Mysteries of Motion Read Online Free

space-station projections in perfect, trustworthy and prophetic order: “Further hope for more righteous times to come is encouraged by the invention of the lie detector.”
    When young Gilpin the grad student came to that fool pronouncement, he rolled onto the floor, kicking out his heels and inadvertently hitting the girl in the eye. Apologizing, “I’m trying to stand on my brain. Like on a big toe.” To console her further, he’d clawed among his scattered books and read the passage to her.
    “They all have these last chapters. Just say Utopia, and they all go slavering. Without a shred of evidence like they’ll spend pages accumulating, on, say, how a water-glycol system acts in space. Or with none of the hardnose they’ll give you on, say, what makes a gyroscope go crazy just at the last.” He quoted Oberth again: “‘The gyroscope is a mysterious object for minds romantically inclined.’” Meanwhile patting her purpling eye. “You know, it’s as if man is not an evidential creature. Or not to them.” She wasn’t consoled and huffily requested a cold compress. In bed again, he suddenly shot up on the pillow to cry, “I’ve got it! It’s sainthood they’re after. Like in any new world—and you can at least trust them to know it’ll be that—sainthood has to be involved. Oh, not for them. For mankind. And that means you and me, Madge.” She’d crawled out the other side of the bed, and being already in her cuddly fake-fur jacket for warmth, grabbed up her sandals and left.
    He hadn’t detained her. He’d found his vocation. Or its practical application. His intellectual friends knew of course that “outer space” was getting nearer all the time. “Galaxy”—a puzzled Spenser specialist had remarked, “you don’t see words like that used poetically anymore.” They knew too, of course, that the planet was very careworn.
    But even if he could woo them to a space museum, to join the hoi polloi who were there for the wide-lens movie and any fantasy they could get, their eyes skewed and wandered. It had nothing to do with them. They hadn’t yet made the connection. All the while those silvery vortices were drawing near.
    Later it would be the hoi polloi, so mournfully willing to shift the line between fantasy and what they know will be foisted on them, and still so graceful with animal trust, who first listened to him. Plus the young, who like Gilpin once had no track record to risk. Or of course, to wield. Though once, early on, he would be listened to by a couple of stock manipulators keen on the “commercial” possibilities of space mining. Other hallucinations of theirs, not so soon to be corroborated, meanwhile sent them to jail.
    He has a classmate (a novelist whose books concern themselves with the Colorado wilderness, and why not, of course?) who for years has spoken of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (learned of from a UN Christmas card Gilpin had once sent him) as a Yuletide joke. Later, the space shuttle had passed him by like a rude bee not native to the West. More recently, hearing that permanent space habitats must apparently be confronted, since his friend Gilpin is going to one, he’d smiled the old science fiction smile, exactly as if offered a blind date with the robot girl who lived under the rainbow. “I still go in for the human quotient.”
    So do I, Gilpin thinks. Don’t I? Under the moonlight, the waves of the Atlantic for as far as Gilpin can see repeat themselves like the border of a Greek vase, flat black ripples raising evenly their small hatchet heads. Grampus waves, his father had called them, for their resemblance to that blunt-headed cetacean. “And because they mean a blow.” Fishermen, like other technicians, taught the particularity of things. His father would have done better than he with the finicky threadings and built-ins of a space suit. Though, since laughter was the only stimulant he ever indulged in, his having to pee into