Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  Nobody’s moving. Though faced away from him, they have an odd symmetry. Not strapped in yet, but their visors are down. Soldier ants are said to give off odor when in swarm. He can’t smell anything new. But nobody’s turning round to him. Cabin Two is full up.

  Aw, come on. He doesn’t say it. That’s his pituitary taking over—that on-the-mark rush. The antennae tightness of his scalp is fear—a protective mechanism. Name it, Wolf says; then stand pat. He forces himself to. The man in the rear seat nearest him stands up. That should be Ervin. He was on EVA when Mole was. He mimes for Mole to approach the flight deck. Mole mimes back, an easy acknowledgment, staring into the other's visor as he goes forward. It isn’t Ervin.

  Passing the next two seats he manages to lean friendly on each shoulder. Neither face is known to him. He passes up a couple. Seat Four is Arthur. Ringers? Mole says without lips as he bends over. Old Arthur blinks. “That was some cockfight, kid,” Arthur says, falsely loud. “Saw you on the monitor.” Mole passes his own usual seat without bending to its occupant.

  He stands at the flight deck hatch. On the closed-circuit monitor they’ll have a view of him standing here. They’ve got used to him toting the gun. But reminded of what was cautioned him when he was led on the ship he resumes his old earth-slouch. The hatch is opening.

  “Don’t shoot,” Mole said.

  The flight deck is blinding bright. Icy stalagmites of chairs encrust upward from the removable floor panels. Display-and-control panels are drip-winking down. The line of crewmen is pinched between. They’re too busy to look up. Too steadfast. They wear the face-exposing chin-strapped helmets which make all men look-alikes. There is no empty seat, though there is a tenth one. He has time to count. Left of it in a fire-blackened frame is the giant star-screen which had awed the medic. Big enough for a man to walk into. Or from. Nearest it, a head turns. “Your father’s expecting you,” Dove said.

  “Where?” he says humbly.

  “Telephone Booth.”

  The simplest directions weigh heavy here. Everything in spacecraft has a nickname. Dove, at the weekly home-dinners, had been full of them, Crawler Transports turning into Train Wrecks and one vast apparatus, whose function they were quiet about, into The Four Horsemen. It was one more way of joking. His father never joined in.

  “Back there, kid.”

  Offset from the rest of the avionics array, but surrounded by the ever-present computer panels and yellow alarms, is the communications center Mulenberg had half described—a whole inner box of trapped light. Well, they have to woo it far. Pride seeps to him, for workmanship in spite of all muddle. “Looks like a fortune-teller’s booth.” Going in he hangs back; in close quarters he doesn’t fancy a person behind him. No great ape does. Dove’s paw is at his elbow. He isn’t wearing his college signet ring; can’t here. His hand looks less plump without it. “Yeah, kid, that was a fight. Worried us. You’re valuable cargo. To one and all.”

  They’re now concealed by the niche’s high-molded angle.

  “You have visitors, Charlie. You still in command?”

  Dove’s leftover burns go redder. “Never was, and you know it. Even a little kid, you were never fooled. Or about him.” Dove put his lips to Mole’s ear. “They came in the carts, at launch-time. Put in their own passengers. Your dear father had us traveling so light. That’ll teach him. Anti-civilians—he’s got ’em now.” Dove pressed a button, or what stood for buttons here. A timer dial lit up. “Seven minutes, then you’re on with him.”

  “He asked for me?”

  “Burnt up the wires, when he heard.”

  “From where?”

  “Joint Command—where else? Wanted to see you.” Dove smiled at his own ring finger. “We sure let him.”

  It gets to him. On EVA. They showed him to his father on EVA. That’s why he was allowed.

  “I was terrible.”

  “Boy, you were. Lucky your sidekick.”

  “Lievering still out there?”

  Dove stares afar. “Yeah, I guess. Until we dock. If.”

  They both let a half-minute go by.

  “Then it is a bummer? The Courier.”

  He’s watching a curious act—Dove smoothing his chin, rubbing his singed nose, knuckling his palms in a washing motion, finally stretching his arms to the physical riches glittering close, all in what must be a loyalty to the thing itself. He moves like a snake unable to rid itself of its sheath. “Look at it—how can it be? Sure, they all have glitches. But we could make it. What we’ve had is a weak link. Oh, not you, Mole. But it’s in the family.

  “The timer’s gone to four. Why else would you have come—” Dove says, “why else would we have been crazy enough to let you.” His lips are swollen. “Dumb enough.”

  “Why did you?” Mole’s voice cracks. He’s ashamed.

  Behind Dove, the man who isn’t Ervin appears, his lean face jutting. So revealed, Mole has seen it somewhere. In a group of men, the only one with shaven head. “Told him yet? What’s expected of him?”

  “Just on.” Dove edges Mole farther in. “Precious—you’re our backup. Don’t tell me you didn’t know.”

  “They couldn’t shift the load,” the other man said. By that arm-embroidery, he’s no NASA commander. “We’ll ditch it. Then come in for terminal-rendezvous. I’ve warned Joint. They won’t agree to it.” He shifts what weight he has. The movement of a spacesuit can be hilarious, or sinister. “That’s where you come in, Junior Perdue. Get that across to him. To yon Admiral. Maybe passengers can wait around. Maybe indefinitely. We can’t. We won’t. We want to land. Alpha rendezvous as planned. We’ll do it by manual control if necessary. We have—that option. We’ll come in nice and tidy, speed less than Mach 5.”

  He poked Mole’s chest. “Say the normal ninety-five miles per.” He lifts a boot and watches it descend. He has a lot of G-force on his own. “So explain to him. How it isn’t fair—for a passenger like you to be expendable.” He straightens; he’s one of those who has to move. “Bawl, if you have to.”

  Maybe it was that bawl. Maybe it was the Junior. Maybe it was the Perdue. “I won’t explain anything,” Mole said, “except what you explain to me.”

  “What did I tell you?” Dove said. “A chip of him. Better let me.” He took Mole by the hand, gazing with distaste at the botched purple wrist. The dial in the niche has gone to five. “One—that extra payload. We didn’t know about it until after. NASA’s nose is clean. Or my mission crew’s is. Two: Our visitors—they did know.” He is counting on Mole’s fingers. “Three: Maybe that payload’s why we had a bump back there nobody knows from what. No matter what else they know. Four: We daren’t dock with that load positioned as it now is; we can’t seem to shift it. Five:” his voice lowers, “We can ditch it.” He grabbed Mole’s other hand, first missing it. “Six and Seven: Command doesn’t want us to; we can do it anyway.” He drew breath. “Eight: If we do, Command will not cooperate. And that we can’t do alone. A rendezvous takes two.” Dove sighs. “Nine? Or we could do as they say. Not drop the payload. Which would avoid international complications. And wait like good boys. In orbit. Until they come for us.” His grip is crushing. “Mister here, is not willing.”

  Over that other face comes a flick of contempt. Among the Washington parents there are one or two fathers like him. Machines don’t satisfy this kind, not down at the bottom of their competence. At a point when, because there are so many machines, ordinary men in service to them give in to them and go home to tree-culture or ritual massage or swing-sex, this man will simply trample the balky machines themselves, in order to get on with it. Only animal confrontation will satisfy—all the more because it can’t be had.

  “You’re Army, aren’t you?” Mole said. “Used to see you at the general’s. You’re one of the ones who swat Linda for listening.”

  The man has a watch like Wert’s. He glances at it.

  “Ten.” Dove drops Mole’s hand. “Mole? That’s you.”

  The dial is counting,
too. Six minutes have gone.

  “What’s that hanging on him?” the man said. “A gun?”

  “An ancient document,” Mole says. “It has no ammo.”

  “That’s how the young shoot these days,” Dove said. “Aw, let him keep it. He’s not a bad kid. Used to see him at his father’s. When we came to dinner, Mole—so your father could spread himself, and his pure intentions. Over the week’s contracts. And those maps.”

  “There were never any people on them,” Mole says.

  “We’re the people,” Dove said. “The guys who run this mission. Dummysville, Grade A.”

  The other man lifts an eyebrow. The insignia on his breast rise. “Want to know why we can’t shift, Dove? The bay is like stacked with consumables. Unbelievable amounts of them. Any idea why?”

  “Wuddya know.” Dove is pushing at panels in the niche. Filmy screens begin to close around Mole.

  “Hey, what are those?” He’s afraid his voice is panicky.

  “For shadow,” the man says. “Optics.” There is still the contempt.

  Dove watches him go. “Hope they’ve noticed the star-sensor is off,” he murmurs. “But you do like they say. Save all our necks.” He pokes his head back in, pointing to a yellow button. “Push that when you’re through. No time to monitor you. You have ten minutes; then we need this place.” His eyes gleam like signet rings. “Shoot him for me,” Dove said.

  He’s alone. The screen in front of him begins working like a soup before it boils. He himself is standing in the deep pollution of the facts. Fred, brought up to a business, will do better at that; he won’t expect his houses to be all dream; he has said so. As he deals with his Osaka contractors, he’ll plunge for the builders’ dream in them, mixing up only his r’s and his l’s. An honorable business. Which in time will make him an eminent Kim.

  There’s another tradition. Good or bad, he, Mole, comes from it. Dummysville, itemizing his fingers for him, tossed that in for finders—how with a man like his father the dream itself can pollute the facts, as well as the anti-dreams which follow after. Gilpin must all along have been watching him, Mole, pilot himself through the optics of that.

  The screen, graining toward image, is filling in the grubby, graphed outline of a head. His father bears forward at him, in black and white. But he can fill in the colors himself, if he cares to.

  He doesn’t. He doesn’t even have to keep away. He already is. In another century. From which he can stare.

  “Son?”

  That’s what the face would say, though it doesn’t move. Half mist, half dot, a glassy refraction of codes; that’s only a kind of still shot they’re showing. Like when a correspondent broadcasts from darkest nowhere, and having only the sound-tape, they shine his photo steady above his by-line.

  “Pa.” And only a by-line.

  “We have to be short.”

  You taught me. “Yop.”

  “Why’d you go?”

  Why had he—to be a good boy? A hero? A Gilpin, a Chape? For my values? For my mother’s?

  To learn how to tell cloud from monument. To be identifiable, in space.

  “For you.”

  A groan. He hadn’t counted on that. “How—is my mother?”

  He wishes that face could move.

  “We’ll come to that.”

  “We have.”

  “You’ve grown hard,” Perdue said. With pride?

  “Short.” Because though I’ve got over you, I cannot bear, I cannot bear to go into it.

  “She’s left me.”

  Hup mother, and over the stile.

  “You don’t ask me why? You don’t express any—”

  “She has my consent.”

  The face doesn’t show anything. But then it never had.

  “Father—” He’s begun to shiver. He grips the gun. “To come so far. To talk.” Like two shadows. And only of a domestic relationship. “It gives me the creeps. I mean—is that all? I mean—is that all right?”

  “You didn’t have to go,” his father said. What’s happening to his voice? “But yes, Mole. It’s all right.”

  “But I did have to.” The gun grips him. “I’m their backup. The passengers.” He waits. “But I didn’t mean it to be—for those.”

  No answer.

  “I’ve a message—” Mole said into the miles between them—how many trillion? “Let me get it right. I’m bad on the flight facts.” He concentrates on his hands. “First—they’re going to ditch, orders or not. They do not intend to be expendable. I’m to say that. They said it the other way round, but that’s what they mean. Then—they’re keeping to Alpha plan rendezvous. We’re going to dock.”

  Is the booth swaying, or is it just the optics? He wishes he hadn’t had his kind of education. With those groans coming at him like Banquo’s ghost. But he’s doing fine. They’re not his groans.

  “What’s that?” his father said. “On your shoulder.”

  He flattened backward. “You can see me?”

  “They didn’t tell you? That’s the way it works, yes.” Any detail and the admiral is himself again. “Joint can’t be on live, because of the security. We may even have had a little—interference. All the more reason—not to be provocative. Mole…what’s that gun for?”

  He looked down at it. “It’s a—go-between.” Between the mystery and the facts.

  “Oh, Mole, Mole.”

  “We get fancy out here. Fred warned me.” If he mentions Fred he won’t bawl. And her. “Anything you don’t understand, ask my mother. Where’d she go?”

  “Down in Virginia. To the old house. You remember it?”

  He suddenly craves a stick of chewing gum. All his girls knew what that meant. The world was too much for him.

  They had given that name to the old house high in the Blue Ridge, the one they used to rent when he was little. When his father was still a biologist.

  “I didn’t know it was still around,” his father said.

  It isn’t. Not really. That’s the trouble. She’s gone back to summer. Those. Thinking maybe you’ll come for her? No. She knows you won’t. We were the ones who knew you best. But will she come back? Wolf is right; hatred is hard to keep. He droops, then remembers he can be seen. “I’ve made so many friends here, Pa. Friends for life.”

  No answer. The I-Ching doesn’t like you to mention life directly. Nor love nor hate, any of those.

  One more of their minutes has gone by. “Give my mother my love. And tell her I’m doing what she taught me.”

  His father doesn’t ask what. He must know. “How did those bastards ever let you on?”

  Because they are stupid. Like you taught them to be. Like you taught me not to bawl. Everybody’s always teaching everybody.

  The dial’s moving in on you, Mole. Pit your body against the universe. Even in a machine.

  “Go on, Pa. Give me the message.”

  Though it seems to him he hears only groans, he gets it. Jettison is not contemplated.

  “Didn’t think it would be.” In a glass case at the Goddard there was a note pad from a famous old mission’s checklist, on it printed Multiple Failures Will Not Be Considered. It lay above a display of “Freedom survival equipment,” including a police whistle, a radio beacon and a self-inflating raft. Wow, the boy who’d tagged after Fred and him had said: That’s kind of beautiful.

  “Command won’t order it. And I have to tell you.” His father’s voice breaks. “Neither can I.”

  No, you don’t have to tell me. But one detail you do. “Pa? You did anyway, didn’t you? Play the Courier to lose?”

  No answer. He doesn’t expect any, except from himself. “So. And you would have let Fred come.”

  “So your mother was right,” his father said. “You came in his stead.”

  “Jeez—” Mole said, “we never thought of it that way.” Did I? Bending to the gun, he fondles it.

  “Sometime back”—his father is saying from a great distance—“Mr. Kim sent me a letter, offering
a design. For retrieval, in case of just such an—orbital situation. I’ve just gotten in touch with him. We’d ignored them. But Kimco began it anyway. He counsels us—to hang on.”

  Hang on. It echoes.

  His father’s head has disappeared. “I—” his voice says, “—there’s also a cable. For you. I’ll put it on.” His father is bawling.

  The screen is as calm as an inland sea. The cable comes on in slow-traveling letters. Its by-line is Osaka. The letters fall into place like autumn leaves do in Japan.

  Fred Kim to his friend Moreson Peldue aboard the U.S. Courier WISH YOU WERE HERE AM BUILDING YOU A HOUSE

  Gad ap the floor, Mole.

  Is this the floor of the Goddard? Was that the guard?

  He can’t move his neck to see. He can open only one eye.

  The eye is almost flat against a no-color wall. He knows this wall, which has no angle where most floors meet a wall. He knows that curving. He must be in that little cylindrical cabin-in-the-sky, the Courier’s general corridor. Which must still have its limbo gravity. For he is on the floor. Have they docked?

  Not yet. It’s not entirely known, even aeromedically, how the plish-plash of even the steadiest vehicle is intuited by the passenger. Those on his own planet took long enough to do so. Centuries.

  He closes his eye. Everything’s moving along as always. Except him. Other than his…eyes. He can now open both of them. The left one must be swollen from where he banged it. When he fell. He cannot turn his neck. He opens both eyes wide.

  Dove and the other man never came back for him. Maybe the Army man thought Mole could have tried harder, maybe Dove knew better, but the facts are that when he came out of that booth with a message somebody would already have monitored—there was no place for him. To ride out the docking in. There is a hierarchy even for stowaways. Two of the strangers edged him out of the Cabin Two hatch. He had the feeling that from now on where he was concerned the Courier would be all brinks. Though it may have been Dove who threw after him his life-support, a great limp Teddy bear. He recalls starting to put it on, alone. Wondering where he’s meant to hole in. He knows better. He’s not meant to.