Damon Knight - Orbit 18

Watching the preparations for the last Apollo on his screen, Edwards remembers the rocket’s thrust, remembers solid ground falling from him and slowly drawing in on itself until a circle formed and shrank so he could cover it with his thumbnail.

Kevin and he watch the last Apollo unwind. Mission Control counts down in a cold clear passionless voice. Smoke, cables move, but the rocket is still, even past zero. In the cabin it feels like liftoff starts ten seconds early; from the ground it appears ten seconds late.

The rocket moves. The Saturn V thrusters have generated sufficient force, and it rises slowly, disencumbered of gravity.

What sexual energy a rocket had. Despite the sterile veneer NASA threw up around the program, its final inevitable symbol was phallic. In the slow steady rise of energies was the primeval pulse of the animal, man’s ends and beginning tied together in his artifacts. Charlotte had attended the lunar liftoff and she said later it was so sensual, so compelling, that warm sympathetic pulsings had started within her. When it was over, she said, people hurried away, awed and embarrassed by that immense potency.

Or say, rather, force: for NASA had stripped rockets of their potency. They had taken the V-2 and removed the warhead, removed in fact the point of it since rockets had been originally designed as missiles, engines of destruction. They flew, fell, exploded. Their trajectories were dramatic curves. But at NASA’s tampering, science’s imperative, they flew straight up, out, fell apart in sections to hurl a payload of weak men at a weightless point in the sky. There was no meaning to that, no climax. Man had not yet grown enough out of his urge for destruction to appreciate this new application, the straightening of the trajectory. There was no drama in it; and Edwards sees now that drama and sex are inextricably linked, that the rise and curve of one is the same as the other. Anything without a climax is ultimately disappointing, and in that is the key to the end of the program.

The ships orbit. The screen is dark with static and crackling voices. They are positioning a camera to follow the docking. Watch now: the Earth rolls slowly beneath, Apollo roams the skies. Over the far curving horizon is a dot, a hint of movement. Soyuz approaches, gaining dimension. It elongates. There is an excited interchange, static garbling Russian and English equally to nonsense.

“Can you understand it, Dad?”

“Shh.”

The Russians’ manned program is scheduled to continue, he understands from what faint rumors escape that tantalizing curtain of silence. So, imagining himself in space, he feels vaguely threatened by the sight of Soyuz. Perhaps he projects his own tension into the voice of the American pilot, but he seems to Edwards as jauntily nervous as a virgin on his first date, strange to the mysteries of women. Edwards has that virgin’s nervousness of Russians himself.

Whispers of space move in the room. He gets a whiff of the void, a brief flicker of weightlessness, a vertigo. The far craft gestures in its approach, makes a single elegant inclination as it nears. Radio signals control the camera; it shifts slowly to take in Apollo. The two ships whisper through vast sweeping statics, they make minor adjustments as the trajectories close. The radio energy is dense as they make ready to touch. Electrons move, pattern, shift. Computers click. Data flickers in great networks around the world.

Kevin is leaning forward, his breath coming quick and shallow. In the moment before contact he hunches, feeling the shadows of all contacts to come in this one. In the screen’s light Edwards sees everything in perspective: blue flickers on the wet brown beer bottle he has not touched, Kevin’s rapt face washed pale, his own reclining tense posture, fat on the once-solid frame . . .

The ships link. Apollo mates with Soyuz. The gates are open, static floods between them, the astronauts and cosmonauts can move between vessels. The mission is consummated, the program over. The camera drifts and Earth swims slowly under it. Browns, blues, whites, haloed in static. The Moon forgotten.

Something recedes in Edwards.

It is his fortieth birthday.

In the yard he studies the moon, and the empty black between it and earth where two vessels reel and clasp each other. They will shuttle between crafts for a bit, trade dull laborious jokes and dry paste meals, then disengage and return to Earth, nothing reached, nothing resolved, America behind while Russia pushes outward. The first time they pulled back from a frontier. He sees what Byrne meant. What will it mean to lose this initiative? Does it matter? Russia, America, what difference? The race goes on. It is the nature of things to continue. Only man, who is bom and must die and has enough of a brain to possess a sense of self, thinks in terms of birth and death, starts and stops. Only man needs drama to make his short, tragic, linear life bearable.

When he goes in, Kevin is gone. He turns off the television. On impulse he goes to the attic to get the heavy binoculars he bought in Okinawa. There is the smell of time behind the attic door, a musty wasting smell that makes him feel heartsick and lost. The attic is neat and orderly, but he cannot find the binoculars. Finally he steps back out, shuts the door.

He stands in the hall, feeling the house’s emptiness. He listens

to its hums and murmurs. Downstairs in the dark the refrigerator turns on. He is numb. He stands in a paralyzed panic at the top of the long dim stairway, unmoving for several minutes.

There is a ringing in his ears now and his hands are cold. He drifts down the hall into Kevin’s room. It is dark, with only a pale illumination flooding sharply in one window. The Moon is gibbous again, waning back through all its phases. It is very late, after midnight; a new day has started.

Kevin lies angled back on the bed as if in a bathtub, binoculars propped in thin white arms bent double against his chest. Edwards enters but does not sit on the bed for fear of breaking the view. Nor does he speak. A minute drags by. Edwards is trembling. He says, “What do you see?”

The son shrugs. “Craters.”

He looks and sees the blurred patches of gray against white. Copernicus, Ptolemy, Clavius, Tranquility . . . the dead. Flags in the void. He felt remote and cold and untouchable. Kevin looked at him.

“Dad? Are we ever going back there?”

He sighed, tired, or on the edge of sorrow, though sorrow was a pointless thing. Waves receded from him. Each word broke a vast illimitable silence. “I don’t know, son. I don’t know.”

Two novels by Kate Wilhelm (“Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis”) were published early in 1976. One, from Harper & Row, is called Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang; part of it appeared in Orbit 15 under the same title. The other, from Farrar, Straus Sc Giroux, is called The Clewiston Test.

Dave Seal wrote a long time ago, concerning a change we had proposed in his story “When We Were Good” (Orbit 17):

“Page 6: ‘Dante’s ears have been pointed, either through accident or design.’ The old rice-picking machine again? Seriously, I think we ought to say ‘through genetic accident or design’ to avoid the improbability of a child falling down on the sidewalk and pointening his ears.”

In March ’75 R. A. Lafferty (“The Hand with One Hundred Fingers”) wrote the following poem about Ms. Wilhelm: