All That Outer Space Allows (Apollo Quartet Book 4)

by Ian Sales

  Bob leans forward and picks up the newspaper, that day’s Los Angeles Times.

  What am I looking at? Bob asks.

  NASA wants more astronauts, Walden tells him.

  Bob looks down at the front page and reads out: “NASA is looking for men. You must be a United States citizen, not over 36 years old, less than 6 feet tall, with a college degree in Math or Science and with at least 1,000 hours flying time. If you meet all the requirements, then please apply.”

  Seriously? asks Bob. You thinking of putting your name in?

  Yeah, replies Walden. They’ve put, what, a dozen guys up so far? And the Soviets have launched about ten. They’re top of the pyramid now, Bob.

  You been keeping track? asks Al (but his grin is a little too knowing).

  Ginny is as surprised as the guys, she didn’t know Walden was interested in space. Walden has asked about the X-15 program, she knows that; but he has not been assigned to it.

  She hopes her husband applies to NASA, and she hopes he is successful. She likes the idea of being married to an astronaut, certainly what she knows of space exploration she finds fascinating and she’d welcome knowing what it’s really like. Ginny reads and writes science fiction, stories about spaceships and alien worlds, but they’re made up, invented. The Mercury program, the Gemini space capsule—they’re real, men have used them to orbit the Earth. They’re actual in a way Ginny’s stories can never be.

  The other wives at Edwards, and their husbands, they don’t know about Ginny’s writing. She hides away the magazines when she has visitors—female visitors, of course; the men simply don’t see them, much as they don’t see anything they consider of interest only to women—and she uses her maiden name as a byline, because she started sending letters to the magazines as a teenager and became known under that name. Ginny keeps her science fiction life separate and secret from her life as an Air Force wife, it’s easier that way. But for all she knows there may well be other subscribers to Galaxy and If and Worlds of Tomorrow at Edwards Air Force Base.

  Of course, life here is all about the menfolk, supporting them, providing a stable home life to succour them when they’re not risking their lives. Perhaps that’s why NASA insists on test pilots—or, at the very least, jet fighter pilots. Because their wives are trained to provide the stability the astronauts need in order to risk their lives publicly in such an untried endeavour…

  If so, then the joke is on NASA: test pilot marriages fracture before test pilot nerves.

  Chapter 2

  T-Minus

  Walden says nothing about the physical at Brooks AFB or, months later, the interviews at the Rice Hotel in Houston; but for a week after his last trip to Texas he swaggers more than usual. Ginny knows this unshakeable confidence is as much a coping mechanism as will be, should he fail, his subsequent realisation he doesn’t really want it anyway. But she hopes he succeeds, she wishes she could go into space herself. But she knows that, at this time, it’s an occupation reserved for men—no, more than that: reserved for men of Walden’s particular stripe, jet fighter pilots and test pilots. She calls him “my spaceman” one night, it just slips out—she is reading the latest issue of If, there’s a good novella in it by Miriam Allen deFord, and Ginny’s head is full of spaceships and spaceship captains; but Walden turns suddenly cold and gives her his thousand-yard stare. He starts to explain the competition is fierce, he won’t know how he’s done until he hears from NASA… but he breaks off, scrambles out of bed and stalks from the room.

  Ginny puts the magazine on the bedside table, but her hand is shaking. She sits silently, her hands in her lap, and waits. He does not return. Fifteen minutes later and he’s still not back, so she rearranges her pillows, makes herself comfortable beneath the sheets, and reaches out and turns off the bedside lamp. She has no idea what time it is when he eventually slides into bed beside her, waking her, and whispers, Sorry, hon. She rolls over, closes her eyes and tries to re-enter some alternate world of sleep where marriages are blissful, life itself is blissful, and she is as famous as Catherine Moore or Leigh Brackett.

  They wake at 0430, the shrill ring of the alarm dragging them both from sleep. While Walden goes for a shower, she wraps herself in a housecoat and heads for the kitchen. There is breakfast to prepare—coffee to roast, bread to toast, eggs to fry, bacon, pancakes and hash browns. She does this every day, sees off her man with a full stomach and a steady heart. Here he is now, crisp and freshly-laundered in his tan uniform, hungry for the day ahead. He takes his seat, she pours him juice and coffee, slides his plate before him, and then sits across the table and watches him eat as she sips from a cup of coffee. She should be getting up before him, making herself ready, dressed and made up, to greet him when he awakes—but countless past arguments have won her the right to make his breakfast and see him off to work without having to do so. The housecoat is enough.

  They kiss goodbye at the door, and he strides off to the Chevrolet Impala Coupe in the carport. Though she wants to go back to bed, there is too much to do, there is always too much to do.

  After clearing up the breakfast things, she makes herself another coffee and settles down to catch up with her magazines, she is a couple of issues behind with Fantastic, and this issue, the last of 1965, features a novella by Zenna Henderson and stories by Doris Pitkin Buck, Kate Wilhelm and Josephine Saxton.

  Later, she will get dressed—and she will dress for comfort, not for appearance’s sake—and she will get out the typewriter and she will work on her latest story. She made the decision years before to incorporate elements of her own life—and, suitably disguised, Walden’s—into her science fiction, so she feels no need to visit libraries or book stores for research. She has a stack of issues of Fantastic Universe, If, Amazing Stories, Galaxy, World of Tomorrow in a closet—they are all the research material she needs. Galaxy, after all, runs a science column by astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin; Amazing Stories has featured science columns by June Lurie and Faye Beslow since the 1940s. Walden, of course, has a library of aeronautics and engineering texts in the bedroom he uses as a den, and Ginny has on occasion paged through them—not that Walden knows: his den is for him alone and she allows him the illusion of its sanctity; naturally, it never occurs to him to wonder how the room remains clean.

  Ginny is feeling lazy today. She likes to think she has an excellent work ethic when it comes to her writing, but some days she finds it hard to muster the enthusiasm to bang on the keys of her typewriter. Especially when she has just read something she thinks she can never approach in quality—and that, she sadly realises, is true of the Saxton story in the magazine she is holding. Josephine Saxton is a new writer, from England, and this is her debut in print. Ginny only wishes her first published story, just four years ago in Fantastic, had been as good.

  The blow to her confidence decides her: she will leave her current work in progress until tomorrow; today she will catch up on her correspondence, she owes letters to Ursula, Judith and Doris, and she really ought to fire off a missive to Cele at Fantastic with her thoughts on the issue she has just read.

  After she has showered and dressed in slacks and shirt, she finds herself outside on the patio, gazing east across the roofs of Wherry Housing toward the Air Force Base and Rogers Dry Lake, and beyond it the high desert stretching to the horizon, where the Calico Mountains dance in the pastel haze of distance. As she watches, a jet fighter powers up from one of the runways and though it is more than a mile and a half from her, she can tell from its delta wing it is a F-102 or F-106. Its throaty roar crowds the lapis lazuli sky, there’s a quick flash of mirror-bright aluminum as the aircraft banks, and then it seems to fade from view as it flies away from her. She wonders if it’s Walden in the cockpit, she has no idea what he does from day to day once he enters the base; officially, he’s a research test pilot in the Fighter Test Group, but she doesn’t know what he researches, which fighters he test pilots. Not the North American X-15, she knows that much, an aircraft whic
h intrigues her because it is also a spaceship—it has flown more than fifty miles above the Earth, right at the edge of space, at over 4,000 miles per hour. And it even looks like a spaceship, like a rocket, as much at home in vacuum as it is in atmosphere. She would like to know more about the X-15 but it’s a sensitive subject in the house. Walden has tried to get on the program but has been refused, and he wears the refusal badly. Perhaps that’s why he was so keen to apply to become an astronaut.

  Ginny is a California girl, a real one, born and bred in San Diego in Southern California, not one of those “dolls by a palm tree in the sand” from that song on the radio. She has history in this landscape of deserts and canyons and mesas, though she grew up beside the limitless plain of the Pacific. Here in the Mojave she is hemmed in by mountains, they encircle her world, her flat and arid world, where the small towns are so far apart they might as well belong to their own individual Earths. Standing here, gazing in the direction of Arizona, she finds it easy to believe Edwards is the only human place in the world, a lonely oasis of civilisation—and she knows her husband thinks of it as a technological haven in a world held back from the best science and engineering can offer by the short-sightedness of others. To some degree, she thinks he may be right. But she is also a housewife, and she lives in a world in which bed linen must be changed, clothes laundered, meals cooked and checkbooks balanced. She envies Walden his freedom to ignore all that—because she manages his world.

  And now she really must get on with her letter-writing, although the lawn looks like it needs mowing and the end of the yard is beginning to look a little untidy…

  #

  “The only women in the group beside myself were Virginia Kidd and Donald Wollheim’s wife Elsie, who wrote a little and was nominally called a Futurian.”

  p44, Better to Have Loved, Judith Merril

  “Gernsback claims he had as many female readers as male, but far fewer women became actively involved with fandom than men. Despite their numbers, the main route to fandom—having your letters published—was blocked to them, perhaps, as Gernsback implies, because they were less interested in engaging with the science of science fiction than men.”

  p25, The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, Justine Larbalestier

  “Not only was the female viewpoint unappreciated in most of the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s, but also women were generally relegated to the position of “things”, window dressing, or forced to assume attitudes in the corner, out of the way.”

  p281, ‘Hitch Your Dragon to a Star: Romance and Glamour in Science Fiction’, Anne McCaffrey (Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow, Reginald Bretnor, ed.)

  “What sort of person writes science fiction? He—it is “she” once in about fifty times—very seldom depends wholly on the writing of science fiction for his living.”

  p51, New Maps of Hell, Kingsley Amis

  “A few women, such as C. L. Moore and Leigh Brackett, were working in the field earlier; Katherine MacLean entered the fray in 1949 in Astounding.”

  p258, Trillion Year Spree, Brian W Aldiss

  “But at the same time [science fiction] has always reflected and continues to reflect a particular type of authority, that of men over women.”

  p87, In the Chinks of the World Machine, Sarah Lefanu

  #

  On Fridays, Ginny drives into Lancaster to do the weekly shopping; there’s a commissary on the base but its stock is better-suited to bachelors. Ginny and Walden only have the one car, of course, the Impala, so she accompanies him onto the base and then drives the car back home. He won’t let her drive him to work, he has to be behind the wheel, though she’s a perfectly good driver, not that he will ever admit it.

  Since Ginny has to make Walden’s breakfast and be ready to leave when he does, she wakes earlier than him in order to shower, dress and make up. She slides out of bed, leaving a sleeping Walden, who breathes as though he were engaged in an endless sequence of underwater dives, and pads across the bedroom to the bathroom. She showers, she washes her hair, she checks her legs and underarms to see if they need shaving; she towels herself dry and wraps it about her torso, and makes turban of a second towel for her hair. She heads for the second bedroom—which is her room in much the same way the third bedroom is Walden’s den. He thinks her room contains only clothes and cosmetics and shoes (her wardrobe is not as big as Walden believes it is)—but her closet is actually filled with back-issues of science fiction magazines, nor does he notice the bookcase holding science fiction paperbacks and a few hardcovers. There is no desk, however, only a dressing-table with a triptych of mirrors on its top. Ginny sits before this and minutely inspects her face…

  By the time Walden appears in the kitchen, washed and uniformed, Ginny is dressed in a lemon yellow short-sleeved A-line summer dress, bought in San Diego during her last visit and not made from a pattern as the other wives would have done (although Ginny is not, perversely, jealous of their facility with sewing machine, needle and thread), face powdered, eyelashes mascaraed and mouth lipsticked, and her purse waiting on the table in the hall. She dishes out Walden’s breakfast and watches him eat it while she sips a coffee. She does not need to glance at her watch to know if they are on schedule—Walden is military, his life is ruled by schedule; he entered the kitchen at the same time he does every weekday, he takes as long to eat his eggs, bacon, hash browns and pancakes as he always does, he pushes back his chair, drains the last of his coffee, and says, Time to go, hon—right on schedule.

  And because it is Friday, she replies, yes, dear. And she rises to her feet, puts his plate and cup, and her own cup, in the sink to be washed later, follows him into the hallway, where she slides on her sunglasses, picks up her purse, and tock-tock-tocks out of the house and into the carport, and waits deferentially while Walden locks up behind her. Once he has slid behind the steering-wheel, she joins him in the car and sits there waiting compliantly as he gives the ignition key a quick, confident twist.

  It’s the first day of April, the temperature is in the low seventies and the sun beats down on the blacktop, causing it to shimmer and flex ahead of the car as Ginny drives the thirty miles to Lancaster, her foot heavy on the throttle. Tucked away somewhere in her purse is a shopping list of groceries, but as well as the Alpha Beta Market she also needs to visit Sears to buy herself some more clothes. She and Walden argued a couple of evenings ago—he came home angry after some incident on the flight line, he wouldn’t say what. She had spent the day writing, he asked in a cold hard voice why she has to dress like a hippy, which only demonstrated to her he has no idea what a hippy looks like, but the remark sparked a fight… And now she must, as she has reluctantly promised, dress more often like the other wives, in skirts and dresses. She is already thinking how she might use the incident in a story, perhaps something about how wives disguise their true nature by presenting themselves according to their menfolk’s wishes and expectations, using all the tricks and tools at their disposal: makeup, foundation garments, skirts and heels and the like; maybe, she thinks, the wives could be alien creatures, forced into their spousal roles in order to survive…

  There are certainly days when Ginny feels like an alien creature—or rather, days when she feels she has more in common temperamentally with some invented alien being than she does her husband of seven years. Walden is not a complicated man, but there are times when she cannot understand what is going through his head. She knows some of it is a result of a peculiar kind of blindness—he pretends not to see her science fiction, and has done for so long now he probably can’t actually see it. His mind filters out anything not of his masculine world. If Ginny leaves out a magazine, a copy of Redbook, perhaps, or Ladies Home Journal, brought round by one of the other wives, Walden says nothing but behaves as if it exists in a blind spot in his vision. When Ginny leaves pantyhose to dry in the bathroom, he complains of her “mess” but cannot say what the mess is. And should Ginny lose something, a lipstick, an earring, he will happily look for it but
he will never find it, she has to do that herself, and she often discovers it in a place where Walden has already searched.

  She twists the steering-wheel and directs the Impala into the Alpha Beta Market’s parking lot, causing it to wallow queasily as it bounces over the edge of the road. She finds a parking space quickly and slots the car into it. After slipping her nyloned feet from the flats she wears for driving into her high-heeled pumps, she exits the Impala; and, as she leans in to pick up her purse, she hears her name called. Surprised, she turns about and there’s a figure across the lot waving at her. It’s another woman, another wife, blonde hair, sky blue A-line summer dress, tanned arms. And it’s a moment before Ginny recognises Mary, wife of Captain Joe H Engle, whom she doesn’t know all that well as Mary’s husband is a pilot on the X-15 program and Walden is still sensitive on the topic. But the four of them have spoken on occasion in the Officers Club on the base, so if they’re not friends then they’re certainly acquaintances.

  The two women meet up at the entrance to the supermarket and it’s clear Mary has something she wants to talk about, although it’s not easy to read her expression due to the large sunglasses she is wearing.

  Joe tells me, she says earnestly, Wal is doing the tests to be an astronaut?

  He is, Ginny confirms. Joe too?

  They walk into the store side by side, through the sliding doors and into its air-conditioned interior.

  You think Wal has a chance? asks Mary.

  He thinks so, Ginny says.

  When do you think they’ll be told?

  Ginny pulls a shopping cart from the line and drops her purse into it. I don’t know, she says. Soon, I hope. I’m not sure I can put up with Walden like this for much longer.