Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Sir Arthur lived behind ten-foot walls, with wire mesh on top of them, in a big squarish house that was comfortable and spacious rather than luxurious. I announced myself, the gate swung open, and I was directed to a stairwell, its windows playfully decorated with bumper stickers from NASA, and one with a large vertical arrow and the message Mars: 35,000,000 miles. I entered the working wing of the house, a lobby, the secretary's office with its file drawers and paraphernalia—fax machine, computer, phones. Documents framed and hung on the wall certified that Sir Arthur had become a member of one society or another, or had won a prize—lots of these; and plaques, trophies, ceremo nial knickknacks inscribed to him. His was a well-rewarded career. He was a serious scientist as well as an ambitious and imaginative writer, anticipating possible futures. It was an old tradition. Writing enthusiastically about Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, Borges claimed that Ludovico Ariosto and Johannes Kepler were early sci-fi dreamers and practitioners. In her memoirs, Doris Lessing (herself a science-fiction writer at times) praised science-fiction writers as visionaries.

"Hello!"

Sir Arthur appeared in a wheelchair, the familiar, smiling, bespectacled man; upright, balding, but rather frail, even in this heat with a blanket over his skinny legs. He looked like the sort of alien he had described in his prose fantasies. Men of a certain age, and some women too, often have the watchfulness, the pop-eyed almost reptilian stare, the glowing dome, and the bone structure we attribute to extraterrestrials.

He had that elderly and slightly unearthly appearance. The apparatus of his state-of-the-art wheelchair only emphasized his Martian look. He'd had polio about twelve years before and was suffering the serious aftermath that afflicts some polio victims years later—muscle weakness, poor breathing, cell degeneration. That too made him alien-looking, because he was cheery and welcoming.

"I'm feeling a bit cloud-nine-ish," he said as he was wheeled into his study, where there were many more plaques and trophies, framed letters from heads of state, and signed photographs—surely that beauty was Elizabeth Taylor, and wasn't that beaming fatty the late pope?

Sir Arthur's lopsided lips and slightly chewed pronunciation of the word "cloud" was from the west of England. I asked him if he was from those parts. He said he'd been born in Minehead, on the Somerset shore.

"A lovely coast—long beaches, very pretty," he said. He spoke slowly, a voice that was also whimsical and vague, with fluttery hands and an expressive frown that suggested memory loss. "How'd you get to Sri Lanka?" he asked.

"I traveled through India," I said, to spare him the details of Georgia and Turkmenistan. He didn't say anything, so I said, "Do you have any thoughts on India?"

"India. Reaching critical mass."

"Population, you mean?"

"Out of control. Too many," he said.

He pulled out a diary as wide as a ledger, opened to the day's date. April 12 was underlined, and beneath it, in a child's scrawl in big letters, Titanic sank 1912.

"Today is an important day," he said and tapped the page of the diary with the yellow nail of a skinny finger. The Titanic was on his mind. "Terrible thing! But is this the right day?"

"We can check," I said. But of course he was an expert on the sinking: fifteen years before, he'd written a novel, The Ghost from the Grand Banks, about two expeditions competing to raise the wreck.

"Look at this," he said and pushed a small silver tray across his desk. It was filled with little glass vials. He picked one up. "Look." The vial was labeled Moon Dust. "Can you see it?"

It was pale grit, like the residue of stale celery salt in a spice jar. He chose another one.

"Look." This one was labeled Rusticle—Titanic. A small dark scab of fungoid iron that had been scraped from the hull and presented to Sir Arthur.

"What is this?" he asked me, lifting another vial, containing a whitish blob.

"Looks like a piece of popcorn."

"It's a Styrofoam cup from the dive! Crushed by the pressure. Look how small it is."

He smiled at the silver tray and sorted the other vials and defied me to identify their contents. They were filled with rare gravel and floating organisms and crumbled souvenirs from expeditions.

"What are you writing, Sir Arthur?"

"Nothing. A few notes. I've destroyed enough trees."

"What about memoirs?"

"Done plenty of those," he said. "All my friends are gone. Look"—and he gestured to the wall of photographs.

This gave me a chance to rise and look at pictures and examine the signatures and inscriptions: a warm salutation from Liz Taylor, a scrawl from the pope, scribbles from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, from smooth-faced smilers who might have been actors, from Stanley Kubrick and others, including Darth Vader.

"Wernher von Braun," I said.