The Weight of Numbers
Read The Weight of Numbers Online
Authors: Simon Ings
The WEIGHT of
NUMBERS
NUMBERS
SIMON INGS
First published in Great Britain in 2006 by Atlantic Books,
an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.
Copyright © Simon Ings 2006
The moral right of Simon Ings to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 1 84354 463 6
eBook ISBN: 978 0 85789 646 9
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Atlantic Books
An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd
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For Anna
Â
It will be an inhuman, an atrocious performance,
but these are the facts.
General Giuilo Douhet,
Il Dominio dell'Aria
The WEIGHT of NUMBERS
Lake Kissimmee, Florida
â
Monday, 25 October 1965
Marilyn, Jim's wife of thirteen years, pours out his second Coke, takes up her own and clinks his glass with ceremony as though it were champagne. Her eyes are big and black in the candlelight, wet with the unnamable emotions pilots' wives acquire in proximity to Canaveral.
Through the window of the restaurant, the night sky is speckled â had they but eyes to see â with spillage from the afternoon's catastrophe: a fuel explosion massive enough to shred a final stage to so much kitchen foil. For Jim the worst part is that at six minutes past three that afternoon, six minutes after the launch and at the very moment the Agena's engine turned over and choked on six tonnes of liquid fuel, he had been gaping, like some fool kid, eyes upturned on a calm sky.
âIt'd have reached orbit,' he says, shaking his head.
âTonight,' their waiter explains, âour bass comes with a macadamia nut butter.'
âWell, whoop-de-doo,' says Marilyn.
âMa-am?'
Marilyn blinks. âI really have no idea why I said that.' She lays her hand on the boy's arm. âI do apologize. Really.'
Perhaps she felt it, too, today. At six minutes past three, a wrinkle in things.
When they are alone: âMarilyn?'
Marilyn giggles. This is the girl he fell in love with in high school. âNo idea at all. Sorry. Odd day today.'
Jim sets about his meal, determined to shake off bad thoughts. âThis fish,' he says.
The fish is really very good.
âYes,' says Marilyn.
He's been told about this place: the best largemouth bass in the county, the tables small, unfussy, few, the air sweet off Lake Kissimmee â all this barely an hour from the Cape. Come December, Jim Lovell is riding shotgun with Frank Borman in Gemini Seven. An unprecedentedly long mission, two whole weeks, Seven is meant to test the shirt-sleeve environment the engineers have planned for the Apollo spacecraft. There's other, rather more gung-ho business for Frank and Jim to perform â for instance, they'll be demonstrating a new, more accurate form of controlled re-entry â but the core of their mission is âstation-keeping', NASA's word for staying clean and tidy and alive for 200 orbits of the Earth. One of the more damn-fool experiments dreamed up for them requires that Jim weigh every mouthful that enters his system before, during and after the flight. Although there are still six weeks to go before the launch, this will be, for Jim, his last unfussed-up meal for some while. To mark the fact, tonight he has arranged babysitters so he can take his wife out to dinner.
He says, âI was standing on the crawlerway.' A pause. âThis afternoon. I watched it take off from the crawlerway.'
The main body of the rocket, the launch vehicle proper, was an Atlas, the machine that put John Glenn, America's first astronaut, into space. Today's Atlas worked perfectly, as far as he's aware. It was the final stage, the Agena Target Vehicle that exploded, one minute after separation, the very moment it tried to start its engine. Without a target vehicle for them to pursue, astronauts Wally Schirra and the rookie Thomas Stafford are even now slouching their way through the most disappointed night of their careers: the launch of Gemini Six, scheduled for tomorrow, is scratched.
âWhat will they do with Tom and Wally?' Marilyn's thoughts are tracking Jim's own with a niceness they had all expected of Gemini Six and its ill-fated target. âCould they run their mission and yours together in any way that makes sense?'
James Lovell looks out the window at the lake. The sky is clear tonight. The water is so still, he can see the brighter stars reflected in the water. âProbably,' he says. âWe'd at least be able to practise the alignment manoeuvres.' The Geminis are meant to lead to Apollo, and a bid for the moon. They are the only real practice the crews are going to get before the big push. Every Gemini failure makes Apollo that bit more daunting. âIt's not docking practice, but it'd be something.' Jim turns back to his wife, aware that in his preoccupation he is hardly giving her interest its due.
Every couple caught up in NASA's folly has its own way of dealing with the dangers and disappointments. Each solution is personal, its secrecy carefully guarded. It is impossible to know if Marilyn's careful, intelligent curiosity about Gemini is shared by any of the other wives. In public, and even among themselves, there can be no breach of the women's etiquette. This has less to do with class and custom â though that is part of it â so much as their common need to bootstrap a workable life out of the demands and sacrifices of the Cape. The artificiality of that life â Sunday clambakes in the shadow of the Vertical Assembly Building â is a given. That life
is
artificial, something you have to construct for yourself, like a shed or a car motor or a Thanksgiving dinner, is the great, soon-to-be-forgotten lesson of these days.
âThey let you on the crawlerway?' says Marilyn, double-taking his earlier remark.
âThat's where I watched it from.'
The crawlerway is, like any construction site, out of bounds. But there was no danger, watching a launch from there.
Practically speaking, the crawlerway is a four-lane highway connecting the launch complexes to the Vertical Assembly Building, where Apollo's colossal Saturn rockets will be built. But the lanes are deceptive. They are built, not for ordinary traffic at all, but for the giant caterpillar tracks of a single vehicle: the 500ft-high mobile launcher.
Standing there today, watching as the Atlas-Agena assembly rose out of its own exhaust cloud, high above Complex 14, Jim felt as though he were standing among giants, in a giant's footprint. He felt smaller than a child and infinitely less significant among these towering machines. He felt more like a rat: something tolerated and expendable.
âIt seems to me now that I felt it.' This is something Jim Lovell absolutely will
not
say to his wife. âIt seems to me that there was a wrinkle in things. At six minutes past three this afternoon, and with nothing left to see besides the contrail, all of a sudden I became aware of a wrongness in the sky's fabric; a wrongness so intimate, at first I was afraid there was something the matter with my eyes.'
âWhat are you thinking?' Marilyn is asking him.
Drawn back to the present, Jim is startled to find himself already behind the wheel of their car. Marilyn is next to him, their meal is done, and Camp Mack Lane is already rumbling beneath their wheels. They are part-way home.
âWait,' he says. âWait a minute.'
âWhat?'
âThis isn't right.'
A wrinkle in things. Surfaces are bent and drawn into accidental contact. A short circuit, and the evening comes apart, skipping and hopping like a scratched record. âWait,' he says. He slows the car. âHang on.' He checks his rear-view mirror, slows them almost to a stop and turns them around.
He cannot rewind the evening. All those minutes wasted in introspection. He has to do something; this is their last easy evening together.
âWhat is it?' Marilyn asks. âDid you forget something?'
âEverything is going to be fine,' he says, and he switches on the radio: a clue for her.
He drives them deeper and deeper into Florida's rural dark, under canopies of post oak and hickory, through pastures abandoned to mesquite. One by one, the stations peter out: WWBC out of Cocoa;
WKGF from Kissimmee. Wayne Fontana and The Mindbenders drift in and away and a silence descends, with an eerie, out-of-range sensation that Marilyn remembers now. âYou old fool,' she laughs, guessing his game. âYou fool, you.'
At a sign for a fishing lodge, he rolls the car down a dirt track. There are no lights, no other vehicles. Woods hug the shore. Between the tree trunks, moonlight glistens on Lake Kissimmee.
She leans over and slips into his arms. âWhat about the babysitter?' she asks him.
âWhat about tomorrow's early start?'
âDid I switch the oven off?'
âDid I lock the door?'
A goofy routine to propitiate the ageing process: they understand that they are too old for this. After their first kiss, Jim draws away and turns off the ignition: it would be just like him to knee the stick into Drive and land them in the lake. The headlights die, the night is blue, they kiss again.
An orphan cloud covers the moon. Blue turns to black. The car's surfaces, tin frame and plastic fascia, close in around them. His scream is silent, wracking him out of her arms. He arches back as though electrocuted and cracks his head against the door column. â
Fuck
â'
âJim!'
âShit.'
âNot much better.'
âSorry.
Darn
.'
She tries to laugh. âWhat?'
âNothing.'
âJim.'
âNothing. A rabbit ran over my grave.'
She thinks this over.
âPesky rabbits,' she says.
She leans over and kisses him again. But the moment has passed. âI'm going for a smoke,' she says, a minute later. She pecks him on the
cheek and climbs from the car. He watches her go. He sits back, lays his hands on the steering wheel and forces himself, by main effort, to calm down. A second cloud hides the moon and the night swallows her. He leans forward and peers up at the sky: what is happening to the weather?