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

by Gerald Brennan

  There is not much to do on the way home. I read Psalms, sneaking in a little faith, at last: “When I considered the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man, that thou art mindful of him?”

  And now Earth looms large in our windows. Against the black of space, she looks very welcoming, cool and blue and forgiving of our absence.

  And soon we are looking through the hatch window as the first bright hot wisps of plasma whip past, curling and trailing off into the distance

  We are plunging into the atmosphere at 25,000 mph. We’d started in a massive rocket, so big it rivalled most buildings, and now all that remains is tucked away in a space smaller than some tents, a little metal shell buffeting through its fiery passage back home, windows filled with an orange and pink glow.

  And at last that fades and we’re in the familiar thick blue atmosphere. The drogue chute fires and pulls out the three main parachutes, and there they are above us, orange and white and full and round and beautiful.

  Down we floated. I move my hand to the circuit breaker that will let Mike cut the chutes once we hit the water. And I brace for impact, but we catch a swell and land gently and there we are, upright in the stable 1 position, sky filling the windows, not quite safe on terra firma, but mare sorta-firma.

  Before I know it, we hear the helicopter, and there is a frogman outside, and we’re signaling that we’re OK. And it occurs to me that it’s over, my job as a crewmember, and now we are individuals again.

  •••

  I wake, weak still.

  There is a smell wafting through the manned module, an awful smell, ugly and foul. Death. I do not understand it. We’ve taken every precaution.

  I can’t help but wonder: Why?

  “The vents,” Kerwin says. “The vents on the EVA suit. The outlet valves. We should have thought of this before. There’s always going to be an outflow if there’s overpressure. And with the chemical processes that are happening, there’s going to be overpressure.”

  “What can we do about it?” I want to leave my bed and help. I don’t know if I can.

  “I’d say close the vents on the inner hatch cover.”

  “We don’t want the command module all fouled up when we do have to go back up there.”

  “No, you’re right.” Kerwin floats in front of me, his head haloed by the light from his chamber, an uncertain angel. “I’ll take care of it. Tape the vents shut on the suit, maybe.”

  “I want to help.”

  “No. Absolutely not. Not in your condition.” He gives me a look. “You don’t have to do work to be valuable, Buzz. Stay down here. Get some rest. Doctor’s orders.”

  He floats back to the main deck, in the direction we keep saying is up. He is gone for a good while. I know he is working, but I do not hear anything.

  I read some Job. There’s a section where Elihu’s responding to Job’s complaints that strikes me:

  …for God is greater than man.

  Why, then, do you make complaint against him that he gives no account of his doings?

  For God does speak, perhaps once, or even twice, though one perceive it not.

  In a dream, in a vision of the night, [when deep sleep falls upon men] as they slumber in their beds,

  It is then that he opens the ears of men and as a warning to them, terrifies them;

  By turning man from evil and keeping pride away from him,

  He withholds his soul from the pit and his life from passing to the grave.

  Or a man is chastened on his bed by pain and unceasing suffering within his frame,

  So that to his appetite food becomes repulsive, and his senses reject the choicest nourishment.

  His flesh is wasted so that it cannot be seen, and his bones, once visible, appear;

  His soul draws near to the pit, his life to the place of the dead.

  I am eager for Joe to come back, but it does not feel like it will be enough. There is a heavy sadness that overtakes me with ease when I am not moving. It feels so easy to slip into sleep or death.

  •••

  All through the run-up to man’s first moon landing, nearly hidden amidst all the positivity and good feeling, there’s been a virulent strain of paranoia periodically springing forth, from naysayers in hysterics about hypothetical moon germs causing catastrophic pandemics. To allay their fevered fears, NASA keeps us in quarantine for two weeks after we get back. It’s been planned for some time, but now that I’ve been up there walking around, it seems all the more absurd. The lunar surface is an open-air solar furnace, a wasteland of dust and rock that’s blasted for 14 days at a stretch by the undiluted sun, and constantly irradiated by cosmic background radiation; if anything, it’s an environment tailor-made to sterilize.

  But eventually we emerge from our aluminum cocoon, and the dry days of isolation give way to torrential publicity.

  We’re jetted from one end of the country to the other, feted by ticker tape parades in New York and Chicago and formal dinners with mayors and governors; we’re presented with plaques, medals, commendations, framed photographs, custom-made track suits, engraved sterling-silver punchbowls, keys to cities.

  And we’re invited out to the Texas Hill Country for a couple days at the LBJ ranch.

  We arrive by helicopter in the early afternoon: the three of us and our public affairs man all dressed sensibly in suits and ties, plus wives and children in their Sunday best, which has become everyday attire. When we touch down at the ranch’s dusty airstrip, three cars are waiting to drive us over to the main house; LBJ himself is leaning against the first one, wearing jeans and a red collared shirt. A photographer flits about, snapping pictures of it all.

  “Pleasure to see you fellas again,” he says, looking over our clothing as he vigorously shakes our hands. “Glad we don’t have to worry about moon germs this time. Y’all are a little overdressed, though!”

  “Sorry, Mr. President.” The PA man apologizes on our behalf. “There was some uncertainty about the schedule and activities.”

  “Oh, we’re not gonna do anything formal,” LBJ says. “These boys need a break! A chance to relax after all that hard work.”

  Somehow I sense the uncertainty originated up top, that LBJ was waiting for us to show up dressed up so he could tell us to kick back. Still, I’m not complaining. I’ve spent the bulk of twenty years under routines and schedules: not only seeing the day’s time all planned out and measured every morning, but also every uniform and suit and change of clothing. And it’s always refreshing to be told (officially ordered, it must be said, for the man is still our boss, when you follow all the organization charts) to throw on some blue jeans and get comfortable.

  We drive the short ways back to the big beautiful house, which all of us have visited at one point or another during Gemini. There are Secret Service agents on hand, but the president makes it a point to help us carry our bags upstairs.

  When he’s gone, I turn to Mike: “Well, he was certainly eager to see us again.”

  “He’s been eager this whole time,” Mike says. “I had a dream on the way back from the moon that we’d splashed down, and we were climbing out into the recovery raft, and the frogman took his mask off, and it was President Johnson.”

  We change and head back downstairs ahead of our wives. LBJ laughs when he sees us. “You boys somehow always manage to look a little uptight. Even with jeans on.”

  “I think Buzz starches his,” Mike says.

  “Iron only, no starch,” I reply.

  “Well, let’s see what else we can do to loosen up a bit.” We follow him into the kitchen, where he produces several Styrofoam cups, which he fills with water and ice and a prodigious pour of Cutty Sark. “Better?”

  “Better,” I smile.

  “I got a gift for each of you.” He hands out cowboy hats, fresh Stetsons for each of us, every one a perfect fit. I only think for a brief moment about the work it takes to make things seem so easy, the discre
et phone calls to NASA for bodily measurements, the careful instructions to department store managers, the scheduling of deliveries and the payment of bills… “Now, what say we go for a drive? Take a break from the womenfolk and get some fresh air.”

  We pile outside and into his big Lincoln Continental. The top’s down, open to the spring Texas sun and the blue sky, which once again looks limitless. LBJ pulls out down a dusty ranch road. A pair of Secret Service men follows in another automobile at a respectful distance. Our car slowly pitches and rolls over the bumps and dips like a ship on a lazy sea.

  “Glad to be done with everything?” LBJ asks.

  “It is nice, Mr. President,” Ed allows.

  “It’s nice to be in a convertible without…a city of people screaming and cheering,” I say from the back. “I kinda wish we’d trained for the publicity. After Gemini was one thing, but now…there’s this…hunger in everyone you meet. Like they want a physical piece of you.”

  “Nice to be popular, huh?” LBJ says over his shoulder.

  “It’s something,” I allow. “I don’t know if it’s nice.”

  “If you think it’s hard being popular, you should see what it’s like when it’s gone.” The president takes a drink and wheels the car around a bend.

  “I try not to talk politics too much, being an officer and all,” Ed says. “But it seems you’re as popular as you need to be these days, Mr. President.”

  “Ha. Whatever popularity I have nowadays, I probably owe to you boys.”

  “Or Frank Borman, at least,” I chuckle. When that famous picture of the Earth from the moon came out smack dab in the middle of the election, many took it as a sign that the country was still on the right track; in a way, it was a campaign ad every bit as effective as the anti-Goldwater flower child had been four years before. Whereas our landing was more of a post-inauguration valediction, confirmation after the fact that the country had been wise in granting him one more term. Still, his poll numbers are up from the pre-election lows, and there’s hope that something good will happen in Vietnam, at last.

  “So are you glad to be done with everything, Mr. President?” Mike asks.

  He laughs. “Done with campaigning, at least. That is mighty nice,” he allows, and allows himself another long sip of his drink. “Although I will admit, whenever I get back here, I think I should have retired when I had the chance!” Abruptly he stops, holds his cup out of the car, and taps it on the side. The Secret Service agent gets out of the trailing car, comes up with a bottle, and fills it back up.

  Then to us: “How ‘bout a fillup, boys?”

  I offer up my empty cup. “Don’t mind if I do.”

  By the time we roll back to the ranch, the cooks are preparing for a barbecue, setting out a massive cast-iron cauldron of baked beans, spinning a hog carcass on a spit over an open fire. Soon we’re sitting down outside at picnic tables covered with red-and-white checkered tablecloths, our plates piled with pig parts. There’s very little talk of the presidency, or the moon; mostly it’s LBJ hamming it up for the women and children.

  We end the night standing around the fire pit, drinking. Our wives have left, to contend alone with sullen children, bedtimes, etc. And Lady Bird’s disappeared to Lord knows where. So there we are, alone again with LBJ, standing and swaying drunkenly, with the glow of the fire flickering on the mesquite trees.

  “Those were wonderful words you had about President Kennedy, sir,” Mike Collins says. “Back on the ship.”

  “Kennedy,” Johnson snorts. “Kennedy was a nice boy. Typical rich kid. Oh, I mean no disrespect, he faced some hardships with his back, did great things in the war, and all that. But Kennedy couldn’t have gotten us up there. His daddy did too much for him, for him to be really strong. He never would have been a senator without his daddy.”

  We say nothing. Sparks fly into the warm Texas night. The moon looks a little thicker than it did when we launched, a fat waxing gibbous, ripe for the picking.

  “My daddy never amounted to much. A politician who can’t get anything done is just about the most useless creature on God’s green Earth. They say you can’t pick your parents. Well, I wanted to pick another father, other than the one I got. I used to feel sorry for myself, just thinking about him.” Johnson does not look at us but sort of stares off into the dark distance, slowly swirling his whiskey. “Maybe it was a good thing, I don’t know. I eventually figured I could learn some lessons from him all the same. Learn to be strong where he was weak. And later I figured, who’s to say you can’t pick? You can adopt a child, why not adopt a parent? So I made it a point to unlearn all the lessons my daddy taught me, and learn from the men who could get things done. Study them like a book. It’s better to study people than books, you know. Roosevelt, Rayburn, Russell, my 3 Rs. And that’s what I’ve done. And here we are.”

  We sit in silence, sipping our drinks.

  “I’ve got no sons. At least, not that I know about.” (The president gives a sly grin. He’s obviously drunk. Not that I’m one to judge.) “My daughters are wonderful girls. The light of my life. And with great daughters, you get great son-in-laws, grandchildren. But still…you boys have sons, don’t you? Namesakes.”

  Mike doesn’t, but he doesn’t say anything. I’m just drunk enough that it takes a moment to form a coherent reply. “Well, I gotta admit, Mr. President. I never much liked being a ‘Junior.’ And I never liked my name. I never wanted to…inflict it on my sons. And having a father like mine who got few things done in his life…well, you love him, of course, but you do want to…avoid the glare, sometimes.”

  We all drink, and think, or give a look like we’re doing so, anyway.

  “I do feel sorry for your kids, in a way,” LBJ says, with a nod up to the sky. “The first men to leave the Earth, and go somewhere else, and walk around. How can any kid live up to that?”

  “Well, there’s a lot more to be done up there, sir,” Ed says.

  “Yeah, I suppose so.”

  We stand there silent in the flickering firelight. When at last LBJ speaks again, it’s a question he could have posed to Ed, but he stares straight at me instead. “So. Really, no bullshit. What did it feel like?”

  It’s the question I hate, but I’m drunk enough to give an honest answer, at least. “Honestly, Mr. President, I didn’t pay attention to what it felt like.” I grin. “I had a lot of work to do. I was too busy just trying not to fuck it all up.”

  This gets a big hearty laugh.

  He leans in closer, closer than any man would ever do in polite company, closer than I get to my wife some weeks, and he speaks only to me: “Thank you for putting my name on the moon.”

  •••

  I feel a little better. But the smell has gotten worse.

  I do not understand it. I know Joe; I’m sure he did a thorough job.

  “The smell…it’s worse,” I tell him.

  “I did everything I could,” he said. “It seemed like it was getting worse before I closed the hatch, even. I think just moving him around was enough to…”

  He doesn’t need to say any more; we don’t want to think about this, much less talk about it. But we are going to have to do something.

  “We can’t go on like this. We’re going to have to do something.”

  Joe takes my temperature. That’s back to normal, at least.

  We have to do something.

  •••

  Ed’s funeral.

  West Point in February is a relentlessly dreary place. Other times of year, there’s a contrast with the rest of the world: splashes of color on Storm King and the Crow’s Nest, and the hills across the river. The eternal cadet joke is that West Point is the place where fun goes to die; in spring and summer and fall, the rest of the world looks alive, at least, and one can dream of escape, either to the glorious hills, or onboard silvery commuter trains to electric white New York, only an hour away. But in winter it feels like the Gothic architecture has somehow sucked the color from the rest of
the planet, like death has contaminated the land.

  We’ve driven through Thayer Gate, a forbidding portal of gray stone. Across the river is a mansion that, according to cadet lore, was used to film The Wizard of Oz. Coming here feels like Oz in reverse, like the trip back to Kansas, or worse. We roll past the Hotel Thayer and on down Thayer Road, big beautiful houses above us on the left, the icy river below us on the right, and through the tangle of barracks and academic buildings, and then into openness at last. There has been much construction since my cadet days, and much more is going on now, but here it feels the same, the open expanse of the snowy Plain, the barracks like arms reaching towards it. And of course all of it, past and future, built of stark gray granite.

  We are not stopping here, of course; we are proceeding around to Washington Road and down to the Old Cadet Chapel and the cemetery.

  It does not seem possible that we are here for this. The best among us always seem impossibly alive, in constant motion, immune somehow to the stillness, not only now, but in perpetuity. And Ed most of all.

  Pat is in the car with me. Pat, and the kids. Beautiful Pat, eyes full of an impossible sorrow whose depths know no bounds. We have spoken of practicalities and arrangements. It is difficult to know what else to say, difficult to look at her, even.

  “Lots of memories, I’m sure,” she says to me.

  “Yeah.” I think of Ed: friendships, conversations, adventures, all over now, forever. He has done great things; he has marked the Earth with his presence, at least, but that must be cold comfort to her now. I don’t know what else to say, but I know I must say something else. “It’s hard to believe it was home. But it does still feel like home.”

  “I’m glad we’re here, at least,” she says. There had been talk of Arlington instead, talk and pressure, but she’d held firm, and we’d held firm with her. “He would have wanted this, at least.”

  We arrive at the cemetery and disembark into the cold, a caravan of reluctant passengers facing the impossible. The same old scene: a panorama of cold stone and dead trees, a Hudson Gothic scene that Washington Irving would love. Now it has new meaning, awful meaning; now there will be new memories I could not have imagined two decades ago, new and bleak memories.