For Joyce, Stephanie Jill and
Erika Cornell

And in memory of Herbert Finney
1898–8/27/61

RECOVERY

Trim Bissell: 1968

1

I loved the Captain in my own way, although I knew that he was insane, the poor bastard. This was only partly his fault: one must consider the conditions. The conditions were intolerable. This will never work out.

2

In the novel I plan to write of the voyage, the Captain will be a tall, grim man with piercing eyes who has no fear of space. “Onward!” I hear him shout. “Fuck the bastards. Fuck control base; they’re only a bunch of pimps for the politicians anyway. We’ll make the green planet yet or plunge into the sun. Venus forever! To Venus! Shut off all the receivers now. Take no messages. Listen to nothing they have to say; they only want to lie about us to keep the administrators content. Venus or death! Death or Venus! No fear, no fear!”

He has also had, in the book, a vigorous and satisfying sex life, which lends power and credence to his curses and his very tight analysis of the personalities at control. “We will find our humanity under the gases of Venus,” the Captain will say, and then the sounds of the voyage overwhelm us and momentarily he says nothing more. I sit with hands clasped, awaiting further word.

The novel, when I write it, should find a large commercial outlet. People still love to read stories of space, and here for the first time they will learn the sensational truth. Even though it is necessary for me to idealize the Captain in order to make the scheme more palatable, the novel will have great technical skill and will make use of my many vivid experiences in and out of the program. They cannot do this kind of thing to us and leave us nothing. I believe that passionately. The novel will be perhaps sixty-five thousand words long, and I will send it only to the very best publishers.

3

On one of these nights I dream that the Captain is falling again. He is falling through the capsule into the center of the sun. “Out,” he says, “enough of this. I’m calling a halt to the bullshit before they turn me into a machine.” Backed into a bulkhead, I beg him to be controlled and assume command of the voyage again, but he says he cannot because of the forces of gravity. Gravity is making him fall into the sun.

“I can’t do all this myself,” I cry as he begins to slither away again. “I’m only equipped to be the copilot. My certification is limited.”

“I’m sorry,” he says with infinite regret, disappeared to the neck now, his fine eyebrows poised as if for sex or intricate testimony. “I misjudged the whole thing totally. It is a mystery. You will have to do the best you can, Evans: find some answers of your own,” and then he disappears, not saying goodbye. The ship convulses slightly as if the Captain were excrement just cleansed.

I wonder why I do not follow my commander into the sun and be done with it, but there is no time for reflection; I have many things to do to keep the ship on course lest it miss Venus and follow the Captain into the solar region. I resolve to follow it through; perhaps this is another simulation testing my psychological strength.

4

The personnel in this large and rather homey institution warn me that I cannot go on this way indefinitely, that I must start acting in a reasonable fashion. “This is a convenient escape for you,” they remind me, “and we’ve allowed it to go on as long as this because we thought you needed some compensatory adjustment, but now it must come to an end. You must grow up, Evans, face reality again. It is time. It is necessary. You must remember what happened to you. You must tell us all of this; we need the information to save others. You would not want to cause the death of a hundred others on the crews because you were too selfish to speak, would you?”

“You wouldn’t send them out until I had spoken, would you?” I reply, my only response in weeks, and then I begin to laugh. I laugh heartily in a most unseemly manner and eventually the institutional personnel go away, although they are scheduled to return to me tomorrow and press me further. The routine is really quite organized. Some of them are young, but on the other hand, some of them are old. Some of them are male, but then again a good many of them are female and these, even unto the ugliest and most professionalized, I eye with vague lust, thinking about connection. I wonder if they will trade a fuck for some information but decide that their procedures are none of my affair; in addition to that, my lust is idle, idle—the magic rays from space rendered me impotent at last, which is a blessing. The fury will overtake me no more. I return to thoughts of the novel I will write, which will be my single attempt to give the full and final truth of the voyage in such a way that all those who understand will surely admire my strength.

5

Several thousand men applied for the project and only a few hundred were accepted. Of these hundreds, only twenty survived screening for the Venus flight and only the Captain and I were finally selected: two out of a pool of some thousand, the highest tenth of one percentile. According to the selection processes, I am the second most qualified man in the country to set foot on Venus for the first time, or at least I was at the time that the Committee made this final determination. Even retrospectively this fills me with a small glow of accomplishment—it is no small thing to have been so highly qualified—even though, at least in the case of the Captain, such a serious mistake was evidently made.

6

I dream I see the Captain fucking his wife. He rears over her, intolerably strong, enormously agile, plunging himself into her wastes. I have never met his wife but picture her well. “Fuck me, you bitch,” he whispers, “fuck me good; tomorrow we’re going into isolation for the flight and it may be months until I get laid again, depending upon how things work out.” She smiles at him, winsome in the darkness, and squeezes her thighs reflexively. The Captain groans and discharges, falls across her in small stages like planks of wood settling, and begins to gasp, “Too fast, too fast, you bitch,” he says and bites her shoulder; but there is the intimation of a smile on his face (I can move very close to them in the dark), and I see that although he is humiliated, he is also proud that he is able to come so fast. It is the mark of a real spaceman. “Bitch, bitch,” the Captain murmurs, and thinking of Venus, he falls asleep against her.

7

In this solar system Venus is the second planet from the sun. It was discovered and labeled a planet by the most ancient astronomers, who in consultation with senior astrologers deemed it the planet of love. Men were tantalized by Venus for centuries, although the first manned expedition there did not occur until 1981.

During the middle third of the twentieth century probes conducted by remote capsules revealed nothing other than that the terrain was mysteriously concealed by thick layers of gases destructive to all biological life as we have conceived of it. This was a great disappointment to scientists who had thought that the life-system of Venus was the most likely of the other eight planets to sustain intelligent life and might even serve as an escape hatch in the event that our own planet should become overcrowded or ruined by atomic devices. It was in the hope of further information about this planet that the initial manned expedition to Venus embarked. The two men on the ship were the survivors of a rigorous selection process and testing program which had established beyond doubt that they were in the highest percentile of fitness and could be trusted to perform well on this unique and extremely well-publicized mission.

Success was particularly important in light of the unsatisfactory Mars adventure of 1976 which so shocked the administrators that explorations of the red planet were abandoned for the duration.

8

Nevertheless, I cannot help feeling that the disaster could have been averted. It was my fault; mere presence of mind would have controlled the situation.

“Nonsense,” I should have said to the Captain. “These suicidal impulses are the result of an anxiety attack, a simple psychoneurotic reaction which can be easily controlled. Get hold of yourself. Be calm. Take the long view. In the anterior bulkhead is a cabinet containing multiple grains of disulfiamazole. Read the instructions carefully and then take a double dosage.”

“We have no business out here,” the Captain says anyway. “None whatsoever. I see it clearly now, more clearly than I have ever seen anything in my life. Nothing can justify this horror. I have had this insight. I have had this enormous insight into everything. Things are not worth the price we pay. They lied to us all the way through. Unless we take action, they will lie to us forever.”

“Still,” I say calmly, “stop raving. Be mature. Consider your responsibilities. This is no time for metaphysical and political rhetoric. Not with the course degrees for Venus to be charted so soon and another television broadcast scheduled some hours from now, in which we will show them some of the effects of lighting upon the anterior of the ship. And reminisce a bit together to give them the personal touch.”

“There is nothing to be charted. We are navigated by remote control. They have given us an illusion of function to keep us from going mad.”

“Still, the broadcast.”

“I do not want to perform for them. I have no homilies; I do not want to be a television personality. Instead, I want to spit in their cameras and expose myself.”

“There is no time for that,” I say kindly. “I understand your position and am highly sympathetic, but you are the commander of this voyage and have responsibilities. Meet them; be a man.”

Slowly but firmly, I exert tremendous pressure on the trembling elbow of the Captain, lead him to the cabinet, fling it open and, removing a bottle, force five grains of disulfiamazole into his distorted mouth. He receives them like cookies.

The Captain chokes, then chews thoughtfully, his features changing and shifting to their more customary content. He sighs, groans, scratches himself, a coarse amiability moving from him in slow, uneven waves.

“Thank you, Evans,” the Captain says. “I feel much better, thanks to you.”

“I’m glad. It was my pleasure. Anything I can do to help, I will.”

“It must have been a fit, just a passing episode. A hint of strangeness overtaking me when I thought of the enormous responsibilities we carry. To land on Venus! To explore! To find another home for mankind! I feel much better now. I will plot courses. I will make deductions. I will smile when the broadcast begins and tell anecdotes of the old days in the academy.”

Mumbling, he moves from the cabinet and begins swiftly to work, seated in a cramped position, absorbed in logarithms or whatever other figures the computer disgorges. I sigh; Evans sighs. Evans relaxes and lets the tension drain from him, thinking how terrible it might have been if he had not assumed command of the situation; how the Captain’s depression might have increased and he, throwing himself into the sun, would have brought the expedition to an abrupt halt.

9

I have a wife. Evans has a wife. Evans and I are the same person, but it is easier sometimes to slip into a more objective tense; there is now so little of myself I can bear that perhaps distancing is the answer. Another name for this, the institutional personnel hint, is disassociation reaction. I have a disassociation reaction. Evans has a disassociation reaction. Each of us has a disassociation reaction, but mine is stronger than his.

Evans has a wife. She is twenty-seven years old, with brown hair and eyes, and he admits that months ago he lived with and committed sexual acts upon her. He has some recollection of breasts with nipples like deadly painted eyes, a cunt which was slow to moisten but eventually enveloped him like knives. She comes to him now, a vaguely pretty girl with breasts now discreetly hidden, and touches his hand. His trembling hand, so dense against the sheets. Pity Evans. I do. He did not choose this way.

“Please,” she says and then shakes her head at the ceiling as if looking for cameras. “Please tell them what you know, Harry. They have sent me to you as the last chance before they take further action. They are talking about shock, although I am not supposed to tell you that. They say that there will be special treatments and painful re-enactment therapy.”

“Ah,” I say. “Aha.”

“They’ll only force the truth from you anyway. You might as well tell them. They always get what they want anyway.”

“Not quite.”

“What happened, Harry? What went on? Don’t tell them, then, if you don’t want them to know. Let it be a secret then. But tell me. I can’t stand this any more.”

Her chin juts, reminding me of that other wedge of bone which rushed me in the night. A pitiful ploy. I think of her superficiality, how she must have been driven to this. The institutional personnel must have had at her in their own way. Perhaps someone is fucking her, opening up reservoirs of stupidity. “Please,” she is saying. “Please.”

“I don’t think I know you,” Evans says, looking past her. “You seem to feel there is a connection here, but you misunderstand. I see no relationship; it must all be in your mind. I do not understand. Evans does not understand. Neither of us understands.”

He touches her anyway—the remote softness of her bare upper arm like metal beneath the surface, the bulbous thrust of her shoulder blade—and he fondles her then as if she were a bulkhead. A bulkhead with many devices. “I appreciate your interest in my situation, but there really isn’t anything further to discuss at this time,” Evans says and tries to push her from the communal room. “Maybe later,” he says, courteous, straining to move her. She folds in layers against him, offering no real resistance, and stumbles backward toward the door. Evans halfway closes that door on her, stops when he sees that institutional staff are eying him solemnly like hounds, holding pencils and pieces of paper. Apparently they have been waiting outside the door all this time, awaiting the result of Evans’ discussion with his wife.

“I don’t think you understand any of this, ladies and gents,” Evans says. “You’re being conventional, mechanical. You are treating me like an ordinary lunatic. But I have been to Venus and back; I am beyond normal motivations or procedures,” and then he realizes that during the process of speaking he has in his excitement shut the door and no one has heard.

He considers opening the door again to repeat his statement but decides against it, inasmuch as he has already made this point several times in conference and on tape and does not want to be accused of forcing the issue. The door remains closed. His wife remains outside. His wife was always outside.

Evans returns to his various tasks in confinement: he must continue his notes toward the novel he will write, and there are also crossword puzzles, cryptograms, codes, anagrams, word games, bridge problems, and chess hairgrayers for him to solve. Lovely small neurasthenic tentacles for Evans, who is already gripped by so many. Putting the novel from his mind for the time being, Evans decides to find all the possible anagrams of VENUS containing four letters or more, plurals not allowed.

From far remove the Captain materializes—as he is occasionally apt to—and looks over Evans’ shoulder, quizzicality and competence in his farsighted gaze.

“You forgot Nevus,” he says.

10

Evans conceives of himself as being in a compression chamber. Enormous gravitational forces occur on acceleration and re-entry, and his copilot’s body must be prepared for massive strain. The program will assist him. Curled into a ball, his detumescent prick merrily fucking the folds of his underwear, Evans feels the pressure surround him like a towel pulled tight, feels the matrixes of his body descend toward one another yet again. This is his fourth time in the chamber; he will be in eight times altogether, each at greater pressure.

Uff, Evans says, feeling his consciousness depart from him like a lover, woom, and faints, eight gravities tearing at him like a bride. When he awakens, the training staff is grouped around him, their eyes alight with interest. “Where is the Captain?” Evans says. “Are you doing this to him as well?”

“Never mind the Captain,” an elderly man says and touches Evans approvingly on the shoulder. “You go through the same things, although not at the same time. You went to eight gravities; that’s very good.”

“You son of a bitch,” Evans says, “I’m going to turn in a report. You can’t torture us for spite.”

“It’s the program, the preparation,” the elderly man says soothingly, “now quiet”; and Evans, considerably shrunken, staggers to his feet and waddles from the chamber, his hilarious posterior jutting for all the world to see, the little knifelike slant of his abused genitals now useless within his clothing. He reminds himself that the Captain is surely surviving the training and therefore he can as well. It is all for Venus and of the highest importance.

11

I write a letter to the institutional staff in which I admit to everything. I confess that I did indeed murder the Captain; during a dismal sleep period when I could not stand the humming of the transistors I caught him unawares and shoved him through a disposal hatch. “I guess that the selection process did have defects. Perhaps I was not as highly qualified as you hoped me to be,” I concede grudgingly.

Furthermore, I tell the staff that I am a felon, a lunatic, a criminal, a deviant. “Obviously I have totally buckled under the responsibility and imagined dangers of the Venus mission,” I point out. “There is certainly very little to be said in my defense other than that I never deliberately hurt him. He was merely an object in the alley of madness. I am inferior, gentlemen, terribly inferior, but what does this make of those who selected me? Can you tolerate this margin of error in your own spirit?”

I fold the confession in quarters and shovel it under the door in little stages, like sex, waiting for the guards to read it and remove my privileges. Place me into deeper custody without even the comfort of cryptograms. Nothing seems to happen for a long time, however, and I become bored with simply waiting; I am tired enough.

I sleep. In this particular sleep I have a dream that the Captain enters fully restored and bestows a kindly hand on my shoulder. “It’s not necessary for you to shield me any more, Evans,” he says with enormous benignity. The Captain Transformed, Transmutated, Ascendant, he says, “I feel perfectly well now after my little journey to the sun and am ready to tell them the truth. The beneficial heat has removed that touch of arthritis in my joints which I concealed from the Committee; now I am ready to tell them everything.” At that moment, leaning forward precariously toward him, knowing that at last I will get to the center of the matter and be finished, I hear the Captain say, “Oh, shit! I forgot that the sun gives you skin cancer; well, I won’t have to worry about that for ten years, which is plenty of time to tell you the truth, which is—” and I wake from the dream to find that the lights in my quarters are still fresh and that the confession meant for the institutional staff remains. It clings perilously by an uplifted corner to the underside of the door. No one has taken it. There were no guards after all, or at least no night patrol. Perhaps they have decided that I am harmless. In any event, no one is interested.

I retrieve the confession, therefore. Now I revise it completely and in line with the ultimate, undeniable truth: I tell them that the Captain poisoned the food supplies and thus made our hands unsteady, driving the ship off course and finally killing himself for fear of apprehension; but the fact is that I do not like this any better than the other approach and so in due course toward the dawn I destroy both copies.

Shredded, in the disposal unit and ready for evacuation, the papers whirl in the flush like the spokes of constellations.

12

I see the Captain in the compression chamber. His features do not change. The gravitational pressures do not affect him. Supine he lies, eyes closed, arms spread, looking toward the gray revolving ceiling with an expression simultaneously so profound and joyous that it is all I can do to combat my shame for yielding so easily to what he may transcend.

13

Sol is a Class C star, really little larger than a dwarf, now on the cycle of ascendance. It has been estimated by the best astronomers that in five or six billion years Sol will lose all energy, dwindle in size to become a husk, and then explode with the deadly power of an exterminator’s tool. Far before then, however, it will have lost the capacity to sustain intelligent life on any of the inner planets; it is quite doubtful, therefore, that this destruction will be witnessed at close hand by many.

The surface temperature of Sol is several million degrees. This is hot enough to warp a spaceship in seconds, to say nothing of a thinly shielded human form.

14

“Special treatment,” they say, lumbering into the room. “Now we will find out. We will discover why this mission failed.”

These are new personnel, heavy, some wearing full-dress uniforms with medals. I go with them unprotestingly; we scuttle through corridors.

“The truth,” I say. “That is of as much interest to me as to you. I want to know. I want to know what happened. Please tell me what happened so that then I can tell you. It is simple. It is all before us. If we can but find it.”

“Where is the Captain?” the machines ask. They have taken me to machines. Now I sit shielded by copper, my head dwarfed by helmeting, trying to get to the center of the matter. “Why did you kill him?” the machines inquire. “How did the ship turn around?” they query, and “How did you get home alone in a two-man capsule?” and restraints or no I try to tell them—gesture vigorously, use my hands to make a particularly intricate point—but the straps are quite binding and I have to do the best I can with the sole armor of my voice. Which I do not understand.

After a while it stops—machines, voice, restraints, everything—and I am returned to my room. There fresh piles of cryptograms and puzzles await me.

15

My wife and I seem to be having an argument. “I hate the program,” she says to me. “I can’t stand it any more. I want you to leave. If you won’t leave, I will, alone, and the hell with your damned public relations. Please, Harry,” she says, holding her breasts in her hands. (We are both naked; this discussion is taking place in bed.) “See these? For these do it for me. I know you hate it too. You told me once. For what we had together—”