Damon Knight - Orbit 18

“I’d like to read something, if you don’t mind.”

Everyone was speechless. Belligerent guests were nothing new, but Air Force colonels were supposed to be better trained. Edwards shifted himself further into the picture. The lights blazed and blinded him. He felt a little drunk with their heat, but below it, calm and composed.

“This is a poem by Lord Byron. It’s very short. It sums up my feelings about the end of the program better than I could myself.”

The audience was silent; the cameras were captive. The paper trembled in his hand, in the hot and blazing dark. The studio whirled beneath him. It was a strange surreal moment in the chatter and rhythmless gabble of television, a moment of silence he suspended before starting to speak:

Electrons made a chaos of snow on the monitors. Offstage a man with horn-rimmed glasses waved franticly. The moderator cleared his throat.

“Thank you, Colonel Edwards. We have to pause here, but we’ll be back in a moment.” The red eyes of the monitors blinked off.

Edwards sank back into his chair. The senator fumed. The moderator leaned over to Edwards and said, “Please, Colonel, we can’t take you off the air now, but stick to the subject at hand.”

“Wasn’t I?”

“Colonel . . . please. You know what I mean.”

“My microphone was turned off. It made me mad.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll see it doesn’t happen again. But please—”

“Just say what I’m supposed to, right?”

“Don’t make things difficult.”

“No more poetry?”

“No more poetry. Please.”

He had gained a large amount of ground; he felt good, in control. But now he was losing—he didn’t know where to go next. He turned to the NASA man, his silent ally, who said, “This isn’t helping us, Colonel,” and all Edwards’ certainty and composure vanished. He had a terrible intuition then: NASA itself did not care. It made no difference to anyone involved how they made their money, in this branch of civil service or another. Of all those in NASA, only Edwards had reason to want to understand what they were doing. He was alone in his concern.

“All right,” he breathed. “All right, you bastards.” He felt a clear sense of climax. He saw what he must do: leave, walk off, dissociate himself from all of them. But at the thought all his strength went from him: he was not conditioned to function alone. And he sat in his weakness, and the monitors came back on, and for the rest of the show he was trapped there, silent, outwardly serene: he saw himself as a small hard circle swimming alone and untouched in a limitless sea of static.

Tuesday his wife returned. The car pulled up and he heard Kevin go down and out the back door, fast and light, as if he had been going anyway. The screen door sighed on its hinge and in the second before she entered the den he knew that today she would finally ask for a divorce. He had been determined not to be the one to mention it. Now with a sick premonition he knew the end was near anyway. Her first words, though, catching him off balance, were, “My God, John, do you have any idea how embarrassing that was?”

“Hello, Charlotte. What was embarrassing?” He considered the woman before him with an objectivity he would never have thought possible.

“The TV show. The poetry. Eric practically dragged the whole commune in to watch you quoting Lord Byron on the Today show. Christ, if you knew what you looked like.”

“Really. I didn’t know you had TV up there in the pristine wilderness.”

“Oh, go screw.”

“All right, let’s have it, what was wrong with quoting Byron?”

“It was, let us say, out of character.”

“So? Did it ever occur to you that I get tired of playing the role of the dumb hero?”

She looked at him. “You think you can get out of it that easily?”

“Maybe.”

“How little you know.”

“What do you mean by that?”

She went to her bedroom and took down a suitcase from the closet. He followed her and sat on the bed with his eyes closed and his fingertips touching at the bridge of his nose. He sat as if in another world and listened to the angry rustlings of clothes as she hurled them about.

“Tell me, John, do you have any idea the kind of crap I have had to put up with these past ten years?”

“Yes.” It had once been a joke between them.

“Did you see the goddamned forty-page manual NASA gave us all on how to be an astronaut’s wife? Did you get a good look at that?”

“Charlotte, don’t start.”

She gave a brutal little half-laugh. “ ‘An astronaut’s wife dresses in clothes out of last year’s McCall’s and does her own decorating. She is active in church and social functions. She believes in equal pay for equal work but thinks that most women’s libbers are just too far out. She never never raises her voice to reporters. And she drinks eight glasses of Tang a day.’ ”

He smiled under his tented fingers; she took it for amusement and grew furious. “But mostly an astronaut’s wife sits around the house drinking and masturbating and hoping the reporters don’t come around to ask her why she’s not smiling or baking a cake or going to the PTA, for fear she might break down and tell the bastards why!”

There was a silence.

“John.”

“Yes,” he said.

“John, I want a divorce.”

“Yes, I know.”

“A legal divorce.”

“All right.”

“All right? Like that?”

“Like that.”

She stared, confused. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Your term of service is over this month, isn’t it? Are you going to renew?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so? Why not?” She sat on the bed now and he became aware of her body, her movements, and it began to hurt. He had held it off till then. “What are you going to do for money?”

“I have some.”

“But another four years and you’d have a pension. And by then Kevin would be through school. If you quit now you’re out on your ass.”

“I was thinking of writing a book.”

“About your mission?”

“Sort of. I was thinking of poetry.”

“Oh. Poetry.” She smiled fractionally and shook her head. “Lover, if you had the barest fraction of poetry in you, it would have come out long ago. If you had any concept of drama or history, you would have said something full of poetry when you first stepped onto the Moon. And what did you say? Well, I don’t have to remind you.”

“Those were their words, not mine.”

“So. And who’s going to tell you what to say in your book?”

“Me, dammit!”

She shook her head wearily. “John, can’t you see that it’s too late? It’s five years too late. You can’t change roads this far on. You’re a national monument, baby! As soon as you touched that rock up there you turned to stone yourself. I know, because I almost did too. I came so damned close to being caught in it...” She stopped herself.

“Go on.”

She looked up quickly. “You want me to?”

“Yes.”

She paused. She looked at her hands. “While you were on the Moon I seduced a newsman.”