by Ian Sales
I am, incidentally, indulging in some artistic licence here. In his autobiography We Have Capture, commander Tom Stafford makes absolutely no mention of his wife and daughters during his discussion of the Apollo 10 flight. And Lily Koppel in The Astronaut Wives Club skips straight from Apollo 8 to Apollo 11. But it seems to me the mission should play an important role in Ginny’s journey of discovery, an almost metaphorical role—in a story in which the US space program has been put to more than its fair share of metaphorical uses…
Ginny fears for the Apollo 10 astronauts because they are using the same hardware her husband will be using when he goes to the Moon; but she is also frightened they might fail, and so the program will be cancelled and Walden will never set foot on the lunar surface. And then there’s what she knows about the spacecraft… So many things that could go wrong, that could fail at any point during the mission and spell death for the crew, even with all the triple redundancies.
It’s something that science fiction, now Ginny thinks about it, never really considers. Space travel is a literary device, it serves to get characters across interplanetary or interstellar distances from point A to point B, as the story requires… But in the real world such journeys are dangerous, space travel is dangerous, space is a hazardous environment, as Ginny has been learning—and science fiction all too often glosses over those facts. It’s an unlooked-for disconnect and it has slowly insinuated itself into her life over the past two years, and she’s not entirely sure how to deal with it.
But, at the moment, she’s mostly concerned with the Walden-shaped hole in her world. It feels like he should be here, editorialising for her, giving a running commentary on the mission. Ginny looks across to the typewriter sitting on the dining table, the pile of training manuals from Walden’s den she has “borrowed”, and she knows they are no real substitute. She’s happy, more so than she has been in previous years, but she is beginning to feel like she has gained her happiness at the expense of something she treasured.
#
The happiness doesn’t last, of course; it never could. As June rolls on and the Apollo 11 launch date grows nearer, the press attention becomes more intrusive. The streets of El Lago are thronged with reporters and television vans, and everyone hides indoors for fear of being photographed doing something which might reflect badly on their husbands and NASA. Those stories Ginny heard about the Mercury Seven seem all too plausible, and Ginny isn’t even the wife of a “Moonwalker”. Yet.
And then she hears rumours from Florida. She knows about the “Cape Cookies”, but she foolishly believes it was before Walden’s time, or that he at least would stay faithful, she thinks she knows him well enough for that. But there’s a story going round about some of the guys and some girls and one of the names Ginny hears is her husband’s—someone saw him in a bar with a young woman. The sacrifices Ginny has made, playing the “happy housewife”, though she is nothing of the sort, in order not to jeopardise his shot at the Moon. And then he goes and… But did he really? She doesn’t want to believe it but she needs to be sure, she can’t just ignore it like so many of the other wives do, pretend it’s not happening, pretend that it’s even okay because he’s an astronaut, because he’s a man.
So Ginny flies to Florida, a commercial flight, hires a car at Orlando Airport, and drives to the Holiday Inn in Cocoa Beach, where the guys stay when they’re at the Cape but don’t want to stay in astronaut quarters.
She gets out of the rental car and gazes across the parking lot at the entrance to the hotel, and she wonders if she’s doing the right thing. Perhaps she should just turn her back on it, ignore it, the way the other wives do. Togethersville has had its casualties over the years, actual deaths, but also those wives who have left their husbands, husbands who have left their wives, like Pam, who left Al in November last year, and Harriet, who divorced Donn. After all those years keeping it together in Togethersville, the cracks are starting to show, and Ginny, who has always felt secure with Walden, she doesn’t want her marriage to crash and burn like some others are doing.
Ginny clutches her purse to her bosom and the righteous anger which fuelled her dash across the country, there’s nothing left of it, it seems to have vapourised as she drove from the airport, evaporated in the Florida sunshine. She takes her bag from the trunk, and it’s a long walk across the lot to the hotel entrance, each step harder to take than the one before, each click of her heels on the asphalt like she’s stabbing herself with a knife. And then she reaches the doors and they swoosh apart and she walks into the air-conditioned interior, her footsteps now muffled by carpet.
She had the foresight to book a room before leaving Houston, though she wondered at the time if doing so might tip off her husband. And there he is, standing by the reception desk, clad in his pale blue flight jacket and flight suit, looking bemused, as she approaches. She sees his face and she knows she has done something wrong, but she’s not about to admit it, that her sudden dash to Florida might have been prompted by fears Walden has himself a Cape Cookie.
She tells him, I thought it was time to take you up on that offer of a tour of the Cape.
Jeez, Ginny, he says, check with me first.
From his expression, he has a shrewd idea of what has brought her to Cocoa Beach, but is he amused that she might think the worst of him? Should he not be insulted, she thinks—or does that smirk signify he has “cleared everything away” for her arrival? She’s over-thinking, she knows she is, life is not a short story, there’s no narrative, that’s what people impose on events in order to make sense of them. But that wide astronaut grin of his, it’s starting to annoy Ginny. Her concerns were valid, if only to herself… and perhaps she’s reading too much into this, there’s no plot, reversal, reveal, resolution, life doesn’t work like that. She knows her husband well and she considers herself a good judge of character—she’s a writer, after all, and even in science fiction knowing how people work is necessary—but she has to admit she’s no wiser now than she was when she left Houston.
We need to talk, says Walden once she has checked in.
He takes her bag and leads her through the lobby and out into the pool area. No peck on the cheek, no hand in the small of her back. She feels his disapproval like something physical has followed them out into the garden. He holds out his hand, she silently places her hotel room key in his palm, he grimaces as he peers at the number and then looks around at the blocks surrounding the garden and pool for her room. Ginny is determined to be unrepentant. She knows NASA is all about the super-family appearance, she has heard stories about the Original Seven and the New Nine, she is an Air Force wife… but if Walden is too dumb, and she has never thought he is, not to realise she has abdicated her life, her wishes and desires to his career, then he’s in for a rude awakening.
Once in her room, he puts down her bag and turns to her. I know what goes on, Ginny, he says, but you ought to have more damn faith in me.
They’ve had their ups and downs, she remembers his moment of foolishness with that fräulein when they were at Ramstein, but she knows Walden is the sort of man who expects no more, and takes no more, than he feels is his due—but he is also a stickler for remaining true to his promises. If she had taken the time to consider it dispassionately, she could guess Walden wouldn’t cheat on her. And certainly not with the astronaut groupies who hang around the Cape. And yet…
This is all so new. At Edwards, he was a nobody, now he’s in the public eye. Even Ginny has been interviewed on television, been written about in national magazines. She’s celebrated. Kind of. For being a wife. Ginny has her fans among the readers of science fiction magazines, but she’s still small fry compared to the likes of Catherine, Miriam, Margaret or Zenna. And even new writers like Ursula and Joanna seem to have more impact with their stories than anything Ginny has ever written.
She stands there just inside the door and she has to admit that seeing him in his flight suit—the NASA flight jacket is a bonus—still makes her heart
take wing; her flyboy, with his blond hair and his aviator’s grin, she never regretted marrying him, even during the years abroad and the years of exile at Edwards. And she moves toward him and if this feels like a bad Hollywood movie, then she’s in the mood for bad Hollywood movie sentiments, and reaching him she puts her arms about her husband and pecks him about the mouth and then on the mouth; and he takes charge, as men do, and presses his lips to hers, he reaches up a hand to the back of her head, and the seduction, if that’s what it is, Walden is surprisingly ardent, insistent, pushing against what she’s willing to let him have, she remembers this from their days courting when she was a student at SDSU but this feels stronger…
Something is unlocked, released, but she never figures out what. They fall onto the bed, feverishly undressing, he strips out of his flight suit, leaving it depending from his booted feet like a pale shadow, she sheds dress, shoes, pantyhose, panties and bra…
Sex: the response to so many marital problems, but so rarely a solution.
#
“It was upon the waterfront that I first met her, in one of the shabby little tea shops frequented by able sailoresses of the poorer type.”
‘Friend Island’, Francis Stevens (1918)
“Margaret reached over to the other side of the bed where Hank should have been.”
‘That Only a Mother’, Judith Merril (1948)
“What a great day it was for everyone, when David came home from deep space.”
‘The Woman from Altair’, Leigh Brackett (1951)
“Ann Crothers looked at the clock and frowned and turned the fire lower under the bacon.”
‘Created He Them’, Alice Eleanor Jones (1955)
“It was an old house not far from the coast, and had descended generation by generation to the women of the Putnam family.”
‘The Putnam Tradition’, Sonya Dorman (1963)
“Here I am, a silver-haired maiden lady of thirty-five, a feeder of stray cats, a window-ledge gardener, well on my way to the African Violet and antimacassar stage.”
‘The Warlord of Saturn’s Moons’, Eleanor Arnason (1974)
“It is impossible to call up the Devil when women are present, I mean real women, that is to say hermaphrodites, for men (real men, who exist) are the people who look at the women, and the women are therefore the people who are looked at by the men.”
‘Existence’, Joanna Russ (1975)
#
The Vehicle Assembly Building is 526 feet tall, so tall in fact, their guide tells Ginny and Walden, that clouds sometimes form inside. It’s the largest building in Florida, and the largest single-storey building in the world. Ginny has never visited New York, she has not seen the Empire State Building, the tallest building in the world and nearly three times taller—so she cannot help gawking like a rube as she gazes upward in one of the VAB’s empty high bays. She puts a hand on the crown of her hard hat to hold it in place as she cranes her neck, and her eyes travel up endless beams and girders and decks, an Escher-like maze, it’s like a forge or a warehouse turned on its end.
A hand grips her arm, and she abruptly returns to earth. The hand belongs to her husband, but the expectant, and amused, gaze on her is their guide’s. He gestures for them to follow, and crosses into another of the high bays—but there is something blocking the view and it’s only as Ginny enters the bay she sees it’s a crawler-transporter tread, and it must be twice her height. The crawler-transporter itself is the size of a large building, like a faculty block from a university campus, and it can move.
But then Ginny looks up and she sees white and black, a vast tapering cylinder painted in those colours, stretching up to the roof and seemingly held upright by a tower of red girders. The Saturn V stack is so much bigger than she imagined. She knows it is 363 feet tall, but that’s just a number, and like many readers and writers of science fiction she has seen so many numbers so much larger—millions of miles! thousands of years! hundreds of light-years! She has become almost immune to scale, blasé about immensity. But this, it takes her breath away, and she finds it hard to credit three men will be perched atop this rocket and it will carry them to the Moon. She feels humbled, as if the immense physical presence of the crawler-transporter and Saturn V has levered open her imagination and created a gaping void to be filled.
Apollo 12, says the engineer, they finished putting it together only two days ago.
When will it launch? asks Ginny.
There’s still weeks of tests yet, the engineer adds. It’s all automated, but we won’t be ready to roll out to the pad for more than a month.
There is an unintended irony here. I have never visited the John F Kennedy Space Center, nor the Lyndon B Johnson Space Center (as the Manned Spacecraft Center is now known), I have never stood beside a Saturn V. I can only imagine its size, its sheer physicality. And yet, here I am, attempting to describe it in such a way that its overwhelming proportions impact my fictional character’s imagination. There are those who consider science fiction an essentially ironic genre, and the universe is indeed indifferent to the plight of humans—but in many science fiction stories, the very fate of the universe is dependent upon a person’s actions. In order to tell stories which will appeal to readers, writers must put people at the centre, and give them the power to change their world. It is almost axiomatic.
Yet here is Virginia Grace Eckhardt, who has no such power. She has power only over the fictional worlds she creates on her typewriter. There is irony. And there is more irony still—
Imagining an entirely female astronaut corps, given that, at the time Ginny is being shown around the VAB in early July 1969, only one woman, Valentina Tereshkova, has been into space.
Positing a history of science fiction in which the genre is dominated by women, in which it is considered women’s fiction.
One of the strengths of science fiction is its capacity to literalise metaphors. The 526 foot tall Vehicle Assembly Building, the Apollo 12 stack on the crawler-transporter in one of its high bays, both could be considered literal representations of the irony which underlies the narrative of All That Outer Space Allows.
The view from the roof of the VAB is astonishing, even though there’s little to see: low scrub, inlets and basins, to the east the blurred grey carpet of the Atlantic Ocean. And, of course, the two launch pads—a wide causeway stretches from the VAB to each of them, along which the crawler-transporter will carry its Saturn V stack.
A cool sea breeze blows across the top of the VAB, and Ginny feels it press the thin material of her dress against her back. There’s a photographer from the NASA press office standing several feet away, so Ginny smiles and grips Walden’s hand tighter and hopes she doesn’t look too foolish in the hard hat. The photographer tells them he’s finished, Walden releases her hand and marches across to have a word with the man. Ginny turns about, puts a hand up to the NASA pass clipped to her dress and plays idly with it as she gazes out at launch pads 39A and 39B. At some point in the next year or two, her husband may well find himself lying on his back in a command module atop 6 million pounds of fuel—kerosene and liquid oxygen; and liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen—which will burn producing 8.5 million pounds of thrust and all to throw around 45 tons into orbit about the Earth in eleven and a half minutes.
She wonders what it might feel like to sit atop a Saturn V mated to one of those giant red gantries at the launch pad, clad in a space suit, the battleship grey instrument panel above her… She hugs her torso and shivers. This is what she has been writing about, but now having witnessed the colossal size of the Saturn V, she wonders if she can truly capture the sensation of flying in it. Science fiction seems such an imperfect tool, too dependent upon well-worn tropes and conventions so long established they’re usually left unexplained.
If only Ginny could apply to be an astronaut herself! But women are not allowed. Women are perfectly capable of being astronauts, of that much she is convinced—and an all-female astronaut corps would do the job just as wel
l as an all-male one, if not better. Perhaps there’s a story in there somewhere, a history of the US space program, but with female astronauts—
Walden is at her side. He’ll send us copies, he says. Have you seen enough, hon?
She glances at her watch. It’s after four, they’ve been here since lunch-time, no doubt the tour would not have taken so long if Ginny hadn’t insisted on asking their guide how everything worked. He seemed as fascinated by her interest as she was by his explanations.
What about the launch pads? she asks. Can we see one of those?
Not with the Apollo 11 stack on the pad, hon, maybe another time.
Walden insinuates an arm around her waist. I got to get back to work, he says. Tomorrow maybe I’ll take you round the MSOB. I can show you the altitude chambers.
He gives her a squeeze and steers her about, toward the stairwell in the centre of the roof. I’ll come to the hotel this evening, he adds, we can have dinner in the restaurant. Another squeeze. Maybe I’ll even stay over.
I’d like that, she replies.
In the VAB parking lot, no longer wearing hard hats, Ginny glances back at the building and is struck anew by its enormous size. Science fiction is all about scale, vast distances and deep time, made manageable, made human. All those parsecs and light years, those millions and billions of years, rendered conceivable. And yet real space exploration is huge too, perhaps just a little bit too large to be believed, even when standing right next to it. The Saturn V seen up close is… monstrous.
