ON CANAVERAL

ON CAPE CANAVERAL, on Gantry Row, sea birds wheel above old space machines abandoned on that shoreline to rust in the sticky salt air, sometimes coming to perch on forked cornices and broken parallelograms no odder than those they might find on a forest floor. Vines creep over pitted metals once forged to absolute specification. On Gantry Row the birds and the jungle fernery are the space-age’s sole archivists.

Here engineers from the great inland installations come to loot these old rocket shapes for a spare part or idea still usable, or to sit on the beached sawhorse of some module once smartly vertical and stare at that quiet line where sea meets sky—the obsolete old horizon which any child these days taken aloft on school trips to witness the first truths can tell you is merely the old shoulder curve of a planet he or she may someday leave. Or a couple of men who’ve already been in space as non-operating personnel, lodged by day shift in the roomier white gantry of the lab but maybe sleeping by “night” in those constraint bags in which a body hangs in non-gravity as on a butcher’s hook, will be playing at toss with one of the small rubber balls which out in weightlessness help keep the muscle tone in the hands. They may play until the sun goes down, none of the spots of its eon-slow death here visible. Or they might simply jog the water’s edge, shouting to each other at the lovely downpull of gravity in the legs—according to the aeromedics not the best deal for the veins of bodies evolved from the non-erect, but still what they were born to. This day a pair have brought a bottle, congratulating the whisky as they pour it for not flying out. Clearly they are veterans of the way matter behaves when it is not “at home.”

Farther down the beach, a man seated on a triangular shooting stick and balancing a briefcase on one knee watches them with a freshman’s envy. Weightless travel could be tolerated, and like jet travel soon would be by all but the few made markedly sick by it, but it took learning and could be curiously tiring. In plain language, it was still a strain for humans to be in an environment where they couldn’t fall.

Nobody stayed on Gantry Row late enough to watch the moon come up. Or bothered to bring a man or a girl. The moon is business now. Like most heavenly bodies, it has suffered the decline in personality and charisma which comes, as in old love affairs, from accumulated familiarity and even the most special handling. Those beachcombers on furlough probably work on it, or on a materials-processing station “nearby.” For the five nights Gilpin has stayed on here after dark, playing hooky from the fancy government motel up the road where all passengers for his flight are quartered, he and those busted old rocket shapes have had Diana LaLuna to themselves in all her phases, and it’s been a quiet affair. The moon no longer has much of a sex. On Canaveral maybe even the dogs don’t bay at it.

On the long-ago night of the Apollo moon shot, Gilpin had been a student on work holiday, gorging himself on boar during end-of-summer festival week in a small mountain town in Tuscany. That night, as all there agreed, “she” had lost her virginity—though a clutch of roisterers, dirty old men clapping their hands to their wine-soaked crotches, had kept shouting that the old man up there had lost his balls, until the matrons serving the tables in the straw tents set up all along the town’s central strada had had them thrown out. After which the women, tightening their downy mustachios with a ripple that ran from one headshake to the next—“Aie, la Luna poverina, aie!” had handed all the rest of them in the tent a free extra plate of meat. Mouth full, gazing up through the starry, straw-rimmed tent hole as if he were watching a rape from a manger, Gilpin had quoted Sir Philip Sidney’s address to the moon. Only the first line of it, which was all a sophomore could recall, but aloud, for hell, this was Italy: “With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climbst the skies!” Telling himself he was participating in the death of a portion of the world’s poetry and was possibly the only person in the world to feel this. Next morning every columnist in the Italian newspapers had felt the same.

The following day he sat in a different stall with his real feelings. Here the wine drinkers were the younger men for whom babies were beginning to spill out—not onto the floors of their grandfathers’ farms, sold now to foreigners, but into the new apartment villas on the edge of town, which the government had had built out of the local tufa stone. Tonight they were drinking grappa, which cost more than their own wine, but maybe because they knew him as the boy who since spring had lived on an absentee inglesi’s farm, trucking in the olives to the press like any of them, they wouldn’t let him pay. He’d have to hang along until sundown when they’d all go off to the cafe where perhaps he could treat. The sky he saw through the straw hole was a bright, hard Tuscan blue, and empty. He had no quote for it. Now and then one of the men shook his clenched fist at it admiringly. Once a man let his thumb slide slowly through his other four fingers, two on a side, and everybody laughed. In the tent hole the sky dimmed to “mountain’s breath,” as the dusk was called here, then to a soft ripe-olive black.

Later, in the cafe that was the village’s grange and heart, he and they trooped past the grannies and mothers who sat with the children at tables near the entrance, past the confectionery counter where girls clustered to talk with the two young daughters-of-the-house from whom he bought his ration of one mouth-filling inch of custard pastry with his after-work cappuccino every midmorning—all the way to the bar at the far end, served by the padrone himself. Among the gathered men he recognized the butcher, his cheeks as yellow as the tallow he worked with, who could be glimpsed every Friday through the bead curtain of the barbershop, confronting the mirror with a hair net on his head. The barber himself, that pink-cuticled Aesop, saluted him. Well apart from these townsmen there stood or leaned the town’s portion of granite-wrinkled old men, in pants of stone also and boots cast by time, who every evening were maybe let out of the vaults of the Etruscan museum across the valley. There was one ancient who never got past the café entrance, standing inarticulate for whole evenings in front of the tinseled, glassed-in Motta chocolate display, staring in with dazed other-era eyes.

Gilpin had ducked through all of them, into the communal pisshole at the back. When he came out they were all on their feet, even the mothers guarding the pointy-lashed teen-gigglers whose baby-ready breasts poked at him from their blouses. The slim doe from the town’s gas pump, who bent her valentine-shaped jeaned hips under his nose to feed the inglesi’s car when he brought it in but wouldn’t let herself be spoken to, now smiled at him. Each and all had a glass in hand, holding these out to him. Moona-shot—Moona-shot-Americani!

That long, classically segmented room, lantern-shadowed yet lit with candy-paper frolic, smelling of after-work wine and ice cream, coffee and field stink and talcum powder, murmuring with three-generational tales whose nuances of wit and death he would never get to the bottom of, and underfoot with children treated like everybody’s saints, had all summer seemed to him a bright parable of the world—and still does. He understood that they were making the ritual their rightfully developed sense of occasion demanded of them, and that they felt extra-lucky to have a real American on hand for it. A drink was thrust into his hand. And no, they still wouldn’t let him pay. A-pol-lo-o! a man shouted from the back—Viv’il machina A-pol-lo! The old man transfixed in front of the glassy display mouthed it—A-pol-lo.

Dice Moona-chut! one brash kid in knee pants heckled him, but was hushed from behind. The old man stared in at the chocolate, as he had all summer. A mother detached herself plumply from a table to go behind the counter to remove the largest bar of chocolate, nodding to the owner, who nodded her credit or extended his own. She slipped the bar into the old man’s stone hand and ankled self-consciously back to her corner. A-pol-lo the tables murmured, and crossed themselves. Together, Tom Gilpin and the old man wept.

All this time the padrone had said nothing. A large man a cut above all his customers except the banker and the pharmacist, he dispensed an air of refinement and benevolence combined, the first maybe from the pastry, the second from the wine. Whenever he chose to speak in his cleanly, Jesuit-schooled speech he was listened to. “We must hope—” he said. He hadn’t crossed himself. Instead, he pointed to the rafters. “We must hope they do things decently, up there.”

So, as a result of that night, here’s Tom Gilpin out on Gantry Row waiting for the moon to come up. On his next-to-last-night on earth, for an indefinite time. As it is for the woman he is waiting for.

The two beach players are gone. The alternate pock of their ball still echoes. One of the men had thrown from a heavy crouch, the other with a baseball windup. Low tide has left their departing tracks indented, the oddly feminine footprints of men in Texas boots. The two sets of tracks narrow up the beach toward the weed line and converge there as if the two had lifted off, bounding up with cells suddenly light. A man newly returned from the world of non-gravity might well be excused for momentarily thinking so. A man about to go might do worse than take an image of those imprints with him.

His old Brownie camera, normally carried though seldom used (a person with a camera is noticed less, and that’s his preference), will go to the one-room historical museum in the disused lighthouse of his island birthplace, a still functioning rarity of the sort the islanders prize. They generously feel that he is something of the same. His briefcase, made from a sharkskin his father once spent a whole winter’s after-lobstering hours curing, must go through tomorrow’s documentation procedures or else be left behind; he hasn’t decided which. Where he comes from, the past has always had to earn its keep through use.

In the pocket of his T-shirt there’s a pad and pencil picked up in the motel room. Shirt and trousers are of the loose kind he’s worn for years; he’ll miss their brownish maroon and round-the-world weight. The pad has a legend on it in Old English print: Compliments of the L-5 Society of Tucson, a group of space-habitant enthusiasts from years back. Their joy must now be high. The childish, peanut-shaped footprints he’s now drawing lead straight into that legend. The white page itself looks like air to him. But even for an artist, which he’s not, it isn’t easy to project weight.

Thrusting the pad into the briefcase now stuck into the sand at his feet, Gilpin stares out at the once multitudinous sea.

Until that night at the Porchetta festival he’d had absolutely no interest in what was going on in the heavens, nor had any of his college crowd. He’d gone back and quietly tacked onto his art history major a raft of courses barely squeezed through, mainly intended to lead to astrophysics. The winter company of physicists could be wonderful, especially in Boston, where the cold nights gave an Early Cantabrigian cast to thought, and the good wives of those who still bothered to have them served up Early Revolutionary meals which cleansed the bowel accordingly. Yet one of the impurer sciences—aeromechanics, say—which soared as greedily as those others but maybe unfortunately got there, might have served him better by far. Meanwhile, he never did abandon his own much scruffier crowd.

The weekly opinion sheet he still owns, begun as a graduate-student journal, hand-set by two others and himself in the gilded but otherwise bare ballroom of a Housatonic River mansion inherited too soon by one of them, has at one time or another probed many antitheses without plumping for any. During the early years it kept wickedly changing its name to suit, under the impression that no respectable idea ever stayed the same. The end result was that their faithful subscribers, at first young like themselves, then aging along with them into the merely young-minded, could always trust it to be the same.

Now that Gilpin is notable, one of his partners of that long-ago ballroom has just written him, in what can be taken for congratulation if read hastily. “Don’t you think, dear Tom, that like most radical journals we were only hoarding up our mutual angers for our friends? Have to hand it to you: yours have been more consistent than most.” Effective, he really meant, but a power in the International Monetary Fund deserved to be answered truthfully. “No,” Gilpin wrote back, “my milder fate is I’ve always been able to be too lively about what I believe. Which is what makes me a superficial person.”

One just anger, unhumorously hung on to, better unified a life. In private, each shift had been painful, while he waited for a true commitment to appear. No one had been more surprised when it had, bringing along with it for the paper the underground name a popular success could now let itself be known by—The Sheet.

Life’s been easy on him. His father and mother bought out his other partners so they could back him themselves, which hadn’t mattered since he and they already knew how well they’d indoctrinated him. His mother, a moneyed Boston girl, had married herself to a Maine lobster-man during one of those ever-recurring periods in American history when such doctrines as Save the Sea, Screw War, Up the Rich, and Know Your Natural Body had all seemed to render one happy savage sense. Absolutists both, they’d reared him to believe that what you did daily, you did both within and to the cosmos.

In bad moods, he now sees his inherited categorizing of all people as a kind of cheaply moral packaging, of which his reforming madness may be the very slightly nobler side. Down at the bottom though, all the Gilpins were popularists, notoriously in love with that whole-flesh collective, mankind. “Who on rainy days,” his self-taught father would say gloomily, “is only poor bloody Pithecanthropuserectus beating the children to stand up straight.” But who, on moonlit nights when the catch was running—same old silver but new shoals—was surely the Fisherman, eyes intent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He’s certainly carried back to earth with him that squared-off position which shoulders tend to assume during the first liftoff sensation of hanging upside down. The flight doctors can’t understand why he should have retained it. He could have told them. Fright. Three weeks in cosmic fright. True, he hadn’t vomited like some. Nor had any serious arrhythmia as a result of the changes in total body water from induced electrolytic charge during weightlessness. And yes, he’d taken the wee pills for sleeplessness, plus those yellow gobbets designed to offset other “abnormal” responses to interruption of his body’s preferences. Which medication had worked optimally, allowing him an eight-hour shift of perfect fright-sleep, and a functional fright-shift by day.

So he’s come through with a perfect record except for one slip, due merely to a minor astigmatism interacting with faulty design—when he’d defecated into the Water Distillator instead of the Hydro John. Which had been taken note of as a viable criticism.

Even his question about his backside had to be taken seriously, for aeromedical research, they told him, had turned up some dandy commercial by-products from even odder observations. “No, his er, coccyx-to-buttocks periphery seems normal. Left cheek, that is. Let’s measure the right.” Behind him the murmuring of the doctors in the return room went on happily. “Decline in red cell mass, median on allowable scale. Muscular-cellular deterioration—hah!” They spun him round to the front on that one. “Slight change in vertebral alignment”—murmur, murmur—“no, no aberration in the right cheek either. But aha, look at that leg. And this one. Yep. Considerable decrease in the girth of each calf.” Smiling at him when they saw his apprehension. “Everybody does it. Just as you’ve almost totally lost the antibacterial immunization given you before going. That red-cell loss will have to be taken care of. Weight loss, eight pounds, which is about average too—but pick up on it, fella, you don’t have that much to spare. You may have to wear a neck brace for a couple weeks, and your Eustachian tubes may be blocked fuller than you’re used to. It’s all absolutely normal. Watch your balance of course—lo—ook at that guy over there trying to negotiate the staircase. For God’s sake, don’t jump off anything in a fit of absent-mindedness. You won’t float.”

One doctor had remarked on a change in the occlusion of his teeth. No surprise to Gilpin, after three weeks of trying to keep their chattering from notice in an environment where every human being, the minute unhelmeted, hungrily scrutinized every other: You all right, Jack? Then I’m all right.

“What you been doing?” this doctor says. “Grinding them?”

Gilpin sticks out his jaw at the pair of them. He feels heavy again, healthy heavy enough for anything. Gravity is laving his feet. The trend in these halls is to discredit it, whenever possible. Birth pains, for instance, are now blamed on G-pull. One of the docs is a woman. He thrusts out his lower lip at her. “Grit,” he answers. “Sheer grit.”

So he’d passed. Certified for the first civilian flight of the first passenger space shuttle, the Citizen Courier. Only a last-minute outcry had kept NASA from naming it the Mayflower. Space humor was analogous to sailors’, and from the same tensions. The habitat they’re going to, until then referred to as the L-5 after its position in space, has been rechristened Island U.S.—pronounced “Us.” Still, he’s going. He’s already a guaranteed aristocrat. And barring certain enthralling considerations—like, would any children born on habitat be non-G inured, or would some of them do so badly in non-gravity that they’d have to be sent back here?—so will be all his heirs.

The waves are now becoming those individual ones the eye vainly keeps trying to hang on to. He hears a few more birds being unhappy, or alert. A sure sign of weather, and before morning. At the launching only the reporters might get wet, stationed in an open reviewing stand a mile and a half away. All the active button pushers will be in underground shelter, with the instruments. He and other passengers will board via a germproof corridor. Test flights like the one he’d taken weren’t launched from the Cape but from other round-the-nation installations which had no such corridors, maybe on the theory that passengers who didn’t disembark in space wouldn’t contaminate it. Was it possible to taint space just by being there? He supposed they were doing their best and would only find out for sure later—possibly when large, catarrhal clouds surround later colonists with their own grandfathers’ germs, or some little lice creature, of the hard-shelled sort that survives eons of non-atmosphere, arrives on habitats now projected to be in the dozens internationally, in perhaps thirty years. Human ecology didn’t change; its “neighborhoods” always went downhill. Then its “best people” moved on.

They were saying the whole planet might eventually have to. Move on. The whole population even, piece by piece. Fleeing the scrap-heap Earth cities that still burned so beautifully at night, the countryside that still loped green and tree-frothed at the transportation window but had lost its cow-dung innocence to canals of fetus-deforming scum, and the air which was a nimbus of cancerous fire invisible, so that we were all fire-eaters now. While our children would grow old and diseased.

It seemed to him, no expert, that there was a curious ignoring here. Your child would grow old and diseased in any case, in what used to be called the fullness of time. If when you first saw the little greased eel when it was expelled, bright with red energy or washed candy-pink in the calm arms of a nurse, you were also shown projections of the mumbling, warted bag of dropsy which age might make it, arriving to die maybe in this same hospital or one like it—what then? You’d perhaps blind your eyes with spread palms or shout, “I don’t expect us to be immortal!” Secretly thinking, “Though perhaps, by the time he grows…Meanwhile, I’ll do something for him, along the way.”

In the fullness of time. That was what had been lost.

The solution had seemed to him simple and ark-like. He shifts the briefcase stuck in the sand at his feet; the tide’s nibbling in. The case contains his master set of those issues of The Sheet which have had a humble place in history, dating from a front-page opening blast seven years ago—the day after NASA’s plans for the present habitat had been ratified, with a dainty absence of hoorah. They knew all the implications far better than the laity. On the left-hand side of the page he’d used the Bible: St. Paul’s injunction that we must be members of one another, and on the right the Statue of Liberty’s injunction: “Give me your tired, your poor,” etc. Both under a wartime-size double head: EVERYBODY MUST GO—WE HAVE THE RIGHT. Subhead: To Go or To Stay. It looks very amateurish now.

He dislikes the Atlantic down here. A northern sea by rights, where it goes warm it also goes glum and sly, with none of the Pacific’s jade openness. Still, on reentry from test flight they had all been whelmed to see it, even in its great reversal. As mariners of the non-air, an element which by now seems to him the very color of equations, and in a descending rocket plane, the sudden sea below, that heaving known, became a giant lily pad whose domestic dangers would have to be relearned. In a queer way they had returned newly vulnerable, having to be careful not to slip in the bathtub, like the old astronaut, Glenn. But the sea mystery, once dominant in his life and the planet’s, could not be relearned. The mystery of the planet itself, was it burned out? Or like St. Elmo’s fire—the sailor’s false beacon, that luminous electric discharge into atmosphere from projecting or elevated objects—merely gone on ahead?

That flight had been eight days and return—and only in orbit. This one will be twenty-one days, and will touch down. The Courier itself would be returning here, not with their crowd but with technicians previously delivered to the habitat in batches, by smaller shuttle units, analogous to the huge Courier somewhat as the older DC planes had been to the wide-bodied jets. He’s resisted knowing more of either general operations or technical detail. If he’s to go, then let him be a passenger as the airplanes or the oceangoing steamships had known them—thousands of us, committing ourselves to the air in a delicately preserved myopia, or to the sea.

During his training trip, the whispering headphones had prophesied continually. Island U.S., though as yet only a “commercial” installation, was located at one of the more suitable Lagrange points. There had followed a short vita of Lagrange himself and an explanation of his discoveries, of the sort Gilpin is learning to tune out. For his instinct to remain passenger-passive was proving right; if you listen too hard to the technology, your ear goes deaf to its implications.

Tonight there are no stars. He’s tired of stars and no longer ashamed of it. In orbit there’d been a fixed rain of them, curving and recurving again, so that he’d seemed to himself imprisoned in a kind of star torture, trapped inside one of the exhibits at the old Hayden Planetarium. And in the window of his future quarters there was promised him a view of the firmament, traveling with him and the flat’s perhaps every-two-minute revolutions. What was the atmospheric mix prescribed for habitat?—he’s been told but has forgotten it.

On-Island, as the phrase had been on his small one, his dependency will increase a hundredfold. Sunsets and sunrises to be arranged. He thinks he can tolerate that. His own planet in its decline has already inured him to much. What he doubts he can take is to be dependent on an elect few for all the tastes of life. For, far as he could tell, these new worlds which their planners spoke of so blandly weren’t to be worlds of grandeur, but merely virtuously free of both dirt and spontaneity and subscribing to their creators’ ideals of comfyness.

His travels have taught him that middle-grade scientists tend to have petit-bourgeois tastes; it is the rich or the poor who are inventively grandiose. It’s just possible he can take Utopia. It’s foregone that he won’t be able to take Utopians.

O Tom Gilpin, keep looking up. Layers of ozone blackened only by solar absence, grubby-warm ocean on a pre-storm night, as you need no satellite to tell you. A damaged moon shining on the rusted molybdenums and non-biodegradable plastics of migration-first-stage from a planet which has lost all its physical unknowns except the wherewithal of the first act of creation. Then why is it still all—choose your words carefully—what it is? Which seizes the throat and no adjective can describe—or only all of them in all languages. Which tears at our vitals as if these were made to be its abacus. The one mystery left to Earth is now leaving it—us. Then let it be us in toto. No other way are we dignifiable. No one part of us, no one person, is completely dignifiable alone.

A stentorian blast blows suddenly from inland—Mmmmmm-ah-ah-ah—mmmmmmm. Birds shoot up and past him on its trajectory, circling in wide agitations to get above the sound’s crescendo, returning in downward swoops tuned to its decrease. This nine o’clock siren has taught even the night birds its musical phrase. A creature like him has to stand in its volume, letting the decibels drain down. Yet he’ll remember Canaveral as a white, even silent place. So much of what it builds is reared behind muffled walls, components assembled in hangars whose vastness makes even the hammers go tick-tock. From these hangars, big enough to house pyramids, constructions are wheeled like huge geometric dreams, which afterward swim like colloidal shapes on the eyeball. Someday masters and apprentices both may be moved in entirety to Outer, where metals have no weight and the cold amalgams can be fused at low temperatures untenable on earth. By that time, in the improved skyworks of a later era, even average personnel should suffer no pangs of transferal. Or so he’s told.

A chill shivers his bones, in spite of air so hot and close that the waves appear blunted. These days there’s a subliminal thrill that comes of already being half able to look back at oneself from up ahead—at one’s old former planet, that spent cannonball. Some here work under that condition constantly; they come out of their labs and projections dazed by the time thrill, the space thrill, frozen into weird concentrations from which they have to be won back. These are the ones who tonight, as on many nights, would be flown to other cities, to the brothels or opera houses of their choice. Those are the lighter cases, the more conventional ones. One brilliantly indispensable woman, whenever at the end of her brain tether, is flown to Finland, where she does time in a center for autistic children, being fed and serviced like one of them, beginning to babble and fling herself about the minute she enters. Though there are such centers here now, she’d refused them. “Finland’s staying,” she’d said. “Nobody’s going yet, from there.”

Contrarily, one man, a mathematician, goes only eight miles, to a health spa whose attendants have instructions to cocoon him in wet blanketings, rolls of bandage-thin ones from which every half hour they are to unwrap one only, with nursery endearments. Once this is done he emerges silent but warmed mentally, and goes home to his wife. There are those who have to be whipped, and neither claim nor evince sexual excitement—unless the return of the terrestrial time sense can be termed sensual. Epileptics, whose brain explosions dislocated them temporarily from internal time sense, were said to be able to work in these future-chill-prone environments without need of other release, their own intermittent attacks, if courted and unmedicated, taking care of it. Means to guard them while under attack were being pursued, for the possession of that other resistance, especially when present in high-caliber brainworkers, would give them top priority.

The wind’s rapping at the loose flaplock of his briefcase, stuck there in the sand like a secretary displaying the boss’s importance to the other board members here: Sky, Moon, Sea, Attendant Galaxies—and an expectantly wired world. He’s spent a third of his life in all the slots of influence, from the walnut miles of government offices to the veiled, holy white of its “installations,” at one moment gossiping away in anarchic little cafes, at another lolling in a press lord’s yacht. Through the sexes too, he’s gone, and out the other side—as can happen to a man really spermed only to an idea. In the shape of history, persons like him are maybe merely that—one motile cell, moving like any sperm, under one enormous general purpose and one very small autonomy. The papers in the briefcase contain his message. Everyone must go, if the world is going to leave the world.

He’d expected to be laughed at and had been—hugely. Receiving letters, however, from a couple of men at the Goddard Space Center, some half dozen from university centers, and a bid to testify before a Senate committee neither he nor the country had yet known to exist.

Nowadays, he sometimes sees his old second broadside—the one with a picture of the Ark, captioned Two by Two—The Elite Is Everybody—framed in a union hall or cartooned in some Christmas annual, and marvels at what a curious progression the advance of any idea is. He himself had been the quietest of rabble-rousers, intending only to start little avalanches of concern here and there, to tickle awake those whom the globe’s anarchy still surprised.

So at last he has reached that middle mass which can assure an idea that everybody knows it exists. His has even been heard to tremble in that pale underground where anemia keeps the sights low—among the socialized poor. One constituency he has had with him utterly—the fierce young. In their company, he keeps to himself how transitory he knows their help must be—on their way, as they are, to all the other categories.

Now he is better known in Washington and the country at large than he ever wanted to be. Two years ago, via a behind-his-back campaign of a former employee retired to the life of sentiment, scotch, and long-distance telephone calls which old newspaper people so often fell into, he had been nominated for the Nobel. Rhoda, always excessive, had had public contacts unfortunately wide. More seriously, he’d been investigated as a lobbyist and cleared, again publicly. He had emerged from between those two prongs as from an Iron Maiden, purer in reputation than the innocent, and to some conservatives more dangerous than the humbly criminal.

From there he could watch with a certain arrogance. His hooted-at insistence that none must be disqualified, none favored—by then a great sticky orb of controversy and study—had rolled on without him. As long as the reformer is merely maligned he is safe. But once his words have been acted upon in his favor, what then? He has to be sure as a god then, that the arrow thrown was the rightful one. He has to be proud as a lord, of his own life. Gilpin is not. Should everybody go; should everybody even want to? Why should he bother, how dared he? What is—natural selection?

Then he’ll see something to humble him, perhaps the gulping smile a very small child makes, as if it’s sipping life. And he’ll be out of that bramble, a man with his eyesight scratched in again. I love, I love, I love.

That too can be publicly dangerous. But that he will risk.

“You’ll want to go yourself, of course, Mr. Gilpin.” As if this man wouldn’t know otherwise. In space matters, walnut offices are for those who still dealt in tycoonism; when you get to steel and enamel like this, and one beady model instrument neither a clock nor a Cellini, then you know you are in the white gantry of the Ship of State. “And Miss Oliphant. See by that article she wrote she’s passed as a candidate also.” This man has a face like an almond with the skin still on, the husk having been ground up to make his smooth-to-gravelly voice. “My wife and girls so admire her.”

In the desk picture the wife is white, the daughters and their light-haired brother not so brown as their father, who is nowhere near so dark as Veronica Oliphant—who likes to wear white fur against her black, and has her own place in the public eye.

“Ah, you two’ll make a fine couple for the ship. A useful one,” Perdue says. Not saying in which way. Private lives were not to be private on the Courier. It must already be in the précis, each computerized, psychographed, and even collaborated upon by its subject. It would be known to Perdue that their relationship, Veronica’s and his, has never been sexual. That Gilpin has no such relationships now would have been gone into, as far back as Madge. While candidate Oliphant’s style in that respect may be part of what Perdue’s girls admire her for.

“We’re not precisely a couple. As you must know.”

“Forgive me. Yes. We’ve had to study up beforehand,” Perdue says with distaste.

“It’s all in the public domain.” Loudly insisted upon at last, by the public itself. “You don’t forgive the process?”

“We abide by it. Dealing with the results as we can. Why do you ask, Gilpin? Balk, did you? When you had to go through the process your self?”

“Only out of humiliation. I’ve so little to hide.”

“I must say. How a man of your background could be so—”

“Foolish?”

“As to trust those data boys.”

“It was either them or the military.”

“Or us.” Perdue actually smiles.

“No one class can be allowed to choose the inhabitants of a new world that rigidly. That’s been my whole point. Besides, it never works.” He’d kept his eye on the family picture. The son’s hair is pale like the mother’s but wooled like the father’s. On a longer head, but with the same snub face. Wonder who that boy admires?

“What’s your alternative?”

He sighed; he sighs a lot in these offices. “Choose by lot.” Which of course they haven’t done. “From a representational pool of humanity, constantly added to. Tied first to the birth rate here, and only then to their capacity for Outer.” Actually he’d been improvising, as usual—adherence to principle being all he wants. In any policy to do with human beings, the means of execution were never ideal. His century has taught him it ought not to be. Let there always be a ragged, civilian, amateur eye.

“Mr. Gilpin, you may be very glad your ship’s crew was not chosen by lot.”

“Oh—with margins for operating personnel, of course.” That’s the loophole. They always see it.

“Everybody in a habitat in space ought to be operating personnel, for Christ’s sake. Just as on any spacecraft.”

“Until when? The millennium?”

Perdue’s a graceful man. “Here’s your promised list, Gilpin. Actually the data boys haven’t done so badly. Every economic and social factor represented.” He lifts a brow. Impossible, as they both know. “To an age curve.” That’s easier. “Over twenty-one. No children yet. But those belonging to present and future passengers on the qualified lists will be sent for later. And four of the younger women are pregnant. Two men in their eighties, three women. Low for the national percentile, but there it is. As has been so much discussed—death will inevitably be represented.” In time. Agreed. “As for your lame, your halt, your sick—” Perdue blew out his breath. “That’s impossible. We must not be burdened. But you do have—let’s see—a blind person. Blind since birth, graduate degree, very nimble—useful member. Also, a paraplegic. Did remarkably in vestibular training…Actually, in non-gravity no limbs can be rather good, you know. Or no use of them. Also, a few who wear hard-of-hearing devices. No sweat there. Plus one mildly retarded clerk, who’s worked excellently in the postal system.” He smiled again. Gilpin had refused to. “One mild emphysema, ditto one cardiovascular, et cetera, et cetera.” He hesitates. “No known carcinomas. Sorry, but we simply couldn’t. Because of the viral evidence, you really can’t expect…” He broke out still another smile. “But a very nice pair of female trusties from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Manics, both of them, on lithium dosage compatible with what we—” Might have to administer when aloft—to anybody? “Want to look it over, before you take it along?” He holds out the list. Take it away, he means, his wrist trembling with rage.

Trembling too, Gilpin bent over that first passenger list. A note appended to it reminded that each name had a case history not here attached, copies to be distributed to all when aboard. In addition, films on each person would be available for showing in the ship’s common room, later to be filed in the Island’s computer library, the file to be cumulative as the Island’s population grew.

“So there you’ll be,” Perdue said. “One hundred and eight average citizens, supposedly. Only nobody who passes our training can be average—you ever figure that?”

“We never campaigned for average citizens. Only for representative ones.” He’s spent years explaining the difference.

“Well, you’ve got them. All the right wrong people.”

“Wrong from NASA’s point of view.” Which by such a narrow margin he’s kept from being his country’s? Or hopes he has.

“From any point of view, they’re a disaster. Why start out with the flawed—valuable people or not—when you can so easily find the healthy equivalent? The functioning one?”

“Maybe we value their viewpoint. Humanly.” He loathes the language, but sees no way out of it. “And these people will function. Your crew saw to that.”

“At a cost of ten months. Why did you do it, Gilpin? I understand you’ve spent years. Healthy people are just as human as the sick ones.”

And the rich as human as the poor, and those in prison as much as those free, and the bad as much as the good. Or vice versa. He’d have had to admit thieves and charlatans and worse—all the human mix—if it had been up to him, but his own guilt is that he’s always known how far he can practicably go. “We want them both. Or rather, all.” He makes himself grin for the thousandth time. “In heaven—as it was on earth.” Except for the cemeteries—no room for those. All of them have signed a cremation release.

“It could be heaven in a way, you know.” That rainbow stare could gimp a scientist’s face as much as any evangelist’s. “In a way, organic life itself will be an intrusion.” This from a man who had started as a biologist. “Why not at least”—Perdue leans across his clean-swept desk—“I’ve a handicapped younger brother myself. Expect to miss him when I go. But—” He claps his knuckles together.

“You going with us?”

“On that first trip out? Uh-uh. I’ve opted for the second.”

“You expect a hitch?” Gilpin gets the freeze traitors deserve. For they’ve had their hitches. “Don’t see much of those displayed at Goddard.”

“Any hitch won’t be in the machinery.”

But in us rabble, he means. Perdue has hazel-green eyes which start out of that skin like electric lights during day, oblong nails and perfect cuffs, but spare as he is, his uniform appears too small for him. A man of contradictions, who has no sense of them? Or a sense so fine that he daren’t notice it.

Gilpin got up to go. “Well, I’m sure you’ll make it, Admiral.”

“I expect to—use my influence.”

“A lot of people will. Have.” He put the list in his briefcase. “We never figured on reforming humanity, you know. Only on including it.”

“For better or worse? Like in a marriage?”

“It is a sort of contract,” he says, surprised at the personal note. “Between the old Earth, and the new…” He would never get used to calling that thing “Earth.”

“Sentimentalists. Just like God, you people. He never would take the last step.” Perdue draws a finger across his throat. Above it, his brown face is more like Buddha’s than Gilpin’s will ever be like Christ’s. “Rested on the seventh day, He did. When a look at any back alley in Washington would tell Him he should’ve—revised.”

“Maybe the Islands’ll do that. Ultimately. Produce their own natural selection.”

“Natural—Huh.” Perdue matches his knuckles, silently. “That takes time. Eons of it. We only have space.”

At the base of the spine is where the future thrill comes, Gilpin thinks to himself. Just above the coccyx, like the budding of a diviner tail. “Perhaps we’ll meet out there then. To continue this.” Gilpin’s glance crosses the desk picture. Perdue hadn’t been in uniform then. “That your son?”

“Mmm. Eighteen now.”

“Who does he admire?”

“You—” Perdue said.

“Gilpin! Gi-ilpin?” The cry comes from the beach behind him. “Is that you?”

Who else would it be, waiting for her company these five nights, secure in the knowledge that only on the last one would she come? He and she tend to meet that way, on the last night of professional involvements, or the beginnings of new ones. No friend of his life has ridden the years better, linked as they are by work topics and an unspoken tolerance of each other’s private lives, neither conducted in directions which ever meet. Yet after all this time her voice retains its Barbadian reserve; she’s an island person too. Until tonight, he’s never thought of it.

As she clambers toward him across the scrub, the long silver boots she wears catch the light like pistons. Those yard-long legs, skinny as a Giacometti figure’s, are her main African feature. Nefertiti’s, the lazy newspapers like to call the suave shape of her head. To him she has the snub face of a neat French child, blacked. In his own childhood attic there are files of an early humor magazine which ran cartoons whose pickaninny voices ballooned in white captions from blank dark. But night doesn’t make black faces harder to see; they make what light there is more apparent. Hers catches the moon’s web like obsidian. Tonight the white shawl top which is her trademark is only a sweater. But even in the jeans she wears to the office, exotic for this particular aviary is how she seems anywhere.

“Tom. Tom.”

“What’s wrong?” Has she the look she had the night they met years ago, strangers on a ratty antique plane whose seats were granted only by favor? A waif—but even then at her own request. And ready soon enough to be a queen.

“Those palm trees, just outside the motel. The ones wired for music. There was a man standing underneath one of them just now. A—passenger. But he’s not on the list.” She crosses her arms, gripping her shoulders, her eyes dilated.

He’s never seen her like this. “A passenger? You’re sure?”

She holds out a wrist. On it, the same mark as on his. The passengers are of divided sentiment on that mark.

“You’ve checked the list?”

“The motel’s. At the desk.” The words come numbly, slurred. But she doesn’t drink. “I was in my room. Working on—something of my own. A part I can never get right. I thought maybe here.” She shook her head. “So I went walking. God—that must be the biggest motel in the world; I saw almost no one.”

Yet they are all quartered there, under security they themselves assent to. A valuable cargo, two years in the making.

“Then a door opened and closed, down an aisle. He came out of it.”

“Some man you know?” His spirits sink. So many of them.

“I knew the shirt. Funny. Those sleeves always too short for him. Or shrunk.” She’d never said “always” about any one of them before. “And the shape of the head. From the back. So I stopped at the desk. He’s not on their list.” She shivers. “Those palm trees outside, they’re not for real. Did you know?”

“Yes.” Vinyl, each must be, all twenty-foot-high spread, and down to each bristly calyx, which bears a torch.

She’s staring past him at water, scrub, and sea, past even the celebrated shape of the module he’s leaning on, discarded here so far back in the space program, to sink into the hoped-for anonymity of rust. “Your briefcase. Look at it.”

Water is rocking it. Tide is coming in. While they watch, the undertow drains past the case, giving it the illusion of motion—a brief running-out to sea—then leaves it high and dry again.

“My past. I was going to let the sea take it.” So much impedimenta. Like the apartment he’d finally disposed of, his lawyer protesting such a giveaway—though already some citizens were getting reluctant to buy. On leasehold, the agreement was. With “ground rights.” For ninety years, unless the owner returned to Earth within a specified time. There would be more leases like that, more and more, coming on like that wave there, rising for its one moment of identity.

“Is the official list in it? Let me see.”

The briefcase wets his knees as he opens it. But his clothes too are to be left. “You should’ve had a copy. Everybody did.”

“I do have. I was saving it. To read on the—the plane.” She flashes him a rueful smile. Her life has been predetermined by planes; she’s one of the diamond successes faceted daily between those time-cutting wings.

He takes a small flashlight from the briefcase, holding it over the page for her. For years she’d worn her head shaved close; now it’s grown out again into its old coiled pattern of tiny braids dividing the scalp, like plowed fields photographed from a satellite. The ears are the smallest adult ones he’s ever seen, and perfect. He never kisses women anymore, nor men either, but those, bent over the list like a child’s, he could have touched. Nineteen years since they’d met—she’s now thirty-six. On the forefinger going down the list, the heavy carnelian ring which had been her father’s, then her stepmother’s, is gone. Given up. Though they never speak of her early history, he’s had intimations of it, as well as of the shape of her present habits, though never the details. Soon, if he wants he may have those as well. Like everyone else.

The finger going down the list is slow. Over a hundred passenger names, each with its small vita attached, introductory to the dossier to come. Once aboard and out of orbit, the full dossiers, drawn from both human and computerized interviews with the life subject and all that life’s contacts, will be available in various audiovisual formats, not neglecting plain print. So that at any unsuspected time your life might be unwinding in another human consciousness, or hers or his in yours, or you might consciously pursue a particular record on a basis less fragile than friendship or love. Optimally, everybody might, with everybody. Easier on an enclosed vehicle than on a planet-at-large, as Earth is now being referred to. Easiest of all where there will be just enough world, and time. On habitat.

“It will be the extraordinary documentary project of the age,” one editorial had said enthusiastically. “All subjects have cooperated as entirely as if on the private psychoanalytic couch.” Which also has been utilized. “A two-part dossier—on the one side its research routes in microfilm, on the other the unified document in readable type, multilingual and transferable to sign language or braille—is an awe-inspiring sight. Holding one in the palm is like holding a human consciousness.”

Palm holding is certainly stretching it. Those things weigh four pounds. He’d been reminded at once of Hermann Oberth’s lie detector. Openness is trust. Without further character delineation.

“I’d forgotten,” he wrote to Colorado, “that only island amateurs like me could dream of modestly doling out the crumbs of justice; my century returns them to us on the double—as boxed cake.”

He stares at Veronica Oliphant’s forefinger, painfully tracking down that list of names. Behind each of which now waits the four-pound box. His little idea of equal opportunity in the new New World may have boomeranged. Governments have to be founded on ideas—yet what government can be trusted to execute them? “Who could have dreamed we were all to become members of the members-of-one-another gang so quickly? Hope St. Paul will be pleased.”

The finger pauses.

“Find the name?” He averts his head, not to pry.

“No. Another man I knew once. Not too long ago.”

He knows her sexual style. Or suspects it.

“Fancy him being along. Mulenberg.” She seems amused.

The forefinger isn’t. At last it stops. The hand drops to her side.

“Not there? The other one?”

“No. But I saw him.”

One man, out of her many? He’s sure of it.

The battered gold locket she always wore—she isn’t wearing it. He turns out the flashlight.

“Turn it back on,” the voice beside him says.

When he does, she’s holding out the locket. “It’s what I was going to throw away.” The long arm goes up. She throws, not with a woman’s wristy toss, but like a basketball player. They watch a sparkle arc upward and silently down, too small for sound. They might have been watching through a telescope the fall of a spacecraft eons away. He thought of the gold oval, so recently on skin, twisting now in the salt wrack, a whole portion of meaning. For a second, the power of the sea is returned to him. Then he recalls where they are going, how far.

“Was there a face in it?” He’d always wondered.

“Not—so you could see.”

“You saw his face, though? The man under the tree?”

“Maybe I only thought I did. That’s what I’m afraid of. Because then it would mean that I still—” She spat her disgust into the sand.

“You?” One of the unique reporters of the world, the world said. “You saw. What you saw.”

Her body planes are always interchanging the way a good dancer’s do, hoarding their own secret central motion under the body’s legerdemain. “His every feature is the same. The same. Only—it’s a face that doesn’t startle you anymore.”

He’s known beauties, male and female both, who’ve aged that way. Just gone ordinary.

Her face never moves much. That’s what makes it such a lens catcher. “He didn’t know me. He didn’t—even know me.”

“That’s impossible.” No one could ever not know her, once seen. There are age marks. Yet, under forty still, it’s as if she’d had irremediable spiritual surgery at seventeen and done nothing since—except not ripen.

“We were right underneath one of those torches.”

Twenty-nine of them there are, one to each nonignitable totem-high palm, making a gigantic flaming avenue suitable to the scale in these parts, and to the intention. No expense has been spared so that this gateway to the cosmos, from which will go forth this first journey of the new aristocrats, might look as much as possible like a Chicago steakhouse. He could see her standing there, a movie girl no one could miss.

“He was checking his watch by the clock on the tower.”

A huge digital one, well lighted, which gave calendar and weather information as well. So the man she’d seen wouldn’t have been the blind passenger. Merely an anonymous one, who somehow carried the mark printed on each of them four days ago.

He isn’t happy about that wrist mark. This one isn’t a tattoo, but more like those purplish proofs of payment rubber-stamped on the back of one’s hand at the ticket doors of conventions or benefit parties. Early on, NASA had proposed an invisibly permanent heraldry. “Some census mark will be necessary to distinguish between Earth and habitat residents, as between any borders.”

The whole fourth estate had reacted magnificently, especially television, whose voracious news maw, needing to be fed every hour on the hour, had found itself to be, like all “open” news, the unwitting ally of a sort of liberalism. “Invisible!” had come its roar. “Invisible?” So all passengers have these highly photogenic, two-year-durable, allegedly non-counterfeitable rosettes.

“So he had the mark,” he says, and sees her shiver. But not for the mark, he thinks. For the man.

He feels the removal he always does, from all those still down there in the hot sexual morass, swinging by their genitalia to the ancient reproductive current however they mind-alter it, and therefore, in spite of all other marvels of brain, ever slightly blunted in their face-up to the rest of the cosmos. Yet who would think of this world traveler in terms of that old melée? Or with her narrow rib cage against a child’s cheek.

“What were you doing, Tom, when I came along the beach?”

“Baying.”

“At the moon?” She stretches her long neck at it.

“At everything.”

She opens her mouth, a small orifice but more expansible than most. A curdling sound pours from it—more than a scream, not a shriek—long and idling. Not a bird flies up. Too late for it. Saluting the moon, she shrugs at him. “That my old friend you’re leaning on?”

It’s the old piece of hardware said to belong to the ill-fated Apollo which had blown up and burned on pad, immolating the three astronauts, Virgil Grissom and—who were the other two?—its fused horror now no more than an iron grimace on the air. She’d once written an article about it. Some said this wasn’t the real relic; there was none. Who’d been the others of the trio? For the life of him he can’t remember. In the space museums now, there isn’t too much space devoted to failure.

“After your story came out, they came to get this. But they must have got the wrong one.” And no wonder. Far as the eye can see, the ever-accumulating old shapes litter the shore.

She strips off her sweater, draping it there. “Bye. Bye-bye.” Underneath, her bikini is wet; she swims and swims here, with that other restlessness which must keep her young. Athletes have the same—a constant need to make muscle patterns in space.

“Where’s your white fur?”

“I was going to leave it. Finally I packed it. So—it’s being documented.”

Everything on the ship has its own document as to its chemical composition and reactivity in any spatial situation. There are to be no accidents this time, though the rocket plane will contain some paraphernalia left over from equipment specifications well back in space history, which if one thinks a minute are far funnier than that fur. Shark chasers, for instance, and pocketknives, and seawater desalting gear, all for use in the event of what was marked on each: JETTISON. Odd stuff, for those who could not possibly ever again land by themselves on that fleck, the sea. Had someone forgotten to eliminate old checklists? Someone always forgets something. Why does that warm him suddenly, instead of chill? Out there, where a bit of the wrong friction could send them all to blazes, there’ll be no margin for endearing human clumsiness.

“I had a girl with a fur once.” He smiles at the puppy thought of her, of the real girl. Except as Madge the symbol, he hasn’t thought of her nor heard from her since the day she left.

“In the days when you had girls?—Or boys. According to the office.”

“Ah, the office.”

She stretches, preparing to swim, then hangs back.

“No, don’t go in that. I don’t like the look of it.”

They both accept what the other knows. Sliding to the sand, she puts her head on her knees. Often they share these pleasantly collapsed silences. They free us, he’s thinking—though not to the same things. In our separate ways we suffer from the same dualism. Or enjoy it. Neither of us cares to confuse mind with body. Or body with mind.

And he likes to guard people, from a distance. Though those high-jutting knees of hers, meeting the shoulders in one limber furl, seem not to need it. On the other hand, those silver boots always scuff.

His attention goes from her to the sky and its portents. That’s dawn over there, not to break for hours yet, only a hectic itch in the sky, like an irritation in old skin. He’d found himself watching nature signs more too these last days in the motel, as if at the last moment these might still tether him.

Under his feet is the scruffy, barrier-island loam which privately he can never admit to the same company as the kneaded brown humus of his New England island, chastely containing itself as if for conscience’ sake, behind the harsh salt rock. We’re going to detach ourselves from the Earth pull, whatever else happens. We’re really going to do it. The draw of the Earth, all the way down to its fiery, quaking bowels, will no longer be the strongest part of our ken. Oh, only a slight detachment of the feet, lovey, they’ll say—they’re saying. You won’t miss it that much, ducky, that heavy deadness in the soles of your feet, in your limbs. Think, now, of lifting a steel T-bar with your fingertips in the nice dustless factory—where dust, they don’t say, can be a bombardment. Or of pedaling out into the late afternoon like a Nijinsky—with a paramour chosen for the same metatarsal tolerances? Oh there’ll be gravity, dear, false of course, and maybe not quite so forceful in the psychology; ethically we may even in the future wish to float rather than to weigh. But there'll be enough candy-gravitation to keep us all sane.

But the trek that starts with the feet always rises in time to the head. There had never been any of mankind's that didn’t. We’re going to float out of Earth’s ken—and out of our bodies, as we now live and breathe. That’s the real import beneath all the glory-talk.

“I’ve been a fool,” he said to her. “No matter how many times they say they’ll ferry us back, in our heads we’re going for good, aren’t we?” Forevermore. “No matter how long it takes.”

“Never takes as long as they first think. After the first time. The shuttles didn’t.” Leaning back against the scabbed metal of the old module, she stretched her long arms in joy he could see well enough. “Yes of course, in the long run. Haven’t you been saying it?”

“It’s just getting to me. Look out there.” The heavens are all fleece now, and stirring. The rising wind would be whipping her garments and hair if these hadn’t been pared down in the style that even at seventeen had made her seem a world traveler, all silhouette bone. “Must be blowing fifteen, twenty knots. There’s going to be a storm—and it won’t matter in the least.”

Smiling, she moves her head from side to side against the module. Except for its rust, she fits it, and into it or its newer versions, as well as any flesh could—a Jeanne d’Arc with the fire well behind her, ready to assumpt to heaven in her silver hip boots. “And you don’t mind it in the least. Do you.”

The wind’s bristling at his T-shirt like an animal held back. A reverse wind—that means a vacuum deadness somewhere. This, though, is no hurricane blow—that hollow roar as if the longest freight car in the world were pounding along sixteen feet up in the air. He wets a finger to test the wind, sees it in front of his nose—and bursts out laughing at the sight. Freight cars!

“Tom.” She pats not him but the shooting stick.

“Oh—I know. I don’t expect Allahabads up there. Out there. Or Chicago either.”

“You saw the drawings. The models.”

“Whose greatest concern—if I get it right—is whether our habitat’s to be wheel-shaped or cylindrical? Oh, I saw.”

“You won’t be looking at the outside shape. We’ll be living inside.”

“All the time. Yop—it’s getting to me.” There was an acid taste in his mouth. His father had always claimed one could taste lightning, in the yallery-greenery charged air before an electrical storm. This wasn’t going to be merely one of those. Shrubs were flattening. The blunted waves could have come from a child’s drawing.

“Poor Tom. You just belong to the old gravity generation.”

“You old—hang-glider.” He’d watched her at it more than once with his head back, teetering sickly. Though he’d often flown in the plane owned by the office, which she sometimes piloted.

“You talk free-fall, Tom. You’ve got the head for it. But not the feet.”

“Nonsense. I just have a hypersensitive middle ear.” But he knows he must seem like those thirty-year-olds who kid themselves they’re doing all right at the teenagers’ disco—and he’s not thirty anymore. In the space museums the crowds of young people saunter without surprise, chewing computer gab like gum, swapping old mission names—Saturn, Vanguard—like batting averages, and forever emitting their weakly hiccuped “you know, y’know?” between the snappiest logistics. Coming up to him shyly, in a museum or on a street, to say, You Tom?

He’s that, yes. Their hero. Whose muscles creak doing their dance. “So you really want to go more than anything. Down deep in your cells even, you buy the glory of it. You really want to go.”

She hesitated, looking out to sea, “Not more than—anything. There’s something else I—” She shrugs that off. “But yeah. Down deep. It’s my kind of unknown, you see. You and I, we don’t have the same unknowns. I almost don’t have the same as the young ones. But somehow, I make it. I slip along in.”

And he’ll be tagging along because some joker wants to see the reformer swallow his own medicine? He can think about that on the way out.

“We met on a plane,” he said. “Seems appropriate we should be ending up on one.”

“Even if it isn’t a plane but a two-stage rocket.” She shakes her head at him fondly. “And not an end—Ah, Tom! Look at you.”

His fear of heights is anticipatory, as much for others as for himself. Worst when those he loves lean over the high railing. He never gets sick at sea. But these days no credit’s given for that.

Once in a while there’s mother in her, though not especially for him, perhaps not for any man. She mothers dramatic old women, or sick ones, in lieu of the stepmother she adored. As once in a while there’s still sex in him, though for no one in particular. He tends to let the impulse pass. As Rhoda, the office manager, has said with the bitterness of the unrequited: Being, like Jesus, too busy for it.

“Tom. After all that training—you’re still plumb scared?” She can’t help the smile; people can’t. Lack of the physical prowess you have yourself is funny.

“Maybe I am. Right now I’m too busy for it. Look.”

The shooting stick, plunged at an angle deep into the wet sand, is moving, almost imperceptibly. One has to know it well to catch the glint on its steel boss. It has known many soils and pavements. There’s a technique to placing it well. Often it accompanied him to the office, where he had no regular desk. Fidus Achates, Rhoda had snarled at the stick when he retired her, why doesn’t he retire you?

Now the stick appears to be walking, or inching. Not horizontally. No wind. A downward pressure he can feel on his own head. But he isn’t moving. Or is he? He kneels. The circle of sand around the stick, flat as a Humpty Dumpty face, tells him nothing at first. Then he sees by a slight winkling that the sand surface is moving centripetally, as if the stick is being sucked from below, with scarcely a grain displaced. He lays his ear to the ground. Nothing. The birds are saying nothing. Then it’s not a land wind. Or not that near.

“Maybe it wants us to kiss the ground,” he says. In return for all the clay and river bottom which humans have walked on, and for all the lutum—the first mud—before. Plus all the pavements since. Kiss it, Tom, for all the places you’ve been, or won’t get to now. He’s never seen the crocodile loam of the Okefenokee, so near to here. He notes that the shooting stick is really in gyroscopic sway—or would be, if of the right shape. It’s being pressed in. His ears feel the pressure now.

He stands up, peering east. In the new light he can see the horizon. Air from the sea crowds in toward them, thick and white, water-heavy. The sea is being brought to them. “Hey—”

The way animals—men and dogs—foresense a great act of weather is in a sudden confusion of terms, an eerie loss of measurement. On-island he used to see his dog circle and circle, nose down, eyes sleeked, as if she must run the great rat to cover. Far out there, high above the seam between sea and sky, the clouds open on a cauldron of lurid light, its edges boiling westward in furious gray. Storm? Or break of day? For a minute he can’t tell; then the funnel rises like a bulging sinew connecting earth and heaven, streaming toward them, in no wind. Centered in the lost elements, the storm is walking the waters, neatly compacted as a tower and higher than Canaveral’s hangars in the distance. There’s a smell of sulfur, hugely rotting, electrical. Not bilge. This is fresh water, a column of it, riding the salt. Slowly. There’s no wind. But they had better run. “Get going.” He grabbed her. The last thing he saw was his stick, keeling gracefully, lost in a slur of waves.

“What is it, a tornado?” she said in his ear as, arm-linked at the waist, they ran on sand, laboring, hiking up their feet against the draw of the planet. Ah, it’s your last pull at us, is it?

“Dunno. A tornado’s twenty to forty—” he gasped back. Miles per hour, or knots? He was confused. Tornadoes were choosy. They could blast a street to lumber, zigzagging around houses left quiet as stars, suck dead a farm’s whole herd and featherbed the farmer meadows away from his tractor seat, safe in a tree. People ran anyway, even into motels that had no basements, and shut the wooden doors.

They ran inland from the promontory, pounding dirt for a quarter mile, then pavement along the road coastward again, to where the motel sprawled, accommodating hundreds, every room with a beach view. White water, such views were called here. They neared the motel’s breastworks, high, fretted panels of pierced stucco, fronded Hawaiian. The torches were shut off now but the palms were rustling with a steady marimba swish. Above the guard wall, lights were popping on along the indented cornices and swooping balconies which allowed each guest his outlook. The castle had been warned. He turned around, to the sea.

The funnel has advanced, is still advancing, grand as a pasha in its turbaned top. “Get inside,” he snarls. “Aren’t you?” she replies, and stays. There’s no rain, no hail; he wishes there would be. “Not a twister, is it,” she says. Now there’s absolute calm, even from the papery false palms. This is the moment before the bad one. They could be sucked seaward in a subtle undertow of currents, when that thing hits—but he doubts it. This is that storm which walks the waters for mariners only. “I never saw one of these,” he says. “But I’ve heard of them.” No time for more. That mushroom at the top, hanging pendant from the storm cloud above, whirls downward, tapering. Wooing the water like a tongue.

Go on. Demonstrate. To see it miles away and clear makes him want to weep, though he knows it’s no spectacle for him alone. One presence, anyone’s, makes it the spectacle. Down the ages, that’s been enough. “Here it comes—” he yells. “Fujiyama.” Tumbling back in silent boulders, the sea flowers upward. Atmosphere spins to meet it, charging down. On impact, the horizon crinkles. Parachutes of water pouring upward bring a cool sluicing air to his flesh; then there are sea mountains, moving whalebacks of gray, between jeweled eruptions lambent at the core, which mean sun behind. And now the breakers come, tons of water swelling in sequences of glass, wallowing on the shore. At last in a sound one can hear.

Halloo-oo, it’s over, fishermen say. And here we fine creatures still are.

“It was a waterspout,” he says, still exultant. No, I don’t have your unknowns, but you see the knowns I have. “Deadly. But they don’t come on land. Let’s go in.”

She bends suddenly, bobbing her head between her legs, crock-kneed, the way dancers did. “Not yet,” came muffled. Peering between her legs at the motel, she straightens slowly, keeping her eye on it, then hitches her behind at it and begins threading the clipped green maze which intercedes between them and the motel steps. The maze is one of modern landscape architecture’s hostilities, dealt the paying customer. If you can’t solve it, you step over a bush or walk the perimeter. She takes it head on, now and then grinning at him. Collapsed on a garden chaise, he now and then waves back. She and he alternate their childhoods with each other. Or their silences. That’s why people tend to couple the two of them. They rescue each other from the general coupling game.

Though the motel itself was only yards away, the path between maze and steps was intricate, another cheap manipulation, done at great cost. Inside there were more, in the public-complex style of grandeur—phony with real marble, for all this was government-owned. He frankly savors its quadruplicate comforts—four pillows for every bed, swimming pools lying like mirages every few yards across the false lawns, free snacks at the cocktail hour in the five bars. There’s a sense of citizen swag flowing in every corner, and although brought up on the hard virtues of a Doré Bible, he’s a citizen. On rainy afternoons on his island, after an hour or two with those steel engravings, he used to feel as if those Old Testament dramas—the Red Sea rolling back, Samson’s thick neck under the temple columns, all the illustrations so thronged with people—were literally taking place in his own inflamed insides. Tonight, exhausted, he feels the same, hoping he isn’t going to go on feeling Earth-responsible.

But maybe they’ll ask us to breed selectively up there. It would be natural. He’s had urges toward parenthood. Which any clear-eyed single person can tell you has nothing to do with sex. Perhaps in time the old master-race theory can seep in without ever being enunciated—what is this selection of machined, closed worlds, if not for that? While down here will be the ragged red-eyes, lupus in the dark, waiting on the property left behind? He thinks of the girl who wants Veronica’s fur. Or those hedonists who flee to the hills to braid flowers and stories, whenever there comes a plague year.

Or the solitary, who writes his journal of it.

She’s back.

“You solve the maze, or step over?”

She won’t say.

He reaches out to press a button on a nearby tree. Nothing happens. Down at the swimming pools the trees burst into song at a touch. Or are left on, murmuring. These must be time-clocked. “Maybe I won’t go.” Would they allow it? “Maybe it’s more honorable to stay.”

She sticks out a long leg, cocking the boot. “Maybe. But not for you.”

Of the two civilizations kept always in mind, one was the world where we actually lived among our own offals, with occasional opal sky-peeks and sudden choirings of architecture. The other was that ideal place which the early church fathers of anywhere, East or West, had formed in our heads—a heavenplace of orthodox avenues cleansed hourly with youth serum, in a white nimbus of air. Meanwhile the middle-class Utopias, white with plastic, whirring with Ali Baba effects, sprayed with fake ozone and greened with refreshants of chemical sweat, were what we were getting, and would get some version of in Outer. Yet the impulse is still lovable, like a child’s dream of birthdays. He has to see it; she’s right.

Just as he wants to see this morning, now warming up over the beach with fumbling touches of light as if searching for what to illuminate—a crab’s shell with the creature gone, a stone to make glow like a palladium. And all sleepers, jaws agape.

Last night in the motel bedroom he began to yearn for the art he owned at home. Reproduced or real, it studs his consciousness. His apartment’s monotonously long corridors had been chosen for it. Passing down these of a morning, each work chimed, to him, steppingstones into the daily cave. Selecting for that ditty bag of personal possessions each passenger was to be allowed, he had put in one art catalogue, its choice an elegy, and the worst wrench so far.

Up ahead, the motel’s Spanish-stucco writhings and ice-cream peaks have dawn on them. Behind each window is some life version from that catalogue: Henry Moore’s Shelter drawings as official artist for the second world war. Behind that window there, or that one maybe, the Pink and Green Sleepers with the monumental curved blanket—four inches by two and a half, the four-fingered hand, huge with slumber, the two heads under their curving shroud, and on the right—inch and a half by two, the great scratched pink shoulder. From now on, only human art would be set before him—real figures he will have to trace and compose, without guide. The idea awes him, yet sets him up foolishly, like a Sunday school warning.

He might as well begin with her, gawping up at the façade, arms akimbo on the minimal hips, at first sight fashion’s very gargoyle, her aviatrix bones drawn with the whirlwind diagnosis with which artists like Reginald Marsh or de Kooning drew women—but with the subtler shadow of the girl he knew. A small head, Senegalese in origin. One man has maybe followed it here, perhaps two. And a friend. Yet in that ebony oval, which contains a brain of worth, he sometimes sees the black mummy face of the relic nun at Assisi, that hard licorice which priests of the moment had surely always anointed, perhaps with local wax. Beneath which it still has its own purpose, undefined.

“Solitude will be the sin, you know,” she says. “They’re already trying so desperately to get us to love one another.”

“I know.” The briefings have talked out all the group techniques of the waning century, from Rolfing to champagne, to fun with trigonometry and baroque music, to Albert Schweitzer and anti-perspirant. “Like St. Paul again. And with about the same results.”

“You’re getting very religious.”

“Tendencies—tend to emerge. In any closed environment. As at a house party. Or a death camp. I see the next three weeks as somewhere between. So do they.”

“What a bunch. Our—managers.”

“Sure are.” Texas professors, born in Russia some of them, but already with barbecue manners and Hollywood haircuts, both sexes of them. East coast think-tankers, fragile as prep-school geniuses, whose hound-dog heads one wanted to scratch between the ears for encouragement, until one saw the wild, monkish eyes. “My apartment co-op, the tenants never really believed they were their own landlord. We’re our managers. And—though that bunch may not know it yet—they’re us.” Even Perdue. He’s us too. And doesn’t know it yet.

She hums mockingly, one of the tunes which had purled at them yesterday all through lunch. “Tom. You’re taking all this so—” She touches his wrist. “I know you always do—who better than me? But this trip—can’t you understand that for a lot of us, it’s only flying. Don’t overload it with—” She sighs.

“Significance. Sorry to be a bore, but I never talk like this with anyone else.”

She smiles. He sees that he does. “Okay, then. Let’s go eat.”

They both burst out laughing. They’ve had their last meal. Until embarkation it’ll be all liquids, rarefied but adequate.

“What’s in those pep drops, Tom? I can feel the vitamins dance. Bee jelly and ox blood?”

“And powdered unicorn horn? Doubt it. Merck’s best formula for aerospace.”

“Anyway, I’m not hungry. Feel as if I never will be. You?”

“No. On a slight jag, though.” He’s just realized it. “The potassium crazies.”

“And I don’t pee much. You?”

“No.”

Their voices die between them.

“Last words,” he says. How strange it’s all going to be, citizens. No account may ever give all of it.

Her eyes dart from side to side. Does she think of Peenemünde, the old site of the German military park, placed there because rocketeer Wernher von Braun’s father had once gone duck hunting in a remote town, and the son had remembered—from which, doing her last article for The Sheet, she’d flown on here? Or of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology—JP of GALCIT for short, where she’d been before? Or of what she’s going to wear for the flight? Which is the same as for him. He checks his watch—his old Waltham from the island, which he’s sending home. Past midnight. Once they get inside, they won’t again be allowed out. Strange, that not more of us are wandering.

“May I offer you my arm?”

She takes it, in style.

“And my love.” Just in case. It’s wise to say.

“And mine. Remember.”

“I shall.”

They swing their joined arms and start up the path, between the double rows of palms. From these, a man emerges on their right, pacing head down, one arm behind him across the small of his back.

It’s a European posture, Gilpin thinks in that first impression which takes precedence over all. Actors walk so, playing unworldly persons or famous ones, Stanislavsky method. Or it’s in the striped suit, out of place for the tropics. Or that iron-gray, maestro hair.

The man steps to the center of the path, silently presenting himself. That is his posture.

His face. What must it have been, if it’s ordinary now? Elongated by youth, would it have been an El Greco? Squared by middle age, it’s no longer a face from those high winds, but one can see that it’s been there—and hasn’t yet settled for handsomeness. Perhaps the extraordinary has since gone into the whole man, who now bows as if they have merely met on the path, and goes on past. Yet he had intercepted them.

They watch him enter the motel. He walks determinedly, the one arm still folded behind his back.

She doesn’t speak. My life’s never been weighted like that, Gilpin thinks. By another person. I love by accretion, finding that no disgrace. But I’ve no background for joining in the dramas which fall upon those who’ve loved otherwise; I lack the proper conventions. I speak from the off-side. People don’t seem to mind. “Thought maybe your locket had washed back in and he’d picked it up.” Finding it empty? “Was there ever a picture in it?”

“Never. I wore it for the continuity of it. For what had been me. Or I thought I did.”

“Is he the one?”

“Now I’m not sure.”

“Neither was he.” Then it must have been that man. “Lievering,” he said. “Wolf Lievering.”

“You remember?”

“Everything you tell me. Which isn’t much.”

“More than you do.”

“There isn’t more.” He’d long ago made it all public. He knows that people find this hard to believe.

“We’ll both soon know.” She grimaces. “About everybody.”

“Or perhaps he’s crew: Operational.”

“Wolf? Hah.”

“What’s his field?”

They’re all booked under one, she to be the official photographer, he the historian, their particular cabin to be shared with, among others, an industrial consultant and the head administrator and wife; whether the wife has another function as well, he doesn’t know.

We’re booked as for any archaeological expedition, he thinks. Our quarry being the future.

“His field? Language. But it was in what he was, more than what he did.”

“And what was that?”

“He—displaced people. From what they were. Everywhere he went.”

He’d certainly done that to her.

“Ah—one of those.” A charismatic. Evangelical or not, they’re always trouble.

“Was Lievering himself a displaced person?”

“I never knew.” She shivered her arms up, stretching. “Let’s go in now.”

Both turn the other way, toward the promontory they have just come from. Strewn with omens, it can no longer be seen.

He stretches an arm. “Which’ll weigh more out there, d’ya suppose? The future—or the past?…Yes, let’s go in.”

As they do so, the palm trees on either side of them burst into a musical signature. Reveille.

Inside the motel for once and all until liftoff, every window that I, Gilpin, looked through became a haunting, by an Earth already half departed from. The motel was an excellent limbo. Downstairs, once past the porte-cochère, there were no windows. The grass-green sward of the rugs, interspersed with blood-red sofas and chairs in suites of three against walls of plastic stone and plywood forestry, projected a present world one would do well to find repellent. Either the authorities knew what they were doing to the psyches under their care, or hadn’t a clue as to how cleverly they were managing—about par for government. I note how I have already begun to think of them as the authorities. I go into the bar.

There’s no piña colada in front of me today. Much as it had done for me once, I hadn’t cared to try its properties since. My glass holds whisky, Irish ordered but bourbon received, which could mean that on Canaveral even the bartenders no longer bother with terrestrial geography. The whisky in any case is forbidden—and that always helps. During these last hours we are on our honor not to have alcohol. Last hours help too, toward a rushing sense of what’s to be done—for I never can believe in them.

As Gilpin, I do perform publicly rather well. But the I of me will not move except to an inner call which Gilpin has no power to provoke. Tapped once before, I recognize the sensation, never having expected it again. Not that the mission I’ve spent most of my span on is fulfilled. The missions that adopt me are not that sort. But once again, I’m on call.

In the movements we make toward one another’s mystery, surely there is where life most is. Those ever-shadowy movements—who does not make them, and who is exempt from studying them? But on the Courier I would be closest to the nature of motion itself. This is why I and the others, and a great nation, are being drawn there, and why history is. For when people are in thrall to a certain physical motion, then life appears to them to be at its height. Meanwhile, swung like an undercarriage below any large vehicle is that other continuous movement—small, rotor, and fatal—between the people themselves.

I hear my own cadence—the part of me that comes from fisherfolk, who are in motion all their lives. We at home were always at once in the trough of the wave and on the anxious shore. We were always listening to the voyaging.

Time to go up. I felt great.

On the way, I stopped at the bookstall and inquired for any publications of the L-5 Society of Tucson.

“Sold out. Days ago.”

How clerks love refusing. It salves them for being clerks. Shortly, I’d be where I would be refused nothing—of what there was to be had.

“Offer me something,” I said.

He stared. Silently he reached into his stock and held out a heavy, lustrous art book, a copy of which I had once owned. Years back NASA had commissioned certain modern artists to paint the space effort, which from craft to environs they had done. I thumbed the preface, supplied by a curator of the National Gallery. “Artists should be key witnesses to history in the making. The truth seen by an artist is more meaningful than any other kind of record.” Depending upon who picked what witnesses. First Edition—marked down to twenty-five dollars. It wasn’t the visitant I’d have chosen from my lost library, but it was one. I held out a credit card I still had on me.

“You a passenger?”

“I am.”

“Sorry. No credit cards.”

I had a hundred dollars in scrip. We all had been issued the same amount, to cross the border with. The clerk’s face lit up. He took the small orange and green slips and put them in a special drawer of the cash register. He was collecting them. He didn’t bother to wrap the book.

So burdened, I climbed the stairs, the soles of my shoes sticking to the risers, partly from reluctance and partly from damp. Halfway up there was a botched crow’s nest where carpenter and material must have come to the end of a contract, though a table and chair were provided, in case one wanted to watch the crowd below. I no longer did. They had been my collection. I took out my remaining scrip instead. Beautifully engraved peacock-feather style, with a leaf-crowned, plump-cheeked Hebe or hermaphrodite on either side, the stuff still had the look of IOU’s. The slips measured about four and a half inches by two, much smaller than our civilian dollars. Each was marked MILITARY PAYMENT CERTIFICATE on its shorter ends. I hadn’t noticed that before. The legend on the two long sides was harder to read. On top: FOR USE ONLY IN THE UNITED STATES MILITARY ESTABLISHMENTS—BY UNITED STATES and on bottom: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL IN ACCORDANCE WITH APPLICABLE RULES AND REGULATIONS. This lettering was very small, but in caps.

I knew where they’d got the whole idea. This was army of occupation currency.

I left the book on the table. Those were not my witnesses.

Upstairs the motel was all luminous white and gray-blue, as if they were already progressing us toward the germ-free corridor. They had given us each a two-room suite. We were to fraternize, like members of an expensive tour, on the eve. So far, in this wing, nobody had. So here we were in our usual ragged enclosure. Each mind enclosing itself, while making frantic land-ahoy signals to its proposed destination.

In the day of the wagon wheel, or the freighter coaling into a sunset, or the ocean liner with its cups of tea, or the trains probing the Rockies and carrying a honeymoon couple or a corpse, a life and its journey were synonymous. The two voyages were one. An air trip is a pocket out of life, an anti-life means to an end, with a tray and a toilet between. But in outer space, with the means so huge and the journey so far, what then? Time—what would it become? All that gear—would it become household, or at least a caravan? Put real people there, with real lives behind them, and could the old continuity come again?

Which would win out, the voyage or the life?

My bedroom has a vast window, from which I can see the dish antennae that dot the Cape, giving its outline an extra blur of puzzlement. There is a pair of binoculars on the windowsill. But I have no further urge to enumerate surfaces or distinguish them. My mind has taken on the mnemonic position. From that moon-flat perspective I can see how foolish my last remark to Veronica was. Which will weigh more, the future or the past? Nothing will weigh the same from now on, certainly not time. Down here a duration, out there would it be more of a distance? As the human faces around one flattened or curved with speed, how would one make contact with the minds behind them? Based in bodies constantly bombarded, would the minds sharpen or drift? Or cling to performance, as the best grip on the moment-at-hand?

This is exploration a priori. Of the first things. Into elements we are not adapted to. We are going backward, into anti-civilization. With everything of course mechanically provided for. Who can know what selves we will find?

Good-bye Amerigo, Eric the Red—who merely knew what they were looking for.

I passed an air-cooled hand over the pane, as if clearing a windshield that was clouding up. Good-bye my own, my native land, body, foot.

On the desk behind me a tape recorder was provided. I had been encouraged to use it. I pressed the button for tape. The slow hiss came on.

“I should have kissed the ground,” Gilpin said.