Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  The moon on Canaveral is now high enough for Gilpin to see that long before Italy his life’s tone had been elected for him, by his having been brought up on almost the smallest of habitable islands: three quarters of a mile wide by one and a half long, highest headlands in the North Atlantic, and the farthest out to sea. Visitors compared it to the Grand Corniche, and as a boy he’d thought maybe this was so, if that place also had a thick central wood in which one could wander as in the Black Forest, and a crabbed lower coastline on which a visitor could either miss footing and not be found among the bayberry bushes until the following year, or else turn from walking out on the flats for clams to find the sea a solid rip tide between him and shore—which some dudes did every season, since no native would warn them. And if that Corniche place was also separated from the mainland by a moody packet boat called the Winnie Mae.

  The island had once been a commonwealth, like those slightly larger sectors of the union, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Kentucky. So when the boy thought of ideal government, a commonwealth was what he thought of first. However, a disproportionate amount of the island’s scant land, and with it a controlling vote in all matters of principle, was held by one man said to be an heir of Thomas Edison, who appeared on island for such meetings only. It had been this man’s habit to acquire more land when he could, preferably a plot with one of the island’s scarce old houses on it, which he would then raze in the interests of the wilderness. Since he was also opposed to the islanders’ having any of the ugly electric cables with which his ancestor had civilized civilization, this left them either to propane gas cylinders always overdue from the mainland, or Aladdin lamps whose tendency to flare up and blacken made for uneasy book study, or to the occasional illegal generator whose noise ruined both conscience and peace. So, when Gilpin thinks of what elective power can do, he thinks of this man.

  There’d been little hardship, except for a lack of company if you didn’t either drink or go to church. Garden season was two months, with no pasture for livestock, barring the few deer which the summer residents sentimentalized and the islanders shot at after Labor Day. There’d never been small fauna, and by agreement no rabbits which might overrun. In compensation, the wildflowers grew extra-foxy-faced and lone. Tourist summers were overpeopled and the comforts they brought effeminate—a time of foreign occupation with the sea still the only way out. Winter or summer, if you wanted whisky, which the islanders drank but didn’t sell, or schooling, for which there’d been no teacher until Gilpin’s tenth year, by which time three other mainland girls had married fishermen—you went across for it. When they needed a doctor, the Coast Guard flew one in by hydroplane, telephoned for at the only store. Conversely, one season when new wells were wanted, the tall well rigs had come across the watery plain, shuddering off the boats like totems come to tower over each backyard in turn, in order to divine its spring. Then the rigs had lifted themselves up with a shake of smart metal and had lumbered off again. At fifteen, he felt the humiliation.

  One summer twilight that same year, just as he was taking the garbage downhill to dump it into the harbor, with the whole island spread beneath him in the glittering light and a buoy lowing like the island’s one cow, a three-masted schooner—which, unknown to the island, a mainland agent had had restored and was running a cruise on—had sailed out of the Grand Banks of cloud to vanish and reappear behind one headland after another, her sails bellied pink with sunset—a paper ship with a dark hull borne on by all the ghosts of travel, above its mizzenmast a star. The blood drained to his feet and he felt gravity, that mother quicksand. Dreamstruck, he carried the garbage back up the hill. It wasn’t the ship he’d wanted to be on—not those old ropes—but the star.

  His boyhood has deeded him that transportational dream which moves nations and every so often ground-shifts the world. At those times the world is half spirit, though its goods might seem to be all that is marching, or its flags.

  The dream in the bone is of migration. Scratch below the supposed goal and every man, every nation, is an islander like him: One day—a farther shore. It sounded like a religious antiphonal because it was one—the hymn that all the boyhoods and girlhoods sang: One day—the mainland. Once upon a time his own country had founded itself on a radical twist put to that refrain: One day, yes—and for all. What he’s done—subversively, some say—is to have reminded them of it.

  The moon looks stationary now, in a fleece of moving cloud. The heavens are being sucked clean by the vacuum attendant on the great wind drifts. This part of the shoreline is a bay really, with a bay’s muted climacterics. The hurricane winds from the West Indies, among the highest in the Beaufort scale, are usually diverted, as they had been from Gilpin’s small island. What he’d had there was talk of them, giants treading near his father’s thumb while it traced a nor’easter in terms of Ferrel’s law. Any moving object on the surface of the earth, Tom, is deflected by the earth’s rotation, to the right in the northern hemisphere, to the left in the southern. On their dining table there was often a small cylindrical cheese with green flecks in it, called sapsago. The moon’s made of green cheese, his mother said. “Have some.”

  Stomachs remember. In his, now, comes that veiny flash which had irradiated it on first reading Goddard—a short article, drawings and print elegantly faded, entitled “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes.” On his return from Italy it had been his conceit to read from early space history on rather than back, so that he might pass historically through any ordinary citizen’s amaze—for in his innocence he supposed that all educated citizens, and to a degree even all those in the simple soda parlors of the world, were keeping up with it. He’d begun in the dark ages, with the legends of spaceships in the records of Tiajuanaco. Passing from Leonardo’s notebooks to the eighteenth-century Turkish admiral Piri Reis’s atlases from the Topkapi Palace, said to delineate topography only now observable from aerial photographs, he’d lingered on such nineteenth-century curiosa as Joseph Atterley’s A Voyage to the Moon. Goddard, writing diffidently of how to prove a rocket could go as far as the moon, had been his first modern.

  That terse prose, learned by heart as Gilpin had once learned tags from Emerson, came to seem of the same order, colorless as a Maine landscape and as full of astral light. A powerful special pleading rose from its few pages, elusive under its author’s reserve. Gilpin was often to encounter during his long private education the scene and sound of a mind ahead of its time, but this was his first brush with it. Leafing through the volume in which Goddard’s article had appeared, he found much the same number of pages devoted to the discovery of a new species of Piper bird from Panama. Goddard himself had at the time guardedly advocated rockets merely for meteorological and solar physics findings. “The only reliable procedure would be to send the smallest mass of flash powder possible to the dark surface of the moon when in conjunction (i.e. the ‘new moon’) in such a way that it would be ignited on impact. The light would then be visible in a powerful telescope. On the moon, distant 220,000 mi., with a telescope of 1 ft. aperture…we should need a mass of 2.67 lbs. to be just visible and 13.82 lbs. or less to be strikingly visible. Larger telescopes would reduce mass. (At sea-level…we need 602 lbs. for every lb. that is to be sent to ‘infinity.’)” In the library of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ostensibly silent, but like all libraries burring with brain sounds as the past ran in front of dozens of pairs of eyes, whispering its counsel and its devilment, the younger Gilpin’s eyes had smarted, learning their true dimension. Robert Hutchings Goddard, he’d said slowly, aloud. Rows of faces fish-gawped or monkey-giggled behind the paw. A librarian had ejected him. For “pranks.”

  Two days later he’d been reading in bed, his buttocks warmed by a girl—in those days there had been time for girls. But it was Hermann Oberth, onetime doctoral student whose rejected thesis had become one of the bases of modern rocketry, who was really in bed with him. Even Oberth’s equations seem to him clearer than other people�
��s. “If the acceleration due to gravity were less—for instance only 12½ ft. per second as on Mars—a man could stand like a ballerina on his big toe.” His fairly clean 1957 drawing of the elbow joint of a space suit hadn’t been too far from what Gilpin will insert himself into tomorrow morning. Yet this same finicker Oberth, when he came to speak of psychological man, could suffer the most terrifying lapses of the critical sense, hazarding in a chapter on the future, and after he’d set forth entire space-station projections in perfect, trustworthy and prophetic order: “Further hope for more righteous times to come is encouraged by the invention of the lie detector.”

  When young Gilpin the grad student came to that fool pronouncement, he rolled onto the floor, kicking out his heels and inadvertently hitting the girl in the eye. Apologizing, “I’m trying to stand on my brain. Like on a big toe.” To console her further, he’d clawed among his scattered books and read the passage to her.

  “They all have these last chapters. Just say Utopia, and they all go slavering. Without a shred of evidence like they’ll spend pages accumulating, on, say, how a water-glycol system acts in space. Or with none of the hardnose they’ll give you on, say, what makes a gyroscope go crazy just at the last.” He quoted Oberth again: “‘The gyroscope is a mysterious object for minds romantically inclined.’” Meanwhile patting her purpling eye. “You know, it’s as if man is not an evidential creature. Or not to them.” She wasn’t consoled and huffily requested a cold compress. In bed again, he suddenly shot up on the pillow to cry, “I’ve got it! It’s sainthood they’re after. Like in any new world—and you can at least trust them to know it’ll be that—sainthood has to be involved. Oh, not for them. For mankind. And that means you and me, Madge.” She’d crawled out the other side of the bed, and being already in her cuddly fake-fur jacket for warmth, grabbed up her sandals and left.

  He hadn’t detained her. He’d found his vocation. Or its practical application. His intellectual friends knew of course that “outer space” was getting nearer all the time. “Galaxy”—a puzzled Spenser specialist had remarked, “you don’t see words like that used poetically anymore.” They knew too, of course, that the planet was very careworn.

  But even if he could woo them to a space museum, to join the hoi polloi who were there for the wide-lens movie and any fantasy they could get, their eyes skewed and wandered. It had nothing to do with them. They hadn’t yet made the connection. All the while those silvery vortices were drawing near.

  Later it would be the hoi polloi, so mournfully willing to shift the line between fantasy and what they know will be foisted on them, and still so graceful with animal trust, who first listened to him. Plus the young, who like Gilpin once had no track record to risk. Or of course, to wield. Though once, early on, he would be listened to by a couple of stock manipulators keen on the “commercial” possibilities of space mining. Other hallucinations of theirs, not so soon to be corroborated, meanwhile sent them to jail.

  He has a classmate (a novelist whose books concern themselves with the Colorado wilderness, and why not, of course?) who for years has spoken of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (learned of from a UN Christmas card Gilpin had once sent him) as a Yuletide joke. Later, the space shuttle had passed him by like a rude bee not native to the West. More recently, hearing that permanent space habitats must apparently be confronted, since his friend Gilpin is going to one, he’d smiled the old science fiction smile, exactly as if offered a blind date with the robot girl who lived under the rainbow. “I still go in for the human quotient.”

  So do I, Gilpin thinks. Don’t I? Under the moonlight, the waves of the Atlantic for as far as Gilpin can see repeat themselves like the border of a Greek vase, flat black ripples raising evenly their small hatchet heads. Grampus waves, his father had called them, for their resemblance to that blunt-headed cetacean. “And because they mean a blow.” Fishermen, like other technicians, taught the particularity of things. His father would have done better than he with the finicky threadings and built-ins of a space suit. Though, since laughter was the only stimulant he ever indulged in, his having to pee into an inside catheter, meanwhile pedaling for exercise on a bicycle ergometer, might have been too much for him. “Your mother’s the one for concepts, son.” Meaning that her money had made her vague. “I have trouble with them.”

  So had Gilpin the grad student. But reading back after his girl Madge had gone, he began to tally why even ordinary citizens still relegated so much of what was happening in the world to science fiction. They themselves were fiction, to the scientists. You and me, Madge; this is our revenge. On the bed, she’d left some scrap notes he’d hoped might be for their class in thermodynamics where she was the better student, which had however turned out to be three separate ways of making piña colada. He’d saved them tenderly. They’re in his archive yet. You and me, Madge, you and me. Those of us who in this migration, not being military enough, or technical enough, or even “healthy” enough, might someday have to go in steerage, or even be left behind.

  For he had just that day come across a chilling passage of a different order. A “hypothetical letter” from a space colonist describing the voyage out, as imagined in the 1970s by a Princeton physicist named Gerard O’Neill, it dealt with those who were to be the new saints. “The three-week trial period is to sort out cases of severe space sickness and to find out whether you are among those who can adapt to commuting each day between normal gravity and zero. That’s important because our homes are in gravity obtained by rotation, and many of us work in the construction industry, with no gravity at all. Those who can adapt to rapid change qualify for higher-paying jobs.”

  He’d sat in his wicker chair with the book-crammed side arms; then he’d gone into the kitchenette to make that piña colada. Not enough. Never enough for all the civilians who were going to be di-di-diddled, once again. Oh, Madge, where will you be, in your funny, cuddly coat? In which crowd? Who will catalogue us, people of the earth? Who will lobby for us?

  So he’d resolved to. While finishing off all three batches of the colada. By family tradition he was heir to a long line of public defenders. The family mailbox, snowed in year-round with severely black-and-white begging envelopes and his parents’ doughty return-mail checks, had been his chore. Because of this and perhaps the island postmistress’s glare, he’d foreseen a certain style for himself. He would keep in touch with all the crowds he could, but by needling influence, not being it, his own modest role to be held to minimum in hope of retaining sense and compassion enough always to recall what the human quotient was. That presumption was to give him recurrent twinges. Last year, pushed by fame-guilt as well, he’d at last taken his own gravitational training. Only to empathize, never intending to make use of it. On that score he’d intended to be that darling of the syllogicians, the last man on earth. He’d never meant to go.

  Tomorrow. To the first public habitat in space. Current winds at Canaveral launching site being roughly north at 10 miles per hr., waves 1 ft. every 10 seconds when he came out on the beach, but within the last hour increasing rapidly to perhaps wind NE at 14, waves 2 ft. every 4 sec.

  Human gesture has been swarming toward him these last days, growing like British pennies in the pocket when you are on the way to France. That summer of the schooner, a woman who’d been in school with his mother had visited them on island—by then a haggard unisex redhead in meager-hipped corduroys and crunchy sweaters planing her breast points, who smelled of alcohol and perfume, had gelid, perfect skin, eyes that picked off men, and a vague, unlipsticked mouth, inner-shaded to mutton, which couldn’t eat without smear. Yesterday in the motel’s coffeeshop he’d seen her double. Staring at him instead of his father, she’d wiped off the orange mustache of his mother’s vegetable soup with the same backsweep of the hand.

  His last week in Washington, going to the dime store, he marked how the girls there still wetted a finger and sleeked a brow. In a New York men’s room, old Captain Stanley’s double
groaned with pleasure as he urinated from Gilpin’s father’s scow. Outside later, truckmen at a loading entrance cocked their brogues like early balloonists. Here at the motel, the cashier, desked like Gilpin’s banker in front of a high window, continually polished the sun from both their bald heads. And last night, waking from height dreams of a house he’d once owned high on a cliff over the Mohawk River, where a contractor, come to estimate a retainer fence, had once stepped back fatally far, Gilpin saw him again in midair, hands spread in apology.

  He’s looking at the still grounded people here with the same embarrassment which during his travel-slumming young years used to crawl in him at the sight of primitive peoples—even when they were still speciously safe in their rain forests or on the hot Kalahari sands where they carried pure water with them in their own buttocks. He knew too much about their future. Now he’s staring that way at his own kind. Professors with fine teeth and solid families, who jogged the parks displaying both, or vagrants with winter-rheumed noses and feet clotted into their shoes past hope of ever shedding them—it’s all the same. He’s standing on the borders of their innocence, which is gravitation. That dower-right of their bodies was about to be corrupted in a way which taking to the air within the stratosphere had never done. In a plane, no matter at what speed, a human body still pulled its own weight. The machine intervened for it, bargaining with Earth for motion. But now we desert into an element where the body can never be quite natural again.

  A sudden bulbul murmur from birds nested somewhere in this dark machinery jungle makes him shift on his own perch, his worn black leather-and-chrome shooting stick. From Allahabad to the Moscow subway, on ski lifts and in the outback, its cup and his bottom had developed such a comfortable triangular relationship that on his own three-week test trip in to orbit a few months ago he’d sorely missed its reassuring pressure, which wherever he and it go has meant “You and I—and gravity—are meditating. Taking it all in.” He’d even begun to wonder whether that rounding of the face which, due to downward pull on the facial features, so alters the physiognomy during orbital insertion mightn’t already be taking place, perhaps permanently, in his backside—and during the intensive checkups on return had even asked them to measure its radius.