Downstairs he savors the danger of the work to come, hopes for it. In grammar school he had once immediately eaten a couple of stinging liqueur-chocolates which a malicious boy with a father in Intelligence had told him were “spy-savers,” for use when cornered. He had wanted that cornering; it was not to be. He still craves it. But the rhythm of fearlessness, which one can neither fake nor avoid, takes care of him—and does his work.
Tonight three other payload specialists are strung out along the mid-fuselage structure of the bay, which stretches for 120 feet. One man is at the payload-handling station, facing aft. This man can open and close the Payload Bay’s door, deploy the manipulator arms and control the lights and cameras mounted inside the bay. Four closed-circuit television monitors are displaying video from those cameras, to check all maneuvers. The second of the three other men stands there. The whole system is known as a “remote” one. It reminds Lievering of his own. Remote, but demanding men in chariotry.
Long ago, when the space push was still quasi-international, the first such manipulator system had been designed by Canadians. They did well. In those days one manipulator arm used to be standard, a second one optional. Now he doesn’t know how many there are. What he and the others are about to do—135 minutes before docking—is not standard. They are going to retrieve a package unfortunately misaligned—in order to deploy it for more stringent pointing and stability accuracy.
He thinks of this process as akin to what was done to him in the British hospital, so long ago. For, this payload item, like him requiring such special handling, has too its own controls for what is termed in technical space language, “its particular experiment.” Like a man’s life. But “since structural deformation error sources always exist between the sensors”—one can never point a payload as exactly as a vehicle. For vehicle, translate: the world.
To be able to get outside one’s world even if only when contingency calls—how marvelous. He’s been out here twice before. The first time he actively assisted in the inspection of photographs, against a possible manual override of certain components. Next time, he merely watched repairs and calibrations of antennae and other instrumentation, to whose vibrations he tremored as to an opened brain. That time, he’d been stationed at an airlock outside the cabin on the aft bulkhead. This time he’s nearer the docking module itself. During docking, this module, should they still be on EVA, must serve as their EVA airlock. If they are no longer on EVA it will mean they have performed their mission well. Or as well as can be.
What he hopes one day to see is the launching of a satellite into orbit—the Island’s orbit, he assumes that to be, no longer the Earth’s. A Courier, they say, can deliver as many as ten on a single mission. First, the satellite would be serviced, checked out and loaded—they would have done all that in the ship. On reaching the orbit desired—and after further predeployment checks—the satellite will lift from the cargo-bay retention structures, then extend away from whatever Orbiter—and release!
Its final activation would of course be by radio command.
To recover a satellite, one would rendezvous with it, maneuver close and grab it with one of those “remote” arms. After that—simply deactivate, stow in the bay and lock it up for further use.
He laughs when he thinks of this process, both in theory and execution so resembling the ingenious laundry pullies, much envied by the English, which his mother had had installed between house and tool shed at their London residence, after a design carried in her head all the way from Berlin.
The item they are handling now would be launched in much the same way. Retrieval, he suspects, might be moot. Though it is obviously a deep-space item, and requires a propulsion stage of its own, he doesn’t know its precise function. What he does know is that the Courier’s retention structure is not quite what it should be—yet they’re carrying two of what the head crewman calls “the little beauties.” Lievering has heard no other name for them. But feeling his way with words, as always, he has put together enough syllables dropped like crumbs during the last two repair jobs, and one fringe ejaculation—“If I knew the activation phrase for this thing I wouldn’t even think it”—to surmise the blinker word going on and off in all heads during tonight’s operation. Detonate.
They like to fool about, and then deny. Unless a vehicle itself goes all to blazes—they’ve declared to him—a little beauty is utterly safe. And maybe even then. It cannot self-detonate. “Unlike a man—” he said to them. They hadn’t replied. He had expected none. But he expects to see the item shortly.
The fourth man, the head crewman himself, is inside the bay, next to it.
The airlock hatch to the bay is D-shaped. In shuttles to date, the flat side of the D had a minimum clearance of thirty-six inches, the inside diameter of the airlock being sixty-three and its length eighty-three. For the Courier—triple it. Men haven’t magnified since the old days. But loads in order to pay off may have to. The same thing used to happen to his father’s library in Berlin—ever being outmoded, and ever more books. Though there, “the old days” had meant more than a decade or so. Still to Lievering rejoicing here, his whole life seems to have deployed and prepared him toward this securely threatened edge.
He’s not anything like a real specialist. Yet Pass me the Nijinsky, they’ll say of him—and down or up or sideways he’ll go for them. Just so the Paris brothel would have gambled on his face to make do for the ordinary rest of him. That wouldn’t happen to his face now, and he is glad. Only a woman may offer to the fate she craves a mere face.
What he’s so far done on EVA is minor compared with what he may be used for now—depending on word from the bay. Last time, while he never touched the radiator panels being installed for increased heat rejection—for what reason they hadn’t said—he was there in time when one of the others, in spite of foot restraints, slipped in the matter of space judgment, and might have soared wide. At present he’s keeping watch at the handrails which extend along the aft bulkhead, down the hinge line of the hatch door and into the bay—and though he has nothing to do with the transfer of the equipment itself, if he has a suggestion for body-handling, the men will follow it. Down in the bay itself are what are called “translation-aids,” for moving about. He is their translation-aid out here.
Tonight he also has charge of the mission kit of life-support expendables. Since their two previous six-hour stints out here have depleted these, the kit now contains only a supply for the remaining emergency EVA allowed them—so in one way his load is light.
The other half of his responsibility is an informal one, like him, not in any manual. As they are aligning the beauties down there in the bay, should there come a spot too tight for normal agility, he’ll fill in for them. While—hopefully or foolishly, they post themselves well away. He is their life-expendable. They may think he isn’t aware of it. They can’t know he relishes it. Or perhaps they may. He doesn’t crave absolutes the way Gilpin does—to help nourish the world. He wants to be one. This is hard to conceal. It would never occur to him to try.
Or to wonder why all his life the idea of rank for himself has horrified him, and the menial task has calmed him best. Down at the bottom of the rich London households—once even a royal one—to which refugee children of his class had now and then been bid, there might still be encountered a man-of-all-work and no one trade, Victorian in job and name, who performed any task the other help had no time or will for, from running to the post to scrubbing out a grate. This man, serving the servants themselves but outdoing them all in randomness, had a shuffling, kitchen-grub freedom they never caught onto. His title was “the useful man,” and the young Wolf, when once teased at his father’s club to tell his ambition, had elected to be one—to veiled smiles from the merchandisers who disliked his father’s airs, and a chorus of praise from the Fabians. A day after, the agonized years of word-memorizing and list-reading had begun, done in their skylighted attic at home, with his father shouting Recite to the Gods.
> Yes, I am in place, Lievering now mimes to the first crewman to enter the hatch. They both have intercoms, but they all mime when they can; it seems to go better with space. Now the two men still out here must be kept in the tail of his concertmeister eye. Finally both have passed him, descending. Down there the lights on booms and side walls illumine all four now in the bay. Two are moving along the sides, which accept the longitudinal and vertical loads. Two are along the keel, which accepts the lateral ones. Now the four conjoin, maybe in conference on just where the two beauties are. He would like to turn off his intercom, but dares not. In compromise, he impels himself along the vehicle to a point from which, though he can spring to duty on command, those four are out of sight.
He is alone. He can dare to look up. He never before has. The secret of his rhythm is that unlike even a pirouetting dancer, it never fixes the eye except on an inner recess. Those possessors of a body rhythm which moves from the loins are accepted readily enough by their fellows. Those in whom it moves from the brain via the restless funnel of the mouth are often scarcely acceptable to themselves. Until he came to the Courier he was ashamed of his gift except when he taught.
He grasps a handrail, for dizziness. Even if he could, he wouldn’t wish to float off clothed. Stealthily, from eyes lowered but observing through what Der Vater had called their Seitenflügeln—their “side-aisles”—a practice forbidden him in the attic, he can see the universe streaming past him. In a second, he is going to cede it his innerness. Unlike in the wranglings of sex, during which some men illusion the same—the movement will not be mutual. He isn’t fool enough, like some, to expect that even of a universe.
What he fears is that when he at last stares fully at this gold-black Eden in which the Courier rides frictionless, once again he will see only a setting—for him. Shutting his eyes tight, riding his wedged feet like a skier, Lievering lifts his arms, his chin—and stares wide.
It is an attic. But through its chinks one may address the gods. Here in this place, there will be almost no gap between the live and the dead, or between a proposal and its destiny. Fact will fulfill itself like dream, and beyond any smirch of the logic which is also gravitational. How else could he have begun to feel—against all the weight of reason—that there must be a buried Savior already on Island, ready to rise with their coming? Because they themselves, the multiple saviors floating out on all the Couriers, will have brought Him there, along with them?
His audience of stars, those fixed points which he can stare at now, tell him it makes no difference why.
Was it Christian or Jewish, or even anti-Jewish, to have proposed such a thing?
Answer: Out here is the sacristy, and the rabbinate.
Now the final heresy: Is it I also who am buried there?
The answer comes as it still must to morning scholars everywhere bent over their cabalas in all the ghettos—or out free: This place sees no difference in the quality of thought as to where it is bred.
And any answer is only his own, like the one given to Mole yesterday, when that imp of a scholar—for that’s what he will be, no matter what headmasters say—asked, shivering, “Wolf—are you, are we really in that all-night sleep of the soul? Am I?” And he’d answered diffidently: “Sure. Sure, all of us,” unable to add as he should have: But you surround me, all of you.
Is that a star falling? If so, not in reply. If the word colleague brings tears to some eyes, those gold auras tell him, that is not our lookout.
What’s happening to his life-supports? He’s so cold now that a tomb might not be a chilly place. He sees the need for jokes. Could he make one? Come in, Wolf, Dr. Larry said one day. We are going to have a little practice session. We are going to act as if you exist. He hadn’t replied. Across the years, Lievering, another refugee, now answers him.
“Ah, Doctor—” Lievering says to the state of things, “always arguing.”
Ah, ah—the deep throb of the craft’s silent progress endorses him.
Sure Sure Sure Sure Sure Sure.
His mouth is stiffening. Speech is what you perpetrate upon the world. “Though it is of no importance—” he manages to eke out, “I am trying to understand myself. And. You. Attack me.”
Out of the fund of situations offered him through life and refused, his own mouth chooses, chanting. He can see the words it speaks just as these were written down for it, some capitalized, some lowercase. At first he’d been required to know the meaning of all words on his father’s lists, but sometimes failed to. Those were the words he articulated best. Once his father caught on, the definitions were let go, though sometimes the voice at his side couldn’t forbear murmuring them, in that threatening library undertone which yet had brought the family so far. Of all the lists, loathed for being forced on him but still compelling, this one, a parable of all journeys out, had been his favorite.
Whip-tom-kelly
Beebread
hemule
Venery
Nichil
nighness
hellward
Flotant
He is going to push off. Calling out whip-whip the name of a bird, chosen for its aspirate. With traces of honeycomb on his lips. And having for company on the way one roebuck in its third year, he will surge out into the sea of venery—mind the two meanings, son: sexual pleasure and the hunting of game.
But he is already past that, and navigating deep into the old spelling of nothingness, on two next words chosen surely for their directional help. At last, he is Flotant—a term applied to anything flying in the air, or so displayed.
All those h’s, and ch’s, and gh’s, chosen so cunningly for a Teuton in England, and the v in venery the hardest; he has done it faultlessly, as never before. All the while on the journey he must have had always in mind.
He floats. On the L-5 they will have—just as is done at an Olympics—Flotant Sports. He will aim instead for those gold points which now cram toward him and recede. Come by elephant, Wolf, or by chariot, or crashing through sonnets or shopping for speech on Der Vater’s grocery lists; it is all the same to them.
In this attic the vision seizes one because it is already here. Even memory is returned to those who have escaped it. Ahead of him, the faces he passed by in life are filling the haunted picture frames he kept bare for martyrs he had never seen.
This is a real attack. His tongue, falling back, fills his mouth with its tremendous joke. He is the boy who kept crying “Wolf!”
The voice calling back to him is not his own. A voice! Of Brotherhood! He catapults toward it and is pulled up short, all the time attached to the craft by those wavering deep-sea divers’ coils which plumb his back. His tongue’s his own again. His fists, clawed in his mitts, relax. Upright, he jounces toward the hatch. In its metal wall he peers at himself, mirrored there. Behind that visor, is there a face he hasn’t seen recently, purer at the cheeks and mouth and temples than a man’s ought to be? It has suffered an attack of space, but it will be a useful man’s yet.
“Lievering—” the voice of the intercom says again, “come down into the bay.”
MOLE’S RENDEZVOUS
MOLE WANTS NOTHING FROM GUNS. He’s annexed this one because it has twice belonged to a boy his age. He has left its ammunition behind. He’s taking it along to the flight deck because it is a document. Dead and buried in a war, revived with the help of Geiger counters and slung over his fatigue suit’s shoulder by its slim new leather, it blends quite well with his other strappings and might be some newfangled implement against shark. It’s a British Enfield, the note accompanying it had said. We wish it was one of ours, a Winchester. But my father says the war in these parts didn’t get those in time, not till 1865. I think he’s wrong. But anyway, it isn’t one.
That boy, too, believes his father is wrong.
On his way, he stops in at the Free Room. He has an itch to see whether anyone ever did use that little confession-pouch. If it’s still there.
He’s managed not to be in th
e Free Room since he hung it there. Now of course the room is empty. Empty rooms used to bug his girl, when she came into their flat alone. They know they can dispense with you, she said. But that was because she was leaving. The Free Room knows he is, too. The pouch is there. Someone has detached it from the grill-work and laid it neatly on a shelf. He half hopes. But it is empty, too.
“We missed you. At the suiting-up.”
In his sandals still, he could easily whirl and grab her, as in old courtships. His flesh creeps toward that. He answers as he is, bent to the shelf, back turned. “That why you followed me?”
“To leave a note for you.”
“Saying what?”
“Hadn’t decided yet. Just knew I wanted to.”
He turns. Suited up as she is except for bare head and hands, there still remain visible the nostrils that so please him, cut like the eyelets in his mother’s table-linen, also her height, matched against his, and most of all her skin—but why choose? There wouldn’t be time for it. There hasn’t been.
She agrees without a word. Much has been saved here, by their being in the same slot, much bypassed. He thinks of it.
“Where will you? Suit up?”
“Cabin Two.”
“And to dock? Where will you hole in?”
Nobody’s said. He’s been so much a part of the drills—and so adept at finding a place, at times he’s forgotten his own status. “Probably there. If Lievering’s on EVA though—I could come to your place.”
She laughs like a riff. He likes that best.
He flicked the empty pouch, addressing it: “Wish me luck, hear?”
Two Cabin is so silent, so ready. Entering from aft, he finds no one lounging. No more locker-room sprawl, or lilting chitchat. Though the second crew’s chaff is kindergarten stuff to the brain-scanning in Cabin Six, he’s liked it here. He sees that his usual seat—up in front of Arthur Shefflin, the next best whistler after the medic—is occupied. No sweat, now and then he’s found it so, the guy in it either telling him to buzz off to drill or galley, or in with Tuohy, or getting up himself to go back to the Pit. Which is what the flight deck is called here, manual or not.
Mysteries of Motion Page 60
