Phases of Gravity

by Dan Simmons

  "No," said Gavin.

  "We'll get it to him," said Baedecker and put the case in the pocket of his flight jacket. He did not flinch when Gavin wheeled to confront him. "It's insulin," said Baedecker. He touched Maggie's hand again and moved ahead of Gavin up the narrowing ridge.

  Lude had made it to within fifteen hundred feet of the summit before collapsing. They found him curled under the heavy pack with the long, sailcloth-covered poles across his shoulder. His eyes were open, but his face was parchment white and he was breathing in short, shallow gasps.

  Baedecker and Gavin helped him out from under the unassembled hang glider, and the three sat on a large rock next to a two-thousand-foot drop to the high meadow below. The shadow of Uncompahgre reached well more than a mile now, touching the steep flanks of the Matterhorn. High peaks and snow-dappled plateaus were visible as far as Baedecker could see. He looked back down the ridge and picked out Maggie's red shirt. The two women were moving slowly but separately as they picked their way down the south ridge.

  "Thanks, man," said Lude, handing the canteen back to Gavin. "I needed some of that. Ran out of water last night before the storm hit."

  Baedecker gave him the syringe case.

  The little man shook his head and ran a shaking hand through his beard. "Hey, yeah, thanks," he said softly. "Stupid. Forgot Maria had that stuff. And all that crap I ate yesterday."

  Baedecker looked away as the injection was administered. Gavin glanced at his watch and said, "Eight forty-three. Why don't I go on up? You can help our friend down, Dick, and I'll catch up to you."

  Baedecker hesitated, but Lude laughed loudly. He was packing away the syringe case. "No way, man. I didn't come fifteen fucking miles to pack this stuff back down. Uh-uh." He struggled to his feet and tried to lift the long bundle. He was able to take five steps up the steep and sandy slope before falling to his knees.

  "Here," said Baedecker, unlashing the sailcloth-covered poles from the pack and helping him to his feet. "You get the pack. I'll carry this." Baedecker started uphill, surprised at how light the long poles were. Tom Gavin made a noise and moved ahead of them.

  The incline became steeper, the trail narrower, the exposure more dramatic just below the summit. But it was the altitude that almost did Baedecker in during the last hundred meters. His lungs could not pull in enough air. His ears would not stop ringing. Baedecker felt his vision blur to the heavy throbbing of his pulse. In the end he forgot everything except the task of setting one foot farther uphill than the other and then lifting his weight against the terrible gravity that threatened to press him down into the rocky mountainside. He had crossed a wide expanse of flat area and almost stumbled over the precipitous northwestern face before he realized that they were on the summit. He sat down heavily and lowered the poles just as Lude collapsed to a sitting position next to him.

  Gavin sat on a wide rock nearby. He had one leg up and was smoking a pipe. The smell of tobacco was sharp and sweet in the clear air. "Shouldn't spend too much time up here, Dick," he said. "We have to pack down to Henson Creek."

  Baedecker said nothing; he was watching Lude. The little man was still pale, and there was a tremor in his large hands, but now he crawled over to the long carrying bag and removed sections of aluminum tubing. He spread out a square of red nylon, took a cloth tool case from his pack, and began laying out parts.

  "Cable," said Lude. "Stainless steel. Nico swedged."

  Baedecker moved over next to him and watched as more bags and baggies were brought out.

  "Prone harness," said Lude. "Knee hangers fasten with Velcro. Attached with this carabiner."

  Baedecker touched the metal ring and felt the sun's warmth on the steel surface, sensed the colder steel beneath.

  "Nuts and bolts," said Lude, laying bags and pieces on the red nylon according to some prearranged pattern. His voice had taken on the cadence of a litany. "Cable tensioners. Saddles, brushings, tangs, nut covers." He removed larger pieces. "Wingposts, noseplates, brackets, crossbar, control bars." He patted the mass of folded Dacron. "Sail."

  "We should be heading down," said Gavin.

  "In just a minute," said Baedecker.

  Lude had connected the long aluminum tubes at their apex and swung them out to an angle of a hundred degrees. Orange-and-white Dacron unfolded like a butterfly's wings opening to the sun. It took him only a few minutes to secure a vertical post and cross-spar. He began working on wires connecting the various components. "Give me a hand, man?" He was speaking to Baedecker.

  Baedecker accepted the tools and followed the young man's lead, securing eyebolts, attaching flying wires to the control bar, and tightening nuts. Lude inflated pockets under the leading edge of the wing and Baedecker noticed for the first time that the camber there was adjustable. Thirty years of flying advanced aircraft made him appreciate the elegant simplicity of the Rogallo wing: it was as if the essence of controlled flight had been distilled into these few yards of steel, aluminum, and Dacron. When they were finished, Lude checked all of Baedecker's connections and adjustments and the hang glider sat there like some bright, oversized insect ready to leap into space. Baedecker realized with a shock how large it was, spanning fourteen feet from noseplate to keel, twenty-nine feet across the delta wing.

  Gavin tapped his pipe out against the rock. "Where's your helmet?"

  "Maria's got the helmet," said Lude. He looked at Gavin and then at Baedecker. Suddenly he laughed. "Hey, man, you don't get it. I don't fly. I just build them, modify them, and show the way. Maria's going to fly it."

  It was Gavin's turn to laugh. "Not today she isn't," he said. "She went down to our camp. She's in no shape to walk, much less fly."

  "Bullshit, man," said Lude. "She's right behind me."

  Baedecker shook his head. "Hypothermia," he said. "Maggie took her down."

  Lude jumped up and ran to the southwest corner of the summit. When he saw the two figures just leaving the ridge three thousand feet below he grabbed his head with both hands. "Damn, I don't believe it." He sat down heavily, his long hair falling over his face. Sounds emerged which Baedecker first interpreted as sobs; then he realized that the man was laughing. "Fifteen fucking miles with that thing on my back," he said and laughed. "All this way up and it's off."

  "Messes up your movie-making," said Gavin.

  "Screw the movie," said Lude. "It fucks up the celebration."

  "Celebration?" said Gavin. "What celebration?"

  "Come here," said Lude, standing and turning to the west. He led Gavin and Baedecker to the edge of the precipice. "Celebration of that," said Lude and swung his right arm in an arc that took in peaks, plateau, and sky.

  Gavin nodded. "God's creation is beautiful," he agreed. "But it doesn't take a foolhardy act to celebrate either the Creator or His handiwork."

  Lude looked at Gavin and slowly shook his head. "No, man, you missed it," he said. "It ain't somebody's thing. It just is. And we're part of it. That deserves a celebration, you know?"

  It was Gavin's turn to shake his head, pityingly, as if at a child. "Rocks and air and snow," he said. "It means nothing by itself."

  Lude looked at the ex-astronaut for a long moment while Gavin shouldered his pack. Finally he smiled. His long hair was blowing in the gentle breeze. "Your mind's really fucked, you know that, man?"

  "Come on, Dick," said Gavin, turning his back on the other. "Let's get started down."

  Baedecker walked back to the Rogallo wing, crawled under the leading edge, and lifted the harness. "Help me," he said.

  Lude ran over. "You sure, man?"

  "Help me," said Baedecker. Lude's large hands were already buckling, cinching nylon webbing, and securing waist and shoulder straps. The crotch straps and D-rings reminded Baedecker of all the parachutes he had worn over the years.

  "You can't be serious," said Gavin.

  Baedecker shrugged. Lude fastened the Velcro leg straps and showed him how to shift forward to get into a prone flying position. Baedecker st
ood and took the weight of the glider on his shoulder at the apex of the metal triangle while Lude held the keel parallel to the ground.

  "You're insane," said Gavin. "Don't kid around, Dick. You don't even have a helmet. We'll have to get a mountain rescue team to get your body off the cliff face."

  Baedecker nodded. The wind was gusting gently out of the west at less than ten miles per hour. He took two steps toward the drop-off. The kite bounced slightly and settled on his shoulders. He could feel the play of wind and gravity in the taut wire and billowing Dacron.

  "This is preposterous, Dick. You're acting like an adolescent."

  "Keep your nose up, man," said Lude. "Shift your body to bank."

  Baedecker walked to within eight feet of the edge. There was no slope; the rock dropped vertically for a hundred feet or more to terraces of jagged rock and then fell away to more vertical faces. Baedecker could see Maggie's red shirt a mile below, a small speck of color against the brown and white of the boulder-strewn tundra.

  "Dick!" said Gavin. It was a barked command.

  "Don't start any three-sixties unless you got a thousand feet of air under you," said Lude. "Away from the hill, man."

  "You're a goddamned fool," Gavin said flatly. It was a final assessment. A verdict.

  Baedecker shook his head. "A celebrant," he said and took five steps and leaped.

  Part Four

  Lonerock

  The funeral is on New Year's Eve, the clouds are low, and the short procession of vehicles has driven the four-and-a-half-hour ride from Salem, Oregon, through intermittent attempts at snow. Although it is still morning, the light seems tired and desultory, absorbed by trees and stones and farmhouse wood until only gray outlines of reality remain. It is very cold. The white exhaust from the idling hearse flows over the six men as they wrestle the casket from the vehicle and carry it across a brittle expanse of frozen grass.

  Baedecker feels the cold of the bronze handle through his glove and wonders at how light the body of his friend seems. Carrying the massive casket is no effort at all with the other five men helping. Baedecker is reminded of a child's game where a group would levitate a supine volunteer, each person placing only a single finger under the tense and waiting body. Inevitably, the reclining child would rise several feet from the floor to a chorus of giggles. To Baedecker as a boy, the sensation of lifting someone that way had carried with it a slight flush of fear at the sense of gravity defied, of unbreakable laws being broken. But always, at the end, the squealing, wiggling child would be lowered, carefully or abruptly, the weight returned; gravity obeyed at last.

  Baedecker counts twenty-eight people at graveside. He knows that there could have been many more. There had been talk of the vice president attending, but the offer carried the odor of an election year, and Diane had put a quick end to that. Baedecker looks to his left and sees the spire of the Lonerock Methodist Church in the valley two miles below. The wan light ebbs and flows with each passing layer of cloud, and Baedecker is fascinated with the sense of shifting substance in the distant spire. The church had been closed for years before this morning's funeral there, and when Baedecker had been packing kindling into the metal stove prior to the arrival of the other mourners, he had noticed the date on an old newspaper: October 21, 1971. Baedecker had paused a moment then and had tried to remember where he and Dave might have been on October 21 of that year. Less than three months before the flight. Houston or the Cape, most probably. Baedecker cannot remember.

  The graveside services are brief and simple. Colonel Terrence Paul, an Air Force chaplain and old friend, makes a few remarks. Baedecker speaks for a moment, remembering his friend moving across the surface of the moon, buoyant, haloed in light. A telegram from Tom Gavin is read aloud. Others speak. Finally Diane talks softly about her husband's love of flying and of family. Her voice breaks once or twice, but she recovers and finishes.

  In the silence that follows, Baedecker can almost hear the snowflakes settling on coats and grass and coffin. Suddenly there is a roar, which shakes the entire hillside, and the group looks up to see four T-38s in tight formation coming in low from the northwest, no more than five hundred feet high in order to stay under the overcast. As the formation shrieks overhead with a scream that echoes in bone and teeth and skull, the jet in the wingman's position suddenly veers out of formation and climbs almost vertically to be swallowed by the gray ceiling of clouds. The other three T-38s disappear to the southeast, the scream of their afterburners fading to a low moan and then to silence.

  The sight of the missing man formation has, as it always does, moved Baedecker to tears. He blinks in the cold air. General Layton, another family friend, nods to the Air Force honor guard, and the American flag is removed from the coffin and ceremoniously folded. General Layton hands the folded flag to Diane. She accepts without tears.

  Small groups and individuals murmur to the widow, and then people pause a moment and move slowly toward the idling automobiles beyond the fence.

  Baedecker remains behind for a few minutes. The air is cold in his lungs. Across the valley he sees the brown hills mottled with patterns of gray snow. The county road cuts across the face of the bluff like a scar. Farther west, a hogback ridge rises from the pine-forested hills, and Baedecker is reminded of a stegosaurus's scales. He glances toward the small shack at the far end of the cemetery and sees the yellow backhoe parked there in semiconcealment. Two men in heavy gray overalls and blue stocking caps are smoking and watching. Waiting for me to leave, thinks Baedecker. He looks down at the surface of the gray coffin poised above the hole dug out of the frozen earth and then he turns and walks to the cars.

  Diane is waiting at the open door of her white Jeep Cherokee, and she beckons Baedecker over after the last of the other mourners have turned to their own cars. "Richard, would you ride down the hill with me?"

  "Of course," says Baedecker. "Shall I drive?"

  "No, I'll drive." They are the last car to leave. Baedecker glances at Diane as they turn down the narrow gravel road; she does not look back at the cemetery. Her bare hands are white and firm on the wheel. It begins to snow more heavily as they switch back down the rough lane and she clicks the windshield wipers on. The metronomic tick of the wiper blades and the purr of the heater are the only sounds for several minutes.

  "Richard, do you think it went all right?" Diane unbuttons her coat and turns down the heater. Her dress is a very dark blue; she had not been able to find a black maternity dress in the three days prior to the funeral.

  "Yes," says Baedecker.

  Diane nods. "I think it did too."

  They rumble over a cattleguard. Brake lights flare as the car ahead of them slows to avoid a large rock protruding from the rutted path. They pass through a rancher's field and turn right onto a gravel road that heads into the valley.

  "Will you stay with us tonight in Salem?" asks Diane. "We're going to have some hot food here at the house and then head back."

  "Of course," says Baedecker. "I told Bob Munsen that I'd meet him up at the site this afternoon, but I could be back by seven."

  "Tucker will be there tonight," she says quickly, as if still in need of convincing him. "And Katie. It would be good to have the four of us together one last time."

  "It doesn't have to be the last time, Di," says Baedecker.

  She nods but does not speak. Baedecker looks at her face, sees the freckles visible against pale skin, and is reminded of a porcelain doll from Germany, which his mother had kept on her bureau. He had broken it one rainy day while roughhousing with Boots, their oversized springer spaniel. Although his father had carefully glued it back together, from that time on Baedecker had always been aware of the infinitesimal tracery of fracture lines on the white cheeks and forehead of the delicate figurine. Now Baedecker searches Diane's features as if seeking new fracture lines there.

  Outside, the snow falls more heavily.

  Baedecker arrived in Salem in early October. He hobbled off the train, set h
is luggage down, and looked around. The small station was fifty yards away. No bigger than a large picnic pavilion, it looked as if it had been built in the early twenties and abandoned shortly thereafter. There were clumps of moss growing on the roof shingles.

  "Richard!"

  Baedecker looked past a family exchanging hugs and could make out the tall form of Dave Muldorff near the station. Baedecker waved, picked up his old military flight bag, and moved slowly in his direction.

  "Damn, it's good to see you," said Dave. His hand was large, the handshake firm.

  "Good to see you," said Baedecker. He realized with a sudden surge of emotion that he was happy to see his old crewmate. "How long has it been, Dave? Two years?"

  "Almost three," said Dave. "That Air and Space Museum thing that Mike Collins hosted. What the hell did you do to your leg?"

  Baedecker smiled ruefully and tapped at his right foot with the walking stick he was using as a cane. "Just a sprained ankle," he said. "Twisted it when I was up in the mountains with Tom Gavin."

  Dave picked up Baedecker's flight bag and the two began the slow walk to the parking lot. "How is Tom?"

  "Just fine," said Baedecker. "He and Deedee are doing very well."

  "He's in the salvation business these days, isn't he?"

  Baedecker glanced at his ex-crewmate. There had never been any love lost between Gavin and Muldorff. He was curious about Dave's feelings now, almost seventeen years after the mission.

  "He runs an evangelical group called Apogee," said Baedecker. "It's pretty successful."

  "Good," said Dave and his voice sounded sincere. They had reached a new, white Jeep Cherokee and Dave tossed Baedecker's flight bag and garment bag in the back. "Glad to hear that Tom's doing okay."

  The Jeep smelled of new upholstery heated by the sun. Baedecker rolled the window down. The early October day was warm and cloudless. Brittle leaves rustled on a large oak tree just beyond the parking lot. The sky was a heart-stoppingly perfect shade of blue. "I thought it was always raining out here in Oregon," said Baedecker.