All That Outer Space Allows (Apollo Quartet Book 4)

by Ian Sales

  She smiles to take the sting from her words, but the memory of the fight with Walden still burns.

  Oh I know, says Mary. Joe’s the same, he’s not good with all the waiting, you’d think he’d be used to that being a test pilot, wouldn’t you?

  Joe already has an astronaut pin, hasn’t he? Flying the X-15?

  The what? Oh I don’t know, I guess.

  Mary pushes her shopping cart alongside Ginny’s and the two make their way, heels clattering, cart wheels squeaking, along the aisle in formation. As they pick items from the shelves and freezers, they discuss what selection by NASA might mean, both for their husbands and for themselves. It’s something Ginny, who has only really thought about the technology of space exploration, the launch vehicles and spacecraft, the science and engineering, has not considered. She has a book she has been reading, hidden in her underwear drawer where Walden will never find it: Americans into Orbit by Gene Gurney, “The Story of Project Mercury”. One day, she hopes, Walden will be in such a book. The issues raised by Mary are ones that have not occurred to Ginny: not only moving to Houston and finding somewhere to live, but being in the public eye, she’s seen the interviews in Life magazine, she’s seen the astronauts and their wives on television, she knows several of them have been invited to the White House and met the president, and there were ticker tape parades in New York for some of the Mercury Seven. Ginny wonders if she wants that—not that she will have any say in the matter if Walden is selected.

  If they ask him, he will accept—and nothing she can do will prevent him.

  #

  The telephone rings but before Ginny can get to her feet, Walden is up and striding into the hallway. She hears him answer, and then it is a succession of yes sir, of course sir, I would be honoured sir, yes sir, I’ll be there sir, yes sir. Someone from the base, she decides; and returns to her book. Moments later, Walden marches into the lounge and he is grinning fit to break his jaw.

  That, he says, was Deke Slayton.

  Ginny recognises the name. He is one of the Mercury Seven, although he never flew since he was diagnosed with a heart murmur. She remembers his headshot from page 89 of Americans into Orbit.

  From astronaut selection at NASA, Walden adds.

  She doesn’t need to ask, she can tell from Walden’s expression.

  I report in four weeks, he tells her.

  You’re going to be an astronaut, she says; and she doesn’t quite believe it. She puts down her book. An astronaut, she says again in wonder.

  He crosses to her, bends forward, grips her about the upper arms and hauls her to her feet. I am! he crows. I’m going into space!

  He wraps her in a tight hug and she can feel the righteousness beating off him like waves of heat. She can also feel where his fingers wrapped her arms and pressed hard enough to bruise.

  You might even go to the Moon, she says.

  She can’t help it, she’s grinning too now, she is as excited as he is.

  Shit, yeah! The Moon! I’m going to the goddamn Moon!

  He whirls her around, and she laughs giddily. Then he pulls her in close again and he says, I wanted this, Ginny, I really wanted it, I wanted it so bad.

  You deserve it, Walden, she tells him, you’re the best.

  She wraps her arms about his neck and pecks him on the cheek—because she’s happy for him, more than happy for him, his joy is hers too; and because she loves him.

  And later, she knows, he will prove his love for her in his own way.

  #

  HOUSTON, TEXAS…Nineteen pilots will join the astronaut team early in May, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced today. They will boost the total number of NASA astronauts to 50. Average age of the group is 33.3 years. Average number of college years 5.8, and average flight time is 2,714 hours, of which 1,925 hours is jet time. Two of the new astronauts have doctorates. Two are single. Four civilians are among those selected. Of the remainder, 7 are Air Force officers, 6 are Navy Officers, and 2 are Marine Corps officers.

  They include:

  Vance D. Brand, 34, an engineering test pilot for Lockheed assigned to the West German F-104G Flight Test Center at Istres, France. Brand, his wife and 4 children live at Martigues, France.

  Lt. John S. Bull, USN, 31, a test pilot at the Naval Air Station, Patuxent River, Maryland. Bull, his wife and son live on the base.

  Maj. Gerald P. Carr, USMC, 33, Tests Director Section, Marine Corps Air Facility, Santa Ana, California. Carr, his wife and 6 children live in Santa Ana.

  Capt. Charles M. Duke, Jr., USAF, 30, instructor at Aerospace Research Pilot School, Edwards Air

  Force Base, California. Duke, his wife and one son live in Edwards, Calif.

  Capt. Walden J. Eckhardt, USAF, 32, experimental test pilot, Edwards AFB, Calif. Eckhardt and his wife live in Edwards.

  Capt. Joe H. Engle, USAF, 33, aerospace research flight test officer assigned as project pilot for X-15, Edwards AFB, Calif. Engle, his wife and two children live in Edwards.

  Lt. Cdr. Ronald E. Evans, USN, 32, on sea duty in the Pacific. His wife and two children live in San Diego, Calif.

  Maj. Edward G. Givens, Jr., USAF, 36, project officer at the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center for the Astronaut Maneuvering Unit (Gemini experiment D-12). Givens, his wife and two children live in Seabrook (El Lago), Texas.

  Fred W. Haise, Jr., 32, NASA project pilot at Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif. Haise, his wife and 3 children live in Lancaster, Calif.

  Dr. Don L. Lind, 35, physicist at NASA Goddard Space flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland. Lind, his wife and 5 children live in Silver Spring, Md.

  Capt. Jack R. Lousma, USMC, 30, operational pilot at Marine Air Station, Cherry Point, North Carolina. Lousma, his wife and one son live in Newport, N.C.

  Lt. Thomas K. Mattingly, USN, 30, student in Aerospace Research Pilot School, Edwards AFB, Calif. He is single and lives on base.

  Lt. Bruce McCandless, III, USN, 28, working toward a doctorate in electrical engineering at Stanford University. McCandless, his wife and two children live in Mountain View, Calif.

  Lt. Cdr. Edgar D. Mitchell, USN, 35, student in Aerospace Research Pilot School, Edwards AFB, Calif. He has a doctor of science degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mitchell, hs wife and two daughters live in Torrance, Calif.

  Maj. William R. Pogue, USAF, 36, instructor in Aerospace Research Pilot School, Edwards AFB, Calif. Pogue, his wife and 3 children live at Edwards.

  Capt. Stuart A. Roosa, USAF, 32, experimental test pilot at Edwards AFB, Calif. Roosa, his wife and 4 children live in Edwards.

  John L. Swigert, Jr., 34, engineering test pilot for North American Aviation, Inc. He is single and lives in South Gate, Calif.

  Lt. Cdr. Paul J. Weitz, USN, 33, squadron operations officer. Weitz, his wife and two children live on Oak Harbor, Washington.

  Capt. Alfred M. Worden, USAF, 34, instructor at Aerospace Research Pilot School, Edwards AFB, Calif. Worden, his wife and two daughters live in Edwards.

  Recruiting of the new astronauts began Sept. 10, 1965. A total of 351 submitted applications, of which 159 met basic requirements. Of that number, 100 were military, 59 civilian. For consideration, applicants must have been a United States citizen; no taller than 6 feet; born on or after Dec. 1, 1929; have a bachelor degree in engineering, physical or biological sciences; and have acquired 1000 hours jet pilot time or have graduated from an armed forces test pilot school.

  Chapter 3

  Liftoff

  A month after the telephone call, Walden rents a car, leaving the Impala with Ginny, and drives to Houston, where he stays in a motel with some of the other guys from Edwards. Of the nineteen astronauts NASA has selected, nine, including Walden, are from Edwards Air Force Base. Ginny jokes in a letter to Joanna that the air of Edwards is so thick with the “Right Stuff”, with a miasma of testosterone blown this way and that, it drives the wildlife into reproductive frenzies. She’s not entirely joking—she has seen th
e other wives ballooning with fecundity at, to her, shockingly short intervals. She and Walden have only been here four years, but surely the streets didn’t used to ring quite so loudly and so frequently with the insistent laughter of children?

  It is something they have fought about. Ginny is not yet ready to be mired in motherhood, made subservient to her so-called biological clock. Nor is she willing to make a young child a hostage to Walden’s good fortune. It is her most telling argument, her one true defence—she will not agree to children while the chance exists Walden might be killed.

  Walden calls her the evening of his arrival in Houston—she has spent the day catching up on correspondence, there are so many people she wants to tell that her husband is now an astronaut; she feels guilty for boasting about it, but oh she feels so righteous in her bragging. She and Walden try to plan their immediate future. He will stay in the motel, and in his free time will look for somewhere more permanent to live. And then Ginny will join him.

  Two months later, she packs up the Impala, having made arrangements for the contents of the house on 16th Street to go into storage until sent for, and sets off on the 1,600-mile drive to her husband. She heads south to San Diego and spends the night with her mother and step-father in the house his successful landscape gardening firm has given them (though Ginny’s mother is the business brains). Ginny welcomes spending time in a properly organised world, where everything has its place because that’s the right place for it, not because military tradition, or orders from on high, say it is. There is a comforting sense of sanctuary, which Ginny feels especially keenly given her and Walden’s abrupt change in circumstances and location—not just the 1,600-mile move, but the glamour, the science, the complex engineering and, above all, the danger of Walden’s new career.

  It is dangerous, darling, isn’t it? asks mother, conveniently ignoring that test piloting is dangerous, that flying fighter jets in Germany is dangerous, that Ginny’s father was a naval aviator who did not survive the war—and whose haloed absence during her formative years no doubt led Ginny to romanticise pilots and so now she’s been married to one since graduating from SDSU.

  No one has died, Ginny tells her. They’ve had all those Mercury flights and Gemini flights, and everyone splashed down safely.

  Ginny cannot know she will be proven wrong before a year has passed. On 27 January 1967, no more than six months away, there is a fire in the Apollo 1 command module during a plugs-out test at Launch Complex 34. The crew of three, Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White, all perish. The Apollo program will be delayed for over eighteen months as the spacecraft is redesigned to rectify the defects which led to the tragedy. Ginny will spend that day weeping, like many of the other astronauts’ wives, not only because she knows the three widows, although not closely, and she knows the men, although barely at all, but because she has rudely learnt, as has every astronaut wife, that her husband flirts with jeopardy to a level she has not previously contemplated or wanted to believe.

  It is perhaps unfair to characterise Ginny as happily ignorant of the perils of spaceflight, and those specifically of the Apollo space program. She writes about space travel, after all; but in her stories it is all so easy, spaceships flying up into the heavens and zipping about the galaxy as if it were no more onerous than a cross-country flight in a plane or an ocean crossing aboard a liner. But that’s not entirely true—she has learned to live with the daily prospect of a uniformed stranger with a grave expression appearing on her doorstep, much as Lieutenant Colonel Hollenbeck did in the first paragraph of this novel. That incident not only illustrated the danger of Walden’s chosen profession, but showed also that Ginny’s immunity to it is no more than skin-deep, a thin veneer of confidence no thicker than a layer of Revlon’s “Touch & Glow” .

  And yet… The romance attached to NASA’s astronauts, to the organisation’s roster of successful space flights, makes Ginny believe her man is indeed safer now. Perhaps she only wants to believe it, as she gazes across the split-level lounge at her mother sprawled elegantly on a sofa, gimlet in one hand, cigarette in the other; and Ginny looks down at the gimlet in her own hand, and all she can think of is a softly-moaning desert beneath a sky like a dome of pure blue ceramic, and her imminent drive across three states through a landscape no different, to reach her husband, who may be going to the most desolate desert of them all on the surface of the Moon.

  #

  Ginny leaves early the next day, setting out on a California July morning that promises freshness but will no doubt soon blur to muggy haze, turning her back on the ocean, though she has not lived within sight of it for many years, and aiming the Impala at Tucson, Arizona. The US Highway 80 runs west out of San Diego, through the chaparral and canyons of the Cucamaya Mountains, across the green checkerboard fields of the Coachella Valley south of the Salton Sea, and down into the Sonoran Desert.

  I could perhaps pass quickly over the long drive east, much as Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke does in his autobiography Moonwalker: “Man, I’m an astronaut. I’ve got it made! I thought to myself as we rolled into Houston.” Or, as Willie G Moseley writes in his biography of Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa, Smoke Jumper, Moon Pilot: “the family traveled from California to Houston in a long station wagon”. Or even James Irwin, whose place in the space program Walden Jefferson Eckhardt has taken in this story, who wrote in his book, To Rule the Night: “I drove down to Houston in my little Kharmann Ghia and reported in at NASA May 10.”

  Journeys, however, are important in people’s lives, although they are probably accorded more importance than they strictly deserve in fiction. They’re not simply, in narrative terms, a relocation but also a metaphor for change—and for Ginny and Walden, great change has indeed entered their lives. This lonesome drive across Arizona and Texas is a threshold moment for Ginny. She is alone in the car, often alone on the road, in the desert, with nothing but herself and perhaps intermittent radio stations for company. She has been briefly enfolded in the maternal bosom, but now she is once again independent, her own woman—albeit linked to her husband of almost eight years by a strong thread of love and respect, and still identified in official correspondence as Mrs Walden J Eckhardt, as if she possesses no name of her own, no history prior to her marriage. Perhaps the landscape she drives through reflects her changing moods, perhaps it triggers trains of thought which speed alongside the Impala as it follows the endless asphalt, accompanied only by the hum of the car’s tyres, the throb of its engine and the whistle of the wind. She wonders if the surface of Mars resembles this near-lifeless land, she considers writing a story about the Red Planet. She remembers a serialised novel in Analog last year which was set on a desert world, where tribes from the deep desert fought Imperial occupiers who had seized their planet to control a unique substance required for interstellar travel. The author’s name was Frances, but they all knew it was a man—editor Kay Tarrant, conscious of her magazine’s readership, felt a female pen-name more appropriate.

  The Impala is not fitted with air-conditioning and once out of the mountains the interior of the car quickly heats up. Even with the windows down, the air is close and seems to possess a hot and smothering weight. Ginny has anticipated this and is wearing a pair of white cotton shorts, but when the backs of her thighs begin to stick to the seat she realises she has chosen badly. She feels quite invisible in this vast empty landscape, a brightly-coloured mote adrift on a sea of sand grains… But she proves sadly all too visible when she stops for gas at a station on the outskirts of Tucson. The shorts, her bare legs, attract male attention, not just eyes she can feel creeping all over her, but comments and whistles too. She’s not in California now, she has spent too long in military society, it has slipped her mind the impact a lone woman, especially an under-dressed one, might have among male strangers. She pays for her gasoline quickly, eager to return to the solitude of the road.

  #

  #

  The route from San Diego to Houston is very different in 20
15 to how it existed in 1966. A single Interstate, I-10, now stretches from Santa Monica, California, to Jacksonville, Florida, crossing the state of Texas at its widest point. Much of I-10 was built during the 1970s and so predates Ginny’s migration—and sometimes not everything required for research can be found online. This is one of the perils of writing a story set in the past and in another nation, “a different country” in both senses of the phrase.

  Ginny spends the night in a motel in El Paso, and the following morning she dresses more comfortably, and modestly, in a mid length checked cotton skirt. She takes to the road early, driving south out of El Paso, scrubby desert to either side and the road running runway-straight through it, and off to her right a line of dark green marking the fertile valley of the Rio Grande, and beyond it the tumbled purple blocks of the Sierra Madre louring on the horizon. She finds the scenery bleak and oppressive and elects to push on, thirteen straight hours behind the wheel; and though San Antonio promises a welcome haven when she reaches the city in the evening, she presses on and arrives in League City just after nine at night.

  Walden seemed unconcerned at the prospect of her “solo flight”, and his directions to the apartment he has rented in League City are perfunctory—she has to forgive him, he has other things on his mind—but she finds the Cardinal Apartments easily enough, turning off the Gulf Freeway onto Main Street, and there it is, on the other side of US 75 in one of the new subdivisions, at the top of Texas Avenue, two or so miles from the junction.

  She slips her bare feet into her sandals, clambers from the Impala and stretches. Pulling her sunglasses from her crown, she throws them onto the car’s bench seat, and then turns about and regards her surroundings. The Cardinal Apartments, looking more like a motel than an apartment complex, with a balcony giving access to second floor apartments. But the area is certainly greener than she has been used to, greener than the Mojave around Edwards with its bent and twisted Joshua trees, greener than the scrubby garden of their house on 16th Street, greener than the desert she has spent the last day driving through. She can see the black clouds of trees against the glowing night sky across the street, and hear the conspiratorial whisper of their leaves in the faint breeze. From somewhere over the trees, the hum of traffic faintly intrudes. The temperature is about eighty, a little warmer than Edwards. She turns back to the apartment building, and is hit by a flood of tiredness. In a single moment, she feels all those hours of driving, and her lack of motion gives her a sharp and momentary sense of vertigo, a brief spin of nauseating dizziness.