Phases of Gravity

Part Four Lonerock

The funeral is on New Year's Eve, the clouds are low, and the short procession of vehicles has driven the four-and-a-half-hour ride from Salem, Oregon, through intermittent attempts at snow. Although it is still morning, the light seems tired and desultory, absorbed by trees and stones and farmhouse wood until only gray outlines of reality remain. It is very cold. The white exhaust from the idling hearse flows over the six men as they wrestle the casket from the vehicle and carry it across a brittle expanse of frozen grass.

Baedecker feels the cold of the bronze handle through his glove and wonders at how light the body of his friend seems. Carrying the massive casket is no effort at all with the other five men helping. Baedecker is reminded of a child's game where a group would levitate a supine volunteer, each person placing only a single finger under the tense and waiting body. Inevitably, the reclining child would rise several feet from the floor to a chorus of giggles. To Baedecker as a boy, the sensation of lifting someone that way had carried with it a slight flush of fear at the sense of gravity defied, of unbreakable laws being broken. But always, at the end, the squealing, wiggling child would be lowered, carefully or abruptly, the weight returned; gravity obeyed at last.

Baedecker counts twenty-eight people at graveside. He knows that there could have been many more. There had been talk of the vice president attending, but the offer carried the odor of an election year, and Diane had put a quick end to that. Baedecker looks to his left and sees the spire of the Lonerock Methodist Church in the valley two miles below. The wan light ebbs and flows with each passing layer of cloud, and Baedecker is fascinated with the sense of shifting substance in the distant spire. The church had been closed for years before this morning's funeral there, and when Baedecker had been packing kindling into the metal stove prior to the arrival of the other mourners, he had noticed the date on an old newspaper: October 21, 1971. Baedecker had paused a moment then and had tried to remember where he and Dave might have been on October 21 of that year. Less than three months before the flight. Houston or the Cape, most probably. Baedecker cannot remember.

The graveside services are brief and simple. Colonel Terrence Paul, an Air Force chaplain and old friend, makes a few remarks. Baedecker speaks for a moment, remembering his friend moving across the surface of the moon, buoyant, haloed in light. A telegram from Tom Gavin is read aloud. Others speak. Finally Diane talks softly about her husband's love of flying and of family. Her voice breaks once or twice, but she recovers and finishes.

In the silence that follows, Baedecker can almost hear the snowflakes settling on coats and grass and coffin. Suddenly there is a roar, which shakes the entire hillside, and the group looks up to see four T-38s in tight formation coming in low from the northwest, no more than five hundred feet high in order to stay under the overcast. As the formation shrieks overhead with a scream that echoes in bone and teeth and skull, the jet in the wingman's position suddenly veers out of formation and climbs almost vertically to be swallowed by the gray ceiling of clouds. The other three T-38s disappear to the southeast, the scream of their afterburners fading to a low moan and then to silence.

The sight of the missing man formation has, as it always does, moved Baedecker to tears. He blinks in the cold air. General Layton, another family friend, nods to the Air Force honor guard, and the American flag is removed from the coffin and ceremoniously folded. General Layton hands the folded flag to Diane. She accepts without tears.

Small groups and individuals murmur to the widow, and then people pause a moment and move slowly toward the idling automobiles beyond the fence.

Baedecker remains behind for a few minutes. The air is cold in his lungs. Across the valley he sees the brown hills mottled with patterns of gray snow. The county road cuts across the face of the bluff like a scar. Farther west, a hogback ridge rises from the pine-forested hills, and Baedecker is reminded of a stegosaurus's scales. He glances toward the small shack at the far end of the cemetery and sees the yellow backhoe parked there in semiconcealment. Two men in heavy gray overalls and blue stocking caps are smoking and watching. Waiting for me to leave, thinks Baedecker. He looks down at the surface of the gray coffin poised above the hole dug out of the frozen earth and then he turns and walks to the cars.

Diane is waiting at the open door of her white Jeep Cherokee, and she beckons Baedecker over after the last of the other mourners have turned to their own cars. 'Richard, would you ride down the hill with me?'

'Of course,' says Baedecker. 'Shall I drive?'

'No, I'll drive.' They are the last car to leave. Baedecker glances at Diane as they turn down the narrow gravel road; she does not look back at the cemetery. Her bare hands are white and firm on the wheel. It begins to snow more heavily as they switch back down the rough lane and she clicks the windshield wipers on. The metronomic tick of the wiper blades and the purr of the heater are the only sounds for several minutes.

'Richard, do you think it went all right?' Diane unbuttons her coat and turns down the heater. Her dress is a very dark blue; she had not been able to find a black maternity dress in the three days prior to the funeral.

'Yes,' says Baedecker.

Diane nods. 'I think it did too.'

They rumble over a cattleguard. Brake lights flare as the car ahead of them slows to avoid a large rock protruding from the rutted path. They pass through a rancher's field and turn right onto a gravel road that heads into the valley.

'Will you stay with us tonight in Salem?' asks Diane. 'We're going to have some hot food here at the house and then head back.'

'Of course,' says Baedecker. 'I told Bob Munsen that I'd meet him up at the site this afternoon, but I could be back by seven.'

'Tucker will be there tonight,' she says quickly, as if still in need of convincing him. 'And Katie. It would be good to have the four of us together one last time.'

'It doesn't have to be the last time, Di,' says Baedecker.

She nods but does not speak. Baedecker looks at her face, sees the freckles visible against pale skin, and is reminded of a porcelain doll from Germany, which his mother had kept on her bureau. He had broken it one rainy day while roughhousing with Boots, their oversized springer spaniel. Although his father had carefully glued it back together, from that time on Baedecker had always been aware of the infinitesimal tracery of fracture lines on the white cheeks and forehead of the delicate figurine. Now Baedecker searches Diane's features as if seeking new fracture lines there.

Outside, the snow falls more heavily.

Baedecker arrived in Salem in early October. He hobbled off the train, set his luggage down, and looked around. The small station was fifty yards away. No bigger than a large picnic pavilion, it looked as if it had been built in the early twenties and abandoned shortly thereafter. There were clumps of moss growing on the roof shingles.

'Richard!'

Baedecker looked past a family exchanging hugs and could make out the tall form of Dave Muldorff near the station. Baedecker waved, picked up his old military flight bag, and moved slowly in his direction.

'Damn, it's good to see you,' said Dave. His hand was large, the handshake firm.

'Good to see you,' said Baedecker. He realized with a sudden surge of emotion that he was happy to see his old crewmate. 'How long has it been, Dave? Two years?'

'Almost three,' said Dave. 'That Air and Space Museum thing that Mike Collins hosted. What the hell did you do to your leg?' Baedecker smiled ruefully and tapped at his right foot with the walking stick he was using as a cane. 'Just a sprained ankle,' he said. 'Twisted it when I was up in the mountains with Tom Gavin.' Dave picked up Baedecker's flight bag and the two began the slow walk to the parking lot. 'How is Tom?'

'Just fine,' said Baedecker. 'He and Deedee are doing very well.'

'He's in the salvation business these days, isn't he?' Baedecker glanced at his ex-crewmate. There had never been any love lost between Gavin and Muldorff. He was curious about Dave's feelings now, almost seventeen years after the mission.

'He runs an evangelical group called Apogee,' said Baedecker. 'It's pretty successful.'

'Good,' said Dave and his voice sounded sincere. They had reached a new, white Jeep Cherokee and Dave tossed Baedecker's flight bag and garment bag in the back. 'Glad to hear that Tom's doing okay.' The Jeep smelled of new upholstery heated by the sun. Baedecker rolled the window down. The early October day was warm and cloudless. Brittle leaves rustled on a large oak tree just beyond the parking lot. The sky was a heart-stoppingly perfect shade of blue. 'I thought it was always raining out here in Oregon,' said Baedecker.

'Usually is.' Dave pulled the Jeep out into traffic. 'Three or four days a year the sun comes out and gives us a chance to scrape the fungus out from between our toes. The cops, TV stations, and local Air Force base hate days like this.'

'Why's that?' asked Baedecker.

'Every time the sun comes out, they get three or four hundred calls reporting a big, orange UFO in the sky,' said Dave.

'Uh-huh.'

'I'm not shitting you. All over the state vampires are scurrying for their coffins. This is the one state in the Union where they can go about their business in daytime without encountering any sunlight. These few sunny days are a big shock to our Nosferatu population.' Baedecker lay his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. It was going to be a long visit.

'Hey, Richard, can you tell that I've recently had oral sex with a chicken?' Baedecker opened one eye. His old crewmate still resembled a leaner, craggier version of James Garner. There were more lines on the face now, and the cheekbones were sharper against the skin, but the wavy black hair showed no hint of gray. 'No,' said Baedecker.

'Good,' said Dave in a relieved tone. Suddenly he coughed twice into his fist. Torn-up bits of yellow Kleenex fluttered into the air like feathers.

Baedecker closed his eye.

'Real good to have you here, Richard,' said Dave Muldorff.

Baedecker smiled without opening his eyes. 'Real good to be here, Dave.'

Baedecker had sold his car in Denver and taken the train west with Maggie Brown. He did not know whether the decision was wise — he suspected that it was not — but for once he attempted simply to carry out an action without analysis.

The Amtrak California Zephyr left Denver at nine A.M., and he and Maggie breakfasted in the dining car while the long train burrowed under the continental divide through the first of fifty-five tunnels awaiting them in Colorado. Baedecker looked at the paper plates, paper napkins, and paper tablecloth. 'The last time I traveled by train in America, there was real linen on the table and the food wasn't microwaved,' he said to Maggie.

Maggie smiled. 'When was that, Richard, during World War II?' She meant it as a joke — a not-so-subtle jibe at his constant mentioning of their age difference — but Baedecker blinked in shock as he realized that it had been during the war. His mother had taken his sister Anne and him from Peoria to Chicago to visit relatives over the holidays. Baedecker remembered the train seats that faced backward, the hushed tone of the porters and waiters in the dining car, and the strange thrill that passed through him as he peered out the window at streetlights and the orange-lit windows of homes in the night.

Chicago had been constellations of lights and rows of apartment windows flashing by as the train moved along elevated tracks through the southside. Despite the fact that he had been born in Chicago, the view had given the ten-year-old Baedecker a sense of displacement, a not unpleasant feeling of having lost the center of things. Twenty-eight years after the trip to Chicago, he was to feel the same sense of uncenteredness as his Apollo spacecraft passed out of radio contact with the earth as the rough limb of the moon filled his view. Baedecker remembered leaning against the small window of the command module and wiping away condensation with his palm, much as he had four and a half decades earlier as the train carrying his mother, his sister, and him pulled into Union Station.

'You folks done?' The Amtrak waiter's voice bordered on belligerence. 'All done,' said Maggie and swallowed the last of her coffee.

'Good,' said the waiter. He flipped the red paper tablecloth up from opposite corners, enclosed the paper plates, plastic utensils, and Styrofoam cups in it, and tossed the entire mass into a nearby receptacle.

'Progress,' said Baedecker as they moved back through the shifting aisle. 'What's that?' asked Maggie.

'Nothing,' said Baedecker.

Late that night, while Maggie slept against his shoulder, Baedecker watched out the window as they changed engines in a remote corner of the switching yard in Salt Lake City. Under an abandoned overpass, bounded about by tall weeds made brittle by the autumn cold, hobos sat by a fire. Are they still called hobos? wondered Baedecker.

In the morning both he and Maggie awoke just before dawn as the first false light touched the pink rocks of the desert canyon through which the train was hurtling. Baedecker knew instantly upon awakening that the trip would not go well, that whatever he and Maggie had shared in India and rediscovered in the Colorado mountains would not survive the reality of the next few days.

Neither of them spoke while the sun rose. The train rushed on westward, the rocks and mesas flying by, the morning wrapped in a temporary and fragile hush.

Dave and Diane Muldorff lived in a well-to-do suburb on the south side of Salem. Their patio looked down on a wooded stream and Baedecker listened to water running over unseen rocks as he ate his steak and baked potato.

'Tomorrow we'll take you over to Lonerock,' said Dave.

'Sounds good,' said Baedecker. 'I look forward to seeing it after hearing about it all these years.'

'Dave will take you over,' said Diane. 'I have a reception at the Children's Home tomorrow night and a fund-raiser on Sunday. I'll see you on Monday.' Baedecker nodded and looked at Diane Muldorff. She was thirty-four, fourteen years younger than her husband. With her tousled mane of dark hair, startling blue eyes, snub nose, and freckles, she reminded Baedecker of all the girls-next-door he had never known. Yet there was a solid streak of adult in Diane, a quiet but firm maturity, which was now emphasized as she entered her sixth month of pregnancy. This evening she wore soft jeans and a faded blue Oxford shirt with the tails out. 'You look good, Di,' Baedecker said on impulse. 'Pregnancy agrees with you.'

'Thank you, Richard. You look good, too. You've lost some weight since that party in Washington.' Baedecker laughed. He had been at his heaviest then, thirty-six pounds over his flying weight. He was still twenty-one pounds over that weight.

'Are you still jogging?' asked Dave. Muldorff had been the only one of the second generation of astronauts who did not run regularly. It had been the point of some contention. Now, ten years after leaving the program, he looked thinner than he had then. Baedecker wondered if Dave's illness was the cause.

'I run a little,' said Baedecker. 'Just started up a few months ago after I got back from India.' Diane carried several icy bottles of beer to the table and sat down. The last of the evening light touched her cheeks. 'How was India?' she asked.

'Interesting,' said Baedecker. 'Too much to take in in so short a time.'

'And you saw Scott there?' asked Dave.

'Yes,' said Baedecker. 'Briefly.'

'I miss seeing Scott,' said Dave. 'Remember our fishing trips off Galveston in the early seventies?' Baedecker nodded. He remembered the endless afternoons in rich light and the slow, warm evenings. He and his son would both return home with sunburns. 'The redheads return!' Joan would cry out in mock dismay. 'Get out the ointment!'

'Did you know that what's-his-name, Scott's holy man, is coming to stay full-time in that ashram of his not far from Lonerock?' asked Diane.

Baedecker blinked at her. 'Full-time? No, I didn't.'

'What was the ashram like in Poona where Scott was staying?' asked Dave. 'I don't really know,' said Baedecker. He thought of the shop outside the main building where one could buy T-shirts with images of the Master's bearded face on them. 'I was just in Poona two days and didn't see much of the ashram.'

'Will Scott be coming back to the States when the group moves over here?' asked Diane.

Baedecker tasted his beer. 'I don't know,' he said. 'Maybe he's here now. I'm afraid I'm out of touch.'

'Hey,' said Dave. 'Want to come inside to the billy yard room for a fast game?'

'Billy yard room?' said Baedecker.

'What's the matter, Richard,' said Dave, 'didn't you ever watch The Beverly Hillbillies back during the golden age of the tube?'

'No,' said Baedecker.

Dave rolled his eyes at Diane. 'That's the problem with this lad, Di. He's culturally deprived.' Diane nodded. 'I'm sure you'll fix that, David.' Muldorff poured more beer and carried both mugs with him to the door of the patio. 'Luckily for him, I've got twenty episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies on tape. We'll start watching as soon as I thrash him in a fast but expensive game of pool. Come wiz me, mon sewer Baedecker.'

'Oui,' said Baedecker. He picked up some of the dishes and carried them toward the kitchen. 'Einen Augenblik, por favor, mon ami.'

Baedecker parks his rented car and walks the two hundred yards to the crash site. He has seen many such sites before; he expects this one to hold no surprises. He is wrong.

As he reaches the top of the ridge, the icy wind strikes him and at the same instant he sees Mt. St. Helens clearly. The volcano looms over the valley and ridgeline like a great, shattered stump of ice. A narrow plume of smoke or cloud hangs above it. For the first time, Baedecker realizes that he is walking on ash. Under the thin layer of snow the soil is more gray than brown. The confusion of footprints on the hillside reminds him of the trampled area around the lunar module when he and Dave returned from their last EVA at the end of the second day.

The crash site, the volcano, and the ash make Baedecker think of the inevitable triumph of catastrophe and entropy over order. Long strands of yellow-and-orange plastic tape hang from rocks and bushes to mark locations that investigators had found interesting. To Baedecker's surprise, the wreckage of the aircraft has not yet been moved. He notices the two long, scorched areas, about thirty meters apart, where the T-38 had initially struck the hill and then bounced even while disintegrating. Most of the wreckage is concentrated where a low band of rocks rises from the hillside like new molars. Snow and ash had been flung far out in rays that remind Baedecker of the secondary impact craters near their lunar landing site in the Marius Hills.

Only vague and twisted remnants of the aircraft remain. The tail section is almost intact; five feet of clean metal from which Baedecker reads the Air National Guard serial number. He recognizes a long, blackened mass as one of the twin General Electric turbojet engines. Pieces of melted plastic and shards of twisted metal are everywhere. Tangles of white, insulated wire are strewn randomly around the shattered fuselage like the discarded entrails of some slaughtered beast. Baedecker sees a section of fire-blackened Plexiglas canopy still attached to a fragment of fuselage. Except for the colored tape and footsteps concentrated there, there is no sign that a man's body had been fused into these broken pieces of baked alloy.

Baedecker takes two steps toward the canopy, steps on something, looks down, and recoils in horror. 'Jesus.' He raises a fist in reflex even as he realizes that the bit of bone and roasted flesh and singed hair under the concealing bush must be part of a carcass of a small animal unlucky enough to have been caught in the impact or ensuing fire. He crouches to look more closely. The animal had been the size of a large rabbit, but the unsinged remnants of fur were strangely dark. He reaches for a stick to prod the tiny corpse.

'Hey, no one's allowed in this area!' A Washington state trooper is wheezing his way up the hill.

'It's all right,' Baedecker says and shows his pass from McChord Air Force Base. 'I'm here to meet the investigators.' The trooper nods and stops a few feet from Baedecker. He hooks his thumbs in his belt as he struggles to catch his breath. 'Hell of a mess, isn't it?' Baedecker raises his face to the clouds just as it begins to snow again. Mt. St. Helens is gone, hidden by clouds. The air smells of burnt rubber even though Baedecker knows that except for the tires, there had been very little rubber aboard the aircraft.

'You with the investigation team?' asks the trooper. 'No,' says Baedecker. 'I knew the pilot.'

'Oh.' The state trooper shuffles his feet and looks back down the hill toward the road.

'I'm surprised they haven't transferred the wreckage,' Baedecker says. 'Usually they try to get it into a hangar as soon as possible.'

'Problem with transport,' says the trooper. 'That's where Colonel Fields and the government guys are this afternoon, trying to get the truck situation straightened out down at Camp Withycombe in Portland. And there's the jurisdiction problem, too. Even the Forest Service is involved.' Baedecker nods. He crouches to look at the dead animal again but is distracted by a bit of orange fabric fluttering from a nearby branch. Part of a backpack, he thinks. Or a flight suit.

'I was one of the first ones here after the crash,' says the state trooper. 'Jamie and me got the call just as we were heading out of Yale going west. Only guy here before us was that geologist who's got his cabin over toward Goat Mountain.'

Baedecker straightens up. 'Was there much fire?'

'Not by the time we got here. The rain must've put it out. There wasn't a hell of a lot to burn up here. Except the plane, of course.'

'It was raining hard before the crash?'

'Shit, yes. We couldn't see fifty feet coming up the road. Real strong winds, too. Like I always pictured a hurricane was like. You ever seen a hurricane?'

'No,' says Baedecker and then remembers the hurricane in the Pacific that he and Dave and Tom Gavin had looked down on from two hundred miles up just before the translunar injection burn. 'So it was already dark and raining hard?' he asks.

'Yeah.' The trooper's tone suggests that he is losing interest. 'Tell me something. The Air Force guy — Colonel Fields — he seems to think that your friend flew over the park here because he knew the plane was going down.' Baedecker looks at the state trooper.

The man clears his throat and spits. The snow has stopped and the soil still visible looks even grayer to Baedecker in the waning afternoon light. 'So if he knew the thing was having problems,' says the trooper, 'how come he just didn't punch out of it once he got the plane over the boonies here? Why'd he ride it down into the mountain?' Baedecker turns his head. On the highway below, several military vehicles, two flatbed trucks, and a small crane have pulled to a stop near Baedecker's rented Toyota. An enclosed jeep with someone in Air Force blue at the wheel begins its climb up the hill. Baedecker walks away from the trooper and moves downhill to meet them.

'I don't know,' he says to himself, the words spoken so softly that they are lost in the rising wind and sound of the approaching vehicle.

'How long to Lonerock?' asked Baedecker. They were headed north on Twelfth Street in Salem. It was already three P.M.

'About a five-hour drive,' said Dave. 'You have to take I-5 north to Portland and then follow the Gorge up past the Dalles. Then it's another hour and a half past Wasco and Condon.'

'Then we'll get there after dark,' said Baedecker.

'Nope.'

Baedecker refolded the road map he had been wrestling with and raised an eyebrow.

'I know a shortcut,' said Dave. 'Through the Cascades?'

'You might say that.'

They pulled off Turner Road onto a lane leading into a small airport. Several executive jets were parked near two large hangars. Across a wide strip of taxi apron sat a Chinook, a Cessna A-37 Dragonfly with Air National Guard markings, and an aging C-130. Dave parked the Cherokee near the military hangar, pulled their luggage out of the back, and tossed Baedecker a quilted goosedown jacket. 'Suit up, Richard. It'll be cold where we're going.' A sergeant and two men in mechanic overalls emerged from the hangar as Dave approached. 'Howdy, Colonel Muldorff. All set and prechecked,' said the sergeant.

'Thanks, Chico. Meet Colonel Dick Baedecker.'

Baedecker shook hands, and then they were moving across the tarmac to where the mechanics were sliding back the side door of a helicopter parked behind the larger Chinook. 'I'll be damned,' said Baedecker. 'A Huey.'

'A Bell HU-1 Iroquois to you, tenderfoot,' said Dave. 'Thanks, Chico, we'll take it from here. Nate's got my flight plan filed.'

'Have a good trip, Colonel,' said the sergeant. 'Nice meetin' ya, Colonel Baedecker.' As Baedecker followed Dave around the ship, he felt a slight sinking sensation in the region of his solar plexus. He had ridden in Hueys scores of times — even clocked thirty-five hours or more flying them during the early days of his NASA training — and he had hated every minute of it. Baedecker knew that Dave loved the treacherous machines; much of Muldorff's experimental flying had been in helicopters. In 1965, Dave had been on loan to Hughes Aircraft to sort out problems in their prototype TH-55A trainer. The new helicopter had a tendency to drop nose first into the earth without warning. The research led to comparison field studies on the flight characteristics of the older Bell HU-1, already in service in Vietnam. Dave was sent to Vietnam for six weeks of observation flying with the army pilots who were reported to be doing unusual things with their machines there. Four and a half months later he was recalled after it was discovered that he had been flying combat missions with a medevac squadron on a daily basis.

Dave had used his experience to solve Hughes's problem with the TH-55As, but he had been passed over for promotion as a result of his unauthorized flying with the 1st Cav. He also received notes from both the Air Force and Army informing him that under no circumstances could he put in for retroactive combat flight pay. Dave had laughed. He had been notified two weeks before leaving Vietnam that he had been accepted into NASA's training program for post-Gemini astronauts.

'Not bad,' said Baedecker as they finished the external checks and moved into the cockpit. 'Got your own slick for weekend jaunts. One of the perks of being a congressman, Dave?' Muldorff laughed and tossed Baedecker a clipboard with the cockpit checklist. 'Sure,' he said. 'Goldwater used to get his free rides in F-18s. I've got my Huey. Of course, it helps that I'm still on active reserve out here.' He handed Baedecker a baseball cap with the insignia AIR FORCE 1_ sewn on it. Baedecker tugged it on and set the radio headset in place. 'Also, Richard,' continued Dave, 'it might reassure you to know — as a concerned taxpayer — that this particular pile of rusted bolts did its duty in ‘Nam, ferried around weekend warriors out here for ten years, and is now officially on the spare-parts list. Chico and the boys keep it around in case anybody has to run up to Portland to buy cigarettes or something.'

'Yeah,' said Baedecker. 'Great.' He strapped himself into the left seat as Dave waggled the cyclic control stick and reached down with his left hand to squeeze the starter trigger on the collective pitch control lever. It had been the constant interplay of controls — cyclic, collective, rudder pedals, and throttle thrust grip — that had given Baedecker fits when he had been forced to fly the perverse machines twenty years earlier. Compared to a military helicopter, the Apollo lunar module had been a simple machine to master.

The gas-turbine engine roared, the high-speed starter motor whined, and the two forty-eight-foot rotor blades began to turn. 'Yowzuh!' called Dave over the intercom. Various dials registered their appropriate readings while the whop-whop-whop of the main rotors reached a point of almost physical pressure. Dave pulled up on the collective control and three tons of well-aged machinery lifted off its skids to hover five feet above the tarmac.

'Ready to see my shortcut?' Dave's voice was flat and metallic over the intercom.

'Show me,' said Baedecker.

Dave grinned, spoke quickly into his mike, and confidently pitched the ship forward as they began their climb into the east.

San Francisco was rainy and cold for the two days Baedecker and Maggie Brown were there. At Maggie's suggestion, they stayed in a renovated old hotel near Union Square. The halls were dimly lit and smelled of paint, the showers were jerry-rigged onto massive bathtubs with claw feet, and everywhere hung the exposed pipes of the building's sprinkler system. Baedecker and Maggie took turns showering to remove the grime of their forty-eight-hour train trip, lay down to take a nap, made love instead, showered again, and went out into the evening.

'I've never been here before,' said Maggie with a wide grin. 'It's marvelous!' The streets were busy with rushing theater-goers and couples — mostly male — walking hand in hand under neon signs promising topless and bottomless delights. The wind smelled of the sea and exhaust fumes. The cable-car system was down for repairs, and all of the cabs in sight were either filled or beyond hailing distance. Baedecker and Maggie took a bus to Fisherman's Wharf where they walked without speaking until a cold drizzle and Baedecker's injured ankle forced them into a restaurant.

'The prices are high,' said Maggie when the main course had been served, 'but the scallops are delicious.'

'Yes,' said Baedecker.

'All right, Richard,' said Maggie and touched his hand. 'What's wrong?' Baedecker shook his head. 'Nothing.' Maggie waited.

'I was just wondering how you were going to make up this week's worth of classes,' he said and poured more wine for both of them.

'Not true,' said Maggie. In the candlelight her green eyes seemed almost turquoise. Her cheeks were sunburned even under their tan. 'Tell me.' Baedecker looked at her a long moment. 'I've been thinking about when Tom Gavin's son pulled that stupid stunt in the mountains,' he said.

Maggie smiled. 'You mean dancing naked on a rock during a lightning storm? With a tent pole in one hand? That stupid stunt?' Baedecker nodded. 'He could have been killed.'

'This is true,' agreed Maggie. 'Especially since he seemed intent upon taking the names of all the gods in vain until he pissed off the wrong one.' She seemed to notice Baedecker's intensity and her voice changed. 'Hey, it turned out all right. Why are you letting it bother you now?'

'It's not what he did that bothers me,' said Baedecker. 'It's what I did while he was up on that boulder.'

'You didn't do anything,' said Maggie.

'Exactly,' said Baedecker and finished his glass of wine. He poured more. 'I did nothing.'

'Tommy's father got him down before either one of us could react,' said Maggie.

Baedecker nodded. At a nearby table several women laughed loudly at an unheard joke.

'Oh, I see,' said Maggie. 'We're talking about Scott again.'

Baedecker wiped his hands on a red linen napkin. 'I'm not sure,' he said. 'But at least Tom Gavin saw his son doing something stupid and saved him from possible disaster.'

'Yes,' said Maggie, 'and little Tommy was . . . what . . .? seventeen, and Scott will be twenty-three in March.'

'Yes, but . . .'

'And little Tommy was ten feet away,' said Maggie. 'Scott is in Poona. India.'

'I know that . . .'

'Besides, who are you to say what Scott's doing there is disaster? You've had your chance, Richard. Scott's a big boy now, and if he wants to spend a few years chanting mantras and giving away his lunch money to some bearded horse's ass with a Jehovah Complex, well, you've had your chance to help him, so what do you say you just get on with your screwed-up life, Richard E. Baedecker.' Maggie took a long drink of wine. 'Oh, shit, sometimes, Richard, you give me such a . . .' She stopped and began to hiccup violently.

Baedecker gave her his ice water and waited. She sat silently for a second, opened her mouth to speak, and hiccuped again. Both of them laughed. The group of ladies at a nearby table looked over at them disapprovingly.

The next day in Golden Gate Park as they peered out from under their newly purchased umbrella at orange metal columns appearing and disappearing in the low clouds, Maggie said, 'You're going to have to work out this thing about Scott before we get on with our own feelings, aren't you, Richard?'

'I'm not sure,' said Baedecker. 'Let's just let it rest for a few days, all right? We'll talk about it later in the week.' Maggie brushed a raindrop from her nose. 'Richard,' she said, 'I love you.' It was the first time she had said that.

In the morning, when Baedecker awoke to bright sunlight sifting through the hotel curtains and to the sound of traffic and pedestrian bustle from the street below, Maggie was gone.

They flew east and then north and then east again, gaining altitude even as the forested land rose under them. When the altimeter read 8,500 feet, Baedecker said, 'Don't Air National Guard regs call for oxygen somewhere around here?'

'Yup,' said Dave. 'In case of sudden loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will fall from the overhead compartments and hit you on the head. Please place them over your snout and breathe normally. If you are traveling with a child or infant on your lap, quickly decide which of you has the right to breathe.'

'Thanks,' said Baedecker. 'Mt. Hood?' They had been approaching the volcanic peak for some time. Now it loomed tall to the left of their flight path, the snow-crested summit still two thousand feet higher than their own altitude. The shadow of the Huey rippled across the carpet of trees below and ahead of them.

'Uh-huh,' said Dave, 'and that's Timberline Lodge where they did the exterior shots for The Shining.'

'Mmmm,' said Baedecker.

'Did you see the movie?' asked Dave over the intercom. 'No.'

'Read the book?'

'No.'

'Ever read any Stephen King?'

'No.'

'Jesus,' said Dave, 'for a literate man, Richard, you're incredibly poorly versed in the classics. You do remember Stanley Kubrick, don't you?'

'How could I forget him?' said Baedecker. 'You dragged me to see 2001: A Space Odyssey five times the year it was at the Cinerama theater in Houston.' It was not an exaggeration. Muldorff had been obsessed with the movie and had insisted on his crewmates repeatedly seeing it with him. Before their flight, Dave had talked enthusiastically about smuggling an inflatable black monolith along only to 'discover it' buried under the lunar surface during one of their EVAs. A shortage of inflatable black monoliths had frustrated that plan so Dave had contented himself with having Mission Control awaken them at the end of each sleep period by playing the opening chords of Also Sprach Zarathustra. Baedecker had thought it mildly amusing the first few times.

'Kubrick's masterpiece,' said Dave and banked the Huey to the right. They flew low over a pass where tents and camper-trailers huddled around a small mountain lake, late afternoon sunlight dappling the water, and then the land was falling away from them, the pine forest looked less green to Baedecker, and low brown hills became visible to the south and east. They flew on at a steady five thousand feet as the land changed to irrigated farmland and then to high desert. Dave spoke softly into his microphone to traffic control, joked once with someone at a private airport south of Maupin, and then switched back to the intercom. 'See that river?'

'Yeah.'

'That's the John Day. Scott's guru bought up a little town to the southwest of there. The same one Rajneesh put in the papers a few years ago.' Baedecker flipped open a navigation map and nodded. He unzipped his goosedown coat, poured coffee from a thermos, and handed Dave his cup.

'Thanks. Want to take the stick for a while?'

'Not especially,' said Baedecker.

Dave laughed. 'You don't like helicopters, do you, Richard?'

'Not especially.'

'I don't know why not,' said Dave. 'You've flown about everything with wings including VTOLs and STOLs and that damn Navy pogo plane that killed more men than it was worth. What do you have against helicopters?'

'Do you mean other than the fact that they're treacherous, untrustworthy pieces of shit just waiting to slam you into the ground?' said Baedecker. 'You mean other than that?'

'Yeah,' said Dave and laughed again. 'Other than that.' They dropped to three thousand feet and then to two. Ahead of them, their sides golden and chocolate in the horizontal light, a small herd of cattle moved sluggishly across a wide expanse of dry grassland.

'Hey,' said Dave, 'remember that press conference we went to before Apollo 11 to watch Neil, Buzz, and Mike show their stuff?'

'Which one?'

'The one right before the launch.'

'Vaguely,' said Baedecker.

'Well, Armstrong said something during it that really pissed me off.'

'What was that?' asked Baedecker.

'That reporter — what's-his-name, he's dead now — Frank McGee asked Armstrong a question about dreams and Neil said he'd had a recurring dream since he was a boy.'

'So?'

'It was the dream where Neil could hover off the ground if he held his breath long enough. Remember that?'

'No.'

'Well, I do. Neil said that he'd first had the dream when he was a little kid. He'd hold his breath and then he'd begin to hover, not fly, just hover.' Baedecker finished his coffee and set the Styrofoam cup into a trash bag behind his seat. 'Why did that piss you off?' he asked.

Dave looked over at him. His eyes were unreadable behind his sunglasses. 'Because it was my dream,' he said.

The Huey nosed over and dropped until they were flying only three hundred feet above the rough terrain, well below FAA minimum altitude requirements. Sagebrush and piñon pines flicked by, reasserting a sense of speed to their passage. Baedecker looked down past his feet, through the chin bubble, and watched a lone house flash by. It had been brown and weathered, its tin roof rusted, its barn collapsed, its only access suggested by two drifted ruts stretching off to the horizon. There had been a new, white satellite dish next to the shack.

Baedecker clicked on the intercom. There was no intercom floor switch for the left seat, so he had to reach out and touch the switch on the cyclic each time he wanted to talk. 'Tom Gavin told me that you were pretty sick last spring,' he said.

Dave glanced to his left and then looked back at the ground rushing past them at one hundred knots. He nodded. 'Yeah, I was having some problems. I thought I had the flu — just running a fever with swollen glands in my neck. Instead, my doctor in Washington said I had Hodgkin's disease. I didn't even know what it was until then.'

'Serious?'

'They grade the thing on a four-point scale,' said Dave. 'Level One is take some aspirin and mail in the forty dollars. Level Four is GYSAKYAG.' Baedecker did not have to ask about the abbreviation. During the hundreds of hours they had shared in cramped simulators, there had been too many times when he had heard Dave's suggested response to some newly inserted emergency as GYSAKYAG — grab your socks and kiss your ass good-bye.

'I was a Level Three,' said Dave. 'Caught fairly early. They got me feeling better with medication and a couple of chemotherapy sessions. Took out my spleen for good measure. Everything looks real good now. If they get it on the first pass, they generally get it for good. I passed my flight physical three weeks ago.' He grinned and pointed to a town just visible to the north. 'That's Condon. Next stop, Lonerock. Home of America's future Western White House.' They crossed a gravel county road and Dave banked sharply to follow it, dropping to fifty feet. There was no traffic. Short, sagging telephone poles ran along the left side of the road, looking as if they had stood there forever. There were no trees; the barbed wire fences had some sort of metal boilers or discarded water heaters as fence posts.

The Huey passed over the lip of a canyon. One second they were fifty feet above a gravel road, and the next instant they were eight hundred feet above a hidden valley where a stream ran through cottonwood groves, and fields lay pregnant with winter wheat and grass. There was a ghost town in the center of the valley. Here and there a tin roof poked above bare branches or fall foliage and at one place a church steeple was visible. Baedecker noticed a large old school looking west from high ground above the town. It was only five P.M., but it was obvious that the valley had been in shadow for some time.

Dave kicked the Huey over in a diving turn that had the rotor blades almost perpendicular to the ground for several seconds. They flew low over a main street that appeared to consist of five abandoned buildings and a rusted gas pump. They banked left and passed over a white church, its spire dwarfed by a jagged tooth of a boulder behind and beyond the churchyard.

Baedecker's intercom clicked. 'Welcome to Lonerock,' said Dave.

Most of the friends and mourners are gone by the time Baedecker returns to Dave and Diane's house in Salem. The snow he had seen near Mt. St. Helens now falls as a light drizzle.

Tucker Wilson greets Baedecker at the door. Before that morning, he had not seen Tucker since the day of the Challenger disaster two years earlier. An Air Force pilot and a backup member of the Apollo team, Tucker had finally commanded a Skylab mission a year before Baedecker had left NASA. Tucker is a short man with a wrestler's build, rubicund face, and only a trace of sandy hair left above the ears. Unlike so many test pilots who tended to speak with southern or neutral accents, Tucker's speech was accented with the flat vowels of New England. 'Di's upstairs with Katie and her sister,' Tucker says. 'Come on in Dave's den for a drink.'

Baedecker follows him. The book-lined room with its leather chairs and old rolltop desk is a study rather than a den. Baedecker sinks into a chair and looks around while Tucker pours the Scotch. The shelves hold an eclectic mix of expensive collectors' editions, popular hardbacks, paperbacks, and stacks of journals and papers. On a stretch of clear wall near the window are a dozen or so photographs: Baedecker recognizes himself in one, smiling next to Tom Gavin as Richard Nixon stiffly extends his hand to a grinning Dave.

'Water or ice?' asks Tucker.

'No,' says Baedecker. 'Neat, please.'

Tucker hands Baedecker his glass and sits in the antique swivel chair at the desk. He seems uncomfortable there, picks up a typewritten sheet on the desk, puts it down, and takes a long drink.

'Any problems with the flight this morning?' asks Baedecker. Tucker had flown in the missing man formation.

'Uh-uh,' says Tucker. 'But there might've been if that overcast had got any lower. We were frying chickens in the barnyard as it was.' Baedecker nods and tastes his Scotch. 'Aren't you in line for a ride after the shuttle program resumes?' he asks Tucker.

'Yep. Next November if things get back on track the way they're supposed to. We're carrying a DOD payload so we'll get to skip all that conquering heroes preflight press conference crap.' Baedecker nods. The Scotch is The Glenlivet, unblended, Dave's favorite. 'What do you think, Tucker,' he says, 'is the thing safe to fly?' The shorter pilot shrugs. 'Two and a half years,' he says. 'More time to fix things than the hiatus after Gus and Chaffee and White died in Apollo 1. Of course, they gave the SRB fix to Morton Thiokol and they're the ones who certified the O-rings safe in the first place.' Baedecker does not smile. He had seen the strange, incestuous dance between contractors and government agencies and, like most pilots, was not amused. 'I hear they'll have the new escape system in place for the first flight.' Now Tucker does laugh. 'Yeah, have you seen it, Dick? They've got a long pole stowed in the lower bay, and while the command pilot holds the ship straight and level and subsonic, the crew hitches up and slides out like trout on a line.'

'Wouldn't have helped Challenger,' says Baedecker.

'It reminds me of the AIDS joke about the heroin junkie who isn't afraid of catching anything when he uses dirty needles because he's wearing a condom,' says Tucker. He drinks the last of his Scotch and pours more. 'Well, hell,' he says, 'there are more than seven hundred Criticality One items in the shuttle stack, and my guess is that the goddamn O-rings are the only ones we don't have to worry about.'

Baedecker knew that a Criticality One item was a system or component, which had no reliable backup; if that item failed, so did the mission. 'You won't be landing at the Cape anymore?' says Baedecker.

Tucker shakes his head. On his first shuttle mission, Wilson had landed Columbia on the long strip at Cape Canaveral only to have a tire blow and two brakes wear to the rim. 'They know now that it's too damn risky,' he says. 'We'll be ferrying from Edwards or White Sands for the foreseeable future.' He takes a long drink. 'But what the hell,' he says and grins, 'no guts, no glory.'

'What's the thing like to fly?' asks Baedecker. For the first time in days, he is able to think about something other than Dave.

Tucker leans forward, animated now, his hands making open-fingered gestures in the air. 'It's damned incredible, Dick,' he says. 'Coming down is like trying to deadstick in a DC-9 at Mach 5. You have to argue with the damn computers to make them let you fly it, but, by God, when you're flying it you're really flying. Have you been in the updated simulator?'

'Had a tour,' says Baedecker. 'Didn't take time to sit in the left seat.'

'You've got to try it,' Tucker says. 'Come down to the Cape next fall and I'll clear some time for you.'

'Sounds good,' says Baedecker. He finishes his drink and turns the glass in his hands, allowing it to catch the lamplight. 'Did you see Dave much down at the Cape?' Tucker shakes his head. 'He hated the idea of all those congressmen and senators getting free rides while us ex-fighter pukes waited years for another go. He was on all the right committees and worked hard for the program, but he disagreed with the Teacher in Space and Journalist in Space crap. He said the shuttle was no place for people who put their pants on one leg at a time.' Baedecker chuckles. The allusion was to one of the first incidents to get Dave in trouble with NASA. During Muldorff's first flight in an Apollo module, an earth-orbital engineering flight, Dave had held a live TV broadcast for the folks at home. Tucker Wilson had been there with him when Dave said something to the effect, 'Well, folks, for years we astronaut-types've been telling you that we're just regular folks. Not heroes, but just like everybody else. Guys who put their pants on one leg at a time like everyone else. Well, today I'm here to show you otherwise.' And with that Muldorff had pirouetted in zero-g, wearing only his in-flight 'long johns' and Snoopy cap, and with a single, graceful move, had tugged on his flight coveralls . . . two legs at a time.

Baedecker crosses to a bookshelf and pulls out a volume of Yeats. Half a dozen slips of paper serve as markers.

'You learn anything this afternoon?' asks Tucker.

Baedecker shakes his head and slides the book back. 'I talked to Munsen and Fields. They're just getting around to transferring the last of the wreckage up to McChord. Bob's going to arrange it so I can hear the tape tomorrow. The Crash Board has some preliminary ideas already but they're taking tomorrow off.'

'I heard the tape yesterday,' says Tucker. 'Not much to go on there. Dave reported the hydraulics problem about fifteen minutes out of Portland. They were using the civil airport because Munsen had come down for that conference . . .'

'Yeah,' says Baedecker. 'Then he decided to stay another day.'

'Right,' says Tucker. 'Dave went east alone, reported the hydraulics glitch about fifteen minutes out, and made his turn about a minute later. Then the goddamned starboard engine overheated and shut down. That was about eight minutes out, I think, on the way back. Portland International was closer so they went with that. There was some ice buildup, but that wouldn't have been serious if he could have climbed out of it. Dave didn't do too much talking, and the controller sounds like a young asshole. Dave reported seeing lights just before he went down.' Baedecker swallows the last of his Scotch and sets the glass on the liquor cart. 'Did he know he was going in?' Tucker frowns again. 'Hard to say. He wasn't saying much, asking for altitude confirmation mostly. The Portland Center controller reminded him that the ridges ran up to five thousand feet around there. Dave acknowledged and said that he was coming out of cloud at sixty-two hundred and could see some lights. Then nothing until they lost him on radar a few seconds later.'

'What was his voice like?'

'Gagarin all the way,' says Tucker.

Baedecker nods. Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit the earth, had died in a crash of a MiG during a routine training flight in March of 1968. Word had spread through the test-flying community of the extraordinary calmness of Gagarin's voice on tape as he flew the flamed-out MiG into an empty lot between homes in a crowded suburb. It was only after Baedecker had gone to the Soviet Union as part of an administrative team a year before the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project that he heard from a Soviet pilot that Gagarin had gone down in a remote forest area and the cause of the crash had been listed as 'pilot error.' There were rumors of alcohol. There had been no voice tape. Still, among test pilots of Baedecker's and Tucker's generation, 'Gagarin all the way' remained the ultimate compliment of coolness in an emergency.

'I just don't get it,' says Tucker and there is anger in his voice. 'The T-38's the safest goddamn plane in the goddamn Air Force.' Baedecker says nothing.

'It averages two goddamn accidents per one hundred thousand hours in the air,' says Tucker. 'Name me one other supersonic aircraft with that sort of record, Dick.' Baedecker crosses to the window and looks out. It is still raining.

'And it doesn't matter a goddamn bit, does it?' says Tucker. He pours himself a third drink. 'It never does, does it?'

'No,' says Baedecker. 'It doesn't.' There is a knock and Katie Wilson enters. Tucker's wife, frizzy-blond and sharp-featured, at first might be mistaken for an aging cocktail waitress with little on her mind, but then one would notice the sharp intelligence and alert sensitivity behind the heavy makeup and southern drawl. 'Richard,' she says, 'I'm glad you're back.'

'Sorry I'm so late,' he says.

'Diane wants to talk to you,' says Katie. 'I made her get ready for bed because I knew she'd be up all night playing the perfect hostess otherwise. She's been awake for forty-eight hours straight, and her due date is in another week, for heaven's sake.'

'I won't keep her up long, Katie,' says Baedecker and goes up the stairs.

Diane Muldorff is in her robe, sitting in a blue chaise longue, reading a magazine. She looks very pregnant to Baedecker. She beckons him in.

'I'm glad you're here, Richard.'

'Sorry I'm so late, Di,' he says. 'I rode up to McChord with Bill Munsen and Stephen Fields.' Diane nods and sets the magazine down. 'Close the door, will you, Richard?' He does so and then comes closer to sit on the low chair near her dresser. He looks at her. Diane's dark hair is freshly brushed, her cheeks pink from a recent scrubbing, but her eyes cannot hide the fatigue and sorrow of the past few days.

'Will you do me a favor, Richard?'

'Anything,' Baedecker says truthfully.

'Colonel Fields, Bob the others they've promised to keep me informed about the crash investigation . . .' She breaks off.

Baedecker watches her and waits.

'Richard, will you look into it yourself? I mean, not just follow the official inquiry, but look into it yourself and tell me everything you find out?' Baedecker hesitates a second, puzzled, and then he reaches across and takes her hand. 'Of course I will, Di. If you want me to. But I doubt that I'll find anything that the Crash Board won't.' Diane nods, but her grip is cool and insistent. 'But you'll try?'

'Yes,' says Baedecker.

Diane touches her cheek and looks down as if suddenly dizzy. 'There are so many little things,' she says.

'What do you mean?' asks Baedecker.

'Things I don't understand,' she says. 'David took the helicopter out to Lonerock, did you know that?'

'No.'

'The weather got worse so he came back in the car we'd stored there,' she says. 'But why did he go there at all?'

'I thought he worked on his book out there,' says Baedecker.

'He was supposed to stop by Salem one night after the fund-raising meeting in Portland,' Diane says. 'Instead, he flew out to Lonerock when the house was all closed up. We weren't planning to stay there until weeks after the baby was born.' Baedecker touches her arm, holds it gently.

'Richard,' she says, 'did you know that David's cancer had returned? I did-n't think he had told anyone, but I thought perhaps he might have called . . .'

'I didn't even have a phone where I was, remember, Di?' he says. 'You had to send that telegram.'

'Yes, I remember,' she says, her voice ragged with exhaustion. 'I just thought . . . He didn't tell me, Richard. His doctor in Washington is a friend . . . He called the day after the accident. The disease had spread to David's liver and bone marrow. They had wanted to do a complete chemotherapy treatment in the spring, using a combination of drugs called MOPP. David had refused. That kind of chemotherapy causes sterility in most cases. Dave had had some radiation and the laparotomy, I knew that. I didn't know about the other . . .'

'Dave told me in October that they were pretty sure they'd caught it all,' says Baedecker.

'Yes,' says Diane, 'they found it again just before Christmas. David didn't tell me. He was supposed to have a flight physical next week. He never would have passed it.'

'Richard!' comes Katie's voice up the stairs. 'Telephone!'

'In a minute,' calls Baedecker. He takes Diane's hand again. 'What are you thinking, Di?' She looks directly at him. In spite of her tiredness and pregnancy, she does not look vulnerable to Baedecker, only beautiful and determined.

'I want to know why he went out to Lonerock when he didn't have to,' she says firmly. 'I want to know why he flew that T-38 by himself when he could have waited a few hours for a commercial flight. I want to know why he stayed in that plane when he must have known it was going down.' Diane takes a breath and smoothes her robe. She squeezes his hand hard enough for it to be painful. 'Richard, I want to know why David is dead rather than here with me waiting for our child to be born.' Baedecker stands up. 'I promise I'll do my best,' he says. He kisses her on the forehead and helps her up. 'Come on now, get in bed and go to sleep. You're going to have guests for breakfast. I may be out early, but I'll call you before I come back.' Diane looks at him as he pauses by the door. 'Good night, Richard.'

'Good night, Di.' Downstairs, Katie is waiting for him. 'It's long distance, Richard. I told them to call back, but they're waiting.' He walks into the kitchen to take it there. 'Thanks, Kate,' he says. 'Know who it is?'

'Someone named Maggie,' calls Katie. 'Maggie Brown. She says that it's important.'

Dave landed the Huey on a ranch half a mile beyond Lonerock. There was a short grassy field, a tattered windsock hanging limp from the cupola of an old barn, and an ancient Stearman two-seater tied down between the barn and the ranch house. 'Welcome to Lonerock International Airport,' said Dave as he switched off the last of the circuit breakers. 'Please remain seated until the aircraft comes to a complete stop at the terminal.' The rotors turned more slowly and then stopped.

'Does every ghost town have an airport?' asked Baedecker. He took off his earphones and cap, ran his fingers through his thinning hair, and shook his head. He could still hear the roar of the turbine in his ears.

'Only where the ghosts are fliers,' said Dave.

A man walked slowly from the barn to meet them. He was younger than either Muldorff or Baedecker, but his face had been darkened and textured by years of working in the sun. He wore western boots, faded jeans, a black cap, and an Indian-turquoise belt buckle. The left sleeve of his plaid shirt was pinned at the shoulder. 'Hullo, Dave,' he called. 'Wondered if you was comin' over this weekend.'

'Evening, Kink,' said Dave. 'Kink, meet Richard Baedecker, friend from the old days.'

'Kink,' said Baedecker as they shook hands. He liked the restrained strength in the man's handshake and the creased laugh lines around his blue eyes.

'Kink Weltner here served three tours as a helicopter crew chief in ‘Nam,' said Dave. 'He lets me park the bird here now and then. Somehow he came into the possession of a big, underground tank of aviation-grade kerosene.'

The rancher walked over and ran his hand lovingly along the cowling of the Huey. 'I can't believe this rusted pile of shit's still flying. Did Chico replace that omni gauge?'

'Yeah,' said Dave, 'but you might want to take a look inside.'

'I'll pull the hell-hole cover when I refuel it,' said Kink.

'See you later,' said Dave and led the way toward the barn. It was cool here in the valley. Baedecker carried his goosedown coat in one hand and his black flight bag in the other. He looked up to watch the hills to the east catch the last bands of evening sunlight. Brittle cottonwood leaves stood out against the fragile blue sky. There was a jeep parked near the barn, keys in the ignition, and Dave threw his stuff in the back and hopped in. Baedecker joined him, grabbing the roll bar as Dave pulled out onto the gravel road at high speed.

'Nice to have your own crew chief way out here,' said Baedecker. 'Did you know him in Vietnam?'

'Nope. Met him after Di and I bought the house here in ‘76.'

'Did he lose his arm in the war?' Dave shook his head. 'Never got touched over there. Three months after he was discharged, he got drunk and rolled a pickup outside of the Dalles.'

They drove into Lonerock past the jagged tooth of a boulder and the closed-up church. Far across the valley, the road they had followed from Condon was a white line on the shadowed wall of the cliff. Baedecker noticed several abandoned houses set back in weeds along the street, caught a glimpse of the old school to the right through the trees, and then Dave pulled to a stop in front of a white house with a tin roof and a low picket fence out front. The lawn was well tended, there was a flagstone patio to one side, and a hummingbird feeder hung from a young lilac tree out front. 'Casa Muldorff,' announced Dave and lifted Baedecker's bag out of the jeep.

The guest room was on the second floor, tucked under the eaves. Baedecker could imagine the sound of rain on the tin roof above. He respected the amount of work that had gone into the old structure. Dave and Diane had ripped out walls, reinforced the floors, added a fireplace in the living room and a stove in the kitchen, repaired the foundation, added electrical wiring and indoor plumbing, remodeled the kitchen, and turned a low attic into a small but comfortable second floor. 'Other than that,' Dave had said, 'the house is pretty much the way we found it.' Back in the days when the Oregon Trail was a recent memory, the house had served as a post office, then sheriff's office, and even a morgue for a while before sagging into disrepair with the rest of the little town. Now the guest bedroom had clean white walls, crisp white curtains, a high brass bed, and an antique dresser with a white bowl and pitcher on it. Baedecker looked out the window through baring branches at the small front yard and dirt street beyond. He could imagine buggies passing by but little other traffic. The remnants of a low, board sidewalk lay rotting in the grass outside the picket fence.

'Come on,' called Dave from downstairs. 'I'll show you the town before it gets too dark.' It did not take long to see the entire town, even on foot. A hundred feet beyond Dave's house, the dirt road doglegged to the north and became Main Street for one block. The county road hooked left from it, crossing a low bridge and continuing off through wheat and alfalfa fields to the cliff two miles west. The stream Baedecker had seen from the air curved around through Dave's property past the weathered shed he called a garage.

The silence was deep enough that Baedecker heard their footsteps on the gravel of Main Street as intrusive. A few houses in town looked occupied, and there was an old mobile home parked behind one boarded-up structure, but most of the buildings were weedchoked and weathered, rafters open to the elements. Three stores sat closed and idle on the west side of Main Street, two with rusted light fixtures sans bulbs over their doorways. A gas pump outside the abandoned store offered high-test at thirty-one cents a gallon. The fly-specked sign hanging diagonally in the window read COKE CLOSED THE PAUSE THAT REFRESHES.

'Is it officially a ghost town?' asked Baedecker.

'Sure is,' said Dave. 'The official census is four hundred eighty-nine ghosts and eighteen people at the height of the summer season.'

'What about the people who stay here year ‘round? What do they do?' Dave shrugged. 'There are a couple of retired farmers and ranchers. Solly in the trailer back there won the Washington lottery a few years ago and settled out here with his two million.'

'You're kidding,' said Baedecker.

'Never kid,' said Dave. 'Come on, I want you to meet someone.'

They walked a block and a half east to the edge of town and then up a sharp grade to where the brick school sat. It was an imposing structure, two stories tall and then some with an oversized, glass-enclosed belfry atop it. As they came closer, Baedecker could see that much care had gone into the old building's rehabilitation. A well-tended garden filled part of what had been the schoolyard, the bricks had been sandblasted clean some years ago, the front door was nicely carved, and white curtains were tied back in the tall windows.

Baedecker was puffing slightly when they reached the front door. Dave grinned. 'Need to jog more, Dickie.' He tapped loudly with a brass knocker. Baedecker jumped slightly as a voice came from a metal tube set into the doorframe near his ear.

'It's Dave Muldorff, Miz Callahan,' shouted Dave into the tube. 'Brought a friend with me.' Baedecker recognized the antiquated mouthpiece as part of an old speaking-tube system such as he had seen only in movies and once in a tour of Mark Twain's home in Hartford.

There was a muffled reply that Baedecker translated as 'come up' and then a buzz as the door opened. Baedecker was reminded of the entrance foyer to his family's apartment building on Kildare Street in Chicago before the war. As he entered, he half expected to smell the mixture of moldy carpet, varnished wood, and boiled cabbage that had meant homecoming to him for the years of his early childhood. He did not. The interior of the school smelled of furniture polish and the evening breeze coming through open windows.

Baedecker was fascinated by the glimpses of rooms as they ascended the two flights of stairs. A large classroom on the first floor had been transformed into an oversized living room. Part of the long blackboard remained but was now bracketed by built-in bookcases holding hundreds of volumes. A few pieces of quality antique furniture sat here and there on a polished wood floor, and a small area had been set off by a Persian carpet and comfortably overstuffed sofa and chairs.

On the second story, as far above the ground as a normal third story, Baedecker caught a glimpse of a book-filled study behind sliding doors and a bedroom with a single, canopied bed alone in the center of six hundred square feet of polished wood. Two cats moved quickly into the shadows at the sound of footsteps. Baedecker followed Dave up a wrought-iron spiral staircase that obviously had been added after the building ceased functioning as a school. They passed through a trapdoor cut into the ceiling and suddenly they were in light again, emerging onto what might have been the pilothouse of a tall stern-wheeler.

Baedecker was so surprised and struck by the view that for several seconds he could not focus his attention on the elderly woman who sat smiling at him from a wicker chair. He looked around, not bothering to hide his expression of delight.

The old school belfry had been enlarged into a glass cupola at least fifteen feet by fifteen feet, and even the top of the belfry had been glassed in with skylights. Baedecker could tell from the quality of light that all of the glass was polarized. Now it merely enhanced the already-rich evening colors of sky and foliage, but he knew that in the daytime the glass would be opaque from the outside while hues would be clarified and exaggerated to an observer within. Outside, running east and west along the crest of two gables leading from the belfry, a narrow widow's walk was set off by an intricate wrought-iron railing. Inside, there were several pieces of wicker furniture, a table with a tea service and star charts laid out, and an antique brass telescope on a tall tripod.

But it was the view that struck Baedecker the most. From this vantage forty feet above the town, he could see over rooftops and treetops to the canyon walls and foothills and beyond them to the high ridges where slabs of ancient sediment thrust through the soil like thorns through tired cloth. The polarized sky was such a dark shade that it reminded Baedecker of those rare flights above 75,000 feet where the stars become visible in the daytime and the cobalt blue curve of the heavens blends to black. Baedecker realized that the stars were becoming visible now, entering the sky in pairs and small clusters like early theatergoers searching for the best seats.

A breeze came through screens set low in the glass wall, the wind ruffled the pages of a book on the arm of a chair, and Baedecker focused his attention on the woman who sat smiling at him.

'Miz Callahan,' said Dave, 'this is Richard Baedecker. Richard, Miz Elizabeth Sterling Callahan.'

'How do you do, Mr. Baedecker,' said the woman and extended her hand palm downward.

Baedecker took it and looked carefully at the old woman. His initial impression had been of a woman in her late sixties, but now he revised that age upward by at least a decade and perhaps more. Still, despite the assault of years, Elizabeth Sterling Callahan retained a beauty too entrenched to be overthrown by time alone. Her hair was white and cropped short, but it stood out in electric waves from her strong-featured face. Her cheekbones pressed sharply against skin freckled by sun and age, but the small, brown eyes were lively and intelligent, and her smile still had the power to intrigue.

'Very pleased to meet you, Miz Callahan,' said Baedecker.

'Any friend of David's is a friend of mine,' she said and Baedecker smiled at the rich huskiness of her voice. 'Sit down, please. Sable, say hello to our friends.' Baedecker noticed for the first time that a black Labrador was curled in the shadows behind her chair. The dog looked up eagerly as Dave crouched to pet it.

'How long?' said Dave, patting the dog's side.

'Patience, patience,' laughed Miz Callahan. 'Good things take time.' She looked at Baedecker. 'Is this your first visit to our town, Mr. Baedecker?'

'Yes, ma'am,' said Baedecker, feeling like a boy in her presence and not necessarily disliking the feeling.

'Well, it's a quiet little place,' said Miz Callahan, 'but we hope you will find it to your liking.'

'I do already,' said Baedecker. 'I also very much like your house. You've done wonderful things with it.'

'Why thank you, Mr. Baedecker,' she said and Baedecker could see her smile in the dimming light. 'My late husband and I did most of the work when we first retired here in the late 1950s. The school had been abandoned for almost thirty years at that point and was in terrible shape. The roof had collapsed in places, pigeons were roosting in all of the second-floor rooms . . . oh, my, it was in terrible shape. David, there is a pitcher of lemonade there on that table. Would you mind pouring us each some? Thank you, dear.' Baedecker sipped the lemonade from a crystal wineglass as full night fell outside. There were a few house-lights visible in town and two pole lights, one not far from Dave's house, but their glow was shielded by branches and did not detract from the beauty of the sky as more stars took their places.

'There's Mars rising,' said Dave.

'No, dear, that's Betelgeuse,' said Miz Callahan. 'You see, it's opposite Rigel and above Orion's Belt.'

'You're interested in astronomy?' asked Baedecker, smiling at Dave's embarrassment. He had had to coach his crewmate during the astrogation exercises for months prior to the mission.

'Mr. Callahan was an astronomer,' said the old woman. 'We met when he was a professor at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. I had gone there to teach history. Have you ever seen DePauw, Mr. Baedecker?'

'No, ma'am.'

'A very pretty little school,' said Miz Callahan. 'Second-rate academically and buried in the seventh circle of desolation out there in the cornfields of Indiana, but a very pretty little campus. More lemonade, Mr. Baedecker?'

'No, thank you.'

'Mr. Callahan was a Chicago Cubs fan,' she said. 'We used to travel to Chicago on the Monon Railroad every August to watch games at Wrigley Field. That was our vacation. I remember in 1945, when they did so well, Mr. Callahan made plans to stay over in the Blackstone Hotel for an extra week. Traveling to the Cubs' games was the one thing Mr. Callahan missed when he took early retirement and we moved out here in the fall of 1959.'

'What made you decide on Lonerock?' asked Baedecker. 'Did you have family in Oregon?'

'Oh, heavens, no,' said Miz Callahan. 'Neither of us had ever been out west before we moved here. No, Mr. Callahan simply had calculated on his maps that this was the best place for magnetic lines of force, and we loaded up the DeSoto and came out.'

'Magnetic lines of force?' said Baedecker.

'Are you interested in watching the sky, Mr. Baedecker?' she asked.

Before Baedecker could respond, Dave said, 'Richard walked on the moon with me sixteen years ago.'

'Oh, David, don't start up with that again,' said Miz Callahan and gave his wrist a playful slap.

Dave turned to Baedecker. 'Miz Callahan doesn't believe that Americans walked on the moon.'

'Really?' said Baedecker. 'I thought everyone accepted that.'

'Oh, now, don't you start teasing me as well,' said the old woman. Her husky voice held mild amusement. 'David's bad enough.'

'It was on television,' said Baedecker and immediately realized how lame the statement sounded.

'Yes,' said Miz Callahan, 'and so was Mr. Nixon's so-called Checkers Speech. Do you believe everything you see and hear, Mr. Baedecker? I've not owned a television since our picture tube failed. It was on a Sunday. Right in the middle of Omnibus. We had a Sylvania Halolite. The halo continued to work after the screen went black. It was rather restful, actually.'

'The lunar landings were in all the papers,' said Baedecker. 'Remember the summer of 1969? Neil Armstrong? ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind?''

'Yes, yes,' chuckled the woman. 'Tell me, Mr. Baedecker, does that sound like something a person would make up on the spur of the moment? Or say at such a time? Of course not. It sounds like just what it is, a poorly written drama.' Baedecker started to speak, looked at Dave, and closed his mouth.

'David, how is dear Diane?' asked Miz Callahan.

'Just fine,' said Dave. 'I was with her when they did the sonogram.'

'Amniocentesis as well?' asked the old woman.

'No, just the sonogram.'

'That was wise,' said Miz Callahan. 'Diane's young enough, there's no reason to run the one percent risk of miscarriage if the procedure is not necessary. When is the due date again?'

'The doctor says January seven,' said Dave. 'Di thinks it'll be later. I'm voting for a little earlier.'

'First baby probably later if anything,' said Miz Callahan.

Baedecker cleared his throat. 'Ah, what were you saying about magnetic lines of force?' Miz Callahan patted her dog and rose to walk slowly and carefully to the table. She glanced at the sky, looked down at her charts, nodded as if satisfied, and returned to her seat. 'Yes, electromagnetic lines, actually,' she said. 'I never understood it all, but after Mr. Callahan first made contact, he wrote it all down. You may look at it someday if you wish. At any rate, Mr. Callahan confirmed that they were correct and that this would be the best spot in the United States . . . in North America, really . . . so we moved. Mr. Callahan passed on in 1964, but since they don't speak to me directly the way they did to him, I have to rely on his early calculations. Wouldn't you agree?'

'I guess so,' said Baedecker.

'Mr. Callahan was undoubtedly correct about the place,' continued the woman, 'but was never quite sure about the time. They simply would not commit themselves to a date. I've seen them fly over hundreds of times, but they have yet to come all the way down. Well, I have to tell you, they had best get on with it. I am not getting any younger, and some days it is all I can do to drag these old bones up the stairs. Tonight will not be a good night for watching because the full moon will be rising soon and . . . oh, my, look!' Baedecker followed the shadowy line of her arm to a point near the zenith where a satellite or an extremely high-flying aircraft glowed briefly for several seconds as it tracked from west to east. The three of them watched its progress until it disappeared against the background of stars, and then they sat in the comfortable darkness and silence for several minutes.

'More lemonade, anyone?' Dave said at last.

After Baedecker's mother died of a stroke in the fall of 1956, his father moved from their Chicago house to their 'log cabin' in Arkansas. Baedecker's parents had won the land in a Herald Tribune contest and had been working on the house for almost five years, spending summers there when possible, sometimes traveling down for Christmas. Baedecker's father had retired from the Marine Corps in 1952, the same year his son had begun flying F-86 Sabres in Korea, and had held a part-time sales job with Wilson's Sporting Goods ever since. They had planned on retiring to Arkansas in June of 1957. Instead, Baedecker's father had gone there alone in November of 1956.

Baedecker had strong memories of two trips there: the first in October of 1957, two months before his father's death from lung cancer, and the second, with Scott, during the hot Watergate summer of 1974.

Scott was ten that year, but he had already entered the growth spurt that would not end until he was six feet one, two inches taller than his father. Scott had let his red hair grow that year so that it was touching his shoulders. Baedecker disliked it — he thought it made the thin boy look effeminate — and he disliked even more the nervous tic his son had developed in constantly flipping the hair out of his face, but Baedecker did not think it important enough to make an issue of.

The drive from Houston had been hot and uneventful. It had been the first summer of Joan's dissatisfaction, or so Baedecker later thought of it, and he was glad to be away for a few weeks. Joan had decided to stay in Houston because of commitments she had made to various women's clubs. Baedecker had left NASA a month earlier and would begin his new job with a St. Louis–based aerospace firm in September. It was his first vacation in more than ten years.

Scott was not pleased. During the first few days of work around the cabin — clearing the underbrush, repairing damaged windows, replacing shingles, and generally shoring up the exterior of a cabin that had been empty for years — Scott had been quiet and obviously sulking. Baedecker had brought a transistor radio along, and the news was filled with urgent speculation on Nixon's impeachment or imminent resignation. Joan had been absorbed in the Watergate story since the televised hearings had begun over a year earlier. At first she resented them because network coverage interfered with her favorite soap operas, but soon she was looking forward to them, watching the evening's replay on PBS, and talking to Baedecker of little else. To Baedecker, on the verge of ending a flying career he had been in since he was eighteen, Nixon's final agonies were graceless and embarrassing, evidence of an unraveling society that Baedecker already viewed with some sadness.

The log cabin was actually a two-story log home quite out of fashion with the stone-and-brick ranch houses and A-frames appearing in developments around the new reservoir. The cabin sat on a hill amidst three acres of forest and meadow. Down a long stretch of hill there was a narrow lake frontage and a short dock Baedecker's father had built the summer Eisenhower was reelected. Baedecker's parents had been working on finishing the second-floor rooms and adding a rear deck, but when he moved there after his wife's death, Baedecker's father left the work unfinished.

Baedecker and Scott tore down the rotting remnants of the deck on the August day that Richard Nixon announced his resignation. Baedecker remembered sitting in front of the cabin that Thursday evening, eating hamburgers he and Scott had grilled, and listening to the last, lame expressions of self-pity and defiance from the departing president. Nixon ended with the phrase, 'To have served in this office is to have felt a personal kinship with each and every American. In leaving it, I do so with this prayer: May God's grace be with you in all the days ahead.' Immediately, Scott said, 'Just get it over with, you lying shit. We won't miss you.'

'Scott!' barked Baedecker. 'Until noon tomorrow, that man is President of the United States. You will not speak that way.' The boy had opened his mouth to respond, but two decades of Marine Corps–instilled authority had gone into Baedecker's command, and Scott was able only to throw down his plate and run away, his face reddening. Baedecker had sat alone in the last vestiges of the Arkansas twilight, watching his son's white shirt receding down the hill toward the dock. Baedecker knew that Scott's sulking would deepen for their few remaining days together. He also knew that Scott's statement, while phrased somewhat differently, adequately expressed Baedecker's own feelings about Nixon's departure. Baedecker had looked at the cabin and remembered the first time he had seen it — the first time he had been in Arkansas — driving straight through from Yuma, Arizona, in his new Thunderbird, being reminded of New England as he passed through small towns with names like Choctaw and Leslie, Yellville and Salesville, and half expecting to see the ocean rather than the long lake where his parents had won their property.

His father's appearance had shaken him; although sixty-four years old, Baedecker's father had always appeared at least a decade younger. Now his hair had remained jet-black, but gray stubble mottled his cheeks, and his neck had gone loose and lined since Baedecker had seen him in Illinois eight months earlier. Baedecker realized that in twenty-four years he had never seen his father unshaven before.

Baedecker had arrived for the visit on the night of October 5, 1957, the day after Sputnik was launched. Late that night his father had gone down to the dock to fish and 'to look for the satellite,' even though Baedecker had assured him it was too small to see with the naked eye. It was a cool, moonless night, and the forest three miles away across the expanse of lake was a black line against the starfield. Baedecker watched the glow of his father's cigarette and listened to the crisp sound of the reel and line. Occasionally a fish would jump in the darkness.

'Who's to say that thing isn't carrying atomic bombs,' his father suddenly had said.

'Pretty small bombs,' said Baedecker. 'The satellite's about the size of a basketball.'

'But if they can send up something that size, they can put a bigger one up with bombs aboard, can't they?' said his father, and Baedecker thought that the deep voice sounded almost querulous.

'True,' said Baedecker, 'but if they can launch that much weight into orbit, they don't need to put bombs aboard. They can use the boosters as ballistic missiles.' His father said nothing, and Baedecker wished he had also kept quiet. Finally his father coughed and spoke again, reeling in the line and swinging it out again. 'I read in the Tribune about that new rocket plane, the X-15, they've got on the drawing boards. Supposed to go up into space, go around the earth, and land like a regular plane. You going to be flying it when it's ready?'

'Don't I wish,' said Baedecker. 'Unfortunately, there are a bunch of guys ahead of me with names like Joe Walker and Ivan Kincheloe. Besides, that's out at Edwards. I spend most of my time at Yuma or back at Pax River. I'd hoped to be on the first string by this time, but I haven't even made varsity yet.' Baedecker saw the glow of his father's cigarette go up and down. 'Your mother and I had hoped to be getting ready for our first winter down here by now,' he said. 'Sometimes it doesn't matter what you hope or plan for. It just doesn't matter.' Baedecker ran his hand across the smooth wood of the dock.

'The mistake is waiting and waiting for the payoff like it's a reward you've got coming,' said his father and the querulous note was gone now, replaced by something infinitely sadder. 'You work and you wait and you work some more, all the while telling each other and yourself that the good times are coming, and then everything falls to pieces and you're just waiting to die.' A cold wind blew across the lake and Baedecker shivered.

'There it is,' said his father.

Baedecker looked up, following the pointing finger, and there in the dark gaps between the cold stars, impossibly bright, orange as the tip of his father's cigarette, moving west to east far too high and too fast to be an aircraft, moved the Sputnik too small to be seen.

Dave made chili, and they had a late dinner after they got back from Miz Callahan's, sitting in the long kitchen and listening to Bach on a portable cassette player. Kink Weltner dropped by and drank a beer while they ate. Dave and Kink talked about football while Baedecker tuned out, football being one of the few sports that bored him senseless. When they went outside to see Kink off, the full moon was rising, outlining rock outcroppings and pine trees on the ridgeline to the east.

'I want to show you something,' said Dave.

In a small back room on the first floor, there were mounds of books, a crude desk made of a door set on sawhorses, a typewriter, and several hundred sheets of manuscript stacked under a paperweight made from part of the abort switch from a Gemini spacecraft.

'How long have you been working on this?' asked Baedecker, thumbing through the first fifty pages or so.

'A couple of years,' said Dave. 'It's funny, but I only work out here in Lonerock. I have to drag my research stuff back and forth.'

'Going to work on it this weekend?'

'No, I'd like you to look at it if you would,' said Dave. 'I want your opinion. You're a writer.'

'Nuts,' said Baedecker. 'Some writer. I spent two years fiddling with that stupid book and never got past chapter four. It finally occurred to me that to write something you have to have something to say.'

'You're a writer,' repeated Dave. 'I'd appreciate your opinion of this.' He handed the rest of the stack to Baedecker.

Later, Baedecker lay on his bed and read for two hours. The book was unfinished — entire chapters existing only in outline form, a few scribbled notes — but what was there, fascinated Baedecker. The manuscript's working title was Forgotten Frontiers, and the opening segments dealt with the early exploration of both the Antarctic and the moon. Parallels were drawn. Some were as obvious as the races to plant the flag, the hunger to be first, taking precedence over any serious or systematic scientific programs. Other similarities were more subtle, such as the stark beauty of the south polar desert drawn in comparison to firsthand accounts of the moon. The information was drawn from diaries, notes, and recorded statements. With both Antarctica and the moon, the inadequate accounts — the descriptions of the Antarctic explorers being, by far, the better expressed — told of the mysterious clarity of desolation, the overwhelming beauty of a new place totally foreign to mankind's previous experience, and of the seductive attraction inherent in a place so inclement and so hostile as to be completely indifferent to human aspirations and frailties.

In addition to exploring the aesthetics of exploration, Dave had woven in minibiographies and psychological portraits of ten men — five Antarctic explorers and five space voyagers. The Antarctic profiles included Amundsen, Byrd, Ross, Shackleton, and Cherry-Ganard. For their modern-day counterparts, Dave had chosen four of the lesser-known Apollo astronauts, three of whom had walked on the moon and one who had — like Tom Gavin — remained in lunar orbit aboard the Command Module. He had also included one Russian, Pavel Belyayev. Baedecker had met Belyayev at the Paris Air Show in 1968, and he had been standing with Dave Muldorff and Michael Collins when Belyayev had said, 'Soon, perhaps, I will see first-hand what the backside of the moon looks like.' Now Baedecker was interested to read that, according to Dave's research, Belyayev had indeed been chosen to be the first cosmonaut to go on a circumlunar flight in a modified Zond spacecraft. The launch date was only a few months after Baedecker and the others had spoken to him in the spring of 1968. Instead, Apollo 8 became the first spacecraft to circle the moon that Christmas, the Soviet lunar program was quietly scrapped under the pretense they had never planned to go to the moon, Belyayev died a year later as a result of an operation for a bleeding ulcer, and — instead of becoming famous as the first man to see the backside of the moon in person — the luckless cosmonaut received the minor distinction of being the first dead Russian 'space hero' not to be buried in the Kremlin Wall. Baedecker thought of his father . . .'then everything falls to pieces and you're just waiting to die.'

The sections on the four American astronauts were — at best — only sketched in, although the direction these chapters would take was obvious enough. As with the portraits of the Antarctic explorers, the Apollo segments would deal with the astronauts' thoughts in the years following their missions, new perspectives they may have gained, old perspectives lost, and a discussion of any frustration they might feel at the impossibility of their ever returning to this particular frontier. Baedecker agreed with the choice of astronauts, he found himself very curious what they might say and share, but he felt that this would be the heart of the book when it was done . . . and by far the most difficult part to research and write.

He was thinking about this, standing at the window looking at the moonlight on the leaves of the lilac tree, when Dave knocked and entered.

'Still dressed, I see,' said Dave. 'Can't sleep?'

'Not yet,' said Baedecker.

'Me either,' said Dave and tossed him his cap. 'Want to go for a ride?'

Driving north on I-5 toward Tacoma, Baedecker thinks about Maggie's call the previous evening.

'Maggie?' he had said, surprised that she had gotten hold of him at the Muldorff's. He realized that it was almost one A.M. on the east coast. 'What's the matter, Maggie? Where are you?'

'Boston,' said Maggie. 'I got the number from Joan. I'm sorry about your friend, Richard.'

'Joan?' he said. The thought of Maggie Brown having talked to his ex-wife seemed unreal to Baedecker.

'I called about Scott,' said Maggie. 'Have you been in touch with him?'

'No,' said Baedecker. 'The last couple of months I've been trying. I cabled the old address in Poona and sent letters, but there was no response. I called out here to Oregon in November, but somebody at their ranch said they did-n't have Scott's name on their residents' list. Do you know where he is?'

'I'm pretty sure he's there,' said Maggie. 'In Oregon. At the ashram-ranch there. A friend of ours who was in India came back to B.U. a few days ago. He said that Scott came back to the States with him on the first of December. Bruce said that Scott had been pretty sick in India and that he'd spent several weeks in the hospital there — or at least in the infirmary that passes for a hospital there on the Master's farm outside of Poona.'

'Asthma?' said Baedecker.

'Yes,' said Maggie, 'and a bad case of dysentery.'

'Did Joan say Scott'd been in touch with her?'

'She said she hadn't heard from him since early November from Poona,' said Maggie. 'She gave me the Muldorffs' number. I wouldn't have called, Richard, but I didn't know where else to get in touch with you, and Bruce — my friend who came back from India — said that Scott's been pretty sick. He wasn't able to walk off the plane when they landed in Los Angeles. He's pretty sure that Scott's at the ranch in Oregon.'

'Thanks, Maggie,' said Baedecker. 'I'll call out there right away.'

'How are you, Richard?' Something in the tone of Maggie's voice changed, deepened.

'I'm all right,' he said.

'I'm so sorry about your friend Dave. I loved the stories you told me about him in Colorado. I'd hoped to meet him someday.'

'I wish you had,' said Baedecker and realized how much truth there was in the statement. Maggie would have loved Dave's sense of humor. Dave would have enjoyed her enjoyment. 'I'm sorry I haven't been in touch,' he said.

'I got your postcard from Idaho,' said Maggie. 'What have you been doing since you were there at your sister's in October?'

'I spent some time in Arkansas,' said Baedecker, 'working on a cabin my father built. It's been empty for a long time. How are you?' There was a pause, and Baedecker could hear vague, electronic background noises. 'I'm fine,' she said at last. 'Scott's friend Bruce came back to ask me to marry him.' Baedecker felt the wind go out of him much as it had four days earlier when Di's telegram had reached him. 'Are you going to?' he said after a minute.

'I don't think I'll do anything precipitous until I get my master's in May,' she said. 'Hey, I'd better go. Please take care of yourself, Richard.'

'Yes,' Baedecker had said, 'I will.'

The fragments of Dave's T-38 take up a significant amount of space on the floor of the hangar. Smaller and more important pieces lie tagged on a long row of tables.

'So what will the Crash Board findings be?' Baedecker asks Bob Munsen. The Air Force major frowns and sticks his hands in the pockets of the green flight jacket. 'The way it looks now, Dick, is that there was a slight structural failure on takeoff that caused the hydraulic leak. Dave got a red light on it about fourteen minutes out from Portland International and turned back immediately.'

'I still don't see why he was flying out of Portland,' says Baedecker.

'Because that's where I'd parked the goddamned thing right before Christmas,' says Munsen. 'I was scheduled to ferry it to Ogden on the twenty-seventh and Dave wanted to ride. He was going to catch a commercial flight out of Salt Lake.'

'But you got hung up for forty-eight hours,' says Baedecker. 'At McChord?'

'Yeah,' says Munsen, and there is disgust and regret in the syllable, as if he should have been in the aircraft when it crashed.

'So why didn't Dave use his priority status to bump someone on a commercial flight if he had to get back so quickly?' Baedecker says, knowing no one there has the answer.

Munsen shrugs. 'Ryan wanted the T-38 at Hill Air Force Base in Ogden by the twenty-eighth. Dave had my clearance and wanted to fly it. When he called, I told him go ahead, I'd deadhead back to Hill.' Baedecker walks over and looks at the charred metal on the table. 'Okay,' he says, 'structural failure, hydraulic leak. How serious?'

'We figure he'd lost about sixty percent of assist by the time he went down,' says Munsen. 'Have you heard the tape?'

'Not yet,' says Baedecker. 'What about the starboard engine?'

'He got a light about a minute after the hydraulic problem showed up,' replies Munsen. 'He shut it down about eight minutes before impact.'

'Jesus Fucking Christ!' shouts Baedecker and slams his fist into the table hard enough to send tagged pieces flying. 'Who the fuck crewed this thing?'

'Sergeant Kitt Toliver at McChord,' says Munsen in a thin voice. 'Best crew chief heading the best crew we've got. Kitt flew down with me for this seminar in Portland over Christmas. The weather closed in, and I drove back up to McChord on the twenty-sixth, but Kitt was in town. He did two inspections of it the day Dave flew. You know how these things are, Dick.'

'Yeah,' says Baedecker, and there is no lessening of the anger in his voice, 'I know how these things are. Did Dave do a complete preflight?'

'He was in a hurry,' says the major, 'but Toliver says he did.'

'Bob, I'd like to talk to Fields and the others,' says Baedecker. 'Could you get them together for me?'

'Not today,' says Munsen. 'They're spread all over the place. I could do it by tomorrow morning, but they wouldn't be very happy about it.'

'Do it, please,' says Baedecker.

'Kitt Toliver's here now,' says Munsen. 'Up at the NCO mess. Do you want to talk to him now?'

'No,' says Baedecker, 'later. First I have to listen to the flight tape. Thanks, Bill, I'll see you tomorrow morning.' Baedecker shakes hands and goes to listen to his friend's voice for the last time.

'Let's get drunk and stick beans up our noses!' shouted Dave. His voice echoed down the dark streets of Lonerock. 'Sweet Christ on a stick, what a beautiful night!' Baedecker zipped up his goosedown jacket and leaped into the jeep as Dave gunned the engine.

'Full moon!' shouted Dave and howled like a wolf. From somewhere in the hills beyond the town came the high yelping of a coyote. Dave laughed and drove east past the boarded-up Methodist church. Suddenly he slammed the jeep to a stop and grabbed Baedecker by the arm. He pointed to the white disk of the moon. 'We walked up there,' he said, and although his voice was low, there was no denying the urgency and pleasure there. 'We walked up there, Richard. We left our little anthropoid, hindpawprints in the moon's dirt, man. And they can't take that away from us.' Dave revved the engine and drove on, singing They Can't Take That Away from Me at the top of his voice.

The jeep ride lasted for less than a mile and ended in Kink Weltner's field. Dave pulled clipboards and flashlights out of the back of the Huey and ran a careful inspection, even crawling under the dark mass of the ship to make sure there was no condensation in the fuel line. They were on the flat roof deck of the ship, checking rotor hub, mast, control rods, and the Jesus nut when Baedecker said, 'We don't really want to do this, do we?'

'Why not?' said Dave.

'It'll wake up Kink.' It was the only thing Baedecker could think of on short notice.

Dave laughed. 'Nothin' wakes Kink up. Come on.'

Baedecker climbed downward and in. He settled himself in the left seat, clicked the shoulder straps to the broad lap belt, tugged on the regulation National Guard helmet that he had left off on the flight out, wiggled the earphones in place, and blinked at the circles of red light glowing at him from the center console. Dave leaned forward to do the cockpit check while Baedecker read off the positions of circuit breakers. When he finished, Dave slid a piece of equipment into metal brackets on his side of the console and ran radio jacks to it.

'What the hell is that?'

'Tape deck,' said Dave. 'No self-respecting Huey flies without it.' The starter whined, rotors turned, and the turbine coughed and caught.

Dave clicked in the intercom. His voice was muffled. 'Next stop, Stonehenge.'

'How's that?'

'Just watch and wait, amigo. Oh, are my goggles on straight?' Baedecker glanced over to his right. Dave was wearing bulky night-vision goggles, but the face under the goggles and helmet was not Dave's. It was not even human. In the red cockpit glow, Baedecker could make out two huge eyes protruding at forty-five-degree angles on short, fleshy stalks, a wide, lipless frog's mouth, no chin, and a neck as lined and wattled as an aged turkey's.

'Yeah, they're on straight,' said Baedecker. 'Thanks.'

Three minutes later they were hovering twenty-five hundred feet above Lonerock. A few lights shone below. 'You didn't care for my Admiral Ackbar?' asked Dave.

'Au contraire,' said Baedecker, 'it was the best Admiral Ackbar mask I've seen in weeks. Why are you doing that?' Dave had triggered the landing-light extension switch on the collective pitch control lever. Now he was flicking the on-off switch. Baedecker could see the flashes through his chin bubble.

'Just sendin' extraterrestrial greetings and felicitations to Miz Callahan,' said Dave, 'so she can call it a night and go to bed.' He retracted the light and pitched the Huey over in a banking turn.

They passed over Condon at five thousand feet. Baedecker saw lights glowing around an empty bandstand in a small park, an abandoned main street frozen in the glow of mercury-vapor lamps, and darkened side streets dappled with glimpses of streetlights through tall old trees. It suddenly occurred to Baedecker that small towns in America were saner than cities because they were allowed to sleep.

'Put this in, would you, Richard?' Dave handed him an audiocassette. Baedecker held it up to the glow of the omni gauge. It said only Jean-Michel Jarre. He popped it into the cassette player. He was reminded of the small tape player they had brought along in the Command Module. Each of them had supplied three cassettes; Tom Gavin had brought country-western tunes and Barry Manilow hits, Baedecker had brought Bach, Brubeck, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and Dave had brought — well, he had brought the damnedest stuff — tapes of whale songs, Paul Winter's group Consort playing Icarus, the Beach Boys, a duet of Japanese flute and Indian sitar, and a recording of some sort of Masai tribal ceremony.

'What now?' said Baedecker.

Dave punched the tape player on and looked at him, the ends of the tubular goggles glowing redly. 'GYSAKYAG,' he said gleefully.

The first pulse of music filled Baedecker's earphones in the same instant that Dave pitched the Huey nose-over in a dive. Baedecker slid forward until he was held in position only by the shoulder harness and seat belt. The dive provided precisely the same sensation he had enjoyed as a kid at Riverview Park in Chicago when the roller coaster ended its long, clattering climb and plunged over the top for its high-speed plummet, only this roller coaster had a five-thousand-foot drop beneath it and there were no rails curving up and away in a reassuring swerve from destruction, only the moonlit hills a mile below, darkened here and there by patches of black vegetation, forest, river, and rock.

Baedecker kept his hands off the left-hand cyclic control stick and collective pitch lever, his feet back from the pedals, and this made the dive seem that much more out of control. The hills rose quickly to meet them, and the descent rate did not lessen until the Huey was at zero altitude, then below zero altitude, banking at the last moment past hills and cliff sides, moonlight bright out Baedecker's open window, black shadows beyond Dave's, and then they were in a valley, a canyon, the cyclic moved back and forth between Baedecker's legs and then centered itself, dark trees flashed by thirty feet on either side, their tops higher than the Huey, and they were hurtling along at 125 knots, fifteen feet above a rapid-rippled, moonlit stream, banking steeply when the canyon curved, now level again, then banking so the rotor blades threw an iridescent wake of spray into the air behind them.

The music meshed with the kaleidoscope of scenery rushing at them and past them. The music was electronic, unearthly, yet driven by a solid and insistent beat that seemed to have throbbed up out of the pulse of turbine and rotors. There were other sounds to the music, laser echoes, the rush of an electronic wind, surf sliding on a rocky shore, but all of it was orchestrated to the demanding drive of the central beat.

Baedecker sat back as the Huey banked steeply to the right, rotors almost touching the river, following a wide curve of canyon. He knew there was no room or time at this altitude for a safe autorotation should the engine fail. Worse, if there were a single cable, high-tension wire, bridge, or pipeline spanning the canyon, there would be no time to avoid it. But Baedecker glanced right at Dave sitting comfortably at the controls, his right hand almost casually moving the cyclic, his attention perfectly focused ahead of him, and he knew that there would be no cables, wires, bridges, or pipelines; that every foot of this canyon had been flown in daylight and dark. Baedecker relaxed, listened to the beat of the music, and enjoyed the ride.

And remembered another ride.

They had come down feet forward, faces up toward the half disk of the earth, the LM engines flaming before them in a 260-mile-long braking burn. They were standing in their bulky pressure suits, minus helmets and gloves, restrained by straps and stirrups while their strange device kicked and clattered and pushed up against their booted feet like the deck of a small boat on an uncertain sea. Dave was to his left, right hand on the ACS stick, left hand poised over the thrust translator, while Baedecker watched the six hundred instrument dials and readouts, spoke to controllers 219,000 miles away across static-filled emptiness, and tried to anticipate every whim and alarm of the overworked PGNS guidance computer. Then they were pitching over, upright at last, eight thousand feet above the lunar highlands and still descending, their trajectory as certain and unrelenting as a falling arrow's, and just then, in spite of the demands of the moment, he and Dave had both lifted their eyes from the instruments and stared for five eternal seconds out the triangular windows at the glaring peaks, death black canyons, and earthlit foothills of the moon's mountains. 'Okay,' Dave had whispered then, with the peaks drifting toward them like teeth, the hills coming up at them like frozen, white waves of rock, 'I could use some help here, amigo.' The music ended and the Huey emerged from the canyon and then they were crossing a wide river, which Baedecker realized must be the Columbia. Wind buffeted the ship, and Dave rode the pedals, compensating easily. They climbed to a hundred feet as a dam flashed underneath. Baedecker looked down through the chin bubble and watched a string of lights go by, saw moonlight on whitecaps. They climbed to five hundred feet and banked right, still climbing. Baedecker saw the north shore pass under them, noticed a steep cliff to their right, and then they climbed again, spun on the Huey's axis, and hovered.

They hovered. There was no sound. The wind pushed once at the stationary aircraft and then relented. Dave pointed, and Baedecker slid his window back and leaned out for a better view.

A hundred feet below them, the only structure on a hill high above the wind-tossed Columbia, the stone circle of Stonehenge sat milk-white and shadow-bound in the light of the full moon.

'Okay,' said Dave, 'I could use some help here, amigo.'

Dust billowed up as they descended through thirty feet. The landing light extended and flashed on, illuminating the interior of a swirling cloud. Baedecker caught a glimpse of a graveled parking lot set on an uneven patch of hilltop below, and then dust surrounded them again and pebbles beat like hailstones on the belly of their craft.

'Talk to me,' Dave said calmly.

'Twenty-five feet and drifting forward,' said Baedecker. 'Fifteen feet. Looks all right. Ten feet. Wait, back up ten, there's a boulder there. Right. Okay. Down. Five feet. You're okay. Two feet. Okay. Ten inches. Contact.' The Huey rocked slightly and settled firmly on its skids. Dust surrounded them and then dissipated in the strong breeze. Dave shut down the ship, the red cockpit glow disappeared, and Baedecker realized that they were in gravity's realm once again. He took off his helmet, undid his straps, and opened the door. Baedecker stepped off the skid and walked around the front of the helicopter to where Dave stood, his dark hair damp with sweat, his eyes alive. The wind was stronger now, ruffling Baedecker's thin hair and cooling him quickly. Together he and Dave walked to the circle of stones.

'Who built this?' Baedecker asked after several minutes of silence. The full moon hung just above the tallest arch. Shadows fell across the large stone lying in the center of the circle. This was Stonehenge as it must have looked shortly after the druids finished their labors, before time and tourists took their toll on the pillars and stones.

'A guy named Sam Hill,' said Dave. 'He was a road builder. Came out here early in the century to found a town and vineyards. A sort of Utopian colony. He had a theory that this section of the Columbia Gorge was perfect for wine grapes — rain from the west, sunlight from the east slopes. Perfect harmony.'

'Was he right?'

'Nope. Missed it by about twenty miles,' said Dave. 'The town's lying in ruins over the hill there. Sam's buried down there.' He pointed to a narrow trail leading down a steep section of hillside.

'Why Stonehenge?' asked Baedecker.

Dave shrugged. 'We all want to leave monuments. Sam borrowed his. He was in England during World War I when the experts thought that Stonehenge had been a sacrificial altar. Sam made this into a sort of antiwar memorial.' Baedecker went closer and could see names set into the stones. What first had appeared to be rock was actually cement.

They walked to the south of the circle and looked out over the river. The lights of a town and bridge glowed several miles to the west. The wind gusted strongly, bending brittle spears of grass on the hillside, carrying the cold scent of autumn with it.

'The Oregon Trail ends a few miles down there,' said Dave, pointing toward the lights. A little later he said, 'Did you ever wonder why they would come so far, pass up two thousand miles of perfectly good land, just to follow a dream?'

'No,' said Baedecker. 'I don't think I have.'

'I do,' said Dave. 'I've wondered that since I was a kid. Christ, Richard, I drive across this country and can't imagine crossing it on foot or in those pis-sant wagons, at an ox's pace. The more I see of it, the more I realize that any man who wants to be president of the United States is committing the ultimate hubris. Wait here a minute, I'll be right back.' Dave walked back through the circle of stones, and Baedecker stood at the edge of the cliff, letting the breeze cool him, listening to the sounds of some night bird far below. When Dave returned, he was carrying a Frisbee that glowed slightly from its own fluorescence.

'Jesus,' said Baedecker, 'that's not the Frisbee, is it?'

'Sure enough,' said Dave. During their last EVA, while performing for the TV camera on the rover, Dave had produced a Frisbee from his contingency collection bag, and he and Baedecker had tossed it back and forth, laughing at its tumbling in a vacuum and its odd trajectory in one-sixth g. Great fun at the time. When they came home four days later, they returned to the Great Frisbee Controversy. NASA was upset because Dave had used the term Frisbee — a brand name — thus providing priceless advertising to a company not affiliated with NASA. Media newscasters and commentators generally approved of the frivolity, one calling it 'a rare human touch in an otherwise heartless undertaking,' but questioned the need for a manned lunar exploration program and pointed to the Soviet robot probes as a cheaper and more sensible approach. A Connecticut senator had discussed 'the six-billion-dollar Frisbee tournament,' and black leaders were incensed, calling the event both callous and insensitive to the needs of millions. 'Two white college boys playing games in space at the taxpayers' expense,' said one black leader on the Today show, 'while black babies die of rat bites in the ghettos.' Capcom had radioed up some of this during their daily news update at the end of their sleep period four hours before reentry. Then the communicator asked if any of them had any opinion on the whole affair or any suggestions for mollifying the agency's critics.

'This channel secure?' Dave had asked. Houston assured him that it was.

'Well, fuck ‘em all,' Dave had said laconically, thus going down — at least for the astronaut corps — into the program record books for the first live-mike use of that particular pilot's term. It had also almost certainly cost Dave a future ride in the Skylab program. Nonetheless, he had waited five more years for a flight, watching Skylab end and the single, obsolete gesture of Apollo-Soyuz go by before finally resigning.

Now Dave tossed the Frisbee to Baedecker. The phosphorescent plastic glowed green-white in the bright moonlight. Baedecker backed up ten steps and snapped it back.

'Works better in air,' said Dave.

They threw the glowing disk back and forth silently for several minutes. Baedecker felt a tide of affection tug at him.

'Do you know what I think?' Dave said after a while. 'What do you think?'

'I think old Sam and all those others had the right idea. You pass all those other places by and keep on going because the place you're headed is perfect.' He caught the Frisbee and held it two-handed. 'But what they didn't understand is that you make it that way just by dreaming about it.' Dave walked to the edge of the cliff and briefly held the Frisbee toward the stars, an offering. 'Everything ends,' he said and pulled back, pivoted, and threw the disk hard out over the drop-off. Baedecker stepped up next to him and the two watched as the Frisbee soared an impossible distance, banked gracefully in the moonlight, and silently fell into the darkness above the river.

Baedecker walked from the cabin to the dock where his son sat on the railing looking out over the lake. The radio had been filled with commentary about the grace of Nixon's resignation and speculation about Gerald Ford. Several reporters had commented glowingly about a statement by Ford that after all of his years in Congress, he had not made a single enemy. Baedecker understood the reporters' relief — after years of abiding with Nixon's obvious belief that he was surrounded by enemies, the change was welcome — but Baedecker remembered his father telling him that you can judge a man by his choice of enemies as well as or better than by his choice of friends, and he wondered if Ford's disclaimer was truly a recommendation of integrity.

Scott was sitting on the railing at the far end of the dock. His white T-shirt glowed slightly in the light from the waning moon. The dock itself sagged in several places and had a stretch of missing railing. Baedecker remembered the new-wood smell of it when he had stood there talking to his own father seventeen years before.

'Hello,' said Baedecker.

'Hi.' Scott's voice was no longer sullen, only distant. 'Let's forget that blowup, okay?'

'Okay.'

Baedecker leaned against the railing and the two looked out at the lake for several minutes. Somewhere an outboard motor growled, the sound coming flat and pure across the still water, but no running lights showed. Baedecker could see lightning bugs flickering on the far shore like the flash of small arms fire.

'I visited your granddad here once not long before he died,' said Baedecker. 'The lake was smaller then.'

'Yeah?' There was little interest in Scott's voice. He had been born eight years after Baedecker's father had died and rarely showed any curiosity about him or his grandmother. Scott's other grandparents were both alive and well in a Florida retirement community and had happily spoiled the boy since birth.

'Tomorrow I thought we'd clear out the last of the old furniture in the morning and take the afternoon off. Want to go fishing?'

'Not especially,' said Scott.

Baedecker nodded, trying not to give in to his sudden flush of anger. 'All right,' he said. 'We'll work on the driveway in the afternoon.' Scott shrugged and said, 'Are you and Mom going to get divorced?' Baedecker looked at his ten-year-old son. 'No,' he said. 'What on earth gave you that idea?'

'You don't like each other,' said Scott, still assertive but with a slight quaver in his voice.

'That's not true,' said Baedecker. 'Your mother and I love each other very much. Why are you saying these things, Scott?' The boy shrugged again, the same one-shouldered little motion Baedecker had seen too many times when Scott had been hurt by a friend or had failed at some simple task. 'I don't know,' he said.

'You know why you said it,' Baedecker said. 'Tell me what you're talking about.' Scott looked away and flipped the hair out of his eyes with a snap of his head. His voice was high but not yet a whine. 'You're never home.'

'My job made me travel, you know that,' said Baedecker. 'That's going to change now.'

'Yeah, sure,' said Scott. 'But that's not it anyway. Mom's never happy, and you don't even notice. She hates Houston, she hates the Agency, she hates your friends, and she hates my friends. She doesn't like anything but her god-damn clubs.'

'Watch what you're saying, Scott.'

'It's true.'

'Watch how you say it anyway.' Scott snapped his head away and silently stared out at the lake. Baedecker took a deep breath and tried to focus on the August evening. The smell of water and fish and oil on the water reminded him of his own summers of childhood. He closed his eyes and remembered the time after the war when he was about thirteen and he and his father had gone up to Big Pine Lake in Minnesota for three weeks of hunting and fishing. Baedecker had been shooting at cans with the .22 on his Savage over-and-under, but when it came time to clean the weapon, he realized that he had left his cleaning rod at home. His father had only shaken his head in that unexpressed disappointment that was more painful than a slap to the young Baedecker, but then his father put down the fishing tackle he was working with, tied a small lead sinker to a string, dropped it through the barrel of his son's .22, and tied a cloth to the string. Baedecker was ready to clean the rifle by himself, but his father kept the other end of the string and the two had pulled the rag through, back and forth, speaking softly about nothing important. They had continued long after the barrel was clean. Baedecker remembered it all: his father's red-and-tan plaid shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, the mole on his father's sun-browned left arm, the soap and tobacco smell of him, the pitch of his voice — and he remembered more than that — he remembered the sad, insistent awareness of everything he was feeling at the moment, his inability, even then, simply to experience it. Even while cleaning the rifle in near-perfect contentment, he had been aware of that contentment, aware that someday his father would be dead and he would remember everything about the moment, even his own awareness.

'You know what I hate?' said Scott and his voice was calm. 'What do you hate?' asked Baedecker.

The boy pointed. 'I hate the fucking moon.'

'The moon?' said Baedecker. 'Why?'

Scott turned so that he was straddling the railing. He flipped the hair out of his eyes. 'When I was in first grade? I told the class during sharing time that you'd been put on the primary crew for the mission? Miss Taryton, she said that was great, but there was this kid named Michael Bizmuth? He was a shit, nobody'd play with him or anything. He came up to me during recess and said, ‘Hey, your Dad's gonna die up there and they're gonna bury him and you're gonna have to look at it your whole life.' So I hit him in the mouth and got in trouble and Mom wouldn't let me watch TV for two weeks. But every night for a year before you went, I'd get down on my knees and pray an hour. An hour each night. My knees'd hurt but I'd stay the whole hour.'

'You never told me this, Scott,' said Baedecker. He wanted to say something else but could think of nothing.

Scott did not seem to be listening. He pushed the hair out of his eyes and frowned in concentration. 'Sometimes I prayed that you wouldn't go, and sometimes I prayed that you wouldn't die up there ' Scott paused and looked right at his father. 'But most of the time, you know what I prayed? I prayed that when you did die there, they'd bring you back and bury you in Houston or Washington, D.C., or somewhere so I wouldn't have to look up at night and see your grave hanging up there for the rest of my life.'

'Do you ever think about suicide, Richard?' asked Dave.

It was Sunday morning. They had risen early, eaten a large breakfast, and were taking a pickup truck borrowed from Kink into the hills above Lonerock to cut firewood.

'No,' said Baedecker. 'At least not much.'

'I do,' said Dave. 'Not my own, of course, but about the concept.'

'What's there to think about?' said Baedecker.

Dave slowed the pickup to ford a small stream. The road up Sunshine Canyon had gone from gravel to dirt to ruts to a vague, two-pronged path between the trees. 'A lot of things to think about,' said Dave. 'Why, when, where, and — maybe most important — how.'

'I don't see why it would matter too much about the how,' said Baedecker.

'But it does!' cried Dave. 'One of my few heroes is J. Seltzer Sherman. You've heard of him . . .'

'No.'

'Sure you have. Sherman was a proctologist in Buffalo, New York, who got deeply depressed about his life in 1965. Said he couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel any more. Flew out to Arizona, bought a telephone pole, sharpened it on one end, took it by mule down into the Grand Canyon. Surely you remember that.'

'No.'

'It was in all the papers. It took him ten hours going down. He buried that pole sharp end up, spent fourteen hours coming back up the trail, took aim, and jumped off the south rim.'

'And?' said Baedecker.

'Missed it by that much,' said Dave, showing half an inch of space between finger and thumb.

'I suppose it's still there as a challenge,' said Baedecker.

'Exactly,' said Dave. 'Although old J. Seltzer himself says that he might try it again someday.'

'Uh-huh,' said Baedecker.

'When Di was a social worker in Dallas, she used to see lots of teenage suicide attempts,' said Dave. 'She said that boys were a lot more efficient than girls. Their methods were more final — guns, hanging, that sort of thing. Girls tended to take overdoses of Midol after calling their boyfriends to say goodbye. Di says that a lot of kids classified as gifted kill themselves. They're almost always successful when they try, she says.'

'Makes sense,' said Baedecker. 'Can we slow down a little? This ride's killing my kidneys.'

'The two men I admired most killed themselves with guns,' said Dave. 'One was Ernest Hemingway. I guess the why was because he couldn't write anymore. The when was July ‘61. The where was the foyer of his house in Ketchum, Idaho. The how was a double-barreled Boss shotgun he'd used to shoot pigeons. He used both barrels against his forehead.'

'Jesus, Dave,' said Baedecker. 'It's too pretty a morning for this stuff.' They bounced along for a minute. The road ran along a wooded ridgeline where Baedecker could look out and see valleys ahead. 'Who was the other man you admired?' he asked.

'My father,' said Dave.

'I didn't know your father killed himself,' said Baedecker. 'I thought you told me once that he died of cancer.'

'No,' said Dave. 'I said that cancer led to his death. So did booze. So did terminal loneliness. You want to see his ranch?'

'It's near here?' asked Baedecker.

'About six miles north,' said Dave. 'He and Mom got divorced back when it wasn't so fashionable. When I was a little kid, I used to take the train out from Tulsa to spend summers on his ranch. He's buried in a cemetery a couple of miles above Lonerock.'

'That's why you bought a house out here,' said Baedecker.

'That's why I knew the area. Di and I had been interested in ghost towns and such down in Texas and California. When we came out to Salem, I showed her this part of the state and we found the house for sale in Lonerock.'

'And that's why you think about suicide?' said Baedecker. 'Hemingway and your father?'

'Naw, it's just a topic of interest to me,' said Dave. 'Like building models or poking around in ghost towns.'

'But you don't see it in relation to yourself?'

'Not at all,' said Dave. 'Well, wait a minute, that's not quite true. Remember on the mission, when we had that eight-minute live-broadcast spot to fill during the last EVA? I did give some thought to it then. Dave Scott'd done that Galileo experiment shtick with the rock hammer and the falcon's feather, remember? That was a hard act to follow, so I figured, what if I just say something like, ‘Well, folks, one of the things we don't know much about up here on the moon is the effect of explosive decompression in hard vacuum on your basic government employee. Here goes nothing.' And then I'd pop open the urine transfer collector valve on my EMU and go squirting out of it like toothpaste out of a stomped-on tube of Colgate right there on prime-time, three-network, live American television.'

'I'm glad you didn't do that,' said Baedecker.

'Yeah,' said Dave and drove on in thoughtful silence for a minute. 'Yeah, I decided that if we couldn't think of anything else to do to fill the eight minutes, I'd go through pretty much the same song and dance and then I'd open your UTC valve.'

'Scott?'

'Dad, is that you?'

'Yes,' says Baedecker. 'My God, it's hard to get hold of you. I've called five times and been put on hold each time, then I was cut off. How are you, Scott?'

'I'm okay, Dad,' says Scott. 'Where are you?'

'Right now I'm up at McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma,' says Baedecker, 'but I'm staying down in Salem for a few days. Scott, Dave Muldorff was killed last week.'

'Dave?' says Scott. 'Oh, shit, Dad. I'm really sorry. What happened?'

'Aircraft accident,' says Baedecker. 'Look, that's not why I called. I heard that you were sick, even in the hospital for a while. How are you feeling now?'

'I'm okay, Dad,' Scott says, but Baedecker can hear the hesitation. 'A little tired still. Look, Dad, how'd you know I was here?'

'Maggie Brown told me,' says Baedecker.

'Maggie? Oh, yeah, Bruce probably talked to her. Dad, I'm sort of sorry about your visit to Poona last summer.' The pay phone clunks, and for a second Baedecker can hear nothing. 'Scott?'

'Yeah, Dad.'

'What is it? Your asthma worse again?' Several seconds of silence pass. 'Yeah. I thought the Master'd cured it last summer, but I've been having some trouble at night. That and some other stuff I picked up in India.'

'Do you have your medication and inhalator?' asks Baedecker.

'No, I left that stuff back at school last year.'

'Have you seen a doctor?'

'Sort of,' says Scott. 'Hey, Dad, are you just out here because of Dave, or what?'

'For now,' says Baedecker. 'I quit my . . .'

'Please deposit seventy-five cents for the past two minutes overtime,' says a synthesized voice.

Baedecker fumbles for change and feeds in the quarters. 'Scott?'

'What'd you say, Dad?'

'I said I quit my job last summer. I've been traveling since then.'

'Jesus,' says Scott, 'you not working? Where have you been?'

'Here and there,' says Baedecker. 'I spent Thanksgiving in Arkansas working on Dad's cabin. Look, Scott, I'm going to be over in your neck of the woods tomorrow and I want to stop by and talk to you.' There is a hiss of interference and a muted buzz of voices.

'What, Scott?'

'I said . . . I said, I don't know, Dad.'

'Why not?'

'Well, there's been some trouble around the ashram here . . .'

'What sort of trouble?'

'Not here exactly,' Scott says quickly. 'But in the area. Some of the ranchers and locals are all upset. There've been some shots fired. The Master's thinking of closing the grounds to outsiders.' There is the sound of another voice speaking to Scott. 'Uh, Dad, I've got to get going now . . .'

'Just a second, Scott,' says Baedecker. He feels an inexplicable panic rise in him. 'Look, I'm going to stop by tomorrow. Scott, I could use some help finishing the job on the cabin. That place could be very nice if I could get it fixed up this spring. Would you think about taking a few weeks off and working on it with me?'

'Dad, I don't . . .'

'Just think about it, please,' says Baedecker. 'We'll talk tomorrow.'

'Dad, I'm afraid that . . .'

The line goes dead. Baedecker tries to call back several times and gives up. He goes into the other room where Kitt Toliver is sitting. Toliver is in his mid-thirties, tall and solidly built. He reminds Baedecker a bit of Deke Slayton because of his crew cut and intensity of gaze. 'Thanks for waiting, Sergeant,' says Baedecker.

'No problem, Colonel.'

'You understand that I'm not part of the official inquiry,' he says. 'I have no official status whatsoever. I'm just trying to find some answers because Dave was a friend of mine.'

'Yessir,' says Toliver. 'I'll be glad to tell you everything I told Colonel Fields and the others.'

'Good,' says Baedecker. 'You did the preflight on the Talon?'

'Yessir, twice,' says Toliver. 'Once in the morning and again after I got the call from Major Munsen telling me that Congressman Muldorff would be flying it.'

'Did Dave do a preflight?'

'Sure did,' says Toliver. 'He said he had to connect with a commercial flight in Salt Lake, but he still took time to look at my PIF and did his own look-see. Did it right, too.'

'And you're convinced that the aircraft was airworthy?'

'Yessir,' says Toliver and there is steel in his voice. 'You can read my PIF 720, sir. They say there was a structural failure after takeoff and I can't argue with what happened, but as far as we could tell from the external inspection and cockpit check, that machine was in perfect order. The engines were new, sir. Less than twenty flying hours on them.' Baedecker nods. 'Kitt, did Dave do anything or say anything during the preflight that you thought was unusual?' Toliver frowns slightly. 'During the preflight? No, sir. Oh, he told me a joke about . . . uh . . . well, about having oral relations with a chicken. But other than that, no sir.' Baedecker grins. 'Did he have luggage with him?'

'Yes, sir. An Air Force flight bag. And the big package.'

'Big package?' says Baedecker.

'Yessir, I told Colonel Fields and the team all about that.'

'Tell me,' says Baedecker.

Toliver lights a cigarette. 'Not much to tell, sir. I went back to the wardroom to get a jacket, and when I came back Congressman Muldorff had loaded a box out of his car.

'How big a box?'

Toliver holds out his hands to signify a shape about two feet by two feet.

'Did it go into the storage locker?' asks Baedecker.

'No, sir,' says Toliver. 'When I got back to the plane, the congressman was settling in and the box was strapped in the backseat.'

'Well strapped in?' asks Baedecker. 'Any chance it could have come loose in flight?'

'No, sir,' replies Toliver. 'It was well secured. Seat belt and harness.'

'Was the backseat armed?' asks Baedecker.

Toliver shakes his head. 'No, no reason for it to be.'

'But Dave's seat was?'

'Yes, sir,' says Toliver and the silent of course, idiot, is all but audible. Baedecker takes some notes on a small pad. 'Did he tell you what was in the box?'

'Yessir,' says Toliver and grins. 'He said it was a birthday present for his son. I said, ‘How old's your boy?' The congressman sort of smiled and said, ‘He'll be one minute old in about two weeks.' Said his wife was due about January seven.'

'Did he say what the present was?' asks Baedecker.

'No, sir. I just said, ‘Congratulations, sir,' and we got him ready for takeoff.' Baedecker closes the notebook and holds out his hand. 'Thanks, Kitt. I appreciate your time. If you think of anything else, you can get in touch with me through Major Munsen.'

'Will do,' says Toliver. He turns to go and then pauses. 'Colonel, there was the one unusual thing I told the team about. I thought you'd probably heard about what the congressman'd said, but maybe you haven't yet.'

'What's that?' asks Baedecker.

'Well, when I was ready to pull the ladder off, I said ‘Have a good flight, sir.' I always say that. And Congressman Muldorff, he sort of grins and says, ‘Thanks, Sergeant, I'm planning on it. This is going to be my last one.' I did-n't think about it much at the time, but it's been bothering me since the crash. What do you think he meant, sir?'

'I'm not sure,' says Baedecker.

Toliver nods but does not leave. 'Yessir. Did you know him well, sir?' Baedecker starts to reply but pauses. 'I'm not sure,' he says at last. 'We'll see.'

'Hey,' said Dave, 'I'm feeling a bit beaucoup drunk.'

'Affirmative,' said Baedecker.

They had cut firewood all Sunday morning in the hills above Lonerock. Baedecker had enjoyed the hard work, the sweat evaporating quickly in the high, cool air. Then they had loaded the pickup, eaten a lunch of thick corned-beef sandwiches with plenty of mustard, had a couple of beers from the cooler, driven back to Lonerock, had a beer or two on the way, unloaded the truck, stacked the wood in the shed behind Dave's house, had a beer, brought the truck back, and had a couple of beers with Kink. Then they had returned to the house to sit on the porch and drink beer.

It was about four o'clock in the afternoon when Dave made his announcement. 'Jesus, drunk from beer,' he said. 'That's high school stuff, Richard.'

'Affirmative,' said Baedecker.

'Hey, you know what we forgot to do? We forgot to tell you to have me remind you to remind me to take you up to see my dad's ranch.'

'Yes,' said Baedecker. 'Remind me to remind you to do that tomorrow.'

'Nuts with that,' said Dave. 'Let's do it now.' Baedecker followed him down to the jeep and watched as Dave tossed things into the backseat. Baedecker eased himself into the passenger seat, taking care not to spill his beer. 'What're we, moving up there or what?'

'Have dinner there,' said Dave, setting the last of the cargo in place and clambering into the left seat. 'Ignition sequence countdown.'

'Check,' said Baedecker, swiveling to look at the heaped backseat.

'Cooler?'

'Check.'

'Beer?'

'Check.'

'Barbecue grill?'

'Check.'

'Hamburgers?'

'Check.'

'Buns?'

'Check . . . no, wait a minute. Red light on the . . . no, there they are, under the charcoal. Check.'

'Charcoal?'

'Check.'

'Lighter fluid?'

'Check.'

'Flashlight?'

'Check.'

'Winchester?'

'Check. What the hell do we need that for?'

'Rattlesnakes,' said Dave. 'Lots of rattlers up there. Lots of rattlers down here, come to think of it. Been real warm this fall. Still out.'

'Oh.'

'S-IVB LH2 precool and fast fill, S-IC LOX tank replenish, glycol fuel jacket topping.'

'Check,' said Baedecker. He pulled a tab on a beer and handed it to Dave. 'We have ignition,' said Dave and started the jeep, backed out of the drive, turned in a cloud of dust, and accelerated north down Main Street at high speed. They sped past the rusted gas pump. 'Houston, we have cleared the tower,' drawled Dave.

'Roger,' said Baedecker.

Dave swung onto a narrow road leading northeast into a canyon. The jeep bounced along the ruts for a quarter of a mile and then emerged onto smoother ground. 'Roll and pitch program completed,' said Dave. 'Stand by for Mode One Charlie.'

'Affirmative,' said Baedecker. They rattled over a cattleguard, and some charcoal bounced out of the bag and disappeared into the dust cloud behind them. 'Inboard cutoff,' said Baedecker. 'Stand by for staging.' The jeep's right wheel jolted over a large rock, Dave's AIR FORCE 1 cap flew off his head and ended up in the backseat under the small charcoal grill. 'Tower jettison,' said Dave.

'Roger.'

They rounded a hairpin curve and began climbing a steep grade. Dave shifted down into second gear and then into first. 'Be advised, Houston,' he said, 'we are GO for staging.' They leveled off on a ridge far above the valley. The jeep trail led along a narrow strip with boulders to the left and a sheer dropoff to the right. 'Affirmative,' said Baedecker. 'GYSA.'

'KYAG,' said Dave.

It was more than six miles. The road ran along treeless ridgetops, dropped into a shadowed canyon, and climbed out across a flat expanse of high desert so that it was half an hour before Dave turned onto a graveled county road and the ranch finally came into view. They drove across a broken cattleguard and down a lane overgrown with sagebrush before pulling to a stop in front of an abandoned wood-frame building. Baedecker could see a barn and a huddle of smaller outbuildings beyond.

They walked through the brittle grass to the house with Baedecker watching for snakes every inch of the way. The ranch house showed signs of long abandonment — windows gone, plaster fallen in most of the rooms, banister missing on the stairway, a rear porch collapsed on one side — but it was also easy to see that it had been built with care and precision. The porch continued around three sides of the building and there the hand-carved gingerbread remained, the interior woodwork had been meticulously crafted, and the large stones in the central fireplace obviously had been set by hand.

'How long has it been empty?' asked Baedecker as they stepped through the litter of plaster in the kitchen.

'Pop died in ‘56,' said Dave. 'A couple of families owned it for a while right after that, but they never had a chance of making a go of it. It's damn hard to make a living around here on a small spread. Pop could never decide if he wanted to be a farmer or a rancher. He didn't have enough water to make a go of the farm, and never had enough pasture to do justice to ranching.'

'How old were you when your father died?' Dave took a long drink of beer and stood looking out the kitchen window. 'Seventeen,' he said. 'That was the first summer I didn't take the train out and stay here. I had a girlfriend and a summer job in Tulsa. Important things to do.' He tossed the beer can in the sink. 'Come on out back. I want to show you something.' They walked past the barn and smaller buildings. As with the main house, the barn had been built to last. Baedecker read the place of manufacture on the large hinges — Lebanon, Pennsylvania, Patented 1906. They crossed a section of field and Baedecker was just beginning to think about snakes again when Dave stopped, pointed to a large, circular depression in the pasture, and said, 'Coot Lake.' It took Baedecker a minute to see it. The mound they were standing on would have been part of the east bank, the rotted wood underfoot a trough to the south part of the irrigation ditch that fed water to the pond, and the washed-out gully to the north the dam itself. Fifty yards across the sunken area was the other dike with half a dozen dusty cottonwoods hanging over the weed-strewn slope that had been the west bank.

'Richard,' said Dave, 'do you ever wonder how much of your life you've spent trying to please the dead?' Baedecker sipped his beer and thought about this as Dave sat on a rock and stripped a long strand of grass for chewing.

'I think we underestimate how much of our own lives we devote to trying to meet the expectations of the dead,' continued Dave. 'We don't even think about it, we just do.' He pointed to a cluster of weeds and bushes twenty yards across the low meadow. 'That's where we had our old raft tied. Sort of a float. The water was only about seven or eight feet deep there, but I wasn't allowed to swim on the south side of it because it was filled with reeds and water plants so your feet'd get all tangled up. Pop'd rip ‘em out every year and they'd be back every summer. He lost one of his old hunting dogs out there before I was born. Then one summer — it must've been during my third summer out here, I was about nine, I think — my dog Blackie got all tangled up in the stuff when he was swimming out to join me on the raft.' Dave paused and chewed on his stalk of grass. The sun was almost setting, and the shadows from the cottonwoods stretched far out over the dead pond. 'Blackie was mostly a Lab,' he said. 'Pop gave him to me when I was born, and for some reason that was very important to me. Maybe that's why he stayed my dog even though I only saw him summers after I was six and Ma and I moved away. We didn't have room for him in Tulsa. Still, it's like he waited all year for those ten weeks each summer. I don't know why it was so important that he and I were the same age, that he'd been born almost the same time I was, but it was.

'So this one day I'd finished my morning chores and was lying on the raft on my stomach, almost asleep, when I hear Blackie swimming out to the raft, then suddenly the noise is gone and I look up and there's no sign of him, just ripples. I knew right away what must've happened, the reeds, and I dove off after him without even thinking. I heard Pop shout at me from near the barn when I came up, but I dove down again, three, maybe four times, pushing through the weeds, getting stuck down there, kicking loose and trying again. You couldn't see anything, and the mud alone would grab you up to ankle and try to keep you down there. The last time I came up I had the stinking water up my nose and I was covered with mud and I could see Pop yelling at me from the shore over there, but I went down again and just when I was out of air and the weeds were all wrapped around me and I was sure there wasn't any use of trying more, I felt Blackie, right on the bottom, not even struggling any more, and I didn't even go back up for air, I just kept pulling at weeds and kicking at the mud, still holding on to him because I knew I wouldn't find him again if I let go for a second. I ran out of air. I remember swallowing some of that stinking water, but goddamn it, I wasn't going back up without my dog. And then somehow I got both of us free and was pulling him into the shallow end there and Pop was dragging us both on shore and fussing over me and yelling at me at the same time, and I was coughing water and crying and trying to get Blackie to breathe. I was sure he was drowned, he was so limp and heavy he felt full of water. He felt dead. But I kept pushing at his ribs while I was throwing up water myself and I'll be damned if that dog didn't all of a sudden cough up about a gallon or so of pond water and start whimpering and breathing again.' Dave took the stalk of his grass out of his mouth and tossed it away. 'I guess that's about as happy as I've ever been,' said Dave. 'Pop said he was mad at me for jumping in — he threatened to wallop me if I ever went swimming there again — but I knew that he was proud. Once when we went into Condon I was sitting in the truck and I heard him telling a couple of his friends about it, and I knew he was proud of me. But I don't think that was why I felt so happy about it. You know, Richard, I used to think about it when I was flying medevac in ‘Nam and knew it was something more than just pleasing Pop. I hated being there in Vietnam. I was scared shitless almost all of the time and I knew it was going to kick the hell out of my career when they found out what I was doing. I hated the weather, the war, the bugs, everything. And I was happy. I thought about it then and I realized that it just made me damn happy to be saving things, saving people. It's like everything in the universe was conspiring to drag those poor sons of bitches down, drag them under, and I'd come along in that fucking chopper and grab on and we'd just refuse to let them go under.' They walked back past the house, set up the grill next to the jeep, and cooked their dinner. The evening chill struck the instant the direct sunlight was gone. Baedecker could see two volcanic peaks catching the last light far to the north and east. They waited until the charcoal glowed white, singed the outside of their hamburger patties, added thick slices of onion, and ate ravenously, each opening a fresh beer with dinner.

'Did you ever consider buying the ranch and rebuilding it?' asked Baedecker. Dave shook his head. 'Too many ghosts.'

'Still, you came back to live nearby.'

'Yeah.'

'I have a friend,' said Baedecker, 'who said that there might be places of power. She thinks we could do worse than to spend our lives searching for them. What do you think?'

'Places of power,' said Dave. 'Like Miz Callahan's magnetic lines of force, huh?' Baedecker nodded. The idea did sound absurd.

'I think your friend is right,' said Dave. He pulled another beer from the cooler and shook the ice off it. 'But I bet it's more complicated than that. There're places of power — yeah — no doubt about that. But it's like we were talking about last night. You have to help make them. You have to be in the right place at the right time and know it.'

'How do you know it?' asked Baedecker.

'By dreaming about it but not thinking about it,' Dave said.

Baedecker pulled the tab on another beer and put his feet up on the dash. The house was only a silhouette against a fading sky now. He zipped up his coat. 'By dreaming about it but not thinking about it,' he said.

'Right. Have you ever practiced any Zen meditation?'

'No,' said Baedecker.

'I did for a few years,' said Dave. 'The idea is to get rid of all the thinking so there's nothing between you and the thing. By not looking you're supposed to see clearly.'

'Did it work?'

'Nope,' said Dave, 'not for me. I'd sit there chanting my mantra or whatever and think about every damned thing in the universe. Half the time I'd have a hard-on from erotic daydreams. But I did find something that worked.'

'What's that?'

'Our training for the mission,' said Dave. 'The endless simulations worked pretty much the way meditation was supposed to and didn't.' Baedecker shook his head. 'I don't agree. That was just the opposite. The whole goddamn thing, when it finally happened, was just like the simulations. I didn't experience any of it because of all the preprogramming the simulations had stuck in me.'

'Yeah,' Dave said and took the last bite of his hamburger, 'that's the way I used to feel. Then I realized that that wasn't the case at all. What we did was turn those two days on the moon into a sacrament.'

'A sacrament?' Baedecker tugged his cap down low and frowned. 'A sacrament?'

'Joan was Catholic, wasn't she?' asked Dave. 'I remember you used to go to Mass with her occasionally in Houston.'

'Yes.'

'Well, you know what I mean then, although it's not as well done these days as when I was a kid and used to go with Ma. The Latin helped.'

'Helped what?'

'Helped the ritual,' said Dave. 'Just like the mission, the simulations helped. The more ritualized it is, the less thought gets in the way. You remember the first thing Buzz Aldrin did when they had a few minutes of personal time after Apollo 11 landed?'

'Celebrated communion,' said Baedecker. 'He brought the wine and stuff in his personal preference kit. He was . . . what . . .? Presbyterian?'

'It doesn't matter,' said Dave. 'But what Buzz didn't realize is that the mission itself was already the ritual, the sacrament was already in place, just waiting for someone to celebrate it.'

'How so?' said Baedecker but already the truth of what Dave was saying had struck him on some internal level.

'I saw the photograph you left there,' Dave said. 'The picture of you and Joan and Scott. By the seismic experiment package.' Baedecker said nothing. He remembered kneeling there in the lunar dusk before the snapshot, the layers of pressurized moonsuit stiff and clumsy around him, the stark sunlight a benediction.

'I left an old belt buckle of my father's,' said Dave. 'I set it right next to the laser reflecting mirrors.'

'You did?' said Baedecker, truly surprised. 'When?'

'When you were getting the Rover ready for the trip to Rill 2 on the first EVA,' said Dave. 'Hell, I'd be amazed if every one of the twelve of us who walked up there didn't do something like that.'

'I never thought of that,' said Baedecker.

'The rest of it was all preparation, just clearing away inconsequentials. Even places of power are useless unless you're prepared to bring something to them. And I don't mean just the things we brought — they're to the real sacrament what the lump of bread is to the Eucharist. Then, if you come away the same person you were, you know it wasn't really a place of power.'

'That's it then, that's the problem,' said Baedecker. 'Nothing changed.' Dave laughed and grasped Baedecker's upper arm through the thick jacket. 'Are you serious, Richard?' he said softly. 'Do you remember who you were and have any idea who you are now?' Baedecker shook his head.

Dave said nothing. He jumped out to dump the last of the embers, bury them carefully in the sand, and stow the gear in the back of the jeep. He came around to Baedecker's side. 'Move over,' he said. 'You're driving. I'm too drunk.' Baedecker, who had matched Dave beer for beer through the afternoon and evening, nodded and shifted to the driver's side.

The jeep's headlights picked out sagebrush and scrub pines as they drove slowly back. Clouds obscured the stars and the full moon would not rise for hours yet.

'Tom Gavin will never understand,' said Dave. 'The poor son of a bitch is so desperate for the sacramental element that he'll never find it. I've seen him on TV talking about being born again in lunar orbit. Shee-it. He talks about it and talks about it and doesn't have the least fucking idea of what being born again means. You were the one, Richard. I saw it.' Baedecker shook his head slowly. 'No,' he said. 'I didn't feel it. I don't know what any of it meant.'

'You think a newborn knows what it all means?' asked Dave. 'It just happens and then you go about the mean business of being alive. Awareness comes later, if it comes at all.' They emerged from the canyon and headed across the last ridge before the switchbacks. Baedecker shifted into first gear and crept along the narrow jeep trail as slowly as the vehicle would allow. He felt sober, but he kept seeing rattlesnakes wiggling at the edge of the headlight beams.

'Being born again doesn't mean that you've arrived somewhere,' said Dave. 'It means you're ready to start the trip. The pilgrimage to more places of power, the doomed quest to keep the people and things you love from being caught by the weeds and dragged under. Stop here, please.' Baedecker stopped and watched while Dave leaned over, was quietly sick over the side of the jeep, and sat up to clean his mouth with water from an old canteen under the seat. Dave slumped back down, burped once, and pulled his cap low over his eyes. 'Thus endeth the gospel according to Saint David. Drive on.'

Baedecker slowed the jeep on the ridge before the switchbacks leading to the last canyon. Lonerock was visible two miles below, a few lights glowing between dark trees.

'Flick your headlights a few times,' Dave said. Baedecker did.

'Okay, drive on.'

'Does Miz Callahan think the aliens drive UFOs with headlights?' said Baedecker.

Dave shrugged without lifting his cap. 'Maybe they take EVAs.' Baedecker shifted down, missed his shift, ground gears, shifted again. 'Mmm, smooth,' said Dave. 'What did you think of my book idea?'

'Frontiers?' said Baedecker. 'I liked it.'

'You think it's a worthwhile project?'

'Definitely.'

'Good,' said Dave. 'I want you to help me write it.'

'Why, for chrissakes? You're doing fine.'

'No, I'm not,' said Dave. 'I can't write the parts about the people for shit.

Even if my work on the Hill gave me time to travel and do the research — which it won't — I couldn't write that part.'

'The part about the Russian, Belyayev, was great,' said Baedecker.

'I picked up all that crap when I was over there for the ASTP,' said Dave. 'The most recent parts are ten years old. The important part of the book will be what the four American guys are up to. And I don't want any of that Reader's Digest pap either — 'Lieutenant Colonel Brick Masterson has since left the Agency to pursue a successful career combining his Austin beer distributorship and his part ownership in a string of lesbian mud-wrestlers.' Uh-uh, Richard, I want to know what these suckers are feeling. I want to know what they don't tell their wives in the middle of the night when they can't sleep. I want to know what moves them right down to the seat of their meat. I don't care how inarticulate we poor ex–jet jockeys are, I expect you to get in there with your little epistemological proctoscope . . . damn, that's good . . . I can't be too drunk if I can say that, huh? I want you to get in there and find out what we need to know about ourselves, okay, Richard?'

'I don't think so . . .' began Baedecker.

'Shut up, please,' said Dave. 'Think about it. Let me know by, say, right after the baby's born. We're coming back out to Salem and Lonerock a few weeks after that. Think about it until then. That's an order, Baedecker.'

'Yassuh.'

'Jesus,' said Dave. 'You ran over that poor snake back there and it wasn't even a rattler.'

Lying on the sleeper sofa in Dave's study, Baedecker watches rectangles of light from passing cars move across the bookshelves and he thinks about things. He remembers Dave's comment, 'I guess that's about as happy as I've ever been,' and he tries to remember a comparable point in time for himself. Dozens of memories come to mind — from childhood, with Joan in the early years, the night Scott was born — but, as important and satisfying as each one is, it is ultimately rejected. Then he recalls a single, simple event that he has carried with him over the years like a well-worn snapshot, bringing it out in times of loneliness and displacement.

It was a minor thing. A few minutes. He was flying back to Houston from the Cape some time during the last months of training. He was alone in his T-38 — just as Dave had been a week ago — when, on an impulse, he overflew the sprawling subdivision in which he lived. Baedecker remembers the perfect timing of the emergence of his wife and seven-year-old child, the clarity with which he saw them from an altitude of eight hundred feet at five hundred miles per hour. He remembers the sunlight dancing on the Plexiglas canopy as he pulled the T-38 into a victory roll, and then another, celebrating the sky, the day, the coming mission, and his love for the two small figures seen so far below.

Someone in the household coughs loudly and Baedecker starts from the edge of sleep, conditioned by years of listening for his son's labored breathing in the night. He watches a rectangle of white light moving across the dark line of books and tries to relax.

Eventually he sleeps. And the dream comes.

It is one of only two or three dreams that Baedecker has that he knows is not a dream. It is a memory. He has had it for years. When he comes awake, gasping and clutching at the headboard, he knows immediately that it has been the dream. And, sitting up in the darkness of Dave's study, feeling the sweat already drying on his face and body, he knows that this time — for the first time — the dream has been different.

Until now the dream had always been the same. It is August of 1962 and he is taking off from Whiting Field near Pensacola, Florida. It is a sickeningly hot day, muggy beyond belief, and it is a relief when he is sealed into the cockpit of the F-104 Starfighter and begins breathing cool oxygen. He is not involved in flight-testing. There is nothing untested about this F-104; the chrome-alloyed aircraft is all stock-block equipment, scheduled to join an Air Force squadron at Homestead Air Force Base south of Miami. Baedecker has spent two weeks ferrying it cross-country on an 'interservice courtesy call,' his first political job for NASA, giving rides to Navy and Army VIPs curious about the new first-line fighter. A retired admiral here at Pensacola — a hulk of a man too fat for his flight suit and almost too fat for the rear seat — had patted Baedecker on the back after his joyride and proclaimed, 'Absolutely first-rate flying machine.' Like most pilots who had flown the F-104, Baedecker did not totally agree. The aircraft was impressive for its power and brute force — indeed, it was used out at Edwards as a proficiency trainer for the X-15 that Baedecker had flown for the first time earlier that summer — but it was not a first-rate flying machine; it was an engine with an ejection seat attached, two seats in this case, and two stubby wings offering about as much lift surface as fins on an arrow.

Sitting in the cockpit on this particularly hot August day, Baedecker is glad that the tour is over; he has a ten-minute solo flight to Homestead and then he will be heading back to California by C-130 transport. He does not envy the Air Force pilots who will be flying the F-104 on a daily basis.

Heat waves rise in rippling billows and distort the runway and line of mangrove trees beyond. Baedecker taxis into position, radios the tower for clearance, and sets the brakes on while he brings the engine up to full power. He can feel that everything is copacetic even before the dials register their proper readings. The machine strains at its mechanical tether like a half-mad thoroughbred pushing at the starting gate.

Baedecker radios the tower again and releases the brakes. The machine leaps forward, slamming him back into his seat while the runway centerline blurs together under the nose of the aircraft. Still, the monster uses an ungainly amount of runway before it reaches rotation speed. Baedecker lifts the nose sharply onto an invisible line twenty degrees above the advancing wall of trees, feels the aircraft solidly off the ground, pulls the gear up, and kicks in the afterburner.

Things happen simultaneously then. Power drops to ten percent of what is needed, Baedecker's board goes red, he knows without thinking that the flanges around the afterburner have popped open and that thrust is spilling uselessly in a blazing fountain behind him, and the stall buzzer screams in panic. Baedecker instinctively throws the nose down, sees he has neither time nor altitude for this, and pulls back sharply on the stick at precisely the same instant the first branches snap off under the belly of the dying F-104. Baedecker hunches in a near fetal position, pulls the D-ring, sees the canopy fly off in a strangely silent act of levitation and waits a full eternity of 1.75 seconds before the charge in his ejection seat fires and he is following the canopy up but too late, the plane is striking heavy branches now, is shearing off entire trunks of pine trees, and the cartwheeling tail section slams into the base of the rising ejection seat, not a solid hit but a foul tip that sends the seat spinning ass-over-tail, Baedecker flying out of it upside down, his spring-loaded chute deploying toward the foliage forty feet below, both of his ankles already broken by the impact, his head ringing. Then the main chute is opening, Baedecker's feet tug toward the sky like a child swinging too high, the impact is too strong, breaking his left shoulder upon opening and his right shoulder after swinging him almost completely around, the main chute side-slipping below him now, an inverted, orange umbrella trying to close in on itself, no reason for it not to close and drop him to the flame and flying carnage below, but it does not and he swings forward in another full arc, his broken feet almost striking the upper branches and flowers of flaming aviation fuel this time, his lungs already breathing in the unbreathable vapors and heat. And then, for two endless seconds, he is hanging under the silk canopy the way God and man had meant, drifting forward like a tourist under a para-glide chute being towed by a KrisKraft, but it is not water under him but half an acre of jagged stumps and branches, ten thousand punji stakes created in three seconds of violent aircraft impact, and flame as far as he can see, flame rising around him and above him, already licking razor-tongues at his suit and shroudlines and pain-dead feet hanging at impossible angles beneath him, and in two more seconds he will land in that conflagration of sharpened stakes and flesh-melting fuel fire, he will land on those broken ankles, bones splintering, body and parachute sputtering into flame in the heat, skin broiling like a mantis boiling and popping through its own shell in the flames.

And Baedecker awakes.

He awakes — as he always does — reaching above him for shroudguides and finding headboard and wall. He awakens — as he always does — silent and sweating and remembering each detail of what he had not been able to remember in the pain-wracked hours of consciousness after the crash or in the pain-measured ten weeks of slow recovery in the hospitals after that . . . or even in the three years following that August day until that first night when he had had the dream for the first time and came awake, just like this, reaching and sweating and remembering perfectly what could not be remembered.

But this time the dream had been different. Baedecker swings his feet to the floor, rests his head in shaky hands, and tries to find the difference.

And does.

The board is red, the stall buzzer is screaming, Baedecker feels the aircraft wallow belly-first toward the trees. There is no reprieve from this heavy pull, the earth is calling him down and under. But Baedecker pulls the stick back into his stomach, hunches and pulls the D-ring, knowing there is not enough time, seeing shattered branches fly up with the lifting canopy, but then — in slow motion — the familiar salvation as the ejection seat rises from the coffin of disintegrating fuselage, rises as slowly as a Victorian elevator in no particular rush to leave, and as his helmeted head passes the line of sight of the deflection mirror set above the cockpit instruments he sees himself for a second there, visor reflecting mirror reflecting visor, and rising farther he sees what he has forgotten, sees what he did not think about in the exigency of the survival instant — which, of course, he had always known, had never really forgotten only abandoned in the reflexive instinct of survival — he sees Scott in the backseat; Scott along for the ride today and still trusting, Scott, about seven years old in crew cut and his Cape Canaveral T-shirt, and his eyes in the mirror, still trusting, waiting for his father to do something but no fear there yet, only trust, and then Baedecker is up and out and safe — but such painful safety! — and screaming Scott's name even as he drifts slowly down to the churning waves of fire.

Baedecker stands and takes two steps to the window. He sets his cheek and forehead against the coolness of the rain-streaked glass and is surprised to feel tears streaking his cheek.

In the deep hours of the morning, Baedecker sets his face against the cold glass and knows exactly now why Dave had died.

Baedecker leaves before dawn so as to be in Tacoma by 7:30 A.M. Some of the members of the Crash Board are not happy to be there but by 8:15 A.M. Baedecker is sitting and listening to the six of them, speaking briefly when they are finished, and by 9:00 A.M. he is on his way south and east, crossing into Oregon above the Dalles. It is a gray, windy day with the smell of snow in the air, and although he scans the northern bluffs for some glimpse of the Stonehenge monument, he sees nothing.

It is a little after 1:00 P.M. when Baedecker looks down at Lonerock from the hilltop to the west of it. There are patches of snow on the steep incline, and he keeps the rented Toyota in second gear. The town seems even emptier than usual as he drives down the short main street. Solly's mobile home is closed up for the winter; Miz Callahan's school has heavy curtains pulled across the windows; and pockets of snow on the side streets have not been disturbed. Baedecker parks in front of the picket fence and lets himself into the house with the keys Di had loaned him two days earlier. The rooms are tidy, still smelling faintly of the ham they had heated up there after the funeral. Baedecker goes into the small writing room at the back of the house, gathers up the stack of manuscript and notes, packs them in a box that had held nine-by-twelve envelopes, and carries it out to the car.

Baedecker walks the hundred yards to the schoolhouse. There is no response either to his knock or to calls into the speaking tube. He backs away to look up at the belfry, but the windows are gray slabs reflecting the low clouds. The garden still holds brittle, broken cornstalks and a decomposing scarecrow dressed in a tuxedo.

He drives the short distance to Kink Weltner's ranch. He has parked the Toyota and is about to go up to the house when he catches sight of the Huey tied down in the field beyond the barn. The presence of the helicopter shakes him in some obscure way; he had forgotten that Dave had flown it there. Baedecker walks to it, runs his hand along the tie-down wires, and peers into the cockpit. The windshield is frosted, but he can see the Air National Guard helmet propped on the back of the seat.

'Hullo, Dick.'

Baedecker turns to see Kink Weltner walking toward him. Despite the cold, Kink is wearing only a dark suit, the left sleeve neatly pinned back.

'Hello, Kink. Where are you headed all dressed up?'

'Headed down to Las Vegas for a few days to get rid of this cabin fever,' says Kink. 'Fucking weather gets tiresome.'

'I'm sorry we didn't get to talk after the funeral,' Baedecker says. 'I had a few things to ask you.' Kink blows his nose with a red kerchief and slips it back into the breast pocket of his suit. 'Yeah, well, I had a lot of chores to finish up. Goddamn, I wish that hadna happened to Dave.'

'Me too,' says Baedecker. He taps the side of the fuselage. 'I'm surprised this is still here.' Kink nods. 'Yeah. I've called ‘em twice about it. Talked to Chico both times because nobody wants to take responsibility for a machine that's not supposeta exist. They're waiting for a patch of good weather, I guess. I'm not sure if nobody wants to drive this far or if they're afraid to fly it over the mountains. It's all fueled and ready to go when they want it. I'd fly it back myself, but it's sort of hard to handle a Huey with one arm.'

'I never mastered it with two arms,' says Baedecker. 'Kink, you talked to Dave when he got here, didn't you?'

'Just said hello. I was surprised to see him right after Christmas an' all. I knew he and Diane was comin' up sometime after the baby was born, but I didn't expect him before that.'

'Did you see him again before he left?'

'Nah, the weather'd already closed in when he landed, an' he said he had the Cherokee stored over to the house. He said he'd be back in a couple of weeks to get the Huey if nobody else picked it up before then.'

'Did he say why he'd come out to Lonerock?' Kink shakes his head and then stops as if he had remembered something. 'I did ask him how his Christmas was and he said fine but that he left one of the presents out here. That didn't make a whole lot of sense since they hadn't been out here — far as I know — since you was here with ‘em back before Halloween.'

'Thanks, Kink,' says Baedecker as they walk back toward the house. 'Can I use your phone?'

'Sure, just slam the door shut on your way out. Don't bother to lock it,' says Kink as he climbs into his pickup. 'See ya around, Dick.'

'So long, Kink.' Baedecker goes into the house and tries calling Diane. There is no answer. The afternoon light makes it seem like late evening, as if there is no energy left in the universe.

Baedecker drives back through Lonerock, passes the closed-up house, and turns right toward the school. He sees the curtains still closed, makes a U-turn in the snow out front, and is heading back toward Main Street when he sees the thin figure with its shock of white hair come around the building from the field behind. He stops and is out of the car jogging uphill toward her, thinking that in her long, dark coat, Miz Callahan resembles the scarecrow in her frozen garden.

'Mister Baedecker,' she says and takes his hand in both of hers. 'I was just getting my automobile ready for the trip. I have decided to drive to the coast and spend a few weeks with Mr. Callahan's sister's daughter.'

'I'm glad I caught you,' says Baedecker.

'Isn't it terrible about David?' she says and her hands clench with emotion. 'Yes, it is,' says Baedecker and watches the large Labrador — Sable — come bounding around the side of the building.

And then there they are — four of them — barely big enough to walk, and Baedecker is on one knee, petting them, rubbing behind their ears, and he does not even need the old woman's next words to confirm what he knows.

'So terribly sad,' she says, 'and David had come so far to pick out just the right one for his little boy.' Baedecker calls from Condon. Diane answers on the third ring.

'I'm sorry I wasn't there for breakfast this morning,' he says. 'I decided to go talk to Bill and the rest of them and get a preliminary report.'

'Tell me,' she says.

Baedecker hesitates a second. 'We can talk tonight when there's more time, Di. I hate to go into it all over the phone.'

'Please, Richard. I want to know the important parts now.' Her voice is gentle but firm.

'All right,' says Baedecker. 'First, the starboard engine had shut down completely just like they thought, but they're pretty sure now that Dave got it restarted just a few seconds before the crash. The hydraulics problem was a result of a stress, structural failure . . . no one could have caught it . . . but even that seems to have stabilized at about thirty-five percent assist. I don't know if the gear would've gone down, but Dave was planning to deal with that when the time came.

'Second, he couldn't see a damn thing, Di. He said on the tape that he could see lights when he came out of the clouds at sixty-two hundred, but that was for about two seconds. The mountain ridge he hit was in the center of a squall, heavy rain and zero visibility down to the deck for at least eight miles to the north.

'Third — and this is the important part, Di — the Portland Center controller handling the emergency told Dave that there were ridges up to five thousand feet there. The ridge he hit was at fifty-six hundred; it ran all the way east to Mt. St. Helens. I'd bet anything that Dave had fifty-five hundred as his punch-out altitude. Maybe higher, but the thing is, he'd just got the beast back in the corral — he was on top of the hydraulics problem, he was out of the ice, he'd just got the engine relit, and he was less than four minutes out from Portland. He was doing the best he could, Di, and he would've had it if it hadn't been for that ridge.' Baedecker pauses, seeing . . . no, feeling those last few seconds. Fighting a stick gone as heavy as a crowbar in a box of rocks, pedals trying to kick his knees back into his belly, no time to look out the rain-streaked canopy, watching the tumbling ball, checking the airspeed indicator and altimeter while handling the throttle and waiting for just the right second to try again on the engine restart. And all the time, above the grind and storm, aware of the small noises from the backseat.

Baedecker, knowing in his gut and soul that Dave was no fool, could see him being the first to snort derision at the sentimental suggestion of a pilot spending two seconds too long in a dying airplane because of a dog, but Baedecker could remember the tone of Dave's voice three months earlier, saying, 'I can't remember ever being any happier,' and in that tone he hears the possibility of a pause of one second or two where no pause is permissible, sees that final straw added to the already significant weight of a test-pilot's determination to save a salvageable aircraft.

'. . . appreciate your doing it and telling me; Richard,' Diane is saying. 'I never doubted, really. There were just so many little questions I couldn't answer.'

'Di,' says Baedecker, 'I know why Dave came out to Lonerock. He had a special present he wanted to give you and the baby.' Baedecker pauses. 'It wasn't . . . ah . . . wasn't ready when he was here,' he lies. 'But I'm going to bring it in tonight if that's all right.' Baedecker glances at the Toyota where the puppy is making scrabbling sounds in the box in the backseat next to the box holding Dave's manuscript.

'Yes,' says Diane and takes a breath. 'Richard, you know the sonogram said we're going to have a boy.'

'Dave told me,' says Baedecker.

'Did he tell you the names we've been considering?' she asks. 'No,' says Baedecker. 'I don't think so.'

'We both agreed that Richard is nice,' Diane says. 'Especially if you think so too.'

'Yes,' says Baedecker. 'I think so too.'

Baedecker drives south on County Road 218, past Mayville and Fossil, crossing the John Day River just past Clarno. The road to the ashram-ranch is wide and graveled, running north from the paved county road. Baedecker drives three miles along it, thinking about Scott. He remembers the drive back to Houston that Watergate summer so long ago, Baedecker wanting to talk more to his son, unable to, feeling — in spite of everything — that Scott also wanted to talk, to change things.

There is a roadblock where the road narrows between two ditches several feet deep. A blue, airport-type limousine is parked diagonally, blocking the road. To the left is a small building with a sloping roof, brown sides, and a single window. It is meant to be a guardhouse, but it makes Baedecker think of the covered school-bus stops that sit by the side of the road in Oregon. He stops and gets out of the Toyota. The puppy is sleeping in the backseat.

'Yessir, may we help you?' says one of the three men who emerge from the shack.

'I'd like to get by,' says Baedecker.

'Sorry, sir, no one beyond this point,' says the man. Two of the three are large and bearded, but the speaker is the larger of the two, at least six-two. He is in his early thirties, and wears a red shirt under his goosedown vest. There is a medallion on the outside of the vest, and Baedecker can see a photograph of the guru there.

'This is the road to the ashram, isn't it?' asks Baedecker.

'Yeah, but it's closed,' says the second man. He wears a dark plaid shirt and Baedecker notices a cheap security-service badge pinned to it.

'The ashram's closed?'

'The road's closed,' says the big man, and Baedecker hears the change in his tone. There will be no more 'sirs.'

'Now turn your vehicle around,' he says.

'I'm here to see my son,' says Baedecker. 'I talked to him yesterday on the phone. He's been sick, and I want to see him and talk awhile. I'll leave my car here if you want to drive me in.' The big man shakes his head and takes three steps forward and in that brief motion comprised of swagger and expectation, Baedecker knows that he will not be allowed to pass. He has never met the man, but he knows him well; he has seen his type in bars from San Diego to Djakarta. He has known several like him — far too many — in the Marines. For a while, as a young man, Baedecker had considered becoming him.

Baedecker glances at the third man — little more than a boy really — thin and pockmarked. He is wearing only a red cotton shirt and is shivering in the cold breeze coming out of the north.

'Nope,' says the big man and comes closer, too close for psychological comfort and knowing it. 'Turn it around, Pop.'

'I'd like to see my son,' says Baedecker. 'If you have a phone in there, let's call someone.' Baedecker makes a move to step around him, but the big man stops him with a thrust of three fingers, hard, in Baedecker's chest. 'I said turn it around,' he says. 'Back it up to that wide spot down there, and turn it around.' Baedecker feels something sharp and cold and familiar well up inside of him, but he stops and backs up two steps. The big man is all shoulders, chest, and arms, broad neck under a wild beard, but his belly is big and soft even under the vest. Baedecker glances down at his own stomach and shakes his head. 'Let's try it again,' Baedecker says. 'This road is still a county road, I asked in Condon. Now if you have a phone or radio, let's talk to somebody who can think and make grown-up decisions. If not, drive me into the ashram and we'll find someone.'

'Uh-uh,' says the big man and shows his teeth. The other one with a beard takes a step closer to his friend while the youngest one moves back into the doorway of the guardhouse. 'Move now, Pops,' says the big man. The same three fingers hit Baedecker's chest again. Baedecker takes another step back.

The man shows more teeth, pleased by Baedecker's retreat, steps forward again, and brings his whole palm forward in what will be a straight-armed shove. Baedecker goes with it, takes the offered arm, brings it around and back and up, not quite hard enough to break bone but quickly enough to let softer things rip inside. The big man yells and pulls, Baedecker steps with it, watching the second man, and lifts higher, only his right hand busy now, leaning on the big man a bit as the other goes cheek down onto the hood of the Toyota.

The man with the badge yells something as he moves in, both arms held out wide like a wrestler beginning a match. Baedecker hits him three times with his left hand, the first two blows fast and useless with no extension and little weight behind them, the third solid and satisfying, landing deep in the other's throat. The man backs away with both hands up to his neck, catches the heels of his cowboy boots in the gravel at the edge of the road, and sits down heavily in the deep ditch.

The big man is still puffing and sliding along the hood, kicking now and trying to get his arm back. Baedecker is sliding with him, ready to get both hands into play, when he sees the youngest man come out of the shack with a twelve-gauge pump shotgun.

Ten feet separate Baedecker and the boy. The kid is holding the weapon somewhere between port arms and the way Scott used to hold a tennis racket when he was little before Baedecker taught him better. Baedecker did not see the boy pump the first shell into the chamber, and he feels strongly that it was not done before the boy emerged from the shack. Baedecker hesitates a second, but already the cold, sharp-edged anger he had felt a second earlier is fading to be replaced by the hot flush of anger at himself. He spins the big man around and propels him back toward the boy hard enough that the man stumbles forward, forgets that his right arm will no longer work to break his fall, and goes face first into the gravel and mud at the feet of the boy with the gun.

The kid is shouting something, waving the shotgun like a magic wand, but Baedecker ignores him, gets back into the Toyota, backs it down the gravel road, turns it around where the road is wide enough, and drives back the way he came.

Baedecker had listened to the tape alone, in a small room at McChord Air Force Base. There was not much on it. The young controller's voice was professionally brisk, but there was the sharp edge of fear just under the surface. Dave's voice was in the mode that Baedecker had always thought of as his in-flight voice; speech lazy and unhurried, the Oklahoma accent out of his boyhood quite pronounced.

Six minutes before the crash. The controller: Ah, Roger that, Delta Eagle two-seven-niner, ah, engine shutdown. Do you wish to declare an emergency at this time? Over.

Dave: Negative that, Portland Center. I'll bring it back your way and we'll do some thinking about it before we mess up all the airline schedules. Over.

Two minutes before the crash. The controller: Ah, affirmative on clearance for runway three-seven, Delta Eagle two-seven-niner. Ah, are you . . . do you have confirmation that landing gear is operational at this time? Over.

Dave: Negative, Portland Center. No green light at this time, but no red light either. Over.

Controller: Roger, Delta Eagle two-seven-niner. Do you have procedure if you receive no down and locked indication? Over.

Dave: Affirmative on that, Portland Center.

Controller: Very good, Delta Eagle two-seven-niner. What is procedure? Over.

Dave: Procedure as follows, Portland. GYSAKYAG. Over.

Controller: Say again, please, Delta Eagle two-seven-niner. We did not copy that. Over.

Dave: Negative, Portland. Busy right now. Over.

Controller: Roger, Delta Eagle. Please be advised . . . ah . . . be advised that your current altitude reads seven-five-two-zero and that there are ridges in your flight path up to five thousand feet. Repeat, ridges to five triple zero. Over.

Dave: Roger. Dropping through seven thousand feet now. Copy bumps ahead to five triple zero feet. Thank you, PC.

Sixteen seconds before the crash. Dave: Coming out of clouds at sixty-two hundred now, Portland Center. See some lights to the right. Okay, now . . .

Then nothing.

Baedecker listened to the tape three times and on the third he heard the final 'Okay, now ' differently. There was triumph under the drawl. Something had begun to go right for Dave in those last few seconds.

The voice recording reminded Baedecker of another time, another flight. He thought of the date on the old newspaper the morning of Dave's funeral — October 21, 1971. It could have been. It would have been in late October, not long before the mission.

They were flying home to Houston from the Cape in a T-38, Baedecker in the front seat. They were over the Gulf, but the only sea visible was the sea of clouds three thousand feet below them, glowing milk white from horizon to horizon in the light from the not-quite-full moon. They had been flying in silence for some time when Dave came on the intercom. 'We're going up there in a couple of months, amigo.'

'Not unless you get the Pings high-gate sequence right in the simulator next time,' said Baedecker.

'We're going,' said Dave. 'And things ain't never gonna be the same.'

'Why not?' asked Baedecker, glancing up. The light prismed on the canopy, distorting the moon's shape.

'Because, Richard,' came the slow reply, 'we're not going to be the same. People who tred on sacred ground come away changed, my friend.'

'Sacred ground?' said Baedecker. 'What the hell are we talking about?'

'Trust me,' said Dave.

Baedecker had been silent a minute, letting the steady pulse of the engines and oxygen flow surround him. Then he had said, 'I do trust you.'

'Good,' said Dave. Then, 'Give me the stick, please.'

'You've got it.' Dave pitched the T-38 into a steep climb, adding throttle as they climbed, until Baedecker was on his back staring straight at the moon as they clawed skyward. The Marius Hills region would be perfectly illuminated in the lunar sunrise. Dave held the climb until the straining aircraft was twelve miles high — six thousand feet above its official ceiling capability — and then, instead of leveling off, he pulled back on the stick until they hung there vertically, unable to gain more altitude, unwilling to fall, the T-38 hanging by its nose between space and the sea of clouds 55,000 feet below, gravity not defied but nullified, all forces in the universe equalized and harmonized. It could not last. An instant before the aircraft stalled into a spin, Dave kicked off with hard left rudder and the little trainer shuddered once like an animal pulled back on its leash, and then they tumbled over into a forty-five mile fall that would end in Houston and home.

Baedecker reaches Lonerock a half an hour before sunset, but the gray day is already drained of light. He drives to Kink's ranch, parks the Toyota, and carries the barking puppy into the house. He feeds it milk, sets the box by the still-warm stove in the kitchen, and is satisfied that the house will stay warm enough for the dog until he returns.

Outside, Baedecker pulls off the tie-down wires, gets the clipboard from the cockpit, and does an external preflight inspection on the Huey as the cold wind blows in from the north. It takes him three times longer than when he and Dave had done it, and when he is down on his knees trying to find the fuel-drain valve, his left hand begins to throb with cold and pain. Three fingers there are swollen to twice their normal size. Baedecker sits on the frozen ground and wonders if any of the fingers are broken. He remembers once when he was about twelve, coming home to the apartment on Kildare Street after a schoolyard fight. His father had looked at his bruised hand, shaken his head, and said only, 'If you absolutely have to fight and if you insist on hitting someone in the face, don't hit them with an empty hand.' Finished with the exterior checks, Baedecker begins to enter by the left door, stops, and goes around to the right side. He steps up on the skid, reaches across to grab the far edge of the seat, and pulls himself in. It is cold in the helicopter. The machine has a heater and defrosters, but he cannot waste battery power on them before the turbine starts. If it starts.

Baedecker straps himself in, releases the inertial reel lock so that he can lean forward, and does the check of console switches and circuit breakers. When he is finished, he leans back and his head taps the flight helmet set atop the shoulder harness bracket. He pulls the helmet on, setting the earphones in place. He has no intention of using the radio, but the headset warms his ears.

Baedecker sits back in the heavy chair, wiggles the cyclic stick between his legs, and grips the collective pitch lever with his left hand. The hand will not quite close on it, but he decides that the grip is adequate. He practices using his finger and thumb to manage the throttle.

He lets out a deep breath. The truth is, he realizes, that he has not flown a powered aircraft in more than three years and he is glad that telemetry is not sending his heart rate back to a bank of doctors; they would diagnose tachycardia after one look at the monitors. Baedecker opens the throttle with his throbbing left hand and squeezes the trigger switch with his good finger. There is a loud whine, the turbine fires up with a loud hiss like the pilot light on a huge hot-water heater catching, and the exhaust-gas temperature gauge shoots into the red while the rotors begin to turn. In five seconds the turbine is humming smoothly, and the rotors are only a blur and a half-sensed pressure overhead.

'Okay, good,' Baedecker mutters into his dead microphone. 'Now what?' He turns on the heating fan and defroster, waits thirty seconds for the windshield to clear, and pulls up lightly on the collective control stick. Even that slight pull — it reminds Baedecker of the finicky parking brake on Joan's old Volvo — increases the pitch angle sufficiently to raise the Huey six feet off its skids.

A hover would be nice, Baedecker thinks. He gives it more throttle to compensate for the increased pitch angle, his left hand protesting with pain at being asked to do two things at once. He slacks off at ten feet, planning to hold the Huey there for a minute, his windshield on level with the open hayloft door of Kink's barn fifty feet away. Immediately the torque tries to spin the machine counterclockwise on its axis. Baedecker gives it some right pedal, overcompensates, and causes the tail rotor to push the Huey around the opposite direction. He brings the rotation to a stop 180 degrees from where he started, but in the meantime the reduced pitch angle has dropped the ship five feet, now eight, and Baedecker is tugging the cyclic stick back too far, leveling off three inches above the ground only to hop fifteen feet into the air as the controls respond.

Baedecker lets it sink back to ten feet, feverishly working throttle, cyclic, pitch control, and pedals in an effort to achieve a simple hover. Just as he thinks he has achieved it, he glances left and sees that he is sideslipping smoothly, as if on frictionless glass rails ten feet above the cold ground, headed directly and implacably for Kink's barn.

He kicks the pedal hard enough to bring the heavy machine around in a yawing, wallowing turn, tucks the stick forward and then quickly back, and flares the Huey into an inelegant, molar-grinding excuse for a landing that sends it skipping twice in four-foot hops before it settles shakily on its skids in the center of the barnyard.

Baedecker mops the back of his hand across his brow and feels sweat running down his neck and ears. He releases the stick and collective and sits back, the harness moving with him, holding him snugly. The rotors continue their senseless spin.

'Okay,' Baedecker says softly, 'I could use some help here, amigo.'

Try holding your breath, dummy. It is Dave's voice over the inactive intercom, through Baedecker's silent earphones. It is Dave's voice in his mind.

Baedecker relaxes, lets the air go out of him in a long exhalation, does not inhale, and lets his mind wander while his body remembers those many hours of instruction seventeen years earlier. Still easily holding his breath, he lifts the pitch lever, pulls back gently on the cyclic stick, adjusts the throttle and pedals as he rises, and hovers effortlessly ten feet above the ground. He carefully takes a breath. The hover is solid, easily held, as simple as sitting in a small boat on a smooth sea. Baedecker swings the Huey around, pitches the nose down to pick up speed, and begins a long, climbing turn that will bring him back across Lonerock at about two thousand feet.

It is not dark yet, the sun is still up, actually becoming visible below the clouds for the first time all day, but Baedecker fumbles on the collective lever for the switch and then trips the landing light on and off several times. Below him, the dark cube of the cupola atop the school remains dark. Baedecker levels off at twenty-five hundred feet and aims the nose of the Huey west-southwest.

At one hundred knots, the trip will take Baedecker less than fifteen minutes. The setting sun glares directly into his eyes. He clicks down the helmet-visor, but the view is too darkened that way, so he slides it back up and squints. Mount Hood gathers a gold corona in the west, and even the underbelly of the clouds glow now in rose and yellow hues as if releasing the colors they had spent the week absorbing.

Baedecker drops to three hundred feet as the John Day River falls behind. He smiles. He can almost hear Dave's voice, 'You're doing the oldest kind of IFR flying, kid. ‘I Follow Roads.'' He almost misses the ashram access road because he is watching a string of cattle to the south, but then he swings to the right in a comfortable bank, feeling the machine working with him now and he with it, glancing sideways almost straight down out his right window at sagebrush and snowbanks and low pines casting long shadows across a dry creek bed.

He passes over the roadblock at a steady 150 feet, seeing two men emerge and resisting the impulse to swing around and make a pass at 120 knots with skids eight feet above the ground. He has not come for that.

Two miles farther he crosses a rise, sees the ashram-ranch, and realizes his error.

It is a goddamn city. The road becomes asphalt through the long valley, and hundreds of permanent tents sit in rank and file along one side while buildings and parking lots line the other. There is a gigantic structure at the junction of two streets, a veritable town hall, rows of buses sit parked behind it, and scores of people are in the streets. Baedecker makes two passes over the main thoroughfare at a hundred feet, but the noise of his rotors only brings more people out of buildings and tents. The muddy streets fill with red-shirted ants. Baedecker half expects the flash of small-arms fire to begin at any moment. He holds the Huey in an indecisive hover above what might be the main hall — a long building with permanent roof and foundations and canvas sides — and thinks, What now?

Relax.

Baedecker does. He rotates the helicopter to watch the sun disappear behind the hills. The sudden twilight is somehow more gentle than the gray day had been. Looking quickly at the mile-long complex below, he picks a flat-topped hill near an unfinished wooden building on the southeast corner of town. The hill and the lone structure are off the main lanes, separated by several hundred yards from the rest of the maze.

He circles once and begins descending carefully. He is still thirty feet above the rough hilltop when he catches a glimpse of red out of the corner of his eye. Five people have emerged from the unfinished building, but Baedecker has eyes only for the one in front. The figure is still sixty yards away, half-hidden in the shadow of the building, but Baedecker knows instantly that it is Scott — Scott thinner than he has ever seen him, Scott without the beard he had worn in India and with hair shorter than Baedecker has seen it in a decade, but Scott nonetheless.

The landing is smooth, the Huey settling onto its skids without a jar. Baedecker has to concentrate on the console for a minute, leaving the rotors turning in a hot whisper but making sure the machine will stay earthbound for a few minutes. When he looks out and down, he sees four of the figures still motionless in shadow, but Scott is moving quickly uphill now, breaking into a slow jog up the rough and rocky hillside.

Baedecker kicks open the door, leaves his helmet in the seat, and moves out from under the rotors in an instinctive crouch. At the edge of the hill he stands upright for a minute, hands on his hips, watching. Then, moving quickly but surely on treacherous footing, Baedecker starts down so as to meet his son halfway.