Phases of Gravity

by Dan Simmons

  "Usually is." Dave pulled the Jeep out into traffic. "Three or four days a year the sun comes out and gives us a chance to scrape the fungus out from between our toes. The cops, TV stations, and local Air Force base hate days like this."

  "Why's that?" asked Baedecker.

  "Every time the sun comes out, they get three or four hundred calls reporting a big, orange UFO in the sky," said Dave.

  "Uh-huh."

  "I'm not shitting you. All over the state vampires are scurrying for their coffins. This is the one state in the Union where they can go about their business in daytime without encountering any sunlight. These few sunny days are a big shock to our Nosferatu population."

  Baedecker lay his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. It was going to be a long visit.

  "Hey, Richard, can you tell that I've recently had oral sex with a chicken?"

  Baedecker opened one eye. His old crewmate still resembled a leaner, craggier version of James Garner. There were more lines on the face now, and the cheekbones were sharper against the skin, but the wavy black hair showed no hint of gray. "No," said Baedecker.

  "Good," said Dave in a relieved tone. Suddenly he coughed twice into his fist. Torn-up bits of yellow Kleenex fluttered into the air like feathers.

  Baedecker closed his eye.

  "Real good to have you here, Richard," said Dave Muldorff.

  Baedecker smiled without opening his eyes. "Real good to be here, Dave."

  Baedecker had sold his car in Denver and taken the train west with Maggie Brown. He did not know whether the decision was wise—he suspected that it was not—but for once he attempted simply to carry out an action without analysis.

  The Amtrak California Zephyr left Denver at nine A.M., and he and Maggie breakfasted in the dining car while the long train burrowed under the continental divide through the first of fifty-five tunnels awaiting them in Colorado. Baedecker looked at the paper plates, paper napkins, and paper tablecloth. "The last time I traveled by train in America, there was real linen on the table and the food wasn't microwaved," he said to Maggie.

  Maggie smiled. "When was that, Richard, during World War II?" She meant it as a joke—a not-so-subtle jibe at his constant mentioning of their age difference—but Baedecker blinked in shock as he realized that it had been during the war. His mother had taken his sister Anne and him from Peoria to Chicago to visit relatives over the holidays. Baedecker remembered the train seats that faced backward, the hushed tone of the porters and waiters in the dining car, and the strange thrill that passed through him as he peered out the window at streetlights and the orange-lit windows of homes in the night. Chicago had been constellations of lights and rows of apartment windows flashing by as the train moved along elevated tracks through the southside. Despite the fact that he had been born in Chicago, the view had given the ten-year-old Baedecker a sense of displacement, a not unpleasant feeling of having lost the center of things. Twenty-eight years after the trip to Chicago, he was to feel the same sense of uncenteredness as his Apollo spacecraft passed out of radio contact with the earth as the rough limb of the moon filled his view. Baedecker remembered leaning against the small window of the command module and wiping away condensation with his palm, much as he had four and a half decades earlier as the train carrying his mother, his sister, and him pulled into Union Station.

  "You folks done?" The Amtrak waiter's voice bordered on belligerence.

  "All done," said Maggie and swallowed the last of her coffee.

  "Good," said the waiter. He flipped the red paper tablecloth up from opposite corners, enclosed the paper plates, plastic utensils, and Styrofoam cups in it, and tossed the entire mass into a nearby receptacle.

  "Progress," said Baedecker as they moved back through the shifting aisle.

  "What's that?" asked Maggie.

  "Nothing," said Baedecker.

  Late that night, while Maggie slept against his shoulder, Baedecker watched out the window as they changed engines in a remote corner of the switching yard in Salt Lake City. Under an abandoned overpass, bounded about by tall weeds made brittle by the autumn cold, hobos sat by a fire. Are they still called hobos? wondered Baedecker.

  In the morning both he and Maggie awoke just before dawn as the first false light touched the pink rocks of the desert canyon through which the train was hurtling. Baedecker knew instantly upon awakening that the trip would not go well, that whatever he and Maggie had shared in India and rediscovered in the Colorado mountains would not survive the reality of the next few days.

  Neither of them spoke while the sun rose. The train rushed on westward, the rocks and mesas flying by, the morning wrapped in a temporary and fragile hush.

  Dave and Diane Muldorff lived in a well-to-do suburb on the south side of Salem. Their patio looked down on a wooded stream and Baedecker listened to water running over unseen rocks as he ate his steak and baked potato.

  "Tomorrow we'll take you over to Lonerock," said Dave.

  "Sounds good," said Baedecker. "I look forward to seeing it after hearing about it all these years."

  "Dave will take you over," said Diane. "I have a reception at the Children's Home tomorrow night and a fund-raiser on Sunday. I'll see you on Monday."

  Baedecker nodded and looked at Diane Muldorff. She was thirty-four, fourteen years younger than her husband. With her tousled mane of dark hair, startling blue eyes, snub nose, and freckles, she reminded Baedecker of all the girls-next-door he had never known. Yet there was a solid streak of adult in Diane, a quiet but firm maturity, which was now emphasized as she entered her sixth month of pregnancy. This evening she wore soft jeans and a faded blue Oxford shirt with the tails out. "You look good, Di," Baedecker said on impulse. "Pregnancy agrees with you."

  "Thank you, Richard. You look good, too. You've lost some weight since that party in Washington."

  Baedecker laughed. He had been at his heaviest then, thirty-six pounds over his flying weight. He was still twenty-one pounds over that weight.

  "Are you still jogging?" asked Dave. Muldorff had been the only one of the second generation of astronauts who did not run regularly. It had been the point of some contention. Now, ten years after leaving the program, he looked thinner than he had then. Baedecker wondered if Dave's illness was the cause.

  "I run a little," said Baedecker. "Just started up a few months ago after I got back from India."

  Diane carried several icy bottles of beer to the table and sat down. The last of the evening light touched her cheeks. "How was India?" she asked.

  "Interesting," said Baedecker. "Too much to take in in so short a time."

  "And you saw Scott there?" asked Dave.

  "Yes," said Baedecker. "Briefly."

  "I miss seeing Scott," said Dave. "Remember our fishing trips off Galveston in the early seventies?"

  Baedecker nodded. He remembered the endless afternoons in rich light and the slow, warm evenings. He and his son would both return home with sunburns. "The redheads return!" Joan would cry out in mock dismay. "Get out the ointment!"

  "Did you know that what's-his-name, Scott's holy man, is coming to stay full-time in that ashram of his not far from Lonerock?" asked Diane.

  Baedecker blinked at her. "Full-time? No, I didn't."

  "What was the ashram like in Poona where Scott was staying?" asked Dave.

  "I don't really know," said Baedecker. He thought of the shop outside the main building where one could buy T-shirts with images of the Master's bearded face on them. "I was just in Poona two days and didn't see much of the ashram."

  "Will Scott be coming back to the States when the group moves over here?" asked Diane.

  Baedecker tasted his beer. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe he's here now. I'm afraid I'm out of touch."

  "Hey," said Dave. "Want to come inside to the billy yard room for a fast game?"

  "Billy yard room?" said Baedecker.

  "What's the matter, Richard," said Dave, "didn't you ever watch The Beverly Hillbillies ba
ck during the golden age of the tube?"

  "No," said Baedecker.

  Dave rolled his eyes at Diane. "That's the problem with this lad, Di. He's culturally deprived."

  Diane nodded. "I'm sure you'll fix that, David."

  Muldorff poured more beer and carried both mugs with him to the door of the patio. "Luckily for him, I've got twenty episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies on tape. We'll start watching as soon as I thrash him in a fast but expensive game of pool. Come wiz me, mon sewer Baedecker."

  "Oui," said Baedecker. He picked up some of the dishes and carried them toward the kitchen. "Einen Augenblik, por favor, mon ami."

  Baedecker parks his rented car and walks the two hundred yards to the crash site. He has seen many such sites before; he expects this one to hold no surprises. He is wrong.

  As he reaches the top of the ridge, the icy wind strikes him and at the same instant he sees Mt. St. Helens clearly. The volcano looms over the valley and ridgeline like a great, shattered stump of ice. A narrow plume of smoke or cloud hangs above it. For the first time, Baedecker realizes that he is walking on ash. Under the thin layer of snow the soil is more gray than brown. The confusion of footprints on the hillside reminds him of the trampled area around the lunar module when he and Dave returned from their last EVA at the end of the second day.

  The crash site, the volcano, and the ash make Baedecker think of the inevitable triumph of catastrophe and entropy over order. Long strands of yellow-and-orange plastic tape hang from rocks and bushes to mark locations that investigators had found interesting. To Baedecker's surprise, the wreckage of the aircraft has not yet been moved. He notices the two long, scorched areas, about thirty meters apart, where the T-38 had initially struck the hill and then bounced even while disintegrating. Most of the wreckage is concentrated where a low band of rocks rises from the hillside like new molars. Snow and ash had been flung far out in rays that remind Baedecker of the secondary impact craters near their lunar landing site in the Marius Hills.

  Only vague and twisted remnants of the aircraft remain. The tail section is almost intact; five feet of clean metal from which Baedecker reads the Air National Guard serial number. He recognizes a long, blackened mass as one of the twin General Electric turbojet engines. Pieces of melted plastic and shards of twisted metal are everywhere. Tangles of white, insulated wire are strewn randomly around the shattered fuselage like the discarded entrails of some slaughtered beast. Baedecker sees a section of fire-blackened Plexiglas canopy still attached to a fragment of fuselage. Except for the colored tape and footsteps concentrated there, there is no sign that a man's body had been fused into these broken pieces of baked alloy.

  Baedecker takes two steps toward the canopy, steps on something, looks down, and recoils in horror. "Jesus." He raises a fist in reflex even as he realizes that the bit of bone and roasted flesh and singed hair under the concealing bush must be part of a carcass of a small animal unlucky enough to have been caught in the impact or ensuing fire. He crouches to look more closely. The animal had been the size of a large rabbit, but the unsinged remnants of fur were strangely dark. He reaches for a stick to prod the tiny corpse.

  "Hey, no one's allowed in this area!" A Washington state trooper is wheezing his way up the hill.

  "It's all right," Baedecker says and shows his pass from McChord Air Force Base. "I'm here to meet the investigators."

  The trooper nods and stops a few feet from Baedecker. He hooks his thumbs in his belt as he struggles to catch his breath. "Hell of a mess, isn't it?"

  Baedecker raises his face to the clouds just as it begins to snow again. Mt. St. Helens is gone, hidden by clouds. The air smells of burnt rubber even though Baedecker knows that except for the tires, there had been very little rubber aboard the aircraft.

  "You with the investigation team?" asks the trooper.

  "No," says Baedecker. "I knew the pilot."

  "Oh." The state trooper shuffles his feet and looks back down the hill toward the road.

  "I'm surprised they haven't transferred the wreckage," Baedecker says. "Usually they try to get it into a hangar as soon as possible."

  "Problem with transport," says the trooper. "That's where Colonel Fields and the government guys are this afternoon, trying to get the truck situation straightened out down at Camp Withycombe in Portland. And there's the jurisdiction problem, too. Even the Forest Service is involved."

  Baedecker nods. He crouches to look at the dead animal again but is distracted by a bit of orange fabric fluttering from a nearby branch. Part of a backpack, he thinks. Or a flight suit.

  "I was one of the first ones here after the crash," says the state trooper. "Jamie and me got the call just as we were heading out of Yale going west. Only guy here before us was that geologist who's got his cabin over toward Goat Mountain."

  Baedecker straightens up. "Was there much fire?"

  "Not by the time we got here. The rain must've put it out. There wasn't a hell of a lot to burn up here. Except the plane, of course."

  "It was raining hard before the crash?"

  "Shit, yes. We couldn't see fifty feet coming up the road. Real strong winds, too. Like I always pictured a hurricane was like. You ever seen a hurricane?"

  "No," says Baedecker and then remembers the hurricane in the Pacific that he and Dave and Tom Gavin had looked down on from two hundred miles up just before the translunar injection burn. "So it was already dark and raining hard?" he asks.

  "Yeah." The trooper's tone suggests that he is losing interest. "Tell me something. The Air Force guy—Colonel Fields—he seems to think that your friend flew over the park here because he knew the plane was going down."

  Baedecker looks at the state trooper.

  The man clears his throat and spits. The snow has stopped and the soil still visible looks even grayer to Baedecker in the waning afternoon light. "So if he knew the thing was having problems," says the trooper, "how come he just didn't punch out of it once he got the plane over the boonies here? Why'd he ride it down into the mountain?"

  Baedecker turns his head. On the highway below, several military vehicles, two flatbed trucks, and a small crane have pulled to a stop near Baedecker's rented Toyota. An enclosed jeep with someone in Air Force blue at the wheel begins its climb up the hill. Baedecker walks away from the trooper and moves downhill to meet them.

  "I don't know," he says to himself, the words spoken so softly that they are lost in the rising wind and sound of the approaching vehicle.

  "How long to Lonerock?" asked Baedecker. They were headed north on Twelfth Street in Salem. It was already three P.M.

  "About a five-hour drive," said Dave. "You have to take I-5 north to Portland and then follow the Gorge up past the Dalles. Then it's another hour and a half past Wasco and Condon."

  "Then we'll get there after dark," said Baedecker.

  "Nope."

  Baedecker refolded the road map he had been wrestling with and raised an eyebrow.

  "I know a shortcut," said Dave.

  "Through the Cascades?"

  "You might say that."

  They pulled off Turner Road onto a lane leading into a small airport. Several executive jets were parked near two large hangars. Across a wide strip of taxi apron sat a Chinook, a Cessna A-37 Dragonfly with Air National Guard markings, and an aging C-130. Dave parked the Cherokee near the military hangar, pulled their luggage out of the back, and tossed Baedecker a quilted goosedown jacket. "Suit up, Richard. It'll be cold where we're going."

  A sergeant and two men in mechanic overalls emerged from the hangar as Dave approached. "Howdy, Colonel Muldorff. All set and prechecked," said the sergeant.

  "Thanks, Chico. Meet Colonel Dick Baedecker."

  Baedecker shook hands, and then they were moving across the tarmac to where the mechanics were sliding back the side door of a helicopter parked behind the larger Chinook. "I'll be damned," said Baedecker. "A Huey."

  "A Bell HU-1 Iroquois to you, tenderfoot," said Dave. "Thanks, Chico,
we'll take it from here. Nate's got my flight plan filed."

  "Have a good trip, Colonel," said the sergeant. "Nice meetin' ya, Colonel Baedecker."

  As Baedecker followed Dave around the ship, he felt a slight sinking sensation in the region of his solar plexus. He had ridden in Hueys scores of times—even clocked thirty-five hours or more flying them during the early days of his NASA training—and he had hated every minute of it. Baedecker knew that Dave loved the treacherous machines; much of Muldorff's experimental flying had been in helicopters. In 1965, Dave had been on loan to Hughes Aircraft to sort out problems in their prototype TH-55A trainer. The new helicopter had a tendency to drop nose first into the earth without warning. The research led to comparison field studies on the flight characteristics of the older Bell HU-1, already in service in Vietnam. Dave was sent to Vietnam for six weeks of observation flying with the army pilots who were reported to be doing unusual things with their machines there. Four and a half months later he was recalled after it was discovered that he had been flying combat missions with a medevac squadron on a daily basis.

  Dave had used his experience to solve Hughes's problem with the TH-55As, but he had been passed over for promotion as a result of his unauthorized flying with the 1st Cav. He also received notes from both the Air Force and Army informing him that under no circumstances could he put in for retroactive combat flight pay. Dave had laughed. He had been notified two weeks before leaving Vietnam that he had been accepted into NASA's training program for post-Gemini astronauts.

  "Not bad," said Baedecker as they finished the external checks and moved into the cockpit. "Got your own slick for weekend jaunts. One of the perks of being a congressman, Dave?"

  Muldorff laughed and tossed Baedecker a clipboard with the cockpit checklist. "Sure," he said. "Goldwater used to get his free rides in F-18s. I've got my Huey. Of course, it helps that I'm still on active reserve out here." He handed Baedecker a baseball cap with the insignia AIR FORCE 1½ sewn on it. Baedecker tugged it on and set the radio headset in place. "Also, Richard," continued Dave, "it might reassure you to know—as a concerned taxpayer—that this particular pile of rusted bolts did its duty in 'Nam, ferried around weekend warriors out here for ten years, and is now officially on the spare-parts list. Chico and the boys keep it around in case anybody has to run up to Portland to buy cigarettes or something."