LIFTOFF

THE HARDEST THING to fake had been the wrist mark.

Mo-o-le-son! Mo-oleson Perdue-ue!

As the boy is lifted off and up, and hung by his heels, the flesh on even such firm cheeks as his enlarging downward while the blood drains from his fingertips, the Space Angel, a grotty character from a comic book often foisted on him and his sisters when they were kids because of their father’s profession, keeps calling his name with the silvery insistence of a receptionist.

Swung by his neatly boxed feet in the alternating light-and-dark of a cabin which lags forever behind him, he zooms upward to the last point of toleration—and rides on from there, a clot of body from which its own mass is dripping, like in the Francis Bacon painting his mother is so proud of, in the dining room in Washington. He’s a haunch of gravity-dripping meat in space—where he’s never before been. That cheap little Angel is even a help to him.—Son-nee! Sonny Perdue!

He hasn’t been called that since he was a home-boy of fourteen arriving at the prep school which promptly dubbed him Mole, and after four mutually guarded years had last June formally extruded him. “Into thy hands dare we pass the torch—?” the headmaster muttered, ceding him his diploma.

“Torch for what, sir?” He’d known the proper answer: To light up the world. But why let on? They might think they had taught him it.

By now the world—which isn’t quite synonymous with his father, though both senior and junior Perdues have it tough not to think so—may already know where Mole Perdue is. Snot drips from his stowaway nose.

The name on his breast pocket says FRED KIM. In that grisly corridor he’d seen nicknames, tribal aliases for some of the blacks, and even flashy acronyms. The project encourages the personal touch—but keeps an encoded master list. The important thing is to be easily identifiable in space. But the name on his pocket is different. It isn’t him. His roommate Freddie Kim, two years older because of travels as a State Department brat and other early sorrows, was the one who had taken the training. Yet down below on the sidelines afterward, between studying the mockups in the museums and working out on the non-gravity training gear which a young Perdue could cadge access to, they thought they’d done pretty well with Mole. “When you get out there, though, the motto is learn, learn—” Freddie’d said worriedly. Yearn, he’d said, actually. He was tall for any part of his mixed ancestry, making his and Mole’s measurements fairly swappable, and though their racial mixes were nothing like, these made for a sort of resemblance even the school had recognized. Temperament was a horse of another color. “Now lemembah, Mo’. In space no moh joke. This one’s big enough.”

Mole tries to laugh. The angle between upside-down diaphragm and esophagus must be wrong for it. His temples are splitting—if they don’t watch out up there on the flight deck, that point of toleration of theirs is going to get beyond him. There’s no second wind out there, Freddie says in his stopped-up ear. No second thoughts either. You have to be with it all the time.

How long will this vehicle continue to rise? He tries to recall the manual—those infantile arrows crossing the white page he’s now on. At two seconds: The vessel will have cleared the launching pad. At six seconds: Fuel rockets burn out and drop. Into the Atlantic Ocean—or was it the Indian? No, that’s where they dump.—Six minutes: Main engines shut down. Smaller orbital engines take over. He sees them, two doll-baby turbo-maneuverers at the edge of space, nidgy nudge. Oops. Over. Into orbit. Your weight will drop to zero. 00000000.

It hasn’t, yet. His outline still fills his couch. His straps still bind. Sequence, though, has been lost—gone with a seven-million-pound thrust. Time is in his own limbs now. He has no other vehicle. He is rising alone. The air will remain at sea level throughout. Do not hyperventilate.

Out there, the mind grows very thin, Freddie said. Too fond of abstraction. Keep to the concrete. Okay then. His heart’s pounding like…a power mower. The grass on his family’s place in Kentucky—where the first known Perdue had been a groom, to put it gracefully—is blue. As in a Van Gogh. Whose madness seems to him worn out. Once it had been so coveted that it had been put in children’s bedrooms. His. Utrillo, at the other end of matters and in the front hall, stank of the false peace made out of one persistent village street. Every century makes its own madness and then makes peace with it, his father says. Making his own. Of course they’re all busy now totting up their century. Keep away from fathers this century said, early on. Well, he’s doing that. He begins to laugh. He chokes.

“Don’t swarrow—” Freddie said, watching him work out on the space simulator. “Roll your tongue.” Loll it, he meant. How can you, from upside-down-sideways? He’s going to choke to death. In the holds of old schooners, old storybooks, cargoes shift, bilges drown. Breakers smash over the poop deck and onto the unused lifeboat. And stowaways die. No matter how rich in privilege. Die in dark green pools of second thoughts.

He’s not died. He’s merely going to be sick. All over his nice new suit. Speed may induce peristalsis the book says, with a complete failure of style. Means your guts veer ahead of you and have to be convulsively repossessed, about every three sees. Count—the briefers said at the jolly motel; when in danger of losing your bearings, count. Okay, Mole. Count motels. Can’t be too many like that one. Better still, imagine yourself with a girl. Last summer’s French one. Who made love at high decibel but would never thou him. Alleging that her aunt, who wouldn’t approve, was in the next room. Which the aunt turned out to be, concrete enough to make tea for them.

Soyez le bienvenu, M. Mole.

For surely his body ship is leveling. The cabin, which he seemed to have left so far behind, is catching up with him, enclosing him again with its warm accordion. Slowly the horizontal reenters his veins, like bliss. Like the warm brim of milk held out to delirium. You’re no longer a reversed clot of consciousness, rushing the dark. Loll your tongue now, Moleson Perdue, Jr. Breathe.

He’s forgotten the information panel. Up there in the sight of all. What he wants is that lighted part in the middle. Two words on it; he sees that much. ON COURSE. But the meaning won’t register. Temporary dyslexia due to deoxygenation. In some individuals. He’s grateful for that last. As an individual. A chimp must feel like this, confronted with the alphabet. Is he aphasic, too? “Abbadabba—” he croaks. “All Gaul is divided.” No, he can understand what he says, and hear himself faintly. His ears are open, hearing the hiss of the pressurization system. Soon his brain will reopen too, and read. He doesn’t have to wait for it. He knows where he is. He looks down at himself. He is floating against the straps.

Superfly, the vehicle, is still keeling, but less and less. Soon he’ll be sitting at almost the same angle as in his scull on the Chesapeake. Turtle haven’t been in the bay since his waiter great-grandfather served soup made of them in the dining car from Philadelphia to Wilmington, at thirty-five cents a plate. Oysters are coming back to it. Keep things concrete. A sob-bubble escapes him. The window on his left is such a stately Magna Carta of the skies he can’t look at it. A giant hand, placed at the small of his back like a generation of physical education instructors, is pushing his shoulders square. Not courage, just the effect of non-G.—the muscles in his back reacting to weightlessness. Feels like that long, gondola glide when you’re coming down from sex; Fred was right. Except that you never land, kid. You’ll grow used to it.

Oh land, Superfly—on land! Reel the film backward, so that he can walk out of this theater, rubbing his eyes. But that window’s stubborn. Traced with God’s own holograph. Give it the stare anyhow—a young man who’s met Gilpin. He wants to smile, but his face has disconnected. Do not disorient. You are in float. The kinesthetic connect between body and will is different. He has the illusion now that the vehicle is static. This mean they’re out of orbit and on their real way? He knows they’d’ve had to get free of circling Earth in order to beam their way to the living-station. But then, what about space being curved? A curve so vast it seems straight—still, no one’s ever mentioned it. He does know for sure that when they lifted off the acceleration doubled his weight, and that now he must have almost none. And that’s about it.

At least he no longer has the illusion he is the vehicle.

Truth is, he can’t seem to retain that sort of fact verbally. Okay, he’d rather experience them, and maybe in time they will stick. “The facts fly from me—” he’d loftily told the exasperated Freddie. “Must mean I’m a real citizen of space.” Nothing doing, Fred said, that day he got back from training. “You just refuse any flight fact. Any scientific fact, almost. Like it came from idiots.” Then they burst out laughing, enormous gasps which flattened them to the ground, where they lay erupting chuckles until the museum guard came over to them. Gad ap the floor. “My friend has an exhibit here,” Mole said proudly. “A space environment. He won a contest on it.” Which was so, but didn’t prevent them from having these bouts of laughter wherever they went. When together, their blood ran pure amusement. At what the world was, which in spite of all delighted them, and at what it would be if they could just get it out of the hands of their parents in time. “The fact is—” Mole observed when they were out of there, “that you pronounced the r in “flight” perfectly. Just like an l.” And they burst out again.

There was no hard reason for Freddie’s accent, which wasn’t always stable, though never assumed. His parents, both born in the U.S., spoke English perfectly, as had he until taken back to Seoul at the age of eight by his feminist-dramatist mother—who then abandoned him to her mother, the repatriated widow of a Korean émigré to New York who’d made a fortune in vegetables. At the age of eleven he’d been bought back by his own father, by then an illustrious architect passing through on a tour of acclaim from his semiancestral Tokyo. “Acquired at gleat cost,” Freddie’d said, twinkling, “to go lound the woh-hld with him. My accent’s a somatic defence, my father says. That means—from the body cells.” He smiles. “My father’s a little, bowing man who moves huge buildings about like pebbles, to keep people from noticing.” “What difference does that make?” Mole said. “Your father’s good.” Since Fred’s mother—who Fred said had an ego as snaky as her neck—certainly wasn’t, but Mole’s mother was okay, he and Mole were more or less even on the parental scale. They’d never needed to discuss what they meant by “good.”

Look at the window now, Mole. It’s only space. You’ve heard talk of it since you were born. Never questioning what was meant by it. Nor had the talkers, in their hip circle no longer even saying “outer,” once that had been taken over by the amateurs. Space was what they wanted certain things from. Not bothering to enumerate. When he’d wanted something from it, he’d gone straight to them.

He spent his infancy at the knees of top NASA personnel, including even a couple of the aging first astronauts, and knows how they love jokes—indeed have to have them, if they’re wise. Tom Gilpin’s name is anathema to all that crowd; that’s how Mole first became interested in him. To a boy reared in the clockwork suburbs of Alexandria, Virginia, and the capital’s white miles of near-monument, Gilpin’s island youth, of which everyone Mole’s age knows the details, is real beyond hope—a father who was a fisherman! His own father he regards as one of the smart ones, yeah, but fatally clobbered by having thrown in his lot with the government, when he could have stayed an honest solo scientist.

Mole understands well enough how his father’s mixed blood might have contributed to his ambitions, even if Mole’s mother—who is an eighty-eighth cousin of Freud and constantly improving upon the connection—hadn’t already explained this to him, her verdict on Mole himself being that he has no color feelings at all. She thinks that everyone, of whatever color or colors, should have the feelings which go with these—for guidance in life. He does have one such feeling, out of kindness concealed from her, which tells him she can say this only because she’s white. As well as being committed to explaining his life to him before he gets to it, which he’s neutralized by shunting her off onto his sisters, who needed that sort of thing until they married, which both now are, to young NASA men. Physically he’s a gangling version of his mother, who has the crimped-gold hair and fair skin of some Viennese Jews, though the long shape of his handsomely wooled skull and the way his snub profile is indented there are, like his father’s, faintly African.

He knows his father idolizes him. He has done his best not to make conscious or unconscious use of it. Yet he knows he’s here because of it, as much as to follow Gilpin, his own idol. If the two idolatries interconnect, which his mother has now and then pointed out, then he thinks he’s made rather a neat response to all that—which, when his father learns of his presence here and burns up the wires to talk to him, it’ll be Mole’s turn to explain.

If there’s time, which he sincerely hopes there will be. Because the real reason he’s here is, he has an inkling something might happen to this ship. Or to put it another way—if something unforeseen or accidental does occur, his father and other NASA conservatives, while never conniving at such an event, mightn’t be averse to seeing such a project, with such a passenger list, make an example of itself. Expensive, but they’re used to that. How many times has he heard them hold up their flagship answer to expense: For the sake of future times.

So, Tom, I felt I had to come. So I did what you wrote you were doing, in The Sheet. Went down the white and walnut offices. So did I, all except Dad’s, which you described so well. In all the other ones, though, I did what I’d so often watched him do. Kept it simple and spoke the truth—only not necessarily all of it. “Dad can’t know about it,” I said, “because of that man, Gilpin.” The smart ones just nodded, screwing up their eyes. The dumb ones said, potato-in-the-mouth, what I’d only had to hint to the others: favoritism would be alleged. All the way, Gilpin, your name was almost enough. Plus maybe a little credit for me, Mole, as a regular guy who wanted to join up early. From these men he’d grown up with. “So you want to go. So, the admiral—Uh-huh. What’s your friend’s name?” A tough bunch, his father’s boys. When he got out of there, respect welled up in him, for his father, too.

What he’s afraid of is that he may want to be a hero more than a good boy should.

The view from where he emerged that day had been part of his childhood and had grown with it. He’d always left these offices from the back. He was in the office yard, one of the atriums which often serviced government architecture there, sparing the Parthenon fronts. Pipes coiled from some basement hernia and went in again, thickly wrapped. Hydrants rose to brass caps on which he had often sat. Where foundation granite met gray earth, iron oxide fringed it like brown fern. Cellar door housings had wooden lids that flapped back as if for dogs. There was the mournfulness of retreated functions, to which nobody paid mind. The undisturbed air had a prism lightness. On the open fourth side, an aerial view of whatever the observer was tall enough for. In the foreground, for years, only an early print of a rectangular park of trees, dotted separate and from there the size of burrs, beyond these, green dales shrubbing an observatory dome soft and rosy as a mushroom, in rain or shine. Now, greater Washington was his, in a glorious, marble-reflecting sky, where even he its son could not always tell cloud from monument.

Come to think of it, none of the men propositioned had laughed.

“I’m laughing—” Mole says low, then stronger. “I’m laughing.” He’s sitting up now like a baby righted by its nurse. The sun at the window is a huge porthole of glare. I’m a barnacle getting a free ride on the universe. Glee shakes him. Freddie, by now in Osaka getting ready to build two houses—one “for quietude,” near the National Park and in the style of the old catabolist school whose disciple he is, but also one house “for protective emulation,” out on the highway and in the style of the sewer-pipe architects—can no longer share the joke. Fred has settled for the ground, Mole for the air. They’d always known they would separate, but not in what style. From now on we have our own jokes is all, Fred said, saying good-bye to him at the airport and handing him the book on the catabolists which is in Mole’s documented luggage. Wonder what style is that motel you’re going to? Let me know. Then for once the laughs hadn’t burst out.

It’s because of architecture that he’s here. Because Kim’s father—Eminent Kim, as Fred fondly calls him—had smelled a rat. A rocket buff from way back, at first he’d been all for Fred’s going on the Courier. “Our firm did some of the industrial design for the living station,” Fred said. He would never say “habitat.” “We ought to keep a Kim foot in the door. My father went to see your father about it.” Both boys know how Washington business is done. “But, Mole…” Fred’s always very sober when he speaks of the firm, but this is more. “Yes, Fred?” He doesn’t like to think of the two fathers together. “I’m to go for training, Mo’. Why not? It’s a plus. But whether I go on the Courier’s maiden voyage afterward—is watch and wait.” Why? Something wrong with Mole’s father’s baby? Oh no—Eminent Kim says Commander Perdue’s team has done a fine job there. “Admiral,” Mole says, “he got for it. So what’s wrong?” The project itself. Somewhere it’s a bummer. What Fred’s father had said more precisely was: “There’s bad architecture there somewhere. Not on the drawing board maybe. But in the head. Or the heart.” From a Kim, bad architecture was the worst that could be said. “I’ll find out,” Mole said. “Go to one of Mother’s teas, if I have to.”

In the worst of the hot weather Mole’s mother handed out paper fans with the drinks. She said it made the gossip more informative. “Ah, Mole dear.” For two months he’s had his own place, on the proceeds of a summer job. The crowd has changed; it always does. But the tiny, packed house makes for classic parties. Amazed, she watches him take a drink, a fan. “Want me to help serve, Ma?” As a knobby-knees he often had, though she’d never prettied him up. Sadly smiling, she shakes the gold head people think she dyes. She and his father still make love and have no other lovers, no matter what is said. But she likes to watch others finding them. “Ah, Mole, if I’d known you were coming—there’s not a soul here your age.”

There isn’t, but over there was the Eminent Kim. Neither he nor the gray-blond civilian talking to him is fanning. If you are a five-foot Oriental among all these gung-ho ramrods, perhaps you don’t. But the other man, an Anglo type with a British suit and finish to him, but an American, who must be in State, maybe a Secretary, for few foreigners come here—what’s he doing with that string of beads crawling through his hand? The Kim has nice manners. “This is the son of the house, Bill. And my son’s friend. Mole, do you know Mr. William Wert?”

“Worry beads,” Wert says, seeing Mole’s look.

“Get them in that headshop, here in Georgetown?” Which sold all the casual machinery of meditation. When Mole was thirteen he’d bought a Turkish water pipe there.

“Inherited them.” Under his linen jacket, Wert’s wearing one of those transparent embroidered shirts from the Philippines. But the type he is, he could wear a monocle, too, and get away with it. “Cool me off better than a fan.”

“Beautiful.” Kim hands back the smoky purple beads. “See you’re wearing a barong. Wish I had the nerve. I’m the only man here in my native dress. A dark suit.” Kim smiles instead of laughs. But that’s where Fred gets his mirth from. “So, Bill. You liked the designs for the living station.”

“Very much.” Wert has a used face, but not a guarded one. “Don’t see how you did it for the price.”

“Cost.” Mr. Kim’s face clouds over. “The next highest bidder—too low to be safe. We know his ways. Wouldn’t like to see it. Not for this. Fraid they were going along with it…Mr. Wert’s to be the civil administrator on the living station, Mole. He’s going on the Courier.”

“But it was a plus for Kimco anyway, wasn’t it, sir? Even at cost?” He’s relieved when Fred’s father, tossing back his Buddha head with an amused gape, admits it. He so wants him not to be a hypocrite. He doesn’t see his own father anywhere.

“I like your hospital wing particularly,” Wert’s saying. “Hope we won’t have to use it much.”

“How many times have you been out there?”

“Once. It’s no ordinary shuttle trip, you know. I do okay. Dull when you get there, though. With just a skeleton crew. Like a big empty stage set waiting for people. They’re right to send that many. If they are.”

“I heard eighty only, Bill. For your empire. I heard—sixty.”

“Still a tussle going on,” Wert said.

“They asked us to do the sick bay for the Courier as well. But we bowed out. Couldn’t stick putting the body lockers damn under it. Some of my Korean ancestors buried their dead under the bed they expired in—but still. Hear they finally used an old Raymond Loewy design, modified. Very nice tambour. Though small.”

“Body lockers, sir?” Mole said.

“I assume they don’t bury—in that sea.”

“Wouldn’t be too sure what they do—hear about those satellites that keep disappearing?” Wert said. “No sign of them. Luckily none of that’s my beat. For the living station, each passenger signs a cremation release.”

“Not for the training.” Mole shot a quick look at Kim. Freddie had left for that the day before.

Kim ignores it. “How’d you get the job, Bill?”

“Fellow named Mulenberg proposed me. Met him in Saudi, few years back. I had a—connection there then. With Ordoobadi International, their branch there. After I met you in Seoul. He’s the project’s civilian for ordnance. He said they didn’t need a scientific chap for administrator, or want one—their military would take care of that.”

“We have to assume they will.” Kim’s eyelids are as good as fans. “Mr. Wert helped me get Fred out of Seoul that time, Mole.”

Wert twiddled each smoky bead as if it was a year. “Well, maybe this’ll be the ultimate country, Ultima Thule. Actually, I’d turned down the job. Funny thing—Gilpin sold me on it. And certain—family matters.”

“You know Tom Gilpin, sir?” Mole said.

“No, wrote him, though, after he spoke once. To a huge crowd in Boston, mostly your age.”

“Fred, too—” the Kim said. “Is of the faith. So, Bill, you too think well of him?”

“Salt of the earth. Like his constituency.” Wert bowed to Mole. “But like all reformers, sometimes inaccurate. The way he talks of the—habitat—you’d think that a living station was already a piece of Tivoli. When it’s only—Paramus, New Jersey? Steubenville, Ohio? Haven’t been back home long enough to know whether Gilpin’ll be the salt of space—hmm. But his principles are as solid as—whatever’s solid.” Wert’s manner was so knowledgeably tired you kept wanting to inquire of what. “He reminds me of Cobbett, or Jean Jaurès. You feel you could put his face on a stamp.”

“Close yours, Mole,” Fred’s father says. “Or use that fan. Here comes your dad.”

His father, embracing him in his complex way, which is never cold physically, scolds him for not coming home oftener, scrutinizes the full drink Mole still held in his hand—“Regular party rounder, eh?” and sends him off toward an army bigwig who’d unaccountably brought his pretty daughter; Mole knows why. Since he and Linda left school he hasn’t dated her.

The general is evidently here for some info. Mole watches him operate. Of medium height, he works both up and down, sticking his short muzzle first at a succession of important wives, including his hostess. Getting nothing from Mole’s mother because his father “never tells her business.” Mole grins at his mother, who knows as much of it as anybody here.

When his mother leaves him to the general and four of the general’s kind, plus a couple of under-secretaries and a covey from the UN—all anti-NASA either for good-and-fearful reason or good power ones—the paper fans really ploy. Mouths that are hidden can leak. No “that man Gilpin” talk is bothered with. The oddity of the passenger list is passed over as negligible, except for one snide reference to the choice of Wert. “It all figures,” they keep saying. Something else is at stake. Linda’s father leaves early, looking as if he may have caught a rat. Leaving her behind.

Mole, dragging Linda by the pinkie, says good-bye to Kim, who’s now alone.

“Your mother’s been so good to Fred, Mole. So good. I like watching her.” Kim’s snake-wife, Fred said, had cured his earlier geisha tastes; they now have a middle-aged Chinese housekeeper with cold flab cheeks and gold teeth.

Kim’s really watching the admiral. Wert is being talked to. “Is Wert State Department, sir?” His father doesn’t think much of Wert; Mole can tell.

“Not—quite. Or not any more. He has a past. Maybe an inch too honorable. For modern tastes.” Wert, now edging toward the front door, caught their eyes on him, nodded ruefully, and edged his way out. “But he has his compensations. Evenings at seven, he goes home to them.”

“Kim’s keen,” Linda said, leaving with Mole. She’d waved off her father the general, who isn’t much but all she has. In revenge she makes use of him in his own style. “Where’s Fred? In training? In Courier training? Gee.” She looks frightened. “Gee.”

Two days later, he had everything he or anybody could find out, short of espionage. If the dissident children of Washington were ever recognized by a foreign power as the prime source of info that they covertly were—the headmaster had once warned at Parents’ Day—it could mean the collapse of government. “Space is heavy, isn’t it,” Linda sighed. “Gee, I love your place.”

Two weeks later, biking off to the Smithsonian to meet Fred, who was having his picture taken there as a member of the training group which had come down from space Saturday and been released from post-training checkup yesterday, Mole feels heavy. What kind of torch is being passed to him, Linda and Fred?

“Oh—you know the Army,” Linda’d said, picking fluff from his new electric blanket out of her long hair. They hadn’t had to use the electric part. You know my father, she’d meant. Just as her pal Adrienne is Air Force and he, Mole, is NASA. Only the navy kids at school banded together, a breed apart, to take their fathers’ side on things; when the sea no longer counts except to dunk spacecraft in, that’s what you have to do. But everyone at school knew the echelons. By family, Adrienne was Mole’s day-in, day-out rival for control of space, though in a pinch the Army—and Linda’s pa the general—if here hand-in-glove with Adrienne’s pa—was top-cousin, Army and Air being entrusted with that biggest hush-hush ambition: the big W. In Germany der big K, in France la big G. Krieg. Guerre. Mole doesn’t know the Chinese or Russki or other names for it.

After that came what Tom Gilpin called the big ruck and muddle, “the best of whom always write their names lower case.” The civilians. Had Mole’s father, the honorary admiral, forgotten that he was once one of them? No, it’s cuckoo reverse. He can’t.

“They don’t want civilians on the platform,” Linda said, lying on her elbow, as Mole was. She put the ball of red fluff she’d collected in Mole’s navel. “I don’t know why.” This last was a fib, but they all had certain loyalties. Platform was what the general called the living-station. His father called it the NASA station, or now and then, depending on context, the L-5. “Why should he call it that?”

She leaned back admiring. “You have a deep belly button—Oh, I dunno. Maybe they want to mail things from it. Or load…’s what platforms are for, aren’t they? What’s your father built it for?”

For glory. But that was understood.

“To be able to build more of them,” he said. “Because we’re already ahead.” She was broody, the way he’d found her when he’d picked her up at home the night before. When the general was between women his aides had to come play poker with him, with deuces and shop-talk wild and Linda serving them beer after beer.

“I don’t ever want to get ahead, do you, Mole?” She was a neat math student—and by remembering the details of her childhood’s banging around the world had won the geography-and-civics prize—but was otherwise simple. Any depth she had came from the broodiness. “Why do they hate civilians? Why does the admiral?”

He sat up, staring at his belly button. “Because they mess things up. You think they’re counting on them to?”

She lay back, tracing a forefinger down his nose. “Oh, not my father. Not him. He’s counting on yours. Any chestnuts to be pulled out of the fire, he says—he’s counting on him.”

“Very old chestnut, that idea,” Mole said.

She said: “You have such a sense of style.” He tickled her ear. They rolled over, sweating. “Look—” she said afterward, “it’s still there. Your red belly button.”

Then she’d reached over to the arm of his drawing board, where he’d set a jar of colored pens and pencils, in his first taste of domestic joy. With another girl. Carefully choosing, she bent to his belly, tracing a circle of dark blue around his navel. He knew it for an orbit at once. Next she drew an outer concentric one, in purple. For the largest, the yellow crayon she picked wouldn’t show. She drew over it in orange instead, blurring the outline to make it a jagged one, with a flourish of her forefinger. Finally she dotted a black pen line from its arrowed end at the navel, down across the three orbits on his belly and into his pubic hair. “Where’s that?”

She patted the curls. “Canaveral. Where the computer blocks are.”

He’d had to laugh, even while concentrating on what she was telling him. “Now draw the Courier.”

Fussing at already having used the black, she chose a thicker felt pen for it, first lightly flipping its point through a pubic curl. Her coquetry wasn’t crude in itself; all girls used the material at hand. She’d got it from being slapped on the buttock for listening, as she trundled back and forth to the fridge for the beer. It was no odder than having an aunt.

She’d put the small black Courier-fly where he’d thought she might—not on the goal line to the L-5, the dark blue, but in the links between the jagged orange orbit and the undefined purple indelible. Where he’d been afraid she would. Then she slammed the pen and pencils back in the jar. “Game fini.” He knew she wouldn’t tell him more.

“Right over my appendix,” he’d said, quickly clowning. “Will I have to have it out?”

But when they kissed good-bye at his door she clung a little, puzzling up at him. “We’re civilians. Aren’t we?”

The minute she was gone he’d rushed to the Goddard. Homework you did on your own was the kind that stuck. Days after, biking to meet Fred, it was still so much in his head that he plowed right into another rider parked at the bike rack. “Sorry,” Mole had apologized, “—wrong orbit.” He’d had to limp up to Fred, who began smiling at the sight of him and couldn’t seem to stop; was Fred a little high? “Dangerous, down here,” Mole said. They loaded his bike onto Fred’s graduation present, a bug-car painted iridescent lime, and drove off to say farewell to Fred’s exhibit at the Goddard, now in its last days. Mole didn’t say he'd been there in the interim.

Fred had enjoyed himself, he said—though only intellectually. “That universe. Wow.” But the going had been tough; he’d just barely qualified. He really shouldn’t have. “But you know, Mole—they let me through like a breeze.” Stopped at a light, they looked at each other greenishly, until the car behind tooted. Fred was driving. “Now tell me about your research,” Fred said.

When they parked, Mole still hadn’t spoken. “Ooh, the Goddard’s an airy site,” Fred said, walking up the inclined approach. “But I know airier.” Suddenly he’d jackknifed into a running stance and galloped a big circle, halting again at Mole’s side. Some tourists stopped to stare, but when he kissed the ground they half applauded. He wiped the gravel from his lips.

“What kind of grass you on?” Mole said.

Where Mole is now, locked and floating, Fred’s answer comes back to him. “Grass?” Fred said.

Inside the museum, Fred no longer looked high but inward, like a person who had some body condition he was monitoring. He kept hunching his shoulders in, squaring them out. Dead center in the lobby was the mammoth walk-in model of the Courier, bristling black and silver but empty, and only one kid leaning over the railing to read about it. “‘Actual rocket size thirty-six stories high.’ Something!” the kid said.

Mole nodded. “The important thing is to be identifiable in space.”

Fred didn’t laugh. Fred, who was never rude, moved on, not choosing to notice that Mole’s limp was real. But in an empty room halfway to their destination he stopped. “Your ankle?”

“You should see my belly.” He still hadn’t washed off the crayons. Why should he be whispering? “Fred—there’s no backup system for that thing. None at all. What’s that mean?”

His friend moved on again, Mole dithering after him. “Oh, I know in a way, Fred—if that thing starts falling in the drink, say. Like the oldest Skylab, only sooner. Or say it misses its rendezvous with the platform. Habitat. Docking the ship, say they miss, yes. But the alternatives, what do they mean? Like—what about burn-up?” He knew he was only playing the idiot so that it would be like old times. Having seen at once that it never again would be.

Fred’s experience had changed him. He was grave. Was he grounded for good? “There’s no backup for burn-up, Mole.” The dickey phrase didn’t make him smile. Or say smart-ass: You just burn, Mo’. In a jagged orange line.

But yes, there were other ways to miss orbit, he said. He detailed them.

“I don’t believe it,” Mole said, this time for real. “I just don’t. Overshoot. Yes of course I know what it is.” It was an orbit like any other, only drawn in purple indelible. “You mean you can just be kept circling? For how long?” He stopped Fred by the elbow: “How long, Fred? Fred. For forever?”

It was an off-day for the Goddard and the room they reached was also empty, except for the guard. The glass case with Fred’s exhibit, a model for a civic center in a lunar colony at the site of the St. George crater, was still there. A multilevel structure for two hundred inhabitants, the card said. With features to influence minds to new sensitivities toward the environment, during the colonists’ leisure time away from normal routine. Access to the lunar surface being possible through airlocks.

“I wouldn’t do it like that now,” Fred said softly. He continued to stare into the glass cage. “Forever? Well, that would depend. On the supply of what they call—‘consumables.’” They waited for each other to laugh.

“Now that you’ve explained it,” Mole said carefully, “I go for the backup.”

Fred swept a finger across the glass case and inspected it. “So does the Eminent Kim. Computers alone can’t always manage, he says.” He thrust his thumbs in his armpits and “did” his father. “Much cost, yes, Fred. In proportion to time. A backup has to be on the ready. To build this one, maybe two years. But they could have. The Courier itself took ten. This pushy admiral, who gets his billions for NASA and does what he wants with them—why didn’t he push for one? So, Fred, I fear this mission is too special for us. No, we don’t go. Not this time.”

Mole, too, stared into the glass case, leaning against it. You were not supposed to. Behind him the guard approached.

“Pity—” the Freddie image in the glass said to the Mole one. “Gilpin’s still going.” The name rang through the glass between the two images. They had discovered each other through him.

“Pity—” Mole said. It was one thing to doubt your father like any green boy, another to grow up to it. And still another, to realize in the same instant that you had inherited some of his tendencies—say a talent for plot. “Pity, Fred. That I can’t go instead of you.” “Pity.” He almost screamed it.

It was then that the guard had to speak to them—men almost, shame on them—screaming “Instead of me,” “Instead of you,” to each other, wrestling in laughter—or was it laughter?—on the museum floor.

He can now read the ON COURSE perfectly well. Maybe he’d dozed, or dreamed not being able to. Nothing else is dream. He’s here. The part of the panel he’s to check for ongoing instruction now lights up in smaller letters: Water Intake. He’s practiced anything to do with food or drink. He presses the armrest. A nozzle inches up. Wrapping his mouth around it, he doesn’t need to suck. The water rises in tendrils, filling him. He doesn’t stop. The nozzle has done it for him; it’s timed. Here each encounter with an element has to be. The elements are fierce and sacred here. He breathes deep. What marvel. To be in a place where this is so.

They’ve put him in the cabin nearest the flight deck, with all his second thoughts. When he came aboard, the crew who’d settled him in seemed to be having some; maybe they’d figured he wouldn’t show. Two had shown up at the motel to check on his nerves; he’d bought them Jack Daniels at the bar, joshing on his own with the bartender, for his being under-age. The two who in the corridor had picked him out of a clutch of other Class A passengers—that elite whose existence Gilpin had predicted—and had seated him, had then drilled him on what they called “the courtesies of the house.” If ever in deep trouble, for instance, there were flanges he and others could activate with their breath. He didn’t ask what trouble. “Not until we’ve cleared the launching tower,” one said, grinning. “And never come near the flight deck,” his buddy said. “We shoot.” “Comprehendo,” Mole said. His father’s word—popped. Such a glister on them all of a sudden. He felt too young to interpret it. “We’ll remember you to him,” they said. “If the time comes.”

The ship’s commander or captain and co-pilot had remained invisible, though they must have been informed he’s here. Though all these men who’ve been picked for the Courier seem to travel in pairs and to think in the same style, there’s some other unity about them, nothing to do with their insignia or even their profession. Pilots and navigators, they’re the active crew who in shifts must run this ship—and after a while it comes to him what else they are—the ones so far known to him.

Charlie Dove, Arthur Shefflin, Ervin something, and two or three others who are merely faces—they’re men of a sort rarely glimpsed in that combined top sector of Air Force and NASA operations known as The Joint, which is his father’s baby, though they sometimes figure in his father’s irritable home-comments. These are the ones who never appear at the Perdue house, in that inner circle which swapped its laser-powered calculations across his mother’s punchwork tablecloth, or lifted glasses white or umber with cosmic change. These are the staff who’ve made it to seniorship by every dogged effort and road of circumstance from honest to dirty, except—top competence. Or have it, but narrowly, without that extra flare of—comprehendo. Government was full of them, his father said. Life must be. His parents have a house-name for them: Grade A Dummyville. In a pinch they could be Comprehendo’s burden, or could outnumber him. Or he could make use of them, with their flaws in mind. His father has staffed the Courier with them.

“Graduation’s such a paranoid time,” his mother had sighed, on that day very full of her noble ancestor. “You think everybody’s at you to settle your values. When really, nobody’s bothering except yourself.” She took snapshots of him, her careful substitute for indecent kissing and mothering. “I was the same.” The phrase which at once spoils all parental advice.

“But we listen to them. How we listen to them,” Fred said, on the second-class train ambling through the Japanese dusk toward Fukuoka, and toward the summer jobs his father had got for them. “My head is all echo. Of course, I never let on.” They were passing through frail paper villages, the houses like lanterns in the woods strung along the train windows. “Eminent Perdue never lets on about his values, he only acts on them,” Mole said. “Then you deduce. What’s that smell?” Hair pomade. The whole car reeked of it. “Have some.” Freddie handed him a tin of it. “Put on a local value. Then you won’t notice it.” But they were already laughing more genteelly. The snares had begun.

Maybe nobody ever really plotted. There were merely marshes of obligation, campaign promises to one’s friends and family, election gains and losses against one’s competitors—who, short of the national defense, were the only enemy—and suitable expropriations of performance and inertia from time to time. While the wind debates over the stage-lit domes as intended, his father and Dummysville greet every morning, the Chinese property man distributes the sunsets and removes them, a Gilpin rises on the national scene on a cockleshell wave and a modern general crosses the Delaware to forestall him—and the oysters come back to the Chesapeake.

And out on his porch watching the skies for weather, some oyster dredger remarks to his wife: “See they’ve floated that Courier on billions of scrip. Rocketed it to the far atriums. So’s that Perdue kid could stowaway on it. So’s he can see that life is only Washington as seen from a hill. And so’s he can deduce his father.” The wife, maybe already pregnant with what may someday be another Gilpin, does not reply.

Maybe nobody’s plotted except Mole. He knows what that means. An excellent schooling in Shakespeare, Aeschylus and all the other great comic books, has taught him it. Plus the headmaster’s required course in Greek and common doom. The plotter is always alone with his crime. In a nimbus of further crime-need. He has Mr. Chape’s own word for it. The class hadn’t yet found out what Chape considered his own personal crime to be, but they knew the feeling. Mole Perdue, who so early on had deduced his father, has no choice but to go on with it, even from half a million miles away.

What Perdue, his father, loves about his wife is that she never messes up from too much of the same talent that keeps them socially above the ruck. Perdue knows too many high civil servants and “militicos”—a word his son has coined for him—to whose dinner parties people go already drearily certain that all the conventions of such parties will be observed. The real powers—that is, the admitted and known ones—rarely appear at such houses beyond the once-a-year obligatory showing. They come regularly to Elsa’s because she has their own tone and self-confidence—more verve and racier conversation—yet her evenings or summer garden-do’s never lose control. Those paper fans of hers are known all over Washington, and once or twice have made the newspapers beyond, after which she’d pulled in a little, without a word from him. Even their menus receded for a while, below their usual Viennese excellence. It isn’t his job to be known.

Not nationally, and not even late in career, like such “character admirals”—his son’s phrase again—as say, Rickover was. The Navy, being the sentimental part of the military, is different. Even the Army is, since an army, even one using weapons so rarefied as to be almost things of the spirit, has to be visible. Yet Perdue can’t keep a free press from asking questions on the military or political aspects of such a mammoth effort as the space one. What he can do, and has, is to keep that side of it constantly forgettable. Just because of such a press, and such a public, rapacious for daily news and weekly features but over the long run indolent, it can be done amazingly well. Unlike the socialist world, his government doesn’t have to issue calendared White Papers, or Five Year Plans.

His best contribution has been never to have one open season for congressional appropriation. Lots of small ones, rather, in which NASA can raise its “progress uncertain” or “timetable delayed” skinny palm, yet rarely make the front page. While even the tremendous commerciality of aeroresearch is not the biggest bell struck—nor even the profusion of watch parts and other micro-hardware you could manufacture cheaper in space. For every time NASA asks for more, it does so in a comforting sea of flash aeromedical news. Give an American a better heart monitor for hospitals and henceforth you have a hold on the heart itself.

Admiral Perdue’s own father had been the first black Hollywood director to make it big, though even by Gramp’s time the family had been cocoa-color to wash-pink. “The American public wants to be aesthetic,” he always said. “Just you keep telling them they are—in wanting what you want to give them. You’ll reap from it. But that’s not the hull story.” He always came down folksy on a word or two; only time you could see the Hollywood in him. “We still let in dissidents, remember? After any war. During some other people’s. What people here want—ancestrally if you please”—he always said that for the gallery—“is to be let in. To anything. From art to politics. Even to killing—you ask it the right way. Everybody want to be let in, remember that. Everybody except those few at the top who already are. You don’t really have to do it, o’ course. Just give the look of it. I don’t make art movies, except by mistake.”

So—the civilians’ shuttle plane, Courier, and its goal, the so-called habitat for civilians. Still a space station really, enlarged suburbanly. A mobile home, trying to look like a real house.

Who could anticipate that a Gilpin would train such high-class philosophy on it? Who could anticipate a Gilpin? Perdue, his father, shivers, stepping up the walk to his house over the little red hands of the Japanese maples, which always fell prematurely. The garden is the only place where to his taste Elsa goes wrong. Mole, in one of his unfathomable switches, likes the stiff flower rows, too many of them red. “Like jelly jars. A jelly garden. Goes with the house.” Whose “expression,” however, Mole dislikes, adding that too many of the Georgetown fronts have it. “Like a Pekinese the husband walks. Sour Ming.”

Warmth chortled in Perdue. Son-warmth. Nothing shows in his face. The best of sons have to flout what their fathers do. He’d done the same. A father has to take his chances with it. Fred and Mole lolling with their knees sky-high the way boys do, saying, “We don’t want to be just drop-ins, you know. Into college.” Still he, Perdue, has done what he can to make old Kim keep young Fred at home. Off the Courier, that is, without making a point of it. Offering Fred a post even, to make further space environments. The best good deeds have to go unnoticed, when not of the sort to be told to sons. These days, when Perdue passes old Kim on the tow path where men like them jog, Perdue with his bodyguard discreetly jogging behind, old Kim’s nod is maybe a mite cool. Perdue can tell. Men of their mixed bloods have an advantage. Their faces, not being of the dominant race, are not as interpretable. Except to each other. Must gall Kim that Mole has elected to go to Japan again, on last-summer contacts Fred had blithely shared with him. When it was Kim’s boy had won the prize.

Perdue’s next-door neighbor, a famous hostess, always has too many cars in front of her house and his. But he won’t complain, because sometimes the parties are Elsa’s, though not tonight. Two cars are from the working press. The press milks a lot out of this street. He has his eye on one of the other houses for his elder daughter; the younger one may in time take over his. Mole won’t marry for years. He has his eye on those geishas, he said. Perdue smiles, though it doesn’t show.

Tonight he and Elsa have a date for a drink alone; she knows the pressures on him. Staying on to check Canaveral round the clock—four nights now, five?—he’s late for it. The last of the old black maids who wait at the corners for the Washington buses has gone home. Good, she won’t look daggers at him for living here. Or murmur, “Uppity.” Standing on the step, he looks forward to Elsa opening the door for him, wife-warmth flooding his heart. She knows a lot about the human heart, related as she is to the man who wrote the book on it. And yet believes so staunchly in the worth of his.

He shivers again, waiting. Early prizes can be saddening, later. Whom the gods love, et cetera. Gods are useful; multiple or single, they take the dirt off one’s hands. He really believes in them. Let the Gilpins be the atheists. And there’s no reason to be sorry about young Fred yet. It’s all on the knees of the gods.

The door opens. The entry hall is so small, so low-ceilinged, the heads of the newsmen gathered behind Elsa bob at him as if on pikestaffs.—Oh, Lee—Her home-name for him—Lee—the Courier.—Yes, Elsa?—The Courier’s, all right, Lee.—Yes I know. Just left the office—. The press can’t already be here for anything wrong there. Besides, he’s wearing an intercom.—Gentlemen?—He knows them all so well. Saw them at the launching. Will go on seeing them.—Lee—. What’s wrong with her? She never interrupts like this. Knows when to sink back, when to shine. Always at his side.

—Admiral?—the senior of them all says. Always ranks you, tenderly. For the blow that’s coming. But from where?—Admiral, we’re reliably informed that a passenger on the Courier under the name Fred Kim is really your son. Can you give us a line on it?—Her mouth is what’s wrong with Elsa. There ought to be a fan in front of it. For she truly knows his heart.

Nothing will show on his face.

And that’s the way it’ll be. Sketch him often enough and it comes out paint. I’m not as sure of her; she’ll never let on what she really thinks of him. But that’s him. Except for too much of the NASA bit. That’s Gilpin. Funny, how it crept in. But in every other way, that’s him all right. I’m always so shitty good at it. At putting myself in his place.

Mole looked down at himself. Wonder will I tell Gilpin?…Know I’m going to. Funny, how when I went up to Gilpin in that grisly corridor, how he seemed to recognize me. Though that’s only the man’s way; they all say. If I tell him I’m here, won’t I have to tell him why? He’ll worm it out of me…Know I want him to.

Freddie won’t talk—if the press get to him in Osaka. But he’s there. And I’m—wherever here will be. Somebody’ll leak it. Maybe the somebody will be me. And that’s the way it’ll be. For the honorable admiral.

The sharp ache in his chest isn’t a physical one. That’s unfair. Everything ought to be physical here.

He ought to be hearing from others in the cabin. Not a rustle above the flight’s steady wash. Soon the aides must come with food—or did muscle drill come before? He’s almost hungry enough to raid the emergency supply under the seat. Would an alarm ring out? He’s tempted to—just to hear something. No, can’t afford yet to get caught with his hand in the cookie jar, or in any unspecified act. Maybe no one here can. Maybe robot-hands, not in the manual, would unfold out and discipline them. Or maybe no one’s here, except him. Which would he prefer? He won’t answer. He prefers to be a child at his window, waiting to be called to meal. When all children are good. Soon the mother-voice will chime.

He dares a look at the window. A tremendous corps de ballet of stars leaps at him and over his head. Shift focus and those stars are stationary, Mole passing. Fixed points, maybe, of a far somebody’s toleration, they gaze toward him out of the uncountable woods. Creaturing toward him, who can fly. If he had his golden branch with him, his magical brass-bone, he’d play clarinet for them. He’s trilling, the long note unfurling from his mouth. Softly, p’roo. Who’d think that one could whistle, in non-gravity? In his dream or doze, his cabinmates answer him.

A man’s descending hand, naked out of its mitt, nicks past his shoulder but can’t rest there. To his sleep-myopic eyes it’s huge and sculpturally near, a marble hand from a Rodin, from a monument. The hand of God, broken from the largest statue in the universe, is at his shoulder. But on the underside of its wrist, on the soft inner part over the tendons, is a human mark.

“Haven’t played the clarinet in years,” Mole mumbled. He woke. “Who’s whistling?”

“You started it.” Gilpin, grasping a wall bracket, is dangling over him.

Mole’s ear can distinguish two or three ordinary chuffers, an off-key Wish-I-were-in-Dixie and one fancy birdman trill. Everybody in the cabin must be at it. Testing space with the tongue. Tasting Outer. God, above him, has a one-day beard.

The space suit hangs on Gilpin shabby-perfect, the way his clothes used to when he was lecturing, easy togas for that well-known head. Which is staring down intently at Mole’s breast pocket. The free hand, marble no longer, floats at his side. The unsupported feet tread air. Sweat starts from the stubbled cheeks—floating is hard work. The free hand lowers to touch Mole’s ungloved hand, turning it palm up. Freddie had done the purple wrist mark on it with a tattoo needle. He’s an able draftsman, but the marks on the two wrists held up for Mole’s inspection are not quite the same. A bead of sweat, loosed from the nodding head above him breaks into a cloud of minute globules, dispersing out.

“Sonny Perdue?” God says.

Lying on his rack, Mole gazes up, the joints of his limbs lifting and lowering as if he himself is the air’s articulation. Thought is breaking out on him, like sweat too, crusting his upper lip with what tomorrow may be beard. The whistling has died, silenced by the truer music of affairs.

“Saw your picture once, in your father’s office.”

Mole, staring up, acquires his first definition of God. God is whoever is ambulating, half-created by the horizontal’s awe for the vertical.

“Does your father know?”

Mole smiles down, studying his own body’s rise and fall. Suddenly, with a swift glance at the panel, which says nothing new, he thumbs the right spot on the couch arm, his straps fly up and he with them, grabbing the hand rail in the cabin wall just in time. He’s panting, but where everybody wants to be, from Peter Pan on. Walking on air. From his cabin mates below, a faint cheer. “Know what?”

“That you’re here.”

Swung by their hands, he and Gilpin ride chest to bumping chest. Must he answer him? Can’t have two idols; you must choose. Letting one destroy the other. According to all the comic books.

“I know.” It feels to him as if he’s chosen himself. Perhaps it’s meant to. This is what Freddie couldn’t tell him. I’m the real liftoff. As Tom here is. As all the whistlers are, in all the goodly vessels. We’re the orbit in the greater dark, and we’ll be the docking, or the overshoot. All of us—the passengers of ourselves. Even to any dummies on the flight deck.

Is he now in possession of all the flight facts?

Quick, the panel’s glowing angrily. RETURN TO COUCH.

“Tom—ask you something?”

But Tom’s head is bent. One wavering hand has slipped its rung. The other’s about to, loosing him to be dashed upward, or from side to side. How it would actually be—Mole can’t recall. But his muscles already move, as on any old playing field. One of his fists uncramps itself, snagging Gilpin by the belt. Straining Gilpin toward him, lifting him like a sack of nothing, a human bubble, he hooks him to the wall. Turning carefully, leaning into it, he does the same for himself. No time for the couch.

So they swing again, side by side.

“Thanks.” Gilpin’s greenish around the mouth. “You wanted—to ask me?”

Mole shakes his head—oops! The tendons he overworked there a moment ago stretch oddly light, but not without effort. There’s weight in space, but it’s not—weight. Let the question hang there. “Never mind.”

“Sorry.” Gilpin’s grimace is new. Three years ago when Mole first heard him speak he had a roundish crowd-blending countenance hard to remember. Now his hawk-lids droop, scarab-patched. One would know him anywhere.

So this is Tom Gilpin. Not old, nowhere near aged, but one can see how his aging is going to be, with no return possible. So this is Mole’s father as well. Those who have to tot up their century. Men of power have such killing smiles when they’re weakly like this—but would one die for them?

Gilpin caught sight of the panel. He sighs, looking downward. “Is that couch a hundred miles away? Or only ten?”

They’ve linked onto the highest grips on the wall. Mole half wants to let go, to try how it would be to bob in helpless ricochet. How niggly careful you have to be here. “You just go down hand over hand. Hand under hand. And leg. See those notches? They’re on the transverse. Makes it easier. Just be careful—not to rise.” He grins helpfully. Down below, the others in the cabin, all second crew, are now sitting upright like good pupils.

“You didn’t understand, Sonny. I’ll make it. Just that I’m scared.” Gilpin’s eyes bore into his. “Still want to ask me something? Or not?”

They swing.

It comes to Mole how precious such a question would be. One of the durable ones likely to go unanswered, even by headmaster Chape. Unasked, it could sustain him through the airlocks ahead. Only clasp it. Is space an opening out? Or a closing in?

“Sorry about this, Sonny. I’m of the gravity generation.”

“Name’s Mole.”

“Sorry, Mole.”

Pass me the torch, Mole said to himself. To all of them.