had smoked a packet of cigarettes in two hours.
‘How far out in space are we?’
‘A billion miles.’
‘A billion miles from where?’ said Hitchcock.
‘It all depends,’ said Clemens, not smoking at all. ‘A billion miles from home, you might say.’
‘Then say it.’
‘Home. Earth. New York. Chicago. Wherever you were from.’
‘I don’t even remember,’ said Hitchcock. ‘I don’t even believe there is an Earth now, do you?’
‘Yes,’ said Clemens. ‘I dreamt about it this morning.’
‘There is no morning in space.’
‘During the night then.’
‘It’s always night,’ said Hitchcock quietly. ‘Which night do you mean?’
‘Shut up,’ said Clemens irritably. ‘Let me finish.’
Hitchcock lit another cigarette. His hand did not shake, but it looked as if, inside the sunburned flesh, it might be tremoring all to itself, a small tremor in each hand and a large invisible tremor in his body. The two men sat on the observation corridor floor, looking out at the stars. Clemens’s eyes flashed, but Hitchcock’s eyes focused on nothing; they were blank and puzzled.
‘I woke up at 0500 hours myself,’ said Hitchcock, as if he were talking to his right hand. ‘And I heard myself screaming, “Where am I? where am I?” And the answer was “Nowhere!” And I said, “Where’ve I been?” And I said, “Earth!” “What’s Earth?” I wondered. “Where I was born,” I said. But it was nothing and worse than nothing. I don’t believe in anything I can’t see or hear or touch. I can’t see Earth, so why should I believe in it? It’s safer this way, not to believe.’
‘There’s Earth.’ Clemens pointed, smiling. ‘That point of light there.’
‘That’s not Earth; that’s our sun. You can’t see Earth from here.’
‘I can see it. I have a good memory.’
‘It’s not the same, you fool,’ said Hitchcock suddenly. There was a touch of anger in his voice. ‘I mean see it. I’ve always been that way. When I’m in Boston, New York is dead. When I’m in New York, Boston is dead. When I don’t see a man for a day, he’s dead. When he comes walking down the street, my God, it’s a resurrection. I do a dance, almost, I’m so glad to see him. I used to, anyway. I don’t dance any more. I just look. And when the man walks off, he’s dead again.’
Clemens laughed. ‘It’s simply that your mind works on a primitive level. You can’t hold on to things. You’ve got no imagination. Hitchcock, old man. You’ve got to learn to hold on.’
‘Why should I hold on to things I can’t use?’ said Hitchcock, his eyes wide, still staring into space. ‘I’m practical. If Earth isn’t here for me to walk on, you want me to walk on a memory? That hurts. Memories, as my father once said, are porcupines. To hell with them! Stay away from them. They make you unhappy. They ruin your work. They make you cry.’
‘I’m walking on Earth right now,’ said Clemens, squinting to himself, blowing smoke.
‘You’re kicking porcupines. Later in the day you won’t be able to eat lunch, and you’ll wonder why,’ said Hitchcock in a dead voice. ‘And it’ll be because you’ve got a footful of quills aching in you. To hell with it! If I can’t drink it, pinch it, punch it, or lie on it, then I say drop it in the sun. I’m dead to Earth. It’s dead to me. There’s no one in New York weeping for me tonight. Shove New York. There isn’t any season here; winter and summer are gone. So is spring, and autumn. It isn’t any particular night or morning: it’s space and space. The only thing right now is you and me and this rocket ship. And the only thing I’m positive of is me. That’s all of it.’
Clemens ignored this. ‘I’m putting a dime in the phone slot right now,’ he said, pantomiming it with a slow smile. ‘And calling my girl in Evanston. Hello, Barbara!’
The rocket sailed on through space.
The lunch bell rang at 1305 hours. The men ran by on soft rubber sneakers and sat at the cushioned tables.
Clemens wasn’t hungry.
‘See, what did I tell you!’ said Hitchcock. ‘You and your damned porcupines! Leave them alone, like I told you. Look at me, shoveling away food.’ He said this with a mechanical, slow, and unhumorous voice. ‘Watch me.’ He put a big piece of pie in his mouth and felt it with his tongue. He looked at the pie on his plate as if to see the texture. He moved it with his fork. He felt the fork handle. He mashed the lemon filling and watched it jet up between the tines. Then he touched a bottle of milk all over and poured out half a quart into a glass, listening to it. He looked at the milk as if to make it whiter. He drank the milk so swiftly that he couldn’t have tasted it. He had eaten his entire lunch in a few minutes, cramming it in feverishly, and now he looked around for more, but it was gone. He gazed out the window of the rocket, blankly. ‘Those aren’t real either,’ he said.
‘What?’ asked Clemens.
‘The stars. Who’s ever touched one? I can see them, sure, but what’s the use of seeing a thing that’s a million or a billion miles away? Anything that far off isn’t worth bothering with.’
‘Why did you come on this trip?’ asked Clemens suddenly.
Hitchcock peered into his amazingly empty milk glass and clenched it tight, then relaxed his hand and clenched it again. ‘I don’t know.’ He ran his tongue on the glass rim. ‘I just had to, is all. How do you know why you do anything in this life?’
‘You liked the idea of space travel? Going places?’
‘I don’t know. Yes. No. It wasn’t going places. It was being between.’ Hitchcock for the first time tried to focus his eyes upon something, but it was so nebulous and far off that his eyes couldn’t make the adjustment, though he worked his face and hands. ‘Mostly it was space. So much space. I liked the idea of nothing on top, nothing on the bottom, and a lot of nothing in between, and me in the middle of the nothing.’
‘I never heard it put that way before.’
‘I just put it that way; I hope you listened.’
Hitchcock took out his cigarettes and lit up and began to suck and blow smoke, again and again.
Clemens said, ‘What sort of childhood did you have, Hitchcock?’
‘I was never young. Whoever I was then is dead. That’s more of your quills. I don’t want a hideful, thanks. I’ve always figured it that you die each day and each day is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you’ve died a couple of thousand times in your life, and that’s a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don’t know or understand or want to understand.’
‘You’re cutting yourself off, that way.’
‘Why should I have anything to do with that younger Hitchcock? He was a fool, and he was yanked around and taken advantage of and used. His father was no good, and he was glad when his mother died, because she was the same. Should I go back and see his face on that day and gloat over it? He was a fool.’
‘We’re all fools,’ said Clemens. ‘all the time. It’s just we’re a different kind each day. We think, I’m not a fool today. I’ve learned my lesson. I was a fool yesterday but not this morning. Then tomorrow we find out that, yes, we were a fool today too. I think the only way we can grow and get on in this world is to accept the fact that we’re not perfect and live accordingly.’
‘I don’t want to remember imperfect things,’ said Hitchcock.