Bradbury Speaks Page 14

  The project can be done; the only question is, will it be done?

  That depends on the president and/or the Congress. The latter is questionable. Space is low down on their priority scale.

  Why should we spend half a billion dollars on a comet? Because we must confront the mystery. What is a comet? The question runs back beyond Bethlehem, before the birth of the pharaohs.

  Is a comet a somewhat soiled but mighty snowball hurled from the left hand of God some winter morning He has long since forgotten? Is it the breath of some old sun now dead but whose final sigh still comes to whisper ’round our yard? Is it a halation of dusts and interplanetary cinders, fragments of meteoroid flaked from some chance encounter with a far planetary system?

  The commonest theory, advanced by Fred Whipple in 1950, describes cometary bodies as blizzards of frozen gases and nonvolatile solids. Small comets are a few hundred meters in diameter. The largest measure twenty miles across. As a comet enters the solar system, the sun heats the frozen sphere. The solar wind blows the debris into a tail a million miles in length.

  The scientific community is very interested in the Comet Rendezvous Program. It is likely that the debris caught in the frozen grasp of the comet head is primordial. As old as the universe. The Halley probe could analyze the dust by spectrometer and magnetometer. Cameras could give us a view of the birth scars of the solar system. It is an opportunity too important to pass up because of mere economics.

  Of course, there are other comets. The boys at JPL have come up with several alternative missions between now and the turn of the century. But Halley’s comet is so American. Indeed, when I first heard of the project, I suggested calling the probe the Mark Twain. Why?

  Well, now, Mark Twain was born in 1835, when Halley’s comet tore across the sky to welcome him. Doubtful of miracles, suspicious of heaven, nonetheless Twain later predicted he would depart this Earth when the comet came back to fetch him. It did, and Twain did, in 1910.

  Halley’s comet has a power over men’s imaginations that far exceeds shuttle diplomacy or the best of prime-time television.

  At the core of our Mark Twain celestial explorer would be cameras and multipurpose devices to photograph the comet, take its temperature, and, with luck, knife through to its bright interior. The instrument package we would hurl into the face of Halley’s comet is doomed—at fifty-seven kilometers per second, the comet devours everything in its path. Another fate awaits the surviving part of the ion-drive craft. It will head out beyond the orbit of Mars, turn tail, and play catch-up with Tempel 2 in 1988. The two will head together for the sun—and for six months we will listen in on their conversation. The ion-drive craft may be captured by the comet, or it may wander off onto a solo journey. It depends on the courtship of gravity.

  Then again, perhaps we can hurl these robot devices in such a way as to track the Tempel 2 comet on its entire circumnavigation of our solar system. Playing dead for a good part of the journey, our sensing machines could be programmed to reactivate in what might be called Project Lazarus. In the far mortuary reaches of space, we could call them awake so as to test the vision of Jupiter’s giant red eye or shake the frost from Pluto’s back porch.

  Think, then, when these long-distance runners return to speak in tongues late in the twenty-first century to tell us of far attic places where we as living flesh cannot follow. Someday, yes, our flesh will landfall Pluto and beyond. But for now our riddle-solving electric children must roam the vast star meadows to graph the heartbeat of Halley’s cosmic beast.

  What’s holding up this grand cosmic parade?

  As in the past, cash in the box.

  With a military budget sucking $129 billion away from cities, away from schools, away from hospitals, that inevitably means away from space, time, comets, and our possible future survival.

  Plus, we have been in a down cycle from overexposure to moon landings, astronauts, and the thousands of hours TV networks poured on us, ladling out multitudinous facts but little insight. We have had our feet and minds, as I have often observed, encased in Cronkite. Without poets, philosophers, or even smart political observers such as Eric Sevareid, the cosmic question goes a-begging year on year.

  Meanwhile, because we are so busy building arms to sell to Arabs to scare the Israelis and selling yet further arms to scared Jews to rescare Saudi Arabia and friends, we have no time to stand and stare. We opt out of being philosophers. To think would seem to be the worst thing we might accuse ourselves of. To think imaginatively is beyond comment. Dreamers, we snort, stand aside! Reality is the only tonic. Facts are the only medicine. Yet we are full of facts; we burst with data and are not made well. Our spirit flags on the pole.

  Can Halley’s comet play doctor to our souls? Can the ion-drive craft we build lift our blood and make us truly care about not just mere existence now but futures yet unplumbed?

  Why bother? a voice cries from the balcony. Who cares? What’s all the fuss and star feathers about?

  Very simply: We march back to Olympus.

  How’s that again?

  Well, now, we Earth people are great ones, aren’t we, for picking ourselves up by the scruff and heaving ourselves out of the Garden or off the holy mount? We shake ourselves together some facts and add them up to doom, don’t we?

  Consider: Two thousand years ago, everything was all right with man’s universe. We inhabited a planet around which the sun moved as if we were central to its existence. The stars did the same. We were God’s navel, and everyone found us good to look upon.

  Then along came various theologians and astronomers, and next thing we know, we’re evicted, both from Eden and from Mount Olympus. We found ourselves out in the rain with a bunch of demoted Apollos, Aphrodites, Zeuses, and Titans. It would take a few thousand years before we got around to naming some rockets for the lost gods.

  Meanwhile, the astronomers told us that we were not central to anything. We were, in fact, inhabitants of a rather smallish rabbit pellet whirling about a minor sun in the subbasement of a galaxy that did not much care whether we came or went, lived or died, suffered or survived.

  The knock on the head that this seeming fact gave us unsettled our egos for quite a few hundred years.

  If Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler told us these things, they must be right. If Darwin added that we were merely a bright chimpanzee wheeling a Maserati or a Pinto along time’s highway, well, then, why bother to get out of bed in the morning?

  But we have got out of bed, and we have gone to the Moon, and then we have reached up and fingerprinted Mars. And to those who look at data and say, Mars is empty, there is no life there, we shout:

  There is life on Mars, and it is us.

  We move into the universe. We name ourselves, along with our rockets, after old deities. We make ourselves central to existence, knowing not how far we must travel before we meet other mirrors of God staring back into His vast gaze.

  For, you see, while facts are important, interpretation of facts is the final builder or destroyer of man and his dream. If we choose to find ourselves minor, or of no worth, the dust will burn and hide our bones. But if we choose to step back into the Garden, devour the apple, throw the snake out into the ditch, and survive forever out beyond the Coalsack Nebula, the choice is ours. We will build Olympus and put on our crowns once more.

  That is what our encounter with Halley’s comet is all about.

  So there you have it: 1986 coming on fast. Here comes our chance to reach up. We would gently touch the passing face of that cold creature, the looming features of that strange matter and force on its blind way ’round the cosmos. We would do so with that puzzled, infinite curiosity that is the beginning of love.

  Do we miss this chance? Do we let time and space churn by without hastening to leap aboard? Do we keep our giant man-made pterodactyl home and lock our best dreams with it, in a box?

  I think not. For some century soon, we will be falling out there ourselves. Our dear flesh will outpac
e that lovely comet.

  Meanwhile, our fabulous machines must go for us, do for us, and come back smoking a pipe filled with incredible data, to tamp Mark Twain observations in our ears to lean us toward survival.

  If our mind flies now, our machines fly later, and our souls fly to follow both in twenty-first-century salvation armies of space. And the higher we fly, the more 1984 will recede like a failed threat, an evil promise disconnected, a hell boarded over, a death done in and buried by life.

  We will write a better book then. Its title will be 1986, and its hero will be the Great White Comet, and Huck Finn’s father’s kite will lay itself out on the solar winds to welcome it.

  As for the comet, it will arrive like doom.

  But it will go back out around with annunciations.

  What will it announce?

  Ourselves, of course, birthing ourselves back into the lap of God.

  Telling Him that soon, soon, oh, very soon, we will drop in for a visit....

  And stay for 10 billion years.

  THE ARDENT BLASPHEMERS (1962)

  Consider America, first of all the new breed of nations.

  Consider America, a nation, because of its newness, ardent in its blasphemy.

  Set in motion by the centrifuge of the great wheel of the industrial revolution, this people flung themselves across sea prairies to stand on New England rimrock and fling themselves yet on across land prairies. Shocking other ages, they blasphemed down the meadows and over hills as ancient as the memory of Jerusalem.

  Consider America, her fire-dragon locomotives huffing out vast devil bursts of fluming spark, setting the lion grass afire as they went.

  Come to a forest, cut it down. Come to a mountain, quarry it to pebbles. Skip the pebbles across God’s lakes. Build new mountains, finally, upright, and ornamented with man’s prideful encrustations. Then run men up and down elevator shafts to a heaven no longer believed in from a hell much better ignored.

  Consider the authors who lived in and with these men and wrote to channel this blasphemy, express it in symbols about which such men could enthuse like devil children. With a new nation being dreamed to life, set to rights with fabulous new toys, the uneasy dreamers cast about and came up with two most ardent blasphemers:

  Herman Melville.

  Jules Verne.

  “American” authors, both.

  Melville, the New Englander, and Verne, the Frenchman, you say, Americans both?

  “American,” yes, in their newness and their attack upon the universe and this world rolling through that universe.

  Another nation could have been “American” first. The seeds of man’s mechanical reaction to nature were cast forth first in England and France. But the flowering of what other ages might have considered an insidious tree was in this raw nation under God that which would soon ask Him to move over, jump aside, step down. We might not even ask His pardon while we scourged the mineral gut, packed once-holy echoes in electronic boxes to deal them forth commercially, split atoms as handily as peas, and dared God to answer back in equal thunders.

  I say another nation could have done this. But the accidents of time and circumstance dubbed us unholy first. Others follow us in our sacrilege: the Japanese and his insect-clicking camera, the Frenchman flung about by our LP jive, the Italian hopping Rome’s hills on angry adaptations of our motorbikes.

  The sacrilege was inevitable.

  The wheel invented by some fine fool of a first blasphemer, once set in motion just beyond old Egypt, rolls up in the late eighties of our time such dust clouds as would dim the bright visage of any spoiled God. Wheels within wheels within wheels rolled forth upon our land and, later, way in the middle of our outraged God’s air.

  And being firstest with the mostest, we not only did but read and, having read, did more.

  And Jules Verne was our text and testament, followed close by packs of “evil” boys like Tom Swift and his Flying Machine plus his A.C.-D.C I.B.M. Power-Circuited Grandmother.

  I Sing the Body Electric! cried Whitman.

  And Americans wound tight their robot devices and set them free to gnaw ugliness across the territories that now, very late, we must clean up after.

  But let us go back to our literary beginnings.

  Why, in introducing you to this book by Jules Verne, do I summon forth the lunar name of Herman Melville? What relation do I see between a Frenchman benevolent as a good uncle in his eccentricities and strange Cousin Herman, who some thought best kept in America’s attic?

  From the viewpoint of Gothic times peering ahead at the tidal wave of the future, let me set up these two men.

  God, after all, was in His heaven a long while, and things went well for Him, if not His children, upon earth. Those born-but-to-die inhabited His churches, and if they questioned, questions were best kept mum in one’s mouth or like gum behind the ear.

  But send these God-doting children free from Europe, strew and scrabble them across a whole continental surprise, hand them commotions and contraptions of steam and whiffling iron, and they pant up frenzies of revenge against God for having maltreated them down the eons.

  Out of questions suddenly posed and needs suddenly found most needful, as the steam blew off and the proud dust settled, we found:

  Mad Captain Ahab.

  Mad Captain Nemo.

  Moby Dick, the great White Whale.

  Nautilus, the whale-seeming submarine, first of its hidden and terrific sort, soaring through sea meadows among sinner sharks and true leviathans.

  Look how these two “evil” men implement their “blasphemy.”

  “Call me Ishmael.”

  So Melville strikes forth on his search for Moby Dick. In his first chapter we find:

  … Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

  Why does Ishmael go to sea?

  Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish....

  By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

  In 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne starts thus:

  The year 1866 was marked by a strange event, an unexplainable occurrence which is undoubtedly still fresh in everyone’s memory.... Several ships had recently met at sea “an enormous thing,” a long slender object which was sometimes phosphorescent and which was infinitely larger and faster than a whale.

  Verne continues:

  The facts concerning this apparition … agreed closely with one another as to the structure of the object or creature in question, the incredible speed of its movements, the surprising power of its locomotion and the strange life with which it seemed endowed. If it was a member of the whale family, it was larger than any so far classified by scientists....

  But it did exist—there was no denying this fact any longer—and considering the natural inclination of the human brain toward objects of wonder, one can understand the excitement produced throughout the world by this supernatural apparition.... />
  So two books begin. Both set somewhat the same tone, both strike chords that might recur within the framework of the book to follow. Yet swiftly we perceive rank differences. We soon know that while Uncle Jules is mostly gently mad, Cousin Herman is beyond the pale.

  We set sail with Ishmael, who, unknowing, is in the clutches of wild Ahab, seeking some universal truth shaped to a monster all frightful white named Moby Dick.

  We set sail almost simultaneously with Professor Aronnax and Ned Land and Conseil on the Abraham Lincoln in search of this other mystery that

  in every big city … became the fashion: it was sung in cafés, derided in newspapers and discussed on the stage. Scandal sheets had a marvelous opportunity to print all kinds of wild stories. Even ordinary newspapers—always short of copy—printed articles about every huge, imaginary monster one could think of, from the white whale, the terrible “Moby Dick” of the far north, to the legendary Norse kraken....

  So we suspect that Uncle Jules has touched minds somewhere down the line with Cousin Herman.

  But without any real exchange or superblending of madness.

  Mr. Verne will go his own way with his “educated” vengeance, leaving Melville with his Shakespearean terrors and laments.

  We do not meet Moby Dick face-to-face; we have only Ahab’s leg torn off in retrospect, until very late in Melville.

  But Verne, in chapter VI of 20,000 Leagues, heaves his “monster” to view and swallows our Jonahs whole and entire.

  Thus ending the tale as Melville might end it?

  No, thus starting to show us the vast differences between the odd American-type French writer and the truly driven New England author/sailor soon to be despairing customs inspector.

  Let us compare some few quotes from each writer.