Phases of Gravity (3 page)

The Delhi-Bombay flight was three hours late getting off. A British helicopter salesman sitting next to Baedecker in the terminal said that the Air India pilot and flight engineer had been having a feud for weeks now. One or the other would hold up the flight every day.

Once airborne, Baedecker tried to doze, but the incessant chiming of call-buttons kept him awake. They had no sooner taken off than every other person on the aircraft seemed to be ringing for the saried stewardesses. The three men in the row ahead of Baedecker were loudly demanding pillows, demanding drinks, and snapping their fingers in an imperious manner that went against his Midwestern, egalitarian grain.

Maggie Brown had left him shortly after breakfast. She had scribbled her "Grand Tour Itinerary" on a napkin and stuffed it into the coat pocket of his suit. "You never know," she said. "Something might happen to change your mind." Baedecker had asked a few more questions about Scott before she drove off in a black-and-yellow cab, but his overall impression was of a girl who had mistakenly followed her lover to a strange and alien land and who no longer knew how he felt or thought.

They were flying in a French Air Bus. Baedecker noticed with a professional eye how the wings flexed with greater latitude than a Boeing product and noted with some surprise the steep angle of attack the Indian pilot chose. American airlines would not allow their pilots to horse the machine around like that for fear of alarming their passengers. The Indian passengers did not seem to notice. Their descent toward Bombay was so rapid that it reminded Baedecker of a ride he had hopped into Pleiku in a C-130 where the pilot had been forced to drop in almost vertically during the final approach for fear of small-arms fire.

Bombay seemed composed totally of shacks with tin roofs and factories rotting with age. Then Baedecker caught a glimpse of high-rise buildings and the Arabian Sea, the plane banked at a fifty-degree angle, a plateau rose to greet them out of the shacks, and they were down. Baedecker nodded a silent compliment to the pilot.

The cab ride from the airport to his hotel was almost too much for Baedecker's exhausted senses. Immediately beyond the gates of Bombay's Santa Cruz Airport the slums began. Dozens of square miles of tin-roofed shacks, sagging canvas lean-tos, and narrow, muddy lanes stretched on either side of the highway. At one point a twenty-foot-high water pipeline cut through the tangle of hovels like a garden hose through an anthill. Brown-skinned children ran along the top or reclined on its rusty sides. Everywhere there was the dizzying movement of uncountable bodies.

It was very hot. The humid air pouring in the open windows of the taxi hit Baedecker like a steam-heated exhaust. Occasionally he caught glimpses of the Arabian Sea to his right. A huge billboard in the suburbs proclaimed 0 DAYS TO THE MOONSOON but there was no cooling rain from the low ceiling of clouds, only a reflection of the terrible heat and an ominous sense of weight that settled on his shoulders like a yoke.

The city itself was even more dizzying. Every side street became a tributary of white-shirted humanity pouring into ever-larger streams and rivers of population gone insane. Thousands of tiny storefronts offered their brightly colored wares to the millions of thronging pedestrians. The cacophony of car horns, motors, and bicycle bells wrapped Baedecker in a thick blanket of isolation. Gigantic, lurid billboards touted movies starring actors with pink cheeks and actresses with raven hair, bee-stung lips, and a purplish cast to their complexions.

Then they were on Marine Drive, the Queen's Necklace, and the sea was a pounding, gray presence to their right. To his left, Baedecker caught glimpses of cricket fields, open-air crematoriums, temples, and high-rise office buildings. He thought that he could see a thin cloud of vultures circling above the Tower of Silence, waiting for the bodies of the Parsee faithful, but when he looked away, the specks continued to circle in the periphery of his vision.

The blast of air-conditioning inside the Oberoi Sheraton made his sodden skin tremble. Baedecker hardly remembered registering or following the red-coated porter to his room on the thirtieth floor. The carpets smelled of some sort of carbolic, antiseptic cleanser, a group of loud Arabs in the elevator reeked of musk, and for a second Baedecker thought that he was going to be sick. Then he was slipping a five-rupee note to the porter, the drapes were drawn across the wide window, the door was closed, sounds were muffled, and Baedecker tossed his seersucker coat on a chair and collapsed on the bed. He was asleep in ten seconds.

They had taken the Rover almost three miles, a record. It was a bumpy ride. The powdered moondust flew out from each wheel in an odd, flat trajectory that fascinated Baedecker. The world was bright and empty. Their shadow leaped ahead of them. Beyond the crackle of the radio and the internal suit sounds, Baedecker sensed a silence cold and absolute.

The experiment site was well removed from the landing area in a flat spot near a small impact crater designated Kate on their maps. They had been moving uphill gradually with the tiny computer in the Rover memorizing each turn and twist. The landing module was a glitter of gold and silver in the valley behind them.

Baedecker deployed the bulky seismic package while Dave took time to make a full panoramic sweep with his chest-mounted Hasselblad. Baedecker took care in running out the ten-meter gold wires. He watched Dave pivot lightly after each shot, a humanoid balloon tethered to a bright beach. Dave called something to Houston and bounced south to photograph a large rock outcropping. The earth was a small blue-and-white shield in a black sky.

Now, thought Baedecker. He dropped to one knee, found that too difficult in the pressure suit, and went to both knees in the dust to secure the end of the last seismic filament. Dave continued to move away. Baedecker quickly unzipped the sample pocket above his right knee and removed the two objects. His thick gloves fumbled over opening the plastic bag, but he succeeded in shaking the contents into his dusty palm. The small, colored photograph he propped against a small rock about a meter from the end of the sensor filament. It was half in shadow and Dave would not notice it unless he was standing right above it. The other object—the Saint Christopher's medal—he held loosely for a moment, irresolute. Then he bent slightly, touched the metal to the gray soil, dropped it in the bag, and quickly returned it to the sample pocket before Dave returned. Baedecker felt odd kneeling there on the lunar soil, supplicant, his bulking shadow thrown in front of him like a black cloth. The little three-by-five photograph looked back at him. Joan was wearing a red blouse and blue slacks. Her head was turned slightly toward Baedecker, who was smiling directly at the camera. Each had a hand on Scott's shoulders. The seven-year-old was grinning widely. He was wearing a white dress shirt for the photograph, but at the open neck Baedecker could see the blue Kennedy Space Center T-shirt, which the boy had worn almost every day of the previous summer.

Baedecker glanced left at the distant figure of Dave and had started to rise when he sensed a presence behind him. His skin went clammy in his suit. He rose and turned slowly.

The Rover was parked five meters behind him. The television camera, controlled from a console in Houston, was mounted on a strut near the right front wheel. The camera was pointing directly at him. It tilted back slightly to track him as he rose to his full height.

Baedecker stared across the glare and the distance at the small, cabled box. The black circle of the lens stared back at him through silence.

The wide antenna cut a sharp parabola from the monsoon sky.

"Impressive, is it not?" asked Sirsikar. Baedecker nodded and looked down from the hill. Small patches of farmland, none larger than two acres, ran along the narrow road. The homes were untidy piles of thatch atop rough poles. All along the way from Bombay to the receiving station, Sirsikar and Shah had pointed out places of interest.

"Very nice farmhouse," Shah had said, gesturing toward a stone building smaller than the garage in Baedecker's old home in Houston. "It has a methane converter, don't you know."

Baedecker was noticing the men standing on their flat, wooden plows behind their tired-looking oxen. Prongs pushed through the cracked soil. One man had his two sons standing with him so the wooden wedges would dig more deeply into the dry earth.

"We have three now," continued Sirsikar. "Only the Nataraja is synchronous. Both the Sarasvati and Lakshmi are above the horizon for thirty of their ninety-minute transit time and the Bombay station here handles real-time transmissions from them."

Baedecker glanced at the little scientist. "You name the satellites after gods?" he asked.

Shah shuffled uncomfortably but Sirsikar beamed at Baedecker. "Of course!"

Recruited while Mercury flew, trained during Gemini, blooded in Apollo, Baedecker turned his eyes back to the steel symmetry of the huge antenna.

"So did we," he said.

DAD. WILL BE ON RETREAT UNTIL SAT JUNE 27. BACK POONA SUN. IF YOU RE THERE, SEE YOU THEN. SCOTT.

Baedecker reread the cable, crumpled it, and shot it at the wastebasket in the corner of his room. He walked to the broad window and stared down at the reflection of lights from the Queen's Necklace on the choppy waters of the bay. After a while he turned and went down to the desk to write out a cable to St. Louis, informing his firm that he would be taking his vacation now after all.

"I knew you'd come," said Maggie Brown. They stepped ashore from the tourist boat and Baedecker recoiled slightly from the onslaught of beggars and peddlers. He wondered again if he had made a mistake by not accepting the credit card commercial. The money would have been welcome.

"Did you guess that Scott would stay at the retreat?" asked Baedecker.

"No. I'm not surprised, but that's not it. I just had a hunch I'd see you again."

They stood on the bank of the Ganges and shared another sunrise. Already crowds were filling the oversized steps that led down into the river. Women rose from the coffee-colored water, wet cotton clinging to their thin forms. Earth-brown pots echoed the color of skin. Swastikas adorned a marble-fronted temple. Baedecker could hear the slap, slap, slap of the washer-caste women beating laundry against the flat rocks upstream. The smoke from incense and funeral pyre floated and mingled in the wet morning air.

"The signs say Benares," said Baedecker as they fell in with the small group. "The ticket was to Varanasi. Which is it?"

"Varanasi was its original name. Everybody calls it Benares. But they wanted to get rid of that because the British called it that. You know, a slave name. Malcolm X. Muhammad Ali." Maggie quit talking and broke into a slight jog as their guide shouted at them to keep up in the narrow lanes. At one point the street became so narrow that Baedecker reached out and touched the opposing walls with his forefingers. People jostled, shouted, shoved, spat, and made way for the ubiquitous cattle that wandered free. A singularly persistent peddler followed them for several blocks, blowing deafeningly on his hand-carved flute. Finally Baedecker winked at Maggie, paid the boy ten rupees, and put the instrument in his hip pocket.

They entered an abandoned building. Inside, bored men held candles to show the way up a battered staircase. They held their hands out as Baedecker passed. On the third floor a small balcony afforded a view over the wall of the temple. A gold-plated temple spire was barely visible.

"This is the holiest spot in the world," said the guide. His skin had the color and texture of a well-oiled catcher's mitt. "Holier than Mecca. Holier than Jerusalem. Holier than Bethlehem or Sarnath. It is the holiest of temples where all Hindus . . . after bathing in the holy Ganges . . . wish to visit before they die."

There was a general nodding and murmuring. Clouds of gnats danced in front of sweaty faces. On the way back down the stairs, the men with the candles blocked their way and were much more insistent with their thrusting palms and sharp voices.

Later, sharing an autorickshaw on their way back to the hotel, Maggie turned to him and her face was serious. "Do you believe in that? Places of power?"

"How do you mean?"

"Not holy places, but a place that's more than just special to you. A place that has its own power."

"Not here," said Baedecker and gestured toward the sad spectacle of poverty and decay they were passing.

"No, not here," agreed Maggie Brown. "But I've found a couple of places."

"Tell me about them," said Baedecker. He had to speak loudly because of the noise of traffic and bicycle bells.

Maggie looked down and brushed her hair back behind her ear in a gesture that was already becoming familiar to Baedecker. "There's a place near where my grandparents live in western South Dakota," she said. "A volcanic cone north of the Black Hills, on the edge of the prairie. It's called Bear Butte. I used to climb it when I was little while Grandad and Memo waited for me down below. Years later I learned that it was a holy place for the Sioux. But even before that—when I stood up there and looked over the prairie—I knew it was special."

Baedecker nodded. "High places do that," he said. "There's a place I like to visit—a little Christian Science college—way out in the boonies on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, not far from St. Louis. The campus is right on the bluffs over the river. There's a tiny chapel right near the edge, and you can walk out on some ledges and see halfway across Missouri."

"Are you a Christian Scientist?"

The question and her expression were so serious that Baedecker had to laugh. "No," he said, "I'm not religious. I'm not . . . anything." He had a sudden image of himself kneeling in the lunar dust, the stark sunlight a benediction.

The autorickshaw had been stuck in traffic behind several trucks. Now it roared around to pass on the right, and Maggie had to almost shout her next comment. "Well, I think it's more than the view. I think some places have a power of their own."

Baedecker smiled. "You could be right."