orator. He has ideas galore and no Senate seat. Grant plays it safe.’

  ‘Grant does nothing, Tim. You came to my office seven times in the last few years—make that a dozen times—bewailing his refusal to vote for good projects.’

  ‘Penny, he’s infinitely better than the Democratic opposition.’

  ‘Conceded. He won’t be a disgrace, the way that lump-head would, but he’s no ornament, either.’

  ‘Few senators are.’

  Her face-to-face meetings with Grant were depressing. He was only sixty-two, but he seemed a worried old man long past any constructive act, and the behavior of the women in his family prevented him from being impressive even with his dark suits and silvery hair. He was a hollow shell, and what was worse, he reverberated rather loudly: ‘We must turn our attention to more serious matters. We must cut the budget and increase our military power. We must get chiselers off the taxpayer’s back and take drastic steps to control crime in the streets. If you return me to Washington, my first priority will be to lower taxes without impairing our ability to defend ourselves.’

  And then he would parade onto the stage, in their historic uniforms and medals, Tim Finnerty, Larry Penzoss and Gawain Butler, who would relate the facts about his heroism and solicit votes for this great American.

  ‘Tim,’ Penny said after the Webster rally, ‘you really ought to knock the heroism bit in the head. You fellows look plain silly in those faded uniforms,’ but Finnerty pointed out correctly: ‘It’s what’s kept him elected for thirty years, going on thirty-six.’

  Tucker Thompson, still searching for one last good story about his Solid Six, arranged for Captain John Pope to fly out to Benton for the rally on November 3, when it was clear that although President Ford might be in trouble, the reelection of Norman Grant was assured. Pope, still a charismatic hero, came onstage, kissed his wife, and in defiance of NASA rules, said a few words asking the voters of his home state to send a great patriot and a foremost figure in America’s space supremacy back to the Senate.

  Penny, like a good wife, posed with her left hand in her husband’s right, but the camera caught her looking with extreme uncertainty at Senator Grant, who was shaking hands with a group of women voters. Tucker captioned the picture, the last his magazine would run of the astronauts:

  She had threatened to kick his butt from Canberra to Tahiti, but in the end she supported him enthusiastically when he campaigned in the successful reelection bid of Senator Norman Grant.

  When Penny saw the picture in the magazine she was alone in her office, and she could not restrain herself from muttering—using profanity, something she rarely did:

  ‘That sonnombeech Tucker! Male chauvinist pig! He knows it was me campaigning for Grant, and John only flew out to help me. But he’s got to write that John was doing the work and I flew out to help him. Penny, this sort of bullshit has got to stop, and you’re the only one to stop it.’

  In this period of emotional turmoil regarding his sons, Stanley Mott took refuge, as men will, in his work, but here also he was confronted with confusion, for in his studies of the planets which he was obligated to conduct for NASA he found himself always oscillating between engineering and science. As an engineer he wanted to build bigger and bigger machines with ever more sophisticated capabilities, regardless of the specific use to which they were put; but as a scientist he longed to send small, precise machines into bold new adventures of the mind: There’s a universe out there we’ve only begun to perceive. And if we had the courage, we could be living intellectually at the heart of it.

  His indecision was marked by the two books he kept near him: the first, an engineering marvel by a physics professor at Princeton; the second, a summary of the scientific knowledge of space by a much different kind of professor in London. Whichever book attained ascendancy at the moment persuaded him to move in that direction; he had become a pendulum.

  The Princeton book was Gerard K. O’Neill’s The Colonization of Space, in which an engineering job of immense dimension—the assembling of a gigantic machine in orbit to be occupied by thousands or even hundreds of thousands of workers and explorers who would spend most of their lives there—was considered by many to be practical. The beauty of O’Neill’s proposal was that work on it could be started now. Rockets like those built by Dieter Kolff, hundreds of them a month, could certainly carry the materials into low Earth orbit. Construction devices already in being at Houston and Huntsville could bind the parts together, while gossamers of enormous dimension could bring from the Sun all the energy needed to operate such an enterprise.

  All that would be required to build such a station would be $1 followed by 27 zeros—a billion billion billion dollars—and that posed problems. Of course, enthusiasts argued that it could be shaved to a mere billion billion, but Mott doubted it.

  Yet he was captivated by the boldness of the concept and convinced himself that before long some nation was going to break O’Neill’s grand design down into manageable parts and build itself a space station not for hundreds of thousands of settlers but for eighty or a hundred, and that nation would acquire an advantage in world control which might never be overcome by other nations less adventurous: From such a station you could beam down the energy of the Sun, making petroleum obsolete. You could control the weather, making rain fall where needed and preventing it from falling elsewhere. You could devise new forms of life, construct new combinations of material, conduct researches into the nature of the universe.

  And whenever he reached that point he stopped, for he could hear the Germanic accents of Dieter Kolff: ‘But you can do all that right now with unmanned probes, and for one-thousandth of the cost.’

  The London book was an extraordinary affair, C.W. Allen’s Astrophysical Quantities, compiled by a retired professor of astronomy at the University of London and offering in 310 pages a summary of everything known about the structure of the universe, with hundreds of tables and thousands of footnote references indicating where the data could be verified. It was the handbook of any Russians, Japanese, Pakistanis, Germans or Americans who addressed themselves to the mysteries of space, and Mott referred to it almost daily.

  It was a book of beautiful simplicity, for it started with a compact list of those constant values which govern existence, then summarized what mankind knew about the atom, and moved purposefully outward to the structure of the Earth, the other planets, the Sun, the fellow stars, the Galaxy, the distant clusters of other galaxies, and on to the infinite reaches of the universe. Even to read the table of contents was an adventure of the mind.

  Mott found special pleasure in the first section, that list of immutable laws so painstakingly uncovered by investigators in so many different centuries and so many different countries. Pi was 3.14159265 …, which Mott had memorized as a boy, and not some other value. There was a Planck constant governing energy, an Avogadro number giving the number of molecules in a standard volume of gas, a Faraday in electricity and a Stefan-Boltzmann constant in radiation.

  To consult this list was a humbling experience: Damned few of the great constants were discovered in America. We build on the work done by men overseas.

  On the other hand, when Mott turned to the later chapters of the handbook, the ones that concerned him, he found that much of the pivotal work had been done in America, as if our people had assembled the wisdom of the world and applied it to daring new concepts. Harlow Shapley initiated the studies whi
ch determined the size of our Galaxy; Carl Seyfert identified new types of galaxies; Edwin Hubble derived the constant that governed them; and Maarten Schmidt extended the definitions.

  For Mott to look even casually into Astrophysical Quantities was like a lover of literature browsing in the Oxford Book of English Verse; every page had its own resonance. Here stood Isaac Newton and Max Planck and Albert Einstein and Ejnar Hertzsprung. Here stood the gateway leading into the heart of the universe, and whenever Mott laid the small green-bound book aside he felt refreshed.

  It was a curious book, the work of an old man who had loved his subject, and the edition that Mott owned, the third, carried this extraordinary preface:

  It may be anticipated that yet another revision will be justified after a lapse of about seven years and preparation for this should begin at once. The author would like to negotiate with anyone willing to cooperate.

  When Mott first read this invitation to become co-author of an established best seller, he idly considered applying, but quickly broke into laughter: All I’d be required to know would be atomic physics, spectrum analysis, radiation, geology, subatomic particles, astronomy, photometry and the whole crazy field of astrophysics. Damn! Wouldn’t it be great to be eligible?

  The whole set of his mind was toward science, but whenever he was tempted to go too far down that road, he could hear old Crampton in the wind tunnel at Langley: ‘Scientists dream about doing things. Engineers do them.’ And he would turn to the more practical jobs at hand: What can we do now? And this would throw him back onto Gerard O’Neill’s space station, a version of which America could have been building right now.

  His day-to-day work with NASA focused on a managerial problem faced at one time or other by most big operations: ‘How do we hold our key personnel together in a time of retrenchment?’ With the Apollo program wiped out and no clear mission to replace it, cutbacks were inevitable and firings had to take place. When he visited Cape Canaveral he found Cocoa Beach in a state of shock: the Bali Hai motel had only two waitresses instead of the eight who had served the astronauts and their friends in the roaring 1960s, and Mr. and Mrs. Quint sat mournfully with Mott in a darkened corner of the once-lively Dagger Bar: ‘Homes that people bought for nineteen thousand dollars ten years ago, you can pick hundreds up for nine thousand dollars each. We lost thousands in population, stores and bars shutting down the way they are.’