Beyond apollo, p.7
Beyond Apollo, page 7
SE JPO NOH
HONE JOPS
ONE J HOPS
34
I dream that I am talking to my dead uncle about the voyage, about all that has happened, and about what has happened to me since last we met. My uncle has been dead twenty years, seven months, and some days—which would seem to imply a certain amount of decomposition—but there he is, exactly as I knew him in life, a little while before the cancer which killed him came out of the gall bladder like a faulty apogee and slew him. He is smoking an archaic nicotine cigarette and sitting with familiar ease in his old lounge chair; although the dream is not clear for time and place, it appears that I am seeing him, as I occasionally used to, at the end of his day’s work in the construction firm that he headed and now, his nap and Scotch ingested, he has become talkative and almost tolerant of me. “A good thing,” he is saying. “Nevertheless, and despite all of that, a good thing. Man must conquer. Man must move onward. Venus is a wonderful goal.”
Apparently the dream is in medias res; in any event, we seem to be deeply engrossed, as we always were during that adolescent series of discussions which in some obscure way I forgot when I entered the program. I have already told him all about the history of my involvement: the apprenticeship, the commission, the tests, the selection, the training program, and the actual events of the voyage itself, with their pitiful aftermath in this institution. I wish that the dream had picked up somewhat earlier in time so that I, as well as he, would then know what happened on the flight, but one cannot have everything; it is a pleasure to talk to my uncle after a lapse of so many years, and from the appearance of the glowing room, the half-filled Scotch glasses, the slow curls of deadly smoke from his cigarette holder, it appears that we are having a good time. “So even though it ended up that way you still think it justified,” I say.
“Anything is justified,” he says, “if it will lead man outward. Accomplishment, struggle, striving, the movement toward the goal. Man is the only one of God’s creatures that can conceive of a goal in abstract terms, that can sacrifice his life toward that attainment. Venus. Wonderful! The moon. Wonderful! When I died, you know, they were just starting the suborbital flights and no one believed. But I had faith even then. Of course, I was too busy to take much of an interest, but I knew. I knew it would come to this.”
“Mars,” I say. “You haven’t mentioned Mars.”
“Mars was unfortunate,” my uncle says, “but this is the price you must pay for achievement. Struggle, suffering, loss, pain. Only the game fish can swim upstream, you know.” He is racked by a hopeless siege of coughing which drives his head helplessly further and further toward the floor; at last his forehead is stopped by his knees and he lies against them for a moment, then slowly eases himself to a sitting position, stabbing out the cigarette in short, trembling bursts. “Fucking cigarettes,” he says. “They were what did it to me, you know. I had no luck. If I had been born twenty years later or if the cancer had just held out a little while, they would have switched to the nicotine-less brands and I would have been able to hear the whole thing myself instead of getting it secondhand from a distant relative. Tell me more, son,” he says, “tell me what Venus is like. I’m very interested in Venus; in any new frontier, any new pole of human accomplishment. After all, that’s what I’m in the construction business for, not just for the money but to expand, to create new things. What is it like? Beautiful, I betcha. It’s the nearest planet to the sun, isn’t it?”
“No,” I say, “it’s the second. Earth is the third. We flew from the third to the second. But I can’t tell you about Venus because we never got there. It has heavy cover formed by gases and vapors and no one knows what’s on the surface. We still don’t know. Now we’ll never know.”
“Why not? So you failed, what does that mean? There will be a second flight and a third and a fifth. Eventually you’ll conquer Venus. That’s in the cards. We got Mexico, didn’t we? California? The South Pole? Once we decide to do something, nothing can stop us. That’s mankind. That’s all of us,” my uncle says and stands, swaying slightly, his dressing gown floating in the strange breeze which seems to be in these spaces, momentarily confused as he looks beyond his easy chair and my own straight-back, puzzled that there is nothing in the distance but a clear, gray mist. “Well,” he says, “this has been very interesting, but I don’t have much more time. I have things to do, appointments to keep. It’s still very interesting and nothing changes, you know. You take care of yourself, Harry, will you?”
“You don’t understand,” I say. “You haven’t even let me finish. I want to know what to do. I’ve got to get some advice. I’ve come to ask you for help.”
“I have no advice.”
“You were the only man I ever knew who talked the way you did. You believed that there were rational solutions to rational problems and that it was only a matter of making the engineering work. You had faith, a belief, a certain conviction in human destiny…” and then I cannot go on; I seem to be crying. Choking sobs well from me; I conceal them with a forearm and force myself to continue. “You can’t just leave,” I say, “you have to give me some answers. What do I do? What do we do next? What’s going to happen to us?”
“The same things that will always happen. We’ll voyage on and on.”
“And me? What about me?”
“I’m afraid that you’ll have to work out for yourself,” my uncle says vaguely. “I can’t get involved in particulars, you know; generalizations were always my specialty. Weil,” he says, standing awkwardly—a certain unease in his gait and unsteadiness in his legs—and weaving his way out of my line of sight, “this has been truly interesting and I’m delighted to know that you’ve done so well, Harry. Keep up the good work and everything will be resolved in the long run.” He looks stricken, a slow look of dismay passing from eyes to forehead and then bouncing down to his cheekbones; he puts a fingernail against his mouth in puzzlement. “I know I forgot something,” he says. “Oh, yes; oh, yes, that’s it. Money. Do you need any money, Harry? You would always hint around for money after our discussions. If you need any—”
“No,” I say. “My needs are provided for here.”
“I was just going to say that if you needed any there’s nothing I can do for you because my sources of income seem to have been taken away. So you’ll have to work that out for yourself, son. Anyway, the important thing is that we had a good talk, didn’t we? And I straightened you out.”
“But you haven’t answered anything,” I say. “You’ve left me the same as before. I still don’t know why—”
“You’ve got to stop this, Harry,” my uncle says and lays a ghostly, not unpleasant hand upon my shoulder, sending small waves of irradiation palpitating down the line of the arm, “and not ask so many questions. I never had any patience with your questions, Harry: to tell you the truth, I just made up the answers that seemed to fit, but I am not a reflective man. Action, accomplishment—that’s all that matters, of course, over the age of twenty-one,” my uncle says and quickly leaves the line of sight; I am standing in pools of grayness as his easy chair contracts into a small ball and is yanked out of the area, the lights go down, I seem to have no clothing on; I am very embarrassed.
“Answers,” I say, “I want the easy answers; you always had them, you can’t run out on me now, you can’t do this to me; you’ve got to come to the point,” and so on and so forth, but my uncle is out of the picture, my voice sounds petulant and juvenile in my ears and the scene mercifully blanks out totally; I am back in my bed, crawling out of the dream in small pieces, sweating and fussing, muttering to myself, or perhaps I am only clambering back into a dream, coming into my room in small sections, but in any event it is very complex and uncontrollable and I can make nothing of it, so after a time I get up from the bed and sit in the chair for a time, contemplating.
At least my wife is not loose in the halls tonight. No one is scrabbling with fingers at my door. I am glad that they have stopped that nonsense. I am entitled to the integrity of this room, not that any of it has come to resolution.
I remember how my uncle looked the last time I saw him and can only admire the restorative benefits of death; he looks better than he had in many years and seems very positive and forward-thinking, not to say pleased with how well his philosophy stands up in the technological age.
35
“We are going to Venus,” I say to the Captain, “because it is populated and it is planned that we will sign a treaty of everlasting peace and friendship with the Venusians, thereby inaugurating several generations of peace and progress. Hidden in the hold are the documents, all signed and notarized on our end. You have been keeping this from me until the landing as a pleasant surprise. You are quite aware of the presence of Venusians on the planet and in due course are authorized to make a deal.”
“No,” the Captain says and chuckles. His eyes are quite wild. He seems progressively abstracted. “That is not the way it worked out at all. Guess again, Evans. Keep them coming. You must make a more serious effort to solve the problem; this voyage is not limitless, and besides, you should show some will and application, discipline and meaning.” He burps, shifts abruptly on the chair, makes a discommoding kick, and lands on the floor. “Hurry,” he says, ignoring his collapse. “Hurry; get to the point. You’ve got to overreach yourself, Evans; get to the point now or you’ll never have a chance to ask me about my sex life. Don’t you want to know about my sex life?” he says with a leer. “There are things you never dreamed possible that I could tell you, and frankly, I’m aching to take you into my confidence because all of this interplanetary space, to say nothing of the conversations with the Venusians, is making me extremely horny, but fair’s fair and we must stick with the rules of the game. What benefits for any of us could there be if we don’t accept our own strictures, have the integrity of our own decisions? No, Evans, you must do better,” he says and reseats himself upon the chair with a thud, placing his elbows on his knees and resting his chin on his hands, a peculiar and intense gleam coming from his damaged eyes. “Come on,” he says, “I’ll give you a hint. It has something to do with our personal lives. There is a direct personal reason why the two of us are on this ship. Look at it from that aspect: private motives, private goals. Does that help? Does that help?” the Captain asks and slides from the chair in a dead faint; I must resuscitate him with glasses of water and some gestures of respiration until at last he puffs and turns over and the game, always the game, resumes.
36
Following through on an old political pledge made by a leader of the discredited administration, men embarked for Mars in 1976. A standard crew of three were involved on the flight. Embarkation was from moon orbit, transfer to the larger ship being made there because of the cheaper costs of final assembly and fuel allowing escape velocity from that satellite. The voyage was scheduled to last six weeks: two weeks toward Mars, two weeks back, and the remainder for actual exploration and mapping of the red planet. According to official statement the three men composing the crew were the most highly qualified team in the history of the project, although only one of them had actually participated in the earlier abandoned moon program. The other two were scientists: a physicist and a biologist, given heavy physical training, to turn the voyage into one of exploration and achievement. The program was responding to popular objections from the media that the moon program had been poorly rationalized, formulated with no clear outcome, and was largely a public relations ploy without true scientific substance or value.
Mars is the fourth planet from the sun in this solar system. It is known as the red planet because early observations detected it as being surrounded by a reddish glow. Whether this was spectral distortion from the atmosphere or whether the sands and grounds of the planet itself were actually tinted red was one of the numerous and interesting questions which the expedition was to answer. Some of the other questions which the expedition was to answer were among the following:
1) Is there intelligent life on Mars?
2) Is there any life on Mars?
3) Are the famous Martian canals geological formations which coincidentally obey laws of geometric relation and appear to run in straight lines, or are they the remnants of a powerful and intelligent race, now extinct, which constructed them as a way of conveying water across their parched and stricken planet?
4) Are the canals phenomena created by a race which is not extinct and would that race yield an explanation of their function?
5) Deimos and Phobos, two satellites of the fourth planet, are immeasurably smaller in proportion to their parent body than any other moons in the solar system. Their peculiar and opposed orbits are also unique, as well as certain indications through spectral study that they may be metallic in construction. Are they, therefore, artificial satellites, constructed by an intelligent race who placed them in their orbits for experimental or technological purposes?
6) Can Mars yield anything worthwhile in either experimental knowledge or produce to mankind?
7) In light of the expensive and essential failure of the Apollo project, can a carefully underpublicized and ostensibly scientific investigation of the planet Mars redeem for the discredited space project, and for the uneasy administration which oversees it, enough credit to justify the expense in terms of time and materials?
On May 4, 1976, the Kennedy II, with its small and well-trained crew, embarked on its flight to solve these as well as some other essential mysteries.
37
“One human being is nothing,” Forrest must have said to me, “no matter the investment, no matter the relationship, no matter the circumstances; in the long run, we must essentially take a cheap view of human life if we are to get anywhere. This was the mistake of the original planners of the program: they valued human life too highly because of the publicity in which these projects took place, and resultantly, progress was slowed by years, perhaps by decades. We could have had a man on the moon in 1958 or maybe 1953 if the value of life had not been misproportioned to that of research. But that will end. That is ending. We are no longer going to make these mistakes.
“We are, in short,” he must have said, leaning closer to me, looking more menacing as he did this, increasing my dislocation and sense of loss, “going to find out what happened, and if we can elicit this information only through painful means, then this is the way in which it will have to be. We do not have the time, Evans, do not have the respect for mysteries, which we might have tolerated at one time: we will approach this in simple, practical ways and we will find what we must. That is your mistake, Evans. You misjudged us. You did not think that we were serious about this, and your training might have given you a disproportionate self-evaluation, but you are in for an unpleasant shock.
“No one man is that important, Evans. You mean nothing to us. You are an informational tool; that is all the two of you ever were, and we are going to get the information in any way we can. Voluntarily or involuntarily. I realize that there is a cost invoked here and it may cost you some pain, but that is the way it must be. I will not apologize.
“Now, Evans, will you be reasonable or must we take measures?” I think he asked and I said nothing; how could I say anything, I lay in ice, sheets of fire surrounding me, the hard, cold eyes of attendants I could not touch tossing sphincters of pain, and I tried to say something but could not. “All right,” I think he said then, “that is what I suspected. So be it then, so be it; let the process begin,” and I was taken out of there, saw nothing until much later.
Surely he must have said this to me. It is the only explanation. If he did not say this to me, then all of this is going on outside of my mind and for all I know I might still be in the ship: locked into the latest and greatest of the Venusian Disturbances, scaled aliens merrily inserting their probes while I lie narcotized and anguished beneath machinery, pouring my secrets into their circuitry, which can only transmit all of this to small jolts and bright flashes on the ribbons which record.
38
“Why not a child?” Evans said to his wife in the aftermath of intercourse, seeing her lie flushed and open under him, an illusion of accessibility which she always had at those times before everything became irretrievably ugly. “I see nothing wrong with it.”
“No,” she said, “no, under no circumstances,” and pivoted under him, swinging neatly to her side of the bed, unbalancing an arm and causing him to topple, abruptly, on his haunches. “I won’t have it.”
“We will someday, you know.”
“No, we won’t. Not if I have anything to say about it. Never, never.”
“We have to think of the future. This isn’t going to last forever, you know.”
“You want it to,” she said to the helpless and stammering Evans. “You have no sense of time at all. You think that it’s going to last.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do and besides I don’t want to talk now because that only means fighting and I’m tired. I want to go to sleep.”
“Hey,” the discombobulated Evans said, running a forefinger across the slickness of her cheek, “hey, remember something. I’m trying to take a flight. I might wind up on a ship to Venus or somewhere. It isn’t impossible. The odds are against it, but they’re against anyone. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
HONE JOPS
ONE J HOPS
34
I dream that I am talking to my dead uncle about the voyage, about all that has happened, and about what has happened to me since last we met. My uncle has been dead twenty years, seven months, and some days—which would seem to imply a certain amount of decomposition—but there he is, exactly as I knew him in life, a little while before the cancer which killed him came out of the gall bladder like a faulty apogee and slew him. He is smoking an archaic nicotine cigarette and sitting with familiar ease in his old lounge chair; although the dream is not clear for time and place, it appears that I am seeing him, as I occasionally used to, at the end of his day’s work in the construction firm that he headed and now, his nap and Scotch ingested, he has become talkative and almost tolerant of me. “A good thing,” he is saying. “Nevertheless, and despite all of that, a good thing. Man must conquer. Man must move onward. Venus is a wonderful goal.”
Apparently the dream is in medias res; in any event, we seem to be deeply engrossed, as we always were during that adolescent series of discussions which in some obscure way I forgot when I entered the program. I have already told him all about the history of my involvement: the apprenticeship, the commission, the tests, the selection, the training program, and the actual events of the voyage itself, with their pitiful aftermath in this institution. I wish that the dream had picked up somewhat earlier in time so that I, as well as he, would then know what happened on the flight, but one cannot have everything; it is a pleasure to talk to my uncle after a lapse of so many years, and from the appearance of the glowing room, the half-filled Scotch glasses, the slow curls of deadly smoke from his cigarette holder, it appears that we are having a good time. “So even though it ended up that way you still think it justified,” I say.
“Anything is justified,” he says, “if it will lead man outward. Accomplishment, struggle, striving, the movement toward the goal. Man is the only one of God’s creatures that can conceive of a goal in abstract terms, that can sacrifice his life toward that attainment. Venus. Wonderful! The moon. Wonderful! When I died, you know, they were just starting the suborbital flights and no one believed. But I had faith even then. Of course, I was too busy to take much of an interest, but I knew. I knew it would come to this.”
“Mars,” I say. “You haven’t mentioned Mars.”
“Mars was unfortunate,” my uncle says, “but this is the price you must pay for achievement. Struggle, suffering, loss, pain. Only the game fish can swim upstream, you know.” He is racked by a hopeless siege of coughing which drives his head helplessly further and further toward the floor; at last his forehead is stopped by his knees and he lies against them for a moment, then slowly eases himself to a sitting position, stabbing out the cigarette in short, trembling bursts. “Fucking cigarettes,” he says. “They were what did it to me, you know. I had no luck. If I had been born twenty years later or if the cancer had just held out a little while, they would have switched to the nicotine-less brands and I would have been able to hear the whole thing myself instead of getting it secondhand from a distant relative. Tell me more, son,” he says, “tell me what Venus is like. I’m very interested in Venus; in any new frontier, any new pole of human accomplishment. After all, that’s what I’m in the construction business for, not just for the money but to expand, to create new things. What is it like? Beautiful, I betcha. It’s the nearest planet to the sun, isn’t it?”
“No,” I say, “it’s the second. Earth is the third. We flew from the third to the second. But I can’t tell you about Venus because we never got there. It has heavy cover formed by gases and vapors and no one knows what’s on the surface. We still don’t know. Now we’ll never know.”
“Why not? So you failed, what does that mean? There will be a second flight and a third and a fifth. Eventually you’ll conquer Venus. That’s in the cards. We got Mexico, didn’t we? California? The South Pole? Once we decide to do something, nothing can stop us. That’s mankind. That’s all of us,” my uncle says and stands, swaying slightly, his dressing gown floating in the strange breeze which seems to be in these spaces, momentarily confused as he looks beyond his easy chair and my own straight-back, puzzled that there is nothing in the distance but a clear, gray mist. “Well,” he says, “this has been very interesting, but I don’t have much more time. I have things to do, appointments to keep. It’s still very interesting and nothing changes, you know. You take care of yourself, Harry, will you?”
“You don’t understand,” I say. “You haven’t even let me finish. I want to know what to do. I’ve got to get some advice. I’ve come to ask you for help.”
“I have no advice.”
“You were the only man I ever knew who talked the way you did. You believed that there were rational solutions to rational problems and that it was only a matter of making the engineering work. You had faith, a belief, a certain conviction in human destiny…” and then I cannot go on; I seem to be crying. Choking sobs well from me; I conceal them with a forearm and force myself to continue. “You can’t just leave,” I say, “you have to give me some answers. What do I do? What do we do next? What’s going to happen to us?”
“The same things that will always happen. We’ll voyage on and on.”
“And me? What about me?”
“I’m afraid that you’ll have to work out for yourself,” my uncle says vaguely. “I can’t get involved in particulars, you know; generalizations were always my specialty. Weil,” he says, standing awkwardly—a certain unease in his gait and unsteadiness in his legs—and weaving his way out of my line of sight, “this has been truly interesting and I’m delighted to know that you’ve done so well, Harry. Keep up the good work and everything will be resolved in the long run.” He looks stricken, a slow look of dismay passing from eyes to forehead and then bouncing down to his cheekbones; he puts a fingernail against his mouth in puzzlement. “I know I forgot something,” he says. “Oh, yes; oh, yes, that’s it. Money. Do you need any money, Harry? You would always hint around for money after our discussions. If you need any—”
“No,” I say. “My needs are provided for here.”
“I was just going to say that if you needed any there’s nothing I can do for you because my sources of income seem to have been taken away. So you’ll have to work that out for yourself, son. Anyway, the important thing is that we had a good talk, didn’t we? And I straightened you out.”
“But you haven’t answered anything,” I say. “You’ve left me the same as before. I still don’t know why—”
“You’ve got to stop this, Harry,” my uncle says and lays a ghostly, not unpleasant hand upon my shoulder, sending small waves of irradiation palpitating down the line of the arm, “and not ask so many questions. I never had any patience with your questions, Harry: to tell you the truth, I just made up the answers that seemed to fit, but I am not a reflective man. Action, accomplishment—that’s all that matters, of course, over the age of twenty-one,” my uncle says and quickly leaves the line of sight; I am standing in pools of grayness as his easy chair contracts into a small ball and is yanked out of the area, the lights go down, I seem to have no clothing on; I am very embarrassed.
“Answers,” I say, “I want the easy answers; you always had them, you can’t run out on me now, you can’t do this to me; you’ve got to come to the point,” and so on and so forth, but my uncle is out of the picture, my voice sounds petulant and juvenile in my ears and the scene mercifully blanks out totally; I am back in my bed, crawling out of the dream in small pieces, sweating and fussing, muttering to myself, or perhaps I am only clambering back into a dream, coming into my room in small sections, but in any event it is very complex and uncontrollable and I can make nothing of it, so after a time I get up from the bed and sit in the chair for a time, contemplating.
At least my wife is not loose in the halls tonight. No one is scrabbling with fingers at my door. I am glad that they have stopped that nonsense. I am entitled to the integrity of this room, not that any of it has come to resolution.
I remember how my uncle looked the last time I saw him and can only admire the restorative benefits of death; he looks better than he had in many years and seems very positive and forward-thinking, not to say pleased with how well his philosophy stands up in the technological age.
35
“We are going to Venus,” I say to the Captain, “because it is populated and it is planned that we will sign a treaty of everlasting peace and friendship with the Venusians, thereby inaugurating several generations of peace and progress. Hidden in the hold are the documents, all signed and notarized on our end. You have been keeping this from me until the landing as a pleasant surprise. You are quite aware of the presence of Venusians on the planet and in due course are authorized to make a deal.”
“No,” the Captain says and chuckles. His eyes are quite wild. He seems progressively abstracted. “That is not the way it worked out at all. Guess again, Evans. Keep them coming. You must make a more serious effort to solve the problem; this voyage is not limitless, and besides, you should show some will and application, discipline and meaning.” He burps, shifts abruptly on the chair, makes a discommoding kick, and lands on the floor. “Hurry,” he says, ignoring his collapse. “Hurry; get to the point. You’ve got to overreach yourself, Evans; get to the point now or you’ll never have a chance to ask me about my sex life. Don’t you want to know about my sex life?” he says with a leer. “There are things you never dreamed possible that I could tell you, and frankly, I’m aching to take you into my confidence because all of this interplanetary space, to say nothing of the conversations with the Venusians, is making me extremely horny, but fair’s fair and we must stick with the rules of the game. What benefits for any of us could there be if we don’t accept our own strictures, have the integrity of our own decisions? No, Evans, you must do better,” he says and reseats himself upon the chair with a thud, placing his elbows on his knees and resting his chin on his hands, a peculiar and intense gleam coming from his damaged eyes. “Come on,” he says, “I’ll give you a hint. It has something to do with our personal lives. There is a direct personal reason why the two of us are on this ship. Look at it from that aspect: private motives, private goals. Does that help? Does that help?” the Captain asks and slides from the chair in a dead faint; I must resuscitate him with glasses of water and some gestures of respiration until at last he puffs and turns over and the game, always the game, resumes.
36
Following through on an old political pledge made by a leader of the discredited administration, men embarked for Mars in 1976. A standard crew of three were involved on the flight. Embarkation was from moon orbit, transfer to the larger ship being made there because of the cheaper costs of final assembly and fuel allowing escape velocity from that satellite. The voyage was scheduled to last six weeks: two weeks toward Mars, two weeks back, and the remainder for actual exploration and mapping of the red planet. According to official statement the three men composing the crew were the most highly qualified team in the history of the project, although only one of them had actually participated in the earlier abandoned moon program. The other two were scientists: a physicist and a biologist, given heavy physical training, to turn the voyage into one of exploration and achievement. The program was responding to popular objections from the media that the moon program had been poorly rationalized, formulated with no clear outcome, and was largely a public relations ploy without true scientific substance or value.
Mars is the fourth planet from the sun in this solar system. It is known as the red planet because early observations detected it as being surrounded by a reddish glow. Whether this was spectral distortion from the atmosphere or whether the sands and grounds of the planet itself were actually tinted red was one of the numerous and interesting questions which the expedition was to answer. Some of the other questions which the expedition was to answer were among the following:
1) Is there intelligent life on Mars?
2) Is there any life on Mars?
3) Are the famous Martian canals geological formations which coincidentally obey laws of geometric relation and appear to run in straight lines, or are they the remnants of a powerful and intelligent race, now extinct, which constructed them as a way of conveying water across their parched and stricken planet?
4) Are the canals phenomena created by a race which is not extinct and would that race yield an explanation of their function?
5) Deimos and Phobos, two satellites of the fourth planet, are immeasurably smaller in proportion to their parent body than any other moons in the solar system. Their peculiar and opposed orbits are also unique, as well as certain indications through spectral study that they may be metallic in construction. Are they, therefore, artificial satellites, constructed by an intelligent race who placed them in their orbits for experimental or technological purposes?
6) Can Mars yield anything worthwhile in either experimental knowledge or produce to mankind?
7) In light of the expensive and essential failure of the Apollo project, can a carefully underpublicized and ostensibly scientific investigation of the planet Mars redeem for the discredited space project, and for the uneasy administration which oversees it, enough credit to justify the expense in terms of time and materials?
On May 4, 1976, the Kennedy II, with its small and well-trained crew, embarked on its flight to solve these as well as some other essential mysteries.
37
“One human being is nothing,” Forrest must have said to me, “no matter the investment, no matter the relationship, no matter the circumstances; in the long run, we must essentially take a cheap view of human life if we are to get anywhere. This was the mistake of the original planners of the program: they valued human life too highly because of the publicity in which these projects took place, and resultantly, progress was slowed by years, perhaps by decades. We could have had a man on the moon in 1958 or maybe 1953 if the value of life had not been misproportioned to that of research. But that will end. That is ending. We are no longer going to make these mistakes.
“We are, in short,” he must have said, leaning closer to me, looking more menacing as he did this, increasing my dislocation and sense of loss, “going to find out what happened, and if we can elicit this information only through painful means, then this is the way in which it will have to be. We do not have the time, Evans, do not have the respect for mysteries, which we might have tolerated at one time: we will approach this in simple, practical ways and we will find what we must. That is your mistake, Evans. You misjudged us. You did not think that we were serious about this, and your training might have given you a disproportionate self-evaluation, but you are in for an unpleasant shock.
“No one man is that important, Evans. You mean nothing to us. You are an informational tool; that is all the two of you ever were, and we are going to get the information in any way we can. Voluntarily or involuntarily. I realize that there is a cost invoked here and it may cost you some pain, but that is the way it must be. I will not apologize.
“Now, Evans, will you be reasonable or must we take measures?” I think he asked and I said nothing; how could I say anything, I lay in ice, sheets of fire surrounding me, the hard, cold eyes of attendants I could not touch tossing sphincters of pain, and I tried to say something but could not. “All right,” I think he said then, “that is what I suspected. So be it then, so be it; let the process begin,” and I was taken out of there, saw nothing until much later.
Surely he must have said this to me. It is the only explanation. If he did not say this to me, then all of this is going on outside of my mind and for all I know I might still be in the ship: locked into the latest and greatest of the Venusian Disturbances, scaled aliens merrily inserting their probes while I lie narcotized and anguished beneath machinery, pouring my secrets into their circuitry, which can only transmit all of this to small jolts and bright flashes on the ribbons which record.
38
“Why not a child?” Evans said to his wife in the aftermath of intercourse, seeing her lie flushed and open under him, an illusion of accessibility which she always had at those times before everything became irretrievably ugly. “I see nothing wrong with it.”
“No,” she said, “no, under no circumstances,” and pivoted under him, swinging neatly to her side of the bed, unbalancing an arm and causing him to topple, abruptly, on his haunches. “I won’t have it.”
“We will someday, you know.”
“No, we won’t. Not if I have anything to say about it. Never, never.”
“We have to think of the future. This isn’t going to last forever, you know.”
“You want it to,” she said to the helpless and stammering Evans. “You have no sense of time at all. You think that it’s going to last.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do and besides I don’t want to talk now because that only means fighting and I’m tired. I want to go to sleep.”
“Hey,” the discombobulated Evans said, running a forefinger across the slickness of her cheek, “hey, remember something. I’m trying to take a flight. I might wind up on a ship to Venus or somewhere. It isn’t impossible. The odds are against it, but they’re against anyone. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
