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

by Gerald Brennan

  “Buzz.”

  After the last letter, he pauses, and looks up with something I don’t imagine you see much on a thick Irish police veteran: confusion.

  “Tell the sergeant your real first name,” the kid says.

  “It’s Buzz! BZZZZZZZZ. Buzz. Like what I’ve got now.” In my drunkenness, this is hilarious. “It was Edwin. I had it legally changed.”

  The kid: “He says he walked on the moon.”

  “Very funny, wiseguy,” Mr. Potatohead says. “What’s your real name?”

  “That’s my name!” I lean forward on the desk and grin stupidly, like I’m actually going to impress him, but it occurs to me my appearance has changed, and maybe that’s why they’re not getting the joke. “I have a beard. I didn’t used to have a beard. But it’s me.”

  “Hands off the desk, mister.” But he looks down and sees my class ring, my crass mass of brass and glass, my bold mold of rolled gold. “Wait, you are…” And just like the guy in the car lot, he looks around like it’s Candid Camera, like Allen Funt’s going to pop out at any moment and tell him it’s all a silly sham, which at this point I kinda still feel like it is.

  “Yep! And you know what my mom’s maiden name is? It’s MOON. M. O. O. N. Moon, moon, moon, moon, moon.”

  “Shhhh!” He shushes me, which I don’t expect, but when I look around there are other officers curiously eavesdropping on the proceedings. “Good Lord. This is…” He looks up at the kid. “What are we booking him for?”

  The kid comes over behind the desk and whispers something in his ear.

  “Uh-huh,” the sergeant says. Then to me: “Finish what you were telling me. Quietly.”

  “My mother’s maiden name is Moon,” I whisper.

  “Not that quietly.”

  “Moon. Isn’t that funny? Moon. How’s that for being born under a bad sign? Except I guess it’s not, it’s a…good…heavenly body. But I can’t go back there anymore! I’ve lost access to this heavenly body.”

  And now he just shakes his head a little, and if this were one of those corny cop shows, it’d probably be the point where he says: Now I really have seen it all. Instead he goes: “Well I would say it’s a pleasure to meet you…”

  Another glimmer of hope opens up. “You want an autograph?”

  “Well, I…”

  “It’s OK. I don’t mind. We can take care of this right here! Take some pictures together. This doesn’t have to be a big deal, does it?” I’m babbling. I don’t know what I’m saying. I just want this all to go away, to dissolve into handshakes and backslaps and good feelings.

  He leans back. “Look. Colonel…”

  “Buzz! I insist.” I continue, oblivious, fumbling around on my person for a pen.

  “Look. Buzz. If I may call you that. I’d say it’s a pleasure to meet you…”

  I don’t have a pen in my pockets, but there’s one on the desk there, and I lunge for it. “Sometimes I charge, but I guess for this, I…”

  “Stop!” He snatches the pen away. “Look. I’d say it’s a pleasure to meet you, but it’s never a pleasure to meet anyone under these circumstances. Especially someone who should know better.”

  This at last snaps me back.

  He continues, looking straight at me, relentlessly. “So I don’t want your autograph. My kids, they look up to you guys. We all look up to you. We followed every mission, we were all watching together when you landed, I let ‘em stay up to watch all the coverage. And now…I don’t want to get your autograph and have to explain how I got it. And besides, it’d be unprofessional. In fact, if you are offering to give me something valuable, a favor in exchange for a favor, well, that could be construed as bribery.”

  These words smack me. And now there is a sadness welling up in me, moon-shaped pools of tears welling at the bottom of my eyes, and all I can think is: pathetic. Pathetic. Pathetic. Whatever else I’ve done in my life, this is me here now, a drunk under arrest.

  “But we could play this a few different ways. In fact, I…” He looks down at my last name already written indelibly in the blotter. “Let’s just sit down and have a little chat. Hansen…”

  The youngster perks up: “Yeah, Sarge?”

  “Get a chair here. And get us some coffee, would you. One for me and one for…Buzz, here. Cream and sugar?”

  “Uhh…that’s fine.”

  Hansen parks a chair besides me and disappears. I sit.

  “I take it this is the first time you’ve been arrested.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Bad night?”

  “Well, I’ve…to be honest, I have…this is…this has been a problem. The drinking stuff. I totaled a car a while back, I’ve made an ass out of myself on many occasions, I…” Again I break down, all the sorrow and the shame. “…I’ve been trying to quit, I just…”

  At this, a little impish glimmer of a smile appears on his face. “So, yeah, the thing of it is, there’s people who have no business drinking. I’m one of those people. I told myself it was the stress of the job, everything I’d seen and done. And I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t do it every day. Work hard, play hard,’ and all that. But regardless of that, I’ve got no business drinking. When I drink, I do things…well, let’s just say, when I drink, I’m no better than anybody I arrest.”

  I nod dumbly.

  “I was always judging people harshly, too. That was the thing of it. And that added to my level of stress. I threw the book at people, even knowing that I just as easy coulda been in the book. But I’ve learned to be…fair. The thing is, as a cop, the less serious the crime, the more latitude you have in how to deal with it. You understand? Some people just need to make some changes, and once they do that, they don’t end up coming back to places like this.”

  “I’ve been trying to change. It just hasn’t worked.”

  “Trying? Like how?”

  “Well, I’ve been meeting people, trying to get sober. This guy Clancy was telling me today…”

  “You know Clancy?” He smirks. “Well I’ll be a sonofabitch. So maybe we know some of the same people. Which is funny.”

  “Oh, yeah!” And here I make the mistake of smiling.

  “Well, you know those people, but you’re still here.” He frowns, leans back. “So you really really should know better. And I’m talking to you while you’re still drunk, so it might be a waste of breath even talking to you.”

  I deflate.

  “I will say, some people don’t get it right away. They still think they can figure everything out on their own. You don’t know if you’re doing them a favor if you let ‘em off easy. They need bad things to happen to them before they’re willing to change. If you prevent that, you might just…” Hansen comes back with the coffee. I take mine. The sergeant just sits his on the desk and continues. “…you might just be helping them think they can get away with it. You might be aiding in their destruction. You understand?”

  I don’t know what to say, so I go back to the dumb nod.

  “Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. Sometimes reporters come by here. Reporters from the Times, on the police beat. And we don’t always like them, but they are members of the public, and the public has a right to know what we do as cops, because they are paying our salaries. Sometimes they do get to look at the blotter, see if there’s any names they recognize.” He stares again at me. “And some people, well, frankly, they need that level of shame and humiliation to actually make some changes in their life. Lotta cops, they do the wrong thing, their friends keep ‘em out of trouble, and it does ‘em no good. They get drunk at home one night and they eat their service revolver. You understand?”

  I’m not sure I do, but I nod.

  “OK. So I don’t entirely know what to do here. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Fair enough.” He gestures with his hands and knocks the Styrofoam cup over, right on the blotter, spilling it all over the new page with my name on it. “Oops! Son of a bitch. Looks like I ruined a page.” He tears the p
age out of the blotter and crumples it up. “You know what this means?”

  I look at him stupidly until I see that he does, in fact, want an answer. “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know. That’s up to you.” He stares deep into me. “I mean, obviously, there was some sloppiness on my part that led to a clerical error. But you can read into it whatever you want. Maybe a professional courtesy. Maybe a wake-up call. I don’t know if it’s good or bad or what. If this is what it takes for you to do what you need to do, it’ll be the best thing that ever happened to you. But if you go out, get behind the wheel drunk and kill someone…”

  I take a deep breath. Such things are certainly not outside the realm of possibility.

  “All I know is, for now, you’re free to go.” He gestures behind me to the lobby, to the three steps leading down to the glass doors out front, and the dark uncertainty of the Los Angeles night.

  •••

  Eventually, I quit drinking. I have to. Or else I die, and in the meantime, live in a way that dying seems like the better option.

  It takes work to stay sober and find happiness. It takes a lot of work, actually, writing in massive notebooks, following new and unfamiliar procedures to take stock of things, dealing in the unfamiliar territory of feelings and emotions, of places inside of me I’ve never seen; and after that work, it takes still more, bringing someone else along for the ride, talking for hours over coffee about all of my relationships, waking up to everything I’ve done, and everything I’m capable of doing.

  Still I find myself staring up at the sky and dreaming.

  I find myself buying notebooks and slide rules and calculators, trying to get ideas out of my head and down on paper, sketching out drawings of possibilities, crunching numbers to make them real. I imagine a new way to design a spacecraft, walls filled with water to absorb cosmic and solar radiation, and perhaps a massive loop of wire that could be cast out into space and charged with current to create an artificial magnetosphere. I calculate planetary orbits and resonances between them, and imagine spacecraft cycling between the planets regularly, like ships on the great trade routes.

  In the meantime, I do what I can to enjoy my days here on Earth, to truly enjoy them and live in the moment, to ski and scuba dive and have fun, not to get away from anything or anyone, but to live more fully.

  I know I will never leave the planet again, but I do not want to end my days staring at pictures of myself and reliving the high points. (There are those in the service who assemble all their plaques and trophies on a living room wall so they’re all in one place: an I-love-me wall, a barricade against bad feelings, a shrine to the ego. There are those among my former coworkers who glory in their uniqueness, who take pride in having done things no one else has done. I cannot live that way. I want others to have these experiences, too; I no longer want to be alone.)

  I try to stay busy, but I catch myself thinking sometimes about parallel universes, these strange possibilities. Sometimes it feels like a waste of time: if these possibilities can’t be made real, does it do any good to think about them? Still, I wonder. Maybe there are an infinite number of universes, and we’re only conscious of the one where we’ve made the right decisions to learn whatever we need to learn. Or maybe there’s only one universe, vibrating like a guitar string, a cloud of possibility, a wave function with fixed endpoints; maybe time collapses all those possibilities into the firmness and reality of the here and now, and then at the end it cycles backward, erasing history and mistake and memory until we’re back at the Big Bang and all is new again, and like a wave crashing into a seawall it reverberates, turns forward once more, and when each of us returns we get to redo it all, with no knowledge of what we did before, and the chance to run through it again, and make it all slightly different.

  Would I make all the same decisions if I could do it over again? Who can say? I know when I see the stars that there are so many places I can never go. I know I’ve learned to love this life here on Earth, and not just the adventures; I’ve learned to wake up and pour a cup of coffee and spill in the creamer and watch it swirl; when I’m in the right frame of mind, it’s as beautiful and intricate as any planet or nebula.

  But waking and dreaming are both part of life. So I still go out at night and look at the stars and the planets, the places I’ll never go, and the places I’ve been. And often I pick one bright spot out of the night sky, one spot redder than all, and brighter than most: Mars. Maybe in some other universe, I’ve already been there. Perhaps in another, you’ll be there soon.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I love space stories not just because they give me the opportunity to be an astronaut without dealing with training and rejection, but also because of the built-in structure: a mission with a clear beginning, middle, and end. One doesn’t necessarily need to come up with the bones of the story; one can simply unearth ones that were buried decades ago. I first heard about the preliminary studies for a manned Venus flyby while browsing Wikipedia; David Portree’s articles on the topic for Wired were an excellent extra resource to flesh out my understanding. What’s more, when I contacted him, he was gracious enough to provide copies of the original preliminary studies, the primary source materials he’d read to understand the various mission profiles and probe packages.

  - NASA Technical Memorandum X-53434, “Analysis of an Interplanetary Trajectory Targeting Technique with Application to a 1975 Venus Flyby Mission,” Bobby Ellison, April 12, 1966

  - Bellcomm, Inc. Document TR-67-600-1-1, “Manned Venus Flyby,” M.S. Feldman et. al., February 1, 1967

  - NASA MSC Internal Note No. 67-FM-25, “Preliminary Mission Study of a Single-launch Manned Venus Flyby with Extended Apollo Hardware,” Jack Funk and James Taylor, February 13, 1967

  - Bellcomm, Inc. Document TR-67-730-1, “Preliminary Considerations of Venus Exploration via Manned Flyby,” D.E. Cassidy et. al., November 30, 1967

  While there were several different proposals, the Funk and Taylor document provided much of the basis for my narrative, and I can’t thank David enough for sending me a copy.

  One does get somewhat paranoid about technical accuracy while writing such things; while the documents gave me a good idea of mission timeframes and timelines, I wanted to know accurate spacecraft speeds and communications delay times for each day of the mission. Towards that end, Daniel Adamo was an invaluable resource. He designed a trajectory which aped the Funk and Taylor document, which provided me the essential details to feel confident in my narrative; he also plotted everything out in Celestia so I could see what Venus would look like at various points during the mission. He truly went above and beyond the call of duty, and far beyond what the average person might do to help a stranger from the internet. (He also made several very astute edits to my first manuscript draft.)

  I owe Benjamin Honey a tremendous debt of thanks for supporting my previous books, and for getting me in touch with Dan. Ben does great work for NASA; in his spare time, he runs an excellent blog at “Rockets From Cassiopeia.” (He also tweets at @spaceguy87.)

  Dr. James Logan of the Space Enterprise Institute was gracious enough to give detailed answers to several of my emailed questions about radiation in space, and the potential effects of a large coronal mass ejection (and cosmic background radiation) on astronauts in deep space. He also passed along some very interesting papers: “Space Radiation: The Elephant in the Room Trumpets,” a commentary he wrote in February of 2016, and “The Day the Earth (Almost) Stood Still,” a piece on coronal mass ejections that he published in September of 2014.

  David Hitt’s Homesteading Space was an invaluable resource for learning about the program of solar observation carried out during the Skylab missions in 1973-74. I adapted these programs for my fictional crew so they’d have something useful to do on the long voyage. David was also a great help in discussing the personalities of some of the astronauts he knew, particularly Joe Kerwin.

  I used NASA Document SP-402, “A New Sun: The
Solar Results From Skylab” to sharpen my own understanding of the sun, and as fodder for Kerwin’s dialogue on the topic in my manuscript. It’s a delightfully well-written document, and well worth a quick Google search.

  I modeled my fictionalized protagonist on details of Buzz Aldrin’s life as recorded in his books Return to Earth and Magnificent Desolation. They’re both very worthwhile reads. (On a personal note, I particularly admire Buzz for his candor and willingness to discuss the lows of his life as well as the highs; these discussions give courage to all of us who have dealt with similar issues.)

  Neal Thompson’s Light this Candle is absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in Alan Shepard, or the early space program, or anyone who just wants to read a cool biography; it’s lively, engaging, and thoroughly researched, and it was a tremendous aid in my efforts to capture a version of this complicated and fascinating man on the page.

  I read a good deal of mission transcripts to try and fill in the blanks at various stages in the mission with (hopefully) convincing dialogue. Of particular value were the transcripts for Apollo 11, 14, 15 and 16, and for the first, second and third manned Skylab missions, which are of course confusingly numbered as Skylab 2, 3 and 4.

  Details from the descent of the Venus probes were inspired by passages in Rockets and People, Boris Chertok’s excellent memoir of the Soviet space program.

  Jay Gallentine’s Infinity Beckoned: Adventuring Through the Inner Solar System, 1969-1989 is an enjoyable and highly readable guide to early robotic space exploration, and the science and technology behind our earliest real searches for life on other planets.

  Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir by Bryan Burrough is a great and compelling book about the human stresses and strains that can manifest themselves during long-duration spaceflight. (This book’s about one of the forgotten near-tragedies of human space exploration, but if you’d like a break from space, Burrough’s Public Enemies is one of the most gripping pieces of nonfiction I’ve ever read.)