Damon Knight - Orbit 18

“And a nice day to you, Lobey.”

Theresa has dropped her pencil. She is staring out the window at the amorphous clouds of cotton-candy castles.

Theresa sits in her dormitory room, trying not to be terrible. It’s hard, when you’re six years old and want to kick up your heels, scratch where it itches, maybe sing a silly song now and then.

The watchbird on the wall is mooning at her with fried-egg eyes. He is disappointed. Not frowning, you see, but you haven’t done much lately to cheer the little fellow up, Terrible Theresa. Isn’t it wonderful when he’s smiling at you? She remembers those rare days when she was as good as gold and when she returned to her room there was a smile on the watchbird’s face.

The watchbird is a simple paper poster in pulp tricolor, frayed at the edges from being taken down and put up so many times. The real watchbird is in the ceiling, but it could be anywhere, under the bed or in your dolly or peering up at you from a tiny camera in your dexie pill or in the flowers in the garden or down in the potty.

Her brow furrows as she thinks of how to be good. She hasn’t learned yet to act without thinking, without worrying about it. She hasn’t yet internalized her controls sufficiently. What comes as easy as spitting for the other children is a painful process of chewing on a dry tongue for Theresa.

Darn it. She wants to be good so she’ll get plenty of M&Ms.

She lies on her bunk and looks up at the ceiling, wipes at pink-rimmed eyes small and piggy from crying all day.

“Relax, Theresa,” Murray has told her earlier that evening. Poor Murray. He has a kinship for Theresa that feels all wrong, somehow. Not natural. It weighs down the buoyant dimples in his cheeks. “Relax,” he repeats, stroking poor Theresa to show her he loves her, just like it says in the comics.

(Hugging: Put your arms around the client while standing or sitting beside him or her. Pull client close, rumple client’s hair or loosely tweak client’s nose between thumb and forefinger. Smile. Tell client that you love him or her.)

“Good behavior will come to you naturally when you wait,” he says. “You don’t have to try for it. You don’t have to fight it. I shouldn’t be telling you this, but it’s because I love you. Lobey will be coming to see you this week, and he loves you, but I wish you could start showing good behavior without his help. You’re seven years old tonight, Theresa. I love you.”

For an instant he holds her fiercely, scaring her some, but not much because it feels so good. Don’t cry, don’t cry, he’ll stop if you cry.

So she lies in her bed with the lights off and looks up at the faint red light in the ceiling. She lets her mind go blank. What’s all the fuss about, Theresa? Why can’t you relax and be a good citizen like the others? Don’t think about it, darling. Don’t use your head at all if you can get away with it, they don’t want the front part of your head, anyway, sweetheart, they want you to listen to the back of your head where they planted all the bombs which are waiting to go off if you’d only stop struggling. Lobey is not happy with the front part of your head, he’s thinking of dipping into it and seeing if he can’t set things right with his sharp stainless needles and scalpels. See Lobey? He’s almost frowning. Poor, poor Lobey for you to have made him so unhappy.

So don’t think about it, don’t think at all. Don't think about pink clouds in the sky at sunset and singing dreams that keep you awake long after the others are snoring. Let your mind be a pretty blank slate for others to write on. Think of cows, Theresa. Cows are the happiest animals in the world. Just look at them. Think about candy. Think about B.T. the skinner with his pigeons and comics and sweets. Think about M&Ms.

The fuse burns down to the tight bundle of newsprint and silver powder in the hot, firecrackerjack core of all those M&Ms, the fission heart beating in Theresa explodes and sets off the deuterium layer in the hard candy coating and zowie!

Nothing has happened. Nothing has changed. She feels the same, but she is smiling. She wipes away the last tear and sits up, smiling, smiling wider than a three-day-dead corpse.

And the door bursts open and who do you think it is but B.T. the skinner, all decked out in his finest party suit and his hands are full of presents and candy and the M&Ms are actually spilling out of his pockets. And . . . what? For me? Yes, for you, darling, it’s your birthday and we’re having a party because we love you, me and Murray and Lobey and everybody here at Behavior Tech. You’re a good girl, smiling so bright and pretty that we just had to make your seventh birthday a very special party day with all the candy you can eat.

“Oh, I’ll be good, I’ll be good, I’ll be so very, very good that you’ll forget you ever called me Terrible Theresa and you’ll feed me M&Ms every day. How I love you, B.T. How I do love you. And how I do love M&Ms.”

Have a nice day.

One small step for a man—one giant stumble for mankind.

MILESTONES

Died. Colonel John Christie Edwards, 64, U.S. Air Force (retired); of a heart attack; in Teaneck, N.J. In 1970, under the auspices of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Edwards became the first man to walk on the moon. He is survived by a wife and son.

—No. I don’t like that dream.

The dream-magazine faded and he was back in 1975, tentatively at least, until sleep plucked him again to a land beyond life where his existence could be reduced to those two magazine appearances: his achievement and his death.

His sweat stained the sheets.

He slept alone, his wife in her own bedroom.

Restless, the curtains ballooned inward on a light breeze. He caught at them, and sat up, and saw the moon standing alone in the sky, so far and meaningless. It was gibbous, bloated past half but less than full. He hated it like that, the lopsided incompletion of it. Half or full or crescent he could almost look at some nights, but gibbous, no, there was nothing redeeming in a gibbous moon. He stared at it, its geography forgotten. Craters were ciphers. He could not pick out within five hundred miles the place on its surface where he had walked, just five years ago. At times now it seemed so improbable that he felt sure the rocket had been turned around midway and had landed on an Arizona mesa or a Siberian desert, or in a Houston simulator.

Below the moon State Street glowed in unconcern. No cars passed this late; the moon might have been another of the cold glaring street lamps. From his present vantage point in Teaneck, New Jersey, it seemed impossible that he had ever been there.

The Lunar Exposé:

Time, August 2, 1987. The article explained that the Moon landing had been a hoax, since the Moon itself was a hoax. It explained how simple it had been for unknown forces to simulate the Moon for unscrupulous purposes; a conspiracy of poets and scientists was intimated. Mass hypnosis was mentioned. Further on was a capsule summary of his mission with a drawing of the flight path, the complicated loops and curves, the projected hyperbolas and multiple spirals that had taken them there and back, straight-line flight being impossible in space, and further still was an inset map of the splashdown area. He remembered it and was suddenly in the capsule with a lurch as it splashed, sank, and bobbed to the surface. He wanted to fling the hatch open and yell in triumph, be dazzled by the spray and brilliant blue Pacific sky—but of course he couldn’t do that, there was no telling what germs they had brought back, what germs had survived the billion-year killing lunar cold and void there was no telling, and the helicopters droned down and netted them and swung them to the carrier and into quarantine and for three weeks they had seen people only through glass; and that must have been the beginning of the isolation he felt now, just as his first time in space had been the beginning of the emptiness. After that he drove to the Cape on business, and then to his new home in New Jersey. When he had reached the Cape after all those weeks and miles and loops and backtracks, the trip was finally over, and he yielded to an impulse; he walked out to the launching pad and bent to put his hand on the scorched ground—but he had an attack of vertigo and a terrible intimation: the Earth itself had moved. If he went to the Cape exactly a year after the liftoff, the Earth would be in position again, the circle would be closed—but then there was the motion of the solar system through the galaxy to consider, and the sweep of the galaxy through the universe, and the universe’s own pulsations—and he saw there was no way for him ever to find the place he started from. Driving back to Teaneck with the road behind him spiraling off through space as the Earth moved and the Sun moved and the galaxy moved, he got violently ill with a complex vertigo and had to pull off the road. Only when it grew dark was he able to drive again, slowly.