Joseph McElroy - Plus

So to dispel the atmosphere of his own Do you mind , he had dispelled the burning smoke and said, “Well you can’t call me a hypochondriac.”

A non-acrid, or good, voice had said, “What are we going to call you?” and had coughed for a number of seconds, and it shook its head laughing like a friend so the coughing and laughing were one spiral, and said, “I don’t know about you but I’m giving it up.” So to lighten the atmosphere Imp Plus had said, “I’ve nothing left to give up.” To which the good voice that had stopped coughing had said, “You have a place — like Goddard.”

The great Goddard in a white coat. The Goddard who launched a liquid-fuel rocket from a handmade farm and kept it quiet for years.

But the acrid voice had said to the good voice, “Think how Goddard went.” Then the acrid voice had eyed Imp Plus, and when the good voice had coughed some more against the oxidizing cigarette and coughed also about the crab that had got caught in great Goddard’s throat, Imp Plus had acted to dispel the smoke in the pale green room and had said that if his place was not in the century like Goddard’s, it was then maybe a place in the decade like that of REP in his.

The self-shortened nickname of another great. And Imp Plus’s own words given off from a communicating room now how much later in orbit round the Earth came from an Imp Plus that Imp Plus could not place. But he placed REP. It was French, like the smoke— Row-bare , plus two more words. REP wanted to be first to get a plane off the ground. REP before War-’14 had foreseen atom-driven spaceships.

But this time the source of the French smoke — namely the acrid voice — had waved the smoke but not like a shearwater sweeping seafoam — toward Imp Plus. Who then had seen that the wave had meant to sweep it away. But no, the acrid voice had been coming through it then to extend to Imp Plus.

To extend a thing that now how much later in orbit the dim echo blocked: by transmitting data on REP: but to Imp Plus: namely that REP built a plane, wrote a book, said the word astronautics , thought up the control stick, almost completed a rocket to shoot instruments sixty miles high, typed letters in French on a machine, but in German wrote using what Imp Plus could not use any better than a control stick and so heard, in the dim echo’s transmission, as smoke: but saw, not heard: yet saw not smoke but the live thing that reached to Imp Plus through the smoke as if the breathing tobacco was smoke whose decay could carry more than carbon and burning. But then that thing through the smoke became a handmade fraction of itself, a false fraction which was a message to Imp Plus that followed from REP by means of data other than and now drowned by what came from the dim echo about the French satellite D-1A, or Diapason. And this data, first radiant, then gray, dimmed if it did not replace what had been missing from the live thing attached to the acrid voice that the acrid voice had extended toward Imp Plus through the camouflage: the data just about jammed that absence out with data on cells: cells to catch the Sun — Sun cells — cells in panels mounted in Diapason’s paddles that could be articulated to make best use of the Sun’s light.

“Four,” said now in orbit the dim echo, naming the number of Diapason’s paddles. But what was the dim echo?

And “Four,” Imp Plus had once said to supply that handmade fraction the acrid voice had withheld: withheld toward him through smoke. Yet now in faraway orbit Imp Plus had no use for the words said along with “Four.”

But he looked now through the absent digits— fingers , he knew fingers —four fingers snapped out of sight — and looked through the dispersals of smoke to the ill will transmitted in the face of the acrid voice. Imp Plus knew the word face . And seeing that unknown but present ill will, he remembered preparing to remember it. Which was no more the same as being briefed to remember, than oxygen was the same as oxidize .

And now at the same time, the division of known Four by known Four left them an unknown One which was not the Imp Plus being briefed in those pale green rooms on Earth and not the busy, informed dim echo here with him in orbit which seemed to know all that Imp Plus had used to know and so seemed even to have once been he. Oxygen was O .

Upending the operation whereby known Four paddles over known Four absent fingers yielded unknown One, Imp Plus felt all around him unknown cavings-out divided by unknown cavings-in to yield space now as spreading as what he’d now come to know he’d lost; as known as four French fingers lost in Row-bare E-P’s work with rocket fuel, familiar as Imp Plus’s own lost fingers and his words to the acrid face: “How do you know the four fingers REP lost were all on one hand?” and familiar as Imp Plus’s own hand and the long acrid hand that had come through smoke shifting its matter into swirls, come through by means of a circle of smoke that jogged the swirls and got flattened itself — the acrid hand came through as if to shake Imp Plus’s hand, only to turn then not into smoke’s acrid signal but an upright thumb’s crude sign knifing humorously upward to remind Imp Plus that he would lose spine, fingers, face and hands, ankles, elbows, neck flying off in radiations of centerless radii, knees, skull, mineral teeth, and don’t forget skin, no longer monitored as it used to be. Skin sensing in advance what the acrid laugher’s palm would feel like in the handshake that then had been withheld. Great Goddard’s terminal sore throat had happened, and Imp Plus had felt for it because in addition to fists and other parts he’d been scheduled to lose in the operation that must precede Operation TL, he would lose his throat.

But what he had been coming to was this: that while the body had been too ill to recover, the throat had not yet been ill. Nor made ill by the acrid voice’s smoke at the earlier briefing in May, nor at the conference less than a full year later in the larger pale green room when the acrid voice thought Imp Plus betrayed a secret hope that Operation TL would last — but the acrid face: this was what Imp Plus had now been coming to — dividing the unknown distances from known to known — to this: the thought that an orbit-decaying contingency plan could be used on him had been dimmed and replaced by the acrid face whose ill will he had thought he saw through the smoke: ill will that said, “Think what you’re going to lose: on behalf of Operation TL: think of it.”

From which Imp Plus had turned back to look down a lens because he could not stand to see the acrid voice. Yet saw only his own quickening decay. Yet now in the midst of Operation TL — in an orbit synchronous with Earth’s for this way Ground could hope to keep solely to itself its radio loop with Imp Plus — a chance fell out around him in new latticed gradients of brightness not like any gradient grid his old ill-briefings had readied him for, a force that came from the direction of the chlorella and the chloroplasts that he found himself comprehending — or seeing — and came from the unwrapping map of the Sun and, on his cabin wall, the birds and the shapes that cast them, but came as well from migrations of himself.

And this new memory received then with desire what had happened that late winter day in the absence of those four fingers snapped out of sight as if cut off at the knuckles of the acrid hand. Yes, the ill body of Imp Plus had been divided by that ill will, divided.

In the large green room that gave off carbon and carbon dioxide and that was not the green thing that gave oxygen, the good voice had said, “We have a casualty,” and had asked if Imp Plus was O.K. For he’d gone pale. For the blood he was soon to shed had slipped from his face. And its sudden drop (cause or effect of a towering headache) had made along the blood’s middle an opposite cascade — tissue of spindles, a logged current, to some place safe among the cells of what would remain when his remains were taken from him. He was so afraid of that that he thought only that he was breathing the acrid voice’s carbon dioxide, but what he feared was that he took the CO 2, but gave nothing back.