Sic Itur Ad Astra
And, as a dying meteor stains a wreath Of moonlight vapour, which the cold night clips,It flush'd through his pale limbs, and pass'd to its eclipse._________ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonaïs The North Carolina highway, the one that led to the place where he grew up, far away from Houston and far away from failure and ruin, always made Collins, Irving Collins, think, and think in ways he usually didn't like to. He was thinking - thinking about his life, what led to this point, the days and months and years were all a beautiful tapestry he was busy ripping to shreds as the speed limit changed from 45 to 55. His uncle - he understood his uncle now, he understood him perfectly and he lamented the days of his youth, living in fear of the Nam vet who was so badly shell-shocked he was little more than clinically insane. But he was just a young punk kid then - he just couldn't get his uncle back then, how something you experienced could kill your brain, turn you into a blithering idiot like someone from an H.P. Lovecraft story. It happened so long ago - how could they be so tangible, so real, years later? He understood his uncle now, because the way his uncle could vividly recount via hallucination and nightmare his experiences of certain doom and certain tragedy was how he was experiencing what had happened three weeks ago.********** "Malfunction." The shrill shrieks drilled into every ear there, the last desperate gasps of a dying man who, more than losing his life and knowing it, was just plain scared, in the deepest and most primal way a man could ever be scared - exactly like the fear that everyone at Ground Control felt, the fear of the creeping Bogeyman in the mind of a six-year old, fear that drove grown men into their mother's arms, crying, begging her to make it stop. "Malfunction." Shouting, yelling, attempts to bypass, attempts to correct, attempts to compensate - he was running, running from station to station, he was looking up at the screen and fighting back dry heaves, his and everyone's worst fears exploding - oh Jesus, what a poor word choice - exploding all
over the monitor. "Malfunction." Nothing worked. Nothing they did worked. The door wouldn't open, the thrusters wouldn't fire...the goddamn thrusters wouldn't fire! Fire the goddamn thrusters, why won't the goddamn thrusters fire?! When it was all over, when it was for certain that they lost him, the most hideous silence fell over the entire room. And then someone down in front - some diagnostics guy he had seen once or twice before now - turned back to him with a crushed look on his face that, though wordless, though completely silent, hurled scream after scream of terrified disbelief and abyssal despair. "Malfunction." People slouched in their chairs. Hands went to foreheads, headphones were thrown off, perfect-pitch openings to sobbing staccatos made debuts here and there, swears and oaths and harsh, painful sighs polluted the whole room. "Malfunction."
******* There was no worse way to die, Collins, Irving Collins, decided. He'd rather be put through anything than what he had just seen happen to another man. All little boys want to be astronauts when they grow up - he'd been one of them. He could hear his father's blithe laughter and his hand ruffling his hair after he told him that very wish, and it made him sick to his very heart. "...on a rocketship, pa! Faster and faster and faster..."**** The inquiry later said there was some thirty to thirty-five seconds of struggle before the inevitable happened. Bullshit. It was thirty five years.******* The man - the dead astronaut, the man whose body and spacecraft were now floating weightless in a decaying orbit around a pale blue dot - was Tom Ryan. Was - past tense. Wikipedia killed him, like Anna Nicole Smith, a solid ten minutes before the networks did.
********** Somebody had to tell the Director. The Director was asleep, so the Assistant
Director was called, he was asleep too, but to Hell with it, this couldn't wait. The silence was so stunned when the news was given it was thought, at first, that the phone had been disconnected. "He's - he's gone? He's really gone?"******* Somebody had to tell the President. It was a thankless task and a fool's errand - because only a fool would give that man such awful news at this hour, and with everything that had been going on in his life lately...the trouble in the Middle East, poll numbers slipping, the usual worries of the 21st Century Commander-In-Chief. Add to that, of course, it was the middle of the night. His reactions were hard to gauge, and there were no guarantees how he'd react to this. But somebody had to tell him.******* Somebody had to tell the wife. When the wife, Anne, asked who this was, as if the identity of the bearer of the bad news would make some sort of difference, he responded: "Collins. Irving Collins. Chief of Flight Control." That was his name, that was his title - both were empty, both were pointless, both didn't matter anymore. Anne Ryan screamed something about how he had been the man who said nothing could go wrong, how nothing could go wrong, how could he say nothing could go wrong and then this and then this happens - Anne Ryan was screaming something about who he was, and who he had been, and he was made to stand there, phone in hand and gripping it tighter and tighter, being told who he was and who he had been, while realizing with every passing second that the phrases were excellent descriptors for a man whose reputation and emotions were now in ruins.
********** The radio station he liked to listen to had played that Sinatra song, "Come Fly With Me," on September 11th, probably by accident. Back then all he could do was turn off the radio in disgust - and had, several years hence, thought it would have been so much better to have called them and given them a very choice piece of his mind. They did it again today, as he was driving on his way home to North Carolina, and he did what he should have done back then, today, and called them, and really let them have it. Since he called the office and not the request line, he spoke to a secretary, and was so harsh she was
crying before he hung up the phone.******* Some months before, FoxNews had interviewed the family. The most memorable clip from this recycled piece of news-garbage was the little girl - and that one thing she said. "My daddy rides with the stars! He said he'd bring me one back one day." They showed that footage of the smiling little girl, cuter than a thousand buttons, in her father's arms, hands clasped about his shoulders, over and over. Her mother - his wife, at least sometimes, but the public would never know for sure whether all the rumors about her sleeping with one of the engineers were true or not - was beside her. The perfect picture of domestic bliss, made depraved and hideous by its new context. Three months ago, no one had given a damn about this clip. Now - well, now... "My daddy rides with the stars!" Anderson Cooper called it exploitative, but he was still showing it on his show - Ed Schultz, O'Reilly, they all played it once or twice during their segments for what seemed like a solid week. The whole interview was leaked to YouTube, and there it achieved immortality, and there the debate raged - interspersed with comments expressing sorrow and sympathy and "prayers" - whether the media was "exploiting" this family and their tragedy. The same thing would happen a few days later, and you could hear the entire nation cringe: "I don't him want to be in space forever up there, Mommy! I want him here! I want him to bring me my star!" But she was right: the son of a bitch didn't go to be with the angels. His helmet came off, and he died the worst death the human mind could ever envision.*******
Collins, Irving Collins, was drunk as Hell the day of the funeral. The guy who was speaking - one of several, but the guy who did most of the talking - was a state senator from Florida who knew Tom Ryan personally, who had believed in him as the golden boy of NASA and given so much time and, being cynical, porkbarrel spending to make the new missions happen. And this man, the state senator, who was going to use this appearance to launch a national career more than probably, droned and on and on in the most egregiously overdone purple-prose bullshit. Here it came: infinite undiscovery, boldly go where no one has gone before, touching the face of God - all of it was there, all of the high-flown high-falutin
horseshit that must be customary every time an explorer or someone who's that synthesis of brave and stupid dies. He had to sit through the whole thing, a hot drunken mess, crying like a baby, knowing his ex-wife was watching him at home with her hand over her mouth, asking herself why she ever divorced him. Because he was pathetic, that's why. And now, on every news network, was the taped evidence, there and then, an overcast day at Arlington. But he wasn't alone, not for long anyway: the senator wouldn't shut up, he just kept going, and the more he kept going, the more he and his NASA people - all clustered together, like they were animals trying to huddle and keep warm from a terrible blizzard - got sicker and sicker, until they were all crying.
******* Tom Ryan was the Barack Obama, the JFK, the Tony Blair, the new face and the new voice of NASA. He was 31, beautiful family, Hollywood looks and MIT smarts. He was a national hero who had single-handedly - call a spade a spade, that's really what happened - single-handedly pulled NASA back from the brink of being the red-headed stepchild of federal agencies. He was too young, too beautiful, too amazing, too cool and altogether too precious to live for long. God hates it, you could say, when you're too much of anything to millions of people.******* Two reporters, one male and one female, in the best Mulder-Scully Stabler-Benson tradition of alternate-gender pairings, stood together, one snapping pictures and the other furiously taking notes, the words and the events almost outpacing her output. This was going to be their big break, what would make their career, if they played their cards right and they did everything about this story right. But she stopped as something caught her eye - she elbowed her partner, who looked down at her quizzically. Silently, she motioned to the grieving widow.
******* The image of Anne Ryan holding their young daughter as she sobbed and sobbed, begging anyone who would listen to bring back her daddy, was instant gold. Of course it was child exploitation - it was JFK Jr. saluting his daddy's coffin, it was the tearful little girl waving an American flag at the 9/11 rally. It was no better than kiddie porn, and everyone knew it, and no one said anything - America loves nothing more than a poor little white kid who misses her parents. Instant. Pulitzer. Gold.******* Anne Ryan had refused
to look at him - Collins, Irving Collins - in the eye the whole day. It was just as well - he refused to look at himself in the mirror for however long it had been, he had refused to look his uncle in the eye since he had been a little boy. It all made sense. It wasn't supposed to - but it all made sense. The image of his dead uncle staring him down with tears in those huge blue-crystal eyes - everyone said he and his uncle shared those eyes, that it was uncanny - flashed before him, somewhere on the dead stillness of the nighted highway. "I'm sorry," he choked aloud. "I'm so, so sorry..." But it occurred to him immediately he had no idea who he was saying sorry to.
********** "You know," said the one reporter to the other, "this whole thing reminds me of that - that one song." "Which one?" The first reporter wrestled with the memory inside her head: "Oh - what was that song, you know, the one that went - " She paused as the words came to her: Earth below us, Drifting, falling... Concurring, the other reporter nodded thoughtfully. "Yeah, I know the one - and yeah it does. Only thing is - Major Tom had chance to say 'give my wife my love.' Tom Ryan never did." The two of them sat in thoughtful silence on the terrace of the restaurant, dress clothes askew and unkempt from a full day of dashing around Washington, watching the night sky. The first reporter noticed that the second reporter had suddenly gotten a long, wistful look in his eyes...a stare that went beyond the city, beyond the lights, somewhere only he could see. "Is it weird..." he said slowly, still staring and not bothering to look at his partner, "...that my mom would sing me that song as a lullaby?"
********** Collins, Irving Collins, a man possessed, finally could take it no longer: he pulled over, on that lonesome highway that could have been, so dark and desolate, one of those imaginary lines drawn between points of light in the sky to make constellations. He stumbled out of his car, collapsed to the ground, and wept - and wept on, for what possibly may have been hours, until something caught his eye. Streaking across the sky was the longest, most beautiful shooting star he had ever seen. It moved slowly, it seemed, brilliantly and majestically, like a kamikaze pilot whose death, however pointless and however grisly, still stood sublime. He had no proof - he
had no way of knowing, no way of even believing for a passing instant that what he saw...that what he saw was what he knew. This was no time for logic, for what he believed and unbelieved for decades now - this was no time for Carl Sagan's billions or Richard Dawkins' empty, Godless universe. Back he went, back he went again - the memories of he and his father at Church, looking ridiculous in that miniature suit, telling him he wanted to ride a rocketship, faster and faster and faster... The Face of God, they said at the eulogy. He touched the Face of God. Two tears rolled down his cheeks, so big they could reflect all the stars in the sky, flowing down his face and plunging down, down into the Earth. And then here it came, that old trope, that stupid catchphrase from that stupid movie - the one he saw when he was still a boy, what started him off on this journey that led him, blindly but inexorably, here. But - it was true. It was so goddam true-- My God. It's full of stars.