by Ian Sales
I’ll book a flight tomorrow, she says.
Walden’s mood abruptly improves, and he grins and lifts his own scotch and branch water and salutes Ginny.
And she thinks, if only she were so easy to please, if only spousal obedience were enough to make her happy—but Ginny ordering Walden about is almost unthinkable, although there are science fiction stories where women dominate: Francis Stevens even wrote one back in 1918! For now, however, Ginny will have to settle for her husband’s faithfulness.
And she knows she’s richer than many of the other astronaut wives for having it.
#
Ginny’s impromptu holiday has had a salutary effect on her. Back in El Lago, she spends a day cleaning the house from top to bottom, getting down on her hands and knees to scrub the kitchen floor, polishing the faucets in the bathrooms until they shine like the skin of a LM, taking the rugs out into the yard and beating them until her arm aches. She rearranges the kitchen cupboards, emptying them, wiping down the shelves, and then deciding what will now go where. Walden can never find anything, so it doesn’t matter if everything has moved.
Only when Ginny is satisfied the house is as clean as it will ever be—and she marvels at the pride she is taking in her home, and she thinks of the years at Edwards and the dust that covered everything and how some things, most things, seemed more important than whether the house was neat and tidy and clean… It’s not just her home however, now she even spends time fussing over her appearance, each morning powdering her face and painting her lips, mascara and eyeshadow, plucking her eyebrows, styling her hair, doing it every day; she wears nice dresses, heels that match, keeps her nails shaped and polished… She is well-groomed, and she takes satisfaction in being so.
Ginny’s flying visit to the Cape was also a holiday from Ginny the astronaut wife. That healthy glow she sees in the mirror each morning is not just suntan. But now she is back home, and she has to think about the house and she has to always look presentable, and her head is brimming with ideas for stories she wants to write. For the first time in such a long time, deep in her heart she knows that Mrs Walden J Eckhardt and Virginia G Parker are one and the same person. So she makes herself a jug of iced tea, and she fetches the Hermes Baby and a sheaf of paper from the closet, and still in the white balloon-sleeved blouse and black skirt and waistcoat combination she dressed in that morning she goes to the dining table. She does not need her slacks, she does not need her plaid shirt. (But she does slip off her peep-toe heels.)
When Ginny was in the MSOB being shown one of the altitude chambers, a great steel drum of a room, with thick hatches and small portholes, like something you’d expect to find in the deepest abyss of the ocean… Peering into the altitude chamber, it occurred to Ginny the surface of Mars is no less inimical than the surface of the Moon. She’s read all those stories by Leigh and Catherine, the ones where Mars resembles the Mojave Desert more than the actual Red Planet, but Ginny has an idea for a story about the first mission to a realistic Mars, and she wonders if it is possible to make the journey using the same technology as the Apollo program. But three men—or in her story, women—cooped up in such a tiny space for a week is plausible, it’s what happened on Apollo 8 and 10… But for months? Perhaps even a year or more? She wonders if there are designs for bigger spacecraft on the drawing board somewhere—after all, what is NASA going to do once the Moon flights are over? Mars is the next obvious target.
She doesn’t know enough about the science. Walden’s manuals, the ones that are not general spaceflight texts, are exclusively about the Apollo spacecraft and flights to the Moon. Maybe some sort of space station could be used—it doesn’t have to be large, just big enough for two astronauts and their supplies on a trip of two years or so to Mars and back…
And what would they find there? She needs some sort of twist… And her thoughts spiral back to Catherine and Leigh and their stories and she thinks: ruins! Her Mars astronauts will find ancient alien ruins; and in among them they will discover something which changes the history of humankind, something which… gives humanity the stars. Yes, she likes that idea. Her astronauts find plans for a space drive invented by aliens, who visited Earth and Mars billions of years before…
Ginny tucks one foot under herself and begins typing. She leaves the title blank for now; later, as the story develops, perhaps something suitable will occur to her…
#
Reporters prowl the streets of El Lago and Nassau Bay; television trucks line the roads. Ginny peers through a gap in the curtains as cars, men in suits, women in smart jackets and skirts, bearing a bewildering array of network logos, pass by. They’re not there for her, but Jan, Joan and Pat. Ginny doesn’t know the three women well, they’re New Nine and the Fourteen, and while she’s met them at the AWC and Jan at the Scotts’, Ginny has remained on the outer edges of Togethersville. Having no children has proven not just a lack of common ground but also a barrier between herself and the other wives. Nor does Ginny go to church, or involve herself in community theatre or local schools. Ginny’s private life, her secret career, is not one she can share with Togethersville.
Early on the morning of 16 July, Ginny sits down to watch the Apollo 11 launch on her own, wishing she were at the Cape to witness the liftoff in person. Afterward, she telephones Mary, Ginny feels she can talk to her since both Joe and Walden were on the support crew for Apollo 10 and Joe is backup LMP on Apollo 14, which means he will fly on Apollo 17, two missions after Walden. Walden and Joe will one day ride a Saturn V into orbit, so Ginny and Mary want Apollo 11 to succeed—and are secretly hoping it might fail.
Not fail catastrophically—Ginny doesn’t think she could handle it if Neil, Buzz and Mike were killed; and she has no desire to wish such a fate upon them, or their families.
I heard, says Ginny, the lunar surface might be like a sea of dust and the LM will just sink into it.
Oh no, breathes Mary, you think so?
They’ve sent probes to the Moon, haven’t they? I don’t think they sank.
What do you think will happen?
Exactly what everyone expects, Ginny reassures her. They know what they’re doing, they’ve been training for this for years.
It’s kind of fun playing what-if, but it’s unfair to inflict it on Mary, who is an astronaut wife and not one of Ginny’s friends from science fiction.
And speaking of “what-ifs”, Ginny does not know it, but the following year, Joe Engle is replaced on Apollo 17 by Jack Schmitt, who was assigned as LMP on Apollo 18. Budget cuts resulted in the cancellation of Apollo 18 in September 1970, and the scientific community lobbied for geologist Schmitt to replace test pilot Engle on Apollo 17. Engle, who already had his astronaut wings from the X-15 program, later went on to fly in the Space Shuttle program.
But it’s safe, asks Mary, isn’t it?
Everything has been tested hundreds, thousands, of times, Ginny says, Nothing will fail.
This is not to say the astronaut wives are not worried about Apollo 11, although they seem to have plenty of faith in the equipment—as recorded in First on the Moon, the first official account of Apollo 11, “written by” Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, with the assistance of Time journalists Gene Farmer and Dora Jane Hamblin: “In El Lago Jan Armstrong was ticking off the minutes, but not out of any particular safety concern; her concern was still the one she had expressed much earlier; would they be able to do all they had been assigned to do on this first lunar landing mission?”
#
#
The images on the television are blurred and ghostly, Ginny leans forward, not entirely sure what she’s seeing. There’s a dim white figure, with a bulbous head and a large pack on its back, descending a dark shape on the left, and then the figure drops the last couple of feet, and Neil’s voice, distorted from its 250,000-mile journey as radio waves, says, That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
And Ginny thinks, what? That doesn’t make sense—
B
ut the announcer is now saying Neil actually said, one small step for a man; and Ginny laughs and salutes the television with her cup of coffee. She wonders how long it took Neil to think up those words—she knows they’re going to be remembered, they have that quality which suggests they’ll echo down the ages, just like the first lines of some novels, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”, or “You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings”.
And now Neil in his spacesuit is bouncing up and down, as if he were filled with some gas lighter than air, although, of course, there is no air on the Moon; but Ginny thinks it must be exhilarating to have such freedom of movement, even if neither Neil nor Buzz can actually touch their surroundings, sealed as they are inside layers of rubber, kevlar, mylar, Beta-cloth and whatever other materials are involved. And Ginny even bounces up and down herself on the sofa, almost spilling her coffee, and then she laughs and swears at herself for being so childish. But it looks like so much fun, Neil and Buzz jumping around on the lunar surface, it’s something she has never considered in all her imaginings about the Moon landing—although, now she thinks about it, she bets it’s hard work inside those suits, she remembers the one Joe showed her at the Cape, those thick gauntlets, how difficult it must be to even bend your fingers, how hard to lift an arm, bend a knee, even in one-sixth gravity.
Like millions of other people scattered around the world, Ginny sits entranced by the poor quality television pictures being broadcast from the lunar surface. She thinks about her own unsuccessful attempts at a story describing a lunar mission and it occurs to her it’s more than just the spacecraft. Simply presenting spaceflight in a realistic manner is not enough—she has to get across to the reader what it actually feels like, she must write in such a way a reader can truly understand and empathise with her protagonist. The Apollo program is a wonderful adventure, an amazing endeavour, and it seems to Ginny it would be a shame for science fiction to ignore it.
Chapter 10
“We have touchdown”
Apollo 12 in December is almost an anticlimax—these missions could never be commonplace, but so much was invested in Apollo 11, in being first, anything which followed was sure to be seen in a lesser light. What an astonishing thing NASA has done, will the human race ever again accomplish anything so marvellous: to set foot on an alien world. Twice to date, and more to come. In these times of Mutually Assured Destruction, Soviet aircraft encroaching on US and NATO airspace, USAF interceptors hurtling into clear blue skies on a regular basis… Some days it seems to Ginny humanity has reached its pinnacle.
But before that happens, NASA has more to do, and in late March 1970, it announces the crew for Apollo 15, so now it’s official: Walden is going to the Moon. Ginny’s stock in the AWC has been slowly rising since late 1969 when the Apollo 15 crew started training, but now it’s out in the open and the pressure is on. When she considers what some of the other wives have been going through, Ginny realises she is lucky. She and Walden go well together, she reached an accommodation with the danger inherent in his job years ago, and though what he’s now doing is so much more dangerous, she has faith, perhaps even more than Walden does, in the hardware and the engineering. Of course, they have it better than most—no kids; and if Ginny has never quite plugged into Togethersville, she still has her friends in science fiction scattered across the country, she still has her writing. She made a conscious decision to support Walden when he joined NASA, and she has stuck to that, and she has been very fortunate nothing has happened to distract her from it.
Which is more than be said for real astronaut Jim Irwin, whose wife Mary was beset by tragedy, and consequently their marriage was slowly disintegrating, while he was training for Apollo 15. He writes in his autobiography, To Rule the Night: “I thought the woman should be there to assist the man, help him in his task”.
Irwin’s attitude was hardly unique among astronauts, or indeed men in general—either in the real world, or the fictional world of All That Outer Space Allows. If Ginny is happy to give the impression she is thoroughly committed to supporting her man, and if she feels her reward for doing so—being a part of the space program, even if only peripherally—is perhaps not enough, that she doesn’t have the best of the bargain, and even their new-found affluence, and the fame too, is no real prize either, she keeps silent for Walden’s sake. Ginny would like to be known as a science fiction writer, not an astronaut wife; and the two forms of celebrity simply do not compare. When she finishes her toilet each morning and inspects her made up features, and she thinks of all she once held dear and has now compromised, the real Ginny Eckhardt hidden beneath all those Revlon products crowding the top of her dressing-table; and she sometimes wishes she could throw it all away and go back to who she wants to be, not who NASA and the AWC and Walden want her to be, to who she was… Except, of course, she never was that woman, the Ginny of Edwards is no less fictional than the Ginny she presents to people in Houston, a consequence of misrembering, confabulation, nostalgia and wish-fulfilment.
Ginny tries hard not to let her new status change her, and she finds the increased press attention a little embarrassing—perhaps she’s afraid some enterprising reporter might dig up her science fiction stories, and it would be horrible if that prevented Walden from going to the Moon… Although she has had nothing published since ‘The Spaceships Men Don’t See’ and that was just over two years ago. In her more reflective moments, Ginny is worried she is now incapable of writing sellable stories, that the new Ginny of Houston, Texas, is too much the astronaut wife, too much the wife, and not enough Virginia G Parker. But these new stories she’s working on, the ones editors don’t seem to want, she thinks they’re worth the effort she’s putting into them, she’s convinced soon something will break and Cele or Bea or Fanny or Evelyn will send her a contract by return post. So, while Walden is off at the Cape, or Long Island, or wherever the hell he is this week, and the house is empty, the house is clean and tidy, Ginny is dressed and made up, should anyone drop by, during those moments of free time she works on her stories, revises and restructures the rejected ones, types out first drafts of new ones. She keeps on writing, even if she has nothing to say, it’s old advice but it works damn it, and better 3,000 words, and “THE END”, to be worked on and rewritten, than half a page that goes nowhere.
#
#
April 1970 and Apollo 13 puts the space program back on the front page, but not for the right reasons. Halfway to the Moon, an oxygen tank in the service module explodes and suddenly the crew of three, Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, could die in space. Once again, the streets are mobbed with reporters, and they’re at their thickest around the houses of Marilyn and Mary (Jack is one of the program’s few bachelors). Togethersville swings into action, and even Ginny finds herself running groceries into the besieged Lovell home in Timber Cove; and she does her best to sympathise with Marilyn, but like all the astronaut wives she’s privately glad it’s not Walden up there.
But NASA shows what it’s made of, and they get the guys home safely, the command module splashes down in the South Pacific, southwest of Samoa and only four miles from the recovery ship.
In September of that year, the dream dies a little when Apollo 18 through 20 are cancelled, and even the promise of a space station, Skylab, can’t lessen the hurt. Some of the rookies who were down for those cancelled missions, they’re angry and disappointed, and Ginny hears it from their wives. It’s worse for the scientists, who are especially bitter that Apollo will forever remain the preserve of test pilots and fighter pilots. Man should go to the Moon for science, NASA should send scientists, but that’s not going to happen now.
So Walden and Dave have to learn the science if the scientists are going to get any useful data out of the mission, and that means trip after trip to Hawaii, the San Gabriel Mou
ntains, the Coso Hills, even back to the Mojave Desert, to learn geology. When Walden is home on his infrequent stay overs, he complains he’s a pilot not a rock hunter, but as the weeks and months pass his attitude changes and he surprises Ginny by getting excited as he talks geology. He’s learnt something new, something completely outside the world in which he has lived his entire life, and the wonder of it animates him whenever he discusses it. Now he wants to go to the Moon not because it’s there, not because it will put him at the top of the pyramid, not because putting a man on the lunar surface is such a bold enterprise… No, he wants to go because he might find some really exciting rocks on the Moon.
By the end of January 1971, when Apollo 14 launches, Togethersville is undergoing changes. There have been two intakes of astronauts since Walden and Ginny arrived, but plenty of people have also left, and that sense of community, the one Ginny never quite plugged into, it’s slowly fading away. Only Al, who is commanding Apollo 14, and Deke, who has never flown, remain from the Original Seven. Neil is retiring and Frank has left from the Next Nine; of the Fourteen, Buzz and Wally Cunningham are going, and Mike has already gone. No one from the Original Nineteen, Walden’s group, has spoken of leaving NASA, but with so many astronauts, so few flights and so much uncertainty about what comes next, Ginny thinks more will go in the next couple of years. In fact, what will she and Walden do after he’s flown on Apollo 15? It’s scheduled for that summer—will he want to stay in the astronaut corps, or return to USAF? It’s no good asking him, she drops a few hints on the infrequent weekends he’s home, but he doesn’t know how to answer. His head is full of Apollo and geology, and he’s so tightly focused on his mission he can’t even conceive of a world after it.
