Damon Knight: Orbit 18

Perhaps she understands then, or perhaps her body betrays her, or perhaps she has secret reasons of her own, but she moves in sympathy; she gives Edwards his dominance. Gives it—

And Edwards deliquesces, his determination melts and Hows from him, sugar water semen flowing back into him, he slows--

Charlotte sighs—

He comes up off her and rolls away and she knows from past experience he will not cry or show anger like some, he will just lie very, very still, hardly breathing, dying small deaths—

“John, it doesn’t matter. It’s all right.”

“No. No, it isn’t.”

“Shh. Yes. It is. I don’t care.”

“I do—"

“I know. It doesn’t matter. It’s not your fault. Try later.”

Edwards lies quietly as she gently caresses him. And peace comes; what a wonder, to have his wife back as she was ten years ago for even these few moments. The darkness grows, and he has visions of space, at once appealing and terrifying. The weight of the world releases him, and he soars transcendent through the firmament. After a while the stars resolve to the grainy darkness of the room and Charlotte is beside him and they talk.

“What do you want here, Shari?”

“I don’t know if I can explain. It’s a feeling. It’s as if I’ve spent my whole life inside, in some horrible hospital or rest home. In Teaneck, even outside I feel trapped, like the sky is a giant bowl clamped down on me. I haven’t felt really free since God knows when. I feel sick and pale and bedridden and convalescent. Christ, John, I want to feel healthy again.” He nods. “Do you ever feel that?”

“Yes. Sometimes I feel the air pressing on me. I feel gravity and I feel the atmosphere like an ocean on my back. And I want —out. I want to be in free fall again. I dream about that sometimes.”

“This is what NASA is to you?”

“Was.”

“Why do you want to resign?”

“Because it’s over! Didn’t you hear me on that program? It’s over, done, finished!” He groans and rolls away from her. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t yelling at you.”

“I know.”

“But it could have been something—and we let it go. We took one step out of the cradle; we put our foot out—and drew it back. What sense does that make? Is that at all sane? I think what it is is that we’re not ready for space, we can’t deal with all that emptiness. We got out there and didn’t know what to do, and got scared and came back. But God—! You can’t reenter the womb. That’s all the earth is.” He pauses. “If only we could be happy with things as they are. If only they didn’t have to mean something, or progress to something, or evolve into something ... if we could only live moments, just moments, unconnected ... I think I could accept that. Be happy with it.”

“John,” she soothes, holding him. Against the coldness of space, the transcendent spirit of man, her warmth is cloying. She binds him to his body. “John, John ... what’s out there, anyway?”

“Nothing,” he says, and sinks into sleep.

On an ocean. Wave mechanics. Harmonic motion. The years cycling back through the seasons. College. His physics professor, strange old man, explaining the motion of the waves: periodic functions, series of crests and troughs, repetitions. Every sort of motion dependent upon harmonic theory. Sine waves, circles, spirals, helixes, orbits, all the same. The same equations apply. Greek letters fly past his sleeping eyes:

Period of a pendulum. Earth’s a pendulum, you know, two ways: swings around the sun, turns on its axis: complex motion. In the middle of the lecture he dropped into philosophic discourse, the brilliant mind derailed and rambling as the classroom pitched on the waves: duality in monism, the one wave with the two halves, see? Positive and negative. Every physical concept doubly poetic; mathematics the purest poetry. Ah, the Greeks, such poets. Class grumbling, breaking up and diving off the platform, old fool senile and rambling about sine fucking waves: sit down! I’m not finished! Edwards alone then; now listen, hissed the teacher, air seething with his hot intense breath, the sea growing long and glassy as if listening, listen: We are all disturbances of the medium. Understand? Disturbances of the medium. Pebbles dropped in a vacuum. Waves. All of us, nothing but a complex collection of sine waves. Heart, lungs, brain, glands, nothing but repetitions, periods, life, life, waves. Frightened, Edwards dove, sank quickly and drowned, and drowning, woke.

As he enters the kitchen and faces all the members of the commune together for dinner, he feels lines of force in the room, constellations of tensions shifting to accommodate him. Interference patterns. How distant he is from this world; how far Teaneck from the mythical land of Woodstock; the others feel this too, and there is that moment of uneasiness, the lines in flux, reality facing the legend, the two worlds’ images mediated to each other only by Time. The moment passes, though. They sit to dinner.

Edwards assimilates his impressions: the dinner discussion is light and varied, ranging over topics of literature, music, 61ms, farming. One girl casually mentions her abortion and Edwards suffers a Catholic reaction. Not that he has been at all religious since marrying Charlotte, but a sense of sin, once acquired, is not easily lost. There is none of that in anyone here: sin and grace are not part of the metaphysical baggage of this generation. They speak in terms of yin and yang, complementaries without relative values. He feels at a loss, vulnerable: nothing that upsets him could move any of these people.

After dinner they sit and talk softly over the littered plates. Byrne starts to roll a cigarette. He has rolled several from tobacco that evening, but now he reaches for a smaller jar, and the flakes are green and Edwards feels a kick of giddy trepidation as he watches Byrne pour the stuff into a rolling machine and pull it into a yellow cigarette. He is acutely aware of everyone, of their casualness and his tension, and he feels Charlotte watching him. Byrne pours more into the machine and rolls another. The first joint moves around, closing on him. Charlotte tokes, smiles at him, and passes it. He shakes his head. She nods and smiles, makes “come on” with her mouth. Afraid of interrupting the casual after-dinner atmosphere, afraid of making a foolish scene over something so minor, afraid perhaps of missing entrance to some new world, and (at bottom) curious, he accepts, sucks, holds, passes. “Keep it in,” Charlotte whispers. He nods secretly. John Edwards, pothead.

The first few rounds he feels nothing and starts to relax, but after a while a certain detachment slips into his senses. They extend; his eyes, ears, fingers are at the far end of a tunnel, relaying everything to him in delayed echoes. Everything has flattened, taken on the aspect of a screen. Entranced, Edwards watches as he would in a theater. Colors are rich, vivid, the dialogue flows wondrously. How lifelike, he thinks.

This goes on for some time before Max gets up. Edwards runs the scene back: Byrne has asked how many chickens he can expect for dinner and Max said, “I’ll go out and cull some now. Come on, Barb.” Then he senses Edwards’ gaze. “Want to see how you cull chickens, Colonel?” and Edwards, suffused with good will, says, “Why, shore,” and they are up and out.

There is a perfect silence outside, a warm still breathless summer silence, with a full moon, orange, just risen. Off on the horizon fireworks burst soundlessly, fast-dying sparks in the night. The Fourth, Edwards suddenly remembers. It is the Fourth of July. America is 199 tonight.