Damon Knight - Orbit 18

“Yeah, well, take my word for it, Chris old boy, we did right. I mean, this is off the record, this isn’t a fucking NASA press release, but it’s gonna be a long time before we’re able to walk hand in hand with the Russkies through the tulip patch, I don’t care what they said about coining in peace for all mankind.”

“What do you think about the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission coming up?”

“Shit, it’s all political haymaking. That mealy-mouthed bastard in Washington thinks he can score brownie points in the next election by cozying up to ’em. He’ll do anything for votes. I mean, answer me this: nasa was ready to get cut off without a cent, right?”

“They still are.”

“Yeah, but I’ll bet my butt-behind they wouldn’t have got the money for this one if it wasn’t that somebody in Washington stood to make points off it, am I right?

“Probably, Hank. You’re quite probably right.”

“You know I am. Well. Listen, Chris, I’d love to talk all day, but if some big cheese walks in here and finds me jawing, I’m liable to be out on that same butt-behind I was betting you. Seriously, they’ve been drifting rumors down to me that I’m not as valuable as I used to be, back when nasa’s name was good.”

“I don’t wonder.”

“What?”

“I say I wonder why.”

“Well, so do I. But seriously now, I’m gonna have to get off. That invitation still goes for you and your kid, and for Charlotte if you two get back together. Any time at all, you know that.”

“Sure, Hank, I know.”

“And I’m sorry as hell to hear what happened. I hope it all works out.”

“I’m sure it will. I’ll let you go now, Hank. Good talking to you.”

“You too. We’ll see you around, huh?”

"You bet.” He hung up. He felt very tired. The living room trembled just outside his field of vision. He sat fora few minutes, and abruptly decided to spend the day in New York, in noise and smog and slow-moving traffic.

Through the magazine where she worked as a secretary, his wife had met an author who ran a commune in upstate New York. The author had submitted an article on communal life-styles to the magazine at a time when such things were attracting the interest of the dissatisfied sophisticates who comprised the magazine’s audience. The article circulated in the office for two days; one evening Charlotte brought home a Xerox copy, which Edwards read with disdain. Some months later the author submitted another article in person and talked to Charlotte all afternoon. She came home excited, with an invitation to the commune for both of them, which, after a week of bitter arguments, she accepted alone. She slept with the author of course; of that he was sure; that had been implicit in his invitation and her decision to go alone. And when she came home Edwards said, stupidly, regret stinging him even as he spoke, “Was he any good?”

And she said, “He was great,” and what had been a bitterness became a war. Kevin was fourteen then, and when in a lull they heard him sobbing through the wall, they were stricken with what had happened to them all unknown.

“My God,” said Charlotte, “what’s wrong with us?” And together they went to their son, that ineluctable symbol of their love, and the three of them held to each other and wept until very late.

The next month was perhaps the best in their marriage; they were all kind and deferential to each other, as if unwilling to test the strength of the frayed fabric. But such violence does not come from or dissolve into nothing. The next time Charlotte left it was for a week, unannounced. Again there was a fight. Again there were tears. But after that, the reconciliations had less and less meaning, and Edwards felt the marriage become weak and brittle, emulsion cracking on an old photograph.

The photograph in the den held them both against a bright but faded Texas sky. Edwards stood stiff and crewcut in his uniform, Charlotte in her crisp white dress, four months pregnant but not yet showing it. They stood in front of the small brick chapel in the hot Texas afternoon, the smaller pasts they had each known then printed on their minds as their images were printed in the silver bromides. Edwards had entered the Air Force from college, blank enough to be a soldier, smart enough to be an officer. He had a uniform and a sheaf of diplomas and awards and citations and his name on a plastic wood-grained prism on his desk at Sheppard Air Force Base, and $213.75 plus expenses, which was more than he would have known what to do with if he hadn’t got married. So then he had a wife and his commission and in a few years a master’s degree and a mortgage, and then a son and a doctorate, and oak leaves and his name on a fistful of credit cards and ID plates and he had his existence recorded in so many cross-indexed files that there was no chance of his ever accidentally losing himself, so he thought.

And then the space program started, and Lieutenant Colonel Edwards being a local boy of fine repute, a good soldier and engineer, and an asset to any organization, it said on his recommendations, he was accepted. He got his colonelcy and a sense of purpose that truly humbled him; he had never been religious but space made him feel as he imagined God might make other people feel. He was a successful man, and his life was a fine, balanced and counterweighted thing.

Then they put him in a rocket and shot him at the Moon.

Abenezra, Abulfeda, Agatharchides, Agrippa, Albategnius, Alexander, Aliacensus, Almanon, Alpetragius, Alphonsus, Apia-nus, Apollonius, Agago, Archimedes, Aristarchus, Aristillus, Aristoteles, Ascelpi, Atlas . . .

The craters, the names, rolled past. A tiny motor ground to turn the four-foot sphere, front and back sides both sculpted in wondrous close detail thanks to his and other missions, thanks to the automatic cameras mounted on the outside of the capsule. Tiny American flags marked all the Apollo landing sites, silly bright dime-store gaudies against the gray.

John Christie Edwards, first man on the Moon, stood in the planetarium at the end of a hall lined with names like Icarus, da Vinci, Montgolfier, Wright, Goddard ... a mural of the history of flight, the individual dreamers down time’s long corridor. Each had had a vision of man transcending his world, his prison of gravity, and Edwards felt small in their presence. Of them all, only he could have been replaced by anyone else. His achievement had been a matter of training, not vision.

But they had told him he was a hero; that he had done something no one had ever done before, that it was the grandest achievement of the human race. It was, he believed that, and for the parades and accolades he’d had, he was grateful. He had every reason to be proud, to be as content, no, more content than Baker. Why, then, did that terrible emptiness come to him at night? In the dark his fame was no consolation; his achievement no part of his life. For it would have happened anyway, without him. Of what classical hero was that true? He felt cut off from the history he had made, isolated from time.

Flanking the lunar globe were photographs: himself, Baker, Cooper, Nixon, Von Braun. Some children recognized him from the photo and crowded around anxiously, seeking mementos, autographs. One asked where he had landed; again he suffered the doubts of last night and finally stabbed a finger vaguely at one of the larger maria. Gratefully he heard the loudspeaker announce the start of the sky show.