Mysteries of Motion Read Online Free Page B

vegetable soup with the same backsweep of the hand.
    His last week in Washington, going to the dime store, he marked how the girls there still wetted a finger and sleeked a brow. In a New York men’s room, old Captain Stanley’s double groaned with pleasure as he urinated from Gilpin’s father’s scow. Outside later, truckmen at a loading entrance cocked their brogues like early balloonists. Here at the motel, the cashier, desked like Gilpin’s banker in front of a high window, continually polished the sun from both their bald heads. And last night, waking from height dreams of a house he’d once owned high on a cliff over the Mohawk River, where a contractor, come to estimate a retainer fence, had once stepped back fatally far, Gilpin saw him again in midair, hands spread in apology.
    He’s looking at the still grounded people here with the same embarrassment which during his travel-slumming young years used to crawl in him at the sight of primitive peoples—even when they were still speciously safe in their rain forests or on the hot Kalahari sands where they carried pure water with them in their own buttocks. He knew too much about their future. Now he’s staring that way at his own kind. Professors with fine teeth and solid families, who jogged the parks displaying both, or vagrants with winter-rheumed noses and feet clotted into their shoes past hope of ever shedding them—it’s all the same. He’s standing on the borders of their innocence, which is gravitation. That dower-right of their bodies was about to be corrupted in a way which taking to the air within the stratosphere had never done. In a plane, no matter at what speed, a human body still pulled its own weight. The machine intervened for it, bargaining with Earth for motion. But now we desert into an element where the body can never be quite natural again.
    A sudden bulbul murmur from birds nested somewhere in this dark machinery jungle makes him shift on his own perch, his worn black leather-and-chrome shooting stick. From Allahabad to the Moscow subway, on ski lifts and in the outback, its cup and his bottom had developed such a comfortable triangular relationship that on his own three-week test trip in to orbit a few months ago he’d sorely missed its reassuring pressure, which wherever he and it go has meant “You and I—and gravity—are meditating. Taking it all in.” He’d even begun to wonder whether that rounding of the face which, due to downward pull on the facial features, so alters the physiognomy during orbital insertion mightn’t already be taking place, perhaps permanently, in his backside—and during the intensive checkups on return had even asked them to measure its radius.
    He’s certainly carried back to earth with him that squared-off position which shoulders tend to assume during the first liftoff sensation of hanging upside down. The flight doctors can’t understand why he should have retained it. He could have told them. Fright. Three weeks in cosmic fright. True, he hadn’t vomited like some. Nor had any serious arrhythmia as a result of the changes in total body water from induced electrolytic charge during weightlessness. And yes, he’d taken the wee pills for sleeplessness, plus those yellow gobbets designed to offset other “abnormal” responses to interruption of his body’s preferences. Which medication had worked optimally, allowing him an eight-hour shift of perfect fright-sleep, and a functional fright-shift by day.
    So he’s come through with a perfect record except for one slip, due merely to a minor astigmatism interacting with faulty design—when he’d defecated into the Water Distillator instead of the Hydro John. Which had been taken note of as a viable criticism.
    Even his question about his backside had to be taken seriously, for aeromedical research, they told him, had turned up some dandy commercial by-products from even odder observations. “No, his er, coccyx-to-buttocks periphery seems