Phases of Gravity (11 page)

After dinner, Baedecker would call Cole Prescott at his home in St. Louis. He would tell Prescott that he was resigning and work out the details of the quickest transition possible. Baedecker wanted to be out of St. Louis by early September. By Labor Day if he could.

Then what? Baedecker raised his eyes to the earth shining in a star-deepened sky. The swirls of cloud masses were brilliant. He would trade in his four-year-old Chrysler Le Baron for a sports car. A Corvette. No, something as sleek and powerful as a Corvette but with a real gearbox. Something fast and fun to drive. Baedecker grinned at the profound simplicity of it all.

Then what? More stars were becoming visible as his eyes adapted. The boy must have worked for hours, thought Baedecker and stared at the ceiling, seeing distant galaxies resolving themselves in great, glowing strands of stars. He would head west. It had been many years since Baedecker had driven across the continent. He would visit Dave out in Salem, spend some time with Tom Gavin in Colorado.

Then what? Baedecker raised his wrist and let it lie on his forehead. There were voices in his ears, but the background interference made them unintelligible. Baedecker thought of gray headstones in the grass and of dark forms scurrying between the rusted springs of a '38 Hudson. He thought of sunlight striking Glen Oak's water tower and the terrible beauty of his newborn son. He thought of darkness. He thought of the lights of the Ferris wheel turning soundlessly in the night.

Later, when Baedecker closed his eyes and slept, the stars continued to burn.

Part Three

Uncompahgre

"Are we all set to climb the mountain?"

Richard Baedecker and the other three hikers stopped in their last-minute adjustments of backpacks and hip belts to look up at Tom Gavin. Gavin was a small man, barely five foot seven, with a long face, short-cropped black hair, and a piercing gaze. When he spoke, even to pose a simple interrogative, his voice seemed propelled up out of his small frame by a wire-taut sense of urgency.

Baedecker nodded and bent over to shift the weight of his pack. He tried again to buckle the padded hip belt, but it would not go. Baedecker's stomach was just ample enough, the belt just short enough, that the metal teeth on the buckle would not secure on the webbing.

"Damn," muttered Baedecker and tucked the belt back out of sight. He would make do with the shoulder straps, although already the weight of the pack was plucking a cord of pain on some nerve in his neck.

"Deedee?" asked Gavin. His tone of voice reminded Baedecker of the thousands of checklists he and Gavin had read through during simulations.

"Yes, dear." Deedee Gavin was forty-five, the same age as her husband, but she had entered that ageless state which some women disappear into between their twenty-fifth and fiftieth birthdays. She was blond and bantam-thin, and although she was constantly animated, her voice and movements held none of the sense of tightly controlled tension that marked her husband's demeanor. Gavin usually appeared to be slightly frowning, as if preoccupied or mentally wrestling with some internal conundrum. Deedee Gavin showed no such signs of intellectual unrest or activity. Of all the various astronauts' wives Baedecker had known, Deedee Gavin had always seemed the least well matched. Baedecker's ex-wife, Joan, had predicted the Gavins' imminent divorce almost twenty years earlier after the first time the two couples had met at Edwards Air Force Base in the spring of 1965.

"Tommy?" asked Gavin.

Tom Gavin Jr. looked away and nodded tersely. He was wearing tattered denim shorts and a blue-and-white Campus Crusade for Christ T-shirt. The boy was already over six feet tall and still growing. At the moment he carried anger like a palpable thing, weighing on him like a second backpack.

"Dick?"

"Yo," said Baedecker. His orange backpack held a tent and rain fly, food and water, extra clothes and rain gear, backpack stove and fuel, mess gear and first-aid kit, rope, flashlight, insect repellent, a Fiberfill sleeping bag and ground cloth, foam pad, and an assortment of other trail necessities. He had weighed it on the Gavins' bathroom scale that morning and it checked out at twenty-eight pounds, but Baedecker was sure that someone had surreptitiously added a few bowling balls and an extensive rock collection to the load since then. The pinched nerve on his neck felt like an overtightened guitar string. Baedecker idly wondered what kind of noise it would make when it snapped. "Ready to go," he said.

"Miss Brown?"

Maggie took a last tug at her pack's shoulder strap and smiled. To Baedecker it seemed that the sun had just come out from behind a cloud even though the Colorado sky had been cloudless all day. "All set," she said. "Call me Maggie, Tom." She had cut her hair since Baedecker had seen her in India three months earlier. She wore cotton shorts and a soft-looking plaid shirt open over a green halter top. Her legs were tan and muscular. Maggie carried the lightest load of any of them, not even a frame pack, just a blue canvas daypack with her goose-down sleeping bag tied beneath it. While everyone else wore massive hiking boots, Maggie wore only her short-topped

Nikes. Baedecker half expected her to float away like an untethered balloon while the rest of them continued to trudge along like deep-sea divers.

"Okay, then," said Gavin, "let's get going, shall we?" He turned and led them away from their parked car at a brisk pace.

Above the meadow the road became something less than a jeep trail as it switched back and forth through stands of ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, and occasional aspen groves. Deedee rushed to keep up with her husband. Maggie fell into an easy gait a few paces behind. Baedecker worked hard to keep up, but at the end of the first three hundred yards of hill he was red-faced and staggering, his lungs laboring to find more oxygen than was available in the thin air at nine thousand feet. Only Tom Jr. lagged farther back, occasionally throwing a stone at a tree or carving something into an aspen with the sheath knife from his belt.

"Come on, let's keep up the pace," called Gavin from the next switchback. "We're not even on the trail yet."

Baedecker nodded, too winded to speak. Maggie turned around and bounded back downhill toward him. Baedecker mopped his face, shifted the pack against the sweat-soaked shirt on his back, and wondered at the sheer insanity of anyone going downhill when they would just have to turn around and go back up again.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," managed Baedecker.

"It can't be too long before we camp," she said. "The sun'll be behind the ridge in forty-five minutes or so. Besides, we'll want to stay in the lower part of the canyon tonight, the terrain gets pretty steep in another two miles."

"How do you know that?"

Maggie smiled and pulled a strand of hair back over her ear. It was a gesture Baedecker remembered well from India. He was glad to see that her shorter haircut hadn't eliminated the need for the motion. "I looked at the topo map Tom showed you last night in Boulder," she said.

"Oh," said Baedecker. He had been too disconcerted by Maggie's sudden appearance at the Gavin household to pay much attention to the map. He adjusted his shoulder straps and began moving uphill again. Immediately his heart began pounding, and his straining lungs could find no oxygen.

"What's wrong with him?" asked Maggie.

"Who?" Baedecker concentrated on lifting his feet. He did not remember asking for lead-lined soles when he bought his new hiking boots the week before, but obviously he had.

"Him," said Maggie and nodded her head downhill at the sullen figure of Tom Jr. The boy was staring back the way they had come, his hands thrust deep in his hip pockets.

"Girlfriend problems," said Baedecker.

"Too bad," said Maggie. "Did she walk out on him or what?"

Baedecker stopped again and took a few deep breaths. It did not seem to help. Tiny drummers performed solos in his ears. "No," he said, "Tom and Deedee decided it was getting too serious. They broke it up. Tommy won't be allowed to see her when he gets back."

"Too serious?" asked Maggie.

"The possibility of premarital sex was raising its ugly head," said Baedecker.

Maggie looked back at Tom Jr. "Good grief," she said. "He must be almost seventeen."

"Try eighteen," said Baedecker, moving again, waiting for his second wind to catch up. It was overdue. "Almost your age, Maggie."

She made a face. "Uh-uh, guess again," she said. "I'm twenty-six and you know it, Richard."

Baedecker nodded and tried to pick up his pace so Maggie would not have to take half steps to stay back with him.

"Hey," she said, "where's your hip belt? It helps with those frame packs if you wear it. Gets the load off your shoulders."

"Broken," said Baedecker. He looked up through the trees and saw Tom and Deedee two switchbacks above, moving quickly.

"You still mad?" asked Maggie. Her voice had changed slightly, shifted down a register. The sound of it made Baedecker's straining heart beat even faster.

"Mad about what?" he asked.

"You know, me showing up when I wasn't invited," she said. "Staying to come along on this weekend with your friends."

"Of course not," said Baedecker. "Any friend of Scott's would be welcome."

"Hunh," said Maggie. "We've been over that already. I didn't fly here from Boston just because I used to be your son's friend. I mean, classes have started already."

Baedecker nodded. Scott would have received his master's degree this year if he had not dropped out to stay with his Indian guru. Baedecker knew that Maggie was four years older than Scott; she had spent two years in the Peace Corps after graduating from Wellesley and was now finishing up her graduate degree in sociology.

They emerged into a clearing on a broad switchback and Baedecker stopped and pretended to appreciate the view of the canyon and surrounding peaks.

"I loved the look on your face when I showed up last night," said Maggie. "I thought you were going to drop your teeth."

"My teeth are my own," said Baedecker. He tugged the pack up and tightened a strap. "Most of them."

Maggie threw back her head and laughed. She brushed at his sunburned arm with cool fingers and then she was bounding up the rough road, pausing to turn and beckon him on, then running again. Running. Uphill. Baedecker closed his eyes for a second.

"Come on, Richard," she called. "Let's hurry up so we can make camp and have dinner."

Baedecker opened his eyes. The sun was directly behind Maggie, surrounding her with radiance, illuminating even the fine, golden hairs on her arms. "Go ahead," he called. "I'll be there in a week or so."

She laughed and ran up the hill, apparently unruled by the gravity that pulled at Baedecker. He watched her for a minute and then followed, stepping more lightly himself, feeling the load on his back lessen slightly as he moved higher toward the dome of thin, blue Colorado sky.

Baedecker had enjoyed nothing of his life in St. Louis so much as his leaving it.

He resigned his position at the aerospace company where he had worked for the past eight years, his sense of almost complete uselessness there being accidentally confirmed by the way his boss, Cole Prescott, had let him go with deep and obviously sincere regret but without need for an interim period to train someone new. Baedecker sold his town house back to the firm that had built it, sold most of his furniture, stored his books, papers, and the rolltop desk Joan had given him for his fortieth birthday, said good-bye over drinks to his few acquaintances and friends there—most of whom worked for the company—and left, driving west early one afternoon after having a leisurely lunch at the Three Flags Restaurant across the Missouri River in St. Charles.

It had taken Richard Baedecker less than three days to liquidate his life in St. Louis.

He crossed into Kansas at Kansas City during rush hour. The insane flow of traffic did not bother him as he sat back in the leather upholstery and listened to classical music on the car's FM radio. He had originally planned to sell the Chrysler Le Baron and get a smaller, faster car—a Corvette or Mazda RX-7 perhaps—the kind of performance vehicle he would have driven eighteen or twenty years earlier when training for a mission or flying experimental aircraft, but at the last moment he realized how stereotypical it would be for the middle-aged man to go hunting for his lost youth in a new sports car, so he kept the Le Baron. Now he relaxed in its upholstered comfort and air-conditioning while listening to Handel's Water Music as he left Kansas City and its grain elevators behind and headed west toward the lowering sun and the endless plains.

He stayed that night in Russell, Kansas, driving into the small town to find a cheaper motel away from the interstate. The sign outside said CABLE TV FREE COFFEE. The old tourist cabins were not air-conditioned, but they were clean and quiet, set back under large trees that created pools of darker shadow in the twilight. Baedecker showered, changed clothes, and went for a walk. He had dinner in the bleachers of the town park, buying two hot dogs and coffee at a concession stand beneath the ball diamond's bleachers. Halfway through the second game the moon rose, orange and waning. Out of old habit, Baedecker looked up and tried to find the Marius Hills in western Oceanus Procellarum, but the site was in darkness. Baedecker sensed a sad, end-of-season flavor to the evening. It was four days past Labor Day and despite the summer's final attempt at a heat wave and the softball tournament, the children had returned to school for the year, the city pool was closed, and the fields of corn beyond the edge of town were growing yellow and brittle as harvest approached.

Baedecker left after the sixth inning of the second game and went back to his motel room. The "CABLE TV" consisted of a small black-and-white television offering two Kansas City channels, WTBS from Atlanta, WGN from Chicago, and three fundamentalist networks.

It was on the second of these religious channels that he saw his old Apollo crewmate, Tom Gavin.

A mile and a half above the meadow where they had left their car, the dilapidated jeep road narrowed into a trail and wound its way up through heavy forest. Baedecker was moving more easily now, setting his own pace, enjoying the evening and the movement of shadows across the valley floor. It had become much cooler as the ridge's shadow filled the narrowing canyon up which they were hiking.