Lost in the Cosmos

leads aft to rec-room-gym, to hibe units (which look like Sears’ Best freezers) and bedrooms (smaller than an Amtrak roomette: here intimacy need not be encouraged, it is obligatory), nursery and supply rooms, and finally the engine.
    The four chairs in command are comfortable, can tilt, vibrate, or swivel to face each other or the computer displays.
    For some reason, no one looks directly at anyone else—except Jane Smith, who—perhaps because she is flight surgeon—gazes curiously from one to the other:
    Tiffany: sprawled, long-legged and handsome in her jumpsuit, yawns and stretches more perhaps than she needs to.
    Kimberly: frowning, preoccupied, a book open in her lap (volume 15 of The Complete Works of B. F. Skinner), chewing on a fingernail for all the world as if she were sitting in the library of the Indiana University.
    Jane Smith: watching them, taking note of the angle at which the chairs are swiveled and toward whom, which leg is crossed, etc. She is smiling slightly. She and the Captain have the first six-month watch—that is, they will alternate eight-hour watches for six months while the other two hibernate.
    Notice the Captain.
    He is every inch the professional, lounging at his ease the way a professional does after doing his thing and doing it well, a bit weary after the hundreds of items on the checklist, after cranking up the ramjet, a bit red-eyed and unshaven, eyes half-closed, rocking just enough in his chair to flex his neck while he massages it gently. But wait. Is he as simple as that? You would perhaps notice, as Jane Smith does (that is why she is smiling) that he is complex and somewhat folded upon himself. Which is to say not only that he is lounging at his ease, which is what one would expect, but that he is quite conscious of doing so and of how he does it. Would he be lounging in quite the same way, massaging his neck in quite the same way, if the women were not present? Indeed, he is first-rate at his job, but he is also something like jetliner Captain Dean Martin in an Airport movie who has just made a successful landing of a disabled 747—while three stewardesses watch. That, too, is a pleasure for Deano the actor sitting in his mockup jet. But Captain Schuyler has the best of both worlds: he is a real pilot but he is also a good actor, which is to say he knows how to do what he does and also how to do it with an actor’s calculated effect. He is aware of his effect on the women.
    Accelerating toward the speed of light as he exits his world, he was never more successfully and triumphantly in his world.
    The eyes are important. The women make a point of watching him while not appearing to, except Jane Smith. He makes a point of not watching them, while appearing watchable.
    Can it be said of him what the Apostle John wrote in his first letter, that he had the best of this world even as he left it, the pride of life and the lust of the eyes?
    Hardly, not lust exactly, in the current meaning, but lust rather in the Old English sense of lysten, to please or take delight. Because lust is a craving and lysten is a taking and giving of delight. Delight in the three women. He wished to delight them in return. A twofold delight in playing out the role of Captain, doing his job, and lounging at his ease, and the added aesthetic delight of consciously doing so in the way the women would expect, and so as a preliminary stratagem, a male display, in what would surely be a complex courtship.
    The stratagem is partially successful. It “works” with Tiffany and Kimberly in the way it is calculated to, just as the sight of weary Deano, collar unbuttoned, tie loosened, massaging his neck in the 747, worked with the stewardesses. In this case, “working” means that they are attracted to him for reasons which he knows about but they don’t. But it doesn’t work with Jane Smith because she knows what he is doing: hence the ironic smile through her eyes. But wait. Does it not work for this very reason? That he knows that his little ruse will not succeed with her and that she will know that he knows that it won’t. At any rate, the encounter between the Captain and Dr. Jane Smith is of a different order of complexity.
    Years pass. Kimberly and Tiffany were impregnated three times outward bound. Dr. Jane Smith refused sex on the first watch with the Captain. Her excuse: Somebody has to run the nursery. Her second excuse: We’re not married. Her third excuse: I’m married to someone