by Ian Sales
“Kristin?” said Suzanne. “Can you come here a moment?”
“What is it, darling?”
Kristin asked Aiko to be quiet with a raised hand, and wormed her way to the front of the bridge to stand beside Suzanne.
“Look at them,” Suzanne told her. “Why are they behaving like that?”
“I’ve no idea,” replied Kristin. “But that humming noise is really starting to get on my nerves.”
“Now what are they up to?”
They watched the men run along the side of the dock to the ramp leading up to the hatch. One of them stepped onto the ramp and hesitantly approached the side of the spaceship.
Five minutes later, Suzanne’s husband arrived panting on the bridge. “What the hell did you do?” he demanded.
All of the women pretended not to know what he meant.
“One of you did something,” he insisted.
“We’ve got absolutely no idea what you’re on about, darling,” declared Kristin.
“The invisibility!” he exclaimed. “It works!”
Another figure appeared in the bridge hatch. It was Layla’s husband. “Did you turn it off?” he asked.
Suzanne’s husband turned to him. “Turn what off?”
“The field. As soon as you entered the ship, it became visible.”
“I haven’t touched anything.”
“I can still hear that hum,” Kristin complained.
“What did you do?” demanded Suzanne’s husband.
“I don’t remember,” replied Aiko, either because she truly didn’t or because she was afraid to admit she had done anything at all.
Suzanne’s husband began to herd the women from the bridge. They trooped along the corridor until they reached the top of the ladder. The two men clambered down it, and the women followed gingerly. Halfway down, the heel of one of Eniola’s scarlet pumps stuck in the edge of a tread. Layla was behind her. While the two struggled, the rest followed the men to the airlock and out of the spaceship onto the ramp. Suzanne saw Kristin’s husband look up in surprise. He grabbed one of the other men and pointed at the women. No, past them. Suzanne looked behind her. What was the problem? There was the UESS Aldridge, looking just as large as life, its grey bulk filling the dock.
Eniola and Layla appeared in the airlock. Eniola was limping, but not because she was injured, and complaining of a run. As the two of them stepped through the hatch and onto the ramp, the men began to talk excitedly amongst themselves.
It took the men less than thirty minutes to determine that the invisibility field only worked when two or more of the women were aboard the spaceship. A single man, however, and UESS Aldridge remained stubbornly visible. It wasn’t just Suzanne, Kristin, Eniola, Layla or Aiko, either. The men fetched secretaries and nurses, and they too triggered the invisibility. But no man could do it. Aiko eventually confessed to having pressed a button, and it proved to be the main power switch for the invisibility field generator. None of the settings had been changed from the last test, which had of course been unsuccessful, before the wives had boarded.
The men began to talk among themselves.
“I don’t understand it at all,” Suzanne’s husband said.
“Something to do with women’s bio-electric field?” suggested Layla’s husband.
“We need to do more tests.”
“We can’t tell the navy it needs to crew all its destroyers with women.”
“They’ll cancel the project.”
“Whoever heard of an all-female space navy? It’s damned ridiculous!”
Kristin took umbrage at this last comment. “Why is it ridiculous?” she demanded. “We can fight as well as men. Women have fought throughout history.”
“The Amazons,” put in Suzanne.
“The Valkyries,” added Kristin.
“Onna-bugeisha,” said Aiko.
“Queen Zenobia,” said Layla.
“And it’s always been visible to you?” Kristin’s husband asked, quickly changing the subject.
The wives nodded.
“Even when we can’t see it?” said Aiko’s husband.
Despite their insistence the UESS Aldridge had remained stubbornly visible to them the entire time, the men seemed reluctant to believe their wives.
At that moment, Betty strolled up. She was wearing her usual flightsuit and had plainly landed minutes before from a test flight. “Hey, what’s going on?” she asked the men.
Suzanne’s husband quickly filled her in. As soon as she heard the UESS Aldridge had actually vanished from sight, she laughed. Then she said, “I watched you as I flew in. The spaceship has been here all along.”
“You didn’t see her disappear?”
Betty shook her head.
“So you can see the ship even when it’s invisible? Just like our wives can?”
Betty nodded and grinned.
Kristin leaned in close to Suzanne. “Just think,” she said, The spaceships are only invisible with women crews. And they’re only invisible to men. It looks like men might be finally out of the war game.”
“Oh no,” said Suzanne, feeling truly happy for the first time since her husband had been assigned to the spaceyard. “If they need us to wage war, I’m sure we can find a better way to sort things out than fighting.”
Chapter 6
First Stage Separation
In August 1967, the Eckhardts move into their new house in El Lago. Ginny is glad to get out of the apartment, but the prospect of keeping such a large house clean is daunting. It’s not as if she were the most house-proud housewife in Houston, and Walden has never been particularly fussy, but they have neighbours now, other members of the astronaut corps and AWC—not just Charlie and Dotty, or Stu and Joan, from their own group, the New Nineteen, but also families from the Original Seven, the New Nine and the Fourteen.
And they might drop in or pop over at any time.
The rest of the year passes in a blur of cleaning and polishing, parties, AWC meetings, visits to the beauty parlour, keeping up appearances, keeping everything primly stable. Walden is there only at weekends, sometimes he’s in Long Island at the Grumman plant, as he’s now specialising in the lunar module, sometimes he’s away on a geology field trip, maybe at the Grand Canyon; but mostly he’s at the Cape. The Hermes Baby sits unused in a closet, there is never enough time to get it out and start writing, there is never enough time to think about what to write. Ginny is even struggling to keep up with her science fiction magazine reading, and she seriously considers letting some of her subscriptions lapse. She has no one to talk to about science fiction, the other wives they only read McCall’s and Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan and Redbook. She looks at herself and she’s turning into one of those robot wives. She wonders how the other wives cope, they seem so self-assured, so organised—a complaint echoed by Mary Irwin in her autobiography, The Moon is Not Enough, “All the other astronaut wives were in the same predicament, but they seemed to be taking it in stride. Or was it that gold-plated image we were encased in and mortally afraid of tarnishing?” Ginny must tread a careful path between the expectations of the public, the bidding of NASA, and peer pressure.
But then ‘The Spaceships Men Don’t See’ appears in the February 1968 issue of Galaxy, alongside stories by Kit Reed, Kate Wilhelm, Jane Beauclerk, Gertrude Friedberg and Sydney J Van Scyoc. The response to the story is positive. Ginny receives approving letters from many of her friends, and it’s enough to motivate her into finally writing all those replies she owes. But seeing the words of her story in the magazine also has a salutary effect on Ginny: she realises she needs to do more than simply keep house if she is to hold onto her sanity here in Togethersville. Being an astronaut wife is not enough, and each passing day Ginny, although not a drinker, has found herself thinking more and more about the drinks cabinet—and she won’t be the first astronaut wife to fall victim to it. She remembers her conversation with Evelyn over ‘The Spaceships Men Don’t See’ an
d it occurs to her she could take more of an interest in her husband’s endeavours. Not simply support him, as a wife should, she’s been doing that since she moved to Houston, but make an effort to understand what he’s been going through, to better sympathise with the stress he’s under, the strain he faces each day. After all, space travel interests her, it always has done, and here she is on the periphery of the greatest space program the planet has ever known. She knows bits and pieces, she’s sneaked occasional looks at NASA press kits, but she wants to be closer still, to actually touch a real spacecraft, a LM or a CM, maybe even a Saturn V.
So she approaches Walden one evening:
We have the house how we want it now, Ginny says, do you think I’d be allowed to see inside the Manned Spacecraft Center?
Allowed? replies Walden. Sure, you want me to take you round?
You can do that?
Sure, Walden assures her offhandedly.
And the Cape, I’d like to see that too, the launch pad and everything.
Hey, small steps, hon, Walden says. I’ll take you in one day next week for a tour of the MSC, how about it?
It takes him several reminders before he eventually arranges something. On the day, Ginny drives to the MSC around mid-morning. The guard on the gate has obviously been informed and waves her straight through. She directs the Impala to where she’s been told to park, and soon spots a figure in a pale blue flight jacket striding across the lot toward her. Even from this distance, even in clothing much like that worn by all the astronauts, she can tell from the way he moves it’s her husband. Once Walden reaches her, he looks her up and down, vetting her appearance, although he has made no mention of a dress code. But what she has chosen she thinks he won’t criticise, a double-breasted dress, belted, with pleated skirt, in a nice sober blue, and matching heels. She’s even wearing gloves, white cotton ones, she hasn’t worn a pair since she was a teenager, though she has seen other wives in gloves on their way to church on a Sunday.
You look nice, says Walden—but it’s perfunctory.
He doesn’t even peck her on the cheek, just turns about and heads back toward the nine-storey building from which he came. She trots after him, walking faster than normal to keep up. She wonders what’s wrong, why this treatment, but as they step inside the building she sees Walden appears neither vexed nor impatient nor annoyed. He is smiling, he looks confident, he looks at ease.
This way, hon, he says.
He walks beside her, perhaps a pace or two in front, he doesn’t hold her, he doesn’t touch her, but he still seems to possess her. She can feel it like a forcefield extending about her, warding off all curiosity—because she is Mrs Walden J Eckhardt. At times like this she wishes Virginia G Parker were not a secret, she’s sure a male science fiction writer, though there are only a handful of them, would have been given VIP treatment.
#
What building is this? Ginny asks. Engaging her husband in conversation, she hopes, might slow his pace.
Administration, he replies.
How many buildings are there?
Hell if I know. Twenty, twenty-five, I guess.
Where are we going?
They exit the rear of the Administration Building, back out into the sunlight. Ginny stumbles, taken by surprise—she’s heard the MSC described as a campus, and she’s imagined something like her alma mater, SDSU, a tightly-packed complex of inter-connected buildings and small dark courtyards. Not this great park like a golf course, with three irregular lakes, scattered trees and low rolling hills of grass. Lined about its circumference are white office blocks, most no more than two or three storeys tall, and some buildings which resemble hangars or large storage sheds with blank aluminum sides and flat roofs.
Walden has halted at the abrupt double-tap of Ginny’s heels on the asphalt path, and looks back at her. She gives him a wan smile and says, It’s very pleasant.
Walden shrugs. Mission Control Center first, he tells her.
She can see his heart is not in this tour, perhaps he hoped she’d forget her request. But she knows some of the other wives have been to the MSC, have seen what it takes to put their husbands into space, keep them alive up there, and then bring them back safely to Earth. She thinks she knows what to expect, she’s seen photographs of the MCC, although she can’t remember where. Not in any of her science fiction magazines—though they may support the space program, the fact it’s a wholly male undertaking rankles with the magazines’ chiefly female readerships. Ginny has seen as much in letter columns, a kind of reverse snobbery which suggests the imaginary space missions of science fiction fans are somehow a greater achievement than actually putting a man on the Moon—
And Walden ushers Ginny into a shed-like building, along a corridor and through a door—there was a sign on it, but she didn’t manage to read it—and she finds herself standing in a viewing gallery at the back of a room the size of a high school gym. But it’s not filled with ropes and benches, or young men in vests and shorts running back and forth between a pair of baskets… There are instead eight lines of large consoles, four to either side of a central aisle, and they’re stepped so all have a good view of the five giant screens on the opposite wall. Half a dozen people sit at each of the consoles, and they’re all men, all young, in short-sleeved white shirts and sombre ties and spectacles, and she just knows every one of them is an engineer, they look like engineers. What’s that phrase Walden uses, Ginny thinks; and then as it comes to her she puts a hand to her mouth to hide a snort of laughter: “pencil-necks”. Those guys there, they’re pencil-necks. Walden and the other astronauts seem to hold them in some small contempt—and some not so small respect too, because they know their lives are in their hands.
Wow, says Ginny.
She steps down to the window and peers this way and that, puts a gloved hand up to the glass, and she’s staring at the consoles, trying to make out what the scrolling lines of white-on-black numbers on the monitors might mean, she’s marvelling at the thick manuals splayed open or piled on every surface, she’s impressed by the earnestness and confidence with which these pencil-necks operate their screens and buttons and switches.
Something about the Mission Control Center strikes Ginny as bizarrely familiar, and it’s a moment before she figures out what: one-upmanship. It seems to seep through the glass, a miasma of intellectual Darwinism, it’s there to see in the desperate way the engineers grab manuals and point out something on a page, the urgency with which they scribble notes and calculations, the need for approval evident in every bespectacled gaze in the MCC. It’s nothing like the testosterone which coloured the air at Edwards, or perhaps it’s a less potent version of it, but there is still a sense that not only do these engineers know they’re the best at what they do but they also feel an addict’s compulsion to demonstrate it time and time again.
Walden walks down to join her at the glass, and Ginny abruptly realises most of the men in the MCC have turned about and are now staring at her as if they’ve never seen a woman before. She feels Walden slide an arm around her waist and she gives an abashed smile, looks to her husband, back again into the MCC… and sees the pencil-necks’ gazes have now shifted to Walden—and from their expressions alone Ginny knows that her husband is an astronaut.
Is there anything happening? she asks him.
She’s beginning to feel like an exhibit in a zoo, one of a mating pair of exotic animals when, really, she’s the one on the outside looking in.
Walden makes a face. There’s an unmanned flight of the Apollo stack scheduled for next month, he tells her, so they can man-rate the Saturn V.
That’s the one that’s going to take you to the Moon?
He manhandles her about, none too gently, and with a hand to the small of her back, directs her up the steps to the exit from the gallery. Out in the corridor, she pulls away from him, and she can sense him simmering.
Not me, he snaps. I’m just one of the greenhorns, I’ve not even been asked to support a flight.
I’m sure you’ll get your chance, she assures him. But she knows the words are empty, as does he, her sympathy won’t get him what he desires most. She’s doing her best, she’s been trying so hard, just look at the way she’s dressed, she goes to the beauty parlour regularly, she attends the AWC meetings and stays on good terms with all the other wives.
This way, Walden says brusquely. And he’s off again down the corridor.
#
#
Another building, another gym-sized room. This, explains Walden, is the Apollo Lunar Mission Simulator. There are banks and banks of computers, with flashing lights and reels of tape that abruptly zip clockwise then anticlockwise. There is a great cubical frame of steel girders off to one side, and just visible within it is a grey and cratered diorama. And there are the three simulators, which look like someone opened a giant closet and all the boxes inside just fell out into piles. Walden points over at a large U-shaped console which looks up at one of the simulators.
That’s where the pencil-necks set up the mission parameters, he tells her. It’s all computerised.
There’s a lot of computers, Ginny says.
Yeah, 4.2 million bucks’ worth.
It’s a sum beyond imagining for Ginny, though not, she suspects, inconceivable to those closely involved with Apollo—after all, putting a man into space, putting a man on the Moon, is a hugely expensive endeavour.
This way, says Walden. This is the LM simulator.
He takes Ginny’s arm and leads her up a short flight of red-carpeted stairs to a platform at the back of the piles of boxes, and he steps through an entranceway into the simulator itself. Ginny halts at the jamb and peers in, and she can feel her pulse quicken as she takes in the grey panels of switches and dials and readouts, the two tiny triangular windows, the hand controllers—and it all looks so very real, an actual spacecraft, something that’s designed to operate in space, to land on the surface of another world. Cold fingers run up her spine and she thinks about magazine and book covers and descriptions in prose in short stories and novellas and novels, about spaceship bridges and control rooms, and here she is gazing at a tiny cabin which will carry two men to the Moon, and in no way does it resemble anything her imagination might have created from the science fiction she has read over the years. She looks down at her feet and wonders if she should take off her heels, they might damage the lunar module, she’s heard it is fragile, walls as thin as a beercan’s—but this, of course, is just a simulator, and the floor is good and solid. So she steps inside beside her husband and he tells her she’s at the commander’s position. She grabs a hand controller with each gloved hand and she stares through the window, which is really some kind of screen, at the surface of the Moon, which is really the diorama she saw earlier inside the giant steel framework. Now she’s starting to feel a little faint, she might even swoon, the sheer physicality of this tiny spacecraft cabin, of the grey instrument panels on every available surface, the dials, the switches, the digital readouts, the little blue and black ball bobbing this way and that beneath a glass etched with reticulations, and everything carefully labelled, so meticulously labelled. Her husband could be going to the Moon, she thinks. She knows this, she’s known it for two years now. (Of course, he might never get selected for a flight—there are sixty-one of them now, and not enough missions for all.) Until this moment, it has never quite struck her precisely what this means. Ginny has read science fiction for much of her life, she calls herself a fan, she has written letters to the magazines, she writes stories, many of the science fiction authors whose books she sees in book stores, she considers friends. But it all means nothing when confronted with this. Sense of wonder, imagination, pictures painted with the mind’s eye, it all pales into insignificance, seems to flatten to two dimensions like some painted backdrop, a theatrical flat, when compared to this reality, to Apollo, the lunar module, this machine which will put two astronauts—and one of them could be her husband!—on the surface of an alien planet.
