Phases of Gravity (31 page)

twelve miles high—six thousand feet above its official ceiling capability—and then, instead of leveling off, he pulled back on the stick until they hung there vertically, unable to gain more altitude, unwilling to fall, the T-38 hanging by its nose between space and the sea of clouds 55,000 feet below, gravity not defied but nullified, all forces in the universe equalized and harmonized. It could not last. An instant before the aircraft stalled into a spin, Dave kicked off with hard left rudder and the little trainer shuddered once like an animal pulled back on its leash, and then they tumbled over into a forty-five mile fall that would end in Houston and home.

Baedecker reaches Lonerock a half an hour before sunset, but the gray day is already drained of light. He drives to Kink's ranch, parks the Toyota, and carries the barking puppy into the house. He feeds it milk, sets the box by the still-warm stove in the kitchen, and is satisfied that the house will stay warm enough for the dog until he returns.

Outside, Baedecker pulls off the tie-down wires, gets the clipboard from the cockpit, and does an external preflight inspection on the Huey as the cold wind blows in from the north. It takes him three times longer than when he and Dave had done it, and when he is down on his knees trying to find the fuel-drain valve, his left hand begins to throb with cold and pain. Three fingers there are swollen to twice their normal size. Baedecker sits on the frozen ground and wonders if any of the fingers are broken. He remembers once when he was about twelve, coming home to the apartment on Kildare Street after a schoolyard fight. His father had looked at his bruised hand, shaken his head, and said only, "If you absolutely have to fight and if you insist on hitting someone in the face, don't hit them with an empty hand."

Finished with the exterior checks, Baedecker begins to enter by the left door, stops, and goes around to the right side. He steps up on the skid, reaches across to grab the far edge of the seat, and pulls himself in. It is cold in the helicopter. The machine has a heater and defrosters, but he cannot waste battery power on them before the turbine starts. If it starts.

Baedecker straps himself in, releases the inertial reel lock so that he can lean forward, and does the check of console switches and circuit breakers. When he is finished, he leans back and his head taps the flight helmet set atop the shoulder harness bracket. He pulls the helmet on, setting the earphones in place. He has no intention of using the radio, but the headset warms his ears.

Baedecker sits back in the heavy chair, wiggles the cyclic stick between his legs, and grips the collective pitch lever with his left hand. The hand will not quite close on it, but he decides that the grip is adequate. He practices using his finger and thumb to manage the throttle.

He lets out a deep breath. The truth is, he realizes, that he has not flown a powered aircraft in more than three years and he is glad that telemetry is not sending his heart rate back to a bank of doctors; they would diagnose tachycardia after one look at the monitors. Baedecker opens the throttle with his throbbing left hand and squeezes the trigger switch with his good finger. There is a loud whine, the turbine fires up with a loud hiss like the pilot light on a huge hot-water heater catching, and the exhaust-gas temperature gauge shoots into the red while the rotors begin to turn. In five seconds the turbine is humming smoothly, and the rotors are only a blur and a half-sensed pressure overhead.

"Okay, good," Baedecker mutters into his dead microphone. "Now what?" He turns on the heating fan and defroster, waits thirty seconds for the windshield to clear, and pulls up lightly on the collective control stick. Even that slight pull—it reminds Baedecker of the finicky parking brake on Joan's old Volvo—increases the pitch angle sufficiently to raise the Huey six feet off its skids.

A hover would be nice, Baedecker thinks. He gives it more throttle to compensate for the increased pitch angle, his left hand protesting with pain at being asked to do two things at once.

He slacks off at ten feet, planning to hold the Huey there for a minute, his windshield on level with the open hayloft door of Kink's barn fifty feet away. Immediately the torque tries to spin the machine counterclockwise on its axis. Baedecker gives it some right pedal, overcompensates, and causes the tail rotor to push the Huey around the opposite direction. He brings the rotation to a stop 180 degrees from where he started, but in the meantime the reduced pitch angle has dropped the ship five feet, now eight, and Baedecker is tugging the cyclic stick back too far, leveling off three inches above the ground only to hop fifteen feet into the air as the controls respond.

Baedecker lets it sink back to ten feet, feverishly working throttle, cyclic, pitch control, and pedals in an effort to achieve a simple hover. Just as he thinks he has achieved it, he glances left and sees that he is sideslipping smoothly, as if on frictionless glass rails ten feet above the cold ground, headed directly and implacably for Kink's barn.

He kicks the pedal hard enough to bring the heavy machine around in a yawing, wallowing turn, tucks the stick forward and then quickly back, and flares the Huey into an inelegant, molar-grinding excuse for a landing that sends it skipping twice in four-foot hops before it settles shakily on its skids in the center of the barnyard.

Baedecker mops the back of his hand across his brow and feels sweat running down his neck and ears. He releases the stick and collective and sits back, the harness moving with him, holding him snugly. The rotors continue their senseless spin.

"Okay," Baedecker says softly, "I could use some help here, amigo."

Try holding your breath, dummy. It is Dave's voice over the inactive intercom, through Baedecker's silent earphones. It is Dave's voice in his mind.

Baedecker relaxes, lets the air go out of him in a long exhalation, does not inhale, and lets his mind wander while his body remembers those many hours of instruction seventeen years earlier. Still easily holding his breath, he lifts the pitch lever, pulls back gently on the cyclic stick, adjusts the throttle and pedals as he rises, and hovers effortlessly ten feet above the ground. He carefully takes a breath. The hover is solid, easily held, as simple as sitting in a small boat on a smooth sea. Baedecker swings the Huey around, pitches the nose down to pick up speed, and begins a long, climbing turn that will bring him back across Lonerock at about two thousand feet.

It is not dark yet, the sun is still up, actually becoming visible below the clouds for the first time all day, but Baedecker fumbles on the collective lever for the switch and then trips the landing light on and off several times. Below him, the dark cube of the cupola atop the school remains dark. Baedecker levels off at twenty-five hundred feet and aims the nose of the Huey west-southwest.

At one hundred knots, the trip will take Baedecker less than fifteen minutes. The setting sun glares directly into his eyes. He clicks down the helmet-visor, but the view is too darkened that way, so he slides it back up and squints. Mount Hood gathers a gold corona in the west, and even the underbelly of the clouds glow now in rose and yellow hues as if releasing the colors they had spent the week absorbing.

Baedecker drops to three hundred feet as the John Day River falls behind. He smiles. He can almost hear Dave's voice, "You're doing the oldest kind of IFR flying, kid. 'I Follow Roads.'" He almost misses the ashram access road because he is watching a string of cattle to the south, but then he swings to the right in a comfortable bank, feeling the machine working with him now and he with it, glancing sideways almost straight down out his right window at sagebrush and snowbanks and low pines casting long shadows across a dry creek bed.

He passes over the roadblock at a steady 150 feet, seeing two men emerge and resisting the impulse to swing around and make a pass at 120 knots with skids eight feet above the ground. He has not come for that.

Two miles farther he crosses a rise, sees the ashram-ranch, and realizes his error.

It is a goddamn city. The road becomes asphalt through the long valley, and hundreds of permanent tents sit in rank and file along one side while buildings and parking lots line the other. There is a gigantic structure at the junction of two streets, a veritable town hall, rows of buses sit parked behind it, and scores of people are in the streets. Baedecker makes two passes over the main thoroughfare at a hundred feet, but the noise of his rotors only brings more people out of buildings and tents. The muddy streets fill with red-shirted ants. Baedecker half expects the flash of small-arms fire to begin at any moment. He holds the Huey in an indecisive hover above what might be the main hall—a long building with permanent roof and foundations and canvas sides—and thinks, What now?

Relax.

Baedecker does. He rotates the helicopter to watch the sun disappear behind the hills. The sudden twilight is somehow more gentle than the gray day had been. Looking quickly at the mile-long complex below, he picks a flat-topped hill near an unfinished wooden building on the southeast corner of town. The hill and the lone structure are off the main lanes, separated by several hundred yards from the rest of the maze.

He circles once and begins descending carefully. He is still thirty feet above the rough hilltop when he catches a glimpse of red out of the corner of his eye. Five people have emerged from the unfinished building, but Baedecker has eyes only for the one in front. The figure is still sixty yards away, half-hidden in the shadow of the building, but Baedecker knows instantly that it is Scott—Scott thinner than he has ever seen him, Scott without the beard he had worn in India and with hair shorter than Baedecker has seen it in a decade, but Scott nonetheless.

The landing is smooth, the Huey settling onto its skids without a jar. Baedecker has to concentrate on the console for a minute, leaving the rotors turning in a hot whisper but making sure the machine will stay earthbound for a few minutes. When he looks out and down, he sees four of the figures still motionless in shadow, but Scott is moving quickly uphill now, breaking into a slow jog up the rough and rocky hillside.

Baedecker kicks open the door, leaves his helmet in the seat, and moves out from under the rotors in an instinctive crouch. At the edge of the hill he stands upright for a minute, hands on his hips, watching. Then, moving quickly but surely on treacherous footing, Baedecker starts down so as to meet his son halfway.

Part Five

Bear Butte

Baedecker ran. He ran hard, the sweat stinging his eyes, his sides aching, his heart pounding, and his panting an audible thing. But he continued to run. The last mile of the four should have been the easiest, but it was by far the hardest. Their running path took them through the dunes and back onto the beach for the last three-quarters of a mile, and it was here that Scott chose to pick up the pace. Baedecker fell five yards behind his son but refused to allow the distance to widen farther.

As their Cocoa Beach motel came into sight, Baedecker felt the effort draining the last reservoirs of his energy, felt his straining heart and lungs demanding a lessening of the pace, and it was then that he accelerated, kicking hard to close the gap between the thin redhead and himself. Scott glanced to his right as his father moved alongside, grinned at Baedecker, and broke into a faster sprint that brought him off the hard, wet shore onto the soft sand of the beach. Baedecker kept up with his son for another fifty paces and then fell back, making the last hundred yards to the low cement wall of the motel in a staggering lope.

Scott was bending and doing stretching exercises as Baedecker collapsed to the sand and set his back against the cement blocks. He dropped his head to his arms and panted.

"Best run yet," said Scott after a minute.

"Hnrh," agreed Baedecker.

"Feels good, doesn't it, Dad?"

"Hnnh."

"I'm going to go in for a swim. Want to come with me?"

Baedecker shook his head. "Go ahead," he panted. "I'll stay here and throw up."

"Okay," said Scott. "See you in a while."

Baedecker watched his son jog across the beach to the water. The Florida sun was very bright, the sand as dazzlingly white as lunar dust at midday. Baedecker was pleased that Scott felt so well. Eight months earlier they had seriously considered another hospital stay for him, but the asthma medicine had quickly begun to help, the dysentery had resolved itself after several weeks of rest, and while Baedecker had been losing weight during the months of diet and work in Arkansas, Scott had steadily put on pounds so that he no longer looked like a redheaded concentration camp survivor. Baedecker squinted at the ocean where his son was swimming with strong strokes. After a minute, Baedecker rose with a slight groan and jogged slowly down the beach to join him.

It was evening when Baedecker and Scott drove north along U.S. 1 to the Space Center. Baedecker glanced at the new developments and shopping centers along the highway and recalled the raw look of the place in the mid-sixties.

The huge Vehicle Assembly Building was visible even before they turned onto the NASA Causeway.

"Does it all look the same?" asked Baedecker. Scott had been a fanatic about visiting the Cape. He had worn the same blue KSC T-shirt through all of his sixth and seventh summers. Joan used to have to wash it at night to get it away from the boy.

"I guess so," said Scott.

Baedecker pointed to the gigantic structure to the northeast. "Remember when I brought you out here to watch the VAB being constructed?"

Scott frowned. "Not really. When was that?"

"Mmm. 1965," said Baedecker. "I was already working for NASA, but it was the summer before I was chosen for flight status with the Fifth Group of astronauts. Remember?"

Scott looked at his father and grinned. "Dad, I was one year old."

Baedecker smiled at himself. "Come to think of it, I do remember you on my shoulders for most of that tour."

They were stopped at two checkpoints before they reached the KSC industrial area. The spaceport, usually wide open to tour groups and the curious, had been closed up tight for the imminent Department of Defense launch. Baedecker showed the IDs and passes Tucker Wilson had provided, and they were quickly waved through.