Phases of Gravity (2 page)

A bullock cart lumbered past, axle grinding, yoke straining, and Baedecker turned to watch it. A woman in the back of it lifted her sari to her face, but the three children next to her returned Baedecker's stare. The man in front shouted at the laboring bullock and snapped a long stick against a flank already scabrous with sores. Suddenly all other noises were lost as an Air India 747 roared overhead, its metal sides catching the gold of the rising sun.

"What's that smell?" asked Baedecker. Above the general onslaught of odors—wet soil, open sewage, car exhausts, compost heaps, pollution from the unseen city—there rose a sweet, overpowering scent that already seemed to have permeated his skin and clothes.

"They're cooking breakfast," said Maggie Brown. "All over the country, they're cooking breakfast over open fires. Most of them using dried cow dung as fuel. Eight hundred million people cooking breakfast. Gandhi once wrote that that was the eternal scent of India."

Baedecker nodded. The sunrise was being swallowed by lowering monsoon clouds. For a second the trees and grass were a brilliant, false green, made even more pronounced by Baedecker's fatigue. The headache, which had been with him since Frankfurt, had moved from behind his eyes to a point at the base of his neck. Every step sent an echo of pain through his head. Yet the pain seemed a distant and unimportant thing, perceived as it was through a haze of exhaustion and jet lag. It was part of the strangeness—the new smells, the odd cacophony of rural and urban sounds, this attractive young woman at his side with sunlight outlining her cheekbones and setting fire to her green eyes. What was she to his son anyway? How serious was their relationship? Baedecker wished he had asked Joan more questions about the girl, but the visit had been uncomfortable and he had been in a hurry to leave.

Baedecker looked at Maggie Brown and realized that he was being sexist in thinking of her as a girl. The young woman seemed to possess that sense of self-possession, of awareness, which Baedecker associated with true adults as opposed to those who had simply grown up. Looking again, Baedecker guessed that Maggie Brown was at least in her mid-twenties, several years older than Scott. Hadn't Joan said something about their son's friend being a graduate student and teaching assistant?

"Did you come to India just to visit Scott?" asked Maggie Brown. They were on the circular drive again, approaching the airport.

"Yes. No," said Baedecker. "That is, I came to see Scott, but I arranged a business trip to coincide with it."

"Don't you work for the government?" asked Maggie. "The space people?"

Baedecker smiled at the image "the space people" evoked. "Not for the past twelve years," he said and told her about the aerospace firm in St. Louis for which he worked.

"So you don't have anything to do with the space shuttle?" said Maggie.

"Not really. We had some subsystems aboard the shuttles and used to rent payload space aboard them every once in a while." Baedecker was aware that he had used the past tense, as if he were speaking about someone who had died.

Maggie stopped to watch the rich sunlight bathe the sides of the New Delhi control tower and terminal buildings in gold. She tucked a wayward strand of hair behind one ear and folded her arms. "It's hard to believe that it's been almost eighteen months since the Challenger explosion," she said. "That was a terrible thing."

"Yes," said Baedecker.

It was ironic that he had been at the Cape for that flight. He had been present for only one previous shuttle launch, one of the Columbia's first engineering flights almost five years earlier. He was there in January of 1986 for the Challenger disaster only because Cole Prescott, the vice president of Baedecker's firm, had asked him to escort a client who had bankrolled a subcomponent in the Spartan-Halley experiment package sitting in the Challenger's payload bay.

The launch of 51-L had seemed nominal enough and Baedecker and his client were standing in the VIP stands three miles from Pad 39-B, shielding their eyes against the late-morning sun, when things went bad. Baedecker could remember marveling at how cold it was; he had brought only a light cotton jacket, and the morning had been the coldest he could ever recall at the Cape. Through binoculars, he had caught a glint of ice on the gantries surrounding the shuttle.

Baedecker remembered that he had been thinking about getting an early start to beat the leaving crowds when the loudspeaker carried the voice of NASA's public affairs officer. "Altitude four point three nautical miles, down-range distance three nautical miles. Engines throttling up. Three engines now at one hundred four percent."

He had thought fleetingly of his own launch fifteen years before, of his job relaying data while Dave Muldorff "flew" the monstrous Saturn V, until he was returned to the present as the loudspeaker carried Commander Dick Scobee's voice saying, "Roger, go at throttle up," and Baedecker had glanced toward the parking lots to see how congested the roads would be and a second later his client had said, "Wow, those SRBs really create a cloud when they separate, don't they?"

Baedecker had looked up then, seen the expanding, mushrooming contrail that had nothing to do with SRB separation, and instantly had recognized the sickening orange-red glow that lit the interior of the cloud as hypergolic fuels ignited on contact as they escaped from the shuttle's destroyed reaction control system and orbital maneuvering engines. A few seconds later the solid rocket boosters became visible as they careened mindlessly from the still-expanding cumulus of the explosion. Feeling sick to his stomach, Baedecker had turned to Tucker Wilson, a fellow Apollo-era pilot who was still on active duty with NASA, and had said without any real hope, "RTLS?"

Tucker had shaken his head; this was no return to launch site abort. This was what each of them had silently waited for during their own minutes of launch. By the time Baedecker had looked up again, the first large segments of the destroyed orbiter had begun their long, sad fall to the waiting crypt of the sea.

In the months since Challenger, Baedecker had found it hard to believe that the country had ever flown so frequently and competently into space. The long hiatus of earthbound doubt in which nothing flew had become the normal state of things to Baedecker, mixing in his own mind with a dreary sense of heaviness, of entropy and gravity triumphant, which had weighed upon him since his own world and family had been blasted apart some months earlier.

"My friend Bruce says that Scott didn't come out of his dorm room for two days after Challenger blew up," said Maggie Brown as they stood in front of the New Delhi air terminal.

"Really?" said Baedecker. "I didn't think that Scott had any interest in the space program anymore." He looked up as the rising sun suddenly was obscured by clouds. Color flowed out of the world like water from a sink.

"He said he didn't care," said Maggie. "He said that Chernobyl and Challenger were just the first signs of the end of the technological era. A few weeks later, he made arrangements to come to India. Are you hungry, Richard?"

It was not yet six-thirty in the morning but the terminal was filling with people. Others still lay sleeping on the cracked and filthy linoleum floors. Baedecker wondered if they were potential passengers or merely people seeking a roof for the night. A baby sat alone on a black vinyl chair and cried lustily. Lizards slid across the walls.

Maggie led him to a small coffee shop on the second floor where sleepy waiters stood with soiled towels over their arms. Maggie warned him not to try the bacon and then ordered an omelette, toast and jelly, and tea. Baedecker considered the idea of breakfast and then rejected it. What he really wanted was a Scotch. He ordered black coffee.

The big room was empty of other customers except for one table filled with a loud crew of Russians from an Aeroflot liner Baedecker could see out the window. They were snapping fingers to call over the tired Indian waiters. Baedecker glanced at the captain and then looked again. The big man looked familiar—although Baedecker told himself that a lot of Soviet pilots have such jowls and formidable eyebrows. Nonetheless, Baedecker wondered if he had met him during the three days he had toured Moscow and Star City with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project crew. He shrugged. It did not matter.

"How is Scott?" he asked.

Maggie Brown looked up and a slightly guarded expression seemed to settle over her like a fine veil. "Fine. He says that he's never felt so good but I think he's lost some weight."

Baedecker had an image of his stocky son, in crew cut and T-shirt, wanting to play shortstop on the Houston Little League team but being too slow, fit only for right field. "How is his asthma? Has this humidity caused it to kick up again?"

"No, the asthma's cured," said Maggie levelly. "The Master cured it, according to Scott."

Baedecker blinked. Even in recent years, in his empty apartment, he had found himself listening for the coughs, the raspy breathing. He remembered the times he had held the boy like an infant through the night, rocking him, both of them frightened by the gurgling in his lungs. "Are you a follower of this . . . of the Master?"

Maggie laughed and the veil seemed to slip from her green eyes. "No. I wouldn't be here if I were. They don't allow them to leave the ashram for more than a few hours."

"Hmmm," said Baedecker and glanced at his watch. Ninety minutes until his flight left for Bombay.

"It'll be late," said Maggie.

"Oh?" Baedecker wasn't sure of what she was talking about.

"Your flight. It'll be late. What are you going to do until Tuesday?"

Baedecker had not thought about that. It was Thursday morning. He had planned to be in Bombay this same afternoon, see the electronics people and their earth station on Friday, take the train to Poona to visit Scott over the weekend, and fly out of Bombay for home on Monday afternoon.

"I'm not sure," he said. "Stay in Bombay a couple of extra days, I suppose. What was so important about this retreat that Scott couldn't take some time off?"

"Nothing," said Maggie Brown. She drank the last of her tea and set the cup down with an abrupt movement that held the hint of anger. "It's the same stuff as always. Lectures from the Master. Solitude sessions. Dances."

"Dances?"

"Well, not really. They play music. The beat picks up. Faster and faster. They move around. Faster and faster. Finally they collapse from exhaustion. It cleanses the soul. That's part of the tantra yoga thing."

Baedecker could hear her silences. He'd read some about this ex-philosophy professor who had become the most recent guru to young rich kids from so many well-to-do nations. According to Time, the Indian locals had been shocked at reports of group sex at his ashrams. Baedecker had been shocked when Joan told him that Scott had dropped out of graduate school in Boston to go halfway around the world. In search of what?

"You don't seem to approve," he said to Maggie Brown.

The girl shrugged. Then her eyes lit up. "Hey, I've got an idea! Why don't you spend some time sightseeing with me? I've been trying to get Scott to see something other than the Poona ashram since I got here in March. Come with me! It'll be fun. You can get an Air India in-country pass for next to nothing."

Still thinking about the group-sex rumors, Baedecker was taken aback for a moment. Then he saw the childlike eagerness in Maggie's face and chided himself for being a lecherous old man. The girl was lonely.

"Where would you be going?" he asked. He needed a second to form a polite rejection.

"I'll be leaving Delhi tomorrow," she said brightly. "I'll fly to Varanasi, then to Khajuraho, a stopover in Calcutta, then Agra and back to Poona later in the week."

"What's in Agra?"

"Only the Taj Mahal," said Maggie and leaned toward him with a mischievous look in her eyes. "You can't see India and not see the Taj Mahal. It's not allowed."

"Sorry. I'll have to," said Baedecker. "I have an appointment in Bombay tomorrow and you say Scott will be back Tuesday. I need to fly home no later than a week from Friday. I'm stretching this trip out as it is." He could see the disappointment even as she nodded.

"Besides," he said, "I'm not much of a tourist."

The American flag had looked absurd to Baedecker. He had expected to be stirred by it. Once in Djakarta, after being away from the States for only nine months, he had been moved to tears by the sight of the American flag flying from the stern of an old freighter in the harbor. But on the moon—a quarter million miles from home—he could think only of how silly the flag looked with its wire extended stiffly to simulate a breeze in the hard vacuum.

He and Dave had saluted. They stood downsun of the television camera they had erected and saluted. Unconsciously, they had already fallen into the habit of leaning forward in the low-gee "tired ape" position Aldrin had warned them about in briefings. It was comfortable and felt natural, but it photographed poorly.

They had finished the salute and were ready to lope off to other things, when President Nixon talked to them. For Baedecker it had been Nixon's patched-in, impromptu phone call that had pushed an unreal experience into the realm of the surreal. The president obviously had not planned what he would say during his call, and the monologue wandered. Several times it seemed that he had ended his sentence and they would begin to reply only to have Nixon's voice come in again. The transmission lag added to the problem. Dave did most of the talking. Baedecker said, "Thank you, Mr. President," several times. For some reason Nixon thought that they would want to know the football scores from the previous day's games. Baedecker loathed football. He wondered if this prattle about football was Nixon's idea of how men talked to men.

"Thank you, Mr. President," Baedecker had said. And all the time he stood there in the camera's eye, facing a frozen flag against a black sky and listening to the static-lashed maunderings of his nation's chief executive, Baedecker was thinking about the unauthorized object he had hidden in the contingency sample pocket above his right knee.