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Her words sounded like clichés, a sermon I had once preached myself a thousand times during the years of international fund raising. I stopped listening to her, as my own voice within became a thunder that required great effort to subdue. This was the most deadly serious mission that had ever been launched!
Throughout the struggle with my own fears, stirred by a growing doubt that we would reach our goal alive, my gaze rested on her. My eyes kept drinking in her image. I felt I had a right to do what seemed impolite at best. After having stood for twenty hours at the fusion furnace, the x-ray microscope, the computer, fighting feverishly against time in an effort to achieve the impossible, I had achieved a miracle. I had been drawing together the very depth of all that was within me, harnessing the experiences of a lifetime to put together this new alloy that had never been invented before. I felt I had a perfect right to stare at her in repayment for having saved her life, too.
And even after the metal was brewed, the very challenge of forging it into bearings which had to work perfectly the first time was worth the highest reward a nation could ever offer. I wasn't asking for much, merely for her permission of resting my eyes on her? The work in the pit had been a sweat job of an intensity I had never before encountered. All I knew, was, that my task had to be accomplished before the mechanical engineering officer would burst into the ship's smithy and demand the 'gold' he had a right to expect with no delay. The only rest period that I was able to allow myself in those twenty some hours, was a ten minute snooze in a corner of the 'ceiling,' wedged between a grease drum anchored to a beam and a stack of oily rags that had been discarded and tied to a post.
Those ten minutes corresponded to the time required for the bearings to cool, after the forging process, before they could be fitted. The worst, however, was the agony of waiting, wondering if the bearings would do the job they were designed to do. This agony alone should have been sufficient to demand a King's ransom. For the moment, however, Natalia was sufficient for me. She represented the world to me, all that was wonderful about being alive as a human being. She was one of those rare individuals that one meets perhaps only once in a lifetime and counts this a blessing forever.
She had traveled far in her mind; to depths, heights, and places that make all the excursions of the world's jet setters, combined, appear as nothing in comparison. And this traveling wasn't the aimless kind of mind excursion, a withdrawal into the realm of semi-unconsciousness that is cherished as a realm of freedom by the new psychedelic culture which was sweeping the globe, of hard music, cheap sex, and mind-destroying drugs.
While looking at Natalia across the Jacuzzi, the day came to mind when she had invited me to her room in order to discuss the constitution of the ship. She called it the most remarkable piece of governmental technology she had ever seen; "a daring step beyond democracy."
"Look!" she had entreated me, and had held the book right under my nose. "As far as I understand this, the captain has no power over our lives, none whatsoever! The only authority he has is to transact the laws of this document, to make certain that the departments that operate the ship are functioning responsibly according to the form outlined in this document of law." Her eyes sparkled when she spoke.
Then she closed the book. "Whoever wrote this law, meant to tell us something. The fact is we are living a paradox!"
"A paradox?" I repeated.
"Yes! Don't you see? We've launched this great mission to explore other worlds in search for answers of the kind that we should really find in ourselves. What we are looking for is a mental technology by which we can regard one another as human beings. I think this is the bottom line, the answer to everything that we are after. It is the answer to war, to deprivation, even AIDS. We've mobilized the resources of the world for this mission, the paradox is that we haven't yet found a way to allow ourselves to explore what it means to regard each other as human beings. We treat each other as members of institutions; as married, single, democrats, doctors, socialists, feminists, or poor underprivileged minorities; but we never treat each other unconditionally as people, without at the same time denying our individualities that make each one of us special. Aren't we primarily people, instead of being primarily democrats, or married individuals?"
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