Phases of Gravity

Part One Poona

Pan Am Flight 001 left the moonlight behind it and dropped into clouds and darkness as it felt its way toward a landing in New Delhi. Staring out at the port wing, Baedecker felt the weight pulling at him and mixing with the tension of an old pilot being forced to suffer a landing as a passenger. The wheels touched tarmac in an almost perfect touchdown and Baedecker glanced at his watch. It was 3:47 A.M. local time. Tiny motes of pain danced behind his eyes as he looked out past the flashing wingtip light at the dark silhouettes of water towers and service buildings moving past. The massive 747 swung sharply to the right and rolled to the end of its taxi run. The sound of engines swelled one final time and then dropped into silence, leaving Baedecker with the tired pounding of his own pulse in his ears. He had not slept for twenty-four hours.

Even before the shuffling line reached the forward exit, Baedecker felt the wave of heat and humidity strike him. Descending the ramp toward the sticky asphalt, he became aware of the tremendous mass of the planet under him, weighted even further by the hundreds of millions of wretched souls populating the subcontinent, and he hunched his shoulders against the inexorable pull of depression.

I should have done the credit card commercial, thought Baedecker. He stood in the gloom with the other passengers and waited for a blue-and-white jitney to approach them across the dark expanse of pavement. The terminal was a distant blur of lights on the horizon. Clouds reflected the rows of blinking lights beyond the runway.

It would not have been very difficult. All they had asked of him was to sit in front of the cameras and lights, smile, and say, 'Do you know me? Sixteen years ago I walked on the moon. That doesn't help me though when I want to reserve an airline seat or pay for dinner in a French café.' Two more lines of such drivel and then the standard closing with his name being punched out on the plastic card — RICHARD E. BAEDECKER.

The customs building was a huge, echoing warehouse of a place. Sodium yellow lights hung from metal rafters and made people's skin look greasy and waxlike. Baedecker's shirt was already plastered to his body in a dozen places. The lines moved slowly. Baedecker was used to the officiousness of customs officials, but these black-haired, brown-shirted little men seemed to be reaching for new heights of official unpleasantness. Three places in front of him in the line, an older Indian woman stood with her two daughters, all three in cheap cotton saris. Impatient with their replies, the agent behind the scratched counter dumped their two cheap suitcases on the floor of the shed. Brightly printed cloth, bras, and torn underpants spilled out in a heap. The customs man turned to another agent and said something in rapid Hindi that brought smirks to their faces.

Baedecker was almost dozing when he realized that one of the customs men was talking to him.

'Pardon me?'

'I said — is this all you have to declare? You are bringing in nothing else?' The singsong of Indian English seemed strangely familiar to Baedecker. He had encountered it with Indian hotel-management trainees around the world. Only then the tone was not edged with a strange suspiciousness and anger.

'Yes. That's all.' Baedecker nodded toward the pink form they had filled out before landing.

'This is all you have? One bag?' The agent hefted Baedecker's old, black flight bag as if it held contraband or explosives.

'That's all.'

The man scowled fiercely at the luggage and then passed it contemptuously to another brown-shirted agent farther along the counter. This man struck an X on the bag as if the violence of the motion would drive out whatever evils it held.

'Move along. Move along.' The first agent was gesturing.

'Thank you,' said Baedecker. He hefted the flight bag and moved out into the darkness beyond the customs shed.

The view had been one of blackness. Two black triangles. Not even the stars had been visible during their final descent. Standing in their bulky pressure suits, locked in position by an array of straps and stirrups, they could see only the featureless black sky. During most of its final burn and descent sequence, the landing module had been pitched back so that the lunar surface was invisible beneath them. Only during the final minutes did Baedecker have a chance to look out onto the glare and tumble of the moon's face.

It's just like the simulations, he'd thought. He knew even then that there should be more. He knew even as they were descending that he should be sensing more, feeling more. But as he automatically responded to Houston's updates and inquiries, obediently punched the appropriate numbers into the computer and read off figures to Dave, the same unworthy thought returned again and again. It's just like the simulations.

'Mr. Baedecker!' It took a minute for the shout to register. Someone was calling his name, had been for some time. Baedecker turned from where he was standing in the alley between the customs shed and the terminal and looked around. Thousands of bugs danced in the glare of the spotlights. People wrapped in white robes slept on the sidewalk, sat huddled against the dark buildings. Dark men in bright shirts leaned against black-and-yellow cabs. He turned the other way just as the girl caught up to him.

'Mr. Baedecker! Hello.' She stopped with a graceful half step, threw her head back, paused to take a deep breath.

'Hello,' said Baedecker. He had no idea who the young woman was but was haunted with a strong sense of déjà vu. Who in the world would be greeting him in New Delhi at four-thirty in the morning? Someone from the embassy? No, they didn't know he was coming and wouldn't care if they did. Not anymore. Bombay Electronics? Hardly. Not in New Delhi. And this young blonde was obviously American. Always poor at remembering names and faces, Baedecker felt the familiar flush of guilt and embarrassment. He ransacked his memory. Nothing.

'I'm Maggie Brown,' said the girl and stuck her hand out. He shook it, surprised at how cool it felt. His own skin felt feverish even to himself. Maggie Brown? She brushed back a loose strand of her shoulder-length hair and again Baedecker was struck with a sense of having seen her before. He would go under the assumption that she worked with NASA, although she appeared too young to have . . .

'I'm Scott's friend,' she said and smiled. She had a wide mouth and a slight gap between her front teeth. Somehow the effect was pleasant.

'Scott's friend. Of course. Hello.' Baedecker shook her hand again. Looked around again. Several cabbies had come up to them and were proffering rides. He shook his head, but their babble only intensified. Baedecker took the girl's elbow and turned away from the gesticulating mob. 'What are you doing here? In India, I mean. And here, too.' Baedecker gestured lamely at the narrow street and the long shadow of the terminal. He remembered her now. Joan had shown him a picture of her the last time he had visited Boston. The green eyes had stuck in his memory.

'I've been here for three months,' she said. 'Scott rarely has time to see me, but I'm there if he does. In Poona, I mean. I found a job as governess . . . not really governess, I guess, but sort of a tutor . . . with this nice doctor's family there? In the old British section? Anyway, I was with Scott last week when he got your cable.'

'Oh,' said Baedecker. He could think of nothing else to say for several seconds. Overhead, a small jet climbed for altitude. 'Is Scott here? I mean, I thought I'd see him in . . . what is it . . .? in Poona.'

'Scott's at a retreat at the Master's farm. He won't be back until Tuesday. He asked me to tell you. Me, I'm visiting an old friend at the Education Foundation here in Old Delhi.'

'The Master? You mean this guru of Scott's?'

'That's what they all call him. Anyway, Scott asked me to tell you, and I figured you wouldn't be staying long in New Delhi.'

'You came out before dawn to give me that message?' Baedecker looked carefully at the young woman next to him. As they moved farther away from the glaring spotlights, her skin seemed to glow of its own accord. He realized that soft light was tinging the eastern sky.

'No problem,' she said and took his arm in hers. 'My train just got in a few hours ago. I didn't have anything to do until the USEFI offices opened up.' They had come around to the front of the terminal. Baedecker realized that they were out in the country, some distance from the city. He could see high-rise apartments in the distance, but the sounds and smells surrounding them were all of the country. The curving airport drive led to a wide highway, but nearby were dirt roads under multitrunked banyan trees.

'When's your flight, Mr. Baedecker?'

'To Bombay? Not until eight-thirty. Call me Richard.'

'Okay, Richard. What do you say we take a walk and then get some breakfast?'

'Fine,' said Baedecker. He would have given anything at that moment to have an empty room waiting for him, a bed, time to sleep. What time would it be in St. Louis? His tired mind was not up to the simple arithmetic. He followed the girl as she set off down the rain-moistened drive. Ahead of them the sun was rising.

The sun had been rising for three days when they landed. Details stood out in bold relief. It had been planned that way.

Later, Baedecker remembered very little about actually descending the ladder and stepping off the LM footpad. All those years of preparation, simulation, and expectation had led to that single point, that sharp intersection of time and place, but what Baedecker later remembered was the vague sense of frustration and urgency. They were twenty-three minutes behind schedule when Dave finally led the way down the ladder. Suiting up, going over the fifty-one-point PLS checklist, and depressurizing had taken more time than it had in the simulations.

Then they were moving across the surface, testing their balance, picking up contingency samples, and trying to make up for lost time. Baedecker had spent many hours composing a short phrase to recite upon first setting foot on lunar soil — his 'footnote in history' as Joan had called it — but Dave made a joke after jumping off the footpad, Houston had asked for a radio check, and the moment passed.

Baedecker had two strong memories of the rest of that first EVA. He remembered the damned checklist banded to his wrist. They never caught up to the timeline, not even after eliminating the third core sample and the second check of the Rover's guidance memory. He had hated that checklist.

The other memory still returned to him in dreams. The gravity. The one-sixth gee. The sheer exhilaration of bouncing across the glaring, rock-strewn surface with only the lightest touch of their boots to propel them. It awakened an even earlier memory in Baedecker; he was a child, learning to swim in Lake Michigan, and his father was holding him under the arms while he kicked and bounced his way across the sand of the lake bottom. What marvelous lightness, the supporting strength of his father's arms, the gentle rise and fall of the green waves, the perfect synchronization of weight and buoyancy meeting in the ribbon of balance flowing up from the balls of his feet.

He still dreamed about that.

The sun rose like a great, orange balloon, its sides shifting laterally as light refracted through the warming air. Baedecker thought of Ektachrome photos in National Geographic. India! Insects, birds, goats, chickens, and cattle added to the growing sound of traffic along the unseen highway. Even this winding dirt road on which they walked was already crowded with people on bicycles, bullock carts, heavy trucks labeled Public Transport, and an occasional black-and-yellow taxi dodging in and out of the confusion like an angry bee.

Baedecker and the girl stopped by a small, green building that was either a farmhouse or a Hindu temple. Perhaps it was both. Bells were ringing inside. The smell of incense and manure drifted from an inner courtyard. Roosters were crowing and somewhere a man was chanting in a frail-voiced falsetto. Another man — this one in a blue polyester business suit — stopped his bicycle, stepped to the side of the road, and urinated into the temple yard.

A bullock cart lumbered past, axle grinding, yoke straining, and Baedecker turned to watch it. A woman in the back of it lifted her sari to her face, but the three children next to her returned Baedecker's stare. The man in front shouted at the laboring bullock and snapped a long stick against a flank already scabrous with sores. Suddenly all other noises were lost as an Air India 747 roared overhead, its metal sides catching the gold of the rising sun.

'What's that smell?' asked Baedecker. Above the general onslaught of odors — wet soil, open sewage, car exhausts, compost heaps, pollution from the unseen city — there rose a sweet, overpowering scent that already seemed to have permeated his skin and clothes.

'They're cooking breakfast,' said Maggie Brown. 'All over the country, they're cooking breakfast over open fires. Most of them using dried cow dung as fuel. Eight hundred million people cooking breakfast. Gandhi once wrote that that was the eternal scent of India.' Baedecker nodded. The sunrise was being swallowed by lowering monsoon clouds. For a second the trees and grass were a brilliant, false green, made even more pronounced by Baedecker's fatigue. The headache, which had been with him since Frankfurt, had moved from behind his eyes to a point at the base of his neck. Every step sent an echo of pain through his head. Yet the pain seemed a distant and unimportant thing, perceived as it was through a haze of exhaustion and jet lag. It was part of the strangeness — the new smells, the odd cacophony of rural and urban sounds, this attractive young woman at his side with sunlight outlining her cheekbones and setting fire to her green eyes. What was she to his son anyway? How serious was their relationship? Baedecker wished he had asked Joan more questions about the girl, but the visit had been uncomfortable and he had been in a hurry to leave.

Baedecker looked at Maggie Brown and realized that he was being sexist in thinking of her as a girl. The young woman seemed to possess that sense of self-possession, of awareness, which Baedecker associated with true adults as opposed to those who had simply grown up. Looking again, Baedecker guessed that Maggie Brown was at least in her mid-twenties, several years older than Scott. Hadn't Joan said something about their son's friend being a graduate student and teaching assistant?

'Did you come to India just to visit Scott?' asked Maggie Brown. They were on the circular drive again, approaching the airport.

'Yes. No,' said Baedecker. 'That is, I came to see Scott, but I arranged a business trip to coincide with it.'

'Don't you work for the government?' asked Maggie. 'The space people?' Baedecker smiled at the image 'the space people' evoked. 'Not for the past twelve years,' he said and told her about the aerospace firm in St. Louis for which he worked.

'So you don't have anything to do with the space shuttle?' said Maggie. 'Not really. We had some subsystems aboard the shuttles and used to rent payload space aboard them every once in a while.' Baedecker was aware that he had used the past tense, as if he were speaking about someone who had died.

Maggie stopped to watch the rich sunlight bathe the sides of the New Delhi control tower and terminal buildings in gold. She tucked a wayward strand of hair behind one ear and folded her arms. 'It's hard to believe that it's been almost eighteen months since the Challenger explosion,' she said. 'That was a terrible thing.'

'Yes,' said Baedecker.

It was ironic that he had been at the Cape for that flight. He had been present for only one previous shuttle launch, one of the Columbia's first engineering flights almost five years earlier. He was there in January of 1986 for the Challenger disaster only because Cole Prescott, the vice president of Baedecker's firm, had asked him to escort a client who had bankrolled a subcomponent in the Spartan-Halley experiment package sitting in the Challenger's payload bay.

The launch of 51-L had seemed nominal enough and Baedecker and his client were standing in the VIP stands three miles from Pad 39-B, shielding their eyes against the late-morning sun, when things went bad. Baedecker could remember marveling at how cold it was; he had brought only a light cotton jacket, and the morning had been the coldest he could ever recall at the Cape. Through binoculars, he had caught a glint of ice on the gantries surrounding the shuttle.

Baedecker remembered that he had been thinking about getting an early start to beat the leaving crowds when the loudspeaker carried the voice of NASA's public affairs officer. 'Altitude four point three nautical miles, down-range distance three nautical miles. Engines throttling up. Three engines now at one hundred four percent.' He had thought fleetingly of his own launch fifteen years before, of his job relaying data while Dave Muldorff 'flew' the monstrous Saturn V, until he was returned to the present as the loudspeaker carried Commander Dick Scobee's voice saying, 'Roger, go at throttle up,' and Baedecker had glanced toward the parking lots to see how congested the roads would be and a second later his client had said, 'Wow, those SRBs really create a cloud when they separate, don't they?' Baedecker had looked up then, seen the expanding, mushrooming contrail that had nothing to do with SRB separation, and instantly had recognized the sickening orange-red glow that lit the interior of the cloud as hypergolic fuels ignited on contact as they escaped from the shuttle's destroyed reaction control system and orbital maneuvering engines. A few seconds later the solid rocket boosters became visible as they careened mindlessly from the still-expanding cumulus of the explosion. Feeling sick to his stomach, Baedecker had turned to Tucker Wilson, a fellow Apollo-era pilot who was still on active duty with NASA, and had said without any real hope, 'RTLS?' Tucker had shaken his head; this was no return to launch site abort. This was what each of them had silently waited for during their own minutes of launch. By the time Baedecker had looked up again, the first large segments of the destroyed orbiter had begun their long, sad fall to the waiting crypt of the sea.

In the months since Challenger, Baedecker had found it hard to believe that the country had ever flown so frequently and competently into space. The long hiatus of earthbound doubt in which nothing flew had become the normal state of things to Baedecker, mixing in his own mind with a dreary sense of heaviness, of entropy and gravity triumphant, which had weighed upon him since his own world and family had been blasted apart some months earlier.

'My friend Bruce says that Scott didn't come out of his dorm room for two days after Challenger blew up,' said Maggie Brown as they stood in front of the New Delhi air terminal.

'Really?' said Baedecker. 'I didn't think that Scott had any interest in the space program anymore.' He looked up as the rising sun suddenly was obscured by clouds. Color flowed out of the world like water from a sink.

'He said he didn't care,' said Maggie. 'He said that Chernobyl and Challenger were just the first signs of the end of the technological era. A few weeks later, he made arrangements to come to India. Are you hungry, Richard?' It was not yet six-thirty in the morning but the terminal was filling with people. Others still lay sleeping on the cracked and filthy linoleum floors. Baedecker wondered if they were potential passengers or merely people seeking a roof for the night. A baby sat alone on a black vinyl chair and cried lustily. Lizards slid across the walls.

Maggie led him to a small coffee shop on the second floor where sleepy waiters stood with soiled towels over their arms. Maggie warned him not to try the bacon and then ordered an omelette, toast and jelly, and tea. Baedecker considered the idea of breakfast and then rejected it. What he really wanted was a Scotch. He ordered black coffee.

The big room was empty of other customers except for one table filled with a loud crew of Russians from an Aeroflot liner Baedecker could see out the window. They were snapping fingers to call over the tired Indian waiters. Baedecker glanced at the captain and then looked again. The big man looked familiar — although Baedecker told himself that a lot of Soviet pilots have such jowls and formidable eyebrows. Nonetheless, Baedecker wondered if he had met him during the three days he had toured Moscow and Star City with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project crew. He shrugged. It did not matter.

'How is Scott?' he asked.

Maggie Brown looked up and a slightly guarded expression seemed to settle over her like a fine veil. 'Fine. He says that he's never felt so good but I think he's lost some weight.' Baedecker had an image of his stocky son, in crew cut and T-shirt, wanting to play shortstop on the Houston Little League team but being too slow, fit only for right field. 'How is his asthma? Has this humidity caused it to kick up again?'

'No, the asthma's cured,' said Maggie levelly. 'The Master cured it, according to Scott.' Baedecker blinked. Even in recent years, in his empty apartment, he had found himself listening for the coughs, the raspy breathing. He remembered the times he had held the boy like an infant through the night, rocking him, both of them frightened by the gurgling in his lungs. 'Are you a follower of this . . . of the Master?' Maggie laughed and the veil seemed to slip from her green eyes. 'No. I wouldn't be here if I were. They don't allow them to leave the ashram for more than a few hours.'

'Hmmm,' said Baedecker and glanced at his watch. Ninety minutes until his flight left for Bombay.

'It'll be late,' said Maggie.

'Oh?' Baedecker wasn't sure of what she was talking about. 'Your flight. It'll be late. What are you going to do until Tuesday?' Baedecker had not thought about that. It was Thursday morning. He had planned to be in Bombay this same afternoon, see the electronics people and their earth station on Friday, take the train to Poona to visit Scott over the weekend, and fly out of Bombay for home on Monday afternoon.

'I'm not sure,' he said. 'Stay in Bombay a couple of extra days, I suppose. What was so important about this retreat that Scott couldn't take some time off?'

'Nothing,' said Maggie Brown. She drank the last of her tea and set the cup down with an abrupt movement that held the hint of anger. 'It's the same stuff as always. Lectures from the Master. Solitude sessions. Dances.'

'Dances?'

'Well, not really. They play music. The beat picks up. Faster and faster. They move around. Faster and faster. Finally they collapse from exhaustion. It cleanses the soul. That's part of the tantra yoga thing.' Baedecker could hear her silences. He'd read some about this ex-philosophy professor who had become the most recent guru to young rich kids from so many well-to-do nations. According to Time, the Indian locals had been shocked at reports of group sex at his ashrams. Baedecker had been shocked when Joan told him that Scott had dropped out of graduate school in Boston to go halfway around the world. In search of what?

'You don't seem to approve,' he said to Maggie Brown.

The girl shrugged. Then her eyes lit up. 'Hey, I've got an idea! Why don't you spend some time sightseeing with me? I've been trying to get Scott to see something other than the Poona ashram since I got here in March. Come with me! It'll be fun. You can get an Air India in-country pass for next to nothing.' Still thinking about the group-sex rumors, Baedecker was taken aback for a moment. Then he saw the childlike eagerness in Maggie's face and chided himself for being a lecherous old man. The girl was lonely.

'Where would you be going?' he asked. He needed a second to form a polite rejection.

'I'll be leaving Delhi tomorrow,' she said brightly. 'I'll fly to Varanasi, then to Khajuraho, a stopover in Calcutta, then Agra and back to Poona later in the week.'

'What's in Agra?'

'Only the Taj Mahal,' said Maggie and leaned toward him with a mischievous look in her eyes. 'You can't see India and not see the Taj Mahal. It's not allowed.'

'Sorry. I'll have to,' said Baedecker. 'I have an appointment in Bombay tomorrow and you say Scott will be back Tuesday. I need to fly home no later than a week from Friday. I'm stretching this trip out as it is.' He could see the disappointment even as she nodded.

'Besides,' he said, 'I'm not much of a tourist.'

The American flag had looked absurd to Baedecker. He had expected to be stirred by it. Once in Djakarta, after being away from the States for only nine months, he had been moved to tears by the sight of the American flag flying from the stern of an old freighter in the harbor. But on the moon — a quarter million miles from home — he could think only of how silly the flag looked with its wire extended stiffly to simulate a breeze in the hard vacuum.

He and Dave had saluted. They stood downsun of the television camera they had erected and saluted. Unconsciously, they had already fallen into the habit of leaning forward in the low-gee 'tired ape' position Aldrin had warned them about in briefings. It was comfortable and felt natural, but it photographed poorly.

They had finished the salute and were ready to lope off to other things, when President Nixon talked to them. For Baedecker it had been Nixon's patched-in, impromptu phone call that had pushed an unreal experience into the realm of the surreal. The president obviously had not planned what he would say during his call, and the monologue wandered. Several times it seemed that he had ended his sentence and they would begin to reply only to have Nixon's voice come in again. The transmission lag added to the problem. Dave did most of the talking. Baedecker said, 'Thank you, Mr. President,' several times. For some reason Nixon thought that they would want to know the football scores from the previous day's games. Baedecker loathed football. He wondered if this prattle about football was Nixon's idea of how men talked to men.

'Thank you, Mr. President,' Baedecker had said. And all the time he stood there in the camera's eye, facing a frozen flag against a black sky and listening to the static-lashed maunderings of his nation's chief executive, Baedecker was thinking about the unauthorized object he had hidden in the contingency sample pocket above his right knee.

The Delhi-Bombay flight was three hours late getting off. A British helicopter salesman sitting next to Baedecker in the terminal said that the Air India pilot and flight engineer had been having a feud for weeks now. One or the other would hold up the flight every day.

Once airborne, Baedecker tried to doze, but the incessant chiming of call-buttons kept him awake. They had no sooner taken off than every other person on the aircraft seemed to be ringing for the saried stewardesses. The three men in the row ahead of Baedecker were loudly demanding pillows, demanding drinks, and snapping their fingers in an imperious manner that went against his Midwestern, egalitarian grain.

Maggie Brown had left him shortly after breakfast. She had scribbled her 'Grand Tour Itinerary' on a napkin and stuffed it into the coat pocket of his suit. 'You never know,' she said. 'Something might happen to change your mind.' Baedecker had asked a few more questions about Scott before she drove off in a black-and-yellow cab, but his overall impression was of a girl who had mistakenly followed her lover to a strange and alien land and who no longer knew how he felt or thought.

They were flying in a French Air Bus. Baedecker noticed with a professional eye how the wings flexed with greater latitude than a Boeing product and noted with some surprise the steep angle of attack the Indian pilot chose. American airlines would not allow their pilots to horse the machine around like that for fear of alarming their passengers. The Indian passengers did not seem to notice. Their descent toward Bombay was so rapid that it reminded Baedecker of a ride he had hopped into Pleiku in a C-130 where the pilot had been forced to drop in almost vertically during the final approach for fear of small-arms fire.

Bombay seemed composed totally of shacks with tin roofs and factories rotting with age. Then Baedecker caught a glimpse of high-rise buildings and the Arabian Sea, the plane banked at a fifty-degree angle, a plateau rose to greet them out of the shacks, and they were down. Baedecker nodded a silent compliment to the pilot.

The cab ride from the airport to his hotel was almost too much for Baedecker's exhausted senses. Immediately beyond the gates of Bombay's Santa Cruz Airport the slums began. Dozens of square miles of tin-roofed shacks, sagging canvas lean-tos, and narrow, muddy lanes stretched on either side of the highway. At one point a twenty-foot-high water pipeline cut through the tangle of hovels like a garden hose through an anthill. Brown-skinned children ran along the top or reclined on its rusty sides. Everywhere there was the dizzying movement of uncountable bodies.

It was very hot. The humid air pouring in the open windows of the taxi hit Baedecker like a steam-heated exhaust. Occasionally he caught glimpses of the Arabian Sea to his right. A huge billboard in the suburbs proclaimed 0 DAYS TO THE MOONSOON but there was no cooling rain from the low ceiling of clouds, only a reflection of the terrible heat and an ominous sense of weight that settled on his shoulders like a yoke.

The city itself was even more dizzying. Every side street became a tributary of white-shirted humanity pouring into ever-larger streams and rivers of population gone insane. Thousands of tiny storefronts offered their brightly colored wares to the millions of thronging pedestrians. The cacophony of car horns, motors, and bicycle bells wrapped Baedecker in a thick blanket of isolation. Gigantic, lurid billboards touted movies starring actors with pink cheeks and actresses with raven hair, bee-stung lips, and a purplish cast to their complexions.

Then they were on Marine Drive, the Queen's Necklace, and the sea was a pounding, gray presence to their right. To his left, Baedecker caught glimpses of cricket fields, open-air crematoriums, temples, and high-rise office buildings. He thought that he could see a thin cloud of vultures circling above the Tower of Silence, waiting for the bodies of the Parsee faithful, but when he looked away, the specks continued to circle in the periphery of his vision.

The blast of air-conditioning inside the Oberoi Sheraton made his sodden skin tremble. Baedecker hardly remembered registering or following the redcoated porter to his room on the thirtieth floor. The carpets smelled of some sort of carbolic, antiseptic cleanser, a group of loud Arabs in the elevator reeked of musk, and for a second Baedecker thought that he was going to be sick. Then he was slipping a five-rupee note to the porter, the drapes were drawn across the wide window, the door was closed, sounds were muffled, and Baedecker tossed his seersucker coat on a chair and collapsed on the bed. He was asleep in ten seconds.

They had taken the Rover almost three miles, a record. It was a bumpy ride. The powdered moondust flew out from each wheel in an odd, flat trajectory that fascinated Baedecker. The world was bright and empty. Their shadow leaped ahead of them. Beyond the crackle of the radio and the internal suit sounds, Baedecker sensed a silence cold and absolute.

The experiment site was well removed from the landing area in a flat spot near a small impact crater designated Kate on their maps. They had been moving uphill gradually with the tiny computer in the Rover memorizing each turn and twist. The landing module was a glitter of gold and silver in the valley behind them.

Baedecker deployed the bulky seismic package while Dave took time to make a full panoramic sweep with his chest-mounted Hasselblad. Baedecker took care in running out the ten-meter gold wires. He watched Dave pivot lightly after each shot, a humanoid balloon tethered to a bright beach. Dave called something to Houston and bounced south to photograph a large rock outcropping. The earth was a small blue-and-white shield in a black sky.

Now, thought Baedecker. He dropped to one knee, found that too difficult in the pressure suit, and went to both knees in the dust to secure the end of the last seismic filament. Dave continued to move away. Baedecker quickly unzipped the sample pocket above his right knee and removed the two objects. His thick gloves fumbled over opening the plastic bag, but he succeeded in shaking the contents into his dusty palm. The small, colored photograph he propped against a small rock about a meter from the end of the sensor filament. It was half in shadow and Dave would not notice it unless he was standing right above it. The other object — the Saint Christopher's medal — he held loosely for a moment, irresolute. Then he bent slightly, touched the metal to the gray soil, dropped it in the bag, and quickly returned it to the sample pocket before Dave returned. Baedecker felt odd kneeling there on the lunar soil, supplicant, his bulking shadow thrown in front of him like a black cloth. The little three-by-five photograph looked back at him. Joan was wearing a red blouse and blue slacks. Her head was turned slightly toward Baedecker, who was smiling directly at the camera. Each had a hand on Scott's shoulders. The seven-year-old was grinning widely. He was wearing a white dress shirt for the photograph, but at the open neck Baedecker could see the blue Kennedy Space Center T-shirt, which the boy had worn almost every day of the previous summer.

Baedecker glanced left at the distant figure of Dave and had started to rise when he sensed a presence behind him. His skin went clammy in his suit. He rose and turned slowly.

The Rover was parked five meters behind him. The television camera, controlled from a console in Houston, was mounted on a strut near the right front wheel. The camera was pointing directly at him. It tilted back slightly to track him as he rose to his full height.

Baedecker stared across the glare and the distance at the small, cabled box. The black circle of the lens stared back at him through silence.

The wide antenna cut a sharp parabola from the monsoon sky.

'Impressive, is it not?' asked Sirsikar. Baedecker nodded and looked down from the hill. Small patches of farmland, none larger than two acres, ran along the narrow road. The homes were untidy piles of thatch atop rough poles. All along the way from Bombay to the receiving station, Sirsikar and Shah had pointed out places of interest.

'Very nice farmhouse,' Shah had said, gesturing toward a stone building smaller than the garage in Baedecker's old home in Houston. 'It has a methane converter, don't you know.' Baedecker was noticing the men standing on their flat, wooden plows behind their tired-looking oxen. Prongs pushed through the cracked soil. One man had his two sons standing with him so the wooden wedges would dig more deeply into the dry earth.

'We have three now,' continued Sirsikar. 'Only the Nataraja is synchronous. Both the Sarasvati and Lakshmi are above the horizon for thirty of their ninety-minute transit time and the Bombay station here handles real-time transmissions from them.' Baedecker glanced at the little scientist. 'You name the satellites after gods?' he asked.

Shah shuffled uncomfortably but Sirsikar beamed at Baedecker. 'Of course!' Recruited while Mercury flew, trained during Gemini, blooded in Apollo, Baedecker turned his eyes back to the steel symmetry of the huge antenna.

'So did we,' he said.

DAD. WILL BE ON RETREAT UNTIL SAT JUNE 27. BACK POONA SUN. IF YOU RE THERE, SEE YOU THEN. SCOTT.

Baedecker reread the cable, crumpled it, and shot it at the wastebasket in the corner of his room. He walked to the broad window and stared down at the reflection of lights from the Queen's Necklace on the choppy waters of the bay. After a while he turned and went down to the desk to write out a cable to St. Louis, informing his firm that he would be taking his vacation now after all.

'I knew you'd come,' said Maggie Brown. They stepped ashore from the tourist boat and Baedecker recoiled slightly from the onslaught of beggars and peddlers. He wondered again if he had made a mistake by not accepting the credit card commercial. The money would have been welcome.

'Did you guess that Scott would stay at the retreat?' asked Baedecker. 'No. I'm not surprised, but that's not it. I just had a hunch I'd see you again.' They stood on the bank of the Ganges and shared another sunrise.

Already crowds were filling the oversized steps that led down into the river. Women rose from the coffee-colored water, wet cotton clinging to their thin forms. Earth-brown pots echoed the color of skin. Swastikas adorned a marble-fronted temple. Baedecker could hear the slap, slap, slap of the washer-caste women beating laundry against the flat rocks upstream. The smoke from incense and funeral pyre floated and mingled in the wet morning air.

'The signs say Benares,' said Baedecker as they fell in with the small group. 'The ticket was to Varanasi. Which is it?'

'Varanasi was its original name. Everybody calls it Benares. But they wanted to get rid of that because the British called it that. You know, a slave name. Malcolm X. Muhammad Ali.' Maggie quit talking and broke into a slight jog as their guide shouted at them to keep up in the narrow lanes. At one point the street became so narrow that Baedecker reached out and touched the opposing walls with his forefingers. People jostled, shouted, shoved, spat, and made way for the ubiquitous cattle that wandered free. A singularly persistent peddler followed them for several blocks, blowing deafeningly on his hand-carved flute. Finally Baedecker winked at Maggie, paid the boy ten rupees, and put the instrument in his hip pocket.

They entered an abandoned building. Inside, bored men held candles to show the way up a battered staircase. They held their hands out as Baedecker passed. On the third floor a small balcony afforded a view over the wall of the temple. A gold-plated temple spire was barely visible.

'This is the holiest spot in the world,' said the guide. His skin had the color and texture of a well-oiled catcher's mitt. 'Holier than Mecca. Holier than Jerusalem. Holier than Bethlehem or Sarnath. It is the holiest of temples where all Hindus . . . after bathing in the holy Ganges . . . wish to visit before they die.' There was a general nodding and murmuring. Clouds of gnats danced in front of sweaty faces. On the way back down the stairs, the men with the candles blocked their way and were much more insistent with their thrusting palms and sharp voices.

Later, sharing an autorickshaw on their way back to the hotel, Maggie turned to him and her face was serious. 'Do you believe in that? Places of power?'

'How do you mean?'

'Not holy places, but a place that's more than just special to you. A place that has its own power.'

'Not here,' said Baedecker and gestured toward the sad spectacle of poverty and decay they were passing.

'No, not here,' agreed Maggie Brown. 'But I've found a couple of places.'

'Tell me about them,' said Baedecker. He had to speak loudly because of the noise of traffic and bicycle bells.

Maggie looked down and brushed her hair back behind her ear in a gesture that was already becoming familiar to Baedecker. 'There's a place near where my grandparents live in western South Dakota,' she said. 'A volcanic cone north of the Black Hills, on the edge of the prairie. It's called Bear Butte. I used to climb it when I was little while Grandad and Memo waited for me down below. Years later I learned that it was a holy place for the Sioux. But even before that — when I stood up there and looked over the prairie — I knew it was special.' Baedecker nodded. 'High places do that,' he said. 'There's a place I like to visit — a little Christian Science college — way out in the boonies on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, not far from St. Louis. The campus is right on the bluffs over the river. There's a tiny chapel right near the edge, and you can walk out on some ledges and see halfway across Missouri.'

'Are you a Christian Scientist?' The question and her expression were so serious that Baedecker had to laugh. 'No,' he said, 'I'm not religious. I'm not . . . anything.' He had a sudden image of himself kneeling in the lunar dust, the stark sunlight a benediction.

The autorickshaw had been stuck in traffic behind several trucks. Now it roared around to pass on the right, and Maggie had to almost shout her next comment. 'Well, I think it's more than the view. I think some places have a power of their own.' Baedecker smiled. 'You could be right.' She turned to him and her green eyes were also smiling. 'And I could be wrong,' she said. 'I could be full of shit. This country will turn anybody into a mystic. But sometimes I think that we spend our whole lives on a pilgrimage to find places like that.'

Baedecker looked away and said nothing.

The moon had been a great, bright sandbox and Baedecker was the only person in it. He had driven the Rover over a hundred meters from the landing module and parked it so that it could send back pictures of the lift-off. He undid the safety belt and vaulted off the seat with the one-armed ease that had become second nature in the low gravity. Their tracks were everywhere in the deep dust. Ribbed wheel tracks swirled, intersected themselves, and headed off to the north where the highlands glared white. Around the ship itself the dust had been stamped and packed down like snow around a cabin.

Baedecker bounced around the Rover. The little vehicle was covered with dust and badly used. Two of the light fenders had fallen off, and Dave had jerry-rigged some plastic maps to keep clods of dirt from being kicked up onto them. The camera cable had become twisted a dozen times and even now had to be rescued by Baedecker. He bounced easily to the front of the Rover, freed the cable with a tug, and dusted off the lens. A glance told him that Dave was already out of sight in the LM.

'Okay, Houston, it looks all right. I'll get out of the way here. How is it?'

'Great, Dick. We can see the Discovery and . . . ahh . . . we should be able to track you on the lift-off.' Baedecker watched with a critical eye as the camera pivoted to the left and to the right. It aimed at his waist and then tracked up to its full lock position. He could imagine the image it was sending. His dusty space suit would be a glare of white, broken by occasional straps, snaplocks, and the dark expanse of his visor. He would have no face.

'Good,' he said. 'Okay. Well . . . ah . . . you have anything else you want me to do?'

'. . . tiv . . .'

'Say again, Houston?'

'Negative, Dick. We're running a little over. Time to get aboard.'

'Roger.' Baedecker turned to take one last look at the lunar terrain. The glare of the sun wiped out most surface features. Even through his darkest visor the surface was a brilliant, white emptiness. It matched his thoughts. Baedecker was irritated to find his mind full of details — the prelaunch checklist, storage procedures, an irritatingly full bladder — all crowding in and not allowing him to think. He slowed his breathing and tried to experience any last feelings that he might be harboring.

I'm here, he thought. This is real.

He felt silly, standing there, breathing into his mike, running the schedule even further behind. The sunlight on the gold insulating foil around the lander caught his eye. Shrugging slightly in his bulging suit, Baedecker bounced effortlessly across the pocked and trampled plain toward the waiting spacecraft.

The half-moon rose above the jungle. It was Maggie's turn to putt. She bent over, knees together, her face a study in concentration. The lightly tapped ball rolled too quickly down the concrete ramp and bounced over the low railing.

'I don't believe this,' Baedecker said.

Khajuraho consisted of a landing strip, a famed group of temples, a tiny Indian village, and two small hotels on the edge of the jungle. And one miniature golf course.

The temple compound closed at five P.M. Entertainment other than the temples themselves consisted of a hotel-sponsored elephant ride into the jungle during tourist season. It was not tourist season. Then they had strolled out behind the small hotel and found the miniature golf course.

'I don't believe this,' Maggie had said.

'It must have been left behind by a homesick architect from Indianapolis,' said Baedecker. The hotel clerk had frowned but provided them with a choice of three putters, two of them bent beyond repair. Baedecker gallantly had offered Maggie the straightest of the lot and they had charged out to the links.

Maggie's missed putt rolled into the grass. A thin green serpent slid away toward higher grass. Maggie stifled a scream and Baedecker held his putter out like a sword. Ahead of them in the humid dusk were peeling plywood windmills and decarpeted putting strips. Cups and concrete water hazards were filled with lukewarm water from the day's monsoon rains. A few yards beyond the last hole stood a real Hindu temple, seemingly part of the miniature montage.

'Scott would love this,' laughed Baedecker.

'Really?' asked Maggie. She rested her weight on her putter. Her face was a white oval in the dim light.

'Sure. This used to be his favorite sport. We used to get a season pass to the Cocoa Beach Putt-Putt course.' Maggie lowered her head and sank a ten-foot putt across pebbly cement. She looked up as something eclipsed the moon.

'Oh!' she said. A fruit bat with a wingspan of three feet or more floated out of the trees and coasted black against the sky.

It was the mosquitoes that drove them inside from the fourteenth hole.

Woodland Heights. Seven miles from the Johnson Space Flight Center, flat as the Bonneville Salt Flats and as devoid of trees save for the precariously supported saplings in every yard, the homes of Woodland Heights stretched in curves and circles under the relentless Texas sun. Once, flying home from a week at the Cape, early on in the training for the Gemini flight that was never to be, Baedecker banked his T-38 over the endless geometries of similar houses to find his own. He finally picked it out by the repainted green of Joan's old Rambler.

Impulsively, he put the little trainer into a dive and leveled off at a satisfying and illegal two hundred feet above the rooftops. The horizon banked, sunlight prismed off Plexiglas, and he brought the jet back for another run. Pulling out, he kicked in the afterburner and brought the T-38 up into a steep climb, arched it into a tight loop, culminated by the sight of the somehow miraculous emergence of his wife and child from the white ranch house.

It had been one of the few moments in Baedecker's life that he could point to and say that he was truly happy.

He lay awake and watched the strip of moonlight move slowly up the wall of the hotel room in Khajuraho. Baedecker idly wondered if Joan had sold the house or if she was still holding it as rental property.

After a while he rose from the bed and went to look out the window. In so doing he blocked the fragile line of moonlight and let the darkness in.

Basti, chawl, whatever the Calcuttans called it, it was the ultimate slum. Stretching for miles along the railroad tracks, the maze of tin-roofed shacks and gunnysack tents was penetrated only by a few winding paths that served as both streets and sewers. The density of people was almost beyond belief. Children were everywhere, defecating in doorways, chasing each other between huts, and following Baedecker with the light-footed hop of the shy and the barefoot. Women looked away as Baedecker passed, or pulled up the cloth of their saris to cover their faces. Men stared with open curiosity verging on hostility. Some ignored him. Mothers squatted behind their children, intent on pulling lice from matted hair. Little girls crouched next to old women and kneaded cow dung with their hands, shaping it into properly sized patties for fuel. An old man hawked phlegm into his hand as he squatted to shit in an empty lot.

'Baba! Baba!' Children ran alongside Baedecker. Palms were stretched out and hands tugged at him. He had long since emptied his pockets of coins.

'Baba! Baba!'

He had agreed to meet Maggie at two o'clock at Calcutta University but had become lost after getting off the overcrowded bus too soon. It must have been getting close to five o'clock. The paths and dirt streets wound back on themselves, trapping him between the railroad tracks and the Hooghly River. He had captured repeated glimpses of the Howrah Bridge, but he could never seem to get closer to it. The stench from the river was rivaled only by the stink of the slums and mud through which he walked.

'Baba!' The crowd around him was getting larger and not all of the beggars were children. Several large men pushed right behind him, speaking rapidly and thrusting out their hands in jabs that fell just short of landing.

My own goddamn fault, thought Baedecker. The Ugly American strikes again. The huts had no doorways. Chickens ran in and out of the cramped, dark spaces. In a low-lying pond of sewage, a group of boys and men washed the black sides of a sleepy bullock. Somewhere in the tightly packed maze of shacks there was a battery-powered radio playing loudly. The music had been rising to a crescendo of plucked strings that augmented Baedecker's growing anxiety. Thirty or forty people were following him now, and lean, angry men had all but pushed the children away.

One man with a red bandanna around his head screamed loudly in what Baedecker took to be Hindi or Bengali. When Baedecker shook his head that he did not understand, the man blocked his way, waved his thin arms in the air, and shouted more loudly. Some of the phrases were repeated by other men in the crowd.

Much earlier, Baedecker had picked up a small but heavy rock. Now he casually put his hand in the pocket of his safari shirt and palmed the stone. Time seemed to slow and a calm descended on him.

Suddenly there was a screaming from one side, children were running, and the crowd abandoned Baedecker to jog down a side street. Even the man with the red bandanna shouted a parting syllable and moved quickly away. Baedecker waited a minute and then strolled after them, descending a muddy path to the river's edge.

A crowd had gathered around something that had washed up in the mud. At first, Baedecker thought it was a bleached tree stump, but then he saw the awful symmetry of it and recognized it as a human body. It was white — white beyond albino white, beyond fish-belly white — and gases had bloated it to twice normal-size. Black holes seemed to stare out from the puffy mass that had once been a face. Several of the children who had been following Baedecker now squatted close to the thing and ran their hands across it with shrill giggles. The texture reminded Baedecker of white fungus, of huge mushrooms rotting in the sun. Pieces of flesh collapsed inward or broke off as the boys prodded and giggled.

Finally some of the men went closer and prodded the body with sharp sticks. They backed away as gas escaped with an audible hiss. The crowd laughed. Mothers with infants slung on their hips pressed forward.

Baedecker backed away, moved quickly down an alley, made a right turn without thinking about it, and suddenly emerged onto a paved street. A trolley car passed, swaying from its load of hanging passengers. Two rickshaw coolies trotted past, pulling overweight Indian businessmen home for dinner. Baedecker stood in the traffic for a few seconds and then waved down a passing cab.

'How are you doing, Richard?'

'Great, hon. Not much to do for the next couple of days. Tom Gavin's been doing most of the work and taking real good care of us. Dave and I are going to send him out to retrieve the film canisters in a few hours. How are things at home?'

'Just great. We watched the lunar lift-off yesterday from here at Mission Control. You never told us that it went up so quickly.'

'Yeah. It was quite a ride.'

'. . . want to . . . few . . .'

'Sorry. Say again. Didn't copy that.'

'. . .said that Scott would like to say a few words.'

'Okay . . . great! Put him on.'

'All right. Good-bye, Richard. We're looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday. Bye!'

'Hi, Dad!'

'Hi, Scott.'

'You looked really neat on the TV. Did you really set a speed record like they said?'

'Ahh . . . for land speed . . . for driving on the moon, yeah, I guess we did, Scott. Only Dave was driving. I guess the record's in his name.'

'Oh.'

'Well, Tiger, we've got to get back to work. It's been real good talking to you.'

'Hey, Dad.'

'Ah roger, Scott . . .'

'I can see all three of you on the big TV here. Who's driving the command module?'

'Ah That's a good question, isn't it, Tom? I guess . . . Scott . . . I guess that for the next couple of days . . . uh . . . Isaac Newton's doing the driving.' The live transmission of the families talking to the astronauts had been NASA's idea of effective PR in time for the evening news. They did not repeat it on the next flight.

'The illustrious sepulchre of His Exalted Majesty Shah Jahan, the Valiant King, whose dwelling is in the starry Heaven. He traveled from this transient world to the World of Eternity on the twenty-eighth night of the month of Rahab in the year of 1076 of the Hegira.' Maggie Brown closed the guidebook, and they both turned their backs on the white eminence of the Taj Mahal. Neither was in the mood to appreciate beautiful architecture or precious stones inlaid in flawless marble. Outside the gates the beggars waited. Baedecker and the girl crossed the chessboard pavement to lean on the wide railing and look out over the river. A monsoon downpour had driven away all but the most hardy of tourists. The air was as cool as it had been during Baedecker's entire visit — as low as the eighties. The sun was hidden behind bruise-black stratocumulus to the west, but a gray light permeated the scene. The river was broad and shallow, and it moved by with the absorbing serenity of all rivers everywhere.

'Maggie, why did you follow Scott to India?'

She looked at Baedecker, avoided a shrug only by hunching her shoulders, and tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. She squinted across the river as if searching for someone on the far bank. 'I'm not sure. We only knew each other for about five months before he decided to drop out and come here. I liked Scott . . . I still do . . . but sometimes he seemed so immature. Other times he was like an old man who had forgotten how to laugh.'

'But you followed him ten thousand miles.' This time she did shrug. 'He was hunting for something. We were both serious about that . . .'

'Places of power?'

'Something like that. Only Scott thought that if he didn't find it soon, he never would. He said that he didn't want to piss away his life like . . .'

'Like his old man?'

'Like so many people. So when he wrote me I decided to come and take a look. Only for me it's just time off. I'm going to get my master's degree next year.'

'Do you think he's found it?' asked Baedecker. His voice was almost trembling.

Maggie Brown brought her head back and took a deep breath. 'I don't think he's found anything. I think he's just set on proving that he can be as dumb an asshole as the next guy. Sorry about the language, Mr. Baedecker.' Baedecker smiled. 'Maggie, I'll be fifty-three years old next November. I'm twenty-one pounds heavier than I was when I was a wage-earning pilot. My job stinks. My office has the kind of blond furniture in it you used to see in the 1950s. My wife divorced me after twenty-eight years of marriage and is living with a CPA who dyes his hair and raises chinchillas as a hobby. I spent two years trying to write a book before I realized that I had absolutely nothing to say. I've just spent the better part of a week with a beautiful girl who didn't wear a bra the whole time and never once did I make a pass at her. Now . . . just a minute . . . if you want to say that my son, my only begotten son, is as big an asshole as the next guy, why, you go right ahead.' Maggie's laughter echoed off the tall building. An elderly English couple glared at them as if they were giggling in church.

'All right,' she said at last. 'That's why I'm here. Why did you come?' Baedecker blinked. 'I'm his father.' Maggie Brown's green eyes did not waver. 'You're right,' he said. 'That's not enough.' He reached into his pocket and withdrew the Saint Christopher's medal.

'My father gave this to me when I went off to the Marines,' he said. 'My father and I didn't have much in common . . .'

'Was he Catholic?' Baedecker laughed. 'No, he wasn't Catholic . . . Dutch Reformed . . . but his grandfather had been Catholic. This thing's come a long way.' Baedecker told her about the medal's trip to the moon.

'Jesus,' said Maggie. 'And St. Christopher's not even a saint anymore, is he?'

'Nope.'

'That doesn't matter, does it?'

'No.' Maggie looked across the river. The light was fading. Lantern lights and open fires gleamed along a line of trees. Sweet smoke filled the air.

'You know what the saddest book I ever read was?' she asked. 'No. What was the saddest book you ever read?'

'The Boys of Summer. Ever read it?'

'No. But I remember when it came out. It was a sports book, wasn't it?'

'Yes. This writer — Roger Kahn — he went and looked up a lot of the guys who played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1952 and ‘53.'

'I remember those seasons,' said Baedecker. 'Duke Snider, Campanella, Billy Cox. What's sad about that? They didn't win the Series, but they had great seasons.'

'Yeah, but that's just it,' said Maggie, and Baedecker was amazed at how earnest and tense her voice seemed. 'Years later, when Kahn looked up these guys, that was still their best season. I mean, it'd been the best time in their goddamn lives, and most of them didn't want to believe it. They were just old farts signing autographs and waiting to die, and they still pretended that the best stuff was ahead of them.' Baedecker did not laugh. He nodded. Embarrassed, Maggie poked through the guidebook. After a silent moment she said, 'Hey, here's something interesting.'

'What's that?'

'It says here that the Taj Mahal was just for practice. Old Shah Jahan had an even bigger tomb planned for himself. Across the river. It was going to be all black and connected to the Taj by a graceful bridge.'

'What happened?'

'Hmm . . . evidently when Shah Jahan died, his son . . . Aurangzeb . . . just slid his father's coffin in next to Mumtaz Mahal and spent the money on other things.'

They both nodded. As they left they could hear the haunting cries of the Muslim call to prayer. Baedecker looked back before they passed out the main gate, but he was not looking at the Taj or its dim image in the darkened, reflecting pool. He was looking across the river at a tall, ebony tomb and its soaring bridge connecting it to the closer shore.

The moon hung above the banyan trees against the pale of the early-morning sky. Baedecker stood in front of the hotel with his hands in his pockets and watched the street fill with people and vehicles. When he finally saw Scott approaching, he had to look again to make sure it was Scott. The orange robe and sandals seemed appropriate to the long-haired, bearded image, but none of it held a referent for Baedecker. He noticed that the boy's beard, a miserable failure two years earlier, was now full with red streaks in it.

Scott stopped a few feet away. The two stared at each other for a long moment that had just begun to shade into awkwardness when Scott, teeth white against the beard, held out his hand.

'Hi, Dad.'

'Scott.' The handshake was firm but unsatisfactory to Baedecker. He felt a sudden surge of loss superimposed upon the memory of a seven-year-old boy, blue T-shirt and crew cut, running full tilt from the house and throwing himself into his father's arms.

'How are you, Dad?'

'Good. Very good. How about you? You look like you've lost quite a bit of weight.'

'Just fat. I've never felt better. Physically or spiritually.' Baedecker paused.

'How's Mom?' asked Scott.

'I haven't seen her for a few months, but I called her just before I left and she was great. She told me to give you a hug for her. Also to break your arm if you didn't promise to write more often.' The young man shrugged and made a motion with his right hand that Baedecker remembered from Little League games in which Scott had struck out. Impulsively, Baedecker reached out and clasped his son's arm. It felt thin but strong under the flimsy robe.

'Come on, Scott. What do you say we go somewhere to have breakfast and really talk?'

'I don't have a lot of time, Dad. The Master begins his first session at eight and I have to be there. I'm afraid I'm not going to have any free time during the next few days. Our whole group is at a real sensitive stage right now. It doesn't take much to break the life-consciousness. I could slip back a couple of months in my progress.'

Baedecker cut off the first response that welled up. He nodded tightly. 'Well, we still have time for a cup of coffee, don't we?'

'Sure.' There was a slight undertone of doubt in the word.

'Where to? How about the hotel coffee shop? It seems to be about the only place around here.' Scott's smile was condescending. 'All right. Sure.' The coffee shop was a shaded, open structure adjoining the gardens and pool. Baedecker ordered rolls and coffee and noticed from the corner of his eye the 'Scheduled Class' woman mowing the lawn with a hand sickle. Untouchables remained untouchable in modern India, but they were no longer called that. An Indian family had come to use the pool. Both the father and his little boy were grossly overweight. Again and again they jumped feet-first off the low board and splashed water on the sidewalk. The mother and daughters sat at a table and giggled loudly.

Scott's eyes looked deeper, even more serious than Baedecker had remembered. Even as a baby Scott had been solemn. Now the young man looked tired and his breathing was shallow and asthmatic.

Their food arrived. 'Mmmm,' said Baedecker, 'I haven't cared too much for the Indian food I've had on this trip, but the coffee's been delicious.'

'Lots of karma,' said Scott. He stared doubtfully at his cup and the two rolls. 'You don't even know who prepared this stuff. Who touched it. Could be somebody with really lousy karma.' Baedecker sipped his coffee. 'Where are you living here, Scott?'

'Mostly at the ashram or the Master's farm. During solitude weeks I check into a little Indian hostel a few blocks from here. It has open windows and a string bed, but it's cheap. And my physical environment doesn't mean anything to me anymore.' Baedecker stared. 'No? If it's so cheap, where has all the money gone? Your mother and I have sent you almost four thousand dollars since you decided to come here in January.' Scott looked out at the pool where the Indian family was making noise. 'Oh, you know. Expenses.'

'No,' said Baedecker softly, 'I don't know. What kind of expenses?' Scott frowned. His hair was very long and parted in the middle. With the beard, his son reminded Baedecker of an eccentric ground crewman he had known while flying experimental aircraft for NASA in the mid-sixties.

'Expenses,' repeated Scott. 'Getting around wasn't cheap. Most of it I've donated to the Master.' Baedecker felt the conversation slipping out of his control. He felt the anger that he had sworn he would not let come. 'What do you mean you give it to the Master? For what? So he could build another auditorium here? Move to Hollywood again? Try to buy another town in Oregon?' Scott sighed and bit into a roll without thinking about it. He brushed crumbs from his mustache. 'Forget it, Dad.'

'Forget what? That you dropped out of graduate school to come spend money on this fake guru?'

'I said forget it.'

'Like hell. We can at least talk about it.'

'Talk about what?' Scott's voice was rising. Heads turned. An older man, in orange robe and sandals, his hair tied back in a ponytail, put down his copy of the Times and stubbed out his cigarette, obviously interested in the exchange. 'What the hell do you know about it? You're so wrapped up in your American materialistic crap that you wouldn't know the truth if it appeared on your fucking desk someday.'

'Materialistic crap,' repeated Baedecker. Most of the anger was gone now. 'And you think that a little bit of tantra yoga and a few months in this ass-backward country is going to lead you to the truth?'

'Don't talk about things you don't know about,' snapped Scott.

'I know about engineering,' said Baedecker. 'I know that I'm not impressed with a country that can't manage a simple phone system or build sewers. I know useless hunger when I see it.'

'Bullshit,' said Scott, perhaps with more of a sneer than he had intended. 'Just because we're not eating Kansas beef you think we're starving . . .'

'I'm not talking about you. Or these others here. You can fly home anytime you want. This is a game for rich kids. I'm talking about . . .'

'Rich kids!' Scott's high laugh was sincere. 'This is the first time I've been called a rich kid! I remember when you wouldn't give me a goddamn fifty-cent allowance because you thought it'd be bad for my self-discipline.'

'Come on, Scott.'

'Why don't you just go home, Dad. Go home and watch your color TVs and ride your exerciser in the basement and look at your fucking photos on the wall and leave me here to go about my . . . my game.' Baedecker closed his eyes for a second. He wished the day would start over so he could begin again. 'Scott. We want you home.'

'Home?' Baedecker watched his son's eyebrows arch. 'Where's home, Pop? Up in Boston with Mom and good-time Charlie? Your swinging-bachelor pad in St. Louis? No thanks.' Baedecker reached out and took his son's upper arm once again. He could feel the tightening there, the resistance. 'Let's talk about it, Scott. There's nothing here.' The two men stared at each other. Strangers in a chance encounter.

'There's sure as hell nothing there,' said Scott fiercely. 'You've been there, Dad. You know it. Shit, you are it.' Baedecker leaned back in his chair. A waiter stood obtrusively nearby, uselessly rearranging cups and silverware. Sparrows hopped across nearby tables, eating from the soiled plates and sugar cups. The fat boy on the diving board called loudly and hit the water in a crude belly flop. His father shouted encouragement, and the women laughed from poolside.

'I have to get going,' said Scott. Baedecker nodded. 'I'll walk you there.'

The ashram was only two blocks from the hotel. Devotees were walking up the flowered lanes and arriving by autorickshaw in twos and threes. A wooden gate and tall fences kept out the curious. Just inside the gate there was a small souvenir shop where one could buy books, photographs, and autographed T-shirts of the guru.

The two men stood a minute by the entrance.

'Can you get away long enough for dinner tonight?' asked Baedecker. 'Yeah. I guess so. Fine.'

'The hotel?'

'No. I know a place downtown that has good vegetarian. Cheap.'

'All right. Well, okay, good. Stop by the hotel if you get out early.'

'Yeah. I'll be going back to the Master's farm on Monday but maybe Maggie could show you around Poona before you leave. Kasturba Samadhi, the Parvati Temple, all that good tourist shit.' The motion with his right hand again. 'You know.' Baedecker almost reached out to shake hands again — as with a client — resisted it. The diffuse sunlight was very hot. From the humidity he knew that it would rain hard again before lunch. He would use the time to buy an umbrella somewhere.

'I'll see you later, Scott.'

His son nodded. When he turned to join the other robed devotees to enter the ashram, Baedecker noticed how straight the thin shoulders were, how his son's hair caught the light.

On Monday morning Baedecker took the train, the Deccan Queen, for the hundred-mile trip down out of the mountains to Bombay. His flight to London was delayed three hours. The heat was very great. Baedecker noticed that the aged airport guards carried ancient bolt-action rifles and wore only sandals over their patched socks.

That morning he had walked through the old British section of Poona until he had found the doctor's house where Maggie worked. Miss Brown was gone — taken the children to the pavilion — did he care to leave a message? He left no message. He left the simply wrapped package holding the flute he'd purchased in Varanasi. The flute and an old Saint Christopher's medal on a tarnished chain.

He boarded about six P.M. and the aircraft was a physical relief. There was an additional maintenance delay, but the stewardesses brought around drinks and the air-conditioning was working well. Baedecker leafed through a Scientific American he had bought in Victoria Station.

He dozed off for a while just before they took off. In his dream he was learning to swim and was bouncing lightly over the clear white sand of the lake bottom. He could not see his father, but he could feel the strong, constant pressure of his father's arms buoying him up, keeping him safe from the dangerous currents.

He awoke just as they took off. Ten minutes later they were far out over the Arabian Sea and they broke through the ceiling of cloud cover. It was the first time in a week that Baedecker had seen a pure blue sky. The setting sun was turning the clouds beneath them into a lake of golden fire.

As they reached their cruising altitude and ended their climb, Baedecker felt the slight reduction in g-force as they came over the top of the arc. Looking out the scratched window, searching in vain for a glimpse of the moon, Baedecker felt a brief lifting of spirit. Here in the high, thin air the demanding gravity of the massive planet seemed slightly — ever so slightly — lessened.