‘You could get fitted for prosthetics tomorrow if you wanted to. Your back is strong enough. The phantom pain . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Might get better if you had prosthetics.’
‘Or worse.’
Dr McAlpine made a steeple of his fingers and peered at Nicholas over it. ‘You don’t strike me as someone who would let pain stop you doing what you want.’
‘Are you kicking me out?’
‘No. We don’t kick anyone out. You can stay as long as you want to. The ongoing therapy is still good for you,’ he added, as if realising Nicholas needed something — anything — so he would not have to admit exactly why he needed to be there. Or at least, not elsewhere, not at home in Sydney with his parents, nor a repatriation hospital with men too like himself.
‘Would you fit the legs here? Or do I have to go somewhere else?’
‘Your choice. You’ll need several months at least of therapy before you can use them easily. But you must have guessed that already. Here or Sydney, whichever you prefer.’
‘A . . . friend and I have talked about getting a flat together in Sydney, near the uni.’ He carefully did not say the friend was Jed. The Thompsons might not believe that she was related to them, but he guessed that Nancy and Tommy, at least, would be protective. Nancy might not regard a couple living together as a sin, but she’d also want to know why Nicholas did not simply propose.
‘What’s up?’ Dr McAlpine’s tone was gentle.
Nicholas attempted a smile. ‘Does it sound crazy to say that I don’t feel ready for new legs yet? Or Sydney,’ he added honestly.
‘But you’d like a break from living with a hundred kids around you?’
Nicholas nodded.
‘Funny coincidence. My sister Flinty rang me up last night. One of her grandsons was at school with you. Lenny Mack? He apparently told Flinty you were here. She wanted to know if you’d like to stay with them for a while. It’s our old family place, up in the Snowies. Flinty and her husband breed horses, though Flinty’s books are their real income. You may have come across them.’
‘Flinty McAlpine? I’ve heard of her, of course. I didn’t realise she was your sister.’
Dr McAlpine grinned. ‘Horse books not your thing? Mine either.’
‘I couldn’t impose —’
‘Flinty wouldn’t offer if she didn’t want you there. She was in a wheelchair herself, for a while. She’ll know what you need. You’re writing a book too, aren’t you? She might be able to help you meet a publisher, or however it’s done. Think it over, anyway.’
‘Yes. Please thank your sister. Thank you too. But I don’t know what I want just yet. Maybe if I could just go on as I am for a while? I don’t want to seem ungrateful . . .’
‘Sometimes there are worse wounds than physical ones,’ said Dr McAlpine lightly. ‘I was a prisoner of war for over three years.’
Nicholas waited for the man to say more about the experience. He didn’t.
Nicholas wheeled himself out of the surgery, through the waiting room, down the ramp. It seemed disloyal to Jed to postpone getting his legs, to even consider retreating to the calm silence of the mountains, the home of an elderly woman who preferred things quiet. Jed needed Sydney if she was to go to university. But did he?
He couldn’t even turn on his transistor radio these days. Not since the story of the My Lai massacre had been flung upon the world.
What had happened at My Lai? Was it truly a massacre of innocents? Did the safe-at-home protesters realise that the Viet Cong didn’t wear uniforms, not in the villages nor in their vast tunnels?
A child in the rice paddy might be an innocent . . . or carrying hand grenades. The girl in her cheongsam might carry a machine gun at night. The old woman, smiling welcome from her front door, might be luring you to linger till the bullets ripped through you, shattered your friends.
Crowds had cheered when he had marched to war. Were the same faces protesting now?
He wanted to yell: ‘You voted for the politicians who sent me there. Who is guilty? You or me?’
And that, of course, was no exoneration.
He hadn’t thought if the war was right or wrong, four years earlier, when his birth date was pulled out of the ballot. Hadn’t wanted Vietnam, not really, but had half wanted the adventure, to add his medals to Dad’s and Grandpa’s from their world wars. And now, if he was anti-war, it was for a reason neither conservatives nor demonstrators would like.
He did not think that America and Australia would win against the Viet Cong. They could win, if the USA did the thing wholeheartedly, if the conscripts they sent weren’t half doped, angry or anguished, waiting for their body bags.
But you would not win a half-fought war. All you would reap was anger at home and anguish in the villages where bombs dropped, where Agent Orange herbicides killed the jungle and the rice fields, poisoned the soil and water with dioxins, where napalm seared the skin of screaming children. Old men feeding young men to the war . . .
We shall remember them. The words burned into him every Anzac Day, even if he had not attended since he came back. Again, pain rippled up legs that weren’t there, lingered in stumps that were.
No, he could not face new legs yet. Nor did he deserve them.
Chapter 54
JED
JULY 1969
The days passed. Jed watched as Apollo 11 made its way to the moon. When she didn’t understand something on the news or that she heard in the canteen, she asked questions until it made sense. The technicians were patient. They told her everything they were allowed to.
The spacecraft slowly rolled to keep an even temperature inside the command module; if only one side faced the sun, it would get too hot for both the men and the equipment inside. The astronauts were weightless now, in light white nylon jumpsuits instead of their heavy pressure suits. They ate beef and potatoes from small tubes, and butterscotch pudding, chocolate brownies and grape juice.
They slept, covering the windows of the spacecraft to block out the sunlight, lying in their tethered sleeping bags, floating free, or resting in a corner with their knees up, trying to feel like they were sitting down. Through the window they could see Earth, the small green-and-white-and-blue planet growing tinier all the time.
After sixty-two hours Earth’s gravity had slowed Apollo 11 to just over three thousand kilometres per hour, but now the gravitational pull of the moon began to speed them up again, to almost eight and a half thousand kilometres per hour.
It was time for the next burn, this one to slow the spacecraft down to orbit the moon, instead of speeding off into the trackless universe. The burn would take six minutes — but it would happen on the other side of the moon, out of reach of any communication with Earth. Any failure now might mean the spacecraft could plunge onto the moon’s surface, or vanish entirely, its fate perhaps forever unknown.
Jed waited outside the computer room, the tea trolley an excuse to linger, till cheers erupted. Madrid Tracking Station had located Apollo 11 at the exact second it was expected.
One more night now, then Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would crawl into the lunar module, Eagle. While Collins remained circling the moon, the Eagle would do a thirty-second burn to send it and Armstrong and Aldrin down onto the surface. That burn too would happen behind the moon.
Forty-five minutes ticked by. This time Jed needed no excuse to linger by the door: it seemed many station staff were crowded with her. Then right on schedule came the scratchy voice of Michael Collins from far above them:
‘The Eagle has wings!’
She managed to get on the early morning shift for 21 July. The Eagle lander would touch down on the moon’s surface at exactly six-seventeen am Australian Eastern Standard Time, leaving Michael Collins orbiting in the main craft above.
Excitement fizzed through her veins as she waited in the winter darkness for the car to pick her up.
This was what she had come for; the vision that had kept Tommy alive, remembering Earth’s passage from steam age t
o space age, and his part in it, dreaming of what would happen to his planet next. Jed still felt that somehow whatever happened now would determine her own future too.
The world would not see the landing, only hear it relayed from above. But the walk itself would be photographed.
Today she would see the moon!
At last the white car crept down the dark Queanbeyan street. She left her post on the footpath and ran towards it, sliding into the back seat, enjoying the car’s warmth after the ice breath of winter air.
The headlights tunnelled through the winter darkness, up the hills, black ice on the road sending the car shivering and twisting. Above, the stars quivered through the icy air. Jed looked at her watch. The Eagle would be landing now!
Or crashing. Or exploding. Or . . .
No! The Eagle had to make it!
Jed looked at the shadowed faces in the front seat, Betty’s mum next to her, dozing. How could they be so calm when the most momentous thing in humanity’s history was happening above them?
The station looked like a lighted palace in the darkness, the hills a deeper black against the starry sky. No moon yet. This station would be in direct contact with the astronauts only once the moon rose between the hills. During the important stages — the landing, the planned moon walk — the California Tracking Station would be Prime, with the moon in their direct line of sight. Honeysuckle was Prime only during the time the astronauts would be sleeping.
If the Eagle landed safely. If the astronauts were alive. Jed opened the car door, careful not to slip on the icy bitumen, then stopped suddenly.
For the tracking station had vanished. In its place a family with dark skins and in furry capes gazed up at the moonless sky. Where they looked she saw a vast emu striding across the sky, not outlined in stars, but made of the darkness between the stars.
She stood, entranced, feeling tears freeze on her cheeks, at the beauty and wonder. She had thought the ghosts she saw just made her weird, but no: each one had been a gift, as if time’s windows had opened to her to see the far reaches beyond the small box called Today. Men might step onto the moon today, but mankind had watched the moon and stars from this spot for tens of thousands of years. She felt the wind of time sweep about her.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, thank you, Mrs Clissold.’
The people vanished, but the joy remained. Light shone across the parking lot again, too bright to see the stars above, to see if the emu still gazed across the universe. It didn’t matter, not now she knew that people had gazed at the moon from this place not just for a few years, but for thousands.
She quickly followed the Clissolds into the warmth of the station. The excitement inside felt so thick she almost had to push her way through it.
The canteen smelled of the night’s bacon and eggs, toast and coffee. Already the pans were piled high.
Was Tommy listening to the Voice of America?
If only Tommy were a little younger, a little stronger. He could be there later today when all the VIPs arrived, watching the moon walk, actually seeing the surface of the moon, ten seconds before the images were released to the waiting world.
She wished she could ring him, at least, but there was no public phone at the tracking station. Nor did she think anyone would let her use their phone, not today, of all days, with so many important people calling.
But she would store it all for him. Everything. Sounds, smells, even her vision of that emu in the sky. She would give it all to him.
Chapter 55
JED
21 JULY 1969
She washed the giant saucepans, stew pots and baking dishes, taking bites of toast and marmalade and sugared tea in between the pots.
What was happening? The television set was still blank, but she knew the operations room and the computer room would be filled with light, and men with that calm inwards look of focus on their faces. So hard to be stuck down here, waiting.
Of course they were all waiting — everyone in this building, and in tracking stations across the world. But at least the men with their headphones on could hear the voices of the astronauts, the mission controllers talking to Honeysuckle operations console and to the many other voices from the other stations, as well as see the telemetry data from the spacecraft above the moon where Michael Collins waited, from the smaller Eagle lander that was heading to the big silver globe she had seen all her life but never really understood.
Another world. Not an imaginary moon made of green cheese or where the moon men from the Dick Tracy comic strip lived, but the real one, so close and still so little known.
How deep was the moon’s dust? Were its rocks like those of Earth?
Poor Michael Collins, so close and yet so far from the surface of the moon. Lucky Michael Collins, to be up there, not washing dishes.
She dried the last of the big pans, then glanced up at the clock. Twenty to six! The Eagle would be landing soon. She looked hopefully at Mrs Clissold as Horrie carried out the garbage bins. ‘Should I take the tea trolley around? They’d be glad of an extra cup, I’m sure,’ she added hurriedly.
Mrs Clissold gave her a knowing look. ‘Off you go, girl.’
Jed loaded cups onto the trolley, coffee, hot water, teapots, sugar, jugs of milk, plates of Orange Creams and Strawberry Creams and Monte Carlos and Nice biscuits, then pushed it along the corridors, trying to hear something, anything, that would tell her what was happening.
It must be going all right. They couldn’t have crashed or exploded, for the faces looked intent, focused, not pale with shock. Yet there was tension there too, eyes crinkled with worry as they watched their equipment for the sudden appearance of any red error lights.
The empty cups rattled as she pushed the trolley into the main operations area. There was the immediate scent of freshly brewed coffee as people grabbed their cuppa and two biscuits, quickly, but still with that deep calm and sense of order. Some supervisory staff tethered at their headsets gestured to her to bring their coffee to their consoles.
Suddenly the sense of focus deepened. Men spoke urgently. She heard the words ‘computer problem in the lunar lander’.
What was happening? They couldn’t crash now! They were so nearly there! If only she could listen to the voices on the headsets.
One of the technicians turned to take a swig of coffee. ‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘What’s wrong?’
He spoke to her while still listening on his headset, his voice quiet, almost automatic as he focused. ‘They should have landed a minute ago! We don’t know what’s happening. The spacecraft computer keeps going into overload. Some MIT computer boffin’s told them to ignore the overload and keep on going.’ He paused to listen again, then added, ‘The Eagle can carry only a certain amount of fuel or it’ll be too heavy to get back up again. Every second they keep flying they’re using up the stuff they need to take off when they’re finished.’ He glanced up at the big clock on the wall. ‘I reckon they only have about ninety seconds left before they won’t have enough to lift back off the moon . . .’
Ninety seconds! She stared at him. If Armstrong and Aldrin didn’t land now, they could be there forever, slowly dying from lack of air in two or three days’ time.
Or they could abort. Head back up into space to the main craft now where Michael Collins waited.
‘Fifty-two seconds!’ someone called.
Fifty-two. They could never land in time now. Jed crept to the doorway and gazed at the faces, trying to work out from their expressions what was happening. Had Armstrong and Aldrin abandoned the attempt to land? Or were they pushing themselves and their craft to the final possible second . . . or even beyond . . .
How many seconds had passed now? She should have made a note of the second-hand on the big clock . . .
Please, she prayed. Please . . .
It was as if a conductor had raised his baton and brought it down, signalling the music to begin. Faces lightened, broke into smiles. From another room sh
e heard a cheer.
The technician she’d been speaking to grinned up at her. ‘The Eagle has landed!’
‘Really? They’re safe? What happened?’
‘Don’t know. Reckon Armstrong and Aldrin were too busy up there to let Houston know what was happening.’ He listened to what was coming from his headset, then looked up at her again. ‘Rocks! Great blinking boulders where they were supposed to land, and then a crater. And we thought they had a nice flat site. But they’re down safely. That’s what matters.’
No, she thought, pushing the trolley again. What matters is: can they get back to Earth? Because if the astronauts didn’t — if they were stuck there on the moon, the world watching while they died — the entire space program might be shut down. This project brought no immediate gain to Earth. Just knowledge and what humans had always sought: an understanding of the world, and a curiosity to know what was around the corner or over the hill.
‘Biscuit?’ she asked one of the secretaries as her mind flew with Michael Collins in the spacecraft, looking out at humanity’s future in the stars.
Chapter 56
JED
The night shift took off their headsets as the morning shift came on at eight am, rubbing their cold hands and stripping off their coats. Jed took the tea trolley around yet again, with another indulgent nod from Mrs Clissold. Mrs Clissold knew exactly why Jed was here, and it wasn’t to wash dishes or even for the wages.
Jed passed outside the computer area, a vast array of twinkling orange lights on long rows of computer cabinets and magnetic tape machines. Computer technicians checked them for any signs of malfunction. On the top of each computer control panel were two large indicator lights, one red, the other green.
Green meant all was functioning properly. Red meant a fault, a glitch.
Would a red light flash today?
Mr Sullivan glanced up. He called out, ‘Tea, white, two sugars.’ Jed went in and handed him his cup, and two of the Strawberry Cream biscuits he loved.
‘What’s happening now?’
The Ghost by the Billabong Page 31