by Dan Simmons
"This access is a little easier than mounting the Saturn V," said Baedecker.
"Had that little boom arm, didn't it?" said Tucker.
"Three hundred and twenty feet up," said Baedecker, "I used to lurch across that damn number nine swing arm in full pressure suit, carrying that little portable ventilator that weighed about half a ton, and hold my breath until I got into the white room. I was sure I was the only Apollo hero who was fast developing a fear of heights."
"We're a little closer to the ground here," said Tucker. "Evening, Wendell." Tucker greeted a technician with earphones connected to a cable jacked into the hull of the shuttle.
"Evening, Colonel. Going inside?"
"For a few minutes," said Tucker. "I want to show this old Apollo fossil what a real spacecraft looks like."
"All right, but wait just a second, please," said the technician. "Bolton's on the flight deck running the communications check. He'll be coming down in just a second." Baedecker ran his hand across the skin of the shuttle. The white tiles were cool to the touch. Close up, the spacecraft showed signs of wear—subtle discolorations between the tiles, flakes of black paint missing, a well-used polish to the fittings on the open entry hatch. The used pickup had been washed and waxed, but it was still a used pickup.
A technician emerged from the round hatch and Wendell said, "Okay, it's all yours."
Baedecker followed Tucker in, wondering as he did so what had become of Gunter Wendt. The old-hand Mercury and Gemini crews had held Wendt, the first white-room "pad führer," in such esteem that they had coerced North American Rockwell into hiring him away from McDonnell when the Apollo program came in.
"Watch your head, Dick," said Tucker.
They crossed the middeck and climbed to the forward seats on the flight deck. To someone trained in Apollo, the shuttle interior seemed huge. There were two additional couches set behind the pilot's and copilot's seats, and a ladder had led to a single seat on the lower deck.
"Who gets the lonesome spot down there?" asked Baedecker.
"That's Holmquist and he's sick about it," said Tucker as he slid into the horizontal command pilot's couch. "He's done everything but bribe one of the other two for a window seat."
Baedecker edged carefully into the right seat. In his center seat in the Apollo Command Module, clumsiness would just have gotten him stuck. A slip now would drop him five or six feet to the windows and instrument bay below him at the rear of the flight deck. He pulled the shoulder harnesses on out of habit, secured the lap belt, but ignored the wide crotch strap.
Several trouble lights hung from hooks, throwing a bright light on the instruments and shadows into the corners. Tucker clicked one of these lamps off and activated several cockpit switches, bathing them both in a red-and-green glow. A cathode ray display directly in front of Baedecker lit up and began running through a litany of meaningless data. The quickly changing lines of data reminded Baedecker of the PanAm passenger shuttle with its flashing cockpit graphics in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dave had insisted they see that movie a dozen times during the winter of 1968. They had been putting in fourteen-hour shifts supporting Apollo 8, and then in the evenings they would drive pell-mell across Houston to watch Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, HAL, and the austro-lopithecines perform to the sounds of Bach and Strauss and Ligeti. Dave Muldorff had been quite irritated one night when Baedecker had fallen asleep at the beginning of the fourth reel.
"Like it?" asked Tucker.
Baedecker ran his gaze over the console. He set his hand lightly on the rotational hand controller. "Very elegant," he said and meant it.
Tucker tapped at the computer keys on the low console that separated them. New information filled all three of the cathode displays. "He's right, you know," Tucker said.
"Who's right?"
"Your boy." Tucker ran a hand over his face as if he were very tired. "It is sad."
Baedecker looked at him. Tucker Wilson had flown forty missions over Vietnam and shot down three enemy MiGs in a war almost devoid of aces. Wilson was a career Air Force man, only transferred to duty with NASA.
"I don't mean it's sad that the services are finally flying missions," Tucker said. "Shit, the Russians have had a pure military presence up there in the second Salyut station for . . . what? Ten years at least. But it's still sad what's happening here."
"How so?"
"It's just different, Dick," said Tucker. "Back when you were flying and I was on backup, things were simpler. We knew where we were going."
"To the moon," said Baedecker.
"Yeah. Maybe the race wasn't all that friendly, but somehow it was more . . . shit, I don't know . . . more pure. Now even the size of the damn bay doors back there was dictated by the DoD."
"You're just carrying an intelligence-gathering satellite back there," said Baedecker. "Not a bomb." He remembered his father standing on a darkened dock in Arkansas thirty-one years earlier, searching the skies for Sputnik and saying, "If they can send up something that size, they can put up a bigger one with bombs aboard, can't they?"
"No, it's not a bomb," agreed Tucker, "and now that Reagan is history, chances are we won't be spending the next twenty years ferrying up SDI parts either."
Baedecker nodded and glanced toward the windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of the stars, but the special glass was shielded for the launch. "You didn't think it would work?" he asked,
referring to the Strategic Defense Initiative—what the press still called, with some derision, Star Wars.
"No, I think it would," said Tucker. "But even if the country could afford it—which we can't—a lot of us feel it's too risky. I know that if the Russians started orbiting X-ray lasers and a bunch of other hardware that our technology couldn't match in twenty years . . . or defend against . . . most of the brass I know would be calling for a preemptive attack on whatever they put up."
"F-16-launched antisatellite stuff?" asked Baedecker.
"Yeah," said Tucker. "But say we didn't get everything. Or they replaced it faster than we could shoot it down. What would you advise the president to do, Dick?"
Baedecker glanced at his friend. He knew that Tucker was a personal friend of the man who had just won the election to replace Ronald Reagan. "Threaten surgical strikes of their launch sites," said Baedecker. The entire shuttle stack seemed to sway slightly in the evening breeze, making Baedecker feel a hint of nausea.
"Threaten?" said Tucker with a grim smile.
Baedecker, knowing from his childhood in Chicago as well as from his years in the Marines just how useless threats can be, said, "All right, launch surgical strikes against Baikonur and their other launch facilities."
"Yeah," said Tucker and there was a long silence broken only by the creaks and groans of the 150-foot external tank lashed to the orbiter's belly. Tucker flicked off the cathode displays. "I love the Cape, Dick," he said softly. "I don't want it blown to shit in a game of tit for tat."
In the sudden darkness, Baedecker breathed in the smell of ozone, lubricant, and plastic polymers; the cockpit smell that had replaced ozone, leather, and sweat. "Well," he said, "the arms deals the last couple of years are a beginning. The satellite you're carrying back there will allow a degree of verification that would've been impossible even ten years ago. And killing ICBMs with good treaties—before the weapons are built—seems more efficient than putting a trillion dollars worth of X-ray lasers in space and hoping for the best."
Tucker laid his hands on the console as if he were sensing with his palms the data and energy that lay dormant there. "You know," he said, "I think the president-elect missed a bet during the campaign."
"How so?"
"He should've made a deal with the American people and the Soviets," said Tucker. "For every ten dollars and ten rubles saved by negotiating away missiles or cutting back SDI, the Russians and us should put ten rubles or ten bucks toward joint space projects. We'd be talking tens of billions of dollars, Dick."
"Mars?" said Baedecker. When
he and Tucker had been training for Apollo, Vice President Agnew had announced that NASA's goal was to land men on Mars by the 1990s. Nixon had not been interested, NASA soon came down from its drunken euphoria, and the dream had receded to the point of invisibility.
"Eventually," said Tucker, "but first get the space station going and then put a permanent base on the moon."
Baedecker was amazed to find that his breathing seemed to catch at the thought of men returning to the moon in his lifetime. Men and women, he amended silently. Aloud, he said, "And you'd be willing to share it with the Russians?"
Tucker snorted. "As long as we don't have to sleep with the bastards," he said. "Or fly in their ships. Remember Apollo-Soyuz?"
Baedecker remembered. He and Dave had been part of the first team to sightsee the Soviet space program prior to the Apollo-Soyuz mission. He still remembered Dave's subtle commentary on the flight back. "State of the art. Jesus, Richard, they call this state of the art! To think we've spent all that energy scaring ourselves and Congress into believing all that stuff about the Soviet space juggernaut, the supertechnologies they're always on the verge of building, and then what do we see? Exposed rivets, electronic packages the size of my grandmother's old Philco radio, and a spacecraft that couldn't perform a docking maneuver if it had a hard-on."
Their written report had been a bit less pointed, but during the Apollo-Soyuz mission the American spacecraft had done all of the chasing and docking and—contrary to original plans—the crews had not switched ships for the landing.
"I don't want to fly in their tubs," repeated Tucker, "but if cooperating with them would get NASA back in the space-exploring business, I could put up with the smell." He unstrapped himself and began climbing down, taking care to use the proper handholds.
"A camel pissing out, eh?" said Baedecker, following carefully.
"What's that?" said Tucker as he crouched in front of the low, round hatch.
"Old Arab proverb," said Baedecker. "It's better to have the camel inside your tent pissing out than outside pissing in."
Tucker laughed, removed a stogie from his shirt pocket, and clamped it between his teeth. "Camel pissing out," he said and laughed again. "I like that."
Baedecker waited until Tucker exited and then he crouched, grabbed a metal bar above the hatch, and swung himself out into the delivery-room brightness of the white room.
Early on the morning of the launch, Baedecker sat alone in the coffee shop of his Cocoa Beach motel, watching the surf break and rereading the letter he had received from Maggie Brown three days earlier.
November 17, 1988
Richard,
I loved your last letter. You write so rarely but every letter means so much. I know you well enough not to know how much you think about and how much you care about . . . and how little you say. Will you ever allow anyone to share the full depths of your insights and feelings? I hope so.
You make Arkansas sound beautiful. The descriptions of early mornings on the lake with the mists rising and crows calling in the bare branches along the shore made me want to be there.
Boston is all slush and traffic and tired brick right now. I love teaching and Dr. Thurston thinks that I'll be ready to begin work on my thesis next April. We'll see.
Your book is fantastic—at least the bits and pieces you've let me read. I think your friend Dave would be very proud. The character studies make the pilots come alive in a way I've never seen equaled in print, and the historical perspectives allow a lay person (me, for instance) to understand our current era in a new light—as a culture choosing between a frightening future of exploration and discovery, or a retreat into the safe and familiar harbors of internecine wars, stagnation, and decline.
As a sociologist I have more than a few questions (not answered by your book . . . or the fragments I've seen) concerning you astronaut-critters. Such as—why do so many of you hail from the Midwest? And why are almost all of you only children or the oldest siblings? (Is this true of the new mission specialists—especially the women—or just the ex-test pilots among you?) And what are the long-term psychological effects of belonging to a profession (test pilot)
where the on-the-job mortality rate is one in six? (Could this lead to a certain reticence in showing feelings?)
Your references to Scott in the last letter sound more optimistic than anything I've heard previously. I'm so pleased he's feeling better. Please give my warm greetings to him. From the tone of your letter, Richard, it sounds like you're rediscovering how complex and thoughtful your son can be. I could have told you that! Scott was indulging his stubbornness when he wasted a year in that stupid ashram, but as I've suggested before, part of that stubbornness comes from his reluctance to let any experience pass unexamined or to remain less than totally understood.
Where could he have gotten that trait do you think?
Speaking of stubbornness, I will not comment upon the mathematical section of your letter. It's not worthy of a reply. (Other than to point out that when you're 180, I'll just be a spry 154. It may be a problem then.) (But I doubt it.)
You asked me in your letter about my own philosophical/religious views on some things. Are we still talking about the places-of-power idea we confronted in India eighteen months ago?
You know about my love of magic, Richard, and about my own obsession with what I think of as the secrets and the silences of the soul. For me, our quest for places of power is both real and important. But you know that.
All right, my belief system. I composed a twelve-page epistle on this since your letter posed the question, but then I tossed it away because I guess my whole system of beliefs can be boiled down to this:
I believe in the richness and mystery
of the universe; and I don't believe
in the supernatural.
That's it. Oh, and I also believe that you and I have some decisions to make, Richard. I won't insult both of us with clichés or the travails of keeping Bruce at bay seven months after the deadline I promised him, but the fact is that you and I have to decide if we have a future together.
Until recently, I felt that we did. The few hours and days we have spent together over the past year and a half convinced me that the universe was richer—and, strangely, more mysterious—when we encountered it together.
But, one way or the other, life is beckoning to each of us right now. Whatever we decide, you need to know that our time together has widened and deepened everything for me, backward and forward in time.
I think I'll go for a walk now to watch the sculls on the Charles.
Maggie
Scott joined him at the table. "You're up early today, Dad. What time are we going over for the launch?"
"About eight-thirty," said Baedecker and folded away Maggie's letter.
The waitress came over and Scott ordered coffee, orange juice, scrambled eggs, wheat toast, and a side order of grits. When she left, he glanced at Baedecker's solitary cup of coffee and said, "Is that all you're having for breakfast?"
"I'm not very hungry this morning," said Baedecker.
"You didn't eat anything yesterday either, come to think of it," said Scott. "I remember you didn't have dinner on Wednesday either. And you didn't touch the pie last night. What's wrong, Dad? Are you feeling all right?"
"I feel fine," said Baedecker. "Honestly. Just not much appetite recently. I'll have a big lunch."
Scott frowned. "Just be careful, Dad. When I used to go on long fasts in India I'd get to the point after a few days where I didn't want to eat anything."
"I feel fine," Baedecker said again. "I feel better than I have for years."
"You look better," Scott said emphatically. "You must have lost twenty pounds since we started running at the end of January. Tucker Wilson asked me last night what kind of vitamins you've been taking. Jesus, you look great, Dad."
"Thanks," said Baedecker. He took a sip of coffee. "I was rereading Maggie Brown's letter and remembered that she said to say hello to
you."
Scott nodded and looked out at the ocean. The sky was a flawless blue to the east, but there was already a haze in front of the rising sun. "We haven't talked about Maggie," said Scott.
"No, we haven't."
"Let's talk," said Scott.
"All right."
At that second Scott's breakfast arrived and the waitress filled their coffee cups. Scott took a bite of toast. "First of all," he said, "I think you've got the wrong idea about Maggie and me. We were friends for a few months before I went over to India, but we weren't all that close. I was surprised when she showed up to visit that summer. What I'm trying to say is, even though the idea occurred to me a few times, Maggie and I never got it on."
"Look, Scott . . ." began Baedecker.
"No, now listen a minute," said Scott, but as soon as he said it, he took time to eat some scrambled eggs with that total focus of attention that Baedecker remembered from as far back as his son's first feedings in his high chair. "I've got to explain this," Scott said at last. "I know it'll sound weird, Dad, but from the first time I met Maggie on campus she reminded me of you."
"Of me?" said Baedecker, at a loss. "How?"
"Maybe reminded isn't the right word," said Scott. "But something about her made me think of you all the time. Maybe it was the way she used to listen so hard to people. Or the habit she had of picking up on little things people do or say and remembering them later. Maybe it was the way she never seemed satisfied with explanations that satisfied the rest of us. So anyway, when I had the chance in India, I tried to arrange it so you and she could have a few days to get to know each other."
Baedecker stared at his son. "Are you saying that's why you had her meet my plane in New Delhi? That's why you kept me waiting a week before I could see you in Poona?"
Scott finished his egg, dabbed at his mouth with a linen napkin, and shrugged ever so slightly.
"Well I'll be damned," said Baedecker and scowled at his son.
Scott grinned and continued grinning until Baedecker found himself grinning back.
The launch was scrubbed with three minutes remaining before ignition.
