by Dan Simmons
"I want to show you something," said Dave.
In a small back room on the first floor, there were mounds of books, a crude desk made of a door set on sawhorses, a typewriter, and several hundred sheets of manuscript stacked under a paperweight made from part of the abort switch from a Gemini spacecraft.
"How long have you been working on this?" asked Baedecker, thumbing through the first fifty pages or so.
"A couple of years," said Dave. "It's funny, but I only work out here in Lonerock. I have to drag my research stuff back and forth."
"Going to work on it this weekend?"
"No, I'd like you to look at it if you would," said Dave. "I want your opinion. You're a writer."
"Nuts," said Baedecker. "Some writer. I spent two years fiddling with that stupid book and never got past chapter four. It finally occurred to me that to write something you have to have something to say."
"You're a writer," repeated Dave. "I'd appreciate your opinion of this." He handed the rest of the stack to Baedecker.
Later, Baedecker lay on his bed and read for two hours. The book was unfinished—entire chapters existing only in outline form, a few scribbled notes—but what was there, fascinated Baedecker. The manuscript's working title was Forgotten Frontiers, and the opening segments dealt with the early exploration of both the Antarctic and the moon. Parallels were drawn. Some were as obvious as the races to plant the flag, the hunger to be first, taking precedence over any serious or systematic scientific programs. Other similarities were more subtle, such as the stark beauty of the south polar desert drawn in comparison to firsthand accounts of the moon. The information was drawn from diaries, notes, and recorded statements. With both Antarctica and the moon, the inadequate accounts—the descriptions of the Antarctic explorers being, by far, the better expressed—told of the mysterious clarity of desolation, the overwhelming beauty of a new place totally foreign to mankind's previous experience, and of the seductive attraction inherent in a place so inclement and so hostile as to be completely indifferent to human aspirations and frailties.
In addition to exploring the aesthetics of exploration, Dave had woven in minibiographies and psychological portraits of ten men—five Antarctic explorers and five space voyagers. The Antarctic profiles included Amundsen, Byrd, Ross, Shackleton, and Cherry-Ganard. For their modern-day counterparts, Dave had chosen four of the lesser-known Apollo astronauts, three of whom had walked on the moon and one who had—like Tom Gavin—remained in lunar orbit aboard the Command Module. He had also included one Russian, Pavel Belyayev. Baedecker had met Belyayev at the Paris Air Show in 1968, and he had been standing with Dave Muldorff and Michael Collins when Belyayev had said, "Soon, perhaps, I will see first-hand what the backside of the moon looks like." Now Baedecker was interested to read that, according to Dave's research, Belyayev had indeed been chosen to be the first cosmonaut to go on a circumlunar flight in a modified Zond spacecraft. The launch date was only a few months after Baedecker and the others had spoken to him in the spring of 1968. Instead, Apollo 8 became the first spacecraft to circle the moon that Christmas, the Soviet lunar program was quietly scrapped under the pretense they had never planned to go to the moon, Belyayev died a year later as a result of an operation for a bleeding ulcer, and—instead of becoming famous as the first man to see the backside of the moon in person—the luckless cosmonaut received the minor distinction of being the first dead Russian "space hero" not to be buried in the Kremlin Wall. Baedecker thought of his father . . . "then everything falls to pieces and you're just waiting to die."
The sections on the four American astronauts were—at best—only sketched in, although the direction these chapters would take was obvious enough. As with the portraits of the Antarctic explorers, the Apollo segments would deal with the astronauts' thoughts in the years following their missions, new perspectives they may have gained, old perspectives lost, and a discussion of any frustration they might feel at the impossibility of their ever returning to this particular frontier. Baedecker agreed with the choice of astronauts, he found himself very curious what
they might say and share, but he felt that this would be the heart of the book when it was done . . . and by far the most difficult part to research and write.
He was thinking about this, standing at the window looking at the moonlight on the leaves of the lilac tree, when Dave knocked and entered.
"Still dressed, I see," said Dave. "Can't sleep?"
"Not yet," said Baedecker.
"Me either," said Dave and tossed him his cap. "Want to go for a ride?"
Driving north on I-5 toward Tacoma, Baedecker thinks about Maggie's call the previous evening.
"Maggie?" he had said, surprised that she had gotten hold of him at the Muldorff's. He realized that it was almost one A.M. on the east coast. "What's the matter, Maggie? Where are you?"
"Boston," said Maggie. "I got the number from Joan. I'm sorry about your friend, Richard."
"Joan?" he said. The thought of Maggie Brown having talked to his ex-wife seemed unreal to Baedecker.
"I called about Scott," said Maggie. "Have you been in touch with him?"
"No," said Baedecker. "The last couple of months I've been trying. I cabled the old address in Poona and sent letters, but there was no response. I called out here to Oregon in November, but somebody at their ranch said they didn't have Scott's name on their residents' list. Do you know where he is?"
"I'm pretty sure he's there," said Maggie. "In Oregon. At the ashram-ranch there. A friend of ours who was in India came back to B.U. a few days ago. He said that Scott came back to the States with him on the first of December. Bruce said that Scott had been pretty sick in India and that he'd spent several weeks in the hospital there—or at least in the infirmary that passes for a hospital there on the Master's farm outside of Poona."
"Asthma?" said Baedecker.
"Yes," said Maggie, "and a bad case of dysentery."
"Did Joan say Scott'd been in touch with her?"
"She said she hadn't heard from him since early November . . . from Poona," said Maggie. "She gave me the Muldorffs' number. I wouldn't have called, Richard, but I didn't know where else to get in touch with you, and Bruce—my friend who came back from India—said that Scott's been pretty sick. He wasn't able to walk off the plane when they landed in Los Angeles. He's pretty sure that Scott's at the ranch in Oregon."
"Thanks, Maggie," said Baedecker. "I'll call out there right away."
"How are you, Richard?" Something in the tone of Maggie's voice changed, deepened.
"I'm all right," he said.
"I'm so sorry about your friend Dave. I loved the stories you told me about him in Colorado. I'd hoped to meet him someday."
"I wish you had," said Baedecker and realized how much truth there was in the statement. Maggie would have loved Dave's sense of humor. Dave would have enjoyed her enjoyment. "I'm sorry I haven't been in touch," he said.
"I got your postcard from Idaho," said Maggie. "What have you been doing since you were there at your sister's in October?"
"I spent some time in Arkansas," said Baedecker, "working on a cabin my father built. It's been empty for a long time. How are you?"
There was a pause, and Baedecker could hear vague, electronic background noises. "I'm fine," she said at last. "Scott's friend Bruce came back to ask me to marry him."
Baedecker felt the wind go out of him much as it had four days earlier when Di's telegram had reached him. "Are you going to?" he said after a minute.
"I don't think I'll do anything precipitous until I get my master's in May," she said. "Hey, I'd better go. Please take care of yourself, Richard."
"Yes," Baedecker had said, "I will."
The fragments of Dave's T-38 take up a significant amount of space on the floor of the hangar. Smaller and more important pieces lie tagged on a long row of tables.
"So what will the Crash Board findings be?" Baedecker asks Bob Munsen.
The Air Force major frowns a
nd sticks his hands in the pockets of the green flight jacket. "The way it looks now, Dick, is that there was a slight structural failure on takeoff that caused the hydraulic leak. Dave got a red light on it about fourteen minutes out from Portland International and turned back immediately."
"I still don't see why he was flying out of Portland," says Baedecker.
"Because that's where I'd parked the goddamned thing right before Christmas," says Munsen. "I was scheduled to ferry it to Ogden on the twenty-seventh and Dave wanted to ride. He was going to catch a commercial flight out of Salt Lake."
"But you got hung up for forty-eight hours," says Baedecker. "At McChord?"
"Yeah," says Munsen, and there is disgust and regret in the syllable, as if he should have been in the aircraft when it crashed.
"So why didn't Dave use his priority status to bump someone on a commercial flight if he had to get back so quickly?" Baedecker says, knowing no one there has the answer.
Munsen shrugs. "Ryan wanted the T-38 at Hill Air Force Base in Ogden by the twenty-eighth. Dave had my clearance and wanted to fly it. When he called, I told him go ahead, I'd deadhead back to Hill."
Baedecker walks over and looks at the charred metal on the table. "Okay," he says, "structural failure, hydraulic leak. How serious?"
"We figure he'd lost about sixty percent of assist by the time he went down," says Munsen. "Have you heard the tape?"
"Not yet," says Baedecker. "What about the starboard engine?"
"He got a light about a minute after the hydraulic problem showed up," replies Munsen. "He shut it down about eight minutes before impact."
"Jesus Fucking Christ!" shouts Baedecker and slams his fist into the table hard enough to send tagged pieces flying. "Who the fuck crewed this thing?"
"Sergeant Kitt Toliver at McChord," says Munsen in a thin voice. "Best crew chief heading the best crew we've got. Kitt flew down with me for this seminar in Portland over Christmas. The weather closed in, and I drove back up to McChord on the twenty-sixth, but Kitt was in town. He did two inspections of it the day Dave flew. You know how these things are, Dick."
"Yeah," says Baedecker, and there is no lessening of the anger in his voice, "I know how these things are. Did Dave do a complete preflight?"
"He was in a hurry," says the major, "but Toliver says he did."
"Bob, I'd like to talk to Fields and the others," says Baedecker. "Could you get them together for me?"
"Not today," says Munsen. "They're spread all over the place. I could do it by tomorrow morning, but they wouldn't be very happy about it."
"Do it, please," says Baedecker.
"Kitt Toliver's here now," says Munsen. "Up at the NCO mess. Do you want to talk to him now?"
"No," says Baedecker, "later. First I have to listen to the flight tape. Thanks, Bill, I'll see you tomorrow morning." Baedecker shakes hands and goes to listen to his friend's voice for the last time.
"Let's get drunk and stick beans up our noses!" shouted Dave. His voice echoed down the dark streets of Lonerock. "Sweet Christ on a stick, what a beautiful night!"
Baedecker zipped up his goosedown jacket and leaped into the jeep as Dave gunned the engine.
"Full moon!" shouted Dave and howled like a wolf. From somewhere in the hills beyond the town came the high yelping of a coyote. Dave laughed and drove east past the boarded-up Methodist church. Suddenly he slammed the jeep to a stop and grabbed Baedecker by the arm. He pointed to the white disk of the moon. "We walked up there," he said, and although his voice was low, there was no denying the urgency and pleasure there. "We walked up there, Richard. We left our little anthropoid, hindpawprints in the moon's dirt, man. And they can't take that away from us." Dave revved the engine and drove on, singing They Can't Take That Away from Me at the top of his voice.
The jeep ride lasted for less than a mile and ended in Kink Weltner's field. Dave pulled clipboards and flashlights out of the back of the Huey and ran a careful inspection, even crawling under the dark mass of the ship to make sure there was no condensation in the fuel line. They were on the flat roof deck of the ship, checking rotor hub, mast, control rods, and the Jesus nut when Baedecker said, "We don't really want to do this, do we?"
"Why not?" said Dave.
"It'll wake up Kink." It was the only thing Baedecker could think of on short notice.
Dave laughed. "Nothin' wakes Kink up. Come on."
Baedecker climbed downward and in. He settled himself in the left seat, clicked the shoulder straps to the broad lap belt, tugged on the regulation National Guard helmet that he had left off on the flight out, wiggled the earphones in place, and blinked at the circles of red light glowing at him from the center console. Dave leaned forward to do the cockpit check while Baedecker read off the positions of circuit breakers. When he finished, Dave slid a piece of equipment into metal brackets on his side of the console and ran radio jacks to it.
"What the hell is that?"
"Tape deck," said Dave. "No self-respecting Huey flies without it."
The starter whined, rotors turned, and the turbine coughed and caught. Dave clicked in the intercom. His voice was muffled. "Next stop, Stonehenge."
"How's that?"
"Just watch and wait, amigo. Oh, are my goggles on straight?"
Baedecker glanced over to his right. Dave was wearing bulky night-vision goggles, but the face under the goggles and helmet was not Dave's. It was not even human. In the red cockpit glow, Baedecker could make out two huge eyes protruding at forty-five-degree angles on short, fleshy stalks, a wide, lipless frog's mouth, no chin, and a neck as lined and wattled as an aged turkey's.
"Yeah, they're on straight," said Baedecker.
"Thanks."
Three minutes later they were hovering twenty-five hundred feet above Lonerock. A few lights shone below. "You didn't care for my Admiral Ackbar?" asked Dave.
"Au contraire," said Baedecker, "it was the best Admiral Ackbar mask I've seen in weeks. Why are you doing that?"
Dave had triggered the landing-light extension switch on the collective pitch control lever. Now he was flicking the on-off switch. Baedecker could see the flashes through his chin bubble.
"Just sendin' extraterrestrial greetings and felicitations to Miz Callahan," said Dave, "so she can call it a night and go to bed." He retracted the light and pitched the Huey over in a banking turn.
They passed over Condon at five thousand feet. Baedecker saw lights glowing around an empty bandstand in a small park, an abandoned main street frozen in the glow of mercury-vapor lamps, and darkened side streets dappled with glimpses of streetlights through tall old trees. It suddenly occurred to Baedecker that small towns in America were saner than cities because they were allowed to sleep.
"Put this in, would you, Richard?" Dave handed him an audiocassette. Baedecker held it up to the glow of the omni gauge. It said only Jean-Michel Jarre. He popped it into the cassette player. He was reminded of the small tape player they had brought along in the Command Module. Each of them had supplied three cassettes; Tom Gavin had brought country-western tunes and Barry Manilow hits, Baedecker had brought Bach, Brubeck, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and Dave had brought—well, he had brought the damnedest stuff—tapes of whale songs, Paul Winter's group Consort playing Icarus, the Beach Boys, a duet of Japanese flute and Indian sitar, and a recording of some sort of Masai tribal ceremony.
"What now?" said Baedecker.
Dave punched the tape player on and looked at him, the ends of the tubular goggles glowing redly. "GYSAKYAG," he said gleefully.
The first pulse of music filled Baedecker's earphones in the same instant that Dave pitched the Huey nose-over in a dive. Baedecker slid forward until he was held in position only by the shoulder harness and seat belt. The dive provided precisely the same sensation he had enjoyed as a kid at Riverview Park in Chicago when the roller coaster ended its long, clattering climb and plunged over the top for its high-speed plummet, only this roller coaster had a five-thousand-foot dr
op beneath it and there were no rails curving up and away in a reassuring swerve from destruction, only the moonlit hills a mile below, darkened here and there by patches of black vegetation, forest, river, and rock.
Baedecker kept his hands off the left-hand cyclic control stick and collective pitch lever, his feet back from the pedals, and this made the dive seem that much more out of control. The hills rose quickly to meet them, and the descent rate did not lessen until the Huey was at zero altitude, then below zero altitude, banking at the last moment past hills and cliff sides, moonlight bright out Baedecker's open window, black shadows beyond Dave's, and then they were in a valley, a canyon, the cyclic moved back and forth between Baedecker's legs and then centered itself, dark trees flashed by thirty feet on either side, their tops higher than the Huey, and they were hurtling along at 125 knots, fifteen feet above a rapid-rippled, moonlit stream, banking steeply when the canyon curved, now level again, then banking so the rotor blades threw an iridescent wake of spray into the air behind them.
The music meshed with the kaleidoscope of scenery rushing at them and past them. The music was electronic, unearthly, yet driven by a solid and insistent beat that seemed to have throbbed up out of the pulse of turbine and rotors. There were other sounds to the music, laser echoes, the
rush of an electronic wind, surf sliding on a rocky shore, but all of it was orchestrated to the demanding drive of the central beat.
Baedecker sat back as the Huey banked steeply to the right, rotors almost touching the river, following a wide curve of canyon. He knew there was no room or time at this altitude for a safe autorotation should the engine fail. Worse, if there were a single cable, high-tension wire, bridge, or pipeline spanning the canyon, there would be no time to avoid it. But Baedecker glanced right at Dave sitting comfortably at the controls, his right hand almost casually moving the cyclic, his attention perfectly focused ahead of him, and he knew that there would be no cables, wires, bridges, or pipelines; that every foot of this canyon had been flown in daylight and dark. Baedecker relaxed, listened to the beat of the music, and enjoyed the ride.
