by Ian Sales
Walden is speaking: See, we fly the LM down from lunar orbit to the surface, it’s mostly all done by the pings but we might have to take over for the last few feet.
Ginny has recovered from her near-fainting fit. She turns to her husband and says, Pings? Like they have in submarines?
But no, that can’t be right—there’s no air in space, so there’s no sound, Ginny knows that much.
Pings, says Walden, P-G-N-C-S, Primary Guidance, Navigation and Control System.
So how does that work? she asks. Explain it to me, like you would to another astronaut.
Another astronaut? asks Walden.
You know what I mean. She grins—and adds, I love it when you talk dirty.
It is intended to be a joke, a lightening of the mood, though this cramped cabin with its grey instrument panels doesn’t lend itself to frivolity.
Walden evidently feels that way: Dirty? It’s technical, Ginny.
Tell me about the switches and these things—what do you call these things?
Barber poles.
And this? What’s this? she asks and presses idly on the number-pad. Verb? she asks. Noun?
Diskey, he tells her.
She looks at him, not understanding.
He spells it out: D S K Y—Display Keyboard. We call it the diskey.
What’s it for?
Programming the guidance computer, he tells her.
And all these switches?
Jeez, Ginny, you want me to explain every one we’ll be here all day.
What’s these ones? Ascent He, Descent He. What’s He?
The moment she says it, she figures out that “He” is helium, but she says nothing as Walden replies:
The fuel for the rocket engines has to be kept pressurised, so we use helium because it’s inert.
Ginny may have studied Lit at SDSU, but she knows what helium is.
The fuel for the engines is hypergolic, Walden adds.
There’s a relish to the way he says “hypergolic”, like it’s a secret word, the password to some secret club. Ginny doesn’t know what it means, why should she? Yet she can think of plenty of words Walden could not define, and not just ones like “camisole” or “pleat”, but even scientific terms she has come across during her years of reading science fiction, such as “parsec” and “semantics”. She even knows what the Fermi Paradox is, and she’s pretty sure Walden has no idea.
Hypergolic, he explains, means the two fuels ignite as soon as they mix. We don’t need to burn them, like on the Saturn V.
They should use women as astronauts, we’re smaller, says Ginny, we’d use less fuel, we even use less oxygen, less water, less food.
It takes more than that, hon. It takes years of training, of flying jet fighters.
So flying a spacecraft is like flying a jet fighter?
Well, no, not really, I guess.
So why do astronauts need to be jet fighter pilots?
It’s complicated.
Walden, you can’t even cook a roast dinner, and you’re telling me being an astronaut is too complicated for a woman?
Women could never be astronauts, he insists. It’s just the way it is.
She doesn’t know it, but Ginny’s point has already been proven—as I have written elsewhere in another work of fiction. In August 1961, Dr W Randolph Lovelace II gave a talk at a symposium of aerospace scientists in Stockholm in which he declared women better suited as astronauts, based on the medical testing he had given to female pilot Geraldyne M Cobb. “We are already in a position to say that certain qualities of the female space pilot are preferable to those of her male colleague,” he told his audience. Cobb’s testing was in all the newspapers, and covered extensively by Life magazine—but Ginny’s journey of discovery, her exploration into making use of her husband’s profession in her science fiction writing, requires her to be ignorant of the Mercury 13. And so the Eckhardts were in Germany at that time, and Ginny’s chief link with home was her science fiction magazines. Which, for some reason, made no mention of it, a lack of sisterly solidarity that might be considered uncharacteristic, although perhaps the magazines’ readerships mostly felt, as Jackie Cochran did when she testified before a Congressional subcommittee against a women’s astronaut program, that it was men’s job to lead the way and for women to follow on and “pick up the slack”.
And isn’t that what Ginny is doing? Letting her man lead the way. Of course she’s not qualified to be an astronaut—she watches her weight and tries to exercise, but she’s no athlete; and she cannot fly an airplane, there is only one licenced pilot in the AWC, and that’s Trudy.
But now that Ginny considers it, as she stands inside the lunar module simulator, it occurs to her that while she can never become an astronaut herself there’s no reason why she can’t write about them. Not something like Judith’s story about the tramp spaceship with the male doctor in an otherwise all-female crew, a story that has been a perennial favourite since its original appearance a decade before. No, Ginny is thinking of something much closer to home, a space program much like Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, those first faltering steps into space… but by women.
The more she thinks about it, the more she likes the idea. She has access to much of the material Walden is using in his training, she can probably get hold of some press kits, and she can use it for research, for the background to her stories. And the more she finds out, the more she understands what an astronaut is and does, the more she will be a better partner to Walden, understand his frustrations, emotionally support him.
It doesn’t occur to her until later that perhaps Walden will object to Ginny “interfering” in his area of expertise. He is the astronaut in the family, she is the wife. As a military man, Walden has always been keen on well-defined areas of responsibility—his den is out of bounds, her dressing-room is of no interest to him; the mess he makes it is her job to tidy up, any mess she might make is, of course, her job to clean up…
They exit the LM simulator and as Ginny stands at the top of the steps, she asks, Are they the same? The other two simulators?
They’re command modules, Walden replies.
Oh, can I see inside one of those?
Walden glances across at the LM simulator console, there’s a lone pencil-neck with his head down, busy doing something, programming perhaps. I guess, Walden says.
But the CM simulator is accessed via a steep ladder leading up to a hatch in the side of the cone-shaped spacecraft. There’s no way Ginny can climb that in her high-heeled pumps, so she slips them off, hands them to Walden, and starts up the ladder. She looks back over her shoulder, and there are a couple of guys over at one of the computer banks and they’re gazing in her direction, so she puts a hand to her skirt to keep it pressed against the back of her legs. It’s an inelegant scramble to get through the hatch and inside the CM, and it’s such a cramped space in there, she can’t believe three grown men—in spacesuits!—will fly to the Moon in it, even she has to duck her head. She works her way round to where three seats in a row gaze up at a wide instrument panel covered in switches and dials and meters and barber poles; and there’s the diskey, recognising it makes her smile. But just then she feels something catch her calf, and she looks down and says, Oh shoot. She has snagged her nylons on something and now there’s a run up one leg from the heel to the back of her knee. She can’t be seen around the MSC like that, so she hikes up her skirt, slips her fingers under the waistband of her pantyhose—
Jeez, Ginny!
It’s Walden, filling the hatchway.
What the hell are you doing?
She peels off her hose, an awkward manoeuvre in the tight space, scrunches it up and passes it to her husband, asking, Can you put this in your pocket?
On the way back to the parking lot, Walden and Ginny bump into Al Shepard, the first American into space. She’s heard the stories about the “icy commander” but they must have caught him on a good day, he is charm itself, shaking Walden’s hand vigorousl
y, flashing a boyish grin at Ginny, maybe even flirting with her a little.
Afterward, Ginny can’t help saying, Fancy meeting Alan Shepard, a real astronaut!
I’m a real astronaut too, protests Walden.
She hugs his arm with both hands and pecks him on the cheek. Sorry, darling, she tells him, I just meant he’s been into space; but you will too, Walden, I know you will.
But she’s thinking about someone else going into space, someone who is not real.
#
Dear Mr. Pohl,
V. G. Parker’s February story, “The Spaceships Men Don’t See” deserves some comments on its frankly bizarre approach to telling what could have been a sound and ingenious piece of science fiction. Much as we may love them, wives have no place in serious science fiction. Or, if they must appear, it should be in the background, nobly supporting their men. But Mr. Parker, for reasons best known only to himself, decides that rather than science and engineering we should be presented with womanly gossip and high heels. Perhaps he thought he was being clever.
If that’s his excuse, I have no idea what might be your excuse for publishing this story. Your male readers greatly outnumber your female readers, and that’s a stone-cold fact. We are not in the littlest bit interested in women’s affairs. If we wanted that, we would be reading a woman’s magazine and not Galaxy.
Robert Allman
4597 Seaview Ave.
Tampa, Fla. 33611
Chapter 7
Lunar Transfer Injection
Soon after, Walden is invited to join the support crew for the Apollo 10 mission, which is the one that will be going to the Moon but not actually landing on it. There is some sort of rota which NASA uses to determine who flies when and on which mission. Because Walden has been picked for a support crew, he thinks the chances are good he will get an actual flight. Or so he tells Ginny. Tom picked him for this support crew, that’s evidence of Tom’s confidence in his abilities, Walden is sure of it. For Ginny, it makes more real the prospect of her husband going to the Moon, and while before she felt proud and honoured, now she begins to feel a little bit afraid.
It’s not like spaceflight has proven any more dangerous than she’d imagined—Apollo 1 happened on the ground, after all; although everyone still bears the scars of the tragedy. The Soviets have lost only a single cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, who plummetted to the ground from orbit and scuttlebutt has it he was cursing all the way down. But Apollo 7 launches safely in October, and three guys spend ten days in orbit testing all the systems in the re-designed command module.
Ginny, accompanying Pam and Mary, drops by Loella’s house, and she sits in the Cunninghams’ lounge, sipping coffee, the other women also smoking cigarettes, and though Loella casts an occasional worried glance at the NASA squawk box on the dresser, the conversation mostly confines itself to gossip about the AWC. They don’t talk about the Vietnam War, though they know women from their air force, navy and marine corps days whose husbands are over there fighting. They don’t mention the protest in Atlantic City against the Miss America pageant—after all, what do they have in common with those women, the protestors or the contestants? The Olympics in Mexico City, the opening ceremony was the day after the Apollo 7 launch, doesn’t enter the conversation. This is the year in which both Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated and now, months later, neither event is ever mentioned at the AWC. Oh, there was a peace march through Houston after King’s death, and the Houston Chronicle claimed an astronaut participated…
This is Togethersville and talk runs along well-worn rails: Apollo flights, home life, church, children… A practiced litany of domestic details with ample opportunity for sympathy, humour, boasting and envy. Ginny lets the words wash over her, there’s something about Wally and Donn, the flight’s not going well and the way they’ve been talking back to Houston, it could be the end of their careers.
Dodie, the Life journalist, she’s with the Schirras today, so they can talk freely. They can all smell a rat in the Eisele home, but everyone knows Togethersville has more than its fair share of rodents. Ginny listens with a fixed smile on her face and she wonders if her husband is as faithless as these women claim astronauts by nature are. What else, besides the training, the swagger, the constant broadcasting of the Right Stuff, must her husband do to get a shot at the Moon? And she worries how easy it would be for Walden to get himself into a situation where he never gets a flight.
Now that Walden is supporting Apollo 10, she sees less of him than ever. He spends most of the week at the Cape, and he doesn’t always fly home for the weekend. Has his behaviour changed? She can’t tell, she’s an Air Force wife, it’s always been like this. If there is a difference now—other than the quality of housing, and the fact they actually own the property—it’s this: whatever Walden is doing is in the public eye. No more military secrets. He can talk about it. He doesn’t, of course; not with Ginny. But she is still bent on her plan to learn more about Walden’s profession, the only thing putting a brake on it is his frequent absences.
Ginny drives home from the Cunningham house on automatic pilot. She knows about closed communities, she’s lived in them for most of her life, Air Force bases and, now she thinks about it, science fiction is much the same. Though her friends are scattered about the country, and they talk via letters and the occasional telephone call, they are all just as inward-looking, as cut-off from the real world, as Togethersville.
Ginny lives in two worlds, a high-heeled pump in each, and neither world seems much interested in reality. And though both exist for pretty much the same reason, the links between them are few and weak. When she goes shopping, and she sees those meagre handfuls of science fiction paperbacks in the book stores, with their gaudy covers featuring pretty women in spacesuits, piloting spaceships or exploring alien worlds; and then over by the magazines, there’s Life, with a Saturn V on a pillar of flame arrowing across the cover.
Are the two really so far apart?
Back at the house, Ginny kicks off her shoes, in the bedroom she strips down to her panties and bra and then, almost reverently, takes her slacks and plaid shirt from the chest of drawers. She sits on the double-bed she shares these days with Walden only on occasional weekends, and gazes down at the folded garments in her lap. It’s been nearly eighteen months since she wrote ‘The Spaceships Men Don’t See’ and though she tells herself she’s been too busy to write in the months since, she knows she’s blocked. She can’t tell her friends, she can’t mention it in her letters to Ursula, Ali, Judith, Joanna… It’s a confession too far, if there’s one thing the AWC has taught her it’s that you only open up so much—hell, if there’s one thing marriage has taught her, it’s that some things need to remain secrets.
The truth is, she’s been meaning to make good on her epiphany in the lunar module simulator eight months ago, but every time she sneaks a look at one of Walden’s training manuals the scale of the task she has set herself overwhelms her. So she goes and cleans the bathroom. Or she calls up Mary or Louise or Dotty. Or she does a million and one other things that are not writing science fiction or trying to learn how an Apollo spacecraft functions. She has been co-opted, assimilated: she has become an astronaut wife.
It’s not how Ginny sees herself, not inside, it’s a part she has been playing, that’s all. These slacks, this plaid shirt, they’re the real Virginia Grace Eckhardt née Parker. It was so easy to be her, back in those days at Edwards, of ceramic blue skies and desert heat and that fine layer of dust which settled on every surface, living miles from anywhere; science fiction was a lifeline, one she clung to with a desperation born of despair. But, oh, how easily she has been corrupted by this new life gifted her by NASA, by that shining beacon in the night sky—which, for the first time in the history of Man, it’s become possible to visit.