All That Outer Space Allows (Apollo Quartet Book 4) (12 page)

If that’s his excuse, I have no idea what might be your excuse for publishing this story. Your male readers greatly outnumber your female readers, and that’s a stone-cold fact. We are not in the littlest bit interested in women’s affairs. If we wanted that, we would be reading a woman’s magazine and not Galaxy.

Robert Allman

4597 Seaview Ave.

Tampa, Fla. 33611

Chapter 7

Lunar Transfer Injection

Soon after, Walden is invited to join the support crew for the Apollo 10 mission, which is the one that will be going to the Moon but not actually landing on it. There is some sort of rota which NASA uses to determine who flies when and on which mission. Because Walden has been picked for a support crew, he thinks the chances are good he will get an actual flight. Or so he tells Ginny. Tom picked him for this support crew, that’s evidence of Tom’s confidence in his abilities, Walden is sure of it. For Ginny, it makes more real the prospect of her husband going to the Moon, and while before she felt proud and honoured, now she begins to feel a little bit afraid.

It’s not like spaceflight has proven any more dangerous than she’d imagined—Apollo 1 happened on the ground, after all; although everyone still bears the scars of the tragedy. The Soviets have lost only a single cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, who plummetted to the ground from orbit and scuttlebutt has it he was cursing all the way down. But Apollo 7 launches safely in October, and three guys spend ten days in orbit testing all the systems in the re-designed command module.

Ginny, accompanying Pam and Mary, drops by Loella’s house, and she sits in the Cunninghams’ lounge, sipping coffee, the other women also smoking cigarettes, and though Loella casts an occasional worried glance at the NASA squawk box on the dresser, the conversation mostly confines itself to gossip about the AWC. They don’t talk about the Vietnam War, though they know women from their air force, navy and marine corps days whose husbands are over there fighting. They don’t mention the protest in Atlantic City against the Miss America pageant—after all, what do they have in common with those women, the protestors or the contestants? The Olympics in Mexico City, the opening ceremony was the day after the Apollo 7 launch, doesn’t enter the conversation. This is the year in which both Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated and now, months later, neither event is ever mentioned at the AWC. Oh, there was a peace march through Houston after King’s death, and the
Houston Chronicle
claimed an astronaut participated…

This is Togethersville and talk runs along well-worn rails: Apollo flights, home life, church, children… A practiced litany of domestic details with ample opportunity for sympathy, humour, boasting and envy. Ginny lets the words wash over her, there’s something about Wally and Donn, the flight’s not going well and the way they’ve been talking back to Houston, it could be the end of their careers.

Dodie, the
Life
journalist, she’s with the Schirras today, so they can talk freely. They can all smell a rat in the Eisele home, but everyone knows Togethersville has more than its fair share of rodents. Ginny listens with a fixed smile on her face and she wonders if her husband is as faithless as these women claim astronauts by nature are. What else, besides the training, the swagger, the constant broadcasting of the Right Stuff, must her husband do to get a shot at the Moon? And she worries how easy it would be for Walden to get himself into a situation where he never gets a flight.

Now that Walden is supporting Apollo 10, she sees less of him than ever. He spends most of the week at the Cape, and he doesn’t always fly home for the weekend. Has his behaviour changed? She can’t tell, she’s an Air Force wife, it’s always been like this. If there is a difference now—other than the quality of housing, and the fact they actually own the property—it’s this: whatever Walden is doing is in the public eye. No more military secrets. He can talk about it. He doesn’t, of course; not with Ginny. But she is still bent on her plan to learn more about Walden’s profession, the only thing putting a brake on it is his frequent absences.

Ginny drives home from the Cunningham house on automatic pilot. She knows about closed communities, she’s lived in them for most of her life, Air Force bases and, now she thinks about it, science fiction is much the same. Though her friends are scattered about the country, and they talk via letters and the occasional telephone call, they are all just as inward-looking, as cut-off from the real world, as Togethersville.

Ginny lives in two worlds, a high-heeled pump in each, and neither world seems much interested in reality. And though both exist for pretty much the same reason, the links between them are few and weak. When she goes shopping, and she sees those meagre handfuls of science fiction paperbacks in the book stores, with their gaudy covers featuring pretty women in spacesuits, piloting spaceships or exploring alien worlds; and then over by the magazines, there’s
Life
, with a Saturn V on a pillar of flame arrowing across the cover.

Are the two really so far apart?

Back at the house, Ginny kicks off her shoes, in the bedroom she strips down to her panties and bra and then, almost reverently, takes her slacks and plaid shirt from the chest of drawers. She sits on the double-bed she shares these days with Walden only on occasional weekends, and gazes down at the folded garments in her lap. It’s been nearly eighteen months since she wrote ‘The Spaceships Men Don’t See’ and though she tells herself she’s been too busy to write in the months since, she knows she’s blocked. She can’t tell her friends, she can’t mention it in her letters to Ursula, Ali, Judith, Joanna… It’s a confession too far, if there’s one thing the AWC has taught her it’s that you only open up so much—hell, if there’s one thing
marriage
has taught her, it’s that some things need to remain secrets.

The truth is, she’s been meaning to make good on her epiphany in the lunar module simulator eight months ago, but every time she sneaks a look at one of Walden’s training manuals the scale of the task she has set herself overwhelms her. So she goes and cleans the bathroom. Or she calls up Mary or Louise or Dotty. Or she does a million and one other things that are not writing science fiction or trying to learn how an Apollo spacecraft functions. She has been co-opted, assimilated: she has become
an astronaut wife
.

It’s not how Ginny sees herself, not inside, it’s a part she has been playing, that’s all. These slacks, this plaid shirt, they’re the real Virginia Grace Eckhardt née Parker. It was so easy to be her, back in those days at Edwards, of ceramic blue skies and desert heat and that fine layer of dust which settled on every surface, living miles from anywhere; science fiction was a lifeline, one she clung to with a desperation born of despair. But, oh, how easily she has been corrupted by this new life gifted her by NASA, by that shining beacon in the night sky—which, for the first time in the history of Man, it’s become possible to visit.

Ginny dresses quickly, almost feverishly. She gets an old pair of sandals out of the closet. She fetches her Hermes Baby, and a stack of typing paper, from her dressing-room, and carries them reverently into the lounge. It is late afternoon, she has a lonely evening stretching ahead of her, normally she’d make herself a salad or something light and then curl up in front of the television, maybe with a magazine to read.

Not tonight. She makes herself a scotch, with plenty of water, not the iced tea which used to fuel her when she was writing, and she sits at the table and holds her hands in readiness over the keys—

Something about going to the Moon, she’s going to write a story about a mission to the Moon. And she’s going to make it accurate and full of realistic detail, a new sort of science fiction, rigorous and backed up by real science and engineering.

A cynical reader might observe Ginny’s evolving relationship to science fiction, and it’s not the science fiction we know, as illustrated by the names of the published writers, all of which are real science fiction authors, which have been mentioned in this novel—Ginny’s changing thoughts and dreams on, and of, the genre, as influenced by her husband’s new career, by this great new adventure the USA is undertaking, recapitulate this quartet’s relationship to science fiction. It would be disingenuous to claim this is happenstance—Ginny is a fictional construct and her life created toward a particular end. And a particular resolution. But there is a wider point to make here: “motif” and “theme” are synonyms for “pattern”, and human beings are predisposed to find patterns, even where they do not exist. It takes little to suggest a higher purpose at work—some carefully-placed hints, an element of serendipity, an insistence that some of the topics explored by literature are universal…

Ginny has learnt for herself that “universal” is not quite so all-encompassing a term the dictionary definition claims. Critical studies of science fiction are almost non-existent: perhaps some Lit student somewhere has written a thesis on the fiction of Margaret St Clair or Alice Norton, but Ginny does not know of any. Science fiction is genre fiction, women’s fiction, not deemed worthy of study. And men control the literature departments of American universities, Ginny knows this for herself (nothing has changed since she graduated). Male professors are not interested in fiction read and written by women.

And yet… Ginny looks down at her hands poised over the typewriter keys, and considers what she is about to do. She is going to take an endeavour which has been presented to the world as the very pinnacle of male achievement—for all of Betty Skelton’s accomplishments, it is only men who have the “Right Stuff”—and she is going to colonise, no,
occupy
it, in the name of women. She is going to take from men something they have quite deliberately kept for themselves—and it is by no means the only such thing—and she is going to re-invent it for her gender…

The audacity of her plan intimidates her.

#

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Ginny’s empty promise earlier in the year proves prophetic when Walden is chosen for the Apollo 12 backup crew by Dave Scott. The rotation schedule means he will get to fly on Apollo 15—David Scott, Commander; Alfred Worden, Command Module Pilot; Walden Eckhardt, Lunar Module Pilot. An all Air Force crew—not just their friend and neighbour back in California, Al; but Dave was also at Edwards when he was selected by NASA in 1963 (the Eckhardts knew of him back then but they did not socialise).

NASA makes the announcement about Apollo 12 in April of 1969, and while all the attention is rightly directed at Pete Conrad, Al Bean and Dick Gordon, the Apollo 12 prime crew, a few weekends after the press release, Ginny and Walden are invited to Dave and Lurton’s ranch-style home in Nassau Bay for a celebration. Al is there, but not Pam, the two have been separated for about six months—and there are some in the Astronaut Wives Club who feel that should make Al ineligible for a flight, they’ve stuck by their men through thick and thin, good and bad, they have made
sacrifices
, and Pam has let them all down. But Ginny is not one of them. She was sad to see Pam leave, she always liked her, they were friends, if not especially close ones—Ginny’s closest friends she has never actually met in person, they’re the people she corresponds with and whose names she sees in the pages of the magazines she reads.