The Time It Takes to Fall

by Margaret Lazarus Dean

  I could see the top of Eric’s head through the backseat window. He appeared to be studying our neighbors’ mailbox; he didn’t look up as I climbed in next to him. He continued staring out his window at birds, buildings, and eighteen-wheelers, all the way to the Cape. I couldn’t see his face at all, so I watched his hand resting on the black vinyl of the seat between us, white and limp.

  We drove to the Space Center, our fathers talking about current events and weather the way adult men do when they don’t know each other well, careful to agree about everything. Through my window, I saw the yellow morning sun lighting up the edges of the same green hanging trees I always saw, the same marshy places, the same shafts of light and wavering stripes on the street I’d always seen, my whole life. Halfway to the Cape, I saw the construction site I remembered seeing when I was little, when my father used to take me to his work on weekends. It was still a rectangular pit in the ground, a skeleton of beams and cranes rising out of it, tiny workers moving on them. To my surprise, Mr. Biersdorfer noticed it too: he pointed at it suddenly, almost hitting my father in the nose.

  “Have you heard anything about that development?” Mr. Biersdorfer asked.

  “No. What’s it going to be? Office complex?”

  “Shopping center,” he said. “I invested in a couple of these projects in St. Pete. Very lucrative. But this one has some kind of curse. First they started digging on some kind of protected wetlands or something—they had to stop work for almost two years while they haggled that out with the EPA. Then some of their funding fell through. The president of the bank ran off to Venezuela with all the money, apparently. I guess it’s back on track now.”

  My father grunted agreeably. “It might be nice to have a shopping center right here,” he said.

  “More and more new families moving in,” said Mr. Biersdorfer. “Good time to invest.”

  Eric fidgeted, rolled his eyes, then looked out the window again. I watched the hole in the ground as we passed it: it seemed impossible that those workers could make of it an actual building, a building like all the other buildings already finished, that people could walk into and spend the day in. Right now it looked like some sort of oversized jungle gym, bare beams surrounded by machines.

  As we got closer to the Cape, the traffic thickened as cars pulled off into the breakdown lane or onto the grass. We crawled past, watching people get out of their cars and stretch, spread picnic blankets on the ground and on the roofs of their cars. At the main entrance to the Space Center, Mr. Biersdorfer rolled up to a red-gated entrance and showed a man in a uniform a badge in a folded leather wallet.

  “Good morning, sir,” the man in uniform said, and the gate opened.

  Mr. Biersdorfer enjoyed playing host, narrating what we were seeing around us. Eric stared out his window, never moving his head to follow his father’s pointing finger. But I was thrilled to be at the Cape again. I knew much more than I’d known last time I was here about what was accomplished in each building, why each was located where it was in relation to the launchpads, why each was designed the way it was.

  The parking lots were full, even the parking lots past the security checks. Mr. Biersdorfer pulled the Oldsmobile into a space marked RESERVED—DIRECTOR OF LAUNCH SAFETY. “One of the benefits,” he said with unconvincing modesty.

  “I wouldn’t mind watching the launch just from right here!” my father said, and when I looked out the window, I saw what he meant: we could see the whole stack from where we sat in the car.

  “Well, it’s going to get even better in the viewing area,” Mr. Biersdorfer said. “And they’ve got some cold drinks up there too!”

  “Sounds good!” my father agreed loudly.

  Mr. Biersdorfer directed his look at me for the first time.

  “So what do you think about the launch?” he asked me. “Pretty exciting, huh?”

  I stared at Mr. Biersdorfer, unsure of what to say to him. The fifth of the six women, Rhea Seddon, would be flying today. She was a doctor and would be conducting medical experiments on herself and the rest of the crew.

  My father cleared his throat and spoke for me.

  “Dolores follows the astronauts’ careers,” my father announced, to my horror. “Which of the women is it flying today, honey?”

  “I don’t know,” I mumbled when they all looked at me.

  “Well, she’s not your favorite one anyway, right?” He turned to Mr. Biersdorfer. “Dolores likes Judith Resnik best,” he supplied. “She could tell you where she went to college and what color her eyes are.”

  “Really,” Mr. Biersdorfer said, looking at me as if I were about to supply this information. When I didn’t, he spoke again. “Judy Resnik. She’s the first—ah—Jewish person in the program.”

  “Oh, is that so,” my father murmured.

  “We’re sending up a U.S. senator for the first time today,” Mr. Biersdorfer went on. “He’s quite excited about going, they tell me. He’s on the Space Appropriations Committee.”

  “Well, as long as he went through all the training programs,” my father said neutrally. In fact, the decision to send a senator had infuriated him. The night we’d heard about it on the news, he’d explained to the TV that the space shuttle was not a carnival ride.

  The viewing area was just a set of bleachers. The Launch Vehicle stood on the other side of an expanse of sand and water. People in the stands watched it as they talked to each other, the way people talk while looking at a TV, even though it wasn’t doing anything yet. Birds flew by once in a while. A large digital clock placed in front of the viewing area counted down.

  “That clock isn’t quite accurate,” Eric said, startling me. “It’s counting hundredths of a second, but it isn’t quite accurate. The one they’ve got in Launch Control is accurate. That one costs millions of dollars.”

  We looked at the countdown clock together. The numbers were orange, five feet high, against a black background of barely visible outlines of 8, like a clock radio display. The hundredths-of-a-second column ran crazily, smoothly, through its numbers.

  “The astronauts are already strapped into the crew cabin,” I said.

  “Yeah. Probably.”

  “Have you seen a lot of launches from here?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “All of them, pretty much.”

  I waited a long, dangerous second. “Do you want to be an astronaut when you grow up?” He looked out over the ocean, so long that I started to think that he hadn’t heard me.

  “Do you see that little green hill out there?” he asked, pointing at the horizon behind us. I didn’t see anything.

  “Out there,” Eric insisted. “Past those buildings.” I shook my head. He dropped his arm in annoyance.

  “Well, there’s a hill. Okay? A species of pelican lives on that hill. Every time the shuttle takes off, the pelicans get freaked out by the noise and the vibration. And every time it lands, the sonic boom scares them. I read that they might die out completely.”

  “Why would they die?” I asked. “Just because of the noise?”

  “The noise scares them,” he repeated, scowling. “They get confused. They forget how to take care of their babies and they forget how to mate.”

  “I don’t see why they should die, though,” I said. “Can’t NASA move them? Can’t they just put them in a zoo or something?”

  Eric shook his head, hard; his face was starting to turn red. “They can only live in that one place,” he said, “that’s their habitat.” As he spoke, I could imagine him hunched over the newspaper as he read it, scowling at the page, indignant. I was happy and relieved that Eric was talking to me, and for a minute I considered agreeing with him, just to make friends with him again. But I found that I couldn’t. It was more important to me to be loyal to NASA, my future employer.

  “Are you saying they should stop the shuttle program just because of some birds?” I asked carefully.

  “Why not?” he said. “If it’s doing more harm than good?”


  I stopped for a moment, thinking about what my father would say. I looked over to where he stood. He was leaning his ear toward Mr. Biersdorfer’s mouth and nodding vigorously.

  “Because I think exploring space is worth certain sacrifices.”

  “Well,” Eric said, his voice full of scorn, “you’d fit right in here, I guess.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They came to just the same conclusion that you did. ‘Oh well. A whole species extinct forever just so we can go to space and service some Japanese satellites. Oh well. Too bad.’”

  “Maybe they’re trying to find a solution,” I said, and that sounded right: that’s what my father would say. “They’ve got the smartest people in the world working for NASA. Maybe one of them is working on how to solve the problem.”

  “Well, they’re not,” said Eric. He had crossed his arms over his chest. “Just take my word for it. They’re not.”

  I looked around at the other people in the stands, their sunglasses making them look like a field of bugs. Mr. Biersdorfer continued yelling technical terms at my father, who continued nodding and smiling vacantly. The shuttle on the pad looked permanent, like a building, like something that wasn’t going anywhere.

  In front of me, a woman I hadn’t noticed before bounced a baby on her shoulder.

  “They told him he could take it,” she was saying, adjusting her sunglasses. “They allot some extra space for each of them, an extra container or whatever, for personal items like that.”

  “Did he say why he wouldn’t take it, then?” her companion asked. She wore the same style of sunglasses.

  “Well…” the woman with the baby hesitated, the way people do when they’re deciding whether to talk behind someone’s back or not. “He didn’t really say this, but he might not have wanted to bring a baby toy, I guess. You know, it’s all these military men. How would he feel bringing this little stuffed animal, this little giraffe, into space? With all these military guys!”

  “Still,” the other woman said. “If it’s for Jeremy. Surely he could tell them, This is for my seven-month-old baby boy, and they wouldn’t say anything more about it.”

  “Well, that’s what I thought,” said the baby woman. “But it’s his first mission. He wanted everything to be perfect.”

  Her hair was limp and mousy brown. I could see only a thin edge of her face not covered by the sunglasses when she turned toward her friend—her face was flushed and blotchy from the heat, and she kept blowing long bangs out of her eyes. She wore a loose pair of denim shorts and a white T-shirt that looked like it had been washed a million times—it was so thin I could see her bra underneath against her skin, the flesh of her back bulging out slightly above the strap. The baby goggled over her shoulder at me, his face a little cauliflower.

  “That’s an astronaut’s baby,” I whispered to Eric. I felt stupid as soon as I’d said it, but he looked up with interest and asked quietly, “How do you know?”

  “She was talking about what her husband was allowed to bring on the mission,” I whispered, and Eric studied the side of the woman’s face, as I had been doing.

  “Wouldn’t it be strange to know someone on it?” I asked.

  Eric nodded. “It’s strange enough that there are people on it,” he said. “When you think about it, they’re basically strapped onto a couple of missiles. That’s all it is.”

  “Yeah, well, my father puts those missiles together,” I pointed out.

  Eric looked over at my father, and I watched his face. I couldn’t tell whether he was impressed, but I thought he might be. He might respect someone who actually worked on the machines, rather than someone like his father, who just made decisions.

  “I’m going to go someday,” I said then. I was surprised to hear myself say it. Eric didn’t answer, didn’t take his eyes off the space shuttle.

  “Don’t you believe me?” I asked.

  “I’m just not sure why you’d want to,” he said. “The astronauts are basically just guinea pigs. They just press the buttons that the engineers on the ground tell them to press.”

  “Yeah, but they get to go to space,” I said.

  I wasn’t as interested in exploring space as I was in the flight itself: the speed, the weightlessness, the gadgets and everyday life lived in a spaceship, the domestic details. I longed to wear that headset, to hold that tiny microphone expertly to my mouth and report things to Houston, rattling and chanting numbers in their complicated language. To say the words they said: telemetry, capcom, go at throttle up.

  “Well, they’re not exactly exploring,” Eric pointed out. “They’re just in low orbit. The same orbit over and over again. It just doesn’t seem worth all of this.” His gesture took in the launchpads, the stands, all of the buildings surrounding us.

  “I mean, so you’re going to space,” he went on. “So you ride to space strapped to a big firecracker. It’s not like you’ve accomplished anything. It’s not like you’ve solved any of the world’s problems.”

  “Well, I’m going to go,” I said. He didn’t answer.

  “Don’t tell anyone, okay?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Don’t tell anyone at school about, you know, what I just said,” I stammered.

  Eric shook his head and snickered.

  “What?”

  “Who do you think I’m going to tell?” Eric asked. “Who do you think I talk to at school?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, exasperated. “I don’t keep track of what you do.”

  “You do too know,” Eric said quietly, in a way that made me shiver.

  After another long silence, I asked, “What are you going to be when you grow up?” I didn’t know what else to ask him.

  Eric shook his head. I feared that he wouldn’t answer me, but then he spoke.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Not an astronaut.”

  “An engineer?” I asked. “A scientist? You could solve that problem with the pelicans.”

  “No,” he insisted. “I’m going to do something that has nothing to do with any of this.”

  We both considered that for a minute. He’d sounded so indignant, so dismissive of the shuttle, of everything around us. But I had to strain to think of other jobs.

  “Maybe I’ll be a teacher,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “You’d be a really good teacher.”

  A hold is built into the countdown at T minus nine minutes, a pause to let Launch Control resolve any minor problems that have been discovered without having to race the clock. Eric and I and our fathers knew this pause was coming and were prepared for it, but all around us a shout of exasperation went up when those giant orange numbers stopped moving. The newcomers always seemed to feel they were somehow being cheated, that NASA had failed.

  I began to get a bad feeling about this launch, the feeling that something disastrous was going to happen. The last launch, which had also been Discovery, had had so many problems—what if they hadn’t all been fixed right? I imagined the Main Engines, with their millions of parts, greasy, nicked, worn, abraded, melting—it might take only one malfunction to kill them all. The whole thing would become a fireball right on the launchpad, shock waves of fire and heat billowing out toward where we stood, right before our eyes, and this woman with the baby would scream and cry for her husband. The astronauts, strapped into the cockpit, must feel the same dread I was feeling now—the certainty that something had not been fixed correctly, that something had been forgotten, overlooked.

  We had been hearing voices over the loudspeakers since we arrived, the voice of the official announcer, and voices of the men in Launch Control. Here in the VIP stands the speakers were bigger and more expensive-looking, and so the voices were richer, brighter, easier to understand than they were through the little speakers nailed to trees and telephone poles in the public viewing area. Now the voices began running through their final checkout: “Flight?” “Go.” “Capcom?” “Go.” “Range Safety?” “Go.”
“Booster?” “Go.” “Flight surgeon?” “Go.” The voice on the loudspeaker called for our attention, and when the clock read T minus ten seconds, he began to count down aloud: Ten. Nine. Eight. His voice was slow and deliberate. Seven. Go for Main Engine Start. Six. Main Engine start. Five. Four. He counted in a thrilled but confident voice. The concrete trench under the ship turned red and orange, an effect I had never been able to see from across the river. All sorts of new details were visible here. Heat ripples made everything waver. The whole stack bucked in place: it was trying to get away, but something was holding it back.

  “And lift off!” the announcer insisted. “Lllllllift off!”

  And it did lift off. Slowly, impossibly, the whole Launch Vehicle—Orbiter, Solid Rocket Boosters, External Tank—lifted as one, the pieces of the tower reluctantly retracting to let it go. The stack shuddered and lifted ridiculously slowly. It continued to rise, faster now, and a plume of white smoke hung in the air, tracing a path through the sky. We watched the shuttle go up and up, and our heads tilted back hard, our mouths gaping open. I wanted to be up there, lifting off; I wanted to be Rhea Seddon, to be the one everyone was watching with such awe and emotion. The astronaut married to this woman with her bra strap and her cracking lips and her stained baby blanket, a man who had kissed this woman standing right in front of me, was on that spaceship, wearing a helmet and talking to Houston. He was tearing straight up into the sky faster than sound. He and Rhea Seddon and five others were going to space and leaving us all behind.

  The shuttle became smaller and smaller until it was a point like any airplane, scoring a white trail onto the blue sky, except upright rather than horizontal. The noise died away and people were still cheering, the clapping dying out the way it always does, sounding a little disappointed. The astronaut’s wife in front of me cried a little. Her friend looked uncomfortable and patted her on the back quickly, saying, “Oh, he’ll be fine, he’s having the time of his life.” The astronaut’s wife nodded and sniffled.

  Some families around us started to pack up their things to leave. But Eric and I still watched the tiny point of light, our heads tipped back; we waited for the Solid Rocket Boosters to fall off, then for External Tank separation, then for Main Engine cutoff. We watched until long after the shuttle had disappeared. Even though he scorned the space shuttle and claimed not to want to be an astronaut, I knew he was feeling the same awe.