All That Outer Space Allows (Apollo Quartet Book 4) (11 page)

I’m sure you’ll get your chance, she assures him. But she knows the words are empty, as does he, her sympathy won’t get him what he desires most. She’s doing her best, she’s been trying so hard, just look at the way she’s dressed, she goes to the beauty parlour regularly, she attends the AWC meetings and stays on good terms with all the other wives.

This way, Walden says brusquely. And he’s off again down the corridor.

#

#

Another building, another gym-sized room. This, explains Walden, is the Apollo Lunar Mission Simulator. There are banks and banks of computers, with flashing lights and reels of tape that abruptly zip clockwise then anticlockwise. There is a great cubical frame of steel girders off to one side, and just visible within it is a grey and cratered diorama. And there are the three simulators, which look like someone opened a giant closet and all the boxes inside just fell out into piles. Walden points over at a large U-shaped console which looks up at one of the simulators.

That’s where the pencil-necks set up the mission parameters, he tells her. It’s all computerised.

There’s a lot of computers, Ginny says.

Yeah, 4.2 million bucks’ worth.

It’s a sum beyond imagining for Ginny, though not, she suspects, inconceivable to those closely involved with Apollo—after all, putting a man into space, putting
a man on the Moon
, is a hugely expensive endeavour.

This way, says Walden. This is the LM simulator.

He takes Ginny’s arm and leads her up a short flight of red-carpeted stairs to a platform at the back of the piles of boxes, and he steps through an entranceway into the simulator itself. Ginny halts at the jamb and peers in, and she can feel her pulse quicken as she takes in the grey panels of switches and dials and readouts, the two tiny triangular windows, the hand controllers—and it all looks so very
real
, an actual spacecraft, something that’s designed to operate in space, to land on the surface of another world. Cold fingers run up her spine and she thinks about magazine and book covers and descriptions in prose in short stories and novellas and novels, about spaceship bridges and control rooms, and here she is gazing at a tiny cabin which will carry two men to the Moon, and
in no wa
y does it resemble anything her imagination might have created from the science fiction she has read over the years. She looks down at her feet and wonders if she should take off her heels, they might damage the lunar module, she’s heard it is fragile, walls as thin as a beercan’s—but this, of course, is just a simulator, and the floor is good and solid. So she steps inside beside her husband and he tells her she’s at the commander’s position. She grabs a hand controller with each gloved hand and she stares through the window, which is really some kind of screen, at the surface of the Moon, which is really the diorama she saw earlier inside the giant steel framework. Now she’s starting to feel a little faint, she might even swoon, the sheer
physicality
of this tiny spacecraft cabin, of the grey instrument panels on every available surface, the dials, the switches, the digital readouts, the little blue and black ball bobbing this way and that beneath a glass etched with reticulations, and everything carefully labelled, so meticulously labelled. Her husband could be going to the Moon, she thinks. She knows this, she’s known it for two years now. (Of course, he might never get selected for a flight—there are sixty-one of them now, and not enough missions for all.) Until this moment, it has never quite struck her precisely what this means. Ginny has read science fiction for much of her life, she calls herself a fan, she has written letters to the magazines, she writes stories, many of the science fiction authors whose books she sees in book stores, she considers friends. But it all means nothing when confronted with this. Sense of wonder, imagination, pictures painted with the mind’s eye, it all pales into insignificance, seems to flatten to two dimensions like some painted backdrop, a theatrical flat, when compared to this reality, to Apollo, the lunar module, this machine which will put two astronauts—and one of them could be her husband!—on the surface of an alien planet.

Walden is speaking: See, we fly the LM down from lunar orbit to the surface, it’s mostly all done by the pings but we might have to take over for the last few feet.

Ginny has recovered from her near-fainting fit. She turns to her husband and says, Pings? Like they have in submarines?

But no, that can’t be right—there’s no air in space, so there’s no sound, Ginny knows that much.

Pings, says Walden, P-G-N-C-S, Primary Guidance, Navigation and Control System.

So how does that work? she asks.
Explain it to me, like you would to another astronaut.

Another astronaut? asks Walden.

You know what I mean. She grins—and adds, I love it when you talk dirty.

It is intended to be a joke, a lightening of the mood, though this cramped cabin with its grey instrument panels doesn’t lend itself to frivolity.

Walden evidently feels that way: Dirty? It’s
technical
, Ginny.

Tell me about the switches and these things—what do you call these things?

Barber poles.

And this? What’s this? she asks and presses idly on the number-pad. Verb? she asks. Noun?

Diskey, he tells her.

She looks at him, not understanding.

He spells it out: D S K Y—Display Keyboard. We call it the diskey.

What’s it for?

Programming the guidance computer, he tells her.

And all these switches?

Jeez, Ginny, you want me to explain every one we’ll be here all day.

What’s these ones? Ascent He, Descent He. What’s He?

The moment she says it, she figures out that “He” is helium, but she says nothing as Walden replies:

The fuel for the rocket engines has to be kept pressurised, so we use helium because it’s inert.

Ginny may have studied Lit at SDSU, but she knows what helium is.

The fuel for the engines is hypergolic, Walden adds.

There’s a relish to the way he says “hypergolic”, like it’s a secret word, the password to some secret club. Ginny doesn’t know what it means, why should she? Yet she can think of plenty of words Walden could not define, and not just ones like “camisole” or “pleat”, but even scientific terms she has come across during her years of reading science fiction, such as “parsec” and “semantics”. She even knows what the Fermi Paradox is, and she’s pretty sure Walden has no idea.

Hypergolic, he explains, means the two fuels ignite as soon as they mix. We don’t need to burn them, like on the Saturn V.

They should use women as astronauts, we’re smaller, says Ginny, we’d use less fuel, we even use less oxygen, less water, less food.

It takes more than that, hon. It takes years of training, of flying jet fighters.

So flying a spacecraft is like flying a jet fighter?

Well, no, not really, I guess.

So why do astronauts need to be jet fighter pilots?

It’s complicated.

Walden, you can’t even cook a roast dinner, and you’re telling me being an astronaut is too complicated for a woman?

Women could never be astronauts, he insists. It’s just the way it is.

She doesn’t know it, but Ginny’s point has already been proven—as I have written elsewhere in another work of fiction. In August 1961, Dr W Randolph Lovelace II gave a talk at a symposium of aerospace scientists in Stockholm in which he declared women better suited as astronauts, based on the medical testing he had given to female pilot Geraldyne M Cobb. “We are already in a position to say that certain qualities of the female space pilot are preferable to those of her male colleague,” he told his audience. Cobb’s testing was in all the newspapers, and covered extensively by
Life
magazine—but Ginny’s journey of discovery, her exploration into making use of her husband’s profession in her science fiction writing, requires her to be ignorant of the Mercury 13. And so the Eckhardts were in Germany at that time, and Ginny’s chief link with home was her science fiction magazines. Which, for some reason, made no mention of it, a lack of sisterly solidarity that might be considered uncharacteristic, although perhaps the magazines’ readerships mostly felt, as Jackie Cochran did when she testified before a Congressional subcommittee against a women’s astronaut program, that it was men’s job to lead the way and for women to follow on and “pick up the slack”.

And isn’t that what Ginny is doing? Letting her man lead the way. Of course she’s not qualified to be an astronaut—she watches her weight and tries to exercise, but she’s no athlete; and she cannot fly an airplane, there is only one licenced pilot in the AWC, and that’s Trudy.

But now that Ginny considers it, as she stands inside the lunar module simulator, it occurs to her that while she can never become an astronaut herself there’s no reason why she can’t write about them. Not something like Judith’s story about the tramp spaceship with the male doctor in an otherwise all-female crew, a story that has been a perennial favourite since its original appearance a decade before. No, Ginny is thinking of something much closer to home, a space program much like Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, those first faltering steps into space… but by women.

The more she thinks about it, the more she likes the idea. She has access to much of the material Walden is using in his training, she can probably get hold of some press kits, and she can use it for research, for the background to her stories. And the more she finds out, the more she understands what an astronaut is and does, the more she will be a better partner to Walden, understand his frustrations, emotionally support him.

It doesn’t occur to her until later that perhaps Walden will object to Ginny “interfering” in his area of expertise. He is the astronaut in the family, she is the wife. As a military man, Walden has always been keen on well-defined areas of responsibility—his den is out of bounds, her dressing-room is of no interest to him; the mess he makes it is her job to tidy up, any mess she might make is, of course, her job to clean up…

They exit the LM simulator and as Ginny stands at the top of the steps, she asks, Are they the same? The other two simulators?

They’re command modules, Walden replies.

Oh, can I see inside one of those?

Walden glances across at the LM simulator console, there’s a lone pencil-neck with his head down, busy doing something, programming perhaps. I guess, Walden says.

But the CM simulator is accessed via a steep ladder leading up to a hatch in the side of the cone-shaped spacecraft. There’s no way Ginny can climb that in her high-heeled pumps, so she slips them off, hands them to Walden, and starts up the ladder. She looks back over her shoulder, and there are a couple of guys over at one of the computer banks and they’re gazing in her direction, so she puts a hand to her skirt to keep it pressed against the back of her legs. It’s an inelegant scramble to get through the hatch and inside the CM, and it’s such a cramped space in there, she can’t believe three grown men—in spacesuits!—will fly to the Moon in it, even she has to duck her head. She works her way round to where three seats in a row gaze up at a wide instrument panel covered in switches and dials and meters and barber poles; and there’s the diskey, recognising it makes her smile. But just then she feels something catch her calf, and she looks down and says, Oh shoot. She has snagged her nylons on something and now there’s a run up one leg from the heel to the back of her knee. She can’t be seen around the MSC like that, so she hikes up her skirt, slips her fingers under the waistband of her pantyhose—

Jeez, Ginny!

It’s Walden, filling the hatchway.

What the hell are you doing?

She peels off her hose, an awkward manoeuvre in the tight space, scrunches it up and passes it to her husband, asking, Can you put this in your pocket?

On the way back to the parking lot, Walden and Ginny bump into Al Shepard, the first American into space. She’s heard the stories about the “icy commander” but they must have caught him on a good day, he is charm itself, shaking Walden’s hand vigorously, flashing a boyish grin at Ginny, maybe even flirting with her a little.

Afterward, Ginny can’t help saying, Fancy meeting Alan Shepard, a real astronaut!

I’m a real astronaut too, protests Walden.

She hugs his arm with both hands and pecks him on the cheek. Sorry, darling, she tells him, I just meant he’s been into space; but you will too, Walden, I know you will.

But she’s thinking about someone else going into space, someone who is not real.

#

Dear Mr. Pohl,

V. G. Parker’s February story, “The Spaceships Men Don’t See” deserves some comments on its frankly bizarre approach to telling what could have been a sound and ingenious piece of science fiction. Much as we may love them, wives have no place in serious science fiction. Or, if they must appear, it should be in the background, nobly supporting their men. But Mr. Parker, for reasons best known only to himself, decides that rather than science and engineering we should be presented with womanly gossip and high heels. Perhaps he thought he was being clever.