Phases of Gravity (24 page)

His father's appearance had shaken him; although sixty-four years old, Baedecker's father had always appeared at least a decade younger. Now his hair had remained jet-black, but gray stubble mottled his cheeks, and his neck had gone loose and lined since Baedecker had seen him in Illinois eight months earlier. Baedecker realized that in twenty-four years he had never seen his father unshaven before.

Baedecker had arrived for the visit on the night of October 5, 1957, the day after Sputnik was launched. Late that night his father had gone down to the dock to fish and "to look for the satellite," even though Baedecker had assured him it was too small to see with the naked eye. It was a cool, moonless night, and the forest three miles away across the expanse of lake was a black line against the starfield. Baedecker watched the glow of his father's cigarette and listened to the crisp sound of the reel and line. Occasionally a fish would jump in the darkness.

"Who's to say that thing isn't carrying atomic bombs," his father suddenly had said.

"Pretty small bombs," said Baedecker. "The satellite's about the size of a basketball."

"But if they can send up something that size, they can put a bigger one up with bombs aboard, can't they?" said his father, and Baedecker thought that the deep voice sounded almost querulous.

"True," said Baedecker, "but if they can launch that much weight into orbit, they don't need to put bombs aboard. They can use the boosters as ballistic missiles."

His father said nothing, and Baedecker wished he had also kept quiet. Finally his father coughed and spoke again, reeling in the line and swinging it out again. "I read in the Tribune about that new rocket plane, the X-15, they've got on the drawing boards. Supposed to go up into space, go around the earth, and land like a regular plane. You going to be flying it when it's ready?"

"Don't I wish," said Baedecker. "Unfortunately, there are a bunch of guys ahead of me with names like Joe Walker and Ivan Kincheloe. Besides, that's out at Edwards. I spend most of my time at Yuma or back at Pax River. I'd hoped to be on the first string by this time, but I haven't even made varsity yet."

Baedecker saw the glow of his father's cigarette go up and down. "Your mother and I had hoped to be getting ready for our first winter down here by now," he said. "Sometimes it doesn't matter what you hope or plan for. It just doesn't matter."

Baedecker ran his hand across the smooth wood of the dock.

"The mistake is waiting and waiting for the payoff like it's a reward you've got coming," said his father and the querulous note was gone now, replaced by something infinitely sadder. "You work and you wait and you work some more, all the while telling each other and yourself that the good times are coming, and then everything falls to pieces and you're just waiting to die."

A cold wind blew across the lake and Baedecker shivered.

"There it is," said his father.

Baedecker looked up, following the pointing finger, and there in the dark gaps between the cold stars, impossibly bright, orange as the tip of his father's cigarette, moving west to east far too high and too fast to be an aircraft, moved the Sputnik too small to be seen.

Dave made chili, and they had a late dinner after they got back from Miz Callahan's, sitting in the long kitchen and listening to Bach on a portable cassette player. Kink Weltner dropped by and drank a beer while they ate. Dave and Kink talked about football while Baedecker tuned out, football being one of the few sports that bored him senseless. When they went outside to see Kink off, the full moon was rising, outlining rock outcroppings and pine trees on the ridgeline to the east.

"I want to show you something," said Dave.

In a small back room on the first floor, there were mounds of books, a crude desk made of a door set on sawhorses, a typewriter, and several hundred sheets of manuscript stacked under a paperweight made from part of the abort switch from a Gemini spacecraft.

"How long have you been working on this?" asked Baedecker, thumbing through the first fifty pages or so.

"A couple of years," said Dave. "It's funny, but I only work out here in Lonerock. I have to drag my research stuff back and forth."

"Going to work on it this weekend?"

"No, I'd like you to look at it if you would," said Dave. "I want your opinion. You're a writer."

"Nuts," said Baedecker. "Some writer. I spent two years fiddling with that stupid book and never got past chapter four. It finally occurred to me that to write something you have to have something to say."

"You're a writer," repeated Dave. "I'd appreciate your opinion of this." He handed the rest of the stack to Baedecker.

Later, Baedecker lay on his bed and read for two hours. The book was unfinished—entire chapters existing only in outline form, a few scribbled notes—but what was there, fascinated Baedecker. The manuscript's working title was Forgotten Frontiers, and the opening segments dealt with the early exploration of both the Antarctic and the moon. Parallels were drawn. Some were as obvious as the races to plant the flag, the hunger to be first, taking precedence over any serious or systematic scientific programs. Other similarities were more subtle, such as the stark beauty of the south polar desert drawn in comparison to firsthand accounts of the moon. The information was drawn from diaries, notes, and recorded statements. With both Antarctica and the moon, the inadequate accounts—the descriptions of the Antarctic explorers being, by far, the better expressed—told of the mysterious clarity of desolation, the overwhelming beauty of a new place totally foreign to mankind's previous experience, and of the seductive attraction inherent in a place so inclement and so hostile as to be completely indifferent to human aspirations and frailties.

In addition to exploring the aesthetics of exploration, Dave had woven in minibiographies and psychological portraits of ten men—five Antarctic explorers and five space voyagers. The Antarctic profiles included Amundsen, Byrd, Ross, Shackleton, and Cherry-Ganard. For their modern-day counterparts, Dave had chosen four of the lesser-known Apollo astronauts, three of whom had walked on the moon and one who had—like Tom Gavin—remained in lunar orbit aboard the Command Module. He had also included one Russian, Pavel Belyayev. Baedecker had met Belyayev at the Paris Air Show in 1968, and he had been standing with Dave Muldorff and Michael Collins when Belyayev had said, "Soon, perhaps, I will see first-hand what the backside of the moon looks like." Now Baedecker was interested to read that, according to Dave's research, Belyayev had indeed been chosen to be the first cosmonaut to go on a circumlunar flight in a modified Zond spacecraft. The launch date was only a few months after Baedecker and the others had spoken to him in the spring of 1968. Instead, Apollo 8 became the first spacecraft to circle the moon that Christmas, the Soviet lunar program was quietly scrapped under the pretense they had never planned to go to the moon, Belyayev died a year later as a result of an operation for a bleeding ulcer, and—instead of becoming famous as the first man to see the backside of the moon in person—the luckless cosmonaut received the minor distinction of being the first dead Russian "space hero" not to be buried in the Kremlin Wall. Baedecker thought of his father . . . "then everything falls to pieces and you're just waiting to die."

The sections on the four American astronauts were—at best—only sketched in, although the direction these chapters would take was obvious enough. As with the portraits of the Antarctic explorers, the Apollo segments would deal with the astronauts' thoughts in the years following their missions, new perspectives they may have gained, old perspectives lost, and a discussion of any frustration they might feel at the impossibility of their ever returning to this particular frontier. Baedecker agreed with the choice of astronauts, he found himself very curious what

they might say and share, but he felt that this would be the heart of the book when it was done . . . and by far the most difficult part to research and write.

He was thinking about this, standing at the window looking at the moonlight on the leaves of the lilac tree, when Dave knocked and entered.

"Still dressed, I see," said Dave. "Can't sleep?"

"Not yet," said Baedecker.

"Me either," said Dave and tossed him his cap. "Want to go for a ride?"

Driving north on I-5 toward Tacoma, Baedecker thinks about Maggie's call the previous evening.

"Maggie?" he had said, surprised that she had gotten hold of him at the Muldorff's. He realized that it was almost one A.M. on the east coast. "What's the matter, Maggie? Where are you?"

"Boston," said Maggie. "I got the number from Joan. I'm sorry about your friend, Richard."

"Joan?" he said. The thought of Maggie Brown having talked to his ex-wife seemed unreal to Baedecker.

"I called about Scott," said Maggie. "Have you been in touch with him?"

"No," said Baedecker. "The last couple of months I've been trying. I cabled the old address in Poona and sent letters, but there was no response. I called out here to Oregon in November, but somebody at their ranch said they didn't have Scott's name on their residents' list. Do you know where he is?"

"I'm pretty sure he's there," said Maggie. "In Oregon. At the ashram-ranch there. A friend of ours who was in India came back to B.U. a few days ago. He said that Scott came back to the States with him on the first of December. Bruce said that Scott had been pretty sick in India and that he'd spent several weeks in the hospital there—or at least in the infirmary that passes for a hospital there on the Master's farm outside of Poona."

"Asthma?" said Baedecker.

"Yes," said Maggie, "and a bad case of dysentery."

"Did Joan say Scott'd been in touch with her?"

"She said she hadn't heard from him since early November . . . from Poona," said Maggie. "She gave me the Muldorffs' number. I wouldn't have called, Richard, but I didn't know where else to get in touch with you, and Bruce—my friend who came back from India—said that Scott's been pretty sick. He wasn't able to walk off the plane when they landed in Los Angeles. He's pretty sure that Scott's at the ranch in Oregon."

"Thanks, Maggie," said Baedecker. "I'll call out there right away."

"How are you, Richard?" Something in the tone of Maggie's voice changed, deepened.

"I'm all right," he said.

"I'm so sorry about your friend Dave. I loved the stories you told me about him in Colorado. I'd hoped to meet him someday."

"I wish you had," said Baedecker and realized how much truth there was in the statement. Maggie would have loved Dave's sense of humor. Dave would have enjoyed her enjoyment. "I'm sorry I haven't been in touch," he said.

"I got your postcard from Idaho," said Maggie. "What have you been doing since you were there at your sister's in October?"

"I spent some time in Arkansas," said Baedecker, "working on a cabin my father built. It's been empty for a long time. How are you?"

There was a pause, and Baedecker could hear vague, electronic background noises. "I'm fine," she said at last. "Scott's friend Bruce came back to ask me to marry him."

Baedecker felt the wind go out of him much as it had four days earlier when Di's telegram had reached him. "Are you going to?" he said after a minute.

"I don't think I'll do anything precipitous until I get my master's in May," she said. "Hey, I'd better go. Please take care of yourself, Richard."

"Yes," Baedecker had said, "I will."

The fragments of Dave's T-38 take up a significant amount of space on the floor of the hangar. Smaller and more important pieces lie tagged on a long row of tables.

"So what will the Crash Board findings be?" Baedecker asks Bob Munsen.

The Air Force major frowns and sticks his hands in the pockets of the green flight jacket. "The way it looks now, Dick, is that there was a slight structural failure on takeoff that caused the hydraulic leak. Dave got a red light on it about fourteen minutes out from Portland International and turned back immediately."

"I still don't see why he was flying out of Portland," says Baedecker.

"Because that's where I'd parked the goddamned thing right before Christmas," says Munsen. "I was scheduled to ferry it to Ogden on the twenty-seventh and Dave wanted to ride. He was going to catch a commercial flight out of Salt Lake."

"But you got hung up for forty-eight hours," says Baedecker. "At McChord?"

"Yeah," says Munsen, and there is disgust and regret in the syllable, as if he should have been in the aircraft when it crashed.

"So why didn't Dave use his priority status to bump someone on a commercial flight if he had to get back so quickly?" Baedecker says, knowing no one there has the answer.

Munsen shrugs. "Ryan wanted the T-38 at Hill Air Force Base in Ogden by the twenty-eighth. Dave had my clearance and wanted to fly it. When he called, I told him go ahead, I'd deadhead back to Hill."

Baedecker walks over and looks at the charred metal on the table. "Okay," he says, "structural failure, hydraulic leak. How serious?"

"We figure he'd lost about sixty percent of assist by the time he went down," says Munsen. "Have you heard the tape?"

"Not yet," says Baedecker. "What about the starboard engine?"

"He got a light about a minute after the hydraulic problem showed up," replies Munsen. "He shut it down about eight minutes before impact."

"Jesus Fucking Christ!" shouts Baedecker and slams his fist into the table hard enough to send tagged pieces flying. "Who the fuck crewed this thing?"

"Sergeant Kitt Toliver at McChord," says Munsen in a thin voice. "Best crew chief heading the best crew we've got. Kitt flew down with me for this seminar in Portland over Christmas. The weather closed in, and I drove back up to McChord on the twenty-sixth, but Kitt was in town. He did two inspections of it the day Dave flew. You know how these things are, Dick."

"Yeah," says Baedecker, and there is no lessening of the anger in his voice, "I know how these things are. Did Dave do a complete preflight?"

"He was in a hurry," says the major, "but Toliver says he did."