by Unknown
The sun hadn’t yet risen when Travis’s Mistral whispered into the carport at the Hill Ranch. He got out of the low seat and stood up, groaning involuntarily; he arched his back and splayed his hands over his kidneys. His lifestyle was getting to him.
A blue white light gleamed far off among the black and twisted live oaks, like Venus newly risen: it was a bare bulb over a barn door. As he walked toward it, two mangy half German shepherd mongrels came out, growling deep in their throats, but he clucked at them and they sniffed his jeans fore and aft and licked his hands and walked beside him, panting and interested, as he went into the barn.
The barn was dark except for a single yellow low-wattage bulb splotched with fried insects. It was warm and smelly in here, the smell of fresh and fermenting hay and fresh horse manure, which was pretty much the same smell as used beer and chili beans. Smelling so much like raunchy, rub-your-nose-in-it, honest-to-God home, in fact, that Travis smiled and sighed and for a moment felt very sad.
He had a pony named Riptide, a plain old bay gelding. Travis hadn’t seen the animal in a while, but he found him in the third stall on the right, alert and familiar. Riptide was a tad small, but he’d been a good quarter horse in his day, with a good deep chest and powerful hindquarters and no-nonsense knees. Travis talked to him now, gave him sweet hay from a bale in the front of the barn, rubbed his muzzle. Then Travis went to the tack room and came back with a threadbare saddle blanket and a cracked and sweat-blackened saddle. He brought Riptide out of the stable, slung the creaking harness over him, buckled it and cinched it. He swung a leg over and set Riptide off at a slow walk through the predawn gloom. The dogs followed for a few hundred yards, but neither Travis nor the horse paid them any attention, and they found other things to do.
Shattered limestone under Riptide’s hooves sounded like splinters of glass. Twisted cedar limbs reached out, strong and stiff, man-on-horseback high, eager to push a rider to the ground. God knew where this broken rocky earth found moisture to make mist, but a thin vapor clung inches above the parched stones, barely visible in the half light of approaching dawn.
The Medina River cut a meander through the Hill Ranch property, an old river fed by an ancient aquifer, springing from the brow of the Cretaceous seabed a few miles to the west. There were dinosaur tracks in this riverbed, not far upstream, the splay-toed tracks of theropod carnivores stalking their prey. As Travis guided Riptide across the broad and mostly dry riverbed of polished limestone, he saw a family of javelinas browsing on the upstream bank: smart, hairy pigs, little changed from the ancestral pig, of a shape familiar from the vase paintings of antiquity and the wall paintings of prehistory. Despite his diminutive size, the boar of this group, with his recurving tusks and fiery eyes and crested shoulders, could have given the Caledonian hunting party a good rough-and-tumble.
Travis watched the javelinas—familiar game and good to eat—and felt himself momentarily unmoored in time.
He questioned what he was about, what it was that drove him to want to climb back into some stinking tin can for the sensation of being a little farther from the planet, a little closer to the stars. There were those who spoke eloquently of the urge to explore space as evolution in action, as the inevitable linear progression of mankind. With apologies, that was bullshit. Evolution had not the slightest idea what it was up to. People hardly ever had the slightest idea what they were up to. They wanted things. They wanted happiness, they wanted satisfaction, and most of all they wanted to discover. They wanted novelty.
Then, after a while, they wanted peace. Humans weren’t unlike the others. They were all in this together, all at once, the great reptiles, the hairy pigs, the horse, the man. A swirling sensation came over him but he made it pass, hoping it was an effect of his hangover. Time and eternity—pigs and dinosaurs and other people—were beside the point. The point was, what was he going to do with his own life?
Once upon a time he had driven out to California in an old oil-burning Japanese ATV, sticking to the back roads—the dirt roads, when he could find them on a map—without a chip player or even a radio to relieve the loud grinding of his engine. But his head had never completely shut up during the entire trip. The visual input was rich, the here and now of the road in front of him—sometimes flat, straight asphalt, sometimes a narrow, rutted mining road—and the aural input was that awful engine, and, on pavement, the vibrating whine of the cleated tires. He’d camped out every night, in places like Sitting Bull Falls and the Santa Catalina Mountains and Anza-Borrego, burning a steak and an ear of corn over his campfire and downing a whole bottle of red in slow sips while browsing in Sambursky’s Physical Thought from the Presocratics to the Quantum Physicists by the light of his hand lamp. He filled his head with historical stuff from the book, stuff enough to silence the noise of his yammering thoughts.
He was five days on his winding road to Pasadena, and only on the fourth day did the yak-yak-yak begin to subside. By then he’d clearly discerned at least three voices, although he suspected there might be more (perhaps the one that was doing the discerning). One mumbled about choices, about navigating the ATV, buying oil and food, finding a campsite, cooking and sleeping. A second voice kvetched—food mediocre, road too long and rough, oil too expensive—spinning off into grandiose thoughts about science and achievement and all the jerks he had to deal with and the bitterness of his love life. Another voice watched the first two with contempt, affecting detachment.
By the fifth day, Travis had somehow tricked the second voice into shutting up for minutes at a time, and the third voice into cooling it altogether. For those minutes he was merely in the world. But that same afternoon he arrived at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, his vacation ended, and he plunged back into stuff.
Guiding sturdy little Riptide into the trans-Medina, Travis remembered how good it had been to listen to only one voice, the one that dealt with things as they came up, things like hunger and fatigue and the world’s occasional sublimity. He doubted he would soon achieve that state again, unless he gave up on everything he thought was worth doing.
The horse carried him deep into the juniper-dotted hills. He watched the sun rise fat and orange in the hazy east; he listened to the yak-yak-yak in his head and tried not to try to make it cease. He succeeded neither in silencing the roar of consciousness nor in confronting the issues that required him to take thought. After two hours he realized he was tired and hungry, and he steered Riptide for home.
He saw Bonnie’s hot red Mercedes parked in the drive outside the house. She and Sam had built a house of their own two miles up the road, although they spent most of each week in Austin.
In the kitchen he grinned at plump Maria Martinez and snatched a warm biscuit from a stack cooling under a clean cotton cloth. Maria smiled back, displaying numerous ivory teeth, pretending to take his hunger as a personal compliment. He wolfed the biscuit down before heading into the sitting room. Through the glass he saw his mother and Bonnie in animated conversation in the rose garden. He sank into an armchair and watched them—his mother launched upon some lecture, Bonnie all smiles and enthusiastic nods.
The morning was hot, and Bonnie was wearing the shorts and cotton top she favored when she wasn’t horseback riding or being a Texas society girl. Her hair danced and sparkled in the morning sun. Bonnie liked Edna May; her smiles and nods were partly her conception of a daughter-in-law’s duty, but mostly genuine. Travis watched her closely—those legs, all long, smooth muscle, the springy bosom—but the feeling that welled up in him wasn’t lust, it was a deep, forlorn longing for which he had no explanation and against which he had no defense.
Damn you, brother Sam.
He thought about why he’d come out here today, which was to ask his mother’s advice, now that NASA had finally pulled out. It came into his mind that he already knew what it would be. Go to the little people, she would say. Write a book about asteroids, with lots of color pictures. Go on video. Create a constituency.
In fact sh
e’d been saying something like that for years. He’d held back, because he rather enjoyed the staid academic prestige he would inevitably lose when he started hustling in public. He didn’t want ARC to become—what had Taylor Stith called it?—a “hobby club tax write-off,” even in appearance.
Seduced by respectability.
Out in the rose garden, Bonnie squatted to inspect a plant’s roots and her khaki shorts stretched tighter over her buttocks. Travis abruptly rose and walked out of the room, through the kitchen—waving a kiss at Maria as he passed—to his car. The Mistral sped away from the house in a cloud of caliche dust.
Travis landed his drink on the hotel bar and fumbled with the blue-and-white badge that identified him as a member of the astronomers’ convention, trying to unpin it from his crumpled tweed jacket. A year and more had passed, and he’d taken the advice he hadn’t wanted to hear from his mother: he had a picture book to sell, and he was on the video circuit.
He heard a husky female voice beside him. “Travis Hill? The astronaut?” The woman was young, dark-haired, with the sort of eyes that looked permanently out of focus, possibly because of her smudged mascara. Her wide hips were tightly encased in a blue plastic miniskirt; she held out a hand with nail-bitten fingers. “I’m Charlotte, from Night Beat.”
He shook her hand. “Pleased to meet you.” Her eyes weren’t meeting his, they were aimed somewhere lower, at his attaché case or at his crotch. He held up the case. “Stills on a chip. I’d like to talk about these with the director, if I can.” Or maybe she was looking at his diamond bracelet.
“You got a cue sheet?” Letting go of his hand, she slid her fingers along his a bit slower than she had to, brushing the bracelet links.
“Yes.” He’d done these appearances often enough by now to be prepared. A memorized script. A cue sheet. A video chip that made sense by itself. “Might save some confusion if I could talk to the director,” he said. “A couple of minutes.” He tried to be firm and reasonable and friendly all at once—because they make a mess of you so fast if they take a disliking to you. Or if they just aren’t paying attention, which is more likely.
“He’s gonna be pretty busy…You really were an astronaut?”
“Lots of people have been astronauts.”
“The other guy’s already in the car,” she said, turning toward the door.
“The other guy?”
“Cartwright, the writer. The guy you’re debating.” She headed for the lobby, and he followed.
“Kiki said I was on by myself.”
“Your publicist? They’ll say anything. Jack says we’ll get more viewer interest from a debate.”
“Who’s Jack?”
“Night Beat’s producer. It’s his creation.” She said “creation” with reverence, as if reading from Genesis.
Charlotte pushed through the glass doors, with Travis close behind her. The Midwest city’s summer night was muggy and smelled of badly tuned turbines. Charlotte’s tiny Sumitomo jet was standing at the curb under the hotel’s marquee; Travis climbed into the back and awkwardly shook hands with Graeme Cartwright, the author, who turned to reach over the front seat.
Travis had seen Cartwright around the convention, but their paths hadn’t crossed. He was a red-haired man with soft hands, an Australian astronomy professor who wrote a science-fiction novel every year or two during his summer recesses. Travis had bought one of his novels in an airport once; it was about evil aliens systematically destroying intelligent life in the universe, unwittingly aided in their dire scheme by fuzzy-minded liberal Earthlings. Travis didn’t know how it all came out. In Cartwright’s code, consciously or otherwise, aliens apparently stood for commies.
Cartwright informed Travis that their “debate” was to be about the Russian presence in space. He nodded. It didn’t matter; he would talk about asteroids. They had to give you equal time, and you didn’t have to answer their dumb questions. Travis sat back and stared out the window of the car at the passing traffic; half of it seemed to be high-sprung customized ATVs with rows of yellow lights on their cab roofs.
The video half-hour was the usual eighteen minutes long, most of it devoted to the happy talk of the show’s two hosts, one of each gender. For half the rest, the science-fiction writer spoke darkly of the Russian menace. Travis spent his fragmentary four or five minutes talking about the urgent need to explore the asteroids, buy his book, and fund his research center. Some of his pictures got on, completely out of sync with what he was saying. But it was all over quickly; he just hoped no one at the convention had been watching.
After the show he felt tired and in need of a shower, but Cartwright had gotten excited about asteroids and wanted to talk about beating the Russians to them. Charlotte’s Sumitomo stopped itself in front of the hotel and Travis got out of the car while Cartwright was still in midsentence.
He opened Cartwright’s door, and when the Australian paused to say thanks, Travis said, “Dr. Cartwright, I’ll be generous and say you’re shootin’ your mouth off about trivial chickenshit. But I’m not rulin’ out the possibility that you’re a paranoid schizophrenic. So why don’t you stick to fiction, bud?”
Turning his back on the affronted novelist, Travis walked around the car and stuck his head in Charlotte’s window. “You want to learn more about astronauts, leave this thing with the doorman. I’ll buy you a drink.” She gave him a wet-lips stare that lasted a second and a half, then got out of the car, tossing its start card to the nearest guy in a uniform.
He bought her the drink in his room, Jack Daniel’s in a bathroom glass with cylindrical ice cubes, and before she finished it he peeled up the blue plastic skirt and worked a long time, three or four times the duration of the video show, it seemed, before he got the little spurt of unconsciousness he was seeking. He told her to call him tomorrow and he would teach her more about astronauts, if she was still interested, and he gave her a hundred-dollar bill to get her car back from the doorman. After she left he went into the bathroom and sat on the toilet lid, swallowing wave after wave of hot spit until the nausea subsided—he refused to vomit, he hadn’t vomited since he was eighteen years old and had taken a charging tackle’s helmet under his wishbone while he was looking for somewhere to throw the football—and then he packed his bags and went downstairs to pay his bill, and took a cab to the airport.
In the same year, riding on Starfire’s glowing wings, NASA’s trajectory climbed smoothly upward toward dreams of ever larger programs, ever larger possibilities: an expanded presence on the moon, a permanent Mars base, exploration of the Jovian satellites, and, perhaps somewhere along the way, a visit to an asteroid.
Taylor Stith rose too, by several floors; after the prototype had gone into construction, Taylor had been in on every detail of mission planning and crew selection. By the time the president with whom he had once shaken hands was well started on his second term, Taylor had befriended two or three of his likely successors. Now Taylor was director of the entire Johnson Space Center, and scuttlebutt had it he was soon to be nominated administrator of the agency itself. It was a rumor he squelched firmly, and as often as he could.
5
Linwood doused a mound of mesquite chunks with half a can of starter fluid and tossed in a match. An orange fireball rose above the kettle, hot enough for Jimmy Giles to feel it six feet away. “One of these days you’re going to blow us all to pieces, Linwood.”
Linwood lifted a singed eyebrow. “Speaking globally, Colonel, I’d say there’s a greater risk of you blowing us all to pieces.”
“Why, Linwood. Peace is my profession.” He slapped a butcher-paper package down beside the spare ribs and chicken parts on the picnic table, unwrapping it to reveal a stack of slick red sausages.
Linwood eyed them with deep suspicion.
“Homemade, by me,” Jimmy explained. “Separate the links. Give ’em about eight minutes, turning frequently. Watch for flare-ups from dripping fat. And let the fire die down first.”
Lin
wood turned his long, quiet stare on Jimmy. “Perhaps I should take notes.”
“How did the resident pyromaniac get assigned to be chef, anyway?”
“No one else volunteered.”
“Would a beer cool you off?”
“A gracious offer, gratefully accepted.”
Jimmy headed off to where the coolers were stacked in the lee of the dunes a few yards away. He and Linwood were the oldest members of Robin’s crew—Jimmy was forty-two and Linwood was in his mid-fifties—and unlike the others, they were old enough to have ridden out career changes and more than one shift in government policy. Despite their differences, it made for an odd bond between them. Linwood, the reformed weapons designer, favored new initiatives to remove a quarter century’s accretion of weapons from space, an attitude Jimmy thought was naive. For his part, the retired if not reformed fighter jock voted the USAF party line, favoring an increase in space-based defenses, using arguments Linwood regarded as disingenuous. But they managed to keep their discussion friendly, recognizing that they were soldiers in the same long campaign, the conquest of space itself.
Jimmy passed his wife, Eleanor, who was reclining under a beach umbrella in her one-piece floral-patterned swimsuit, guarding her freckled white limbs from the sun. He smiled cheerily, but she didn’t look up from her volume of short stories; she was ostentatiously keeping her own company.
The two Giles daughters, in their early teens, were not so reserved; they splashed in the sluggish surf nearby and rooted enthusiastically in the viscous yellow sand after God knew what living creatures, using the entertainment of Linwood’s dark-eyed grandsons, a five-year-old and a three-year-old, as an excuse to revert to their own earlier childhoods.
Jimmy dug a couple of bottles of Pearl out of the ice in the cooler. A ski boat’s jet howled far out on the glassy surface of the Gulf; he glanced up to see Melinda driving the boat flat out, towing Spin behind her. From the look of the fancy figure eights she was cutting, she was doing her best to toss Spin off his slalom ski. Spin was unperturbed; he clattered over the puny waves, sliced the wake, and slid up alongside the boat at sixty klicks before hauling back, digging in, and shooting up a ten-meter rooster tail. Before long they’d trade and he’d be driving the boat just as wildly as she was, trying to throw her. They spent a lot of energy trying to outdo each other.
