Lost in the Cosmos

Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. Finally, in the event of the former, they must reproduce themselves.
    The first problem was approached by calling for volunteers who for their own good and sufficient reasons were willing to leave—perhaps, as in at least one case, for patriotic reasons: somebody has to do it, we’re in trouble, and maybe the civilization on Barnard P1 can help us. Or for less admirable though just as compelling reasons: wanting out, bad marriages, wanderlust in the old U.S. head-for-the-territory, walk-out-the-front-door-and-hit-the-road tradition, or just being sick and tired of the old earth with its sad past and sadder prospects for the future, sick and tired of living in the gloomy condos of Houston, Pasadena, and Canaveral. Whatever. Volunteers were not hard to come by. NASA was deluged by thousands of applicants, not merely nuts, but qualified scientists. Apparently, many people wanted out. The main problem was not the choice of individual crew members but rather the social composition of the crew. After a careful review of cultural trends, such as the breakdown of monogamous marriage and the newest experiences in communal living, open marriage, serial monogamy, polygamy, and in the light of recent discoveries of genetic differences in the right and left-brain cortices of men and women, a crew of four was hit upon. One man and three women. Consultation with the best American neurologists and behaviorist psychologists and group-psychotherapists and with the most highly regarded Moslem sociologists and neo-Mormon marriage counselors confirmed the decision. The projected life style was to be called “programmed serial monogamy.”
    Different social combinations had proved disastrous in simulated environments. Two couples or a triangle, one man and two women, or one woman and two men, failed to tolerate a year’s confinement. A single couple, married or not, either fell to murderous quarreling or became so bored with each other that performance fell off. In the case of two couples, it generally happened that one couple fell out and the spouse of one sex took up with the spouse of the opposite sex in the second couple. But it did not generally happen that the leftover pair bonded. There seldom occurred a symmetrical swap. Triangles were always disrupted by destructive pair-bonding. Somebody got left out and either sulked or became violent.
    One-man-three-women teams seemed to get along best. In a post-Christian and post-feminist era, it appeared that women generally accept a polygamous relationship, given a reasonable respect for their persons and professional skills, while men were at the least less bored and at the most quite pleased. Women, it seemed, were different from men after all, not worse or better, but different. In the event of pair-bonding between man and woman, the two surplus women seemed content with a relationship, not necessarily homosexual, with each other. The sole man was enjoined, however, to treat all three women with loving and impartial care insofar as he was able. The men in the sealed-environment experiments readily agreed and by and large succeeded.
    The captain was a native of Rye, New York, of Dutch descent, and named after a Roman emperor: Marcus Aurelius Schuyler. Thirty-two years old, once a history major at Harvard, he changed course, graduated from the Air Force Academy, and went to M.I.T. for astronomy. A somewhat wayward, wintry, and sardonic man, as wintry as his namesake—he was the sort who could sit in Robinson Hall listening to a lecture on the Battle of Verdun, gaze out the window at the tender green of the spring trees, suddenly reach a decision, close his book, and walk away forever, head for Colorado to fly. His consciousness was reflected and folded in upon itself. Though he might appear as stolid and as steady as one of the old astronauts or a commercial airline pilot—even a little dumb—in fact he was very much conscious of doing just that: playing the unflappable captain. It was his complex way to make the untoward odd decision and to take pleasure both in savoring the very oddness of it and in sticking to it. For example, after the launch of the shuttle to the orbital platform from which he would depart in the starship Copernicus 4, the shuttle crossed the Northeast coastline some hundred miles up and rising. Looking down through the clouds, he could just make out Long Island nuzzling into the continent like a great whale. There, just off its