Damon Knight - Orbit 18

And then he goes silent; he gets quite cold and distant, and sweeps his eyes slowly around the room. He says, “Where’s my wife?”

“Your wife. Ah, yes.” Byrne smiles strangely. “You’ll find her in her bedroom, I think.”

He pauses for only a second as he reaches his wife’s door—the hairs on his wrists move and his hand stops before touching the knob—then he forces it forward, twists, pushes.

He freezes in the doorway.

The first kid he met in the barn, Robert, is on his wife. He moves quickly across the room, sees Charlotte clutch at the kid and he is sure she seduced him, he runs the whole scene through his mind instantly, yes, the kid would never take that initiative with the husband in the house, but nonetheless there he is, and he grabs the kid’s shoulders, pulls him back and off, gasping astonishment. Charlotte spits, “Bastard, bastard!” and he whirls the kid, hits him in the stomach, slick against his fist, hits him again higher, the kid squeals, and again, better now, a deep full grunt, he is hurting him, playing him like a drum, he establishes a rhythm of attack, the kid moving only in defense, curling, incapacitated by that incredible shock of extremes, pain like a searing splash of ice water, numbly taking it like a piece of training apparatus, Edwards working the slow easy rhythms as if he were in a simulator, on a flight, keeping up muscle tone, the impartial repetitions of exercises lulling him into lazy introspection, he punches with first one arm then the other, watching the kid collapse with heavy-lidded eyes, the dull dispassionate discharge of energy, they had to do these in space, to burn up calories and drain excess energy, to work their bowels regularly, on schedule, to masturbate and cancel sexual tensions, they had to do it in just this dispassionate systematic way, 0100 commence masturbatory sequence, he saw that in a cartoon once after he got back and it made him sick. . . .

The Moon was full outside the capsule, you could see all of it, but all was only half because the Moon was locked in orbit with the same face always to the Earth and you could never see the far side, even when it was full, bright, naked to the stars—had they come that far just for a glimpse at the far side?—and Earth, its billions hidden behind its calm placid mask of blue . . .

... and the kid falls heavily to the bed, and he turns and Byrne is there with the rest behind him, sick faces peering in fear of violence, oh yes he has found their weak spot, in the alien air of conflict. Now is the time for confrontation, now is when Byrne steps forward, challenges him to a fight, or simply says between tight-drawn lips, “Out!”

But Byrne does no such thing. He smiles sadly at Edwards and says, he asks— “Do you want to talk about it?”

Yes, there are climaxes, brief spurts of passion, oscillations from times of greater energy to times of lesser energy, but they resolve nothing, no, resolution is beyond us. The stories do not end neatly, much as we need them to. Our lives are incomprehensibly tangled. Such a demand for climaxes and resolutions drives us to our madnesses, our fictions. For the world is round and nothing but round, there are only the soft risings and fallings, the continual fall of day into night, the endless plummet through space without end or beginning. We drift, we live, we die, but death is not an end because the race goes on building roads and pyramids, launching rockets, and survive or perish, we all fill some evolutionary role. We are a statistical whole.

He tells himself he is not a hero or a myth. America is not Greece or Olympus. The world has turned round and the universe has closed and we have all been forced to touch one another and know that we are all alone and none of us are alone and that we have precious little time to come to grips with that truth. Night rushes past his car. Far-spaced lights wash him rhythmically. Three billion people on a single planet, together and alone in so much night; while the moon shines with a single dead light from all its craters, myths and heroes.

Evolution. Statistics. He can drive off the road now, or not drive off, and either way help fill the statistics. He feels he is falling again; weightless, orbiting; falling forever through the void.

He looks at the speedometer and sees with shock the needle at 110. He slows, the Thruway slows beneath him, and he drives calmly all the rest of the way back to Jersey.

That week his inquiry and samples are returned with a polite letter; his name at least has brought him the courtesy of a prompt personal response. The editor explains how interesting the poetry looks, how intrigued he is by the prospects, but why he must reluctantly refuse. The house has been losing money consistently on poetry, and they now have a blanket policy about first poetry books. You must be published before you can publish. This circular logic annoys Edwards: he remembers his father saying long ago you can’t go in the water till you can swim, John boy, and you can’t swim till you get in the water.

The letter goes on to state that a dramatized account of his voyage might be of interest, but he is no longer assured of selling even that on the strength of his name. Sic transit gloria mundi, he thinks, and drops letter, précis, and samples into the trash.

The next day he gets his renewal notice from the Air Force. He thinks of his $2,500 a month, he thinks of Kevin’s college, he thinks of his $10,000 in the bank. He has two days to decide. He thinks of four years ahead of him, of retirement and pension at forty-four.

The letter joins his poems.

For some reason he goes to the typewriter. He sits at it for a long time, silent. Minutes pass, and then with great definiteness, he types his name, slowly and precisely. J. O. H. N. C. H. R. I. I. I. Why. Why the Moon is void to him. Needed something to put his mark on. Nothing on the Moon: flags, machinery, plaques: had anything to do with him. Me. I. John Chri. S. T. I. E. E. D. W. And the fear of God that came on him in the capsule. A. R. D. S. The single key strokes echoed through the house. J.

The universe is round. Life is round. The Moon goes from full to new to full, he himself has gone from understanding to not understanding and so on. What was the point in that? Perhaps it was that you understood a little more each time, and the place you returned to was different for having been left. It was not like in the books, though: no triangles or pyramids, no ends or beginnings. He should have been able to write a book like that, a book that was round, incidents orbiting around the center, himself. But he could not do it well enough to get it published. And if he learned to write well enough to get published, by then he would be proficient and facile and would see things differently: books like monuments, not circles.

They were not circles, even: they were helixes. You came to the same point again, like the Earth moving through space, but it was not the same point because time had moved the circle’s center. The form of life then was the helix: that same corkscrew molecule that carried in your cells messages of growth and regeneration.

Why should he try to put life in a book, anyway? What had books to do with life?

It is quite possible that until the Apollo photos no one really believed the Earth was round. It took the photographic image of the blue Earth, streaked with ochres and swirls of white, hanging visibly alone in the void, to make man speak of a spaceship Earth. We disregard thoughts, ideas, concepts, until they are interfaced with us through our technology. The best seat in the stadium belongs to the camera. News comes to us only on a screen. Four centuries of foreknowledge could not prepare us for the impact of that single photo, its horrible truth.