All That Outer Space Allows (Apollo Quartet Book 4) (13 page)

Back in Edwards, everyone partied hard, but the mantle of responsibility laid across the astronauts’ shoulders by the nation has left them subdued and more inclined to work off their frustrations in the privacy of their own homes. For Ginny, this has meant fights, nights where Walden silently and sullenly chugs beer, the two of them occasionally sleeping in separate bedrooms and reproachful apologies the following morning. She knows Walden is under pressure, that the work is hard—she is trying herself to understand what NASA is asking of him… although she has not yet worked up the courage to tell him so.

Dave has been in space twice before, on Gemini 8 and Apollo 9, and Walden has admitted to her he couldn’t have asked for a better commander. The Apollo 11 crew were later described by Michael Collins as “amiable strangers”, but the Apollo 15 crew are as close as long-time colleagues. Tied together by shared memories of Edwards, by careers that have trod similar paths, they are alike enough to be comfortable in each other’s presence, and yet different enough not to cavil at their enforced closeness. In
Falling to Earth
, Al Worden describes Dave Scott as “the quintessential professional”, Jim Irwin as “restrained and reticent” and Scott’s “yes-man”; and in reference to his own role: “[Scott] wanted things his way, but on a few occasions I had to tell him, ‘Well, Dave, I am not sure I want to do it like that.’” The crew had, in Worden’s words, “a bond of competence and professionalism”. Imagine a similar dynamic at play with Walden J Eckhardt in Jim Irwin’s place. When Walden’s conversation becomes peppered with “Dave” and “Al”, Ginny is at first glad everything seems to be going so well; but it soon palls. She looks forward to the days when Walden is at the Cape, and she will not be sharing the bed with her husband and the ghosts of his crew-mates.

The Scotts’ party takes the form of a luau, though neither Ginny nor Walden have been to Hawaii and so can’t vouch for its authenticity. The shirts are certainly Hawaiian—the Scotts have provided suitable garments for Al and Walden. And there are pineapples and a barbecue with far too much meat. Ginny is no stranger to barbecues, they were regular occurrences at Edwards, but there is something desperately festive about this one. It’s not just the ridiculous paper leis, or the paper lanterns strung across the garden, or even the cake with the Moon drawn in blue icing on its top.

Ginny sits alone at a table, in a plain red top and white capri pants—her concession to the theme, though several of the other wives are in muumuus, but now she thinks about it maybe they wore capri pants in
Girls! Girls! Girls!
and not
Blue Hawaii
—and sips from some fruity cocktail which boasts a pair of swizzle sticks and a paper umbrella, Lurton told her the name but she can’t remember it. And she’s thinking about the short story she finished a few days ago, the third since she discovered how to write again, the third since she started to make good on her epiphany in the LM simulator all those months ago, the third since she’s been working her way secretly through her husband’s training manuals. Not all of the stories have worked, often some vital narrative element seems just beyond her grasp, and the one she has sent out has not sold, the rejections sadly uninformative on the story’s flaws.

Hey, why so glum, asks Dave, as he marches past bearing a huge bowl of potato salad.

Ginny starts. Uh, I was a million miles away, she tells him. She considers adding she was in fact only a quarter of a million miles from Houston, Texas, somewhere in the vicinity of the Sea of Tranquility, designated Apollo Landing Site 1. But he has already swept past.

Apollo 11 will actually land at Apollo Landing Site 2, also in the Sea of Tranquility, but some 150 miles west of Site 1. Ginny cannot know this, of course, not in April 1969, as NASA has not yet announced where the first lunar landing will take place.

She watches Dave bear down on the table at the other end of the patio and begin sorting the plates and dishes on its top to find room for the potato salad. Although the food has been made by the wives, the men always take charge during a barbecue, presenting the various dishes as if they themselves were responsible for the salads and sauces and condiments.

A hand settles on her shoulder and Ginny looks up to see a man smiling down at her. He is wearing aviator sunglasses and has a bottle of beer in one hand. For one brief moment, she wonders who he is—and is thrown into even more confusion when Dave turns and yells, Hey, Swede!

Swede? Ginny asks her husband.

It’s nothing, hon, says Walden, just a dumb nickname.

He walks away. She can hear the chatter of the other wives behind her, busy doing something inside the house, and now the men have congregated at the barbecue, leaving Ginny alone and between the two groups. She should be indoors, joining in the gossip, helping with the food preparation which remains to be done, she’s a fully paid up member of the AWC and she’s been in it now for two and a half years. But she sits at the table by herself and thinks about the future.

Not just the future of the here-and-now, Walden backup crew for Apollo 12, which is due to fly later this year, but also Walden prime crew for an upcoming flight to the Moon. And because he has specialised in the lunar module, has spent the last eighteen months studying it, because it is
his
spacecraft, so he is LMP, which means he will certainly be setting foot on the lunar surface. But there is also the future of Ginny’s invented worlds—and there’s that famous story of Judith’s which opens, “Martha begat Joan and Joan begat Ariadne. Ariadne lived and died at home on Pluto, but her daughter, Emma, took the long trip out to a distant planet of an alien sun”. But who needs an alien sun when there’s an alien world hanging over everyone’s head, and the more Ginny learns of the science and engineering of putting a man on the Moon, the more she realises how astonishingly
difficult
a task it is, and the freedom of the galaxy, as practiced by her friends and peers, seems a thing so very fanciful, so much more so than imagining a woman walking through lunar regolith—and that’s something she supposes will never come to pass.

The wives spill out into the garden, in their vibrantly-coloured muumuus and dresses, and the men mill about with their bottles of beer, and Ginny sits alone in the centre of what feels like a whirlwind of activity, as if time has slowed for her, everyone moving so fast, their voices an unintelligible gabble, and the irony of her situation, that she, someone who travels forward in time in her stories, does not escape her.

And then Walden is looming over her and she puts her empty glass on the table and rises to her feet, tottering a moment on her high-heeled mules. The sun is sinking, spraying reds and oranges across the darkening sky, like fire splashing over a launch pad as a Saturn 1B lifts off, not that Ginny has seen one in person, only some footage on television and photographs in magazines. She smiles at her husband as he snakes an arm about her waist and pulls her in close, and this is the most intimate he has been in over a year— No, not “intimate”, he has been that, their sex life has suffered but it still limps along. This is the most
husbandly
he has been since they moved to Houston—holding her close, and she knows she loves him for all his faults, and she knows he reciprocates the feeling in his own way, and looking across to the other astronauts and their wives, she thinks, what an extraordinary group of people we are and what an extraordinary time this is to live. The things we are doing here in Houston, in just a few short months we will put a human being on the Moon—and the
realness
of it is palpable, is there to be felt in the muscular arm encircling her waist, in the warmth of Walden’s body pressed against her own, in the drunken gestures and bright chatter, the toothsome smiles and wholesome features. There’s such a sense of community to this gathering, one that science fiction, for all its decades of stories and letter columns has never quite managed.

She thinks perhaps it’s because science fiction fans don’t get together, they don’t meet up, their husbands likely wouldn’t allow it, fathers would certainly not let teenage daughters travel to other cities alone to visit other science fiction fans. Maybe there are small literary circles dedicated to science fiction at some universities, perhaps some of them even have male members… But fandom as such, it can’t even decide on an award, they’ve been discussing it since the late fifties, but who to name it for? Francis Stevens? She was prolific and popular during the first two decades of the century, she arguably invented science fiction; but perhaps they should use her real name, Gertrude Burrows Bennett? Or, how about a long-established and successful living author? Alice Norton? Catherine Moore? And there were those writers who were successful back in the 1930s, just as the science fiction magazines began to appear, like Leslie F Stone and Claire Winger Harris and Hazel Heald…

Lurton rushes up and holds out a hand for Ginny, and she’s pulled from her husband’s side and over to a group of wives, and someone pushes another cocktail into her hand, and as she hears the topic of conversation—it’s Togethersville gossip, of course, divorces and separations, but it’s also about the upcoming Apollo 11 and Neil, standing over there by the barbecue, he’s going to be
the first man to set foot on the Moon
… Janet doesn’t know whether to be proud or frightened, and so settles for both, and though Janet and Lurton are firm friends, no one really knows Neil, who is often almost inhumanly distant—so much so David Scott mistakenly ascribes to him Pete Conrad’s motto, “if you can’t be good, be colourful”, in the autobiography Scott shares with Alexei Leonov,
Two Sides of the Moon
.

And it all brings Ginny abruptly back to Earth and it’s a rapid enough descent to make her head spin. Which she blames on the drink, as she puts a hand up to her mouth and gives a sheepish grin.

Chapter 8

Lunar Orbit Insertion

Nineteen sixty-nine is a red letter year, the year a man first sets foot on the Moon, the year NASA, the people of the United States of America, make good on their president’s promise, “before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth”. Apollo 7 and Apollo 8 launched the previous year, of course—and who can forget Bill, Jim and Frank reading verses from the Book of Genesis 234,474 miles from the Earth? Apollo 9, a month before the Scotts’ luau, was almost routine by comparison.

At the beginning of the decade, the Space Race was exciting, it captured the public’s imagination. Alan Shepard, the first American but the second man into space, spent only fifteen minutes in a suborbital hop, he met the president, who gave him a medal. John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Gordo Cooper, Gus Grissom, they all had ticker tape parades in New York. The Gemini flights weren’t so glamorous, nothing could ever be “routine” about spaceflight, but they were no longer front page news, the astronauts who flew them didn’t go on world tours. Sure, everyone had to spend some time “in the barrel”, and even Walden has given talks to high schools and plant workers.

But the Apollo flights are different. America is in front, they’re beating the Soviets. It puts the astronauts back in the headlines. Frank, Bill and Jim even get a ticker tape parade after their trip around the Moon.

Ginny, of course, is still pretty much a nobody—she’s sort of famous because she’s an astronaut wife, but Walden Jefferson Eckhardt is only one of fifty-four astronauts and he’s never flown so no one is really all that eager to interview Ginny or snap photographs of her. None of the reporters, of course, know about her career as Virginia G Parker—she can just imagine the magazine articles if they ever found out.

As backup to Apollo 12’s LMP, Al Bean—Ginny is aware of Pete Conrad’s crew, with their matching gold and black Corvettes, but she knows the wives only in passing—Walden is at the Cape pretty much all the time. She understands he might have to take Al’s place, and she’d want him as prepared as possible should such an eventuality arise… To be honest, she’s used to it now, she’s used to being left on her own for weeks, seeing her husband only infrequently. The house keeps her busy—my God, the endless housework—the AWC is there when she feels the need for company, and the new sense of purpose she has brought to her writing is proving the sort of intellectual challenge she now realises she has been missing. For those long busy months of 1969, as spring fades and summer threatens to throw a blanket of muggy heat over Houston, Ginny is happier than she has ever been. Though she has never thought of herself as a homemaker, she is proud of their home, proud of the hand she played in creating it; and she is beginning to enjoy her reflected minor celebrity, the wife of an astronaut who will probably go to the Moon, even if it has yet to be officially confirmed.

In May, Apollo 10 launches, and its crew of three make the quarter of a million mile journey to the Moon, and then descend to within ten miles of its surface. But they do not land. Ginny visits Faye during the flight, sitting on the sofa, trying to listen to the other women present and the squawk box at the same time. But really she wants Walden home so she can ask him to explain what is going on. She hears something over the squawk box and it sounds like: Okay, it’s attitude control three mode control … commander is four jet … when you hit hard over here it’s going to be hot fire.

But Walden is not in Houston, and though Ginny can find her way around a diagram of the lunar module, and make an educated guess at some of the workings depicted in sub-system diagrams, much of the astronauts’ speech is impenetrable, full of acronyms and terms she doesn’t understand. What she needs is a glossary and a legend for the acronyms.