S Is for Space

  A loon flew over the sky, crying.

  Somebody shivered.

  Mr. Tridden worked on his gloves. “Well, time to go. Parents’ll think I stole you all for good.”

  The trolley was silent and cool-dark, like the inside of an ice-cream drugstore. With a soft green rustling of velvet buff, the seats were turned by the quiet children so they sat with their backs to the silent lake, the deserted bandstand, and the wooden planks that made a kind of music if you walked down the shore on them into other lands.

  Bing! went the soft bell under Mr. Tridden’s foot, and they soared back over sun-abandoned, withered flower meadows, through woods, toward a town that seemed to crush the sides of the trolley with bricks and asphalt and wood when Mr. Tridden stopped to let the children out.

  Charlie and Douglas were the last to stand near the opened tongue of the trolley, the folding step, breathing electricity, watching Mr. Tridden’s gloves on the brass controls.

  Douglas ran his fingers over the green creek moss, looked at the silver, the brass, the wine color of the ceiling.

  “Well … So long again, Mr. Tridden.”

  “Good-bye, boys.”

  “See you around, Mr. Tridden.”

  “See you around.”

  There was a soft sigh of air; the door collapsed gently shut, tucking up its corrugated tongue. The trolley sailed slowly down the late afternoon, brighter than the sun, all tangerine, all flashing gold and lemon, turned a far corner, wheeling, and vanished, gone away.

  “School buses.” Charlie walked to the curb. “Won’t even give us a chance to be late for school. Come get you at your front door. Never be late again in all our lives. Think of that nightmare, Doug, just think it all over.”

  But Douglas, standing on the lawn, was seeing how it would be tomorrow, when the men would pour hot tar over the silver tracks so you would never know a trolley had ever run this way. He knew it would take as many years as he could think of now to forget the tracks, no matter how deeply buried. Some morning in autumn, spring, or winter, he knew he’d wake, and if he didn’t go near the window, if he just lay deep and snug and warm in his bed, he would hear it, faint and faraway.

  And around the bend of the morning street, up the avenue, between the even rows of sycamore, elm, and maple, in the quietness before the start of living, past his house, he would hear the familiar sounds. Like the ticking of a clock, the rumble of a dozen metal barrels rolling, the hum of a single immense dragonfly at dawn. Like a merry-go-round, like a small electrical storm, the color of blue lightning, coming, here, and gone. The trolley’s chime. The hiss like a soda-fountain spigot as it let down and took up its step, and the starting of the dream again, as on it sailed along its way, traveling a hidden and buried track to some hidden and buried destination....

  “Kick-the-can after supper?” asked Charlie.

  “Sure,” said Douglas. “Kick-the-can.”

  The Flying Machine

  In the year a.d. 400, the Emperor Yuan held his throne by the Great Wall of China, and the land was green with rain, readying itself toward the harvest, at peace, the people in his dominion neither too happy nor too sad.

  Early on the morning of the first day of the first week of the second month of the new year, the Emperor Yuan was sipping tea and fanning himself against a warm breeze when a servant ran across the scarlet and blue garden tiles, calling, "Oh, Emperor, Emperor, a miracle!"

  "Yes," said the Emperor, "the air is sweet this morning."

  "No, no, a miracle!" said the servant, bowing quickly.

  "And this tea is good in my mouth, surely that is a miracle."

  "No, no, Your Excellency."

  "Let me guess then—the sun has risen and a new day is upon us. Or the sea is blue. That now is the finest of all miracles."

  "Excellency, a man is flying!"

  "What?" The Emperor stopped his fan.

  "I saw him in the air, a man flying with wings. I heard a voice call out of the sky, and when I looked up, there he was, a dragon in the heavens with a man in its mouth, a dragon of paper and bamboo, colored like the sun and the grass."

  "It is early," said the Emperor, "and you have just wakened from a dream."

  "It is early, but I have seen what I have seen! Come, and you will see it too."

  "Sit down with me here," said the Emperor. "Drink some tea. It must be a strange thing, if it is true, to see a man fly. You must have time to think of it, even as I must have time to prepare myself for the sight."

  They drank tea.

  "Please," said the servant at last, "or he will be gone."

  The Emperor rose thoughtfully. "Now you may show me what you have seen."

  They walked into a garden, across a meadow of grass, over a small bridge, through a grove of trees, and up a tiny hill.

  "There!" said the servant.

  The Emperor looked into the sky.

  And in the sky, laughing so high that you could hardly hear him laugh, was a man; and the man was clothed in bright papers and reeds to make wings and a beautiful yellow tail, and he was soaring all about like the largest bird in a universe of birds, like a new dragon in a land of ancient dragons.

  The man called down to them from high in the cool winds of morning. "I fly, I fly!"

  The servant waved to him. "Yes, yes!"

  The Emperor Yuan did not move. Instead he looked at the Great Wall of China now taking shape out of the farthest mist in the green hills, that splendid snake of stones which writhed with majesty across the entire land. That wonderful wall which had protected them for a timeless time from enemy hordes and preserved peace for years without number. He saw the town, nestled to itself by a river and a road and a hill, beginning to waken.

  "Tell me," he said to his servant, "has anyone else seen this flying man?"

  "I am the only one, Excellency," said the servant, smiling at the sky, waving.

  The Emperor watched the heavens another minute and then said, "Call him down to me."

  "Ho, come down, come down! The Emperor wishes to see you!" called the servant, hands cupped to his shouting mouth.

  The Emperor glanced in all directions while the flying man soared down the morning wind. He saw a farmer, early in his fields, watching the sky, and he noted where the farmer stood.

  The flying man alit with a rustle of paper and a creak of bamboo reeds. He came proudly to the Emperor, clumsy in his rig, at last bowing before the old man.

  "What have you done?" demanded the Emperor.

  "I have flown in the sky, Your Excellency," replied the man.

  "What have you done?" said the Emperor again.

  "I have just told you!" cried the flier.

  "You have told me nothing at all." The Emperor reached out a thin hand to touch the pretty paper and the birdlike keel of the apparatus. It smelled cool, of the wind.

  "Is it not beautiful, Excellency?"

  "Yes, too beautiful."

  "It is the only one in the world!" smiled the man. "And I am the inventor."

  "The only one in the world?"

  "I swear it!"

  "Who else knows of this?"

  "No one. Not even my wife, who would think me mad with the sun. She thought I was making a kite. I rose in the night and walked to the cliffs far away. And when the morning breezes blew and the sun rose, I gathered my courage, Excellency, and leaped from the cliff. I flew! But my wife does not know of it."

  "Well for her, then," said the Emperor. "Come along."

  They walked back to the great house. The sun was full in the sky now, and the smell of the grass was refreshing. The Emperor, the servant, and the flier paused within the huge garden.

  The Emperor clapped his hands. "Ho, guards!"

  The guards came running.

  "Hold this man."

  The guards seized the flier.

  "Call the executioner," said the Emperor.

  "What's this!" cried the flier, bewildered. "What have I done?" He began to weep, so that the beautiful paper appar
atus rustled.

  "Here is the man who has made a certain machine," said the Emperor, "and yet asks us what he has created. He does not know himself. It is only necessary that he create, without knowing why he has done so, or what this thing will do."

  The executioner came running with a sharp silver ax. He stood with his naked, large-muscled arms ready, his face covered with a serene white mask.

  "One moment," said the Emperor. He turned to a near-by table upon which sat a machine that he himself had created. The Emperor took a tiny golden key from his own neck. He fitted his key to the tiny, delicate machine and wound it up. Then he set the machine going.

  The machine was a garden of metal and jewels. Set in motion, the birds sangs in tiny metal trees, wolves walked through miniature forests, and tiny people ran in and out of sun and shadow, fanning themselves with miniature fans, listening to tiny emerald birds, and standing by impossibly small but tinkling fountains.

  "Is it not beautiful?" said the Emperor. "If you asked me what I have done here, I could answer you well. I have made birds sing, I have made forests murmur, I have set people to walking in this woodland, enjoying the leaves and shadows and songs. That is what I have done."

  "But, oh, Emperor!" pleaded the flier, on his knees, the tears pouring down his face. "I have done a similar thing! I have found beauty. I have flown on the morning wind. I have looked down on all the sleeping houses and gardens. I have smelled the sea and even seen it, beyond the hills, from my high place. And I have soared like a bird; oh, I cannot say how beautiful it is up there, in the sky, with the wind about me, the wind blowing me here like a feather, there like a fan, the way the sky smells in the morning! And how free one feels! That is beautiful, Emperor, that is beautiful too!"

  "Yes," said the Emperor sadly, "I know it must be true. For I felt my heart move with you in the air and I wondered: What is it like? How does it feel? How do the distant pools look from so high? And how my houses and servants? Like ants? And how the distant towns not yet awake?"

  "Then spare me!"

  "But there are times," said the Emperor, more sadly still, "when one must lose a little beauty if one is to keep what little beauty one already has. I do not fear you, yourself, but I fear another man."

  "What man?"

  "Some other man who, seeing you, will build a thing of bright papers and bamboo like this. But the other man will have an evil face and an evil heart, and the beauty will be gone. It is this man I fear."

  "Why? Why?"

  "Who is to say that someday just such a man, in just such an apparatus of paper and reed, might not fly in the sky and drop huge stones upon the Great Wall of China?" said the Emperor.

  No one moved or said a word.

  "Off with his head," said the Emperor.

  The executioner whirled his silver ax.

  "Burn the kite and the inventor's body and bury their ashes together," said the Emperor.

  The servants retreated to obey.

  The Emperor turned to his hand-servant, who had seen the man flying. "Hold your tongue. It was all a dream, a most sorrowful and beautiful dream. And that farmer in the distant field who also saw, tell him it would pay him to consider it only a vision. If ever the word passes around, you and the farmer die within the hour."

  "You are merciful, Emperor."

  "No, not merciful," said the old man. Beyond the garden wall he saw the guards burning the beautiful machine of paper and reeds that smelled of the morning wind. He saw the dark smoke climb into the sky. "No, only very much bewildered and afraid." He saw the guards digging a tiny pit wherein to bury the ashes. "What is the life of one man against those of a million others? I must take solace from that thought."

  He took the key from its chain about his neck and once more wound up the beautiful miniature garden. He stood looking out across the land at the Great Wall, the peaceful town, the green fields, the rivers and streams. He sighed. The tiny garden whirred its hidden and delicate machinery and set itself in motion; tiny people walked in forests, tiny faces loped through sun-speckled glades in beautiful shining pelts, and among the tiny trees flew little bits of high song and bright blue and yellow color, flying, flying, flying in that small sky.

  "Oh," said the Emperor, closing his eyes, "look at the birds, look at the birds!"

  Icarus Montgolfier Wright

  He lay on his bed and the wind blew through the window over his ears and over his half-opened mouth so it whispered to him in his dream. It was like the wind of time hollowing the Delphic caves to say what must be said of yesterday, today, tomorrow. Sometimes one voice gave a shout far off away, sometimes two, a dozen, an entire race of men cried out through his mouth, but their words were always the same:

  “Look, look, we’ve done it!”

  For suddenly he, they, one or many, were flung in the dream, and flew. The air spread in a soft warm sea where he swam, disbelieving.

  “Look, look! It’s done!”

  But he didn’t ask the world to watch, he was only shocking his senses wide to see, taste, smell, touch the air, the wind, the rising moon. He swam along in the sky. The heavy earth was gone.

  But wait, he thought, wait now!

  Tonight—what night is this?

  The night before, of course. The night before the first flight of a rocket to the Moon. Beyond this room on the baked desert floor one hundred yards away the rocket waits for me.

  Well, does it now? Is there really a rocket?

  Hold on! he thought, and twisted, turned, sweating, eyes tight, to the wall, the fierce whisper in his teeth. Be certain-sure! You, now, who are you?

  Me? he thought. My name?

  Jedediah Prentiss, born 1938, college graduate 1959, licensed rocket pilot, 1971. Jedediah Prentiss … Jedediah Prentiss....

  The wind whistled his name away! He grabbed for it, yelling.

  Then, gone quiet, he waited for the wind to bring his name back. He waited a long while, and there was only silence, and then after a thousand heartbeats he felt motion.

  The sky opened out like a soft blue flower. The Aegean Sea stirred soft white fans through a distant wine-colored surf.

  In the wash of the waves on the shore, he heard his name.

  Icarus.

  And again in a breathing whisper.

  Icarus.

  Someone shook his arm and it was his father saying his name and shaking away the night. And he himself lay small, half-turned to the window and the shore below and the deep sky, feeling the first wind of morning ruffle the golden feathers bedded in amber wax lying by the side of his cot. Golden wings stirred half-alive in his father’s arms, and the faint down on his own shoulders quilled trembling as he looked at these wings and beyond them to the cliff.

  “Father, how’s the wind?”

  “Enough for me, but never enough for you....”

  “Father, don’t worry. The wings seem clumsy now, but my bones in the feathers will make them strong, my blood in the wax will make it live!”

  “My blood, my bones too, remember; each man lends his flesh to his children, asking that they tend it well. Promise you’ll not go high, Icarus. The sun or my son, the heat of one, the fever of the other, could melt these wings. Take care!”

  And they carried the splendid golden wings into the morning and heard them whisper in their arms, whisper his name or a name or some name that blew, spun, and settled like a feather on the soft air.

  Montgolfier.

  His hands touched fiery rope, bright linen, stitched thread gone hot as summer. His hands fed wool and straw to a breathing flame.

  Montgolfier.

  And his eye soared up along the swell and sway, the oceanic tug and pull, the immensely wafted silver pear still filling with the shimmering tidal airs channeled up from the blaze. Silent as a god tilted slumbering above French countryside, this delicate linen envelope, this swelling sack of oven-baked air would soon pluck itself free. Draughting upward to blue worlds of silence, his mind and his brother’s mind would sail with
it, muted, serene among island clouds where uncivilized lightnings slept. Into that uncharted gulf and abyss where no bird-song or shout of man could follow, the balloon would hush itself. So cast adrift, he, Montgolfier, and all men, might hear the unmeasured breathing of God and the cathedral tread of eternity.

  “Ah …” He moved, the crowd moved, shadowed by the warm balloon. “Everything’s ready, everything’s right....”

  Right. His lips twitched in his dream. Right. Hiss, whisper, flutter, rush. Right.

  From his father’s hands a toy jumped to the ceiling, whirled in its own wind, suspended, while he and his brother stared to see it flicker, rustle, whistle, heard it murmuring their names.

  Wright.

  Whispering: wind, sky, cloud, space, wing, fly …

  “Wilbur, Orville? Look, how’s that?”

  Ah. In his sleep, his mouth sighed.

  The toy helicopter hummed, bumped the ceiling, murmured eagle, raven, sparrow, robin, hawk; murmured eagle, raven, sparrow, robin, hawk. Whispered eagle, whispered raven, and at last, fluttering to their hands with a susurration, a wash of blowing weather from summers yet to come, with a last whir and exhalation, whispered hawk.

  Dreaming, he smiled.

  He saw the clouds rush down the Aegean sky.

  He felt the balloon sway drunkenly, its great bulk ready for the clear running wind.

  He felt the sand hiss up the Atlantic shelves from the soft dunes that might save him if he, a fledgling bird, should fall. The framework struts hummed and chorded like a harp, and himself caught up in its music.