Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  The screen goes blank. Cabin Six won’t see how its rocket dropped away into the ocean to join or not join the recoverable. The cabin waits, like hide-and-seekers closeted. It knows it is here, to be found.

  “Those onion-domes back there,” Lievering said hoarsely, “those were the tracking-ships.”

  Have they slept again? Wert, missing Soraya, checks the watch he’s allowed to wear here, constructed on habitat. Since the fire on the flight deck destroyed some circuits, the Courier has used the backup system, which sounds like ship’s bells. Only fifteen minutes have passed. Should he recall Soraya from the Hygiene Unit? Better not. The baby has made her boss of herself. Also, like many men from his region, the women, black and white both, have trained him to believe that women apprehend everything. If after Jenny he hadn’t let women into his serious life sooner, that must be why. Like those Irishmen who marry late out of their respect for the church, but not too late to have a large family—out of respect for it.

  “Do you suppose—that coffee? I feel unwontedly calm,” Gilpin says.

  “Oh no,” Wert answers at once, out of Embassy habit. Allay panic where you can. “End of journey stress maybe. The brain takes care of it. I dropped off, too, actually. Did anyone else?”

  Oliphant thinks she has not.

  “Indeed not—” Mulenberg says.

  “Are we all awake now?”

  Lievering has to be roused.

  Two cups. No one likes to say it. Maybe only one of the natural herbal restoratives their contracts specified. “I like to be forewarned,” Gilpin said.

  “Mole?”

  “I have been awake,” Mole said.

  “I still would drink that Kaffee,” Lievering murmurs. “Entschuldigen Sie, bitte! The screen!”

  STAND BY STAND BY STAND BY

  “I confess I am eager to see them,” Gilpin said. “Our constituency.”

  But it’s Dove. Full-face, a patch of plaster on his cheek, he speaks slowly, at some length. They can’t hear a word he says. He continues, unaware. A final phrase they catch in mime.

  Veronica says it dreamily, “‘Is that clear?’”

  “Not yet,” Mole says. But not smart-alecky. What makes the boy this sad? It’s plain that Veronica will take him on. Already has? Wert thinks not; where could they? But Mole’s not one to wait to be asked. What a marvelous, complicated kid—would he want one like him?

  Wert’s shaken by the answering physical rush, swelling his chest, opening his hands. How the empathy rises, tumid as sex. When you have a son.

  “Get…on…with…it,” Mulenberg says to the blank screen. That gray voice must have a separate pipeline through his easy, floppy bulk.

  The screen, a vapid, uneasy mauve, activates in white script, agitated but obedient.

  WE HAVE PARTIAL VIDEO FAILURE PICTURE AND SOUND DO NOT SYNCH WE HAVE JUST RECEIVED JOINT COMMAND’S REPORT WHICH FOLLOWS THEY ARE TRACKING US LIVE

  When the screen blanks again, Mulenberg’s fist rears up and comes down with a crack. His knuckles? Or the couch.

  With the new seating, Wert is right behind him. In his head he reviews the two arrangements, not sure why. What had been Mulenberg, Oliphant, Lievering, Gilpin, himself, and Soraya, is now: Mulenberg, himself, Lievering, Gilpin, Oliphant—and Mole. In emergency, their deployment can make only accidental difference. But he can hear Mulenberg’s heavy breathing, feel the balked energy, always so evasively sexual. They all have some of that now, though nothing like Jack. Gilpin shows it least, but one too-sharp twit from him, or one more twinned whisper from the two end-seats, and that raw intake in front of Wert could blow. Wert’s in the right place, if anyone has to take charge.

  In front of him, he sees a descending moisture, falling slowly, in accordance with G-force. From Mulenberg’s couch.

  Dove here. The screen is blank. Can you hear me? The voice clears its throat. All cabins attend. The voice has already shrunk. Cabins Three and Four in particular stand by for command report. Followed by film if we can pick it up. They have us on world satellite. The voice fades, replaced by a flash of the flight deck. Dove is reading from a panel, in clogged static, blurred with squeals. They hear a blurted One eighty-five and what may be a Please God. The flight deck vanishes.

  “What are the wild waves saying, Dove?” Mole’s voice from the rear. “Give us the script.”

  Mulenberg, with a growl, leaps from his seat.

  “Hold it, Jack. He’s using the intercom on my seat.” Wert’s just realized it.

  “Give us the screen alone, please. The audio has a glitch in it.” Mole has the pebble-smooth space-command voice down to perfection. But shouldn’t he identify them, Cabin Six to Flight Deck? Maybe they know.

  They do. The cabin is irradiated by a large white message, in caps moving left to right: NASA JOINT COMMAND TO COURIER: ACCORDING TO ATTITUDE INFORMATION COURSE DEFLECTION DUE TO UNIDENTIFIED RESISTANCE NOW MODERATING…INERTIAL MEASURING UNITS NOW PROVIDING CORRECT NAVIGATIONAL REFERENCE…VECTOR UPDATE INITIALIZATION AND EXTRAPOLATION NOW PROCEEDING…TACAN INTERROGATOR ON FORWARD AVIONIC BAY WAS KNOCKED OUT NOW FUNCTIONING…PAYLOAD S-BAND INTERROGATOR WAS OFF…NOW IN ORDER…YOU ARE NOW OPERATIONAL…BUT KEEP CHECKING MSBLS

  YOU ARE NOW TOO FAR OFF POSITION FOR DOCKING PLAN ALPHA BUT WILL ATTAIN CAPABILITY FOR CONTINGENCY TERMINAL RENDEZVOUS IN 185 MINUTES…WE HAD EXPECTED TO INITIATE A POINTING VECTOR TOWARD TARGET WITHIN AN ACCURACY OF PLUS-MINUS ZERO POINT 5 DEGREES HOWEVER YOU SHOWING PAYLOAD MISALIGNMENT ERROR AS REPORTED PREVIOUSLY…CHECK PRIORITY PAYLOAD VIA PLANNED EVA…ALL CABINS STAND BY FOR ACTIVE RENDEZVOUS DRILL…REPEAT…YOU ARE TOO FAR…

  They watch it through twice. There is no PLEASE GOD. The cabin is dark.

  “Software—” Mulenberg says then. “The muddy software. I told them.”

  “What’s MSBLS?” Gilpin says. “Look in your pocket, Jack.” For the diagram he carries everywhere.

  “Don’t have to. Microwave Scan Beam Landing System. Know the company who makes it. I told Quality Control, might as well depend on extra-sensory perception.”

  “But you still—came aboard.”

  “Yes, Oliphant. I’m aboard.”

  “But, Mr. Mulenberg—Jack.” Lievering has never before called him that. “Are we not depending on that all the time? When I am on EVA I feel it especially.” He waits, a man used to hostility. “Not just for me, please. A force.”

  “You never said. When we were out there.”

  “But you felt it, yes, Mole? You felt it.”

  “For you, Vulfie,” Mole said.

  After a pause, Veronica says, “That force, Lievering. Are you for it? Or against.”

  No answer is expected. None comes.

  “Soraya—” Wert says. “I must go to her. If it’s going to be this dark.”

  “Hush—” Gilpin says. “All of you. They’re tracking us. They’ll be showing us. Live. Us now.”

  He’s so humbled here, by the physical. They’ve forgotten who he is—the most public man here. And the passenger with the longest expertise—in comradeship.

  It grows hot in the cabin. Or seems so, as closets do. Are all their temples pounding as Wert’s are? Pleading to be found?

  “Jesus God—” the seat in front of him mutters, “pick us up, will you!”

  To estimate time in the dark is an acquired faculty. In prison, Soraya did it. You travel on your breath, she said once—like in sex. And whom do you copulate with, then—God? Wert hadn’t asked. Her first month pregnant she lost the power anyway. I cannot even estimate my child, she’ll say, laughing. That’s so my son will have all the time he wants, in his dark. She has the sudden humor of the submissive. His other wife, who bends in his arms like a rod which understands everything and denies it, has none. She is like Lievering.

  All these indemnifying and subtracting powers, how they swirl around him. In the computing dark.

  Dove’s voice comes, through the keyhole. They have us.

  On the screen a white dot, growing larger. Is it nea
ring, or are we nearing it? Child-in-the-dark, how absurd. We are it.

  The voice comes again, shakily. This is us, folks.

  There we are. That white fly, long since shed of its hard sheath. In shape exactly like the deerfly which haunts a scroungy stable, or will settle for a man’s scalp.

  They stare, deep in their own marvelous continuity.

  “Soar on!” Somebody says it aloud. The civil administrator.

  Soar. Soar. Soar. Soar. It comes in a Gregorian rumble, from all.

  Oh we float, the administrator says, deep within himself. Freed of nations or not—we float.

  “Keep seeing us as we are, Down Below,” Gilpin says shakily.

  “Oh, Tom—” Oliphant cries, “there we go.”

  The fly’s becoming a dot again. They watch it recede. Dying is like this, some Tractarians say. The soul hangs over the body, watching it.

  “We are still here, Ronchen. In our chariot.” Lately, Lievering has a way of returning her to seriousness he plainly thinks she has missed. Lately, she tolerates it.

  Wert no longer sees the frivolous or stark as that divisible. In the constant assemblage of light and dark which is the mind here, even a shoelace he has to bend to becomes part of all capability. Space invades the being from any crack. Words are merely Lievering’s crack. And he’s always hunting words for brotherhood. But the ancient Britons had a chariot whose wheels, mounted with sickle-blades, cut to pieces whatever came its way. Lievering’s words—like those of a woman too deep in emotion, are often over-apposite.

  Like Wert’s other wife, for instance, who is forever leaving, and puts all her life on her tongue tip when she says good-bye.

  “Yes, Veronica.” Gilpin always gives her her full name. “Gone.”

  How many of the 185 minutes have passed? Wert can’t recall what a rendezvous drill is. All instruction has oozed from him, like the trickle from the couch in front. He wishes he could see the face of his watch. Though strictly it has no face. Like so much made on Island Five.

  COURIER YOU ARE NOW GOING OUT OF RANGE

  Of whose? Canaveral’s? And is that good or bad? Where are we now?

  Passengers who attempt the other expertise create their own suspense. In the eddying vacuum Wert feels for what his black nurse used to call his mind-truths. Two weeks ago, knowing very well where he was, he’d turned his back on the gawpers scanning his mare before the handicap, off-track bettors who came one day a year, armed with tip sheets just as Cabin Six had been, and in the same state of demi-ignorance. To whom he could have said: at the sale the mare looked to me for all the world like that old engraving of Blink Bonny, the great runner and a good dam—one of whose foals was brought to this very county a century and a half ago, and lost sight of. Got her cheap, because of the native curl in her tail. He yearns unbearably—for that dot.

  U.S. NASA JOINT SPACE COMMAND

  WE HAVE COURIER

  The screen-shine of this Mission Control, wherever it is, is bright. The sectored room looks much as any space command. High above its winking panels one may glimpse though not quite read that blazon now on every NASA facility, the living-station as well: MAN IS BOTH THE WEAKEST AND MOST IMPORTANT LINK IN THE CHAIN

  The men working at the many panels have their backs to the viewers. Those on a short uniformed line of five men in front do not. One officer in the center is capless. Like the legend, he is too far for details, but not for outline. A tall, frizzed head on its long Mole-neck. Surely that’s Perdue. All the officers have their right arms raised in the familiar space gesture. They are in salute.

  Mulenberg bursts into song. “Morte-e—” His voice cracks on it. Standing to face the screen, he bawls on anyway. He has the old Italianate pronunciation, the vowels long. High syllables, linking Wert to old Sundays. He finishes head bowed.

  “That a prayer?” Gilpin says, not harshly.

  “Only one I know.”

  “What’s it say?”

  He turns, red-faced. “I never knew.”

  “I used to know Latin,” Wert said. “But no prayers.”

  “Sorry. If I blocked the screen for anyone.” Mulenberg sank into his seat.

  “You didn’t,” Mole said.

  If we could—Wert feels—we should swivel to look at Mole, show some kind of faith in him. To swear to his worth. But the whole cabin’s now bathed in the video’s alternate flashes, brown to white.

  EARTH TO COURIER COURIER TO EARTH

  L-5 VIA ALL SATELLITES

  STAND BY

  “Veronica—” Gilpin says, “your tidy pals at Peenemünde must have briefed you on this. Do us the honor.”

  “They briefed me, nuh. But not on what you think. Sure we’ll watch you, Peenemünde said. Und auch Der L-Fünf. Will we watch them to the Ode of Joy?…Our cargo shuttles lift off and dock to it, you know…Beethoven belongs to the world, I told them. Ah, but you people—they said—Sie wunschen die Ganze Welt haüslich machen. You wish to domesticate the whole world.”

  “Germans,” Lievering said.

  “No—everywhere. That’s what they brief you. That they won’t disappear.”

  “We lack tact,” Wert said. It was always said to him.

  “The English, too, Ronchen. Before I leave I get letter from a poet friend. They are shocked the Courier is not international.”

  “Space is any man’s glory. We’ll do it for them.” But suddenly Mulenberg makes the squeezed sound which comes from that other plexus in him, involuntary.

  There it is on the screen, the Earth. Colorless but charged with silver, like all video. Moving at the pace of the tears of things, that imperceptible motion. It is as they think; it is everything they think. Have they escaped it? More than half of its population will be looking at them. Wert feels—not homesickness. The malaise of the linked.

  “Superfly,” Mole whispers. “Here comes Superfly.”

  The Courier is now flying on full camera, so close that they might be looking at it from an escort plane. They can see that queer, proud embossment on the wings—NASA—as other worlds might see it. Two plane points. Or missiles. Or pyramids.

  And as it vanishes, in replacement the Courier’s passengers see its own interior for the first time in entirety, spread out cockpit to tail, aft to forward as seen from above, like some diagram an even huger Mulenberg might have in his pocket. Is it a model? Or what interpenetrated slide-magic has imaged all those tiny figures slumped forward in their couches?

  “One hundred of us? By God, there are.” Behind Wert, Tom Gilpin must have risen to his feet. In the long, opened-up belly of the Courier—like an alligator slit from snout to toe, the top half laid back and all its organs plain, do they almost see a tiny figure rise?

  “Look, Veronica,” Mulenberg babbles, “here we are again. On television. That’s how we met. But on the street. You had a gun in my back. Or nearly.” He speaks in a lover’s voice.

  The diagram regards them steadily. Will it never leave? Perhaps they’re to see themselves so until docking—a page from a magic manual. Wert puts his head in his hands. To rest his eyes? His hands tremble; they know he’s kidding. His body feels Soraya’s absence like a guilt; he’s let her stay away; he admits it. And the other in Switzerland, he’s let her stay away, too—or go. You are maybe a man who should only be in public life she’d said, shrewdly unfair. For this was their kinship, yet she would be leaving him to the more private one. He has come away, or been led, rather than decided.

  But it’s public service that rests him, in the profound relief which adherence to early precept always brings. As if his right hand had early been sewn to his breast in a certain posture. So armed, he can sleep at night in face of the bloodiest event. He has his village, which he cannot get away from—sometimes behind him, sometimes before.

  “That fifth cabin—” Mole says. “Why’s it dark?”

  The screen switches now, coolly normal, filled as it is in the whitish living-room style, with three cleanly seen talking heads. This is the hom
e studio, commenting on their flight. Behind is the controllable, backdrop sky which each tired citizen yearns toward at evening. The two men on the ends are those same interlocutors who performed in the corridor before liftoff. The stage-left one is the more famous. Between them, cinched like a plainer animal in a fancy trap, will be the usual “expert.” A table borders them. But with that sky and the twinkle of mike on each, it might be an arête they are gazing from, or a battlefield. Yet they chat.

  So familiar is the scene, Wert almost fails to realize that the screen is again in synch. So fluent and easy now the voices of the commentators, swallowing all events. Briefed to the ears with destiny, taking responsibility for none, it’s their alternation which is so brilliantly shoddy. The man in the middle, hugging his expertise, looks uncomfortable.

  Neatly the other two bounce out the Courier’s situation, by turns tickling danger, reassurance and history:

  We proceed to the docking, which will be at Eastern Standard Time Central Western To rendezvous with Island 5 the Courier will have to pass through For those who don’t know what is meant by EVA Contingency EVA A fire in the avionic bays temporarily but now The Courier has been flying during the anniversary week of the first orbital flight of the pioneer space-shuttle Columbia, which initiated Since then the number of technical and military missions exceeds Island 5 is the first built in space itself, and will launch an industrial effort whose working population is expected to reach If the eight-year plan on Island 5 is successful our country will be the first to Though other nations are assumed to have long-range laser capacity for missile and spacecraft intercept tion, none is known to function beyond a range of Island 5, whose concept has for the present superseded NASA’s interplanetary exploration, lies at a range deemed beyond It is estimated that the number of Islands, of which other prototypes are under NASA study for similar locations, could by the middle of the coming century reach

  Such facts become raindrops. One doesn’t listen. But now the two interlocutors stumble—like over a pram left at the bottom of the stairs.

  “It has just been reported—”