MARS

THE national excitement over John Pope’s heroic odyssey lasted eleven days, and then the nation awakened to the fact that never again in this century would an American walk on the Moon. The enchantment of Apollo vanished, the glory of the astronaut dimmed.

Dr. Loomis Crandall, the Air Force psychologist who had helped select the various groups of spacemen and who knew more about them than any other official, compiled a condescending summary which infuriated Mott:

Our sensible astronauts, correctly assessing the national mood, are resigning from the program, seeking employment in business, but most often merely drifting from one public relations job to another for the good reason that they have no basic skills except calculus and astrophysics.

True, John Glenn has gone to the Senate and Frank Borman to an airline, but the typical astronaut is Ed Cater, who left NASA to front for a real estate developer in Miami, then to an insurance company in New Orleans, and now to a used-car dealership in his hometown of Kosciusko, where his wife has become a partner in a dress shop and earns more than he does.

[652] Nine of the finest we had are dead. All the living comported themselves with a heroism and dignity of which we can be proud. But, we can also be disappointed, for they produced no national spokesman for space, no poet of the skies like Saint-Exupéry of France. They were in effect red-hot test pilots who transformed themselves into red-hot spacecraft pilots-and nothing more. In this limited response they reflected the national attitude toward space.

When Mott finished reading, he stormed into headquarters, eyes blazing behind his steel-rimmed glasses, a small, wiry man whose most sensitive nerves had been abused. When he found Crandall in the administrator’s office he bored right in: “Let’s take an equal number of graduate from the Harvard School of Business, from Cal Tech, MIT and Notre Dame and let’s compare records. Glenn a senator. They tell me Schmitt of New Mexico might make it next time. Borman at Eastern Airlines. Anders an ambassador. Young men doing wonderful things way beyond their age qualification. I’ll put my astronauts up against any group you assemble, Crandall, including an equal number of Ph.D.’s in psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychosometric voodoo.”

“Stanley,” the administrator interrupted, “Crandall’s only writing a report.”

“Well, I don’t like it. I do not like to see the great work done by this agency denigrated. If our program is grinding to a halt, it’s not because it was a bad program, but because we stopped too soon.”

In this fighting mood he trudged up to the Capitol to defend NASA in one more public hearing, and normally he would have been the quiet, self-effacing scientist on whom Congress had come to rely. But on this morning a senator from North Dakota had asked why NASA lagged so far behind private industry in certain learned fields, and Mott almost lost his temper:

“NASA is private industry, Senator. We make nothing. We’re a grandiose procurement agency, one of the best this world has ever seen. We’ve spent more than fifty billion dollars since I came aboard, without a single case of fraud or embezzlement or [653] malfeasance. The nation has never had to apologize for our behavior, and although I can give you a dozen examples where in my opinion we chose the wrong contractor, you cannot give me one where we awarded that contract fraudulently. I would be proud if all government operations could say the same.”

Yet, even as he defended his agency Mott realized it was beginning to retreat from its days of grandeur, and he told his young assistants, “We ought to be taking bold new steps in space, dispatching spacecraft with and without men to probe the farthest frontiers. When we do this, philosophers will face new complexities and be forced to explain them to the public.” At a conference of astrophysicists at Purdue University he warned:

“Within the last few years we have made discoveries which stagger the knowing mind. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson have identified the residue reverberations of the original explosion which set our universe in motion. Maarten Schmidt has made brilliant deductions about the speed at which distant galaxies travel. Hawking at Cambridge asks awesome questions about quasars, pulsars and black holes, and I believe we must rethink all our basic concepts.

“How will the general public react? Three precedents provide some guidance.

“Copernicus kept his new knowledge largely to himself, and when the Church objected to his conclusions, he stifled them. His immediate impact was nil, but his ultimate effect on morals, theology and individual comprehension was profound.

“Giordano Bruno flaunted his radical theories, irritating Catholics and Protestants equally. He agitated society by pointing out the consequences of scientific discoveries, and in the end, was burned at the stake to refute his astronomical heresies.

“Charles Darwin’s work produced so many shattering implications that he was rebutted immediately, and since his theory of evolution abused religious [654] sensibilities, it aroused intense opposition which has not yet abated.

“I believe that the speculations we have awakened regarding the ultimate nature of the universe must disturb our generations as profoundly as Darwin’s theories affected his. Whenever we stand on a threshold, as we do now, we must inescapably bring into question positions held previously, and when such revision involves the origin of the universe, we find ourselves on inflammable ground and must anticipate vigorous rebuttal.”

Mott had always been a religious man. His father, after all, had been a Methodist minister, and young Mott had been raised with the Bible as a constant presence. At one time he had been able to recite from memory the names of the books of both Testaments, a skill which he found useful in later years when he wished to locate a quotation, but he had also known their content rather thoroughly, and this, too, had been significant, for it prevented him from slipping thoughtlessly into a cliché “scientist-as-atheist” position. When his father’s ministerial friends railed against Darwin’s theory of evolution, he was never contemptuous in his attempts to defend it, and if they pressed, “But do you believe in God?” he was always able to answer without dissembling, “Yes, I do.”

But he also believed, without even the smallest nagging question, that mankind evolved in much the same way that the Sun had evolved from primordial matter, and he believed this because when he inspected the heart of existing galaxies, including our own, he could watch stars evolving from great clouds of matter. This was fact, not theory, and he could conceive of no alternative. He supposed that when religionists abused Darwin and proposed an instant, godlike creation, they were merely saying what he was saying, but in a more poetic form, and therefore he felt no sense of opposition to his father’s affirmation of his belief.

But he also believed without any reservation whatever that this universe of which he and his Earth and his Sun were a part had come into being-that is, in its present form-about eighteen billion years ago, with the Earth assuming its existence and shape about four and a half [655] billion years ago. When his father’s friends insisted that the Book of Genesis was the accurate statement, he was able to agree: “It’s a poetic version. It says about the same thing I’ve been saying, except that its word day is best understood to mean a vast geologic era.”

If debaters tried to make him deny that the billions of years required for the formation of Sun and Earth ever existed, and if they argued that all the magnificent galactic structure came into being a mere six or seven thousand years ago, with geological strata and dinosaur bones hidden in place like some jolly theological treasure hunt, he refused to argue. “Possible but not likely” was all he would respond.

The real question in this debate had been posed by his father: “If I concede, Stanley, that the universe did begin with your big bang eighteen billion years ago, tell me what set that bang in motion?”

“Science has no answer to that.”

“Was it not God?”

“I think so. Or some force mysteriously like God.” But when his father smiled in philosophical relief, his son insisted upon adding, “The big bang could not have taken place 4004 B.C.”

“Fair deal,” the elderly minister said. “I’ll give you your billions of years if you’ll give me my God.”

Once while vacationing between meetings he listened to a park ranger on the rim of the Grand Canyon describing to some tourists how that trivial stream, the Colorado River, had through the ages cut the gorge from one level of rock to another until the masterpiece stood revealed, and after the ranger ended his talk and went back to his office, Mott remained on the rim speculating on the beautiful accident by which the United States had acquired parks like this Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, and he silently congratulated those social pioneers who had fought the battles for succeeding generations: This canyon is totally unspoiled. Somebody deserves a lot of credit. And he could envisage someone like himself, three hundred years from now, standing on the edge of a canyon on Mars and saying, “That NASA gang, whoever they were, who reached here first, they did very little to destroy what they found,” and if he was proud of what his team had done, he was even more proud of what they had not done.

[656] He had barely formulated such thoughts when a tall, awkward, flaming-eyed man stepped out of the crowd who had been listening to the park ranger’s description of how the canyon had evolved, and shouted for attention:

“These park rangers, government employees, have been getting away with murder for too long. Standing here on government property and spreading lies that contradict Holy Scripture. Telling us yarns about how that little river down there took a hundred million years to sculpture this magnificent canyon. You know and I know that that’s a lie. That’s a damned lie, and one of these days, mark my words, park rangers like that are going to be held to account.

“This noble canyon was born about five thousand years ago, no more, when God sent the planet Venus scraping along the edge of the Earth, building mountains and cutting gullies. You can look at that canyon and know in your hearts it can’t be a million years old. And a hundred million? That’s laughable. It was cut down when men like Moses and Jeremiah were living on this Earth, and it is not the handiwork of some puny little river; it is the handiwork of God.”

He orated with fiery eloquence for nearly half an hour, holding Mott and the other vacationers captivated by his bold assertions, and at the end of his argument he cried, “Let’s have a show of hands. How many of you know in your hearts that I’m right and the park ranger is wrong?” To Mott’s surprise, more than half the listeners voted that the Grand Canyon of the Colorado could not be more than five thousand years old.

Wherever he went these days the world seemed to be divided into two groups, the few who had followed the deeper researches of the astrophysicists and the many who appeared to long for a simpler universe, one with fewer speculative aspects, and this feeling intensified as the year 1976 approached, for across the land people yearned for a return to the simplicities of 1776.

His son Millard was a case in point. When President Ford, following his pardon of Richard Nixon, offered a meager and grudging pardon to the young men who had [657] fled to Canada to escape the draft, Millard crept back to the Mott home under the most humiliating circumstances, even though, as he told his father, “everyone now concedes that men like me and Roger were right to protest. America knows that Vietnam was a horrible mistake.”

Roger had refused to accept, America’s reluctant forgiveness and had elected to remain in Canada. When Millard told his parents of their separation, he burst into tears, and for the first time the older Motts realized what a deep human attachment their son had felt for Roger, and they were surprised the next day to learn that Millard was now living with a young man named Victor, who ran what was known as a “head shop” in Denver. They did a big business in astrology books, tarot cards, the I-Ching, and cheese-and-wine lectures by gurus from India who explained to the college students in the area how society ought to be organized.

After Millard flew back to Colorado, Rachel Mott studiously tidied the apartment: the Mondrians were straightened on the living-room wall, the classical records were alphabetized again, excess books were placed in a corner to be given to the community college, and various unnecessary things which had accumulated were thrown away. When she finished getting all things in place, she sat on her bed and looked once more at the loving Axel Petersson figures carved in wood, and said to her husband, “Talking with Millard about his Roger and Victor was exactly like listening to a headstrong daughter who has divorced her banker husband and is living with an architect. It’s very difficult to keep values straight.”

“Especially for people in their late fifties,” Stanley said.

While brooding about his sons he idly thumbed a science magazine, and came upon a startling proposal by a scientist named Letterkill: “We should position in outer space a gigantic radio telescope whose distance between its two elements would be ten astronomical units. That would give us a base line of 900,000,000 miles.”

His imagination ablaze, Mott started drawing diagrams at top speed, then explained the basic principle to his wife: “It’s magnificent! The problem of parallax carried to the ultimate. You know how a range finder on a battleship works? You have this very long base line, say ninety feet. The longer the better. And they have two small telescopes, [658] one at each end. And the difference in angle between how each looks at the same target can be converted into precise distance. Boom! Your big guns fire, hit the target and sink the enemy, all because you used parallax intelligently.”

He proceeded to explain that earlier astronomers had determined star distances through clever applications of parallax: “On December 20 they took a photograph of the star Sirius. On June 20, when the Earth had moved halfway through its orbit and was as far away from its December position as possible, they took another photograph of the same star, using the same camera. Parallax revealed that Sirius was 8.6 light-years away.”

He said that astronomers had already devised a vast radio telescope, one leg in California, the other in Australia, with each taking a “photograph” of some heavenly body at exactly the same moment, so that the differential in angles could determine distance: “But now what this fellow Letterkill proposes is to place a huge radio telescope atop a rocket and fire it a billion miles into space, and lock it there. Then fire the other half of the telescope out into space, a billion miles in the opposite direction. What a fantastic base line we’d have. Rachel, we could see to the outer edges of the universe.”

His excitement grew at such a pace that he telephoned Huntsville, even though he suspected that Dieter Kolff would be asleep, and when the drowsy man came on the telephone, he asked, “Dieter, read about a man who has just made a dazzling proposal and I want your reading on it. Could we build a giant gossamer telescope in two parts? Throw one by rocket about a billion miles out into space and fix it there in orbit? Then throw an exact duplicate a billion miles out in the opposite direction? I think he recommends an angle of about a hundred and twenty degrees and ...”

“You have a base line of enormous length.”

“Something like ten astronomical units.”

“And you could penetrate beyond the farthest known galaxy.”

“Is it practical?”

“We could do it tomorrow.”

The two men talked for about an hour, with Kolff always bringing the discussion back to the two activating rockets, which he was prepared to build if NASA wanted [659] to bring him back from retirement, and Mott speaking always about the gossamer construction of the telescopes: “You understand, Dieter, we use no metal except in the frame for the radio eye. Everything is gossamer. Whole telescope would weigh, what? Less than three thousand pounds?”

When the call to Huntsville ended he could not sleep, and as he pored over Letterkill’s proposal, the thought came to him that this might well be the same man who had planned to make the Wallops Island rocket device the first satellite into space, and at four in the morning he had an operator track this Letterkill down at the Lewis Center in Cleveland: “Are you the fellow who came up with that brilliant proposal at Wallops Island? Excuse me, I’m Dr. Stanley Mott, who supported you at that time.”

It was the same Levi Letterkill. A man who has one good idea is always apt to have another, but his proposal for a telescope with a base line of ten A.U.’s did not get immediate attention, because later that morning, about 830 Washington time, the Miami police called to inform the Motts that their son Christopher was in jail again, this time on a very serious charge of bringing cocaine in from Colombia.

When Christopher Mott went to trial in Florida on the charge of smuggling cocaine from Colombia to the street value of $3,000,000, as they said in the newscasts, his parents defended him in anguish. Nearing sixty and unwavering defenders of all that was good in American life, they flew down to the muscular town of West Palm Beach, across the Intracoastal Waterway from the real Palm Beach, and sat for three days in a grubby courtroom while the state’s attorneys wove a web of damning evidence against their son.

The Motts presented a sorrowful picture as they listened to the ugly facts they had tried so diligently to ignore through the preceding years: a middle-aged couple who had always tried to appear respectable-Rachel, her Grecian hairdo severely in place, her tailored suit neatly pressed, her firm mouth never quivering; and Stanley in his blue-black pin-striped suit, white shirt, foulard tie and steel-rimmed glasses. They looked like an executive family from Bethlehem Steel or IBM, but since the trial took [660] place so near to Cape Canaveral, the papers emphasized their membership in the NASA family.

Christopher was twenty-five years old now and no longer entitled to consideration as an unknowing youth, but as he sat with the defense lawyers he seemed so slim and frail, so close to what a young man of his age with an assistant professorship at some college like Bates or Bowdoin should look like, that Rachel sometimes had to bow her head to keep from weeping, but then fresh evidence of his behavior would echo throughout the courtroom, and she would ask herself: How could this have happened? What in God’s name went wrong?

At the end of each day’s testimony she and Stanley returned to their glossy motel near the big shopping center, and it seemed to her that this was the other face of Cape Canaveral: up there the huge rockets soaring off into space with cheers and hundreds of technicians monitoring the flight and the young heroes in the capsule; down here. only a few miles away, a confused young man in a courtroom attempting to defend himself against a society which had almost encouraged him to become a criminal.

The songs of his day, the patterns of dress, television’s idealization of the illiterate rowdy who disrupts the classroom, sleazy newspaper stories and the dreadful pressure of one’s peers, all had conspired to put her son on trial, and she and Stanley had been too preoccupied with society’s business to combat the destructive influences.

“We never worked for ourselves,” she whispered as the damaging second day ended. “It was always for the Army. for the Germans at El Paso, for the Alabama rural children, even now, for the families of the astronauts. We’ve not been selfish, Stanley.”

“I may have been,” he said mournfully as he sat on the motel bed casting up the accounts of his life. “You tried to warn me in California when I was studying so hard. We know that’s when Millard started running with the wrong crowd and Chris began his undisciplined behavior. I feel the guilt almost unbearably.”

On the third day the case went to the jury at eleven in the morning, and shortly after lunch the seven men and five women brought in their verdict of guilty on all counts. The judge announced that because Christopher’s parents had to leave Florida quickly, he would sentence their son [661] two days later, and they spent most of those days at the jail talking with Chris and giving him what belated support they could.

When Rachel heard the sentence-five years in jail-she almost fainted, but then joined her husband and the defense lawyers in a plea that her son be remanded to a minimum-security prison where the likelihood of abuse and sodomy would be diminished. The judge listened tentatively, said that he could not accept the insinuation that Florida jails were out of control, and denied the request.

When the President suggested that John Pope make a world tour to allow other nations to see what an engaging hero America had produced, the NASA medical staff demurred on the grounds that he had undergone a grueling experience and deserved rest, but Pope said, “I’ll go if I can be routed through Australia. I’d like to thank that fellow at Honeysuckle. He was very important to me-twice.

So Pope flew to Europe, where the papers made much of his determination to visit the Australian voice that had helped save him, and Down Under newspapers kept track of how many days it would be before he reached Australia. The American ambassador flew from Canberra to Sydney to welcome him, then flew him in an American plane to receptions in rowdy Brisbane, staid Adelaide and gracious Melbourne, with a final stop at the American embassy in Canberra, where a large assembly waited to greet the hero.

He was courteous as always, explaining several times that his wife, Penny, would normally have accompanied him, except that this time she was kept in Washington by her duties with the Senate. The Russian ambassador gave a small party for what he termed “The American cosmonaut and a very brave man,” and then Pope called it quits.

“I came here to see the Australian communicator at Honeysuckle, and it’s time we got to it.” The U.S. ambassador agreed, and next morning a car and driver were provided to take Pope to the concentration of huge radio dishes hidden among the hills south of Canberra. These formed the system whereby Houston kept in touch with its satellites when they were over the Indian Ocean and [662] the western Pacific, and Pope was awed by their size, their complexity and the beauty of their setting.

“This must be one of the most attractive features of the space age,” he told the Australian manager, and before he entered the low buildings where the messages were processed in a bank of computers, he walked among the trees and flowers that made the place a garden.

“Appropriately named,” he told the Australians, then he stopped suddenly to watch two kangaroos feeding in a grassy swale. “They really do hop along on their hind feet,” he said, and his guides had to tug at his arm. “McGuigan’s waiting,” they said, “and some press people want to talk with you later.”

So reluctantly he left the Australian woodland with its enchantments and entered the working area of the communications center, where wires from the great hemispherical dishes pointing to the invisible satellites delivered their messages. McGuigan, a tall, thin, hipless Australian with a barbarous accent, stepped forward eagerly to meet the man with whom he had talked in both Gemini and Apollo.

“Hello, Pope. Glad you made it back.”

“Thanks to your help.” They talked for some minutes most amiably, and then Pope said to one of the managers, “I guess I’ve got to go through with it,” and the manager shrugged.

“Call the staff together, please,” Pope said, and while the local workers assembled he inwardly asked forgiveness for what as a guest he was now required to say.

On almost every important American space shot, the Australian workers had waited till the last crucial moment, then threatened a strike for higher wages. For a spacecraft to try to negotiate the vast corridors of heaven without any contact over half the surface of the Earth was unthinkable, so always NASA had to surrender to the blackmail, but Pope also knew that once the higher wages were agreed to, the Australians provided the best communications in the entire network. On one occasion men left the picket line, and under the most adverse circumstances, walked miles into the arid backlands to repair a communications link to ensure that the American spacecraft passing over the Indian Ocean could maintain its communication with Houston.

[663] When the crew was assembled, Pope said quietly, “All astronauts realize what a profound debt they owe you wonderful communicators in Australia, and especially this superb crew here at Honeysuckle. On two occasions Mr. McGuigan here provided me with assistance beyond the call of duty, and I should like to hand him two medals, placed in my care by the American government. The first is to him personally. The second is to him as representative of your excellent crew.” As he handed over the medals and listened to the cheering, he wanted to add, but didn’t: “That’s till the next time you strike, you lovable sonsabitches.”

After the crowd dispersed, the manager said, “The press is in the other building,” and Pope had a second chance to observe the rugged beauty of this unusual place. He was therefore in an amiable mood when he entered the press room to find five journalists awaiting him, four from Australia, one from Japan. He could see only Cindy Rhee, beautiful like the flowers outside, dressed in somber colors and staring at him with those dark, slanted eyes.

“I have wanted to finish my story,” she said as she took his hand.

“You came all the way here from Tokyo?”

“I wanted to see the last of my astronauts in a real setting. With his own kind. At Honeysuckle.”

“This is Captain John Pope,” one of the managers said. “You’re all aware of his accomplishments.” In answer to the Australian questions, John lied: “We’ve never had anything but the most amiable relations with your stations. They’ve been invaluable links in our chain of communications, and I particularly can testify ...” He saw Cindy smiling sardonically, and then he remembered the night at the Bali Hai motel when Claggett told the gang how the Australians at Honeysuckle had threatened a strike before his first Apollo flight. “I wanted to go down there when the flight was over and cut their balls off,” Claggett had said, and Pope had watched Cindy copying his words in her notebook. Now she was copying his, and smiling.

“I asked especially to come to Honeysuckle,” he continued, “to pay my respects to Mr. McGuigan. I couldn’t always understand his accent, but I sure could appreciate the warmth of his interest.”

When the press conference ended, the managers started [664] to walk Pope back to his embassy car, but Cindy interposed, saying, “I’ve a rented car. I’ll take him back,” and before anyone could protest, she had ordered the American car to return empty to the embassy compound while she led Pope to her Volkswagen.

“I have a room in a village toward Mt. Kosciusko in the Australian alps,” she said, and they drove for more than an hour through parklands that sometimes teemed with kangaroos, large, tawny beasts that played along the roadway. “I’ve written my book,” she said, “but it can’t be completed without your story, John.”

“Mine’s easily told. Three of us went up, one of us came down.”

“But why did you go up? When, on those great flat plains of Fremont, did you first visualize yourself in the heavens?”

“Did you take the trouble to visit Fremont?”

“I visit everywhere. I visited Honeysuckle last week to be sure I would know my way around.”

“But why?”

“John, you and the others, you’re real ... don’t you realize it? You’re immortal. Four hundred years from now they’ll read about you the way we read about Magellan today.”

She said this so simply, and with such conviction, that he could say nothing, nor did she, and after passing through a village he asked, “What did you mean by real?”

“Well,” she said as she looked directly at him, her hands almost off the steering wheel, “There’s Randy Claggett, one of the best men this century will produce, and then there’s Timothy Bell, a pathetic bombast.”

“Are you going to say that? He’s dead, you know.”

“He was always dead, and I shall say so.”

“You’re remorseless.”

“So is the truth.”

She drove to an inviting country inn whose sign announced that it sold Toohey’s ale, and since it was not yet dusk they sat in the garden with their tea. Slowly, at first, he began to talk; then words rolled out unimpeded, as if he had hoarded a universe of impressions which he must now share. He spoke of things close to the heart of space, things he had never before been able to verbalize, not even [665] in those long debriefings conducted by the super brains of NASA.

“They kept asking how I felt, alone in the command module flying home, and I kept feeding them the answers I knew they wanted, expressed in words I knew they would accept. Responsibility. The job I was assigned to do. Training in the simulators quite adequate. Plus a lot of real guff about loneliness. But would you like to hear the truth?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“The module was a very small place. Like from here to here. When I was alone, how did I feel? I felt roomy. Free to spread out. At last I had all the space I needed, and to confess the truth, I was rather relieved.” He laughed at himself for having revealed his anti-heroism, but then he stopped. “The others? Even in the roominess their ghosts crowded in upon me.”

They talked till dinner was called, and all through the meal, and afterward in the parlor decorated with brightly colored English hunting prints, a great outflowing of evaluation, and when the time came to go to bed, there was a brief moment of embarrassment, as if Cindy expected him to suggest that they sleep together, or as if he expected her to. It passed when he banged on the desk bell and asked the manager, “Can you show me to my room?” Cindy followed them upstairs and accompanied him to his door, where she said, “Goodnight, John. Let’s continue at breakfast.”

They spent the entire next day lounging about the inn or walking its flower-strewn grounds, but always talking about space, and when they passed members of the hotel staff he could hear them whisper, “That’s John Pope, the one who brought the spaceship home. He’s rooming with the Japanese newspaper girl.”

By the end of that day it seemed as if everyone in Australia knew what he was up to, plus many of the people in Washington. Senator Grant, receiving a flow of confidential messages from NASA, did his best to keep their content hidden from the committee counsel, but before long one of the secretaries felt that Mrs. Pope should really know how her errant husband was behaving: “He’s shacked up with that Korean babe.” With a forced smile Penny said, “Occupational hazard,” and no more.

[666] When cables began pouring into the embassy in Canberra, demanding that Pope be found and escorted personally to his major speech in Sydney, the embassy tracked down where he was hiding and telephoned to reprimand him, but he would accept no calls, so the woman running the inn brought him the messages in person: “I’m afraid the fat’s in the fire, Captain Pope.”

“It’s been there before,” he told her, and to Cindy he said, “We seem to have whipped up a storm.”

As if they both realized that this probing interview could never be repeated, the mood and the willingness having been lost, they spent that last day at the core of the space experience, and Pope found himself saying strange things which he would never have divulged to another:

“Claggett from the South and me from an area where there were no blacks, yet we had the standard prejudices. ‘Niggers smell funny,’ Claggett insisted, ‘and bein’ cooped up in that tight module ain’t gonna be fun.’ So I pointed out that this would be my problem, since it was my seat which jammed against Linley’s.

“Well, Paul was about the most fastidious man I ever knew. Cleaner than an elk’s horn in autumn. Me? After a couple of days without proper washing I began to smell like fermenting turnips. Just before we reached the Moon, I asked Paul, ‘Do I stink?’ and he said, ‘You sure do.’ And all three of us busted out in laughter because we all knew that he was the one who was supposed to smell bad.”

Cindy took notes constantly, then bored in with her harsh questioning: “Pope-san, do you think of yourself as mature?”

He bit his lower lip. “I guess I’ve always been a plebe at Annapolis.”

“The others were simply oriented, too. Claggett, Jensen. From the day of their births they were intended-”

“I use that word a lot. Intended. I intended to do certain things, in certain ways. I believed that manhood consisted of stating your intentions and fulfilling them.”

“Did you ever fail?”

[667] “No,” he said, and then he shivered. “I’m not sure how to answer that truthfully. As a boy I dreamed of going to Annapolis. Our senator, Ulysses S. Gantling-get the son-of-a-bitch’s full name-promised me an appointment, but at the last minute he reneged. I was left with nothing.”

“What did you do?”

“For two days I cried. Thought my heart would break. Then I began to curse him, which I never did before, and I’ve never cried or cursed since that second day. You know the rest.”

“You enlisted in the Navy for spite. Practically tore it apart till you got sent to Annapolis ... second in your class. You got everything you wanted, didn’t you?”

“Nothing I didn’t work for.”

“Was Penny the first girl you ever kissed?”

“The only one, really. I’ve been remarkably happy with Penny. When you look at the six of us, only Hickory Lee has a marriage as good as mine.”

“How about Harry Jensen? Inger is a dear.”

“Compared to Penny, Inger is a piece of fluff.”

“Will you ever go into space again?”

He left his chair and stalked about the room, wondering whether he ought to speak to this strange woman about a subject so personal that he had not even discussed it with Penny. “Have your spies told you that NASA is fed up with me?”

“I’ve heard rumors you’re in the doghouse. Ed Cater dropped a hint in his last letter.”

“Does he write to you?”

“Of course. We were very dear friends. Always will be.”

“What gossip was he selling?”

“He said, if I remember correctly, ‘Straight Arrow Pope surprised us all by disobeying the brass twice. When Claggett died he refused to leave the scene. And when Claggett was buried he insisted upon taking you to the funeral.’ He said he supposed your days were numbered.”

“You know more about this than I do,” he said with some petulance.

“That’s my business,” she said.

He was tempted to show his irritation, but instead he broke into a smile. “When Claggett flew with me in Korea, I could never understand how he could love Debby Dee working in Japan and at the same time his little Jo-san [668] at our air base in Pusan. I didn’t know you then.”

She shrugged her shoulders, her warm amber-gold smile irradiating the parlor. “You’re worth knowing, Pope-san. Another time, another age …” She looked down at her note tablet and made a promise: “You and Penny have something very precious, and I shall try to depict you both as you actually are. And if I can achieve that-”

They were interrupted by the sound of some man bustling into the reception hall and loudly demanding to know where this damned John Pope was shacked up with his Korean popsie.

It was Tucker Thompson, rushed out by NASA, the State Department and Folks to protect their shared in vestment in Astronaut Pope. He looked awful. “They shoved me aboard an Air Force jet at Dulles. Flew to Los Angeles Fifteen minutes to board Pan American, then non-stop across the Pacific to Auckland. Australian airline to Sydney. Same one to Canberra, and excuse me if I fall flat on my face.”

“You exhausted hero,” Cindy said. “Have a drink.”

“And what do I find? America’s favorite Boy Scout shacked up in a cheap-”

“Let’s start with one understanding, Tucker. We have not been shacked up. We’ve been talking.”

Tucker looked with amazed delight at the two, then broke into a wide grin. “You stay with that explanation, Pope, and I hope to God you can peddle it. But if Time gets hold of the truth, we’re dead ducks. And I mean all of us.”

Pope swung him around. “I told you. We came here to talk.”

Thompson brushed Pope’s hand away and fell into a chair. “In 1960 I sold the hard-shell Baptists in Texas on the line that John F. Kennedy was a sweet, simple-hearted Irish spalpeen who sang ‘Mother Machree’ and would take no orders from the Pope. Maybe I can sell this. That a red-blooded American hero and his almond-eyed Dragon Lady ...”

Pope came extremely close to belting Thompson in the mouth; instead he reached out and embraced him. “Tucker, an hour with you is better than a year in the sewers of Middle America. I love you.”

[669] “Stick to your story, son. It’ll draw more comment than the truth.”

“It all matters so very little,” Cindy said. “You took six American boys and the girls they married when they were young, and you wove a fairy story-” Her voice broke and suddenly all her bravado vanished. She started to cry, and when she found Pope’s hand she held it close to her lips. “You were all so very small,” she whispered. “You never told the world that, Tucker. That they were such ordinary little men. Not big and heroic at all, not with wide shoulders and heavy jaws. God, they were heroic in their age, and whenever the Moon rises red in October they will be remembered.”

Several fine books would be written about the astronauts-Mailer, Collins, Wolfe, to name the best-but if you want to know how it really was inside the men inside the capsule, the book to read is the one by the Oriental newspaperwoman Rhee Soon-Ka. She was a Korean, but to irritate her Japanese enemies she adopted an American name, Cynthia, and to irritate the American establishment, which she despised, she titled her account The Golden Midgets.

Any average wife who might have heard of Mrs. Pope’s reaction to her husband’s Australian escapade with the Korean newspaperwoman would have been dismayed that a self-respecting woman would allow herself to be so abused, and so publicly. It would be three more weeks before Captain Pope returned to the States, for he was obligated to tour New Zealand and then fly to South America via Fiji, Tahiti and Easter Island, and during this waiting period Penny Pope conducted her normal work with the Space Committee, often dealing with matters which affected her absent husband.

She never alluded to his misbehavior, and when Senator Grant tried to comfort her, she rebuffed him: “Captain Pope knows what he’s doing. We’ve always trusted each other.” But if she would allow no one to mention the matter, she herself speculated constantly on how she must behave when John returned, and she found herself limited by restraints which other wives might ignore.

For she was not an average wife. She was a Navy wife, [670] and that made a huge difference; from the first day of their courtship she had been prepared to stay at home for long periods while her husband served on some distant ocean; she was prepared to supervise the moving from place to place while he was in Japan or Germany; and she had always known that if she and John had children, it would be her responsibility alone to care for them during his long absences.

Those, of course, were the housekeeping details, and like many Navy wives, she never complained; Navy wives since the days of Darius and Xerxes had anticipated such absences, but there was also an emotional component of this problem, and this was a subject about which the wives rarely spoke among themselves.

Their husbands tended to be absent during the very years when their sexual drives were strongest; when they finally became stay-at-home admirals, they were in their fifties, when absences would have been easier to handle. So the Navy wife always knew that her lusty man was stuck in some foreign port at a time when his desires, and hers, were greatest, and she preferred not to be told what happened at such times. Indeed, she blanked out this portion of her married experience and was usually none the worse for it.

Penny had tried to be an ideal Navy wife, and although her work in Washington had prevented her from living with John at his various duty stations, she had visited him whenever practical and had known with favor the wives of many of his associates. Once when she was visiting with the Claggetts at Solomons Island, Debby Dee had observed: “It’s really as if John was the civilian married to Penny, who’s in her own Navy.” And that was often the way it was: he would have some free time but she would be occupied with her Washington duties, and she never pried into how he spent his freedom.

She knew from her Patuxent River days that Navy families were usually too busy to permit much hankypanky when the husbands were ashore, and she was constantly surprised at how capably the wives adjusted to all difficulties; there were very few Navy divorces, and when one did occur, the separating partners quite often found some other Navy type to marry, as if they knew that it was they and not the system that was at fault.

[671] The one constant peril faced by the military wife was not infidelity, it was alcoholism, for the officers’ club was always open, booze was cheap, loneliness was a constant spur to heavy drinking, and there were always older women on the bottle who sought the companionship of younger wives. Penny had watched a dozen older women become flaming alcoholics, and she had heard rumors of several celebrated cases in which the wives of top generals and admirals were habitually attended by junior officers whose job it was to see that the dipsomaniac did not create a scandal or fall headfirst down a flight of stairs. Since Penny drank only an occasional beer, this major pitfall presented no danger.

Most of all, her attitude toward marriage, and particularly Navy marriage, had been determined by her husband’s character. As a plebe at Annapolis he had been a straight arrow, always near the top of his class, always dating only her. At Pax River he had occupied bachelor quarters to save money, which he turned over to her. In Korea, according to Claggett, John had avoided the airfields where the pretty little Jo-sans waited table and slept in the officers’ quarters. He had never gone ratting about the countryside with Hickory Lee, and when this Korean woman invaded the Bali Hai with the avowed intention, some said, of sleeping with the entire contingent, she had been assured by the other wives that her husband would have nothing to do with her. Now both Debby Dee Claggett and Gloria Cater, eager to believe that the idol had crumbled, sent letters using the same rowdy phrase: “Join the club!”

A subtle change took place in Penny’s attitude. She still trusted John, but she also had to consider her self-esteem. She was three years shy of fifty, the occupant of a position of some importance and looked up to by the women graduates of good colleges who aspired to better jobs than typing. She represented something, and it was galling to think that she had been so poorly used, and in public. Her resentment caused her to look unsentimentally at the ramifications of her life, and what she saw evoked even deeper indignation.

When she attended public Senate hearings she noticed how many of the heavy-drinking old men found it impossible to follow arguments, frequently falling asleep in the [672] midst of testimony. She marked the ones who grubbed servilely for every passing penny, yearning to sell their votes to any likely bidder, not even waiting to arrange the most profitable deal. When she compared these bumbling fellows with the best women appointees to federal positions, she was startled by the difference, and when she started to study the House members she knew, she was even more distressed, for here she saw public servants accepting money from Korean lobbyists, pursuing wildly deviant sex behaviors, and voting like idiots, while able women languished as mere assistants.

Her standards of comparison were high, for she had worked closely with three first-class politicians: Lyndon Johnson, who could contrive anything if it gave Texas and his private bank account a slight edge; Mike Glancey, who was perhaps the best man she had ever known, but whose vote was always negotiable on the principle of “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”; and good, faithful Norman Grant, a man of impeccable integrity who did the same swapping of votes, but on a slightly higher level. These were good men and they served their nation admirably, but it was quite clear to her now that America produced an equal number of good women who were held contemptuously down.

She had for some years been listening carefully to the arguments of certain liberated women who had been addressing these problems, but she had never been attracted to their cause. Germaine Greer, the Australian, she found too harsh, Bella Abzug too abrasive, and Betty Friedan far too lacking in feminine qualities; and sometimes she suspected their logic, for without fanfare she had acquired one of the good jobs in Washington and she supposed that other women could do the same. But when Gloria Steinem and a woman with the fascinating name of Letty Pogrebin began analyzing situations exactly like her own, she began to listen more attentively, and she saw that women were discriminated against in scores of situations, that they were compressed by society into certain cliché molds, and that the consequences were nearly as damaging to the men as to the women they subjugated.

She became painfully aware of these matters when Tucker Thompson returned breathlessly from Australia to coach her in how the good people at Folks expected her [673] to play the role of the insulted wife. “Mrs. Pope, in Australia we had a near-miss. I flew all the way to Canberra. Christ, that’s a big country, and I suppose you know what I found. Scandal about to erupt all over the place. NASA is fed up with your husband, and Time and Newsweek are sitting on the story, just hoping for a break that’ll allow them to level a real blast.”

“What’s holding them back?”

“Your husband is a national hero. How would they play it? For laughs? I don’t think they’d dare. As a hard sex story? I doubt it. Now, if we get in first with a style-setter, we can pull their fangs.”

“What does your magazine recommend?”

“That we take the bit in our teeth, run the flag up the pole, and show a spread of you welcoming your husband home after his triumphal tour.”

“Would I be kissing him, did your, editors think?”

“Yes. The important thing is to set the pattern. It would be dreadful if this affair got out of hand.”

“Isn’t it already out of hand?”

“Not unless you make it so,” Thompson said firmly. “This is a national problem, Penny. NASA’s reputation at a time of budget review. The whole shmeer.”

“It would be quite easy for me to kiss my husband,” Penny said, “because I love him.”

“God, if we could only work a quote like that into the story. But it would raise more questions than it answered.” Then, for the first time, he began to suspect that this dangerous woman whom he had never liked was toying with him. “You do intend to cooperate, don’t you?” he asked hesitantly.

“It would be undignified to behave otherwise,” she said.

“You mean that?”

“Of course I do.”

“Could I have more coffee?” He was perspiring, and after a deep swig of java he said expansively, “It’s downright remarkable, Penny. The NASA selection committee picked six families, out of a hat as it were, and they got six all-time winners. How many other American girls would have behaved better than you six? Death, disappointment, threats of divorce, now scandal, you kids were champions.”

“We intended to be,” Penny said, borrowing her husband’s favorite phrase.

[674] “It’s been an honor to be associated with a girl like you.”

“I’m forty-seven.”

“We never mention that in the articles. To our readers you’re all still girls, well dressed, well behaved. I’m terribly proud to have known you girls, Penny.”

“You keep speaking as if it were all past.”

“It is. Space is a dead duck. If I were an evil man, I’d play this Pope versus Pope thing for high scandal-the end of the epoch, the fond farewell to a group of symbols. I could write that story now, no strain. And it would be one hell of an exit.” He shook his head as if regretting that he was no longer working for a Hearst newspaper with its huge headlines. Then he said, “But I love you kids as if you were my own family. This is my swan song, too, you know. Yep, retired against my will next month. And I refuse to sully something I’ve loved. Penny, let’s go out in style.”

“What is the proper style?” she asked.

“The American wife, loyal, trusting, forgiving. We don’t want to show you in your office this time. We’ve done that and it always seemed harsh. What I have in mind is a small house somewhere-”

“What I have in mind, Tucker, is my office, with an American flag in the corner, as always, and the big photograph of Johnson, Glancey and Grant, the architects of our space program.”

“But-”

“I am just as much a part of NASA as my husband, and in some ways, I think, even more important, because I helped keep the whole damned thing running.”

Thompson saw instantly that he was venturing into waters far too deep for him to negotiate. This office bitch was going to behave just as he feared she might: Give me a hundred Alabama cheerleaders any day, twisting their pretty asses in the sunlight, to one girl who got straight A’s in college. The cheerleaders know how to act in any situation, and the damned college girls never learn.

“I’m afraid what I had in mind won’t work, Mrs. Pope.”

“I’m sure it won’t.”

“You better pray that Time and Newsweek don’t start running with this story.”

“They have my office number.”

He was about to leave, but he could not allow one of [675] his Solid Six to dash headlong into danger. “Please, Mrs. Pope, we’ve had a tremendous run with this story. Gemini ... Apollo ... your husband’s heroics ... Claggett. Jesus Christ, don’t throw mud on Claggett.”

Lowering her head, she said in a whisper, “You wrote in one of your stories about how Randy and John had flown together in Korea, then tested planes at Pax River, then shared a Gemini phone booth for sixteen days. And of how John had to leave him dead on the Moon. It was very strong writing, really.” She looked up at him. “Do you think I’d do anything to sully those relationships?”

“I don’t think you would.”

“Of course I’ll cooperate. Bring your photographers. But it will have to be in my office.” When he groaned, she said, “You’re a master with words, Tucker. Spin one of your fables. The modern wife who does two things superbly-runs her office, loves her man.”

“I don’t think it’ll play in Peoria.”

He decided not to try the John-Pope-and-his-loving-wife-Penny story, for he saw that it contained far too many time bombs, but as he was about to leave, distressed by his failure to manipulate Mrs. Pope, she suddenly caught his arm and forced him back into a chair.

“You’ve done me a great favor, Tucker. Up to one minute ago I never gave Betty Friedan much time. I simply did not like her style, but everything you said fortified the basic thesis in her Feminine Mystique. Writers like you, and your magazine, are major forces in creating the myth of what an American woman should be. The little house, not the office. A white jumper, not a business dress. The forgiving wife, not the woman who feels herself humiliated.”

“Penny,” he broke in, “it’s no longer something I worry about with Folks. To hell with Folks, they’ve said to hell with me. But I beg you, don’t divorce-”

“Who said anything about divorce?”

“You said you were humiliated by John’s behavior in-”

“Of course I am. I’m humiliated by what he’s done to me. But I’m just as humiliated by what you and your magazine would like to do. The fake posing. The fake quotations. Tucker, you’re on your way out. John’s on his way out of NASA. I may be on my way out of my job as counsel to the committee. Let’s all go out with a bang. [676] Here’s the one quote from me you’re authorized to use in your wrap-up: ‘Mrs. John Pope said, when apprised of her husband’s juvenile performance in Australia, “I’d like to kick his ass from Canberra to Tahiti, then hand him a NASA medal for acting like a perfect Boy Scout.’ ” And I want you to run it with the photograph of me kissing him beneath the American flag in my office with this caption: ‘All is forgiven. He’s the only Boy Scout I have.’ ”

“I wonder if we could get away with it?” Thompson mused. “I wonder if there’s some way I could imply that you said “kick his ass from Canberra to Tahiti” without actually saying it?”

“Use it as I said it,” Penny snapped, “because that’s the way I’m going to say everything from here on out.”

Disgusted with this modern woman, he started to stamp out of her office, but one more danger signal flashed. “Maybe you haven’t heard, but your husband has cooked up a story that all he and the Korean Typhoon did for three days was talk. Please, if that’s going to be his version of three days in the sack, let him get away with it. Don’t laugh at him in public.”

“Did he say that?” she cried, and when Thompson nodded she gave him a huge kiss. “Tucker, you are adorable, corrupt, stupid, even a little evil ... but downright adorable.”

When her husband landed at National Airport with two suitcases of medals and mementos, Penny was there to greet him. On the tarmac he said, “I’m sorry, Pen, if I caused you embarrassment. But I had to talk. It was important that I get it on the record with someone who understood.”

“Why couldn’t you have talked with me?” she asked, tears of joy filling her eyes.

“You were always so busy.” He corrected that: “I was always so occupied with things that didn’t really matter.” Arm in arm they walked toward the waiting cameras.

Like an ultra-sensitive barometer that monitors the atmosphere, predicting when the hurricanes will strike, Leopold Strabismus followed every nuance of the national mood, and long before Senator Grant realized that the space age had stumbled to a conclusion, he had detected the change, and with the termination of the Apollo program, he realized that he must alter his strategies or suffer [677] loss. Accordingly, one morning in the summer of 1976 he woke, pulled down the bedcovers, pulled up the nightgown of his sleeping partner, slapped her roundly on the bottom, and said, “Out of bed, Marcia! We’re getting married!”

She was thirty-seven that year, still slim and beautiful with her pouting look and her feline skills, and she had about given up on the possibility that Strabismus would ever marry her. Still, she had a good life. They continued to make substantial profit from the menace of little green men and a small, steady income from the sale of diplomas, so that she had her own Mercedes and a secretary to look after her affairs. Ramirez still ran the general office with imagination and things were prospering, which made this sudden proposal of marriage a shock.

“What’s eating you?” she asked.

“The handwriting is on the wall, my lovely.”

“Investigation? Police?”

“No, the turn of the wheel. The awakening of the public.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve had a kind of vision, Marcia. The kind I had at Yale when I saw as if in revelation that California was the promised land.”

“I don’t want to leave California.” She shuddered. “Could you imagine us living in Fremont or Nebraska?”

“We get married today. And we make California twice the home it ever was before.” When he jumped out of bed and grabbed the trousers of a business suit reserved for trips to wealthy donors back East, Marcia saw that his eyes were aflame with enthusiasm.

“What is it, Leopold?”

“Goddammit, get your clothes on. This is for real.” And when they were dressed, he led her outside to a roadway from which she could see all of the fine building that housed their university, and she could feel him almost trembling as he divulged his plans: “We have enough money right now to build the two wings I used to speak about. One here. One there. Not little wings, big ones.”

“To what purpose, please tell?”

“Religion.”

She said nothing, but in the protracted silence she could imagine what her brilliant companion could do with this volatile subject. She imagined him behind a pulpit-big face, beard, huge imposing body draped in a robe of some [678] kind, thundering voice-and she knew instinctively that he would excel. She could visualize the university building expanded into a cathedral, with hundreds of cars parked in front, and devoted followers, and the money rolling in even more generously than before. It was quite clear, given the nature of her man and the nature of California, but it had to be done correctly, because the competition was terrific. Running a bogus university was easy, because not many manipulators sought to operate in that specialized field, but the religious arena was brutal, and unless one could invent some special allure, success was not assured.

“What religion?” she asked.

“I’ve been thinking about that for the last two months. I’d like to keep USA. It’s a good set of initials. How about Universal Spiritual Association?”

“Every word is wrong. The U must be United. Start from there.”

“You may be right. What’s wrong with Spiritual?”

“Sounds too much like spiritualism. Too restricted.” “You may be right again. How about Salvation? I plan to hit very hard on salvation.”

“I like that. I like it, Leopold. Hold on to that.”

After discussing for some time the appropriate word for A they could agree on nothing, so they drove to one of the storefront churches where the seedy minister was willing to forgo the legal waiting period and predate the marriage certificate to 1973, which he said a clerk at the courthouse would register as of that year for an extra ten dollars. They then returned home and telephoned the Red River Bible University: “Reverend Hosea Kellog? This is Dr. Leopold Strabismus, president of the University of Space and Aviation in Los Angeles. I’ve heard of your good work. Reverend Kellog, and my university would like to award you with a Doctor of Laws if you would give me a Doctor of Divinity. This is extremely important to me, and I’d appreciate it if the date could read 1973.”

It was arranged, and Strabismus asked Ramirez to prepare an especially ornate diploma for Dr. Kellog, and with the same plate but different lettering, to print up one for Strabismus from the University of Western Dakota in the fields of Hebrew, Greek and Latin. With these and other impressive documents framed on the wall behind his head, [679] he was qualified to decide what branch of theology his new church would sponsor, but before he printed up any materials, he had long discussions with his wife.

“We had to get married,” he said, “because I plan to stress morality. This country is hungry for a revival of the old-time spirit, Marcia.”

“Hadn’t you better send those two girls from Texas packing?”

“That’s a possibility, but the important thing was to have you up front for people to see. I plan to use you extensively. Senator Grant’s daughter. Play up his heroism in World War II.”

“And what else?”

“A rejection of scientific atheism-Darwin’s evolution from apes, geology. All that rot.”

“But we’ve done very well with science. The pamphlets ...”

“That’s all finished. We’ll keep the university, that’s a gold mine. But we’ll let someone else handle the little men, because flying saucers have run their course. Believe me, Marcia, the new field is old-time religion.”

He told her that he had been much impressed by a Southern television preacher who had mounted a campaign against what he called “atheistic humanism,” and although neither Strabismus nor the minister seemed to have a very clear concept of what this was, it made a splendid target, and when Leopold reached home he took four or five books from the Los Angeles Public Library and within a week made himself an expert on atheistic humanism.

“It’s the mind-set of smart-ass librarians who corrupt our young people with their immoral books. It’s the beliefs of college professors who seek to destroy this nation. It’s what makes the editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post soft on Communism. It’s what’s wrong with this fine country, and people who subscribe to it have got to be rooted out of our national life. A lot of generals in our Army are secret humanists, and they’ve got to be identified before they destroy our armed forces.”

In the days when the two wings of his temple were being erected he began to speak like an illiterate Southern farmhand, using phrases like: “Nukelar warfare,” “Old [680] Tessamint religion,” “Socialist subsidation of infamy,” “Dimunition of our power to defend ourself,” and “Irrevelant big-city argaments.”

At New Haven he had twice written Ph.D. theses for laggard scholars in English literature; now he habitually used “Jesus wants you and I ...” and “We wuz lost in the wilderness of sin.” But what made his oratory especially effective was his new pronunciation of old words; for example, it was always “God’s luuuv” in three long-drawn syllables. It was hisse’f; and shouldn’t auter, and evoluushun.

He adopted this usage because he knew that people who craved an old-time doctrine were intuitively suspicious o• university types and big-city editors and hotshot television announcers; they yearned for the simplicities of rural life and believed that only a man who was close to the untutored farmlands of their remembered youth could be trusted. They thus became not only a part of the national swing away from learning; they became with their cash contributions a leading factor in the movement. The nation, as if surfeited with the marvels of space and medicine and science and sophisticated social analysis, seemed hungry for anti-intellectual preachment, and Leopold Strabismus was eager to provide it.

He saw immediately that to be effective he must have access to television, but he knew he should move cautiously. “Marcia, I want you and Ramirez to scout every corner of this area and find a radio station that we can buy cheap. I don’t care where it is or what its power. Buy us a station.”

They found a fifty-watter, a dawn-to-dusk affair in the hills back of Los Angeles, and because the Reverend Dr. Strabismus spoke from it with great passion during all daylight hours, using the same taped sermons over and over, with no apologies, it became a sensation: “Why do I have to stop deliverin’ God’s message at sunset? Why am I forbidden to bring you the word of the Lord when the sun goes down? Because the atheistic humanists who run our State Department have entered into a corrupt deal with Mexico ...” He heaped special scorn on Yale University and Stanford as centers of the humanism that was destroying our nation.

[681] With sizable funds collected from his radio ministry, he was able to acquire a real twenty-four-hour radio station, which he threw open to the electronic ministers across the nation, and through the cooperation of these gifted orators he at last found an opening on television, where his bulk, his beard and his fiery oratory gained immediate approval. His income, after only twenty months of his ministry, was $300,000 a year.

Marcia, who was one of the factors in his success-for he sat beside the pulpit whenever he preached, giving testimony when called upon-identified the one weakness which might destroy his effectiveness: “Leopold, one of these days the newspapers have got to discover that your real name is Martin Scorcella and that you’re Jewish. That could create quite a scandal.”

“Half-Jewish,” he corrected. “And I’ll handle it the way Fiorella La Guardia handled his problem, which was just like mine, Italian father, Jewish mother. He said nothing about it during six elections. Let all the voters think he was Catholic. When he was finally challenged and some smart-ass newspaperman asked, “Why did you hide the fact that you were half-Jewish?” he said, “Half-Jewish ain’t enough to brag about.” When they find out about me six or eight years from now, I’ll be so firmly established they can’t touch me.”

“People who take religion seriously, they could be very disturbed. The way the Jews crucified Jesus and all that.”

“I’ve thought about it, Marcia, and I think I have the perfect answer. I’ll say, ‘Yes indeed, I was born a Jew, like St. Peter and St. James and Jesus Christ Hisse’f. But like them, I seen the true way, hallelujah, and became a Christian, and I will not rest until every Jew on this earth acknowledges his error and, like me and St. Paul, converts to Christianity.’ And you can bet that’ll hold ‘em.”

He first attracted statewide attention because of his television program Chimp-Champ-Chump, in which he savagely attacked the theory of evolution. He was especially effective because in his New Haven days he had produced three graduate theses on the Darwinian theory which had required him to master the details of this controversial subject. He was, indeed, better informed on the theory than most of the professors who defended it, and [682] when he poured his scorn on Darwin and his atheistic humanism, he was more amusing than the average vaudeville show.

He asked Marcia and Ramirez to scout the animal trainers in Hollywood for a likable monkey, and they came up with a chimpanzee named Oliver, whom they dressed in short satin pants and big white shoes. He appeared with Reverend Strabismus seated at a desk under the handsomely lettered sign CHIMP-CHAMP-CHUMP, and he took a liking to Leopold’s beard, which he pulled frequently. He had the attractive gift of listening attentively and smiling when Strabismus talked to him, and of nodding aggressively whenever the Reverend made a telling point. He was a delightful animal, and viewers up and down the state applauded whenever he appeared.

“I love this little animule,” Strabismus bellowed. “Look at him, he’s as cute as a button. It’s a privilege to call him my friend, but I do not want to call him my grandfather. There ain’t a shred of evydence in ever’thin’ that Charles Darwin ever wrote that proves to me or to any sensible man or woman that this here monkey was my ancestor, and there is ever’ evydence in the Bible that he was created as an animule and me as a human bein’ with God-given intelligence and immortality.”

Chimp-Champ-Chump became such a popular show that it led the movement in California to ban the teaching of evolution outright, or at least to require the parallel teaching of Biblical genesis. Wise science teachers, sensing the shift in public opinion, accorded more time and emphasis to creationism, as they called it, than to the much-ridiculed theory of evolution, and a generation of California students was beginning to believe that Darwinism was a fraud perpetrated by atheistic humanists, because Reverend Strabismus and the other preachers who shared his television show said so.

Strabismus muscled his way onto the national scene by his imaginative campaign to force rangers in national parks to stop saying in their lectures that places like the Grand Canyon had evolved through billions of years, when it was known from the Book of Genesis that they had been created within the passage of one week. Whenever listeners reported that federal employees were supporting evolution during their public talks in national parks like [683] Yellowstone and Glacier, he moved in furiously to combat their heresies.

But now the nation’s leading scientists began to take his attacks seriously, and there was a countereffort. Men at Harvard, Chicago and UCLA felt obligated to inform the people that America was going to make an ass of itself in the eyes of the world if it engaged in a know-nothing persecution of science, and they had begun to make some headway when Strabismus and a score of his associates launched a frontal assault, charging the professors with being atheistic humanists and Communists.

The confrontation became ugly when Reverend Strabismus, in a widely repeated harangue, invited his listeners to join him in a great crusade: “It ain’t my doin’. It’s the work of devoted Christians back East. They call theirselves the Righteous Rulers, and under their inspired leadership we are gonna drive the money changers outa the Temple. We are gonna defeat ever’ United States senator who supports the atheistic humanists. We are gonna drive from ever’ campus in this nation perfessers who teach Communistic evolution. We are gonna cleanse our library elves of ever’ book that contains filth and un-American teachings. And we are not gonna halt until we bring this nation back to God.”

When the response exceeded his hopes-hundreds of thousands of dollars streaming in through the mail-he told Marcia, “I think we got somethin’ important started, somethin’ much bigger than you and me foresaw.” He was now talking rural illiterate, even in his private life.

Senator Grant suffered no ambivalence about his role in space. He had bombarded NASA with the credentials of Gawain Butler’s nephew and had watched with pride as that young man became the nation’s first black astronaut. He had delighted in the early behavior of Captain John Pope, a lad from his hometown who had become rather difficult after his historic solo flight. Nevertheless, he had gone personally to President Nixon, urging that Pope be sent around the world as an ambassador of good will and … “to remind the Russians who’s still ahead.”

But as for any future NASA spectaculars, or for providing federal funds for such escapades, he was rigorously opposed: “We had three men who fought this battle when [684] the honor of our nation was exposed, Lyndon Johnson, Michael Glancey and me. The first two did their work honorably, and are now dead. I feel myself to be their surrogate, and I am satisfied that if they were still living, they would vote with me against any enlargement of the NASA commitment.”

He never ranted against NASA, nor did he attempt to lead any kind of open crusade; he merely voted consistently in favor of cutting the budget for space, telling anyone who asked about his activity, “We’ve proved that we can do anything we put our minds to, and now we must address more serious problems.”

Much of his attitude stemmed from the fact that he was up for reelection in 1976, and like a cautious politician, he endeavored to sense the national mood, which had shifted markedly and now opposed any further adventures in space. As one farmer said during a campaign meeting in Calhoun, “There’s damned little plowing to be done on the Moon and a great deal down here.” Blacks objected to further expenditures; young people who had opposed the war in Vietnam now turned their animosity toward science in general, so that when Grant surveyed his electorate he found almost no constituency for space.

“It’s a dead issue,” he told Finnerty. “Let’s take credit for everything we’ve done so far but avoid questions about the future.” He asked Finnerty to schedule John Pope, as a local hero, for meetings across the state, knowing that the astronaut would not be able to speak out publicly in his behalf, but would consent to being photographed with him.

What worried Grant in this campaign was not space, but the deplorable spiritual condition of the American people: “Here it is, the two hundredth anniversary of our republic and we find ourselves powerless even to mount a national birthday celebration.” The grand designs which had been discussed since 1969 for a world fair, immense parades, exhibitions and innovative enterprises in theater, sports, publishing and television had all collapsed; a great nation, one of the gleaming hopes of mankind, was celebrating its triumphs in virtual silence, as if it were ashamed of itself.

“The reason,” Grant mourned, “is that 1976 happens to be an election year, and we Republicans started out trying [685] to make capital of the celebration, as a kind of jubilee honoring Richard Nixon’s eight years in the White House and paving the way for Spiro Agnew’s eight years to come. Well, that part of the plan collapsed with Watergate, so we decided to make the Bicentennial a celebration of the new Republican leadership. Totally the wrong thing to do.

“And the Democrats were just as venal. Publicly they gave lip service to a grand national holiday, but since we would manage it, they wouldn’t vote a dime. So because of election politics, we’re celebrating one of the noblest days of our history in craven silence. How contemptible.”

He was also deterred from taking any major stance that might attract too much attention by his wife Elinor’s sad deterioration, and only the kindness of the local press prevented her behavior from becoming an election scandal. She had given her entire personal inheritance to Dr. Strabismus to support the good work he was doing in California, and if the senator’s staff had not stopped payment on certain checks and recovered others she had forged, the Grant name would have been badly sullied.

Elinor, far better informed on the perils facing the nation than her husband, had complained to reporters that Norman was starving her and keeping her imprisoned: “It’s very much like Bluebeard. Here I am a captive in a castle.”

“But we were free to come here to see you,” a woman reporter said.

“Yes, but you can’t imagine what would happen if I tried to leave when you do.”

“Let’s try. Let’s the five of us go downtown for lunch.”

“I wouldn’t dare. There are spies everywhere.”

“You mean, the senator employs spies ...”

“Not only the senator,” she said darkly.

When the editors read such reports they decided that Norman Grant was stuck with a whacko, and out of respect for his heroism in the war and the good work he had done subsequently, they decided to suppress the story, but they continued to express interest in the deportment of the senator’s daughter out in California. In news reports written with extreme delicacy and utilizing all kinds of ingenious innuendo, they referred to her association with the notorious fraud Leopold Strabismus and his diploma mill:

[686] Marcia Grant, daughter of Senator Norman Grant (Republican-Fremont), longtime personal friend of Strabismus and now his wife, serves as his dean of faculty with the degree of Ph.D. conferred upon her by her own institution. What her role is other than the collection of fees is difficult to ascertain, since the university appears to have no faculty. Repeated demands to meet with at least one professor have been rejected by Dean Grant on the grounds that her staff was far too busy correcting examination papers, written presumably by students who also do not exist.

Careful investigations in Sacramento have revealed that the state of California accredits several degree mills like the Strabismus USA on the grounds that “They do very little real harm and everyone knows their degrees are spurious.” When we asked why the state condoned such open fraud, we were told, “If we attempted to discipline the fake universities, then we’d be expected to do the same with the bogus churches, and defenders of the First Amendment would climb all over us. In this state you can have any religion you like, any university, and this office can do nothing about it.”

It was curious, really, that in the heat of a senatorial campaign the Democrats made so few attacks on Norman Grant’s private life, but as Tim Finnerty told his staff one night, “In the American system everyone knows that men are incapable of disciplining their wives, their daughters or their sons. If you start to raise hell with Grant, where do you stop?”

The senator was grateful for this courtesy, but the deportment of his women caused him deep concern, for he believed that if he had been a better husband and father, Elinor and Marcia would have developed more normally, and never was this feeling more intense than when Penny Pope flew west to help in his campaign, for then he saw a local girl, much like his daughter, who with far fewer advantages had become a leading Washington figure. At forty-nine she was tough-minded in committee meetings, self-directed in her personal life, and a most attractive [687] wife to a national hero. Grant had seen the reports submitted by State Department people who had chaperoned John and Penny Pope on their triumphal tours to foreign countries:

John Pope is a winner wherever he goes, modest, self-effacing, a most likable hero. He meets kings and presidents with an attractive reserve and addresses public gatherings with skill and good sense. A winner all the way. But wherever we go, Penny Pope steals the show. She dresses immaculately, tends her appearance and is refreshingly frank in whatever she says. In diplomacy, she’s worth ten battleships.

Penny was never loath to heckle Grant about his retreat on space, but she did so only in private, and was especially careful never to speak as John Pope’s wife but only as counsel to the committee: “To hear you talk, Senator, one would think that America had quit the space race. Look it up. How many satellites do you think we have up there right now? Year after year? Going round and round and sending us billions of messages?”

“I know from our committee that a lot of work keeps going on. But we have no Apollos. Skylab’s ended, so we have nothing big up there.”

From her briefcase she took a NASA publication, Satellite Situation Report, and with a delicate finger pointed to a line of figures: “Every item that has ever been shot into space has been given a serial number, starting with 1. What do you think the Russian Cosmos that went up the other day was numbered?” And she showed him-9,509.

“Good God! Why don’t they bump into each other?”

“Different altitudes. Different orbits.”

“Who put them up there?” he asked, and she reminded him of the wild variety of nations that had the capacity to do so: “Spain, India, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Netherlands and, of course, the United States and Russia.”

“We have 2,116 American objects sending signals right now,” she said. “Russia has 1,205.”

When the senator borrowed the report he spotted an ominous column: “What’s this ‘Inanimate Objects-6,078’ and most of them Russian?”

[688] “They’ve run out of electrical power. Send no messages. Just go round and round in timeless beauty.” She pointed to Catalogue Number 4041: “That’s the little craft that carried Armstrong and Aldrin down to the Moon in 1969. When they came back to Apollo 11 they jettisoned it. Read Footnote 9.” And Grant read: “A manned spacecraft which successfully landed on the Moon, after which it went into perpetual selenocentric orbit.”

“What’s selenocentric?” he asked.

“Selene was the Greek goddess of the Moon. Around the moon forever.” She laughed. “Senator, the other night in Webster you spoke as if we’d abandoned space. We’re just beginning to use it.”

When Penny spoke with such authority, Grant could not help speculating on what his life might have been had he married such a woman, one who was stable and judicious. There had been talk in Nixon’s first administration of bringing Grant into the Cabinet in one of the really good positions, perhaps even Defense, and because of his winning margins in Fremont, there had even been suggestions that he go on the ticket as Vice-President to forestall Rockefeller, but he had been painfully aware of his vulnerability because of his wife and daughter, and when he confided his fears to the Nixon advisers they quickly saw that he was prudent, and talk of any high-visibility position evaporated. As one of the California mafia said, “We have hundreds of men in this country who would make damned fine senators but lousy national leaders. And Norman Grant of Fremont is perhaps the outstanding example.”

With a wife like Penny Pope, he mused, anything would have been possible.

But whenever she campaigned on behalf of Senator Grant and listened to his oratory, Penny realized what a soggy pathetic politician this particular Republican had become. He stood for nothing. He represented no vital force. He had no vision of the future. And he ran on the simple program of patriotism and the fact that he answered his constituents’ mail within forty-eight hours.

His life had known two apexes: when he steered his destroyer escort right at the heart of the Japanese fleet. [689] and when he lined up with Lyndon Johnson and Michael Glancey to lead America into the space age. Everything since had been downhill, and now he presumed to ask the voters of his state to return him for another six years of futility. Penny was ashamed to be part of his team.

“Now wait,” Finnerty said one night in June after they had arranged a rousing campaign rally in Calhoun. “Norman Grant represents this state almost ideally. Look at the federal funds he’s brought in-the installations we’d never have had otherwise. And the service he gives his constituents.”

“I’ll grant the last. No senator takes more visitors to the Senate dining room. But his ideas ...”

“They’re adequate. Look at what happened to Fulbright. Rhodes scholar, wonderful orator. He has ideas galore and no Senate seat. Grant plays it safe.”

“Grant does nothing, Tim. You came to my office seven times in the last few years-make that a dozen times-bewailing his refusal to vote for good projects.”

“Penny, he’s infinitely better than the Democratic opposition.”

“Conceded. He won’t be a disgrace, the way that lump-head would, but he’s no ornament, either.”

“Few senators are.”

Her face-to-face meetings with Grant were depressing. He was only sixty-two, but he seemed a worried old man long past any constructive act, and the behavior of the women in his family prevented him from being impressive even with his dark suits and silvery hair. He was a hollow shell, and what was worse, he reverberated rather loudly: “We must turn our attention to more serious matters. We must cut the budget and increase our military power. We must get chiselers off the taxpayer’s back and take drastic steps to control crime in the streets. If you return me to Washington, my first priority will be to lower taxes without impairing our ability to defend ourselves.”

And then he would parade onto the stage, in their historic uniforms and medals, Tim Finnerty, Larry Penzoss and Gawain Butler, who would relate the facts about his heroism and solicit votes for this great American.

“Tim,” Penny said after the Webster rally, “you really ought to knock the heroism bit in the head. You fellows [690] look plain silly in those faded uniforms,” but Finnerty pointed out correctly: “It’s what’s kept him elected for thirty years, going on thirty-six.”

Tucker Thompson, still searching for one last good story about his Solid Six, arranged for Captain John Pope to fly out to Benton for the rally on November 3, when it was clear that although President Ford might be in trouble, the reelection of Norman Grant was assured. Pope, still a charismatic hero, came onstage, kissed his wife, and in defiance of NASA rules, said a few words asking the voters of his home state to send a great patriot and a foremost figure in America’s space supremacy back to the Senate.

Penny, like a good wife, posed with her left hand in her husband’s right, but the camera caught her looking with extreme uncertainty at Senator Grant, who was shaking hands with a group of women voters. Tucker captioned the picture, the last his magazine would run of the astronauts:

She had threatened to kick his butt from Canberra to Tahiti, but in the end she supported him enthusiastically when he campaigned in the successful reelection bid of Senator Norman Grant.

When Penny saw the picture in the magazine she was alone in her office, and she could not restrain herself from muttering-using profanity, something she rarely did:

“That sonnombeech Tucker! Male chauvinist pig! He knows it was me campaigning for Grant, and John only flew out to help me. But he’s got to write that John was doing the work and I flew out to help him. Penny, this sort of bullshit has got to stop, and you’re the only one to stop it.”

In this period of emotional turmoil regarding his sons, Stanley Mott took refuge, as men will, in his work, but here also he was confronted with confusion, for in his studies of the planets which he was obligated to conduct for NASA he found himself always oscillating between engineering and science. As an engineer he wanted to build bigger and bigger machines with ever more sophisticated capabilities, regardless of the specific use to which they [691] were put; but as a scientist he longed to send small, precise machines into bold new adventures of the mind: There’s a universe out there we’ve only begun to perceive. And if we had the courage, we could be living intellectually at the heart of it.

His indecision was marked by the two books he kept near him: the first, an engineering marvel by a physics professor at Princeton; the second, a summary of the scientific knowledge of space by a much different kind of professor in London. Whichever book attained ascendancy at the moment persuaded him to move in that direction; he had become a pendulum.

The Princeton book was Gerard K. O’Neill’s The Colonization of Space, in which an engineering job of immense dimension-the assembling of a gigantic machine in orbit to be occupied by thousands or even hundreds of thousands of workers and explorers who would spend most of their lives there-was considered by many to be practical. The beauty of O’Neill’s proposal was that work on it could be started now. Rockets like those built by Dieter Kolff, hundreds of them a month, could certainly carry the materials into low Earth orbit. Construction devices already in being at Houston and Huntsville could bind the parts together, while gossamers of enormous dimension could bring from the Sun all the energy needed to operate such an enterprise.

All that would be required to build such a station would be $1 followed by 27 zeros-a billion billion billion dollars-and that posed problems. Of course, enthusiasts argued that it could be shaved to a mere billion billion, but Mott doubted it.

Yet he was captivated by the boldness of the concept and convinced himself that before long some nation was going to break O’Neill’s grand design down into manageable parts and build itself a space station not for hundreds of thousands of settlers but for eighty or a hundred, and that nation would acquire an advantage in world control which might never be overcome by other nations less adventurous: From such a station you could beam down the energy of the Sun, making petroleum obsolete. You could control the weather, making rain fall where needed and preventing it from falling elsewhere. You could devise new forms of life, construct new combinations of material, [692] conduct researches into the nature of the universe.

And whenever he reached that point he stopped, for he could hear the Germanic accents of Dieter Kolff: “But you can do all that right now with unmanned probes, and for one-thousandth of the cost.”

The London book was an extraordinary affair, C.W. Allen’s Astrophysical Quantities, compiled by a retired professor of astronomy at the University of London and offering in 310 pages a summary of everything known about the structure of the universe, with hundreds of tables and thousands of footnote references indicating where the data could be verified. It was the handbook of any Russians, Japanese, Pakistanis, Germans or Americans who addressed themselves to the mysteries of space, and Mott referred to it almost daily.

It was a book of beautiful simplicity, for it started with a compact list of those constant values which govern existence, then summarized what mankind knew about the atom, and moved purposefully outward to the structure of the Earth, the other planets, the Sun, the fellow stars, the Galaxy, the distant clusters of other galaxies, and on to the infinite reaches of the universe. Even to read the table of contents was an adventure of the mind.

Mott found special pleasure in the first section, that list of immutable laws so painstakingly uncovered by investigators in so many different centuries and so many different countries. Pi was 3.14159265 … which Mott had memorized as a boy, and not some other value. There was a Planck constant governing energy, an Avogadro number giving the number of molecules in a standard volume of gas, a Faraday in electricity and a Stefan-Boltzmann constant in radiation.

To consult this list was a humbling experience: Damned few of the great constants were discovered in America. We build on the work done by men overseas.

On the other hand, when Mott turned to the later chapters of the handbook, the ones that concerned him, he found that much of the pivotal work had been done in America, as if our people had assembled the wisdom of the world and applied it to daring new concepts. Harlow Shapley initiated the studies which determined the size of our Galaxy; Carl Seyfert identified new types of galaxies; Edwin Hubble derived the constant that governed [693] them; and Maarten Schmidt extended the definitions. For Mott to look even casually into Astrophysical Quantities was like a lover of literature browsing in the Oxford Book of English Verse; every page had its own resonance. Here stood Isaac Newton and Max Planck and Albert Einstein and Ejnar Hertzsprung. Here stood the gateway leading into the heart of the universe, and whenever Mott laid the small green-bound book aside he felt refreshed.

It was a curious book, the work of an old man who had loved his subject, and the edition that Mott owned, the third, carried this extraordinary preface:

It may be anticipated that yet another revision will be justified after a lapse of about seven years and preparation for this should begin at once. The author would like to negotiate with anyone willing to cooperate.

When Mott first read this invitation to become co-author of an established best seller, he idly considered applying, but quickly broke into laughter: All I’d be required to know would be atomic physics, spectrum analysis, radiation, geology, subatomic particles, astronomy, photometry and the whole crazy field of astrophysics. Damn! Wouldn’t it be great to be eligible?

The whole set of his mind was toward science, but whenever he was tempted to go too far down that road, he could hear old Crampton in the wind tunnel at Langley: “Scientists dream about doing things. Engineers do them.” And he would turn to the more practical jobs at hand: What can we do now? And this would throw him back onto Gerard O’Neill’s space station, a version of which America could have been building right now.

His day-to-day work with NASA focused on a managerial problem faced at one time or other by most big operations: “How do we hold our key personnel together in a time of retrenchment?” With the Apollo program wiped out and no clear mission to replace it, cutbacks were inevitable and firings had to take place. When he visited Cape Canaveral he found Cocoa Beach in a state of shock: the Bali Hai motel had only two waitresses instead of the eight who had served the astronauts and their friends in the roaring 1960s, and Mr. and Mrs. Quint sat mournfully [694] with Mott in a darkened corner of the once-lively Dagger Bar: “Homes that people bought for nineteen thousand dollars ten years ago, you can pick hundreds up for nine thousand dollars each. We lost thousands in population, stores and bars shutting down the way they are.”

When Mott asked if they thought they could keep the Bali Hai open, they were gloomy: “We have a better chance than most, our good beach, and people know us. One Apollo shot a year would keep us prosperous. But that’s all gone, and we just don’t know.”

“But you are going to try?”

“Resort type of business, maybe. Catch the snow-birds as they drive south for the winter.”

“I wish you luck. This place is a part of American history.” He could hear the vanished astronauts; he could see Cynthia Rhee flashing into the bar like a comet in low orbit; most of all he could see the three young men he had admired so much when he supervised their activities: Bell the proficient civilian; Jensen the dream kid who typified the perfect astronaut; Claggett the tight-jawed doer, the clown, the best young man he had ever known, flawed but magnificent. They died, and now Canaveral was dying, too. When he left the Bali Hai to drive down to Palm Beach to visit his son in jail he saw the mournful signs: HOUSE FOR SALE. ANY REASONABLE OFFER.

It was the same wherever he went: the great, proud bases from which man had conquered space were retrenching, and some were on the verge of extinction. Personnel were being fired at an appalling rate, but it was not until he reached California on his inspection that he appreciated the real problem facing NASA and the nation, for at both Ames and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory he heard the same story: “We can cut back. We can fire people. But how do we maintain a basic capacity to spring back into action if we’re needed in a hurry?”

That was the headache. How does one preserve a cadre of intelligence and skill? What manufacturing jobs do you assign them to in the downswing? And most important of all, how do you keep the infrastructure vital so that it can be quickly expanded in time of need? Automobile companies, military units, big retail stores all faced that problem, but never so acutely as NASA did in these painful years, because each man it fired carried with him some [695] unusual and vital skill that could not easily be replaced. Mott listened as supervisors described the men let go at JPL: “Henderson knew more about computer enhancement than anyone else on the block. He could take data and make the whole thing sing. If a war came along, he’d be invaluable to the military, but what can he do working the salary list at Sears Roebuck? Ondrachuk knows more about metal stress than any of us. A very cautious man. But how can he use such knowledge teaching in junior high school, supposing he gets the job?”

There was an even deeper problem: “Henderson and Ondrachuk had learned how to work together. They’d evolved a jargon which extended to fifty other experts, each with his own peculiar field. In a pinch we could probably find men as good as they are, but without the accumulated jargon. And what’s worse, keep them out of the program for three years and they’ll have lost the jargon. They won’t have kept up with their fields, no matter how much they study. Space is a hands-on experience. You have to do it to learn it.”

Sometimes at night he trembled to think of the intellectual capacity his country was squandering ... dissipating to the four winds ... ignoring at a time of no-crisis and perhaps destroying against the day of great-crisis. But a democracy worked that way, by fits and starts, by dynamic response to felt emergencies, then slothful indifference when the emergency dissolved. However, when he reached the Lewis base near Cleveland and found that the creative engineer Levi Letterkill had been let go, he perceived the problem not in the abstract but in fiercely human terms.

“You can’t fire Letterkill. Call him right now and get him back on the job.”

“We had to let him go. Quotas.”

“I don’t give a damn about quotas. Letterkill is twice as bright as I am, and this country needs him.”

“We don’t. Not in this shop.”

“You think you don’t. But let me tell you about this man. In 1957, well before Russia put Sputnik up, he devised a way for the gang at Wallops Island to put one of our little machines into orbit. You know what he came up with last year? A radio telescope with a base line ten A.U.’s long. We need this man.”

[696] “Not here, we don’t.”

“If he goes, I go.” He had thrown out a challenge which the Lewis people jumped to accept. They called Washington and said that they refused to be overridden by some headquarters has-been; then Mott took the phone and said calmly, “If Letterkill is fired, I have to be fired, too.” There was a long silence, then a conciliatory voice: “Is this a conference call? Are you both listening? Mott, why don’t you see if Huntsville could find Letterkill a place?”

When he reached Huntsville he found them in a frenzy of retrenchment, too, but with urging from Washington he persuaded them to take Letterkill into their think tank, where bold ideas were generated, and Mott thanked the administrators profusely.

That evening he dined with the Kolffs up on Monte Sano, and after supper, as he and Dieter and Liesl sat on the front patio overlooking the city, they told him the wonderful news: “Always when I was working at Peenemünde I loved to borrow classical records from Von Braun. He loved music. The records were Polydor, the best ever made, no scratch. And I used to dream that the day was coming when I would be a big manager like Von Braun and I, too, would be able to afford Polydor records. Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner. Now look!”

He returned to the living room and turned on his record player; soon sounds of heavenly clarity filled the night with music Mott could not identify, but quite soon Dieter was back with one of those handsome album jackets of Deutsche Grammophon with the golden-yellow cartouche across the top: VIVALDI. CONCERTO IN A FOR TRUMPET AND ORCHESTRA. Magnus Kolff with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. Holding the jacket on his knees. Mott listened to the brilliant trumpet sounds as they filled the room behind him, making it a noble symphony hall.

“Is it too loud?” Dieter asked.

“No. I like the reverberations.” After a while he said, “You must be very proud, Dieter.”

“I am. It’s better to me than all of Von Braun’s Polydors.” Then he explained: “You understand, of course, that Polydor merged with Deutsche Grammophon. It’s the same company, really.” When Mott turned the jacket over he found a photograph of young Kolff, twenty-nine years old, [697] his German-American face smiling, his left hand clasping his trumpet.

“How do we keep the team together?” Mott asked.

“We had the same problem at Peenemünde. Hitler blows hot, lots of work. He has a negative dream, fire everybody. He has a positive dream, the A-4 will win the war, our staff triples. Vietnam and Watergate, America has a bad dream.”

“How did Von Braun handle it?”

“When General Funkhauser came along to find volunteers for the front, he hid people in barns.”

“Did you hear that Congress gave Funkhauser a medal last month?”

“I saw the papers. He deserved it, Stanley. He did one hell of a job in this country.”

“He got me my job with NASA. It was NACA then. I wonder where I’d be if he hadn’t intervened?”

Kolff laughed. “I know where I’d be if Liesl hadn’t stopped him from intervening. I’d be six feet under in some German potato field.”

“What should NASA do now?”

“Hide its best men in a barn. Wait for Hitler or whoever to have a better dream.”

Mott received advice that was more specific from Senator Grant when he visited him in the Senate Office Building: “I’ve resigned from the Space Committee, Mott. Made my small contribution and turned the job over to younger men. When we had astronauts up there-Glenn, Armstrong, Claggett-the whole nation throbbed with excitement. Today, what? Total indifference. This Mars thing you’re about to do. What’s it really mean to the man in the street?”

“It could be our most significant accomplishment in space.”

“Don’t you believe it. If no men are involved, it’s merely an exercise.”

“But men are involved, sir. The comprehension of the entire world ...”

“That comes later. Much later. In books that men like you read. Not in real life.”

“What would you advise NASA to do?”

“Cut back to the bone. Close down three-fourths of your [698] installations. Go ahead with your inexpensive shots that explore the planets. Keep the scientists happy, but don’t try to occupy center stage.”

“What about preserving our cadre? In case of a national emergency down the line?”

“That’s the military’s problem. I’ve done some studying of my own. Every really competent man NASA’s fired has gone either to the Pentagon or to the air-space industry and got a better job. The capacity is kept alive, but in a different set of buildings.” When Mott tried to counter this argument, citing the preeminence of civilian control, Grant cut him short: “Why do you suppose I quit the Space Committee? To take a more important job on military affairs. That’s where the action’s going to be.”

Again Mott tried to interrupt, and again Grant forestalled him: “Look at your own group of astronauts-the ones you brought in and coddled. Three dead. That fine man Cater back in civilian life. John Pope from my hometown about to resign. Only that chap from Tennessee ... what’s his name?”

“Hickory Lee.”

“Only one left. Too limited in outside experience to land a good civilian job. Well, we need caretakers.”

“How far should we cut back, Senator?”

“I was rather startled the other day when our committee counsel, Mrs. Pope-you know her-told me how many satellites we already have in the air, and the good purposes they serve. Keep them up there. Add to them. Improve the new models and be sure they function. Work hand in hand with the military and you’ll find enough to do. But drop the idea that you’re some superagency, some Manhattan Project inventing the atomic bomb. You’re the Department of Agriculture now, a service agency with a limited budget. Learn to live with it.”

“Did you say that John Pope was leaving the program?”

“He’s bright. He can see we’re at the end of an epoch.”

“What’s he going to do?”

“I don’t know. He has an able wife with a good job to tide him over till he makes up his mind.” Grant grew hesitant. “You know, I suppose, that the high brass at your shop is displeased with Pope. His arrogance when we talked Claggett into postponing his divorce ... the bit about that Japanese newspaperwoman at Claggett’s funeral. And I [699] don’t need to specify the Australian foul-up ... the high brass ...”

“I’m fairly high brass,” Mott said coldly, “and I find no fault with Pope.”

“Neither do I! Look, he’s from my hometown. I’m indebted to him. He campaigned for me. But ...”

He walked Mott to the door. “The days of wild blue yonder, the science-fiction bit-that’s all finished, Mott. Now we address ourselves to practical matters.”

Senator Grant was correct; John Pope had concluded that he would do better if he resigned from NASA. “It’s this way, Penny, I’m forty-nine. They’re not ever going to send me up again. Nothing to send me in.”

“They surely have some kind of job for you, an outfit that big.”

“Sure, pencil-pushing in some third-floor office. I’m not the type.”

“You can do anything you put your mind to, John. I’ve watched you.”

“That’s true, but it has to be something of significance. Now, if they wanted me to study a completely new field-for a new kind of flight, that is-I’m their boy. But that’s passed. The whole establishment is chairborne now, and there’s really no place for me.”

“John, I see the budget. It’s enormous even now. A lot of work to be done ...”

“I’ve been in space. I’ve been to the Moon. If the flight program has ended, I can’t spend the rest of my life at a desk.”

“What will you do?” They were in her apartment in Washington, where the activity of a great nation throbbed with vitality, and to hear him talking as if life had somehow ended was distasteful, an evaluation she allowed to creep into her voice.

“I’m still a Navy captain. I can always go back.”

“John, the best you could do in the Navy is more pencil-pushing. They don’t want an old-timer like you, respected though your record would make you.”

“Look, I’m still one of the real pilots around.”

She burst into laughter as she poured him a ginger ale. “John, those young tigers at Pax River wouldn’t know what to do with you ... or me.”

[700] They thought about this for some time and after a while John turned on the television, but Penny immediately turned it off. “We must talk about this, John. The Navy’s no solution. It’s trading a NASA desk job for a Navy desk job, so who’s ahead?”

“Who has to be ahead? I could teach astronomy at Annapolis, maybe.”

“No, if you’re going to make a break, make a big one.”

“Like what?”

In their dilemma the Popes became just another NASA family faced by unemployment because a great program was winding down, and like the other perplexed experts, they wandered off into many different possibilities.

“John, have you ever considered us both moving back to Clay? We’d have a decent pension. We could-”

“We could what?”

“You could go into politics, maybe.”

“I’d never touch it.”

“You could get elected, you know.”

“I am not a politician.”

He refused to discuss that possibility any further, turned on the television and watched a football game, but next day when he went to Navy headquarters in the Pentagon he received a jolt: “John, the Navy would always find a place for you, but you’ve been away so long. You’re definitely age in grade.” This meant that in the normal flow of a Navy man’s career, someone like John Pope ought statistically to be much further advanced than he was; his lagging on the promotion ladder meant simply that the Navy no longer expected him to become one of its senior admirals. He was tagged, indelibly, as a loser.

“But in aviation ...”

“You’re a champion, John. No doubt about it. But you’ve converted yourself into a civilian.”

“Sir, I could certainly ...”

“I can’t think of a commander who would feel easy having a national hero your age, your reputation, under him. It would be quite out of balance.”

“They tell me Yeager’s being promoted to general. I’m due for admiral.”

“Yeager stayed in the chain of command. You didn’t.”

“How about Patuxent River?” Before the admiral could respond, Pope added with obvious enthusiasm, “I [701] sometimes think they were the best days I ever had. Did you know that Claggett was there with me? Hickory Lee did a stint there, too, while he was in the Army.” The admiral listened with respect, tapping his fingers, as Pope recalled the glory days when he was a hotshot lieutenant commander, probably, and gradually the fire subsided. “I suppose I would be overage for Pax River. But those were damned good days.”

“Believe me, John, you’d make a terrible mistake trying to come back in.”

He was not wanted. There was no way that the Navy could feel comfortable with a front-line civilian hero like John Pope on its administrative hands, and when he left the Pentagon it was with the solid knowledge that retreating to the blue uniform was not a possibility. Penny had been right, and when he reported to her apartment this time he was prepared to listen.

“You feel it’s the end of the line at NASA?” she asked.

“Definitely. I’m through there, whether I want to admit it or not.”

“And you’re through at the Navy?”

“I’m sure that’s what they were trying to tell me.”

“How about business? Claggett told me that six different firms wanted to lure him away from NASA.”

“That was Claggett. He could sell anybody anything.”

“Well then, I have a surprise for you. Behind your back Senator Grant and I have been doing some logrolling. The State University of Fremont invites you to join its faculty.”

“As what?”

“Professor of Applied Astronomy.”

John leaned back in his chair, hands to lips, and tried to visualize the job, and gradually a big, relaxed smile came over his lean, tough face. “That I would like.” Then he asked, “You coming, too?”

“Much of the year. Yes, I know just the house we must buy.”

“What do you mean by much?”

“I have work here I want to finish up. At the committee. What with Glancey gone and Grant out. I’m needed.” She moved about the apartment, straightening chairs, something she did only when inwardly confused. “And there’s been some loose talk about appointing me to one of the federal agencies ... maybe even a judgeship.”

[702] “You’d be damned good. Penny. If they make a solid offer, grab it.”

“I’d have vacations. You’d have vacations. I’m sure it would work, John, but on the other hand, if you wanted to find something here in Washington ...”

“I think I’ve had Washington.”

“I think you’re right. I have this strong feeling that you ought to get back to your home soil. Dig in for the hard work that lies ahead.”

“Like what?”

“Who knows? You’re not fifty yet. You have twenty-five good years ahead.”

“Penny, the most important aspect of this making decisions ... it’s difficult to say.” He seemed to choke on his words, then blurted out: “You know I love you-more than flights, more than anything else.”

“That’s hard to believe ... sometimes.”

“But we always seem to be you here, me in Korea. You here, me at Pax River ... or the Moon.”

“You trained me to be a Navy wife, John. You did a great job.”

“So it’s still you in Washington, me in Fremont?”

“During these good years of our lives, yes. But we can handle it.”

“I intend to,” John said.

To honor John Pope’s return to his hometown, the citizen and the university united in organizing a gala celebration worthy of a national hero, but the community itself was far from united on anything else; in fact, it was riven into warring segments.

Religious fundamentalists who believed in the literal truth of every word in the Old Testament had some time before launched a crusade in the state of Fremont to expunge from the school curriculum, elementary through university graduate work, any reference to Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the movement might have died under the scorn of editorials and expert testimony had not the Reverend Leopold Strabismus of the United Scripture Alliance of Los Angeles seen the situation as a heaven-sent opportunity to lead a publicity campaign against godless humanism: “We have a statewide arena, Marcia. We have a new area which has never heard our preachments before. [703] And I think we can command a national audience.”

He therefore moved into his wife’s state with great force: tents for rural meetings, sound systems to amplify his thundering voice, choirs to provide music, and local enthusiasts to keep the excitement moving. Fremont had never seen the like, and people who normally might not have bothered with a revivalist’s meeting flocked to hear Dr. Strabismus excoriate science, Communism, false prophets and Yale University. It was an excellent side show, at first, but it quickly degenerated into a searing attack on the general intellectual establishment.

The most popular member of the Strabismus troupe was not Strabismus himself, huge and hefty in his white suit, nor his very attractive wife, who nodded vigorously when he made his major points, but the appealing little animal, quite tame now and hungry for applause and bananas, who participated in the lectures as Chimp-Champ-Chump:

“Do you good folks really believe that this here monkey was your grandfather? Do you accept the teaching of the atheistic humanists at Yale University that this here monkey lived two million years ago, breeding a nest of half-animals, half-men, when the Bible itself says God made this Earth about six thousand years ago, and we have proof to prove it?”

His assault became so powerful and his logic so persuasive that the voters of Fremont placed a referendum on the ballot so that the citizens of the entire state could vote on whether Genesis was correct or Darwin, whether God was supreme or some Communist atheistic humanists at Yale University.

Men and women defending each point of view stormed into the state, and the air was filled with acrimony. In a rousing revival for rural communities in the western half of the state, Strabismus spelled out the goals of his campaign:

“I got me on’y five points, and they’re taken straight from the Bible. First, in no tax-supported institution in this state, elementary school through the university, can anyone teach Darwin’s atheistic theory as a fact. Second, in every institution, God’s creationism [704] has got to be taught. as the fact that all sensible people believe. Third, we have got to erase from our textbooks any reference to millions and billions of years. This Earth came into bein’ about six thousand years ago, and that’s that. Fourth, we have got to stop talkin’ about dinosaurs and the like as havin’ lived a very long time ago and died out for some confused geologic reason. They died in the Flood, that’s how they died. Five, we don’t want no more geology of any kind pollutin’ our kids’ minds.”

When the full force of his crusade was appreciated and it was seen that his side had a chance of winning the referendum, scholars from other states and textbook publishers from New York and Boston streamed into the state to try to restore reason, but they were powerless to quench the firestorm he had ignited.

He based his persuasive reasoning on two books which a Mississippi clergyman of some erudition had brought to his attention. The first was by Philip Gosse, an English writer, who argued simply that there were fossils, yes, and there were dinosaur bones, and there were geological strata, and everything was exactly as Darwin and the geologists described it. The secret was that in the year 4004 B.C. God had created the world exactly as Genesis said, and had hidden all these bits of evidence in the rocks and in the dinosaur bones as a kind of temptation to man’s intellectual presumptions. Gosse explained everything in such simple and beautiful terms that Strabismus said, “No further discussion is necessary. The record is exactly what the atheistic professors at Yale say. It has to be, because God placed it there on the day of Creation.”

The second book was extremely useful when arguing with people from the universities who had a smattering of knowledge. It was George McCready Price’s The New Geology, which Marcia Strabismus sold for ten dollars a copy, to those who sought the truth. It was a formidable essay, well founded in scientific jargon and difficult to rebut. Its major thesis appealed to all who suffered from the tyranny of science, and when Strabismus translated this into his own terms it made a persuasive argument:

[705] “These here scientists try to tell us that fossils found in rocks always grow from primitive forms to complex forms like you and me. And to prove this they show us that the primitive forms always appear in the earliest rocks, and the complex forms in later rocks. But how do they date the layers of rock? You stop right now and tell me how they date the layers of rock.

“They do it by seein’ that primitive forms are in what they call the older layers. And the complex forms in the younger. Don’t you see that they’s arguin’ in a great big circle. It’s jest like a boy tellin’ his girl, “You ought to kiss me because it’s Valentimes Day, and Valentimes Day became special because that’s when girls kissed boys.”

“That’s crazy reasonin’ and the boy knows it, and the scientists know it, and they’s pullin’ the wool over the eyes of the public. I say it’s time to stop.”

Several professors of geology volunteered to debate Strabismus, but he would meet them only in his tent, where the choir, the charm of Mrs. Strabismus, the cheers of his supporters and the antics of Chimp-Champ-Chump put the scientists to rout.

Leopold Strabismus was a most formidable adversary, much better educated than most of his opponents, and as the time for voting in the referendum approached, it became obvious that the citizens of a great state were going to throw evolution, geology, anthropology and paleontology out of the state curriculum. Two hundred years of the most painstaking accumulation of data and understanding were to be tossed overboard.

Why did Strabismus pursue this campaign so frenetically and with such diabolic effectiveness? He made no money from the crusade, since everything that reached him in the nightly collection was spent on rentals of the tent and the sound system. He could not have done so because of ignorance of the subject matter, for he had written Ph.D. theses on both evolution and Devonian geology. And he certainly did not act from deep religious conviction, for he had none.

[706] He was driven by two great compulsions: a desire for power, and a longing for revenge against the academic community which had refused to accept him on his own dubious terms. Sooner than most, he had sensed that America was becoming surfeited with science and longed for simpler explanations, and very early in his crusade he had discovered that people in the hinterlands enjoyed listening to attacks on places like Yale University and institutions like the New York Times.

But most of all, his antennas, those remarkably sensitive probers of the national consciousness, reported to him that America was preparing itself for a major swing to the right, and he proposed to help lead that swing.

What were his own inclinations? His Italian grandparents would have been Christian democrats had such a party existed in Mount Vernon, and his Jewish grandparents were still avowed socialists. His parents on each side had softened these beliefs, becoming standard Democrats who voted now and then for really good Republicans like General Eisenhower and Jacob Javits. In the normal unfolding of events, Martin Scorcella should have been a moderate liberal, which is exactly what he was until his expulsion from New Haven.

Then he began to wonder, falling into the habit of telling jokes on himself in public: “I came from a family of eleven Democrats, but I learned to read.” And what did he read? Eugene Lyons, Igor Gouzenko and, especially, Ayn Rand, and gradually he came to see that liberalism with its state-social approach was horribly wrong.

His next decision was vital, one often made by brilliant young men since the days of Greece: If society is rotten, I shall manipulate society. He had started with little green men, moved on to the founding of a bogus university and now to a religious temple, but what not even his wife Marcia had detected, he planned soon to surrender his basilica in Los Angeles and acquire several thousand acres in the suburbs to house a temple and a real university based on the Bible. In the meantime, he had the Fremont plebiscite to win, for he hoped that if he could encourage even one state to outlaw evolution, a groundswell would develop, and as its champion in state after state, he would inevitably become a man of considerable power.

[707] When the vote was counted, the people of Fremont had elected to rescind most of modern science, and the educators of the state began the painful process of weeding out from their libraries any books which spoke well of Darwin, geology or dinosaurs. The task was easier than it sounded because avid citizens volunteered for the job, and there was a general cleansing.

It was into this heated atmosphere that John Pope returned, and there was general apprehension when the university announced that its most beloved professor emeritus, Karl Anderssen, who had taught John Pope his astronomy, would give the major address at the celebration. Anderssen was now a very old man and there was cause to fear that he might ramble on, and a possibility that although he had not participated in the fight against Strabismus, he might speak unguardedly and open old wounds. The officials were relieved, therefore, when Anderssen said, “I’ll give my speech honoring John in the planetarium.”

“The place is small enough,” the president of the university assured his board, “So that the rabble can’t force their way in.”

They convened at eight in the evening, the intellectual cream of the community, many of whom had voted to outlaw evolution and geology, but they were not fanatics and they wanted to hear what the old man had to say.

“Tonight is the twenty-second of June 1976, and when the lights go down we shall see the heavens as they are outside this planetarium. Now, I’m going to turn the sky-clock back 922 years. It is again June 22 in A.D. 1054. The sky looks almost the same as it does tonight, a few planets in different positions, but that’s about all.

“I’m going to speed through eighteen days, and here we have the heavens as they appeared at sunset on the night of 10 July 1054. Let’s go to midnight in Baghdad, where Arabic astronomers are looking at the sky, as they always did. Nothing unusual. Now it’s 11 July 1054, toward three in the morning. Still nothing exceptional. But look! There in the constellation Taurus!”

[708] In the silence of the planetarium the audience watched in awe as an extremely brilliant light began to emerge from the far tip of the Bull’s horn. It exceeded anything else in the heavens, infinitely brighter even than Venus, and increasing in brilliance each moment.

“It was a supernova, in the constellation Taurus, and we know the exact date because Arabic astronomers in many countries saw it and made notes which confirmed the sightings in China. Indians in Arizona saw it and marveled. In the South Pacific natives marked the miracle. And watch as daylight comes in 1054! The new star is so bright it can be seen even against the rays of the Sun, which was not far off in Cancer.

“For twenty-three days, the astronomers of Cathay and Araby tell us, this supernova dominated the sky, almost as bright as the Sun, the most incandescent event in recorded history. No other nova ever came close to this one. Look at it! Challenging even the Sun! And watch how it commandeered the night sky, this flaming beacon.”

He allowed his planetarium to run rather slowly, re-creating the cycle of those twenty-three unequaled days, when watchers throughout the world had been stunned by this miracle. By day, by night, it filled the planetarium so that John and Penny Pope could see each other in its radiance. and the faces of all around them. And then, on the evening of the second day of August 1054 the great new star diminished, fading with a speed more precipitous than that with which it had arisen, until Taurus looked as it had for a thousand years and would look for a thousand years thereafter.

“Why do I tell you these things on the night we honor our cherished son John Pope? For one simple reason. This great star, which must have been the most extraordinary sight in the history of the heavens during mankind’s observation, was noted in China, in Arabia, in Alaska, in Arizona and in the South Pacific, for we have their records to prove it. But in Europe nobody saw it. From Italy to Moscow, from [709] the Urals to Ireland, nobody saw it. At least, they made no mention of it. They lived through one of the Earth’s most magnificent spectacles and nobody bothered even to note the fact in any parchment, or speculate upon it in any manuscript.

“We know the event took place, for with a telescope tonight we can see the remnants of the supernova hiding in Taurus, but we have searched every library in the western world without finding a single shred of evidence that the learned people of Europe even bothered to notice what was happening about them.

“An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.”

Never had NASA’s planning been more delicate. In the great orbiter mission to Mars in 1971 there had been no attempt to land on the planet itself, and since the Mariner remained aloft, taking from a distance those remarkable photographs which delighted the scientific world, there was no worry about safe landing sites. But on this flight the Viking was going to land on the actual surface of Mars and send its photographs from there. In 1971 Mars had been 75,000,000 miles away. This time it would be 199,000,000, and that, too, made a difference.

But what gave the exploration a touch of elegance was the time chosen for the landing. Starting back in 1961, when the trip was first contemplated, with little apparent chance of success at that time, skilled mathematicians had laid out a timetable which could deposit the machine on Mars at three o’clock Eastern Daylight Saving Time on the afternoon of the Fourth of July 1976. This daring, intricate, wonderful, imaginative feat would thus serve as capstone to our nation’s two-hundredth birthday.

Year by year NASA leaders had asked their experts: “Are we keeping to schedule? Will it land on the Fourth of July?” In 1975 they began asking monthly, and after the Viking was launched in August of that year, they checked week by week. Now, in the centennial year itself, with the landing date looming ahead, they verified their figures daily, and always they received the same answer: “We’re on schedule to land at three in the afternoon on the Fourth of July.”

[710] Since the government lacked any other spectacular event to use as the highlight of its two-hundredth birthday, the politicians fastened upon the Mars landing as the apex of their celebration. President Ford would make a nationwide broadcast congratulating the scientists who had achieved this miracle. The three television networks would relay photographs as they reached the Earth. And the entire world would celebrate with us this exquisite intellectual victory. Thousands of Americans in all parts of the nation geared their lives to bringing this stupendous adventure to a successful conclusion.

The NASA high command asked Dr. Stanley Mott to fly out to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena to ensure that there would be no housekeeping glitches in a performance that would be watched by millions, and when he arrived three weeks before the Fourth he was pleased to find that leading scientists were gathering to study the data Viking would be sending back; engineers worked around the clock to keep the spacecraft on target; the Landing Site Selection Team would choose the exact spot for touchdown; the Image Processing Team would determine which of the thousands of photographs would be released to the media; the Inorganic Chemistry Team would analyze the data sent down by sensors; the Surface Sampler Team would concentrate on the actual composition of the planet; and at least three teams would try to collect any evidence which would prove that life had previously existed on Mars ... or that it did now in some minute, unfamiliar form.

It was a dazzling concentration of brilliant minds, made more so when NASA flew in a group of distinguished civilians, not connected with the project but deeply interested in Mars, to conduct a seminar establishing an intellectual framework in which to understand the landing. Jacques Cousteau, lean and magisterial, spoke of the inner forces which goad men to explore, whether on Mars or in the ocean deeps. Ray Bradbury, the science-fiction giant, exploded into poetry to convey his feelings, while crippled little Philip Morrison of MIT, one of the subtlest brains in the world, shared his reflections as Viking sped silently into orbit.

On the third of July, with President Ford preparing his [711] notes to inform the world that we had landed on Mars and with television cameras crowding the room in which Dr. Mott and his men would make their scientific disclosures, a small group of NASA scientists, the ultimate wizards of this project, studied the latest close-up photographs of the site chosen for landing six years earlier and were shocked by what the scanner was revealing.

“We can’t land in that nest of craters!”

“Look! The President of the United States is standing by. All those television cameras are waiting out there.”

“I don’t give a damn. You can’t land a fragile machine n terrain like that.”

“You don’t give a damn for the President of the United States?”

“I didn’t say that, but as a matter of fact, in this situation I don’t.”

“What do you propose?”

“Slip the landing a few days. Look around for a better site.”

“Slip? Dammit, you can’t slip!”

“I just did. Landing tomorrow is absolutely impossible. We must find a safer site.”

A sickening pall settled over the room, for these men knew the disappointment such an announcement must entail. They appreciated the abuse NASA would receive for having botched a mission of such importance, with the whole world watching. There was brief discussion as to who would announce the postponement, and a committee of three was chosen: two project scientists and Dr. Mott from headquarters. The grieving men took deep breaths, after which the one who had made the decision said, “Well, lets get on with it.”

The formal announcement caused a dull mutter of resentment through the briefing hall, for these hundreds of reporters and television crewmen had traveled long distances to participate in this triumphant moment, and they were not pleased with the three men who gave them the bad news.

“So your whole delicate schedule is shot to hell?” one belligerent asked.

“It is,” the leading scientists admitted, but when the questioners reached Dr. Mott, they found him unwilling [712] to concede a single point. Sitting primly and wearing a formal jacket while the others were in shirt sleeves, he parried all the castigations:

“We cannot land on July 4, which is a deep disappointment. But I feel confident from the new photographs that we will land on a better and safer spot on July 21 or even 20. That’s a delay of sixteen or seventeen days, and in the long history of man’s exploration, what did it really matter whether Christopher Columbus sighted his New World on October 12 or two weeks later?”

“If he’d delayed two more weeks,” a newsman growled, “his crew might’ve lynched him.”

“We’ve spent years of effort and millions of dollars to bring this effort to the verge of success. An adventure like this has never before in the history of the world been attempted, and we must not endanger it at the last minute by trying to land in the middle of a plain of rocks.”

“Will your next site be any better?” a science writer asked.

“We’re not guaranteeing anything, but this mission is so difficult, we’ve got to have as many factors as possible in our favor. We know that the July 4 site is no good. We hope the next one we select will be.”

“Why didn’t you see that the present site was no good three weeks ago? Save us hauling out here on a no-go mission.”

“Three weeks ago we had to rely on photographs taken from a distance of several thousand miles. Now we have close-ups and radar probes, and I can tell you, that makes a difference. But if at the last minute on July 21 real close-ups show that site to be a bummer, we’ll back away from it, too. Gentlemen, scientists grope for information, and when we get it we must obey its dictates. That’s what science is.”

[713] So this big day, the day of national celebration, passed ignominiously. President Ford filed his notes. The television crews went home, and second-guessers around the world explained how the affair should have been handled. But at the end of two weeks the NASA scientists concluded that everything was in their favor, so on 20 July men like Cornell’s Carl Sagan and Hal Mazursky, the superbrain, bit their lips, and white-haired Jim Martin crossed his fingers and gave the signal to detach the small lander from the bigger orbiter which had brought it safely across so many millions of miles.

One of the young scientists gripped Mott’s arm and whispered, “It’s got to work.” And when the signal reached Earth confirming that the lander had broken away neatly, the young man sighed and whispered again, “I knew it would work.”

For two painful hours the NASA men checked indicators as the frail lander drifted down through Martian space, and then, when it began to descend precipitously, tension rose and in the disciplined silence excitement multiplied: “Viking is 300,000 feet aloft ... Viking is 74,000 feet from landing ... Viking is at 2,600 feet ... Viking is approaching Chryse in perfect attitude ...”

The room fell silent; men could hear each other breathing. Then across 199,000,000 miles came the steady, unemotional signal: “Viking has landed. All systems go.”

Men leaped into the air. Some wept. Jerry Soffen, project scientist for the adventure since its inception, shouted, “After fifteen years ... Mars!” Mott, overcome with emotion after having just witnessed the defeat of science in the Fremont plebiscite, danced with Carl Sagan in celebration of this tremendous victory.

Man had reached the planets. He stood challenging the entire solar system to reveal its secrets. Even the ramparts of the Galaxy were now approachable, and where this vast adventure into space would end, no man could predict. The landing on the nearby Moon had carried trivial significance compared to this, for the Moon was a dead appendage to planet Earth; Mars was a planet in its own right, and now it was being revealed as scarred, arid and lifeless.

The young fellow who had whispered at the moment of [714] maximum tension now studied the first incoming photographs and again gripped Mott’s arm. “Damn it. Damn it to hell! A barren waste. If only it had shown a palm tree, we’d start planning a manned flight tomorrow. This way, we’ll forget it by September.”

Mott, hearing this gloomy prediction, knew it to be true, but only insofar as the immediate future was concerned. And he felt he must correct the young scientist: “In this work we build slowly. That photograph which is so disappointing to you ... it could set the mind of some young Japanese ablaze. Or some schoolboy in Massachusetts.”

He stood apart, trying to recall the days when he had been such a schoolboy: “Maybe the most important book I ever read was that ridiculous affair by Percival Lowell. It was totally wrong, but it set my mind working. Look! Seventy short years after he published it, here we are on Mars. And if I helped get us here, he helped get me started.” He moved in close to study the new photographs as they evolved in real time, and they showed no canals.