The meal is further interrupted when Houston puts forth its ideas about how to prevent disorder from breaking out on the Mars mission. The note is to Laurie Corelli, who has probably already been briefed as to its contents, but we are copied on it, as is the Geronimo. The note is among the evening bulletins for the mission, and so it shows up on my clipboard, right by the dinner table.
“Read it out,” Jim says.
“‘Pequod and Geronimo, dock ship-to-ship at 0500 hrs, 28 Nov, instructions, coordinates to follow. Astronauts Lepper and Quartz to be exchanged. Excelsior as per earlier orders.’ ”
“Holy shit,” Jim says.
José says, “I say we cook them and eat them.”
“José,” Jim says, “you don’t have manners.”
“I’m not paid to. That was nowhere in the job description. There were, however, some sections about geological training, the chain of command, and absolute loyalty to mission objectives.”
Dinner comes to an end at this point. The discussion lapses, that is, and this is when I do the dishes. We hear nothing more from the Pequod for the evening, and I am loath to ring them up in order to hear about what’s going on, just as I am loath to fire a message off to Debbie Quartz, who may or may not be conscious. Back at home, you kids probably think that all is going well up here, and that we are following a mission plan that allows certain crew members to go into cryonic suspension, or something approaching cryonic suspension, in order to preserve resources until such time as we arrive. If only we could freeze José.
Three days pass, and we do our best not to dwell on what we cannot control. The big questions have to do with how you sleep, and whether you can still move your bowels after two months of reconstituted, freeze-dried food products. Answer: not exactly. This is not such a bad thing for someone like your correspondent, who, as I have said, is noted for explosive difficulty in these areas. On one of these three days, I spend a long time reading up on necrotizing fasciitis, which is having that big outbreak in the Detroit area. It’s probably only when you are up in the little soda can that you feel fully protected against an outbreak of necrotizing fasciitis that is sweeping through the rather large tent encampments in that city. If there are any of you reading these remarks from the Detroit area, please accept my condolences for the outbreak, and let me say that I dedicate today’s portion of the journey to any of you; you are in my thoughts, and I really mean that.
Of course necrotizing fasciitis makes me think about this mysterious bacterium that Debbie Quartz mentioned, the one that was originally found in ALH 84001, the interplanetary bauble that washed up on Antarctica. I keep thinking I should ask José about ALH 84001, or maybe I should ask Arnie Gilmore about this.
And somehow the whole situation reminds me of those last three hundred whooping cranes, those birds that someone has been forcibly migrating back and forth from Florida for the past twenty-odd years with the aid of an ultralight. This small population of birds is not a sustainable population, the experts all say, because with the right outbreak of avian flu, which we already know can knock out a couple million people in an overcrowded ecosystem, the entire whooping crane population could collapse. One germ and extinction follows. A beautiful thing, though, a whooping crane, and in the not-so-distant future there will be only a couple of them left, and they will have only one wing apiece, and they will idle on some lawn, like the lawn near Cape Canaveral. One of this nonmating pair will die of old age, and then there will be the one last whooping crane, and it will eat moldy popcorn from underneath the NASA reviewing stand, and it will have delusional thoughts, mothballed memories in which it was part of a flock, and this flock followed an ultralight down to Brazil for the winter, and then back again. What does our whooping crane think? The last whooping crane of planet Earth? The last one? It thinks that the currents of air are a marvel, and it conceives of them in colors, spectra, as we think of sunsets; just so does the last whooping crane, despite the fact that only the one wing works, think of those air currents; it remembers treetops, which were like sofas to the whooping crane; back when it still had two wings, it could land in any treetop and put its head under its wing, and the whooping crane remembers, or believes it remembers, certain kinds of fish that are particularly savory, and maybe a certain level of freshness in the matter of seafood is what a whooping crane most prizes, and it remembers mating, because back when it was young it was picky in the mating department, and like many whooping cranes it was not, despite its lanky beauty, terribly kind to the girls; moreover, there was always the danger of infighting among the whooping cranes, and this last crane remembers all of this, and because the crane cannot speak of it, the memories are that much more painful, and now, in his loneliness, there is no other bird who protects that past of cranes, that long history of the most beautiful bird in this part of the country, and so the only other account of these events, after the others fade, is the memory of the guy who flew the ultralight, a balding guy with a not-very-good sense of humor, a guy who told the worst jokes, not that the whooping crane understood the jokes, but rather the whooping crane recognized the timbre of this man’s voice, a kind of ragged baritone that shaded into the tenor range, but with outbreaks of alto when he got nervous, and this was the call of the ultralight, as far as the last whooping crane is concerned, this guy’s rather humorous voice; it was not the cry of the whooping crane, which is a majestic sound, it was the cry of some bald guy who never much expected to be piloting birds. He probably believed he would have a career in civil aviation, or maybe he thought he would be an astronaut or something, and in fact that is what he decides to do because the day comes when this pilot can no longer fly the ultralight, because there are not enough cranes anymore, there is only the one crane, and he is crushed, well, come on, everyone is crushed, life crushes you, and this is just one more story to stomp up and down on your crushed heart, this balding fellow going to visit the last crane sometimes, over where he thinks the crane might still be living, in some cage for injured birds, and he and the crane recognize each other, indeed, though they have no common language in which to speak of their recognition, there is no way for the crane to speak of the man as a man speaks of a crane, and it would all go fine if the man could speak in the tongue of cranes, but he can’t. While he’s visiting with the crane, there is, in the distance, a liftoff, one of the last space shuttle missions, and you can see it from almost twenty miles away, the conditions are that favorable in south Florida that day, and the guy, the balding pilot, the one with the bad jokes and the not-terribly-reliable timbre to his voice, thinks that maybe the only reasonable thing to pursue after the experience of flying the ultralight is the experience of going up into space, as soon as he can, and he sits on a bench by the one-winged whooping crane for a while, and then he notices that he is talking to the whooping crane, and he’s saying, “Well, I don’t exactly want to leave you here like this; I can’t really think of anything worse, and I have left some people behind in my life, who hasn’t, even some people I loved, but none of that is as bad as thinking that I won’t see you here again, and no one who comes here to see you will know what I know about you, and you won’t recognize these people, nothing could be worse, but still a man has to move on sometimes, I can’t just stay here doing this, and so I’m wondering, would you think it was okay for me to go ahead and undertake to become an astronaut? Do you think you could possibly give me your blessing?” He knows that the whooping crane can’t answer him, that’s obvious enough, but he feels he owes a reasonable explanation to the whooping crane, even more of an explanation than he owes his wife or his parents, and the crane can’t see how bad the pilot feels, how broken up he is, when the man thinks that he won’t be able to visit the crane again. When the crane is a thing of the past, when the crane is nothing more than fertilizer for creatures to come, the pilot will only learn of it online, because he will be off pursuing his ambition, flying his test missions, sleeping in the barracks, all so that he might get the hell off the planet that slew the whooping cranes.