Assorted Prose by John Updike

triangular asteroids. There was as yet no burlesque, however brutal, of the celestial landscape that seemed beyond the youthful powers of our companion in world leadership.
    Troubled, we woke when it was still dark, and went to the window, to see, through a screen of leafless elm branches, the moon half submerged on the horizon—bloated, cockeyed, and, in the orange dawn, transparent. Lord, we thought, the moon has foundered! Our wife, also awake now, assured us the moon was merely setting in its accustomed manner, and together we watched it sink from view, plunge on its way, poor, blind, dumb thing, to the other side of the earth, where an eclipse and heaven knew what strange assault awaited it. How reluctantly it abandoned the obsolescent safety of the American sky!
    The next night, the mammoth stone returned unharmed—indeed, augmented and completely full. We were grateful. Whether it was the honor of the universe or of our country that had survived a crisis we are as yet too addled by moonbeams to declare.
    September 1959
    T WENTY-TWO MONTHS AGO , we wrote in this space of our deep, primeval fear that Soviet Russia would celebrate the revolution’s fortieth anniversary by splashing red paint on the face of the moon. This threat of heavenly vandalism was in the wind, you may remember, shortly after the first sputnik violated the azure serene of our national vanity. Since that innocent awakening, sublunar space has become as crowded with peculiar missiles as a panel of “Krazy Kat”; the phrases “in orbit” and “launching pad” have entered our advertising slang; the fizzles at Cape Canaveral have blended with the friendly sizzling of breakfast bacon; and the United States government, in all seriousness, has selected seven young fathers from dreamy towns like East Derry, New Hampshire, to colonize the circumambient vacuum. Perhaps television comedians and the backs of Kix boxes have made this whole awesome business too familiar to all of us. At any rate, the Soviet flag has pricked the moon, and we feel no pain.
    March 1963
    S CIENCE takes away with one hand what it gives with the other. No sooner do Russian scientists claim that they have revived two lizards that had been frozen in the Siberian tundra for five thousand years than American scientists announce that there is no life whatever on Venus. In a way, we’re relieved, for there’s so much life in France, Cuba, and the subway these days that it’s a comfort to know there are still a few underdeveloped areas in the universe. But in a way we’re sorry, for the tendrilous, polyoptical Venutian was, along with the wispy, transparent Lunite and the green-skinned, snaggle-toothed, canal-building Martian, a childhood friend. How vivid the populations of other planets once seemed—far more imaginable than the residents of Cambodia or Chicago! The people on Jupiter were terribly squat and slow, because of the intense gravity; when they moved, it was like lava pouring, and when they talked, it was like furnaces grumbling. The inhabitants of Saturn always wore wide-brimmed hats and hoopskirts, whereas the folks on Neptune swam everywhere they went, carrying tridents. Pluto, so remote, cold, and small, seemed the planetary poor relation, and we pitied the cosmic hillbillies who had to live there, clad in rags, drinking cheap sulphates, and trying to warm their shivering limbs in the rays of a sun no bigger than a star. At the opposite end of the system, but somewhat kindredly underprivileged, were the almost Caribbean individuals sweltering out their lazy days on Mercury, which always kept the same side toward the sun, and where everything this side of silicon melted, making machinery impossible and architecture unstable.
    Now they tell us this is all fancy. Venus, far from being a tropical paradise beneath its mantle of perpetual clouds, is a baking limbo of eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Though there is still hope that a bit of moss enlivens Mars, the planets