Phases of Gravity (21 page)

"Kubrick's masterpiece," said Dave and banked the Huey to the right. They flew low over a pass where tents and camper-trailers huddled around a small mountain lake, late afternoon sunlight dappling the water, and then the land was falling away from them, the pine forest looked less green to Baedecker, and low brown hills became visible to the south and east. They flew on at a steady five thousand feet as the land changed to irrigated farmland and then to high desert. Dave spoke softly into his microphone to traffic control, joked once with someone at a private airport south of Maupin, and then switched back to the intercom. "See that river?"

"Yeah."

"That's the John Day. Scott's guru bought up a little town to the southwest of there. The same one Rajneesh put in the papers a few years ago."

Baedecker flipped open a navigation map and nodded. He unzipped his goosedown coat, poured coffee from a thermos, and handed Dave his cup.

"Thanks. Want to take the stick for a while?"

"Not especially," said Baedecker.

Dave laughed. "You don't like helicopters, do you, Richard?"

"Not especially."

"I don't know why not," said Dave. "You've flown about everything with wings including VTOLs and STOLs and that damn Navy pogo plane that killed more men than it was worth. What do you have against helicopters?"

"Do you mean other than the fact that they're treacherous, untrustworthy pieces of shit just waiting to slam you into the ground?" said Baedecker. "You mean other than that?"

"Yeah," said Dave and laughed again. "Other than that." They dropped to three thousand feet and then to two. Ahead of them, their sides golden and chocolate in the horizontal light, a small herd of cattle moved sluggishly across a wide expanse of dry grassland.

"Hey," said Dave, "remember that press conference we went to before Apollo 11 to watch Neil, Buzz, and Mike show their stuff?"

"Which one?"

"The one right before the launch."

"Vaguely," said Baedecker.

"Well, Armstrong said something during it that really pissed me off."

"What was that?" asked Baedecker.

"That reporter—what's-his-name, he's dead now—Frank McGee asked Armstrong a question about dreams and Neil said he'd had a recurring dream since he was a boy."

"So?"

"It was the dream where Neil could hover off the ground if he held his breath long enough. Remember that?"

"No."

"Well, I do. Neil said that he'd first had the dream when he was a little kid. He'd hold his breath and then he'd begin to hover, not fly, just hover."

Baedecker finished his coffee and set the Styrofoam cup into a trash bag behind his seat. "Why did that piss you off?" he asked.

Dave looked over at him. His eyes were unreadable behind his sunglasses. "Because it was my dream," he said.

The Huey nosed over and dropped until they were flying only three hundred feet above the rough terrain, well below FAA minimum altitude requirements. Sagebrush and piñon pines flicked by, reasserting a sense of speed to their passage. Baedecker looked down past his feet, through the chin bubble, and watched a lone house flash by. It had been brown and weathered, its tin roof rusted, its barn collapsed, its only access suggested by two drifted ruts stretching off to the horizon. There had been a new, white satellite dish next to the shack.

Baedecker clicked on the intercom. There was no intercom floor switch for the left seat, so he had to reach out and touch the switch on the cyclic each time he wanted to talk. "Tom Gavin told me that you were pretty sick last spring," he said.

Dave glanced to his left and then looked back at the ground rushing past them at one hundred knots. He nodded. "Yeah, I was having some problems. I thought I had the flu—just running a fever with swollen glands in my neck. Instead, my doctor in Washington said I had Hodgkin's disease. I didn't even know what it was until then."

"Serious?"

"They grade the thing on a four-point scale," said Dave. "Level One is take some aspirin and mail in the forty dollars. Level Four is GYSAKYAG."

Baedecker did not have to ask about the abbreviation. During the hundreds of hours they had shared in cramped simulators, there had been too many times when he had heard Dave's suggested response to some newly inserted emergency as GYSAKYAG—grab your socks and kiss your ass good-bye.

"I was a Level Three," said Dave. "Caught fairly early. They got me feeling better with medication and a couple of chemotherapy sessions. Took out my spleen for good measure. Everything looks real good now. If they get it on the first pass, they generally get it for good. I passed my flight physical three weeks ago." He grinned and pointed to a town just visible to the north. "That's Condon. Next stop, Lonerock. Home of America's future Western White House."

They crossed a gravel county road and Dave banked sharply to follow it, dropping to fifty feet. There was no traffic. Short, sagging telephone poles ran along the left side of the road, looking as if they had stood there forever. There were no trees; the barbed wire fences had some sort of metal boilers or discarded water heaters as fence posts.

The Huey passed over the lip of a canyon. One second they were fifty feet above a gravel road, and the next instant they were eight hundred feet above a hidden valley where a stream ran through cottonwood groves, and fields lay pregnant with winter wheat and grass. There was a ghost town in the center of the valley. Here and there a tin roof poked above bare branches or fall foliage and at one place a church steeple was visible. Baedecker noticed a large old school

looking west from high ground above the town. It was only five P.M., but it was obvious that the valley had been in shadow for some time.

Dave kicked the Huey over in a diving turn that had the rotor blades almost perpendicular to the ground for several seconds. They flew low over a main street that appeared to consist of five abandoned buildings and a rusted gas pump. They banked left and passed over a white church, its spire dwarfed by a jagged tooth of a boulder behind and beyond the churchyard.

Baedecker's intercom clicked. "Welcome to Lonerock," said Dave.

Most of the friends and mourners are gone by the time Baedecker returns to Dave and Diane's house in Salem. The snow he had seen near Mt. St. Helens now falls as a light drizzle.

Tucker Wilson greets Baedecker at the door. Before that morning, he had not seen Tucker since the day of the Challenger disaster two years earlier. An Air Force pilot and a backup member of the Apollo team, Tucker had finally commanded a Skylab mission a year before Baedecker had left NASA. Tucker is a short man with a wrestler's build, rubicund face, and only a trace of sandy hair left above the ears. Unlike so many test pilots who tended to speak with southern or neutral accents, Tucker's speech was accented with the flat vowels of New England. "Di's upstairs with Katie and her sister," Tucker says. "Come on in Dave's den for a drink."

Baedecker follows him. The book-lined room with its leather chairs and old rolltop desk is a study rather than a den. Baedecker sinks into a chair and looks around while Tucker pours the Scotch. The shelves hold an eclectic mix of expensive collectors' editions, popular hardbacks, paperbacks, and stacks of journals and papers. On a stretch of clear wall near the window are a dozen or so photographs: Baedecker recognizes himself in one, smiling next to Tom Gavin as Richard Nixon stiffly extends his hand to a grinning Dave.

"Water or ice?" asks Tucker.

"No," says Baedecker. "Neat, please."

Tucker hands Baedecker his glass and sits in the antique swivel chair at the desk. He seems uncomfortable there, picks up a typewritten sheet on the desk, puts it down, and takes a long drink.

"Any problems with the flight this morning?" asks Baedecker. Tucker had flown in the missing man formation.

"Uh-uh," says Tucker. "But there might've been if that overcast had got any lower. We were frying chickens in the barnyard as it was."

Baedecker nods and tastes his Scotch. "Aren't you in line for a ride after the shuttle program resumes?" he asks Tucker.

"Yep. Next November if things get back on track the way they're supposed to. We're carrying a DOD payload so we'll get to skip all that conquering heroes preflight press conference crap."

Baedecker nods. The Scotch is The Glenlivet, unblended, Dave's favorite. "What do you think, Tucker," he says, "is the thing safe to fly?"

The shorter pilot shrugs. "Two and a half years," he says. "More time to fix things than the hiatus after Gus and Chaffee and White died in Apollo 1. Of course, they gave the SRB fix to Morton Thiokol and they're the ones who certified the O-rings safe in the first place."

Baedecker does not smile. He had seen the strange, incestuous dance between contractors and government agencies and, like most pilots, was not amused. "I hear they'll have the new escape system in place for the first flight."

Now Tucker does laugh. "Yeah, have you seen it, Dick? They've got a long pole stowed in the lower bay, and while the command pilot holds the ship straight and level and subsonic, the crew hitches up and slides out like trout on a line."

"Wouldn't have helped Challenger," says Baedecker.

"It reminds me of the AIDS joke about the heroin junkie who isn't afraid of catching anything when he uses dirty needles because he's wearing a condom," says Tucker. He drinks the last of his Scotch and pours more. "Well, hell," he says, "there are more than seven hundred Criticality One items in the shuttle stack, and my guess is that the goddamn O-rings are the only ones we don't have to worry about."

Baedecker knew that a Criticality One item was a system or component, which had no reliable backup; if that item failed, so did the mission. "You won't be landing at the Cape anymore?" says Baedecker.

Tucker shakes his head. On his first shuttle mission, Wilson had landed Columbia on the long strip at Cape Canaveral only to have a tire blow and two brakes wear to the rim. "They know now that it's too damn risky," he says. "We'll be ferrying from Edwards or White Sands for the foreseeable future." He takes a long drink. "But what the hell," he says and grins, "no guts, no glory."

"What's the thing like to fly?" asks Baedecker. For the first time in days, he is able to think about something other than Dave.

Tucker leans forward, animated now, his hands making open-fingered gestures in the air. "It's damned incredible, Dick," he says. "Coming down is like trying to deadstick in a DC-9 at Mach 5. You have to argue with the damn computers to make them let you fly it, but, by God, when you're flying it you're really flying. Have you been in the updated simulator?"

"Had a tour," says Baedecker. "Didn't take time to sit in the left seat."

"You've got to try it," Tucker says. "Come down to the Cape next fall and I'll clear some time for you."

"Sounds good," says Baedecker. He finishes his drink and turns the glass in his hands, allowing it to catch the lamplight. "Did you see Dave much down at the Cape?"

Tucker shakes his head. "He hated the idea of all those congressmen and senators getting free rides while us ex-fighter pukes waited years for another go. He was on all the right committees and worked hard for the program, but he disagreed with the Teacher in Space and Journalist in Space crap. He said the shuttle was no place for people who put their pants on one leg at a time."

Baedecker chuckles. The allusion was to one of the first incidents to get Dave in trouble with NASA. During Muldorff's first flight in an Apollo module, an earth-orbital engineering flight, Dave had held a live TV broadcast for the folks at home. Tucker Wilson had been there with him when Dave said something to the effect, "Well, folks, for years we astronaut-types've been telling you that we're just regular folks. Not heroes, but just like everybody else. Guys who put their pants on one leg at a time like everyone else. Well, today I'm here to show you otherwise." And with that Muldorff had pirouetted in zero-g, wearing only his in-flight "long johns" and Snoopy cap, and with a single, graceful move, had tugged on his flight coveralls . . . two legs at a time.

Baedecker crosses to a bookshelf and pulls out a volume of Yeats. Half a dozen slips of paper serve as markers.

"You learn anything this afternoon?" asks Tucker.

Baedecker shakes his head and slides the book back. "I talked to Munsen and Fields. They're just getting around to transferring the last of the wreckage up to McChord. Bob's going to arrange it so I can hear the tape tomorrow. The Crash Board has some preliminary ideas already but they're taking tomorrow off."

"I heard the tape yesterday," says Tucker. "Not much to go on there. Dave reported the hydraulics problem about fifteen minutes out of Portland. They were using the civil airport because Munsen had come down for that conference . . ."

"Yeah," says Baedecker. "Then he decided to stay another day."

"Right," says Tucker. "Dave went east alone, reported the hydraulics glitch about fifteen minutes out, and made his turn about a minute later. Then the goddamned starboard engine overheated and shut down. That was about eight minutes out, I think, on the way back. Portland International was closer so they went with that. There was some ice buildup, but that wouldn't have been serious if he could have climbed out of it. Dave didn't do too much talking, and the controller sounds like a young asshole. Dave reported seeing lights just before he went down."

Baedecker swallows the last of his Scotch and sets the glass on the liquor cart. "Did he know he was going in?"

Tucker frowns again. "Hard to say. He wasn't saying much, asking for altitude confirmation mostly. The Portland Center controller reminded him that the ridges ran up to five thousand feet around there. Dave acknowledged and said that he was coming out of cloud at sixty-two hundred and could see some lights. Then nothing until they lost him on radar a few seconds later."

"What was his voice like?"

"Gagarin all the way," says Tucker.

Baedecker nods. Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit the earth, had died in a crash of a MiG during a routine training flight in March of 1968. Word had spread through the test-flying community of the extraordinary calmness of Gagarin's voice on tape as he flew the flamed-out MiG into an empty lot between homes in a crowded suburb. It was only after Baedecker had gone to the Soviet Union as part of an administrative team a year before the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project that he heard from a Soviet pilot that Gagarin had gone down in a remote forest area and the cause of the crash had been listed as "pilot error." There were rumors of alcohol. There had been no voice tape. Still, among test pilots of Baedecker's and Tucker's generation, "Gagarin all the way" remained the ultimate compliment of coolness in an emergency.