A rustle went through the physics room at these words. None of us had ever seen a major malfunction. That was an old term, left over from Apollo, when major malfunction was purely hypothetical. Launch Control had never lost sight of a ship at launch.
The camera, not finding the shuttle, searched the people in the bleachers. Acres of faces tipped up, squinting against the sun, shivering in the cold. Christa McAuliffe’s son Scott had brought his whole third-grade class to the launch. The kids all looked up at the sky, confused, then at their teacher. She was young and blond. She had her hand over her mouth. The loudspeaker crackled something, and the NASA announcer repeated it: “We have no downlink…”
Now Christa’s parents were in the camera’s frame. Bundled against the cold, they weren’t sure what they were being told, and their fixed, proud smiles were becoming crossed with confusion. They spoke to each other briefly without taking their eyes off the sky, inclining their heads together.
The announcer’s voice came on again: “We have a report from the flight dynamics officer that the vehicle has exploded,” he said in the same tone he had used to report the wind speed. “Flight director confirms that. We are looking at checking with the recovery forces to see what can be done at this point.” Christa’s father took off his hat and clutched it to his chest.
Some kids around me said, “Oh!” a shock like someone had poured cold water over them. Dr. Schuler still stood with his back to us, never taking his eyes off the TV. We all watched the edge of his face for some reaction. He only flexed his jaw muscle; we could see the shadow of it standing out in the glow of the screen. I looked around the room at the other kids, their eyes sparkling, their cheeks flushed with the euphoria of disaster. The TV was still on when we ran outside. We got up, leaving our books and notebooks and pencils behind, and ran past the teachers, ran down the hall, and banged out the double doors to the athletic field, where other classes already stood in clumps out in the cold, their heads tipped back. We stopped, dizzy, to look up. The accident was all over the sky.
I’d forgotten that it was cold outside; the smell and feel of it kept shocking me. I stood on the grass and looked up, feeling as though I had been out there looking up all day, as though I had been born and raised only to look up. It made me dizzy to see it. On TV, the explosion had been such a neat and tidy Y shape, white against blue, simple to understand, but out here it was distorted and misshapen, sickeningly three-dimensional—the arms arced out away from us, raining debris into the ocean. A kid behind me said he could see one of the astronaut’s bodies falling, that he could make out a speck with arms and legs, but we knew he was lying. It was too far away.
The teachers shivered out on the athletic field, pulling their cardigans tighter around themselves. We stood a distance from one another and planted our feet wide, as people do on unstable ground. It felt like entering a strange room in a dream, everything’s place unknown and sickeningly familiar. The monkey bars in the play-ground across the street stood out against the sky, and it was embarrassing how I had played on them, laughing stupidly as if everything would always be for the best. Behind them now were vertical streaks, hundreds of them, white and crazed, and we followed the streaks up to where they met the Y. Each piece took forever to make its way crookedly down to the horizon, trailing a bright white ribbon of smoke. We stood and watched them all until only the trails were left melting. No one told us to go back to class.
Some time later, I found myself crouching with my head between my knees. I could see the steam of my breath gathering and then drifting away. Sets of shoes walked through the grass. Some of them approached me, then politely steered around me. One pair stopped, large black men’s shoes. A hand dropped onto my head.
“Feeling faint?” Dr. Schuler’s low voice said. He sounded strangely muffled because my knees were pressed against my ears. I made no move to answer.
“You should go to the nurse’s office if you feel you might pass out,” he said. His voice was distant, authoritative. The warm print of his hand weighed like a secret thought on my head. I waited, crouching silently, until he slowly pulled it away and I heard the shoes scuffle across the grass, back to the open door of the school.
I wasn’t thinking about the astronauts then, or about technical causes or the public reactions, the inevitable layoffs, not until later. Instead, I remembered my first memory, which was of lying on the floor watching TV with my father and not understanding anything I saw. It was a memory I often used to soothe myself: the warm light and the burbling voices, my father’s steady concentration, his steady breathing. My mother would be in and out of rooms, a snarl of smoke. I remembered the grim gaiety of the children’s shows, animated, the bits of color and sound. The old movies from the fifties with their black and white laugh tracks, the women always wearing dark lipstick, their lacquered hair. Game shows, late night, music and glum enthusiasm, applause, applause, and a man in a blue suit all in garish color, standing on a stage with his hands in his pockets. The safety of knowing that even if this was meaningless to me, it made sense to my father.
I worried about how I must look squatting down like that, a little ball of a girl curled on the ground. I could imagine my curved back, shoulder blades protruding, my brown ponytail curling around my neck, my thin arms wrapped around my knees. I was not Judith Resnik. I felt the dullness of being, again and forever, myself—breathing my own breath, thinking my own thoughts. There was no escaping it. Again I thought of Eric, of his breath and his thoughts, and this time I felt sure he was thinking of me too, right at that moment, and that we could achieve some telepathy this way. I miss you, I tried to send him. No one sees me but you.
More feet walked toward me, then around. I wondered what people must think of me. Perhaps they thought I just wanted attention, that I was exaggerating my own reactions the way some girls did, to make a general disaster into something about themselves. I stood up and dusted myself off.
Inside, I found the hallways filled with students. Kids stood together in groups, their arms crossed, talking about launch criteria, budget cuts, whether the astronauts had been killed instantly or not, whether the shuttle had been sabotaged by the Iranians or not. From a row of three pay phones snaked three lines of kids waiting to talk to their parents. I walked down the hall to the lunchroom, where more kids huddled around a TV that someone had rolled in from one of the classrooms. A shot of the bleachers, now nearly empty of spectators, and beyond it, the countdown clock still running, oblivious, its huge orange numbers still counting the elapsed minutes of the mission. T plus one hour seven minutes. An anchorman who had sweat through his makeup was saying over and over that there had been an explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, that all seven astronauts were missing and feared dead. We stood for a long time and watched him talk, listened with care to every word he told us, though he didn’t know a thing we didn’t.
18.
THE BUS JERKED AND SWAYED US AS IT ALWAYS HAD ON THE RIDE home. We leaned with it, this way and that. We were almost completely silent. The sound of the bus’s gears grinding, an old and familiar sound, was now new and dangerous, the sound of impending mechanical failure. One kid in the back kept yelling, “They blew it up, they blew it up!” Everyone turned to look at him, and he looked giddy, clutching the seat in front of him as though on a roller coaster cresting the highest peak. His friends laughed as quietly as they could, frantically shushing him.
I let myself into the house and walked around it aimlessly, unable to settle down anywhere. The living room looked strange to me now, all our furniture squatting in its usual places on the carpet. It seemed a million years since I’d seen it that morning, back when the shuttle was still safe and ordinary. I walked around the house as if it were someone else’s.
I found my space notebook and opened it to the picture I had torn from a magazine before the launch, before its subjects’ faces became famous for being the faces of the dead. It was a formal NASA portrait showing the seven astronauts in their blu
e jumpsuits, posing at a draped table with a plastic model of the ship. An American flag huddled discreetly in the corner. The astronauts smiled in the photo, and there was something strange about their smiles; not posed or awkward, they were real smiles, slightly goofy. It seemed the seven of them were amused by the prospect of going on this journey together, like a long car ride. They wore patches bearing their last names and held their space helmets in front of them.
In the eternal present of the photo, McNair holds his helmet gingerly on both sides, slightly away from his body, like it’s a full fish-bowl. Jarvis, wearing a gleeful smile, grips his as if it’s a helium balloon that may get away from him. McAuliffe holds hers to one side, a little awkwardly, smiling distantly, like it’s somebody else’s baby. Resnik smiles a smile so pleased it’s smug. She holds hers out to us balanced on her straightened fingers, like it’s a gift.
I flipped through the notebook, moving backward through all the launches, back to the very first. I saw dozens of times launches had been delayed or scrubbed due to problems with the Main Engines, Solid Rocket Boosters, heat tiles, the External Tank, the onboard computers, safety contingencies, payload, launchpad facilities. Every mission was a list of possible failures. Somehow, the constant presence of those failures had made it seem that nothing could ever really go wrong.
I went into my parents’ room. It had a warm, musty smell with traces of my mother’s perfume. I sat on their unmade bed for a while looking around to see whether any of her things had moved, whether anything had been taken or put back. Nothing had.
I looked in my mother’s bottom bureau drawer; the carton of cigarettes was still there. I selected a pack and turned it over in my hands, not sure yet whether I was going to take it. The cellophane was dry and satiny in a way that plastic is for only a short time, until the touch of hands makes it greasy. Something about the shape and size of the pack comforted me. I took it and hid it at the bottom of my desk drawer.
By the time Delia got home, I was switching from channel to channel, looking for new information. Delia’s teacher had told her class that the space shuttle was “missing,” a euphemism that had confused Delia thoroughly.
“Probably they’ll find it today,” she assured herself, going into the kitchen to look for a snack.
“I think they know where it is,” I said. The rescue planes had had to wait over an hour for debris to stop falling before they could move into the area to search. By that time, heat tiles and lighter pieces of debris were already washing up onto beaches.
Delia stopped in her tracks, turned, and asked, “Where is it?”
“You’re so stupid, Delia,” I said. “Never mind.”
On the TV, a local newscaster insisted that, compared to other launches, Challenger had risen significantly more slowly. He speculated that maybe the External Tank hadn’t held enough fuel. Experts offered other theories: the computers had malfunctioned; the heat tiles had been damaged by ice; a breach inside the External Tank had allowed the two fuels to mix; Christa McAuliffe had panicked and pressed the wrong button; some malicious person had committed sabotage. Computer experts expressed concern that none of the onboard computers had corrected the problem, whatever it had been, or even picked up on it. NASA denied any connection between the explosion and the unusual cold.
Again and again, the white trail of smoke climbed jumpily, then popped and split into two trails. That image would later become iconic of the disaster, overexposed into cliché, drained of horror, but in its first moments and days, it was still a shock each time to see it, still the experience of watching failure, watching people’s deaths. Each time, as Challenger muscled its way toward the top of the screen, it seemed that everything would be normal this time, and each time I was shocked all over again to see it explode.
Over and over, the camera zoomed in on different pieces of debris, zoomed in on the Solid Rocket Booster that broke off and shot to the right, painting its white trail against the blue sky. I watched the right-hand rocket, the white casing that I had seen up close, that my father had touched and assembled. That rocket broke off and arced crazily, traced a new, wrong trail, then popped into a cloud, its self-destruct explosives having been triggered by a signal from the ground. The camera zoomed in and in, trying to find some telling detail, and the picture became blurred, white pixels and gray pixels and pink pixels separating themselves and blurring into one.
The walkout repeated over and over, the shot of the seven astronauts leaving Operations and Checkout that morning and waving for the cameras—Delia and I studied that moment each time we saw it, as if we hadn’t already seen the same thing a million times before. We wanted to see the astronauts waving and smiling optimistically; it made us feel that they were still all right.
Over and over again, the Y in the sky, the “If you are just joining us,” the “Authorities are still unsure.” The summaries were the same each time, but each time we listened closely, hoping to catch some word, some intonation that would betray some new piece of information. The news anchors looked gravely into our eyes, their voices and expressions communicating their displeasure with us, with our accidents, with our failure. They were like stern parents; they were sympathetic for our loss, but they could not condone this oversight. We had been far too careless this time.
President Reagan appeared, sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. I got out my space notebook to take notes.
“He’s nice,” Delia said preemptively. She loved the President fiercely and got upset when our mother had called him names. Reagan adjusted himself at his desk, refolded his hands. He spoke, warm and firm. The astronauts were heroes, he told us; we had to carry on in their names.
“And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America,” he said, his voice smooth and brown as gravy. He gazed right into the camera, his face lined with concern. As always, his cheeks were oddly rosy.
“I know it’s hard to understand,” Reagan said, “but sometimes painful things like this happen.”
“You are aware that he’s cut NASA’s funding every year he’s been President?” I asked Delia. She and Reagan ignored me.
“The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted,” Reagan said slowly. “It belongs to the brave.”
“The future doesn’t belong to the faint-farted,” I said for Delia’s benefit.
She smiled warily. “He’s nice,” she repeated. “He’s my favorite President.”
“You can’t remember any other President,” I reminded her. I had only a dim recollection of Jimmy Carter myself, a slow-talking man with a big smile and a wide tie.
“The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, as they prepared for their journey and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God.”
“‘The face of God’?” I yelled at the TV. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Delia looked up at me, worried. I was surprised by my sudden anger at Reagan for implying the astronauts’ being vaporized in a fireball was a good thing, like they were lucky to have died that way.
“‘The face of God,’” Delia repeated.
Delia and I watched TV for six hours that night, never moving, as the sun set and our father didn’t come home. Everything in the living room turned redder, then grayer, then faded until it was dark. Every channel announced that the State of the Union address, scheduled for that evening, had been canceled due to the national tragedy.
“Do you know what happened, Delia?” I asked her once it was so dark I couldn’t see her face clearly, just the white of her cheeks in the reflected light of the television.
I could feel her looking toward me, wondering whether I was somehow tricking her. “There was an accident,” she said carefully.
“That’s right,” I said. “An accident.”
“An explosion,” she added. “Something went wrong with Daddy’s space shuttle.”
“That’s right,�
� I said.
A while later, she asked, “Are they dead?”
“Who?” I asked, though of course I knew who she meant.
“The people,” Delia said. It seemed such a childish word to use. Here is the church and here is the steeple. On TV, we had seen footage of Coast Guard boats on the ocean, searching for survivors. We had seen the water moving with a layer of twisted debris, smashed pieces of the ship, heat tiles floating.
“I think so,” I said. “I’m pretty sure they’re dead.”
Long after dark, we heard the front door open. Delia looked at me, her eyes wide. We knew it was my mother even before she appeared in the glow of the TV; we recognized her way of opening the front door, her way of jingling her keys. We heard her in the entryway, fumbling with her coat and then her shoes, one clunking onto the floor after the other. She crept into the living room, and we could make out only the nimbus of her hair, the shiny material of her dress where it fell across her shoulder, the swishing of her skirt. She moved as quietly as she could, heel to toe, as if someone were sleeping or sick, and she did not turn on a light.
“Girls,” she whispered.
“Yeah,” Delia whispered back.
Our mother knelt in front of us where we sat on the sofa. She looked pink and youthful; her eyes sparkled as she turned her face quickly from me to Delia and back again. “Girls,” she said again. “I’ve missed you.”
Neither of us said a thing; we just watched her.
“Your dad asked me to come over tonight,” she said. It felt odd to hear her explain, as if we would challenge her right to be there. “He’ll have to be at work a long time tonight. Maybe all night. Do you know about what happened today?”
I felt a surge of anger. Were we not sitting in front of the television, upon which the space shuttle blew up repeatedly?
The Time It Takes to Fall Page 21