Phases of Gravity (25 page)

"Bob, I'd like to talk to Fields and the others," says Baedecker. "Could you get them together for me?"

"Not today," says Munsen. "They're spread all over the place. I could do it by tomorrow morning, but they wouldn't be very happy about it."

"Do it, please," says Baedecker.

"Kitt Toliver's here now," says Munsen. "Up at the NCO mess. Do you want to talk to him now?"

"No," says Baedecker, "later. First I have to listen to the flight tape. Thanks, Bill, I'll see you tomorrow morning." Baedecker shakes hands and goes to listen to his friend's voice for the last time.

"Let's get drunk and stick beans up our noses!" shouted Dave. His voice echoed down the dark streets of Lonerock. "Sweet Christ on a stick, what a beautiful night!"

Baedecker zipped up his goosedown jacket and leaped into the jeep as Dave gunned the engine.

"Full moon!" shouted Dave and howled like a wolf. From somewhere in the hills beyond the town came the high yelping of a coyote. Dave laughed and drove east past the boarded-up Methodist church. Suddenly he slammed the jeep to a stop and grabbed Baedecker by the arm. He pointed to the white disk of the moon. "We walked up there," he said, and although his voice was low, there was no denying the urgency and pleasure there. "We walked up there, Richard. We left our little anthropoid, hindpawprints in the moon's dirt, man. And they can't take that away from us." Dave revved the engine and drove on, singing They Can't Take That Away from Me at the top of his voice.

The jeep ride lasted for less than a mile and ended in Kink Weltner's field. Dave pulled clipboards and flashlights out of the back of the Huey and ran a careful inspection, even crawling under the dark mass of the ship to make sure there was no condensation in the fuel line. They were on the flat roof deck of the ship, checking rotor hub, mast, control rods, and the Jesus nut when Baedecker said, "We don't really want to do this, do we?"

"Why not?" said Dave.

"It'll wake up Kink." It was the only thing Baedecker could think of on short notice.

Dave laughed. "Nothin' wakes Kink up. Come on."

Baedecker climbed downward and in. He settled himself in the left seat, clicked the shoulder straps to the broad lap belt, tugged on the regulation National Guard helmet that he had left off on the flight out, wiggled the earphones in place, and blinked at the circles of red light glowing at him from the center console. Dave leaned forward to do the cockpit check while Baedecker read off the positions of circuit breakers. When he finished, Dave slid a piece of equipment into metal brackets on his side of the console and ran radio jacks to it.

"What the hell is that?"

"Tape deck," said Dave. "No self-respecting Huey flies without it."

The starter whined, rotors turned, and the turbine coughed and caught. Dave clicked in the intercom. His voice was muffled. "Next stop, Stonehenge."

"How's that?"

"Just watch and wait, amigo. Oh, are my goggles on straight?"

Baedecker glanced over to his right. Dave was wearing bulky night-vision goggles, but the face under the goggles and helmet was not Dave's. It was not even human. In the red cockpit glow, Baedecker could make out two huge eyes protruding at forty-five-degree angles on short, fleshy stalks, a wide, lipless frog's mouth, no chin, and a neck as lined and wattled as an aged turkey's.

"Yeah, they're on straight," said Baedecker.

"Thanks."

Three minutes later they were hovering twenty-five hundred feet above Lonerock. A few lights shone below. "You didn't care for my Admiral Ackbar?" asked Dave.

"Au contraire," said Baedecker, "it was the best Admiral Ackbar mask I've seen in weeks. Why are you doing that?"

Dave had triggered the landing-light extension switch on the collective pitch control lever. Now he was flicking the on-off switch. Baedecker could see the flashes through his chin bubble.

"Just sendin' extraterrestrial greetings and felicitations to Miz Callahan," said Dave, "so she can call it a night and go to bed." He retracted the light and pitched the Huey over in a banking turn.

They passed over Condon at five thousand feet. Baedecker saw lights glowing around an empty bandstand in a small park, an abandoned main street frozen in the glow of mercury-vapor lamps, and darkened side streets dappled with glimpses of streetlights through tall old trees. It suddenly occurred to Baedecker that small towns in America were saner than cities because they were allowed to sleep.

"Put this in, would you, Richard?" Dave handed him an audiocassette. Baedecker held it up to the glow of the omni gauge. It said only Jean-Michel Jarre. He popped it into the cassette player. He was reminded of the small tape player they had brought along in the Command Module. Each of them had supplied three cassettes; Tom Gavin had brought country-western tunes and Barry Manilow hits, Baedecker had brought Bach, Brubeck, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and Dave had brought—well, he had brought the damnedest stuff—tapes of whale songs, Paul Winter's group Consort playing Icarus, the Beach Boys, a duet of Japanese flute and Indian sitar, and a recording of some sort of Masai tribal ceremony.

"What now?" said Baedecker.

Dave punched the tape player on and looked at him, the ends of the tubular goggles glowing redly. "GYSAKYAG," he said gleefully.

The first pulse of music filled Baedecker's earphones in the same instant that Dave pitched the Huey nose-over in a dive. Baedecker slid forward until he was held in position only by the shoulder harness and seat belt. The dive provided precisely the same sensation he had enjoyed as a kid at Riverview Park in Chicago when the roller coaster ended its long, clattering climb and plunged over the top for its high-speed plummet, only this roller coaster had a five-thousand-foot drop beneath it and there were no rails curving up and away in a reassuring swerve from destruction, only the moonlit hills a mile below, darkened here and there by patches of black vegetation, forest, river, and rock.

Baedecker kept his hands off the left-hand cyclic control stick and collective pitch lever, his feet back from the pedals, and this made the dive seem that much more out of control. The hills rose quickly to meet them, and the descent rate did not lessen until the Huey was at zero altitude, then below zero altitude, banking at the last moment past hills and cliff sides, moonlight bright out Baedecker's open window, black shadows beyond Dave's, and then they were in a valley, a canyon, the cyclic moved back and forth between Baedecker's legs and then centered itself, dark trees flashed by thirty feet on either side, their tops higher than the Huey, and they were hurtling along at 125 knots, fifteen feet above a rapid-rippled, moonlit stream, banking steeply when the canyon curved, now level again, then banking so the rotor blades threw an iridescent wake of spray into the air behind them.

The music meshed with the kaleidoscope of scenery rushing at them and past them. The music was electronic, unearthly, yet driven by a solid and insistent beat that seemed to have throbbed up out of the pulse of turbine and rotors. There were other sounds to the music, laser echoes, the

rush of an electronic wind, surf sliding on a rocky shore, but all of it was orchestrated to the demanding drive of the central beat.

Baedecker sat back as the Huey banked steeply to the right, rotors almost touching the river, following a wide curve of canyon. He knew there was no room or time at this altitude for a safe autorotation should the engine fail. Worse, if there were a single cable, high-tension wire, bridge, or pipeline spanning the canyon, there would be no time to avoid it. But Baedecker glanced right at Dave sitting comfortably at the controls, his right hand almost casually moving the cyclic, his attention perfectly focused ahead of him, and he knew that there would be no cables, wires, bridges, or pipelines; that every foot of this canyon had been flown in daylight and dark. Baedecker relaxed, listened to the beat of the music, and enjoyed the ride.

And remembered another ride.

They had come down feet forward, faces up toward the half disk of the earth, the LM engines flaming before them in a 260-mile-long braking burn. They were standing in their bulky pressure suits, minus helmets and gloves, restrained by straps and stirrups while their strange device kicked and clattered and pushed up against their booted feet like the deck of a small boat on an uncertain sea. Dave was to his left, right hand on the ACS stick, left hand poised over the thrust translator, while Baedecker watched the six hundred instrument dials and readouts, spoke to controllers 219,000 miles away across static-filled emptiness, and tried to anticipate every whim and alarm of the overworked PGNS guidance computer. Then they were pitching over, upright at last, eight thousand feet above the lunar highlands and still descending, their trajectory as certain and unrelenting as a falling arrow's, and just then, in spite of the demands of the moment, he and Dave had both lifted their eyes from the instruments and stared for five eternal seconds out the triangular windows at the glaring peaks, death black canyons, and earthlit foothills of the moon's mountains. "Okay," Dave had whispered then, with the peaks drifting toward them like teeth, the hills coming up at them like frozen, white waves of rock, "I could use some help here, amigo."

The music ended and the Huey emerged from the canyon and then they were crossing a wide river, which Baedecker realized must be the Columbia. Wind buffeted the ship, and Dave rode the pedals, compensating easily. They climbed to a hundred feet as a dam flashed underneath. Baedecker looked down through the chin bubble and watched a string of lights go by, saw moonlight on whitecaps. They climbed to five hundred feet and banked right, still climbing. Baedecker saw the north shore pass under them, noticed a steep cliff to their right, and then they climbed again, spun on the Huey's axis, and hovered.

They hovered. There was no sound. The wind pushed once at the stationary aircraft and then relented. Dave pointed, and Baedecker slid his window back and leaned out for a better view.

A hundred feet below them, the only structure on a hill high above the wind-tossed Columbia, the stone circle of Stonehenge sat milk-white and shadow-bound in the light of the full moon.

"Okay," said Dave, "I could use some help here, amigo."

Dust billowed up as they descended through thirty feet. The landing light extended and flashed on, illuminating the interior of a swirling cloud. Baedecker caught a glimpse of a graveled parking lot set on an uneven patch of hilltop below, and then dust surrounded them again and pebbles beat like hailstones on the belly of their craft.

"Talk to me," Dave said calmly.

"Twenty-five feet and drifting forward," said Baedecker. "Fifteen feet. Looks all right. Ten feet. Wait, back up ten, there's a boulder there. Right. Okay. Down. Five feet. You're okay. Two feet. Okay. Ten inches. Contact."

The Huey rocked slightly and settled firmly on its skids. Dust surrounded them and then dissipated in the strong breeze. Dave shut down the ship, the red cockpit glow disappeared, and Baedecker realized that they were in gravity's realm once again. He took off his helmet, undid his straps, and opened the door. Baedecker stepped off the skid and walked around the front of the helicopter to where Dave stood, his dark hair damp with sweat, his eyes alive. The wind was stronger now, ruffling Baedecker's thin hair and cooling him quickly. Together he and Dave walked to the circle of stones.

"Who built this?" Baedecker asked after several minutes of silence. The full moon hung just above the tallest arch. Shadows fell across the large stone lying in the center of the circle. This was Stonehenge as it must have looked shortly after the druids finished their labors, before time and tourists took their toll on the pillars and stones.

"A guy named Sam Hill," said Dave. "He was a road builder. Came out here early in the century to found a town and vineyards. A sort of Utopian colony. He had a theory that this section of the Columbia Gorge was perfect for wine grapes—rain from the west, sunlight from the east slopes. Perfect harmony."

"Was he right?"

"Nope. Missed it by about twenty miles," said Dave. "The town's lying in ruins over the hill there. Sam's buried down there." He pointed to a narrow trail leading down a steep section of hillside.

"Why Stonehenge?" asked Baedecker.

Dave shrugged. "We all want to leave monuments. Sam borrowed his. He was in England during World War I when the experts thought that Stonehenge had been a sacrificial altar. Sam made this into a sort of antiwar memorial."

Baedecker went closer and could see names set into the stones. What first had appeared to be rock was actually cement.

They walked to the south of the circle and looked out over the river. The lights of a town and bridge glowed several miles to the west. The wind gusted strongly, bending brittle spears of grass on the hillside, carrying the cold scent of autumn with it.

"The Oregon Trail ends a few miles down there," said Dave, pointing toward the lights. A little later he said, "Did you ever wonder why they would come so far, pass up two thousand miles of perfectly good land, just to follow a dream?"

"No," said Baedecker. "I don't think I have."

"I do," said Dave. "I've wondered that since I was a kid. Christ, Richard, I drive across this country and can't imagine crossing it on foot or in those pissant wagons, at an ox's pace. The more I see of it, the more I realize that any man who wants to be president of the United States is committing the ultimate hubris. Wait here a minute, I'll be right back."

Dave walked back through the circle of stones, and Baedecker stood at the edge of the cliff, letting the breeze cool him, listening to the sounds of some night bird far below. When Dave returned, he was carrying a Frisbee that glowed slightly from its own fluorescence.

"Jesus," said Baedecker, "that's not the Frisbee, is it?"

"Sure enough," said Dave. During their last EVA, while performing for the TV camera on the rover, Dave had produced a Frisbee from his contingency collection bag, and he and Baedecker had tossed it back and forth, laughing at its tumbling in a vacuum and its odd trajectory in one-sixth g. Great fun at the time. When they came home four days later, they returned to the Great Frisbee Controversy. NASA was upset because Dave had used the term Frisbee—a brand name—thus providing priceless advertising to a company not affiliated with NASA. Media