Island of Clouds: The Great 1972 Venus Flyby (Altered Space Book 3)

by Gerald Brennan

  “I’ve made my peace with it,” he says. “In fact, I feel…blessed. That could’ve just as easily happened with us in there. Or in orbit. So to my mind, it was a pretty decent outcome. And it was a lesson I needed. You know how it is, all that Academy stuff. You’re out in the halls, or up on the chalkboards, and everybody expects a flawless performance. And if you can’t be perfect, you have to go behind closed doors and work your ass off until you are. And you do that until everything really is the way it’s supposed to be. Well, I guess I needed a little deprogramming.”

  I give him a look.

  “Buzz, look around,” he says, waving a hand at the outdoor scene, a dark futuristic panorama of lights and silhouettes, traffic and palm trees and neon. “It’s an absolutely perfect night. Gorgeous California weather. We’re in the best country on the planet, doing the best job in the country, working towards a goal that has…transfixed humanity throughout recorded history. And it’s in our grasp. We’ve got a night off, and we’re outside eating cheeseburgers. What more could we possibly want?”

  I shrug. Maybe he’s right.

  “Actually,” he goes on, “I do want another burger.”

  “Jesus, where do you put it? I always feel like I’m having dinner with Paul Bunyan.”

  “High metabolism! I got in some pushups at the plant, and I’m gonna run tomorrow. Gotta stay moving, Buzz! That takes fuel.”

  “That’s why you’re out here, isn’t it? Making sure they put enough food lockers in the spacecraft when they redesign it.”

  “You’re on to me.” He laughs. “This is important stuff, Buzz!” Then he gets up and grabs another burger. (Another man might seem like a pig eating so much, but not Ed White. He’s always polite and neat about it, almost reverentially ravenous. And there’s something entirely appropriate about his appetite; it’s another way he’s a touch ahead of everyone, a standout even in a crowd of overachievers, a Cadillac in a room full of Buicks.)

  “Whaddaya think, go grab a beer somewhere?” I ask when he returns.

  “Ehh, I’m beat. Let’s just head on back, relax for a bit.”

  “Relax” isn’t a word I’ve heard a lot lately, but I figure he’s probably right, so before long, we’re back at the motel. He flips through the TV Guide. “Star Trek’s coming on in a few.”

  “That’ll work.”

  Ed turns on the TV and it’s clouded in static. “All right. Let’s see if our technical skills are equal to the common American television set.” He turns the VHF dial and adjusts the rabbit ears. It still doesn’t look all that great.

  “Jesus, it’s a good thing you’re working on flight controls and not communications,” I laugh. “Here, let me.” I realign the antenna and the picture improves considerably.

  The episode opens with Enterprise circling an alien planet.

  The TV starship is being buffeted heavily by some unknown shockwaves, which turn out to be ripples of time displacement. Doctor McCoy arrives to tend to a wounded crewman; he accidentally falls on an injector and gives himself a massive dose of cortazine. In a flash, he goes stark raving mad; he flees the bridge on the ship’s elevator, ranting about murderers and assassins. Cut to a cigarette commercial.

  “Not a bad setup they’ve got,” Ed says.

  “I would kill to have that much room on a spaceship. You could fit every Gemini ever flown on the bridge alone.”

  “Come on, we’re just getting started!” Ed laughs. “You can fit a lot of Wright Flyers in a C-141, too. Give it a couple centuries, Buzz.”

  “Why wait? You know, as long as we’re out here working on a redesign…” (I look at my watch.) “…we could drive up to Hollywood, kidnap a couple set designers, take them back to North American. We’d have a roomier spaceship in no time.”

  Ed laughs.

  The episode resumes. “The City on the Edge of Forever,” it is called. Kirk makes a captain’s log entry about the situation with McCoy. “In a strange wild frenzy he has fled the ship’s bridge,” he intones. “We have no way of knowing if the madness is permanent or temporary, or in what direction it will drive McCoy.” The doctor, it turns out, is heading to the transporter room; he beams himself down to the planet, near the center of the time displacement.

  In short order, Kirk and Spock and Uhura follow, along with a landing party: uniforms of gold and blue and red. They find themselves near a large arch: ancient ruins 10,000 centuries old, putting out waves of time displacement. The time portal awakens and starts talking; it announces that it is the Guardian of Forever.

  Then it starts showing images from human history, like a television set that’s somehow tuned in to signals from long ago. “Behold…a gateway to your own past,” the Guardian of Forever says. The portal starts showing scenes from the 20th century: howitzers firing, soldiers rushing across a cratered battlefield. “Strangely compelling,” Kirk says. “To step through there, and lose oneself in another world…” And then McCoy jumps through the portal.

  Uhura tries to communicate with the Enterprise, but she can’t reach them. “Your vessel, your beginning. All that you knew is gone,” the Guardian solemnly intones. To which Kirk says: “McCoy has somehow changed history. Earth’s not there, at least not Earth as we know it. We’re totally alone.”

  “Whoops,” Ed adds as the commercials start to roll.

  “My father’s always been…obsessed with the past. I don’t get it. You can’t go back there. It’s always getting further away. Why not look ahead instead?”

  Ed shrugs. “We are in a profession that focuses on the future.”

  “He was, too, though! He was a…pioneer of aviation!”

  Ed nods. “Yeah, I remember you talking about him.” (We’ve known each other long enough that there’s always that danger of having the same conversation two, three, four times. But Ed’s never been the type of guy to make you feel like an ass for repeating yourself.) “That’s another thing we’ve got in common: a legacy to live up to.”

  “Legacy.” I snort. “I never wanted to follow in his footsteps. I love him, but…I’ve always needed to mark out my own path. And this is one way. Avoiding all this…fucking nostalgia. That’s all he talks about, what he’s already done. Driving around pointing out old history like it’s…more real than reality. ‘Here’s the field where Goddard and I did this,’ and ‘Here’s the restaurant where Jimmy Doolittle and I did that.’ For a pilot in particular, it seems like you’d want to keep moving forward. I mean, that’s how flight works...”

  “So you’re saying: time flies, it doesn’t drive,” Ed chuckles.

  I laugh. “Yeah, something like that.”

  When the show comes back, Kirk and Spock have decided to travel through the portal themselves, to prevent McCoy from altering the past. They have to rewatch all of the imagery flickering past and judge their leap exactly. The portal is shrouded in smoke and fog; when the time seems right, they leap into the clouds.

  They emerge on a city street with posters for a boxing match in Madison Square Garden. It’s America in the 1930s.

  “So it’s a time travel story instead of a space travel story,” I observe.

  “Every story’s a time travel story,” Ed points out. Then to the TV: “Jeez, guys, go to a time I haven’t seen, at least! They’re stuck in our childhood.”

  I laugh.

  Kirk and Spock explore their new surroundings, looking absurd and self-conscious in their Starfleet uniforms. Kirk spies some clothes hanging out to dry on a fire escape and says: “Well, we’ll steal from the rich and give back to the poor later.” They’re stopped by a meat-and-potatoes Irish beat cop; Kirk stumbles through a comical lie attempting to explain Spock’s alien ears. “My friend is actually Chinese…he caught his head in a mechanical rice picker.”

  “Honor code violation!” I holler, as Mr. Spock puts a Vulcan neck pinch on the cop and the two scamper off with their stolen clothes.

  Ed laughs. “Lying and stealing. They never should’ve made it through Starfleet.”<
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  The men flee to a basement, where they get changed and discuss their predicament. It seems impossible that they’ll randomly run into Dr. McCoy in the past. But Spock points out that they could somehow be drawn towards the same time and place. “There could be some logic to the belief that time is fluid like a river. Currents, eddies, backwash.” he says, putting on a skullcap to hide his pointy ears. Kirk asks if this is true, to which Spock replies: “I didn’t say it was true, Captain. I said we had no other hope.”

  Then a beautiful woman comes down the stairs and asks what they’re doing there. Kirk admits that they’ve stolen clothes and fled from a cop.

  “Oh, now he gets all honest!” I laugh. “Once there’s a woman involved…”

  “Charming and disarming,” Ed chuckles.

  The woman runs a charitable organization, the 21st Street Mission. Kirk and Spock go to work for her; soon they’re eating soup and bread in the mission, listening to the woman preach to the other homeless men. “One day soon, man is going to be able to harness incredible energies, maybe even the atom,” she says. She talks about voyaging to the stars “to give each man hope, and a common future.” Her name, it turns out, is Edith Keeler.

  Before long, Edith Keeler and Captain Kirk start falling for each other. She has a sense that he belongs in another time and place, that things are somehow disconnected and wrong. But soon they’re going out on the town; Kirk charms her with stories of novels that don’t exist, and planets yet to be discovered. Meanwhile, Spock builds an electrical contraption with a lot of metal and lightbulbs, like a microfiche reader that can read newspapers from the near future. He pulls up a headline with a picture of Edith Keeler that says: SOCIAL WORKER KILLED.

  Kirk comes back and asks Spock what he’s discovered. Spock finds another newspaper article from six years hence which discusses Edith Keeler meeting with President Roosevelt. Then the recording device short-circuits and catches on fire.

  Kirk seems intrigued by the presidential meeting, but Spock offers up the other alternative: “Or, Captain. Edith Keeler will die this year. I saw her obituary. Some sort of traffic accident.” Kirk muses: “She has two possible futures. And depending on whether she lives or dies, all history will be changed.” To which Spock replies with cold logic: “Suppose we discover that, in order to set things straight again, Edith Keeler must die.”

  “Now it’s getting interesting,” Ed says as the commercials roll.

  “You think that could make a difference?” I ask. “A traffic accident and a war?”

  “Sure, why not? Everything makes a difference. Look at the fire. Look at the accidents we’ve seen in our careers. Small decisions, big consequences. Somebody replaces an engine, or waits to change an indicator light, or tries to stay under the clouds in bad weather…”

  This brings up painful memories: Charlie Bassett, the crash. “I try not to think about that stuff. I tend to get a bit…fatalistic.”

  “I think we all do. You have to. You do all the preflight checklists and tests, but if it’s your turn…”

  “Do you ever get the feeling that it’s all…wrong somehow?” I ask. “Like we took a wrong turn somewhere back, and things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be?”

  He gives me a strange look, uncomprehending. “Everything’s the way it’s supposed to be, Buzz.”

  “Yes, but who’s to say, though?”

  He thinks about it for a minute. “I guess, for me, it’s just part of having faith. If you believe in God, you have to believe things are the way they should be. That all these little supposedly random things happen the way they’re supposed to.”

  The episode resumes. McCoy arrives in the past, still raving about assassins and murderers. He realizes he’s on Earth in the 20th century; he breaks down weeping about doctors who “sew people like garments.” Meanwhile Kirk and Edith Keeler are spending more time together; she fantasizes that all the money spent on war and death could instead be spent on life: space travel and exploration. Kirk’s clearly smitten.

  When he goes back to his room, Spock’s getting the memory circuit back up and running. Kirk watches anxiously. Spock reads more from the device, discussing news reports about a growing pacifist movement in the 1930s, led by Edith Keeler. It apparently delayed the U.S.’s entry into World War II, giving Germany time to complete nuclear experiments. “She was right,” Kirk says. “Peace was the way.” To which Spock responds with chilling words: “She was right. But at the wrong time. With the A-bomb, and with the V2 rockets to carry them, Germany captured the world.”

  Kirk tells Spock he’s in love with Edith Keeler. To which Spock responds with pure logic, like a glass of cold water to the face: “Jim. Edith Keeler must die.”

  Out in the hallway, the two bump into Edith. She stumbles; Kirk catches her and keeps her from falling down the stairs. She mentions offhandedly that she could have broken her neck, and thanks Kirk for saving her. But Spock pulls Kirk aside and points out that Keeler could have died then and there. He says: “If you save her and do as your heart tells you to do, then millions will die who did not die before.”

  Meanwhile, McCoy finds his way to the 21st Street Mission. Edith Keeler takes him in, and soon he’s back to normal: gentle and emotional, and grateful for her care.

  Soon, Edith Keeler’s back out on the town with Kirk, getting ready to go to the movies. A normal peaceful night, until she mentions Dr. McCoy. This gets Kirk’s attention: the object of their time travel is finally at hand. He jerks into full alertness as if coming out of a trance: no longer a starry-eyed romantic, but a man with a fateful mission. He runs across the street just as Dr. McCoy comes outside. Edith Keeler, confused by all of this, crosses the street herself to see what was going on...

  Then: headlights, and a truck’s dark silhouette. A crash.

  We both sit there for a few moments as the chilling ending unfolds. Then, credits and the familiar theme music, and once that’s done, we’re staring blankly at the flickering commercials.

  Finally, Ed reaches up and turns off the set. I get up and use the bathroom, and when I come back out, he’s on the phone with his wife, talking about nothing.

  •••

  I fall asleep, then wake suddenly. Not much time has passed.

  Ed sleeps soundly in the other bed, the peaceful sleep of the pure of heart. I try to lie still, but my mind is fully charged: circuits closed, capacitors full. I do not know why I’m so restless.

  I glance over at the dead lamp, the vacant desk and chair, the dim edges of the room; I watch as the occasional pair of car headlights angles through the edge of the heavy curtains, sweeps the darkness from the corners for a few brief moments, then slices back out to leave us in gloom once more.

  I think of poor Charlie Bassett, my old neighbor.

  •••

  It’s February of 1966. Charlie and Elliott See are in a T-38, flying to St. Louis in bad weather alongside Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan. And in the deteriorating weather, both planes botch the runway approach and circle around to try again. Charlie’s a great guy and a helluva pilot, near the top of everyone’s list, and we all know he’ll be a shoo-in for the big missions. But Charlie’s in the back seat of the T-38. And when See makes the turn, he loses too much altitude. At some point, he realizes his mistake and hits the afterburners, but it’s too late. Their plane hits the roof of the McDonnell Douglas plant, and both men die instantly.

  In the weeks afterwards, everyone mourns them, but the whispers around the astronaut office are that See was a fair-weather pilot, too used to the sunny skies of Southern California, too unaccustomed to monitoring on the instruments in bad weather. So the purest sympathy falls on poor Charlie, who was sitting in the back with his hands off the controls, and ended up victim to an accident he might have avoided if he’d been flying.

  What’s worse, in the shuffling of crews afterwards, Jim Lovell and I end up with the Gemini XII mission. I get my first flight into space, in part, because my neighbor and good fri
end died so horribly.

  •••

  I attempt to sleep and fail miserably. I should be tired. At around 10:30, I slip out.

  In the parking lot, I look around for a minute. It’s clear there isn’t really anywhere to go without the car. I get in, drive around for a while. Before I know it, I’m merging onto an expressway, swept up in the red taillight rivers of the electric Los Angeles night. (When you get on the freeway late at night in L.A., it’s still a traffic jam somehow, and you wonder, “Where the hell are all these people going?” But you don’t know where you’re going, either.)

  I get back on the surface streets. I figure I’ll stop and get a drink, at least.

  The place I choose is a dive, a dark oasis in the neon sea.

  Inside: a man behind the bar, and two on the other side. One’s a neatly-trimmed but slightly overweight businessman in a three-piece suit; he sits there reading a book in a circle of light. The other’s a dirty postman with acne scars so bad I can see them even though he’s in the shadows.

  I order up a Schlitz. For a moment I just sit there, relaxing, pleasantly anonymous.

  The man in the suit pulls out a pen and underlines several lines in the slim paperback he’s reading. Then he leans back with a satisfied air, returns the pen and retrieves a cigarillo, and asks me for a light.

  I make a show of patting myself down for the matches I know aren’t there. “Sorry. Stopped carrying them when I quit.”

  “Well, aren’t you special,” he says.

  “I had to quit. I can’t step out for a smoke break in my line of work.”

  “What do you do, friend?”

  Do I want to go into all of it? All of those questions, what’s it like up there, and all that? No. So: “Oh, you know. Government work.”

  “Top secret, huh?”

  “Not exactly.” I eye him suspiciously. “Why, what do you do?”

  “I’m a mathematician.”

  I chuckle. “I work with a lot of mathematicians, a lot of physicists. They say all physicists want to be mathematicians, and all mathematicians want to be God.”