Damon Knight - Orbit 18

The sky show was absorbing, much more so than the night sky usually was for him, even the clear country sky he could see for two weeks every year at his brother’s summer cottage on Lake Hopatcong; he was enchanted by the flitting arrows on the sky, the narrator’s calm clear explanations, the wonderful control of time the projector had over the universe. Stars rose, set, went forward, back. They could be spun at almost any rate or acceleration, moving in ever-faster circles.

In the past year Edwards had acquired the notion that he would like to write poetry. That was not unreasonable; in his present depression it seemed that only such an intensely personal act as writing could give him back to himself.

So after the Planetarium, shortly after noon, he finally gave in, seduced by the stars, and drove downtown to buy some anthologies of verse. Byron, Yeats, Eliot, Pound ... all the names vaguely remembered from college. While getting pleasantly cramped reading in the aisle, he found a comment by Frost to the effect that the most important element of poetry is its dramatic content. So after some consideration he also picked up Freytag’s Technique of the Drama. He had learned to pursue things in an orderly fashion. Then he tore himself away, before he bought more than he could carry. It was years since he had read anything but newspapers; he was drunk with the limitless neglected mysteries of books. In this fine giddy mood he felt himself approaching the edge of a change, the crest of an oscillation, the start of a new phase; he felt charged with the energy of the unpredictable.

At home he dipped into his package, the sharp-cornered paperbacks and stiff-spined hardcovers smelling of glue and new paper. He read single pages, fragments, the shortest poems, skimming in an excited random fashion. From MacLeish’s Streets in the Moon he read, “No lamp has ever shown us where to look. Neither the promiscuous and every-touching moon, nor stars ...”

“The moon is dead, you lovers! ... I have seen her face. . . . Her face was dead. It was a woman’s face but dead as stone. And leper white and withered to the bone. It was a woman’s skull the shriveling cold out there among the stars had withered

He saw Charlotte’s face deflagrate before him, burn without fire. Touched by the void, it turned into a death’s-head moon, attained, unattainable, glowing with the stark stripped brilliance of reflected sun, grim reminder of day through the night. Of all the astronauts, only Edwards had had the dimmest chance of understanding the Moon, only he had even a circumstantial reason for wanting to understand it. He needed to know why he had made history.

“Dad? You busy?”

He started. “Oh, no. Come on in, son.” Immediately annoyed at himself; how had he ever started calling Kevin son?

The boy drifted in. Tall, pale; his son, brought out of a hot union years past, and already faded, but for this phantom, this stranger in the house. His son.

“Are you and Mom going to stay together until September?”

“Sure. Until you’re at school.”

“Oh.” The room was silent. Somewhere an air-conditioner hummed.

“Why do you ask?”

“Things are getting worse between you, aren’t they?”

“Don’t worry about it, Kevin.”

“If you’re staying together just for my sake, I wish you wouldn’t. I mean, I don’t want you to. I think you should separate now if that’s the case.”

Edwards looked at his son. A troubled sixteen, his emotions already burnt brittle into a fragile, ashen maturity. And Edwards himself moving back along a rocket wake into a second adolescence, a time of self-consciousness, self-discovery. When had he first touched this boy with his fire, in what way shaped him?

“I’ll think about it. I’ll talk to your mother. Listen, Kevin—?” “Yeah, Dad.”

“This business with your mother and me—it hasn’t affected you too badly, has it?” His memory stung him brutally with the image of a woman he had once brought to the house, out of spite for Charlotte and her author, and Kevin finding them ... “I mean, just because things aren’t working out for us, I don’t want you to think . . .”

“I don’t think about it anymore. It’s just one of those things that happen.”

“Because it would be a terrible thing if this were to turn you against marriage, or against women . . .”

“Don’t worry about it, Dad. I’ll think what I think. I’m not sad about you and Mom—I think it’s better this way. Really. I think it might even be better for you if you split up sooner.”

“Well, thanks, Kev.” Then, because he was less afraid of being embarrassed than of being untouchable, he hugged his son. Kevin held still for this, and Edwards let go soon enough to make both of them grateful.

“Okay if I stay out late tonight?” Kevin asked, leaving. “I have a date.”

“How late?” Pleased, but their late sentiment demanded a strict return to formality. The balance was too delicate to threaten.

“One o’clock?”

“Make it twelve-thirty.”

“Okay.”

“Who’s the girl?”

“Nobody you know.”

“Oh. Well . . . have fun . . .”

Kevin left. Later, Edwards opened the Freytag and read: Poetry must bring forth its characters as speaking, singing, gesticulating. This is the nature of the hero.

It was not the first time the thought had occurred to him that if he was a national hero, the nation must be in very bad shape.

Drama possesses—if one may symbolize its arrangement by lines—a pyramidal structure. It rises from the introduction with the entrance of exciting forces to the climax and falls from here to the resolution.

—Gustav Frey tag, Technique of the Drama

His obligations as a national monument took him the next day to a half-hour talk show with a state senator, a NASA administrator, and an ABC newsman. The topic was the discontinuation of the manned space program, made topical by the upcoming Apollo-Soyuz mission. As they set him up and gimballed the lights his way and adjusted his microphone, he felt very used. He felt bronzed and shat upon and tarnished a flaking green, like some Civil War general in the comer of some park, passed and never noticed.

The show started with the senator asserting, no doubt to mollify Edwards, so strong was the hostility he radiated to the senator, that the space program was by no means ending but was merely being cut back in favor of more pressing domestic issues. The senator said that the magnitude of our problems at home far surpassed those of space. The senator said that space exploration could be done far more cheaply and efficiently and safely by machines than by men. Edwards asked if perhaps other areas of the national budget might be better cut—defense, for instance, which consumed one hundred times as much money as NASA. Edwards went so far as to suggest that what the Pentagon wasted yearly in staples and paper clips could support NASA. He compared the senator’s personal convictions to a bowl of tapioca. No one knew how to react; Edwards thought the NASA man might be smiling, off-camera.

Then the commentator pleasantly directed the conversation elsewhere, toward the hopeful symbolism of the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission. The senator, recovered, called it a magnificent extension of the successful detente that his party had already, et cetera. Edwards started to ask why, if the detente was so successful, the defense budget was not being cut, but as he leaned forward to speak, the commentator forestalled him, speaking in a rapid gabble, his eye glazed with panic, and Edwards realized that his microphone was off. This so enraged him that he began to tremble. He leaned over into the camera’s eye and began to speak into the senator’s microphone.