Plus

3

The green thing did not have eyes. Imp Plus had thought of its eyes, but he had not really seen the green thing. Yet he had seen green. Was he in error?

He had spotted birds or shadows beyond him inside where he was. Was he in error?

Error was accepting the wrong perigee. Or giving the wrong velocity.

Yet adding TL to the frequency had been no error.

The orbit took the same time as Earth’s daily turn, and the near point nearly equalled the far, and the velocity of this stationary orbit 22,300 miles from Earth was 1.9 miles per second. It was a synchronous orbit. To be persuaded not, you would require a lie. Yet to lie about orbit or velocity was not to be in error. It was camouflage manipulated to persuade; for someone had said so, no less than someone, the camouflage was the decay of something. Maybe you could not stop this decay. It was too late. Yet you could not go out to meet it.

Camouflage.

Imp Plus knew the word. He didn’t know manipulate. He didn’t know from where he knew camouflage.

In place of where, was acrid, another word.

But acrid was not a word that had been said in the place where there had been acrid laughing. Camouflage had been said. The place was a room on Earth. Imp Plus had stood there. But when he had said to the acrid laughter, “Stick to the point,” the word camouflage had not been one of the words that had made him speak.

Camouflage had been said in that room on Earth. But before. Not then.

Someone was to be persuaded by the camouflage.

Imp Plus was putting unknowns over unknowns; that was what this felt like.

He did not know what felt was like.

Someone was to be persuaded by the camouflage; someone had said so. In that room on Earth near the end of things it was not the laugher who was acrid. Imp Plus had said to that laugher, “Stick to the point”—had said in the same hard voice but at another point, “Do you mind.”

And this other point had been when that person in the pale green room on Earth had said camouflage.

He had used the word acrid in that room on Earth. And he had felt separate. Which was why this laughter broke out later when someone said, “You don’t want to go on forever, do you?”

Someone was to be persuaded by the camouflage. But not yet. Persuaded by false perigee, false velocity. It was not the someone who had precipitated acrid laughter by asking Imp Plus if his desire was to go on forever. Who was it who was to be persuaded?

It must be someone on a frequency. Hence later in orbit the frequency check Imp Plus had thought needless.

But Imp Plus was putting unknowns over unknowns.

The someone could be an alien monitor.

The shapes like birds and shadows were not only longer or larger or more; they were now more an answer.

Say they were the alien monitor. But they were inside here, and the letters TL had been transmitted from inside here.

The alien monitor would be outside. If the letters TL had never till now been transmitted at the end of the frequency, the alien monitor would know only the frequency, not the TL. So the TL which Imp Plus came up with would show Ground it was not getting the answer from an alien monitor which might have been manipulating.

What was manipulating?

But Imp Plus was the IMP PLUS of the transmissions, and the dim echo inside his head had said the letters TL which Imp Plus knew stood for Travel Light; and since he had no head, the dim echo with these extra words that had made Ground say O.K. could be the alien monitor, except the dim echo had felt familiar, and if it was not inside Imp Plus’s head because Imp Plus himself was not inside his head because he did not have a head, the echoing voice was still inside; and was it then more familiar to Ground than Imp Plus was?

For Ground did not feel familiar now.

Yet in darkness and in light Imp Plus had, he felt, been able to respond.

Which was different from seeing eyes in the green thing that were not there.

But Imp Plus had called it chlorella. Now that was something. If he was putting unknowns over unknowns, maybe he’d get less.

Even if it was not chlorella. Or more than chlorella.

It was not animal. It was vegetable.

It gave off oxygen.

Unlike the blind news vendor who would not be a vegetable.

And unlike Imp Plus, who gave CO₂, Imp Plus did not know how he did that. Others knew about giving CO₂, so why didn’t he?

CO₂, said the dim echo. But this did not answer the question Imp Plus saw he had had the desire to ask: namely, how did he himself give CO₂?

The dim echo went on, but now from Ground came the words IMP PLUS SAY AGAIN. WHAT ABOUT CO₂?

Something up ahead caved, and he heard its absence of sound coil the way he had seen the green thing and had felt the green thing an idea and called it chlorella. And Imp Plus felt he could now answer Ground only in his own way, and the dim echo was not speaking to Earth now: and a thing caved out which was not metal though a ball glinting in a socket, yet caved in, a filament bulging in a space. And this was why the still dimmer echo that now was even more here with Imp Plus was no longer speaking to Earth, though he did not know why. And when Imp Plus thought about himself, he found he did not see how he gave CO₂—though he had known. And he found also he did not know why the echo was trying different numbers and saying arrow this arrow that, and all Imp Plus saw was that there was less space inside, and the capsule was more full, yet there was more of everything also, and the arraying of letters and numbers high and low breathed (for the dim echo said) a bond or bonds between the dim echo and him.

An orbit of bonds.

But then, CO₂ IS BEAUTIFUL, Imp Plus said to Earth, and metabolism crackled back like a code or laughter, and Ground said, SUIT YOURSELF IMP PLUS, YOU ARE DEVELOPING A SENSE OF HUMOR. WHAT IS CORRELATION BETWEEN THIS AND GLUCOSE INCREASE?

But what was metabolism? What he recalled put a shadow over what he thought he saw. He did not recall metabolism. Did he see it?

But now the dim echo reviewed orbital period, apogee, perigee, velocity. And Imp Plus thought there was no more camouflage: velocity could not be increasing, for in synchronous orbit perigee was as nearly equal to apogee as ellipse permits.

More crackling came. Ground said, IMP PLUS HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?

The crackling was acrid like camouflage. Arrows crackled from the dim echo. But arrows were only on a green space drawn partly white by an acrid hand. But crackling led by many lines which were now new holes to what now happened again: the caving in and out. This went faster to become silent, but the jets and the many sands of salt never fused no matter how fast, and Imp Plus did not himself have to tell anyone why, for the jets which were like strokes were not a pumping so much as an inclining so that he tilted in order to make a hill for the things to flow down or up. And, against the power outside, what was inside and was lately less was being pumped outside into what seemed more. And Imp Plus felt the caving in and out, and he thought because it burned it did not come through the protective window; then he felt the caving so much more that he felt other things. They moved within a wall not on the other side but in the wall. It was not one but many, while the things swarmed to get out or crackle it to pieces and were themselves pieces black and white. Or not black and white but other because of speeds at which pulses came from the fire-gold source of this light around or from the green chlorella itself or the green that was hard blue like the sea. For the voice that distant spring day on Earth just before it laughed its spiral up the spine that was not here now had cried, “Look at the colors of the sea.” For yes these pulses here now in orbit were color, yet depended on how Imp Plus inclined to see them. Pulses flying at you but never displaced. Yet pieces too. Or things beyond color. Too small to see but no less seen. He did not know you. Imp Plus desired the pieces but felt moved to name them first.

But the names came from the pale green rooms on Earth. He did not quite know those names. They might be camouflage, but they were not acrid laughter. Yet these names came some of them from the acrid laugher and not mainly in the large room where there was the acrid laughter and the acrid laugher’s words You don’t want to go on forever. The names came instead in a smaller room — our cell, he’d said — where the acrid laugher was only an acrid voice. And one of the names spoken by the acrid voice that now came as if Imp Plus himself should know it, was mitochondria. And two more were carbon dioxide.

But by now what had been damply nuzzling bumping to get out of that wall was not crackling any more. Though crackling was not really it. For there had been no sound.

What had tried to get out might as well have been the eyes that the green thing once had seemed to have.

But if Imp Plus had not exactly eyes and so could not have seen eyes in the green thing, this need not be why he knew now that the green thing hadn’t eyes after all.

I am Imp Plus, or a part, said Imp Plus.

He had been in another mode the word for which seemed unknown.

The cave-in came again dividing distance into more, so the cave-in was still further off from the dim echo busy with its arrangements. And this time the cave-in or cave-out had been a burst, an unknown cough individual in decay whose product was not hawked up to be gulped down, but instead the parts where the blast took place hadn’t been there before. As if after the smoke went, there they were. Or no, the smoke had come before the blast in reverse order.

But the smoke that cleared was not quite here. It was in a large pale green room on Earth where Imp Plus with reddening skin had said to acrid laughter Do you mind.

But if not here, then why had it cleared here? For it had cleared, and there were moving things in the chlorella which were not only chlorella; and the moving things spun and had names Imp Plus had prepared to recall but they didn’t matter except their sound of spin which Imp Plus desired Earth not to overhear and which he chose not to make even as a respiratory transmission to the dim echo right here which was saying to itself or to Imp Plus, “Chlorella contains photosynthetic cells, cells contain cytoplasm, cytoplasm contains chloroplasts which have membranes, membrane contains structure, structure contains chlorophyll.”

But the dim echo that Imp Plus felt part of him in the curve of what happened had said something that no more made these chloroplasts beat like glistening lids than had the acrid voice when it had shown Imp Plus the garden.

But here it was: green not as he had prepared or could have prepared to remember — not a dark beet-green or spinach-green or a dull jewel of buds called broccoli. And not a green that eyes in a late green room had seen. No, a green of its own breathing, its own breath.

If the cavings were a seeing, was that how he saw without eyes?

It could not be much.

And if Imp Plus had not known, with a desire like the windy flight of long-winged birds shearing the tips of the sea, that the dim echo was no real part of him but part of what Imp Plus was part of, he could have thought it the alien monitor or thought himself what the camouflage was meant to be an answer to.

Meant? Manipulated. Manipulated was the word. Said by a not-acrid voice in the pale green room on Earth. This had been a good voice. Not the acrid voice.

The acrid voice, to whom someone had said, “Say that again,” said near the end of things You don’t want to go on forever, do you? and had also said in a smaller pale green room, and not a full year before then, things similar to what came from the dim echo here now in orbit though with a feeling absent from the echo’s syllables and in words that now but even then caved out and in like some reach of Imp Plus. This reach seemed why he did now recall them, except he was the one who had said, “Say that again”—but whether in answer to the forever question or to these other things, he could not recall. Except that he had prepared to recall some of them but now not exactly these: cytoplasm (the acrid voice had said in the smaller room), cytoplasm you know about, and we are talking (said that acrid voice) about the cytoplasm of cells that are called eukaryotic cells, cells with an already well-formed kernel—nucleus to you (the voice had said — but meant what? — and Imp Plus had not known the tone of the voice except to feel he was stopped from asking, then stopped it seemed at times from listening: to words like mitochondria that had had to do with him but not so that he’d been led to respond while the acrid voice had gone on naming events in which, as the voice now said:) we need to see what happens between two kinds of organelles. The first are the structures which turn light into chemical energy—chloroplasts to you (said the voice with that sound of ill will so Imp Plus did not ask what organelle meant — yet he knew!). And the second kind are the structures in which enzyme systems help oxidize food then regain the resulting energy in the form of ATP, and are thus the cell’s power plants—mitochondria to you.

But why to Imp Plus?

For him it should be the other way around — power plants to Imp Plus. His supplemental briefing from the acrid voice built up in him a cold charge that was large, minus, and more than full. But the briefing then kept the charge from getting out into more than a single question he had wanted to ask so much that the walls of the smaller pale room on Earth had begun to move more in than out to increase his towering discomfort, and the charge got out only by jumping the room, let go by Imp Plus’s words I’m ill. Which was no news to the acrid voice.

Nor more new to Imp Plus than his own jumping words not quite a full year later, Do you mind: for these had been among the questions the cold acrid voice in the smaller room had inhibited in him, and if less to the point than the question What is an organelle? or What is oxidize? or What is the link between how enzymes inhibit and how they release? — the sudden Do you mind uttered by Imp Plus a year later in a larger pale green room amid acrid laughter had also been more to another point: and this point was nonetheless itself nothing like the project’s data on electrons shot by enzymes along a cell’s chain of respiration, or on the electron carriers called cytochromes, or concerning ordinary cytoplasm which the dim echo here now in orbit — how wholly far from the pale green rooms — reminded Imp Plus was the stuff outside the cell’s core. This an acrid voice on Earth cast on a screen to show lurking near the cell wall the alien ellipsoid — that known power plant the mitochondrion, which in great numbers must as a power plant have let off later the laughter which Imp Plus answered on impulse back there in a larger pale green room. Answered with a Do you mind shot at the acrid voice that had thrown up at him a supplemental mass of tobacco smoke. From this Imp Plus turned to a microscope on a table. He had guessed again the smoker’s feeling. It had preceded the emission of the smoke, but it held itself now behind the smoke. And Imp Plus had prepared to recall what the project controllers meant him to, but also something else he had thought: which was that the camouflage spoken of in this room, near the end of things — this camouflage that might be manipulated (one voice said) to persuade—might be used not on an alien monitor but on this unknown extra, this late addition to TL, namely Imp Plus.

But if that was what it meant, it was one more thing to try to remember, while always he tried not to think of the speed of light darting inside all of him decaying into holes he could not fill with any amount of desire if all his ill body could think about was lentil soup for lunch.

So to dispel the atmosphere of his own Do you mind, he had dispelled the burning smoke and said, “Well you can’t call me a hypochondriac.”

A non-acrid, or good, voice had said, “What are we going to call you?” and had coughed for a number of seconds, and it shook its head laughing like a friend so the coughing and laughing were one spiral, and said, “I don’t know about you but I’m giving it up.” So to lighten the atmosphere Imp Plus had said, “I’ve nothing left to give up.” To which the good voice that had stopped coughing had said, “You have a place — like Goddard.”

The great Goddard in a white coat. The Goddard who launched a liquid-fuel rocket from a handmade farm and kept it quiet for years.

But the acrid voice had said to the good voice, “Think how Goddard went.” Then the acrid voice had eyed Imp Plus, and when the good voice had coughed some more against the oxidizing cigarette and coughed also about the crab that had got caught in great Goddard’s throat, Imp Plus had acted to dispel the smoke in the pale green room and had said that if his place was not in the century like Goddard’s, it was then maybe a place in the decade like that of REP in his.

The self-shortened nickname of another great. And Imp Plus’s own words given off from a communicating room now how much later in orbit round the Earth came from an Imp Plus that Imp Plus could not place. But he placed REP. It was French, like the smoke—Row-bare, plus two more words. REP wanted to be first to get a plane off the ground. REP before War-’14 had foreseen atom-driven spaceships.

But this time the source of the French smoke — namely the acrid voice — had waved the smoke but not like a shearwater sweeping seafoam — toward Imp Plus. Who then had seen that the wave had meant to sweep it away. But no, the acrid voice had been coming through it then to extend to Imp Plus.

To extend a thing that now how much later in orbit the dim echo blocked: by transmitting data on REP: but to Imp Plus: namely that REP built a plane, wrote a book, said the word astronautics, thought up the control stick, almost completed a rocket to shoot instruments sixty miles high, typed letters in French on a machine, but in German wrote using what Imp Plus could not use any better than a control stick and so heard, in the dim echo’s transmission, as smoke: but saw, not heard: yet saw not smoke but the live thing that reached to Imp Plus through the smoke as if the breathing tobacco was smoke whose decay could carry more than carbon and burning. But then that thing through the smoke became a handmade fraction of itself, a false fraction which was a message to Imp Plus that followed from REP by means of data other than and now drowned by what came from the dim echo about the French satellite D-1A, or Diapason. And this data, first radiant, then gray, dimmed if it did not replace what had been missing from the live thing attached to the acrid voice that the acrid voice had extended toward Imp Plus through the camouflage: the data just about jammed that absence out with data on cells: cells to catch the Sun — Sun cells — cells in panels mounted in Diapason’s paddles that could be articulated to make best use of the Sun’s light.

“Four,” said now in orbit the dim echo, naming the number of Diapason’s paddles. But what was the dim echo?

And “Four,” Imp Plus had once said to supply that handmade fraction the acrid voice had withheld: withheld toward him through smoke. Yet now in faraway orbit Imp Plus had no use for the words said along with “Four.”

But he looked now through the absent digits—fingers, he knew fingers—four fingers snapped out of sight — and looked through the dispersals of smoke to the ill will transmitted in the face of the acrid voice. Imp Plus knew the word face. And seeing that unknown but present ill will, he remembered preparing to remember it. Which was no more the same as being briefed to remember, than oxygen was the same as oxidize.

And now at the same time, the division of known Four by known Four left them an unknown One which was not the Imp Plus being briefed in those pale green rooms on Earth and not the busy, informed dim echo here with him in orbit which seemed to know all that Imp Plus had used to know and so seemed even to have once been he. Oxygen was O.

Upending the operation whereby known Four paddles over known Four absent fingers yielded unknown One, Imp Plus felt all around him unknown cavings-out divided by unknown cavings-in to yield space now as spreading as what he’d now come to know he’d lost; as known as four French fingers lost in Row-bare E-P’s work with rocket fuel, familiar as Imp Plus’s own lost fingers and his words to the acrid face: “How do you know the four fingers REP lost were all on one hand?” and familiar as Imp Plus’s own hand and the long acrid hand that had come through smoke shifting its matter into swirls, come through by means of a circle of smoke that jogged the swirls and got flattened itself — the acrid hand came through as if to shake Imp Plus’s hand, only to turn then not into smoke’s acrid signal but an upright thumb’s crude sign knifing humorously upward to remind Imp Plus that he would lose spine, fingers, face and hands, ankles, elbows, neck flying off in radiations of centerless radii, knees, skull, mineral teeth, and don’t forget skin, no longer monitored as it used to be. Skin sensing in advance what the acrid laugher’s palm would feel like in the handshake that then had been withheld. Great Goddard’s terminal sore throat had happened, and Imp Plus had felt for it because in addition to fists and other parts he’d been scheduled to lose in the operation that must precede Operation TL, he would lose his throat.

But what he had been coming to was this: that while the body had been too ill to recover, the throat had not yet been ill. Nor made ill by the acrid voice’s smoke at the earlier briefing in May, nor at the conference less than a full year later in the larger pale green room when the acrid voice thought Imp Plus betrayed a secret hope that Operation TL would last — but the acrid face: this was what Imp Plus had now been coming to — dividing the unknown distances from known to known — to this: the thought that an orbit-decaying contingency plan could be used on him had been dimmed and replaced by the acrid face whose ill will he had thought he saw through the smoke: ill will that said, “Think what you’re going to lose: on behalf of Operation TL: think of it.”

From which Imp Plus had turned back to look down a lens because he could not stand to see the acrid voice. Yet saw only his own quickening decay. Yet now in the midst of Operation TL — in an orbit synchronous with Earth’s for this way Ground could hope to keep solely to itself its radio loop with Imp Plus — a chance fell out around him in new latticed gradients of brightness not like any gradient grid his old ill-briefings had readied him for, a force that came from the direction of the chlorella and the chloroplasts that he found himself comprehending — or seeing — and came from the unwrapping map of the Sun and, on his cabin wall, the birds and the shapes that cast them, but came as well from migrations of himself.

And this new memory received then with desire what had happened that late winter day in the absence of those four fingers snapped out of sight as if cut off at the knuckles of the acrid hand. Yes, the ill body of Imp Plus had been divided by that ill will, divided.

In the large green room that gave off carbon and carbon dioxide and that was not the green thing that gave oxygen, the good voice had said, “We have a casualty,” and had asked if Imp Plus was O.K. For he’d gone pale. For the blood he was soon to shed had slipped from his face. And its sudden drop (cause or effect of a towering headache) had made along the blood’s middle an opposite cascade — tissue of spindles, a logged current, to some place safe among the cells of what would remain when his remains were taken from him. He was so afraid of that that he thought only that he was breathing the acrid voice’s carbon dioxide, but what he feared was that he took the CO₂, but gave nothing back.

Yet spindles. Axis upon axis. Not wingless fuselages, and so much more than logs in a river, and not the first time or pale green room. But cascades shuttling from plasms to light too fast for ionizing words like chromosomes to yield fear for the things they named any more than for the one part of him that would be left when the words of the operation had subtracted him. Axis upon axis. Electromagnetic cascade. Parts broken down into fresh motion, not decayed dioxide — that was the idea. Or it itself. Or his desire or desired memory. Also fear. Of being a vegetable hawked as an Extra by the vendor who had taken hold. For Imp Plus would be news.

But he had been stranded between knowing. He had thought electromagnetic cascade. It was not wrong. And was so much more than logs in a river, but he had seen those logs in his thought like solids. But now that Earthly sight was dark years off and best so.

That sight as far off now as a spring day when he’d been touched — he couldn’t cast away the touch — by another laughter which moved up the grid of his back, and he had turned from the unhooded carburetor of a car that would not go and had seen first acres of sea crest skimmed by three broad-winged shearwaters.

And nearer had seen the light laughter and the mouth. And in order to save face started to say that the cause of the trouble was between the points and the carburetor. But the mouth was saying, “Forget the car,” and saying words that folded the soft laughter inward into words that said, “Glad I didn’t pack a bag.”

Something lay between those words and the next words. Was it CO₂ or was it Oxygen?

Whatever it was, it came not from the acrid mouth that blew the flattening ellipse, but another mouth — in words this other mouth did not know all the meaning of. And these next words were “Travel light.”

Between which the dim echo now must come transmitting correct velocities. But were they correct? And Imp Plus did not know if the transmission was to Ground or him. He seemed to be transmitting within himself. DIM ECHO. ACRID VOICE. GOOD VOICE.

He must heed the cavings-in, he must heed the cavings-out, and the shapes around whether they heeded him or not.

There was more all around, and the more all around was joining itself to Imp Plus.