Phases of Gravity (12 page)

Maggie was waiting for him at a curve in the path, and they walked awhile in companionable silence. Beyond the next curve in the trail, Tom and Deedee were busy setting up camp in a clearing ten yards above the stream, which the trail had been paralleling. Baedecker dumped his pack, stretched, and rubbed some of the soreness out of his neck.

"Did you see Tommy back there?" asked Deedee.

Maggie answered. "He was a hundred yards or so down the trail. He should be here in a minute or two."

Baedecker spread the ground cloth and staked down the two-person orange tent he had been carrying. There were several fiberglass poles and wands to connect, and it took Baedecker and Maggie several moments of laughter to get the exoskeleton rigged and the tent properly draped from it. When it was finished, Baedecker's low tent sat a few yards from Tom and Deedee's blue dome.

Gavin came over and kneeled by Maggie, offering her a nylon bundle. "This is Tommy's old one-man tent," he said. "Pretty small. More of a bivouac bag, really, but we thought it would do the trick for one or two nights."

"Sure," said Maggie and went to rig the small tent a few yards downhill from Baedecker's. Tommy had come into camp and was speaking animatedly to his mother as she gathered wood on the far side of the clearing.

"You and Tommy in the two-man, okay?" asked Gavin. He was watching Maggie pound stakes with a rock.

"Fine," said Baedecker. He had removed his hiking boots and was wiggling his toes through his sweat-soaked socks. The relief was a functional definition of heaven.

"Known her long?" asked Gavin.

"Maggie? I met her this summer in India," said Baedecker. "As I said last night, she's a friend of Scott's."

"Hmmm," said Gavin. He seemed about to say more but rose instead and brushed off his jeans. "I'd better get the fire going and the food on the grill. Want to help?"

"Sure," said Baedecker. He stood and walked gingerly across the grass, feeling the pressure of each twig and pebble beneath his feet. "In just a moment. I'll help Maggie get her tent raised and I'll be right there, Tom." Stepping lightly, Baedecker moved down the grassy slope to where Maggie was working.

The cable TV's program had been one of the many clones of the PTL Club that filled the fundamentalist network's schedule. The set was done in Kmart gothic, the host's gray hair perfectly matched the gray polyester of his suit, and a ten-digit phone number remained permanently affixed on the screen in case a viewer was suddenly moved to pledge money and had forgotten the address which the host's white-wigged wife displayed every few minutes. The wife seemed to be afflicted with some neurological disorder, which set her off on crying jags for no apparent reason. During the ten minutes that Baedecker watched before Tom Gavin appeared, the woman cried while reading letters from viewers who had repented and converted while watching the program, she cried after the paraplegic ex-country-western singer gave a rendition of "Blessed Redeemer," and she cried when their next guest told of a miraculous disappearance of an eight-pound tumor from her neck. Incredibly, the wife's mascara—which looked to have been applied with a trowel—never ran.

Baedecker was in his pajamas and was rising to turn the TV off when he saw his ex-crewmate.

"Our next guest has seen the glory of God's creation in a way which few of us have been privileged to witness," said the host. The man's voice had taken on a sonorous, serious-but-not-quite-solemn tone, which Baedecker had heard all of his life from successful salesmen and middle-level bureaucrats.

"Praise Jesus," said the wife.

"Air Force Major Thomas Milburne Gavin, besides being a war hero in Vietnam . . ."

Tom ferried jets from California to bases in Okinawa, thought Baedecker. Oh well.

". . . was decorated with the president's Medal of Freedom after his Apollo spacecraft went to the moon in 1971," said the host.

We all got a medal, thought Baedecker. If we'd had a ship's cat, it would've received one too.

". . . a test pilot, an engineer, an astronaut, and a respected scientist . . ."

Tom's not a scientist, thought Baedecker. None of us were until Schmidt flew. Tom got his degree in engineering from CalTech later than most of us. It was either that or drop out of the program at Edwards.

". . . and, perhaps most importantly, the man who may well have been the first true Christian to walk on the moon," said the host. "My friends, Major Thomas M. Gavin!"

Tom never walked on the moon, thought Baedecker.

Gavin shook hands with the host, received a kiss from the host's wife, and nodded at the paraplegic singer and the woman who had lost her tumor. He sat down on the end of a long couch while the host and his wife settled themselves into what may have been wing chairs but which—at least on Baedecker's small screen—looked like crushed-velour thrones.

"Tell us, Tom, when was it that you first heard the Lord's voice while you were walking on the moon?"

Gavin nodded and looked at the camera. To Baedecker's eye, his old acquaintance looked no older than he had when the two of them and Dave Muldorff had spent endless hours in simulators in 1970 and '71. Tom was wearing Air Force flight coveralls with an assortment of NASA mission patches sewn on. He looked lean and fit. Baedecker had added twenty pounds since their mission days and could fit into none of his old uniforms.

"I'm looking forward to telling you about that," said Gavin with the thin, tight smile that Baedecker remembered, "but first, Paul, I should mention that I never walked on the moon. Our mission called for two members of the crew to descend to the lunar surface in the LM—the lunar excursion module we called it—while the third crew member remained in lunar orbit, tending to the command module's systems and relaying communications from Houston. I was the crew member who remained aboard the command module."

"Yes, yes," said the host, "but, gosh, after going so far, I mean, it was almost to the moon, right?"

"Two hundred forty thousand miles minus about sixty thousand feet," said Gavin with another thin smile.

"And the others came back with some dusty moon rocks, while you came back with the eternal truth of God's Word, isn't that right, Tom?" said the host.

"That's right, Paul," said Gavin and proceeded to tell the story of his fifty-two hours alone in the command module, of the time spent out of radio contact behind the moon, and of the sudden revelation over the Crater Tsiolkovsky when God spoke to him.

"By gosh," said the host, "that was a message from the real mission control, wasn't it?" The host's wife squealed and clapped her hands together. The audience applauded.

"Tom," said the host, even more serious now, leaning forward and extending one hand to touch the astronaut's knee, "everything you saw on that . . . on that incredible trip . . . everything you witnessed during your trip to the stars . . . I've heard you tell young people this . . . it all bore witness to the truth of God's Word as revealed in the Bible . . . it all bore witness to the glory of Jesus Christ, didn't it, Tom?"

"Absolutely, Paul," said Gavin. He looked directly into the camera, and Baedecker saw the same resolve and angry determination there that he remembered from the team handball tournaments held between Apollo crews. "And, Paul, as exciting and thrilling and rewarding as it was to fly to the moon . . . that couldn't compare to the reward I found on the day that I finally accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and personal savior."

The host turned to the camera and nodded his head as if overcome. The audience applauded. The host's wife began to cry.

"And, Tom, you've had many opportunities to bear witness to this and bring others to Christ, haven't you?" asked the host.

"Absolutely, Paul. Just last month I was privileged to be in the People's Republic of China and to visit one of the few remaining seminaries there . . ."

Baedecker lay back on the bed and put his wrist on his forehead. Tom had not mentioned his revelation during the three-day trip back, or in the debriefing during the week-long quarantine

they had shared. Actually, Tom had not mentioned it to anyone—or acted upon it—for almost five years after the mission. Then, shortly after his distributorship had failed in Sacramento, Gavin had talked about his revelation while on a local radio talk show. Shortly after that he and Deedee had moved out to Colorado to start an evangelical organization. Baedecker wasn't surprised that Tom hadn't talked to Dave or him after the mission; the three of them had made a good crew, but they had not been as close as people might imagine given two years of training time together.

Baedecker sat up and looked at the television. ". . . we had an eminent scientist on our last program," the host was saying, "a Christian and a crusader for equal time for creationism in the schools . . . where children are, I'm sure you're aware, Tom, now being taught only a single, seriously flawed, godless theory that man came from monkeys and other lower life forms . . . and this eminent and respected scientist made the point that with the number of shooting stars that hit the earth each year . . . and you must have seen a lot of them when you were in space, hey, Tom?"

"Micrometeorites were a concern to the engineers," said Gavin.

"Well, with all those millions of little . . . like little rocks, aren't they? With millions of those striking the earth's atmosphere every year, if the earth was as old as their theory says, what? Three billion years?"

Four and a half, thought Baedecker. Idiot.

"Somewhere over four billion," said Gavin.

"Yes," smiled the host, "this eminent Christian scientist made the point, in fact, he showed us mathematically, that if the earth was really that old, it'd be buried several miles deep in meteorite dust!"

The audience applauded wildly. The host's wife clasped her hands, praised Jesus over the noise, and rocked back and forth. Gavin smiled and had the good grace to look embarrassed. Baedecker thought of the "orange rock" that he and Dave had brought back from Marius Hills. Argon-39 and argon-40 dating had shown the chunk of troctolite breccia to be 3.95 billion years old.

"The problem with the theory of evolution," Gavin was saying, "is that it goes contrary to the scientific method. There is no way, given the brief human life span, to observe the so-called evolutionary mechanisms they postulate. The geological data is just too doubtful. Gaps and contradictions show up in those theories all the time, whereas all of the biblical accounts have been confirmed time and time again."

"Yes, yes," said the host, nodding his head emphatically.

"Praise be to Jesus," said his wife.

"We can't trust science to answer our questions," said Gavin. "The human intellect is just too fallible."

"How true, how true," said the host.

"Praise Jesus," said his wife, "God's truth be made known."

"Amen," said Baedecker and turned off the television.

It was just after dinner, during the last minutes of twilight, when the others entered the clearing. The first two were boys—young men of college age, Baedecker realized—carrying obviously heavy backpacks with aluminum tripods lashed atop them. They ignored Baedecker and the others and hurried to dump their packs and set up the tripods. From the packs they removed foam padding and two sixteen-millimeter movie cameras. "God, I hope there's enough light left," said the overweight one in shorts.

"There should be," said the other one, a tall redhead with a wisp of beard. "This Tri-X is fast enough if he gets here pretty quick." They concentrated on attaching their cameras to tripods and focusing on the section of trail from which they had just emerged. High overhead a hawk circled on the last of the day's thermals and let out a lazy screech. A final ray of sunlight caught its wings for a few seconds and then the evening twilight was absolute.

"Wonder what's going on," said Gavin. He scraped out the last of his beef stew and licked the spoon clean. "I chose this old Cimarron Creek approach to the mountain because hardly anyone ever uses it anymore."

"They'd better get their shot pretty soon," said Maggie. "It's getting dark."

"Anyone want S'mores?" asked Deedee.

There was pale movement in the gloom under the fir trees and a man appeared, bent under a long load, moving slowly but surely up the last few yards of trail into the clearing. This man also appeared to be of college age but seemed older than the two bent behind their cameras: he was dressed in a sweat-soaked blue cotton shirt, torn khaki shorts, and solid hiking boots. On his back he carried an oversized blue climbing pack with nylon webbing attached to a long, cylindrical burden wrapped in red-and-yellow sailcloth. The poles must have been fourteen feet long, extending six feet beyond the small man's bent shoulder and dragging in the dust an equal distance behind him. The man's brown hair was long and parted in the middle, hanging down in damp folds to curl in along his sharp cheekbones. As he came closer, Baedecker noticed the deep-set eyes, the sharp nose, and the short beard. The man's posture and obvious exhaustion added to Baedecker's feeling that he was watching an actor reenacting Christ's final journey up the hill to Golgotha.

"Great, Lude, we're gettin' it!" shouted the redheaded boy. "Come on, Maria, before the light's gone! Hurry!" A young woman emerged from the darkening trail. She had short, dark hair, a long, thin face, and was wearing shorts and a halter top that seemed several sizes too large for her. She was carrying a large pack. She moved forward quickly as the bearded hiker dropped to one knee in the meadow, loosened shoulder straps, and lowered the cloth-covered poles to the ground. Baedecker heard the sound of metal striking metal. For a second the man appeared too exhausted to rise or sit; he remained on one knee, head bowed so that his hair covered his face, one arm resting on his other knee. Then the girl named Maria came forward and touched the back of his head gently.

"Great, we got it," shouted the heavyset boy. "Come on, we gotta get all this shit set up." The two boys and the girl went about setting up camp while the bearded man remained kneeling.