Beware of Darkness

Part I: Photons

Leaves of poplars pick Japanese prints against the west.

Moon sand on the canal doubles the changing pictures.

The moon's good-bye ends pictures.

The west is empty. All else is empty. No moon-talk at all now.

Only dark listening to dark.

Carl Sandburg Moonset

It had been, oddly enough, a quiet moon floating through a tree that first captured the little boy's imagination. Hanging up there in the sky as he waited for sleep, waiting in the shadows of dreams yet to be, yet soon enough he talked of little else.

"A man in the moon? Oh, really? Where?" he cried, once upon a time.

"It's right there! Can't you see him?"

"No! What are you talking about?!"

Even then the myths so casually passed along made little sense to the boy. Because, he realized, the people who pretended to know everything really didn't seem to know very much at all.

But then, in what would come to define the little boy, his curiosity blossomed. "...There has to be more I can learn --" became his mantra.

Because there always was more, and you could find 'more' when you pushed yourself hard enough to uncover it.

Then he had an odd encounter -- with, of all things, a telescope. On a camping trip in the Sierras with his fellow Cub Scouts.

The encounter came in the form of a kindly old man with a pristine four-inch refractor set-up on the simplest alt-az mount imaginable, yet when he first set his eyes on the moon through that telescope he felt his entire universe shift underfoot. He'd stared at the crescent orb for so long his eyes hurt, and he found he was trying to memorize everything he saw. He realized something important during that night, namely that he never wanted this journey to end. Perhaps just as important, the boy's father saw the explosion of real interest and watched with great interest.

Books followed, leading to his first steps beyond imagination. Simple books with big, colorful pictures on them because, after all, he was only a second-grader. An Atlas of the Moon waited for him under the tree the very next Christmas, and just five months later he watched as Alan Shepard and Freedom 7 kicked off a mad decade of exploration and experimentation -- everything coming into sharp relief when the boy was in high school when Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took a stroll on his beloved moon.

His father was a physicist; his mother a physician; both worked and taught at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He grew up not far from the university, on a narrow tree-lined street in Menlo Park, California, and in schools teeming with bright students, he was considered the brightest star of them all. He'd developed a profound love of and intuition for advanced mathematics, especially for calculus, by the time he left grade school, and he'd learned to play the piano simply in order to explore the mathematical possibilities within music notation. By the time he turned ten he was considered something of a prodigy -- until he realized that the planets and stars didn't sing all that much.

And so he turned his attention to the sky, but still almost always to the moon.

Until one night, on a field trip to the Mount Lick Observatory just east of San Jose.

The boy had, of course, seen pictures of globular clusters, and he'd even looked at M13 through a small telescope before, but the experience of seeing a pale smudge in the sky had been less than underwhelming -- and so he'd thought little of them since. Until that first night up at Lick.

One of the twenty-inch astrographs was being collimated that night, so no cameras were attached as technicians and astronomers aligned and realigned set screws on the delicate front objective, and actual eyepieces were being used to fine-tune the 'scopes final alignment. At one point, and when the boy happened to be standing nearby, this team of astronomers pointed the 'scope at Eta Herculis, then at M13 -- the primary globular cluster in the Hercules asterism -- and then one of the astronomers looked down and asked the boy if he might want to look at something interesting.

"Of course," the boy said as he made his way up to the viewing platform.

"Well then, try this out for size."

Eugene Sherman made his way to the eyepiece and after just a few seconds observing he knew his world had shifted once again, then he turned to the other astronomer up there with him and he smiled.

"Do you have a bigger telescope?" Eugene Sherman asked.

The boy was only a little surprised when his question caused all the other astronomers to break out in gales of raucous laughter, for that was, and is, the professional astronomer's mantra.

+++++

School was still school, which meant that Saturday mornings, especially in autumn, were best of all.

Because from the time he was just big enough to sit on his father's knee, when the Stanford Cardinals were playing at home he and his Old Man made their way over to the stadium to watch the game. And when "Gene" Sherman was just starting out in elementary school, he and his Old Man started throwing the football in the park, and by the time he went to middle school he was good enough to play quarterback, and oddly enough he only improved over time. By his junior year of high school, by the time he was ready to think about college, schools like Harvard and MIT wanted him enough to offer his football scholarships. So did Berkeley and even Princeton.

Only...Gene Sherman had decided he wanted to go to Annapolis, because by then he'd decided he wanted to be an astronaut. He wanted to walk on the moon, just like Armstrong and Aldrin had. He wanted to build an observatory up there, too, and he figured he was probably the best person for the job. But getting into Annapolis wasn't as straightforward a thing as getting into Harvard or MIT. Getting into a service academy meant getting appointed by a member of congress, so this he set out to do...in the same patient, methodical way he'd always turned to -- at least whenever he really wanted to get something done right the first time.

And so few were surprised when Sherman won his appointment to the Naval Academy, and he reported for duty in the summer of 1973.

He played football. He studied astronomy and physics, and because this was the Naval Academy he studied aeronautical engineering. When it became more than apparent there was no way into the astronaut corp without first completing test pilot school, which of course meant becoming a Naval Aviator, he set out to do this, too -- though there were some in the great scheme of things who were disappointed by his choice. They'd seen him working in more advanced, theoretical realms, more than likely working to develop a new sort of satellite-based navigation system, but they had decided to let him pursue his dreams -- for now. He'd earned that much respect and consideration, they said.

So...off the boy went, to Pensacola -- because, by his best calculation, that was still the best way to the stars.

+++++

April, 1979 Strait of Hormuz.

Sitting in the cockpit of an A-6E on Cat 1 aboard the Coral Sea. Three in the morning and the temperature was almost ninety degrees; with the canopy retracted and the night air dripping with humidity, sweat was pouring down his face, rolling down his neck and into his flight suit, pooling in the small of his back.

Gene "Tank" Sherman was flying 'Texaco' this morning, waiting for the word to launch and get airborne so his Intruder could refuel the ready flight that had launched fifty minutes ago. Iranians had been holding the US Embassy in Tehran for almost three months, and tensions were high, the mood on the streets of Tehran ugly. And his squadron -- VA-165 -- had been tasked to bomb airfields in and around Tehran...should the need arise...and everyone on board hoped the need was there. Because they were ready. And, because everyone wanted revenge, blood was in the air -- all the time now.

'Even I want revenge,' Sherman had to admit, if only to himself. 'But why? Why another war when there's so much else we need to be working on...?'

He leaned back in the ejection seat and found Hercules up there in the early morning sky, and out here hundreds of miles from land he could see M13 with his naked eyes...a faint little smudge hanging up there -- almost right where Hercules' heart should be...but no, that didn't make sense.

Nothing made sense. Not now.

Apollo...canceled. No more moon shots. Just another war -- Vietnam, and now this. And the moon had been replaced by something they were starting to call a space shuttle, but this latest thing looked like just another black hole, another government boondoggle designed to spread pork all over the aerospace industry. Damn! Even Stanley Kubrick could see the future better than the morons at NASA. We needed infrastructure...up there -- in space...in orbit -- so we can build things up there...and not a taxi to nowhere! And that Apollo-Soyuz bullshit? How 'bout no more 'meet 'n greets' with the goddamn commies! They aren't our friends and they never will be!

'Two years of my life...spent out here,' he thought, sighing as he watched M13 slide behind another wall of cloud.

"Well, ain't life grand?" his navigator said -- just as the carrier sailed into a wall of deep fog. "I didn't think fog got this far north?"

"An eddy in the current," Sherman said, "but it won't last."

Then the CAG up in Pri-Fli came on over the radio. "Our Phantoms just reported two Bogeys airborne, lighting them up. Launch the tanker, standby to launch Alert Three and Four."

"They be playing our song, Tank," Pete "Putter" Masters, his navigator, said. "Time to go!"

Sherman secured the canopy and checked lock on the wings once again, and when he got the all-clear from the deck-ape he started engine one, watching the tape come up to 40% and hold steady. He looked right and got the all-clear and rolled two, watching power come up and stabilize. After the JBD, or the Jet Blast Deflector came up he added power slowly to FMP, or Full Military Power, before dropping back down to 60% for the hold. The F-4N on Cat 2 ran up to FMP and as suddenly cut back, and that was that. Now it was his turn.

Power to FMP again and watch the tapes for ten seconds, then he looked at the ape crouching out there almost on the edge of the flight deck, the wands in his hands beating out the rhythm of the fight. He saluted as he flipped the nose gear light on and off, then pushed back in his seat, waiting for the...

...slam in the back...that kick in the ass...and he fixed his eyes on his panel because out there on the other side of the glass there was nothing but black. Pure, solid black.

'Positive rate,' he said to himself, 'gear up, trim up, flaps and slats up. Check vertical rate, start a gradual turn ten to the left and climb to Angels Five. Okay, watch your angle of attack...'

"Outta the fog," Masters said a moment later.

"Got it," he said, still not taking his eyes off the panel, not yet. Heading 340, angle of attack five degrees up, climb at 215 KIAS. "Man, this pig is wallowing," he said a minute later, when he could finally breathe easy.

"Feel heavy?"

"Yeah man. We there yet?"

"Call it thirty seconds, then start your track."

"Got it," Sherman said as he zeroed out his clocks, keeping one eye on the altimeter and the other scanning the sky...then he started his hack and began a slow 180 to the left.

Then the E-2B from VAW-117 came on the net. "Boomer 5-0-2, Banger-3, come right to 0-3-0, signal Buster, repeat Buster, inbound flight Bingo."

"5-0-2 to 0-3-0 Buster," Sherman replied, turning hard and adding power.

"502, 3, Reaper 2-0-2 reports three Bandits now up and heading for the merge. Ready Three and Four have the intercept. 2-0-2 took a hit, needs a visual for BD."

"5-0-2 roger."

"5-0-2, make it Angels 10."

"5-0-2 to 10."

"5-0-2, call it fifty miles now."

"5-0-2, got it." Sherman replied as he started his climb from five to ten thousand feet.

"Picking up two airborne sets," Putter said, "and they look like that new AWG-9 set in the -14," -- indicating there were at least two hostile aircraft up right now with advanced search radars operating, because Iran now had four operational squadrons of F-14As -- all of them fully armed with the latest American air-to-air weaponry...and all of that vastly superior hardware courtesy of the now-deposed Shah of Iran -- and his cozy relationship with the Pentagon. Coral Sea's Phantoms in VF-21 were F-4N models, with 60s vintage avionics and radar, and were no match for the Tomcat's Phoenix long range fire control system.

"5-0-2, come right to 1-7-5, speed 220, set pos lights now."

"5-0-2 right to 175, 220 and we're lighting up now."

"5-0-2, Reaper 2-0-2, got your lights, gimme 1500."

"Reaper 2-0-2, 1500 set, drogue one out, advise..."

"Banger-3...Break-break! Two launches, I think they're...check that...two confirmed AIM-54s in the air, track while scan mode active..."

"Reaper 2-0-2 breaking right!"

"Boomer 5-0-2 going left," Sherman added, launching chaff and flares as his Intruder broke formation. He climbed left and rolled inverted, starting a dive to the hard deck and sending out packets of chaff along the way when he felt heat all along the left side of his body, then Putter shouting "Eject...eject...eject!"

Then...darkness. Everywhere. Slamming echoes, stuttering time. Discontinuity. He was falling and nothing made sense, especially not the pain in his left leg.

Then salt, in his mouth, and in his eyes. Salt water. Sea water. And he was still falling...!

Then an explosion around his neck. Life vest. Follow the bubbles, swim for the light. Hold your breath until...

He opened his eyes when he felt air on his face, tried to turn his head but everything hurt.

Then he saw Putter talking as he swam up to him with a life raft, but he realized he couldn't hear a thing.

"I can't hear," he managed to say -- just before another echo slammed into him, just before the hovering lights came for him.

+++++

He recognized the lights overhead and the green tiles on the walls. He was in an operating room, and people in green were moving him from a gurney to an operating table.

'This can't be good,' he thought, then he saw people talking before he realized he couldn't hear a damn thing they were saying. Then he realized his left leg really hurt and he tried to lift his head to take a look...

...then explosions of hot light filled his mind's eye, and as suddenly he started vomiting salt.

'Sea water? I'm barfing up sea water?'

Helping hands held his face while others turned him on his right side, and waves of pain crushed him and pushed him down under waves of impossible weight. Then people were helping him onto his back again, and a mask went over his mouth and nose. Probing fingers came next, on his arm, and an IV was inserted in his left forearm. He was awash in enveloping warmth after that, so he was never aware that his left leg was being amputated just above the knee.

Part II

Incident Light

That place among the rocks--is it a cave,

Or a winding path? The edge is what I have.

Theodore Roethke In A Dark Time

Boston, Massachusetts October, 2001

Most days he walked to class, though he still found the experience painful -- some days more than others. And when those days came he used a wheelchair, and his students knew better than to cross swords with him when he rolled into the classroom -- almost always a few minutes late. They knew his reputation -- everyone on the MIT campus did. The stricken warrior, the aura of the Annapolis grad and the Naval Aviator never far from anyone's mind, so when Professor Sherman came into a room everyone turned and looked and judged the man by the shadow of his past, and maybe because this spry, fifty-something-year-old man still looked like an actor called up from central casting to play the part of the warrior. Lean, and still muscularly so, only now with close-cropped steel gray hair, Sherman still had both the peregrine eyes of a pilot and the withering, caustic wit that almost always kept everyone at a respectful, if somewhat fearful distance. When students got him talking "about things" they learned about his years at Annapolis and of his three years quarterbacking the Midshipmen, and afterwards the hushed, whispered awe surrounding his mystique only grew more intense, and as is usually the case with the passage of time, this aura was a little more exaggerated with each new retelling.

He was late today, and yes, because he was in his chair. Students in the first few rows -- the bright ones -- could see the pain in his eyes, the thin bead of sweat on his brow, and they could only guess he'd had a rough night. And that could only mean one thing...

Pop quiz. The inevitable, and painfully difficult pop quiz.

Unless one of them could refocus his energy and somehow get him talking. Get him to tell one of his legendary "war stories," because he lost track of time when he fell into that trap -- and, if they were clever enough, they might get him to forget about a last minute quiz.

Hey, it's always worth a try, right?

But he wasn't even wearing his leg today, which meant he wouldn't even try to stand and address the class...and that was something his students dreaded most of all. Instead, and as usual, he switched on the overhead projector and laid a transparency on the panel...and there it was. A huge, daunting problem in celestial mechanics almost -- but not quite -- like the one from the textbook, and to arrive at the solution everything from radial velocities to doppler shifts would be needed.

"I'm assuming everyone finished chapter three over the weekend?" Sherman said, and he smiled at the chorus of groans spreading across the classroom. "Good. Let's take a moment to go over any questions you have before we break off into groups. And, oh, by the by, your answers will need to be on my desk by the end of office hours on Friday..."

Groans were followed by startled gasps and rolling eyes.

Their questions were more involved than expected and this part of class lasted longer than he'd wanted, though he smiled inside when a couple of kids tried to get him talking about g-forces in jet aircraft for the umpteenth time. Five minutes before class ended he reminded them that their TAs would be on hand to help with any questions during tomorrow's lab sessions, and as he sent the class on their way he looked down and closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose when another wave of pain grabbed him by the throat.

His hands were shaking by then, because the shattered remnants of his left femur felt just like glass shards tearing into his thigh muscles -- it's 'just the nature of the injury' -- or so his doctors kept saying, implying there was nothing more they could do to help. But just where did that leave him, he asked his learned physicians? Vicodin? Or Percocet? Get strung out on pain meds until he blew his liver out -- or worse, before the inevitable overdose took him out. Then what? He knew one thing: there was no way he'd be able to keep teaching if he was strung out on pain meds, yet with so much lingering pain for how much longer could he keep real focus in the classroom. How much longer could he be worthy of teaching at this level.

"Professor Sherman? Are you okay?"

He looked up, saw one of those young bright faces from the front row looking down at him, her soulful eyes full of infinite concern. "I'm fine, Beth," he sighed. "Really."

"You don't look so fine, Doc," she said, her voice laden with a mother's concern, and a fair amount of maternal sarcasm, too.

He shrugged. "It is what it is. Now, is there something I can help you with?"

"Are you going to your office?"

"Yes. Office hours today."

"I'll push your chair, if that's okay..."