Phases of Gravity

Part Five Bear Butte

Baedecker ran. He ran hard, the sweat stinging his eyes, his sides aching, his heart pounding, and his panting an audible thing. But he continued to run. The last mile of the four should have been the easiest, but it was by far the hardest. Their running path took them through the dunes and back onto the beach for the last three-quarters of a mile, and it was here that Scott chose to pick up the pace. Baedecker fell five yards behind his son but refused to allow the distance to widen farther.

As their Cocoa Beach motel came into sight, Baedecker felt the effort draining the last reservoirs of his energy, felt his straining heart and lungs demanding a lessening of the pace, and it was then that he accelerated, kicking hard to close the gap between the thin redhead and himself. Scott glanced to his right as his father moved alongside, grinned at Baedecker, and broke into a faster sprint that brought him off the hard, wet shore onto the soft sand of the beach. Baedecker kept up with his son for another fifty paces and then fell back, making the last hundred yards to the low cement wall of the motel in a staggering lope.

Scott was bending and doing stretching exercises as Baedecker collapsed to the sand and set his back against the cement blocks. He dropped his head to his arms and panted.

'Best run yet,' said Scott after a minute. 'Hnrh,' agreed Baedecker.

'Feels good, doesn't it, Dad?'

'Hnnh.'

'I'm going to go in for a swim. Want to come with me?'

Baedecker shook his head. 'Go ahead,' he panted. 'I'll stay here and throw up.'

'Okay,' said Scott. 'See you in a while.' Baedecker watched his son jog across the beach to the water. The Florida sun was very bright, the sand as dazzlingly white as lunar dust at midday. Baedecker was pleased that Scott felt so well. Eight months earlier they had seriously considered another hospital stay for him, but the asthma medicine had quickly begun to help, the dysentery had resolved itself after several weeks of rest, and while Baedecker had been losing weight during the months of diet and work in Arkansas, Scott had steadily put on pounds so that he no longer looked like a redheaded concentration camp survivor. Baedecker squinted at the ocean where his son was swimming with strong strokes. After a minute, Baedecker rose with a slight groan and jogged slowly down the beach to join him.

It was evening when Baedecker and Scott drove north along U.S. 1 to the Space Center. Baedecker glanced at the new developments and shopping centers along the highway and recalled the raw look of the place in the mid-sixties.

The huge Vehicle Assembly Building was visible even before they turned onto the NASA Causeway.

'Does it all look the same?' asked Baedecker. Scott had been a fanatic about visiting the Cape. He had worn the same blue KSC T-shirt through all of his sixth and seventh summers. Joan used to have to wash it at night to get it away from the boy.

'I guess so,' said Scott.

Baedecker pointed to the gigantic structure to the northeast. 'Remember when I brought you out here to watch the VAB being constructed?' Scott frowned. 'Not really. When was that?'

'Mmm. 1965,' said Baedecker. 'I was already working for NASA, but it was the summer before I was chosen for flight status with the Fifth Group of astronauts. Remember?' Scott looked at his father and grinned. 'Dad, I was one year old.' Baedecker smiled at himself. 'Come to think of it, I do remember you on my shoulders for most of that tour.'

They were stopped at two checkpoints before they reached the KSC industrial area. The spaceport, usually wide open to tour groups and the curious, had been closed up tight for the imminent Department of Defense launch. Baedecker showed the IDs and passes Tucker Wilson had provided, and they were quickly waved through.

They drove slowly past the sprawling Headquarters Building and turned off the parkway into the lot of the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building. The huge, three-story complex looked as ugly and functional as it had during Baedecker's stay there during the training and prelaunch phases of his Apollo mission. Ribbons of glass on the west side caught the last gleam of the sunset as they parked the car.

'This is sort of a big deal, isn't it?' said Scott as they walked toward the main entrance. 'Thanksgiving dinner with the astronauts and all.'

'It's not really Thanksgiving dinner,' said Baedecker. 'The members of the crew had dinner with their families earlier. This is just coffee and pie . . . sort of a traditional gathering the night before a flight.'

'Isn't it unusual for NASA to fly on a holiday like this?' asked Scott.

'Not really,' said Baedecker as they stopped to show their identification to a guard just inside the door. An Air Force aide led the way up a narrow staircase. 'Apollo 8 flew around the moon over Christmas,' Baedecker continued. 'Besides, the DoD set the date for this launch because of the satellite deployment windows.'

'And besides that,' said Scott, 'Thanksgiving is today and the launch is tomorrow.'

'Right,' said Baedecker. There were two more checkpoints before they were shown into a small waiting room outside of the crew dining quarters. Baedecker looked around at the green sofa, uncomfortable chairs, and low coffee table covered with magazines, and was pleased for some reason that the private quarters area had maintained the same late-sixties feel to it that he had known two decades earlier.

The door opened and a group of businessmen emerged from the dining room. They were guided by a young Air Force major. One of the men wearing a dark suit and carrying an attaché case stopped when he saw Baedecker. 'Dick,' he said, 'goddammit, it's true then that Rockwell got you.' Baedecker stood up and shook hands. 'Not true, Cole,' he said. 'Just stopping by for a social call. Cole, I don't know if you've met my son. Scott, this is Cole Prescott, my boss back in St. Louis.'

'We met years ago,' said Prescott as he shook hands with Scott. 'At the company picnic right after Dick started working for the company. You were about eleven, I think.'

'I remember the three-legged race,' said Scott. 'Nice to see you again, Mr. Prescott.' Prescott turned to Baedecker. 'So what have you been up to, Dick? We haven't heard from you in . . . what? Six months?'

'Seven,' said Baedecker. 'Scott and I spent last spring and summer fixing up an old cabin in Arkansas.'

'Arkansas?' said Prescott and winked at Scott. 'What the hell is in Arkansas?'

'Not much,' said Baedecker.

'Hey,' said Prescott. 'I heard tell that you were out talking to people at North American. ¿Es verdad?'

'Just talking.'

'Yeah, that's what they all say,' said Prescott. 'But look, Dick, if you haven't signed with anybody . . .' He paused and looked around. The others had left. Through the slightly opened door to the dining room came laughter and the clink of dishes. 'Cavenaugh's retiring this January, Dick.'

'Yes?'

'Yes.' Prescott leaned over as if about to whisper. 'I'll be filling his chair when he goes. That leaves room on the second level, Dick. If you had any thoughts about coming back in, now'd be the time.'

'Thanks, Cole,' said Baedecker, 'but I have a job right now. Well, not exactly a job, but a project that will be keeping me pretty busy for the next few months.'

'What's that?'

'I'm finishing work on a book that David Muldorff began a couple of years ago,' said Baedecker. 'The part remaining involves quite a bit of traveling and interviewing. In fact, I have to fly to Austin on Monday to start work on it.'

'A book,' said Prescott. 'Got an advance on it yet?'

'A modest one,' said Baedecker. 'Most of the royalties will go to Dave's wife Diane and their little boy, but we're using the advance to cover some of the expenses.' Prescott nodded and glanced at his watch. 'Okay,' he said, 'but keep in mind what I said. It was nice seeing you again. Dick, Scott.'

'You too,' said Baedecker.

Prescott paused by the door. 'It was a damn shame about Muldorff.'

'Yes,' said Baedecker. 'It was.' Prescott departed just as a NASA PR man in shirtsleeves and a black tie came to the open door of the dining room. 'Colonel Baedecker?'

'Yes.'

'The crew's just about ready for dessert. Would you and your son like to come in now?'

There were five astronauts and seven other men at the long table. Tucker Wilson made the introductions. Besides Tucker, Baedecker knew Fred Hagen, the copilot on this mission, and Donald Gilroth, one of the NASA administrators present. Gilroth had put on considerable weight and corporate status since Baedecker had last seen him.

The three other astronauts, two mission specialists and a payload specialist, were also Air Force. Tucker was the only full-time NASA pilot involved in this mission, and despite recent efforts to include women and minorities in the space effort, this all-military flight was a step back to the WASP-male tradition. Conners and Miller, the mission specialists, were quiet and serious but the youngest crewmember, a blond youngster named Holmquist, had a high, infectious laugh that made Baedecker like him immediately.

There were a few minutes of obligatory discussion of the old Apollo days as the pie and coffee arrived, and then Baedecker turned the conversation to the upcoming mission. 'Fred, you've been waiting quite a while for this, haven't you?' Hagen nodded. He was a few years younger than Baedecker, but his crew cut had gone completely gray so that he looked a bit like Archibald Cox. Baedecker realized with a start that most of the shuttle pilots were approaching his age. Space, once a frontier so frightening that the experts had worried that the youngest, boldest, and strongest of the nation's test pilots might not withstand its rigors, had now become the property of men with bifocals and prostate worries.

'I've been waiting since the MOL folded,' Hagen said. 'With a little luck, I'll help to fly up its successor as part of the space station.'

'What was the MOL?' asked Scott.

'Manned Orbiting Laboratory,' said Holmquist. The blond mission specialist was only two or three years older than Scott. 'It was one of the Air Force's pet projects, like the X-20 Dyna Soar, that never got off the ground. Before our time, Scott.'

'Yeah,' said Tucker and lobbed a wadded-up napkin at the younger astronaut, 'back in pretransistor days.'

'I suppose you could look at the shuttle orbiter as a bigger, better Dyna Soar,' said Baedecker and even as he said it, he saw the word in his mind as 'dinosaur.' He had flown powerless lifting bodies at Edwards in the mid-sixties as part of NASA's contribution to the defunct Air Force program.

'Sure,' said Hagen, 'and Spacelab's sort of an updated, international version of the MOL . . . a couple of decades late. And Spacelab itself has become a sort of a test project for the space station components we'll start ferrying up in a couple of years.'

'You're not carrying Spacelab on this mission though, are you?' asked Scott.

There was a silence in which several men shook their heads. The DoD payload was out-of-bounds for this conversation, and Scott knew it.

'Is weather still a worry?' asked Baedecker. Thunderstorms across the Gulf had been building up by midmorning for days.

'Little bit,' said Tucker. 'Last word from meteorology was go, but they didn't sound too sincere. What the hell. The windows are brief, but we've got them for three days in a row. You two going to be in the VIP stands tomorrow, Dick?'

'Wouldn't miss it,' said Baedecker.

'What do you think of all this, Scott?' asked Hagen. The Air Force colonel was looking at the redhead with friendly interest.

Scott started to shrug and stopped himself. He glanced at his father and then looked right at Hagen. 'To be honest, sir, I find it very interesting and a little sad.'

'Sad?' It was Miller, one of the mission specialists, a dark, intense man who reminded Baedecker a bit of Gus Grissom. 'Why sad?' Scott opened the fingers of his left hand and took a breath. 'You're not broadcasting the launch tomorrow, right? Not allowing reporters on the Cape? Not announcing any part of the mission progress except the absolute minimum. Not even telling the public when exactly the launch is going to take place, right?'

'That's correct,' said Captain Conners. There was the clipped quality of the Air Force Academy in his voice. 'That seems the least we can do for national security in what has to be a classified mission.' Conners glanced at the others as a waiter picked up the pie plates and refilled coffee cups. Holmquist and Tucker were smiling as they looked at Scott. The others were just looking.

Scott did shrug, but he grinned before he spoke and Baedecker felt that some of the fierce, unrelenting intensity that he had felt emanating from his son for years had lessened somewhat in recent weeks. 'I understand that,' said Scott, 'but I remember the days when Dad flew when the press knew about it every time a crew member farted . . . excuse me, but that's what it was like. For the families, too. At least during the missions. What I'm trying to say is I just remember how open it was and how we kept comparing that to the secrecy of the Russians' program. We were proud to let it all hang out for everybody to see. Now, I guess, it makes me a little sad that we're getting to be more like the Soviets.' Miller opened his mouth to speak, but Holmquist's laugh cut him off. 'Too true,' said Holmquist. 'But I tell you, my man, we've got a long way to go before we're like the Russians. Did you see the reporters down at Melbourne Airport taking notes as all the defense contractors' baggage came in? That's all they needed to let them know what kind of payload's flying. Have you seen the Washington Post or New York Times today?' Scott shook his head.

The young payload specialist went on to describe the articles appearing in press and TV, never confirming or denying their veracity but elaborating in humorous detail the frustrated efforts of Air Force press officers to stick their fingers in a dike that had become a sieve. One of the NASA administrators told a story about the press boats that were being chased from the area when all the while Soviet intelligence-gathering ships were deployed just beyond the restricted zone.

Fred Hagen offered a tale about his X-15 days when an enterprising reporter disguised himself as a visiting Brazilian Air Force officer to get an exclusive. Baedecker told about his trip to the Soviet Union prior to the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project and how, late one wintry night, Dave Muldorff had walked up to a lampshade in their living quarters in Star City and suggested loudly that a nightcap sure would hit the spot, but they were all out of the complimentary booze their hosts had provided. Ten minutes later a Russian orderly had shown up with bottles of vodka, Scotch, and champagne.

There was more laughter as the dinner group broke up into small conversations and several of the administrators took their leave. Holmquist and Tucker were talking to Scott when Don Gilroth walked around the table and put his hand on Baedecker's shoulder. 'Dick, could we take a minute? Outside here?' Baedecker followed the other man into the empty waiting room. Gilroth closed the door and hitched his belt up over his ample stomach. 'Dick, I didn't know if we'd get a chance to talk tomorrow, so I thought I'd get to you tonight.'

'Talk about what?' said Baedecker.

'About coming back to work for NASA,' said the administrator. Baedecker blinked in surprise. The idea had never occurred to him. 'I talked to Cole Prescott and Weitzel and some of the others, and I hear you're considering some other things, but I wanted you to know that NASA's interested too,' said Gilroth. 'I know we'll never be competitive with private industry, but these are exciting times around here. We're trying to rebuild the whole program.'

'Don,' said Baedecker, 'I'll be fifty-four years old before long.'

'Yeah, and I'll be fifty-nine in August,' said Gilroth. 'Don't know if you've noticed, Dick, but the shop isn't being run by teenagers these days.' Baedecker shook his head. 'I've been out of touch for too many years . . .' Gilroth shrugged. 'We're not talking about going back onto active flight status, you know,' he said. 'Though God knows with all the work comin' up in the next couple of years, anything's possible. But Harry could sure use someone with the experience over in the Astronaut Office. Between the leftovers and the trainees, we've got close to seventy astros running around here. Not like the old days when Deke and Al had to keep an eye on just a dozen or so of you hell-raisers.'

'Don,' said Baedecker, 'I've just begun work on a book that Dave Muldorff didn't have time to finish and . . .'

'Yep, know all about that,' said Gilroth and tapped Baedecker on the upper arm. 'There's no rush on this, Dick. Think it over. Get back to me anytime this year. Oh . . . and Dick . . . Dave Muldorff must've thought it was a good idea, you're coming back. I got a letter from him last November where he mentioned it. Sort of confirmed my own thinking about trying to get some of the old pros back.' Baedecker was digesting this when Tucker and Scott came through the door.

'There you are,' said Tucker. 'We were planning to take a little ride up to the pad. Want to come along?'

'Yes,' said Baedecker. He turned to the departing Gilroth. 'Don, thanks for the idea. I'll get back to you.'

'Good enough,' said the administrator and gave the three of them a two-fingered salute.

Tucker drove them in a green NASA-owned Plymouth for the eight miles up the four-laned Kennedy Parkway to Pad 39-A. The VAB, illuminated from above and below by floodlights, loomed impossibly large as they approached. Baedecker looked up at an American flag painted on one corner of the south face and realized that the flag alone was big enough to play a football game on. Beyond the assembly building, the space vehicle became visible, enclosed in a protective web of gantries. Searchlights cut beams through the humid air, lights glowed throughout the latticework of pipes and girders, and Baedecker thought that the whole thing looked like a gigantic oil derrick filling some interplanetary supertanker.

They passed through security checkpoints, and Tucker drove up the long ramp to the base of the Service and Access Tower. Another guard approached them, saw Tucker, saluted, and stepped back into the shadows. Baedecker and Scott got out of the car and stood looking up at the machine poised above them.

To Baedecker's eye the shuttle — or the SSTS, Space Shuttle Transportation System as the engineers liked to call the entire package of orbiter, external tank, and solid rocket boosters — looked jerry-rigged and awkward, an unlikely coupling of species neither aircraft nor rocket, creating a sort of interim evolutionary form. Baedecker realized, not for the first time, that he was looking at a space-faring platypus. Now it struck him with full force how much the space shuttle — that much-vaunted symbol of America's technology — already had become an assemblage of aging, almost obsolete equipment. Like the older command pilots who flew them, the surviving shuttles carried the dreams of the 1960s and the technology of the 1970s into the unknowns of the 1990s, substituting wisdom from painfully learned lessons for the unlimited energy of youth.

Baedecker liked the look of the rust-colored external fuel tank. It made sense not to burn precious fuel lifting tons of paint into the fringes of space only to have the expendable, thin-skinned tank burn up seconds later, but the effect of such common sense was to make the shuttle look more workaday, almost battered, a good, used pickup truck rather than the classy showroom models flown in earlier space programs. Despite — or perhaps because of — this new-paint-over-the-old-rust feel to the entire ungainly machine, Baedecker realized that if he were still a flying member of the team, he would love the shuttle with the kind of pure and unreasonable passion men usually reserved for wives or lovers.

As if reading Baedecker's mind, Tucker said, 'She's beautiful, isn't she?'

'She is that,' agreed Baedecker. Without thinking about it, he let his gaze wander to the aft field joint of the right-hand solid rocket booster. But if there were O-ring demons lurking there, waiting to destroy ship and crew by raking sudden tongues of flame across the hydrogen-primed bomb of the external tank, there was no sign of them today. But then, Baedecker realized, there had been no sign of them to the Challenger crew either.

Around them, men in white went about their business with the insect-intensity of technicians everywhere. Tucker pulled three yellow hard hats from the back seat of the Plymouth and tossed one to Baedecker and another to Scott. They moved closer and craned their necks to look up again.

'She's something, isn't she,' said Tucker. 'Quite a sight,' murmured Baedecker. 'Frozen energy,' Scott said to himself. 'What's that?' asked Tucker.

'When I was in India,' Scott said, speaking so softly that his voice was barely audible above background work noises and the soft chug of a nearby compressor, 'I guess, for some reason, I started to think of things . . . to really see things sometimes . . . in terms of energy. People, plants, everything. Used to be, I'd look at a tree and see branches and leaves. Now I tend to see sunlight molded into matter.' Scott hesitated, self-conscious. 'Anyway, that's what this is . . . just a huge fountain of frozen kinetic energy, waiting to thaw into motion.'

'Yeah,' said Tucker. 'There's energy waiting there, all right. Or at least there will be when the tanks are topped off in the morning. About seven million pounds of thrust when those two strap-on roman candles get lit.' He looked at the two of them. 'Want to go up? I promised you a look-see, Dick.'

'I'll wait here,' said Scott. 'See you later, Dad.' Baedecker and Tucker rode up in the pad elevator and stepped out into the white room. Half a dozen Rockwell International technicians in white coveralls, white overboots, and white caps were working in the brilliantly illuminated space.

'This access is a little easier than mounting the Saturn V,' said Baedecker. 'Had that little boom arm, didn't it?' said Tucker.

'Three hundred and twenty feet up,' said Baedecker, 'I used to lurch across that damn number nine swing arm in full pressure suit, carrying that little portable ventilator that weighed about half a ton, and hold my breath until I got into the white room. I was sure I was the only Apollo hero who was fast developing a fear of heights.'

'We're a little closer to the ground here,' said Tucker. 'Evening, Wendell.' Tucker greeted a technician with earphones connected to a cable jacked into the hull of the shuttle.

'Evening, Colonel. Going inside?'

'For a few minutes,' said Tucker. 'I want to show this old Apollo fossil what a real spacecraft looks like.'

'All right, but wait just a second, please,' said the technician. 'Bolton's on the flight deck running the communications check. He'll be coming down in just a second.' Baedecker ran his hand across the skin of the shuttle. The white tiles were cool to the touch. Close up, the spacecraft showed signs of wear — subtle discolorations between the tiles, flakes of black paint missing, a well-used polish to the fittings on the open entry hatch. The used pickup had been washed and waxed, but it was still a used pickup.

A technician emerged from the round hatch and Wendell said, 'Okay, it's all yours.' Baedecker followed Tucker in, wondering as he did so what had become of Gunter Wendt. The old-hand Mercury and Gemini crews had held Wendt, the first white-room 'pad führer,' in such esteem that they had coerced North American Rockwell into hiring him away from McDonnell when the Apollo program came in.

'Watch your head, Dick,' said Tucker.

They crossed the middeck and climbed to the forward seats on the flight deck. To someone trained in Apollo, the shuttle interior seemed huge. There were two additional couches set behind the pilot's and copilot's seats, and a ladder had led to a single seat on the lower deck.

'Who gets the lonesome spot down there?' asked Baedecker.

'That's Holmquist and he's sick about it,' said Tucker as he slid into the horizontal command pilot's couch. 'He's done everything but bribe one of the other two for a window seat.' Baedecker edged carefully into the right seat. In his center seat in the Apollo Command Module, clumsiness would just have gotten him stuck. A slip now would drop him five or six feet to the windows and instrument bay below him at the rear of the flight deck. He pulled the shoulder harnesses on out of habit, secured the lap belt, but ignored the wide crotch strap.

Several trouble lights hung from hooks, throwing a bright light on the instruments and shadows into the corners. Tucker clicked one of these lamps off and activated several cockpit switches, bathing them both in a red-and-green glow. A cathode ray display directly in front of Baedecker lit up and began running through a litany of meaningless data. The quickly changing lines of data reminded Baedecker of the PanAm passenger shuttle with its flashing cockpit graphics in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dave had insisted they see that movie a dozen times during the winter of 1968. They had been putting in fourteen-hour shifts supporting Apollo 8, and then in the evenings they would drive pell-mell across Houston to watch Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, HAL, and the austro-lopithecines perform to the sounds of Bach and Strauss and Ligeti. Dave Muldorff had been quite irritated one night when Baedecker had fallen asleep at the beginning of the fourth reel.

'Like it?' asked Tucker.

Baedecker ran his gaze over the console. He set his hand lightly on the rotational hand controller. 'Very elegant,' he said and meant it.

Tucker tapped at the computer keys on the low console that separated them. New information filled all three of the cathode displays. 'He's right, you know,' Tucker said.

'Who's right?'

'Your boy.' Tucker ran a hand over his face as if he were very tired. 'It is sad.' Baedecker looked at him. Tucker Wilson had flown forty missions over Vietnam and shot down three enemy MiGs in a war almost devoid of aces. Wilson was a career Air Force man, only transferred to duty with NASA.

'I don't mean it's sad that the services are finally flying missions,' Tucker said. 'Shit, the Russians have had a pure military presence up there in the second Salyut station for . . . what? Ten years at least. But it's still sad what's happening here.'

'How so?'

'It's just different, Dick,' said Tucker. 'Back when you were flying and I was on backup, things were simpler. We knew where we were going.'

'To the moon,' said Baedecker.

'Yeah. Maybe the race wasn't all that friendly, but somehow it was more . . . shit, I don't know . . . more pure. Now even the size of the damn bay doors back there was dictated by the DoD.'

'You're just carrying an intelligence-gathering satellite back there,' said Baedecker. 'Not a bomb.' He remembered his father standing on a darkened dock in Arkansas thirty-one years earlier, searching the skies for Sputnik and saying, 'If they can send up something that size, they can put up a bigger one with bombs aboard, can't they?'

'No, it's not a bomb,' agreed Tucker, 'and now that Reagan is history, chances are we won't be spending the next twenty years ferrying up SDI parts either.' Baedecker nodded and glanced toward the windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of the stars, but the special glass was shielded for the launch. 'You didn't think it would work?' he asked, referring to the Strategic Defense Initiative — what the press still called, with some derision, Star Wars.

'No, I think it would,' said Tucker. 'But even if the country could afford it — which we can't — a lot of us feel it's too risky. I know that if the Russians started orbiting X-ray lasers and a bunch of other hardware that our technology couldn't match in twenty years . . . or defend against . . . most of the brass I know would be calling for a preemptive attack on whatever they put up.'

'F-16-launched antisatellite stuff?' asked Baedecker.

'Yeah,' said Tucker. 'But say we didn't get everything. Or they replaced it faster than we could shoot it down. What would you advise the president to do, Dick?' Baedecker glanced at his friend. He knew that Tucker was a personal friend of the man who had just won the election to replace Ronald Reagan. 'Threaten surgical strikes of their launch sites,' said Baedecker. The entire shuttle stack seemed to sway slightly in the evening breeze, making Baedecker feel a hint of nausea.

'Threaten?' said Tucker with a grim smile.

Baedecker, knowing from his childhood in Chicago as well as from his years in the Marines just how useless threats can be, said, 'All right, launch surgical strikes against Baikonur and their other launch facilities.'

'Yeah,' said Tucker and there was a long silence broken only by the creaks and groans of the 150-foot external tank lashed to the orbiter's belly. Tucker flicked off the cathode displays. 'I love the Cape, Dick,' he said softly. 'I don't want it blown to shit in a game of tit for tat.' In the sudden darkness, Baedecker breathed in the smell of ozone, lubricant, and plastic polymers; the cockpit smell that had replaced ozone, leather, and sweat. 'Well,' he said, 'the arms deals the last couple of years are a beginning. The satellite you're carrying back there will allow a degree of verification that would've been impossible even ten years ago. And killing ICBMs with good treaties — before the weapons are built — seems more efficient than putting a trillion dollars worth of X-ray lasers in space and hoping for the best.' Tucker laid his hands on the console as if he were sensing with his palms the data and energy that lay dormant there. 'You know,' he said, 'I think the president-elect missed a bet during the campaign.'

'How so?'

'He should've made a deal with the American people and the Soviets,' said Tucker. 'For every ten dollars and ten rubles saved by negotiating away missiles or cutting back SDI, the Russians and us should put ten rubles or ten bucks toward joint space projects. We'd be talking tens of billions of dollars, Dick.'

'Mars?' said Baedecker. When he and Tucker had been training for Apollo, Vice President Agnew had announced that NASA's goal was to land men on Mars by the 1990s. Nixon had not been interested, NASA soon came down from its drunken euphoria, and the dream had receded to the point of invisibility.

'Eventually,' said Tucker, 'but first get the space station going and then put a permanent base on the moon.' Baedecker was amazed to find that his breathing seemed to catch at the thought of men returning to the moon in his lifetime. Men and women, he amended silently. Aloud, he said, 'And you'd be willing to share it with the Russians?' Tucker snorted. 'As long as we don't have to sleep with the bastards,' he said. 'Or fly in their ships. Remember Apollo-Soyuz?' Baedecker remembered. He and Dave had been part of the first team to sightsee the Soviet space program prior to the Apollo-Soyuz mission. He still remembered Dave's subtle commentary on the flight back. 'State of the art. Jesus, Richard, they call this state of the art! To think we've spent all that energy scaring ourselves and Congress into believing all that stuff about the Soviet space juggernaut, the supertechnologies they're always on the verge of building, and then what do we see? Exposed rivets, electronic packages the size of my grandmother's old Philco radio, and a spacecraft that couldn't perform a docking maneuver if it had a hard-on.' Their written report had been a bit less pointed, but during the Apollo-Soyuz mission the American spacecraft had done all of the chasing and docking and — contrary to original plans — the crews had not switched ships for the landing.

'I don't want to fly in their tubs,' repeated Tucker, 'but if cooperating with them would get NASA back in the space-exploring business, I could put up with the smell.' He unstrapped himself and began climbing down, taking care to use the proper handholds.

'A camel pissing out, eh?' said Baedecker, following carefully.

'What's that?' said Tucker as he crouched in front of the low, round hatch. 'Old Arab proverb,' said Baedecker. 'It's better to have the camel inside your tent pissing out than outside pissing in.' Tucker laughed, removed a stogie from his shirt pocket, and clamped it between his teeth. 'Camel pissing out,' he said and laughed again. 'I like that.' Baedecker waited until Tucker exited and then he crouched, grabbed a metal bar above the hatch, and swung himself out into the delivery-room brightness of the white room.

Early on the morning of the launch, Baedecker sat alone in the coffee shop of his Cocoa Beach motel, watching the surf break and rereading the letter he had received from Maggie Brown three days earlier.

November 17, 1988

Richard,

I loved your last letter. You write so rarely but every letter means so much. I know you well enough not to know how much you think about and how much you care about . . . and how little you say. Will you ever allow anyone to share the full depths of your insights and feelings? I hope so.

You make Arkansas sound beautiful. The descriptions of early mornings on the lake with the mists rising and crows calling in the bare branches along the shore made me want to be there.

Boston is all slush and traffic and tired brick right now. I love teaching and Dr. Thurston thinks that I'll be ready to begin work on my thesis next April. We'll see.

Your book is fantastic — at least the bits and pieces you've let me read. I think your friend Dave would be very proud. The character studies make the pilots come alive in a way I've never seen equaled in print, and the historical perspectives allow a lay person (me, for instance) to understand our current era in a new light — as a culture choosing between a frightening future of exploration and discovery, or a retreat into the safe and familiar harbors of internecine wars, stagnation, and decline.

As a sociologist I have more than a few questions (not answered by your book . . . or the fragments I've seen) concerning you astronaut-critters. Such as — why do so many of you hail from the Midwest? And why are almost all of you only children or the oldest siblings? (Is this true of the new mission specialists — especially the women — or just the ex-test pilots among you?) And what are the long-term psychological effects of belonging to a profession (test pilot) where the on-the-job mortality rate is one in six? (Could this lead to a certain reticence in showing feelings?) Your references to Scott in the last letter sound more optimistic than anything I've heard previously. I'm so pleased he's feeling better. Please give my warm greetings to him. From the tone of your letter, Richard, it sounds like you're rediscovering how complex and thoughtful your son can be. I could have told you that! Scott was indulging his stubborn-ness when he wasted a year in that stupid ashram, but as I've suggested before, part of that stubbornness comes from his reluctance to let any experience pass unexamined or to remain less than totally understood.

Where could he have gotten that trait do you think?

Speaking of stubbornness, I will not comment upon the mathematical section of your letter. It's not worthy of a reply. (Other than to point out that when you're 180, I'll just be a spry 154. It may be a problem then.) (But I doubt it.) You asked me in your letter about my own philosophical/religious views on some things. Are we still talking about the places-of-power idea we confronted in India eighteen months ago?

You know about my love of magic, Richard, and about my own obsession with what I think of as the secrets and the silences of the soul. For me, our quest for places of power is both real and important. But you know that.

All right, my belief system. I composed a twelve-page epistle on this since your letter posed the question, but then I tossed it away because I guess my whole system of beliefs can be boiled down to this:

I believe in the richness and mystery of the universe; and I don't believe in the supernatural.

That's it. Oh, and I also believe that you and I have some decisions to make, Richard. I won't insult both of us with clichés or the travails of keeping Bruce at bay seven months after the deadline I promised him, but the fact is that you and I have to decide if we have a future together.

Until recently, I felt that we did. The few hours and days we have spent together over the past year and a half convinced me that the universe was richer — and, strangely, more mysterious — when we encountered it together.

But, one way or the other, life is beckoning to each of us right now. Whatever we decide, you need to know that our time together has widened and deepened everything for me, backward and forward in time.

I think I'll go for a walk now to watch the sculls on the Charles.

Maggie

Scott joined him at the table. 'You're up early today, Dad. What time are we going over for the launch?'

'About eight-thirty,' said Baedecker and folded away Maggie's letter.

The waitress came over and Scott ordered coffee, orange juice, scrambled eggs, wheat toast, and a side order of grits. When she left, he glanced at Baedecker's solitary cup of coffee and said, 'Is that all you're having for breakfast?'

'I'm not very hungry this morning,' said Baedecker.

'You didn't eat anything yesterday either, come to think of it,' said Scott. 'I remember you didn't have dinner on Wednesday either. And you didn't touch the pie last night. What's wrong, Dad? Are you feeling all right?'

'I feel fine,' said Baedecker. 'Honestly. Just not much appetite recently. I'll have a big lunch.' Scott frowned. 'Just be careful, Dad. When I used to go on long fasts in India I'd get to the point after a few days where I didn't want to eat anything.'

'I feel fine,' Baedecker said again. 'I feel better than I have for years.'

'You look better,' Scott said emphatically. 'You must have lost twenty pounds since we started running at the end of January. Tucker Wilson asked me last night what kind of vitamins you've been taking. Jesus, you look great, Dad.'

'Thanks,' said Baedecker. He took a sip of coffee. 'I was rereading Maggie Brown's letter and remembered that she said to say hello to you.' Scott nodded and looked out at the ocean. The sky was a flawless blue to the east, but there was already a haze in front of the rising sun. 'We haven't talked about Maggie,' said Scott.

'No, we haven't.'

'Let's talk,' said Scott. 'All right.'

At that second Scott's breakfast arrived and the waitress filled their coffee cups. Scott took a bite of toast. 'First of all,' he said, 'I think you've got the wrong idea about Maggie and me. We were friends for a few months before I went over to India, but we weren't all that close. I was surprised when she showed up to visit that summer. What I'm trying to say is, even though the idea occurred to me a few times, Maggie and I never got it on.'

'Look, Scott . . .' began Baedecker.

'No, now listen a minute,' said Scott, but as soon as he said it, he took time to eat some scrambled eggs with that total focus of attention that Baedecker remembered from as far back as his son's first feedings in his high chair. 'I've got to explain this,' Scott said at last. 'I know it'll sound weird, Dad, but from the first time I met Maggie on campus she reminded me of you.'

'Of me?' said Baedecker, at a loss. 'How?'

'Maybe reminded isn't the right word,' said Scott. 'But something about her made me think of you all the time. Maybe it was the way she used to listen so hard to people. Or the habit she had of picking up on little things people do or say and remembering them later. Maybe it was the way she never seemed satisfied with explanations that satisfied the rest of us. So anyway, when I had the chance in India, I tried to arrange it so you and she could have a few days to get to know each other.' Baedecker stared at his son. 'Are you saying that's why you had her meet my plane in New Delhi? That's why you kept me waiting a week before I could see you in Poona?' Scott finished his egg, dabbed at his mouth with a linen napkin, and shrugged ever so slightly.

'Well I'll be damned,' said Baedecker and scowled at his son.

Scott grinned and continued grinning until Baedecker found himself grinning back.

The launch was scrubbed with three minutes remaining before ignition. Baedecker and Scott sat in the VIP stands near the Vehicle Assembly Building and watched across the turning basin canal as high cirrus from the west quickly were replaced by cumulonimbus. The launch was scheduled for 9:54 A.M. By 9:30 the clouds were overhead and the wind gusts had risen to twenty-five knots, close to the maximum allowed. At 9:49 there were lightning strikes visible to the north and rain began to fall intermittently. Baedecker remembered sitting in these same stands when lightning had struck Apollo 12 as it lifted off, knocking out every instrument in the Command Module and causing Pete Conrad to say some candid things into a live mike. At 9:51 A.M. the voice of NASA's Public Affairs Officer came over the loudspeakers to announce that the mission had been postponed. Because of a very tight launch window — less than an hour — they would recycle the countdown for a launch the next day between two and three P.M. At 10:03 the speakers announced that the astronauts had been removed from the shuttle, but the voice was talking to an empty grandstand as the would-be spectators ran through the growing rain squall to reach automobiles or shelter.

Baedecker let Scott drive the rented Beretta as the flood of vehicles inched its way west across the causeway. 'Scott,' he said, 'what are your plans if the launch goes off tomorrow?'

'Just what I'd planned before,' said Scott. 'Go up to Daytona for a few days to visit Terry and Samantha. Then fly to Boston next week to see Mom when they get back from Europe. Why?'

'Just wondering,' said Baedecker. He listened to the windshield wipers tick away in their useless effort against the downpour. Brake lights flashed in the long line ahead of them. 'Actually,' said Baedecker, 'I was considering flying to Boston today. If I wait until after the launch tomorrow afternoon, there won't be enough time before my appointment in Austin on Monday.'

'Boston?' said Scott. Then, 'Oh, yeah . . . that might not be a bad idea.'

'Would you go up to Daytona tonight, then?' Scott thought for a second, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. 'No, I don't think so,' he said. 'I already told Terry I'd be there tomorrow night or Sunday. I think I'll stay here and watch the launch.'

'You don't mind?' asked Baedecker, looking at his son. The months they had spent together the previous spring and summer had helped him become much better at gauging Scott's true reaction to things.

'Naw, I don't mind a bit,' said Scott and his grin was sincere. 'Let's go by the motel and get your stuff.'

The rain had let up considerably by the time they turned south on Highway 1.

'I hope Thanksgiving wasn't too much of a letdown,' said Baedecker. They had eaten alone at the hotel before going to the crew's dessert gathering.

'Are you kidding?' said Scott. 'It was great.'

'Scott,' said Baedecker, 'do you mind if I ask what your plans are? Long-term plans, I mean.' His son ran his fingers through his short, wet hair. 'See Mom for a while, I guess. Get through this semester.'

'You're definitely going to finish?'

'With five weeks left before graduation? Damned right I am.'

'What about after?' said Baedecker.

'After graduation? Well, I've been thinking about it, Dad. I got a letter from Norm last week and he said I can get back on his construction crew and work right on up until mid-August. It would help pay for the doctoral program in Chicago.'

'Are you planning on that?'

'If the philosophy program is as good as Kent says it is, I'm very tempted,' said Scott. 'And even though the scholarship offer is partial, it's the best deal I've seen. But I've also been thinking about going into the service for a couple of years.' Baedecker stared at his son. He could not have been more surprised if Scott had calmly announced that he was flying to Sweden for a sex-change operation.

'It's just a thought,' said Scott, but there was something in his voice that suggested otherwise.

'Don't commit yourself to anything like that unless I get a few hours . . . or weeks . . . to try and talk you out of it, okay?' said Baedecker.

'I promise,' said Scott. 'Hey, we're still going to spend Christmas vacation at the cabin, aren't we?'

'I'm planning on it,' said Baedecker.

They drove east over the 520 Causeway and turned south again past endless rows of Cocoa Beach motels. Baedecker wondered how many times he had driven this way from Patrick Air Force Base in a mad rush to get back to the Cape. He said, 'What branch?'

'Hmmm?' asked Scott, searching for their motel entrance through a renewed downpour.

'Which branch of the service?'

Scott pulled into the drive and parked in front of their unit. The rain pounded on the roof. 'Gee, Dad,' he said. 'You need to ask that of me? What with me growing up in a family proud of three generations of Baedeckers in the U.S. Marine Corps?' He opened the door and jumped out, hunkering down in the rain just long enough to say, 'I was thinking Coast Guard,' and then ran toward the protective overhang of the motel balcony.

It was snowing in Boston and already growing dark by the time Baedecker took a cab from Logan International to the address near Boston University. Still sunburned from the three days in Florida, he looked out through the gloom at the brown, icy water of the Charles River and shivered. Lights were coming on along the dark banks. The snow turned to dirty slush to be thrown up by the cab's tires.

Baedecker had always pictured Maggie living near the campus, but her apartment was some distance to the east, not too far from Fenway Park. The quiet side street was lined with stoops and bare trees, a neighborhood that looked to have been on the edge of decay in the sixties, saved by young professionals in the seventies, and now would be on the verge of invasion by the middle-aged affluent with an urge to homestead.

Baedecker paid the driver and ran from the cab to the door of the old brownstone. He had tried calling from Florida and again from Logan, but to no avail. He had pictured Maggie out shopping for groceries, returning home just as he arrived, but now he glanced up at the dark windows and wondered why he thought he would find her home on the Friday evening after Thanksgiving.

The second-floor hallway was warm but dimly lit. Baedecker checked the apartment number on the envelope, took a deep breath, and knocked. There was no answer. He knocked again and waited. A minute later he walked to the end of the hallway and looked out a tall window. Through an alley opening he could see snow falling heavily in front of a neon sign above a darkened shop.

'Hey, mister, were you the one knocking?' A young woman in her early twenties and a young man with horn-rimmed glasses were leaning out into the hall from an apartment two doors down from Maggie's.

'Yes,' said Baedecker. 'I was looking for Maggie Brown.'

'She's gone,' said the woman. She turned into the apartment and shouted, 'Hey, Tara, didn't Maggie go to Bermuda with what's-his-name . . . Bruce?' There was a muffled reply. 'She's gone,' said the young woman as Baedecker took a step closer.

'Would you know when she'll be back?'

The woman shrugged. 'Thanksgiving break just started yesterday. Probably a week from Sunday.'

'Thank you,' said Baedecker and went down the hall and stairway. An attractive young woman with short brown hair passed him in the foyer.

Baedecker stepped out onto the sidewalk and paused, looking up at the snow. He wondered how far he would have to go to find a phone or a taxi. The cold cut through his raincoat and he shivered. He turned right and began walking back toward Massachusetts Avenue.

He had gone a block and a half and his shoes were soaked through when he heard a voice calling behind him. 'Hey, you, mister, wait up a second, please.' Baedecker stopped at the curb while the young woman he had passed in the foyer ran across the street to him. 'Are you Richard, by any chance?' she asked.

'Richard Baedecker,' he said.

'Wow, I'm glad I stopped to chat with Becky,' she said and stopped to catch her breath. 'I'm Sheila Goldman. You talked to me once on the phone.'

'I did?' Sheila Goldman nodded and brushed a snowflake from her eyelash. 'Yes,' she said. 'Way back last September right at the beginning of the school year. Maggie was with her family that night.'

'Oh, yes,' said Baedecker. It had been the briefest of conversations; he had not even left his name.

'Becky told you that Maggie was gone for break?'

'Yes,' said Baedecker. 'I didn't know the university's schedule.'

'Becky said that she thought Maggie had gone with Bruce Claren, right?' She paused and brushed more snow from her lashes. 'Well, Becky doesn't know much. Bruce had been hanging around for weeks, but there was no chance that Maggie was going anywhere with him.'

'Are you a friend of Maggie's?' asked Baedecker.

Sheila nodded. 'We've been roommates for a while,' she said. 'We're pretty close.' She rubbed her nose with her mitten. 'But we're not so close that Maggie wouldn't kill me if she found out that you'd come to visit and . . . well, anyway, she's not down in Bermuda with Brucie.' A car took the turn at high speed, splashing slush at both of them. Baedecker took Sheila Goldman's elbow and they backed away from the curb together. 'Where did Maggie go for Thanksgiving?' he said. He knew that her parents lived only an hour's drive away in New Hampshire.

'She left yesterday for South Dakota,' said Sheila. 'She flew out late in the afternoon.' South Dakota? thought Baedecker. Then he remembered a conversation they had had in Benares many months before. 'Oh, yes,' he said. 'Her grandparents.'

'Just Memo, her grandmother, now,' said Sheila. 'Her grandfather died in January.'

'I didn't know that,' said Baedecker.

'Here's their address and everything,' said Sheila and handed him a slip of yellow paper. The handwriting on it was Maggie's. 'Hey, you want to come back to our apartment to call a cab or anything?'

'No, thanks,' said Baedecker. 'I'll call from down the street if I can't flag one down on Mass Avenue.' Impulsively he took her hand and squeezed it through the mitten. 'Thank you, Sheila.' She reached up on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. 'You're welcome, Richard.'

Baedecker flew into Chicago shortly before midnight and spent a sleepless six hours in the airport Sheraton. He lay in the dark room listening to vague motel sounds and breathing motel smells and he thought about his last conversation with Scott.

Waiting with him in the Melbourne Airport near the Cape for Baedecker's connecting flight to Miami, Scott had suddenly said, 'Do you ever think about what your epitaph might be?' Baedecker had lowered his newspaper. 'That's a reassuring question right before flight time.' Scott grinned and rubbed his cheeks. He was letting his beard grow back, and the red stubble caught the light. 'Yeah, well, I've been thinking about mine,' he said. 'I'm afraid it will read — 'He came, he saw, he screwed up.'' Baedecker shook his head. 'No pessimistic epitaphs allowed until you're at least twenty-five,' he said. He began reading again and then set the paper down. 'Actually,' he said, 'that's not too far from a quote I've carried around in my head for years, half suspecting that it might end up serving as my epitaph.'

'What's that?' asked Scott. Outside, the rain was letting up, and they could see bright sky silhouetting palm trees.

'Have you ever read John Updike's ‘Music School'?'

'No.'

Baedecker paused. 'I guess it's my favorite short story,' he said. 'Anyway, there's a place in it where the narrator says, ‘I am neither musical nor religious. Each moment I live I must press my fingers down without confidence of hearing a chord.'' Scott said nothing for half a minute. The airport PA system was busy paging people and disavowing any collusion with religious solicitors. 'So how does it end?' asked Scott.

'The story?' said Baedecker. 'Well, the narrator remembers when he was a boy going to Holy Communion and had been taught not to touch the Host with his teeth . . .'

'Uh-uh,' said Scott. 'That's not what they taught me at Saint Malachy's.'

'No,' agreed Baedecker, 'now they bake the wafer so thick that it has to be chewed. That's what the narrator decides about his life at the end of the story. I think the closing lines are — 'The World is the Host. And it must be chewed.'' Scott stared at his father for some time. Then he said, 'Have you read any of the Vedic holy books, Dad?'

'No,' said Baedecker.

'I did,' said Scott. 'I read quite a bit from them last year in India. They did-n't have much of anything to do with the stuff the Master was teaching, but somehow I think I'll remember the books longer. One of my favorite things was from the Tattireeya Upanishads. It goes — 'I am this world, and I eat this world. Who knows this, knows.'' At that moment the boarding call was announced for Baedecker's flight. He stood, hefted his flight bag with his left hand, and held out his right hand to his son. 'Take care, Scott. I'll see you at Christmas break if not before.'

'You take care, too, Dad,' said Scott and, ignoring the offered handshake, threw his arms around Baedecker and hugged him.

Baedecker put his hand on his son's strong back and closed his eyes.

Baedecker caught a 7:45 A.M. United flight out of O'Hare. It was bound for Seattle but had a scheduled stop in Rapid City, South Dakota, which was as close as Baedecker could get to Maggie's grandparents' ranch near Sturgis without bailing out. Tired as he was, Baedecker noticed that the aircraft was one of the new Boeing 767s. He had not flown in one before.

They served breakfast somewhere over southern Minnesota. Baedecker stared at the tray of reheated scrambled eggs and sausage and decided that appetite or no appetite, it was time to eat after almost three days. He could not do it. He was sipping coffee and looking down at glimpses of brown landscape between the clouds when the stewardess came up to him and said, 'Mr. Baedecker.'

'Yes?' said Baedecker and felt a stab of alarm. How did she know his name? Had something happened to Scott?

'Captain Hollister wonders if you would like to come up to the flight deck.'

'Sure,' said Baedecker and followed her forward through the first-class section with relief slowing his heart rate. He searched his memory, trying to recall if he had met an airline pilot named Hollister. He could remember no one with that name, but he did not trust his memory.

'Here you are, sir,' said the stewardess and opened the door for him. 'Thank you,' said Baedecker and stepped through.

The pilot looked up and grinned. He was a florid-faced man in his early forties with thick hair, a boyish grin, and a pleasant, Wally Schirra-like expression. 'Welcome, Mr. Baedecker, I'm Charlie Hollister. This is Dale Knutsen.' Baedecker nodded a greeting at both men.

'Hope we didn't disturb your breakfast,' said Hollister. 'I noticed your name on the passenger list and just wondered if you'd like to see how our new baby here compares to your Apollo hardware.'

'My God,' said Baedecker. 'I'm amazed you made the connection with my name.' Hollister smiled again. Neither pilot nor copilot appeared to be involved with flying the aircraft.

'Here,' said Knutsen and released his straps. 'Have my seat, sir. I'm going back to the galley for a minute.' Baedecker thanked him and settled into the fleece-lined right seat. Except for the yoke in place of a hand-controller, the cockpit could have been a close relative of the space shuttle's. Video display terminals flashed instrument readings, lines of data, and colored maps onto three screens in front of him. A computer keyboard filled the console between Hollister and him. Baedecker looked out at the blue sky, distant horizon, and layer of clouds far below. He looked back at the pilot. 'I am surprised that you made the connection,' he said. 'We haven't met, have we?'

'No, sir,' said Hollister. 'But I know all of the names from the various missions and remember seeing you on television. The only thing I ever really wanted in life was to be an astronaut myself, but, well . . .' Baedecker extended his hand. 'Let's drop the sirs,' he said. 'They make me feel a little old. My name's Richard.'

'Howdy, Richard,' said Hollister as they shook hands across the computer.

Baedecker glanced at the flashing data screens and moving yoke. 'The aircraft seems to be flying itself pretty well,' he said. 'Does it let you do anything?'

'Not much,' said Hollister with a rueful laugh. 'She's a doozy, ain't she? State of the art. I can program her on the ground at O'Hare and wouldn't have to do a thing until we're setting down in Seattle. Only thing she can't do herself is lower the gear.'

'You don't actually go on full automatic like that, do you?' asked Baedecker.

Hollister shook his head. 'We argue that we need to keep our hand in, and the union supports us. The airline argues back that they bought the seven-six-seven so that the Flight Management Computer System will save money on fuel and that every time we take over manual, we piss that away. Fact is, they're right.'

'Is it fun to fly?' asked Baedecker.

'She's a good ship,' said Hollister. He punched a button and the displays changed. 'Safe as sitting on Grandma's back porch. But fun . . . naw.' He proceeded to show Baedecker details of the Automatic Flight Control System, the Engine Indicating and Crew Alert System, and the computerized color radar displays that incorporated maps of their position relative to VHF Omni-Range stations, waypoints, and Instrument Landing System beams. The same map showed the location of weather fronts, kept a running count of wind velocity, and let them know which direction they were flying at all times. 'It'll tell me who my wife's sleeping with if I ask it real politely,' said Hollister. 'So how does this stack up with the gear you took to the moon?'

'Impressive,' said Baedecker, not telling Hollister that he had worked for a company producing military avionics light-years ahead of even this system. 'To answer your question, we had a lot of crude gauge and dial instrumentation and the LM computer we depended on to guide our butts to the surface had a total capacity of only thirty-nine thousand words . . .'

'Sweet Christ,' said Hollister and shook his head.

'Exactly,' said Baedecker. 'Your FMCS here can work rings around our old PGNS. And most of ours was locked in. If a new problem came up, we could only call on a couple of thousand words.'

'It makes you wonder how we got there at all,' said Hollister. He took the controls, threw a switch high on the instrument board, and set his right hand on the throttles. 'Want to take it a second?'

'Won't United shit a brick?' asked Baedecker.

'No doubt about it,' said Hollister. 'But the only way they're going to find out is if they hear our voices on the black-box flight recorder, and it won't make any difference to us then. Want it?'

'Sure,' said Baedecker.

'You've got it.'

Baedecker handled the yoke gingerly, thinking of the hundred-some passengers juggling their coffee cups behind him. Far ahead, the clouds were dissipating enough that the brown line of the horizon was visible.

'Was it true that Dave Muldorff wanted to name the lunar module The Beagle?' asked Hollister.

'Sure was,' said Baedecker. 'He almost had them convinced, too. He said it was in the tradition of Darwin, voyage of the Beagle and all that. You see, when the crews first started naming the machines, they had names like Gumdrop and Spider and Snoopy. Then after Neil and the-Eagle-has-landed and all that, the names kept getting more serious and pretentious . . . Endeavor and Orion and Intrepid and Odyssey. At the last minute they didn't trust Dave's intentions and strongly suggested that he go with Discovery.'

'What was wrong with Beagle?' asked Hollister.

'Nothing,' said Baedecker, 'but they knew Dave and they were right. He'd worked out a whole shtick starting with, ‘Houston, the Beagle has landed,' and getting worse. He was trying to get Tom Gavin to go with Lassie for the CM. He would've called our wheeled lunar vehicle Rover and told everybody it was a reliable little son of a bitch. We would probably have gone down in NASA history as the Beagle Boys. No, they were right to head him off at the pass, Charlie.' Hollister laughed. 'I remember watching that Frisbee thing you two did up there. Jesus, that must have been a fun time to be flying.' The copilot returned with Styrofoam cups of coffee for each of them. Baedecker returned the controls to Hollister, gave up his seat to Knutsen, and stood a minute, leaning on the back of the copilot's seat and looking out at the vast expanse of cloud and sky. 'Yes,' he said and raised his cup in a silent toast and drank some of the rich, black coffee. 'It was fun.'

The Rapid City Airport appeared to be a landing strip in search of a town. The approach took them over weathered pastureland, dry streambeds, and ranches. The single runway sat atop a grassy mesa, which held only a tiny terminal, low tower, and an almost-empty parking lot.

As Baedecker settled into his rented Honda Civic, he decided that he had had enough of scheduled flights and rental cars. He would use the bulk of his savings to buy a 1960 Corvette and have done with it. Better yet, when the money came in, a nice little Cessna 180 . . .

It was a forty-minute drive from Rapid City along Interstate 90 to the Sturgis exit. The highway ran along the foothills separating the dark mass of the Black Hills in the south from the prairie and pastureland stretching north to the horizon. The housing developments and mobile home parks perched on hillsides along the way looked as raw as open wounds on the landscape.

It was twelve-thirty when Baedecker asked directions at a Conoco station near the I-90 exit and almost one P.M. by the time he drove under a wooden arch and down a long lane to the Wheeler Ranch.

The woman who approached him as he got out of the car and stretched reminded him somewhat of Miz Elizabeth Sterling Callahan of Lonerock, Oregon. In her seventies, at least, but still fluid in her movements, this woman had her long, gray hair tied back in a scarf and wore a red mackinaw jacket over dark blue pants. Her face was lined but placid. A collie trotted at her heels. 'Hello there,' she called. 'Can I help you?'

'Yes, ma'am. Are you Mrs. Wheeler?'

'Ruth Wheeler,' said the woman as she came close. There were deep laugh lines around eyes as startlingly green as Maggie's.

'My name's Richard Baedecker,' he said and offered his hand for the collie to smell. 'I'm hunting for Maggie.'

'Richard . . . oh, Richard!' said the woman. 'Oh, my, yes. Margaret has mentioned your name. Well, welcome, Richard.'

'Thank you, Mrs. Wheeler.'

'Ruth, please,' she said. 'Oh, my, Margaret will be surprised. She's gone right now, Richard. She went into town to run some errands. Won't you come in the house for some coffee while we wait for her. She should be back soon.' On the verge of accepting, Baedecker felt a tremendous impatience seize him, as if he could not rest, could not stop until a long voyage was finished. 'Thank you, Ruth,' he said. 'If you have an idea where she might be, I think I'll run into town and try to find her.'

'Try the Safeway in the shopping center or the hardware store on Main,' she said. 'Margaret's driving our old blue Ford pickup with a big, red generator in the bed. It has my Dukakis sticker on the rear bumper.' Baedecker grinned. 'Thank you, ma'am. If I don't find her and she gets back first, tell her I'll be back soon.' Mrs. Wheeler walked up and put her hand on the open window after he turned the Civic around. 'One other place she might be,' she said. 'Margaret likes to stop by Bear Butte. It's a big old hill just outside of town. Just go to the north end and follow the signs.'

The blue pickup was not in the Safeway lot or parked along Main Street. Baedecker drove slowly back and forth through the small town, half expecting to see Maggie step out of a doorway at any moment. The one-thirty news on the radio talked about the secret launch of the space shuttle that should be lifting off sometime in the next two hours. The reporter incorrectly referred to the KSC as 'Cape Kennedy' and reported that the area had high clouds but that the weather should hold for the launch.

Baedecker turned around in the parking lot of a beef jerky plant and drove back through Sturgis, following the green signs to Bear Butte State Park.

The small lot was empty of cars. Baedecker parked the Civic near a closed-up information building and looked up at Bear Butte. It was an impressive hill. If his geology training still served, Baedecker estimated that the mountain was a well-weathered volcanic cone rising in a long ridge to a summit he guessed to be at least eight hundred feet above the surrounding prairie, perhaps more. The mountain was separated from the foothills to the south and it leaped out of the grasslands quite dramatically. Baedecker had to use his imagination to see a bear in the long hill, and when he did it was a bear hunkered forward with its haunches in the air.

On a whim, Baedecker grabbed his old flight jacket out of the back seat and began walking up the trail from the visitors' center.

Although patches of snow lay here and there in shaded areas, the day was warm and Baedecker could smell the thawing earth. He felt somewhat light-headed as he switchbacked up the first, steep segment of trail, but he had no trouble breathing. He wondered idly why he had felt no appetite the past three days and why, despite no sleep for two days and an empty stomach, he felt strong and fit, almost buoyant.

The trail evened out to run along the rising ridgeline and Baedecker paused to look out over low piñon and ponderosa pines to admire the view to the north and east. About a third of the way up he began noticing bits of cloth, tiny colored rags, tied to low bushes along the trail. He stopped and touched one of them as it fluttered in the warm breeze.

'Hello.'

Baedecker spun around. The man was sitting in a low area near the cliff edge about fifteen feet from the trail. It was a natural campsite, sheltered from the north and west winds by rocks and trees but open to the view on three sides.

'Hello,' said Baedecker and walked closer. 'I didn't see you over here.' Baedecker had no doubt that the old man was an Indian. His skin was a burnt copper, his eyes were so dark as to appear black, the wrinkles on his brow radiated from a broad blade of a nose, and he was wearing a loose, blueprint shirt, had a red headband pulled tight, and had tied his long, graying hair into pigtails. He wore a single ring of some deep blue stone. Only his tattered, green-canvas sneakers were out of character. 'I didn't mean to intrude here,' said Baedecker. He looked beyond the old man to where a tan canvas tent had been erected near a lower structure built of boughs and rocks and branches. Baedecker instantly knew that the thing was a sweat lodge without knowing how he knew.

'Sit down,' said the Indian. The old man himself was seated on a rock, not cross-legged but with one leg over the other in a comfortable, almost feminine pose. 'I am Robert Sweet Medicine,' he said. His voice was husky, amused, as if he were on the verge of chuckling at some unstated joke.

'Richard Baedecker.'

The old man nodded as if this was redundant information. 'Nice day to climb the mountain, Baedecker.'

'Very nice day,' said Baedecker. 'Although I'm not sure I'm going all the way to the top.' The Indian shrugged. 'I have been coming here a very long time and have never been to the top. It is not always necessary.' He was using a pocketknife to whittle at a short stick. There were various twigs, roots, and stones on the ground in front of him. Baedecker noticed the bones of some small animal in the heap. Some of the stones had been painted bright colors.

Baedecker looked out at the miles of prairie to the north. From this vantage point he could see no highways and only small pockets of trees showed where ranches huddled. He had a sudden, visceral sense of the physical freedom the Plains Indians must have felt a century and a half earlier when they had roamed without restriction across that seemingly boundless land. 'Are you a Sioux?' he asked, not knowing whether the question was polite but wanting to know the answer.

Robert Sweet Medicine shook his head. 'Cheyenne.'

'Oh, for some reason I thought the Sioux lived in this part of South Dakota.'

'They do,' said the old man. 'They ran us out of this region long ago. They think this mountain is sacred. So do we. We just have to commute farther.'

'Do you live near here?' asked Baedecker.

The Indian took his knife and cut off a small section of new cactus growing between the rocks, peeled it, and set the leaf on his tongue like a wood-wind player readying his reed. 'No. I travel a long way to come here. It is my job to teach things to young men who will someday teach them to other young men. But my young man is a little late.'

'Oh?' Baedecker looked down at the distant parking lot. His Civic was still the only vehicle there. 'When were you expecting him?'

'Five weeks ago,' said Robert Sweet Medicine. 'The Tsistsistas have no sense of time.'

'The who?' said Baedecker.

'The People,' said the old man in his amused, husky voice. 'Oh.'

'You also have traveled a long way,' said the other. Baedecker thought about that and nodded.

'My ancestors such as Mutsoyef traveled a long way,' said Robert Sweet Medicine. 'Then they fasted, purified themselves, and climbed the Sacred Mountain to see if a vision would present itself. Sometimes Maiyun would speak to them. More often he would not.'

'What kind of visions?' asked Baedecker.

'Do you know of Mutsoyef and the cave and the Gift of the Four Arrows?'

'No.'

'No matter,' said Robert Sweet Medicine. 'That does not concern you, Baedecker.'

'You say the mountain is also sacred to the Sioux?' The old man shrugged. 'The Arapahoes received a medicine here they could burn to make sweet smoke for their rituals. The Apaches received the gift of a magic horse medicine; the Kiowas the sacred kidney of a bear. The Sioux say they received a pipe from the mountain, but I do not believe them. They made that up because they were jealous. The Sioux lie frequently.'

Baedecker shifted his weight and smiled.

Robert Sweet Medicine ceased his whittling and looked at Baedecker. 'The Sioux did claim to have seen a great bird on the mountain, a true Thunderbird, with wings a mile across and with a voice like the end of the world. But this is no great medicine. This is Wihio trickery. Any man with even a little bit of medicine can call up the Thunderbird.'

'Can you?' asked Baedecker.

The old man snapped his fingers.

Two seconds later the earth shook with a roar that seemed to come from the sky and ground at the same time. Baedecker caught a glimpse of something huge and gleaming behind him, its shadow hurtling toward them and covering entire hillsides, and then he was up on one knee and watching as the B-52H finished its bank and roared off to the north at less than five hundred feet altitude, lower than the Butte, its eight jet engines leaving a black wake of smoke in the afternoon air. Baedecker sat back down, still feeling the vibrations of the aircraft's passing in the rocks under his thighs.

'Sorry, Baedecker,' said the old man. His teeth were yellow and strong looking, with only one of the lower ones missing. 'That was a cheap Wihio trick. They come by here from Ellsworth Base every day at this time. I am told they use this mountain to make sure their radar device tells them the truth as they travel.'

'What's a Wihio?' asked Baedecker.

'It is our word for the Trickster,' said the Cheyenne, cutting and chewing a new cactus leaf. 'Wihio is Indian when he wants to be, animal when he wants to be, and always is up to no good. He can show a very cruel sense of humor. It is the same word we use for spider and for White Man.'

'Oh,' said Baedecker.

'Many of us also suspect that he is the Creator.' Baedecker thought about this.

'When Mutsoyef came down off this mountain,' said the old man and paused a second to remove a bit of plant from his tongue. 'When he came down, he brought with him the Gift of the Sacred Arrows, he taught us the Four Songs, he told us our future — even of the passing of the buffalo and the coming of the White Men to take our place — and then he gave his friends the Arrows and said, ‘This is my body I'm giving you. Always remember me.' What do you think of this, Baedecker?'

'It sounds familiar,' he said.

'Yes,' said the old man. He had been cutting a root into small pieces, and now he frowned at it. 'Sometimes I worry that my grandfather and great-grandfather borrowed a good story when they heard it. It does not matter. Here, put this in your mouth.' He handed Baedecker a small piece of root with the outer layer removed.

Baedecker held it in his hand. 'What is it?'

'A piece of root.' The old man's voice was patient.

Baedecker put the small chunk in his mouth. There was a faint bitterness. 'Do not chew it or suck on it,' said Robert Sweet Medicine and put a slightly larger piece of root in his own mouth. He worked it around until it bulged like a small wad of tobacco in his cheek. 'Do not swallow it,' added the old man.

Baedecker sat a minute in silence, feeling the sun on his face and hands. 'What is this supposed to do?' he said eventually.

The old man shrugged. 'It keeps me from getting too thirsty,' he said. 'My water bottle is empty and it is a long walk down to the pump by the visitors' center.'

'Could I ask you something?' The old man paused in his cutting of more root and nodded.

'I have a friend,' said Baedecker, 'someone I love and suspect is very wise, who believes in the richness and mystery of the universe and does not believe in the supernatural.' Robert Sweet Medicine waited. After a minute he said, 'What is the question?' Baedecker touched his forehead, feeling the sunburn there. He shrugged slightly, thinking of Scott as he did so. 'I just wondered what you thought of that,' he said.

The old man cut two more pieces of root and popped them in his mouth, moving them to the other cheek and speaking slowly and clearly. 'I think your friend is wise.' Baedecker squinted. It might have been the result of several days without food or the time he had spent in the sun, or both, but the air between him and the elderly Cheyenne seemed to be shimmering, rippling like heat waves above a highway on a summer day. 'You don't believe in the supernatural?' asked Baedecker.

Robert Sweet Medicine looked out to the east. Baedecker followed his gaze. Far out on the plains, sunlight glinted on a window or windshield. 'You may know more science than I do,' said the old man. 'If the natural world is the universe, how much do you think we know of it, understand it? One percent?'

'No,' said Baedecker. 'Not that much.'

'One percent of one percent?'

'Perhaps,' said Baedecker although as soon as he said it he doubted it. He did not believe that the universe was infinitely complex — one ten-thousandth of an infinite set was still an infinite set — but he felt in his gut that even in the limited realm of basic physical laws, humans probably had not glimpsed a ten-thousandth part of the permutations and possibilities. 'Less than that,' he said.

Robert Sweet Medicine pocketed his folding knife and opened his hands, fingers spreading like petals in new sunlight. 'Your friend is wise,' he said. 'Help me up, Baedecker.' He stood and grasped the older man by the arms, prepared to lift hard, but Robert Sweet Medicine weighed nothing at all. The old man came to his feet with no effort from either of them, and Baedecker had to thrust a leg back to keep from falling backwards. His forearms tingled where the Cheyenne's fingers gripped him. Baedecker felt that if they were not holding on to each other, they could have floated off the ground at that instant, two untethered balloons drifting over the South Dakota prairie.

The Indian squeezed Baedecker's forearms once and released him. 'Have a good walk up the mountain, Baedecker,' he said. 'I have to go all the way down the hill to get water and to use their smelly outhouse. I hate squatting in the bushes; it is not civilized.' The old man picked up a three-gallon plastic jug and moved slowly down the hill, walking in a comical, flatfooted shuffle. He stopped once and called back, 'Baedecker, if you find a deep cave up there, a very deep one, tell me about it on the way down.' Baedecker nodded and watched the old man shuffle away. It did not occur to him to say good-bye until Robert Sweet Medicine was out of sight around a curve in the trail.

It took Baedecker forty-five minutes to reach the summit. Not once did he feel winded or tired. He did not find a cave.

The view from the top was the finest he had ever seen from the earth itself. The mountains of the Black Hills filled the south, an occasional snowy peak rising above forested folds. Overhead a succession of weightless cumulus marched from west to east, reminding Baedecker of the flocks of sheep he and Maggie had watched on the Uncompahgre Plateau. To the north, the plains stretched off in brown-and-green undulations until they blended with the haze of distance.

Baedecker found a natural chair made of two small boulders and a fallen log. He settled into it and closed his eyes, feeling the sunlight on his eyelids. The pleasant emptiness in his stomach spread through his body and mind. At that second he was going nowhere, planning nothing, thinking nothing, wanting nothing. The sun was quite warm, but in a minute even that warmth was a distant thing, and then even it was gone.

Baedecker slept. And as he slept he dreamed.

His father was holding him, teaching him to swim, but they were not at North Avenue Beach in the shallows of Lake Michigan; they were on top of Bear Butte and the light was very strange, soft and brown yet very rich, as clear as the summer heat lightning that had once illuminated the patrons of the Free Show in Glen Oak's little park, freezing them all in time, preserving the instant with a single, stroboscopic flash of silent light.

There was no lake to swim in atop Bear Butte, but Baedecker noticed that the air itself was as thick and buoyant as water, more so, and his father was holding him horizontal, one arm under Baedecker's chest, another under his legs, and was saying, 'The trick is to relax, Richard. Don't be afraid to put your face down. Hold your breath a second. You'll float. And if you don't, I'm here to hold you up.' Baedecker obediently put his face down. But first he looked at his father, looked closely at the familiar face inches away, the mouth he would always know, the lines around the mouth, the dark eyes and dark hair he had not inherited, the half smile he had inherited. He looked at his father in his baggy swimming trunks, the dark tan line ending on the upper arms, the slight pot belly, the pale chest beginning to curve in at the center as age approached. Baedecker put his face down obediently but first, as he had done before, he lifted his face to the hollow of his father's neck, smelling the soap and tobacco smell of him, feeling the slight scratch of tomorrow's whiskers, and then, as he had not done before, had not done, he lifted both arms around his father's neck and hugged him, lifting his cheek to his father's cheek, hugged hard and felt the hug returned.

Then he put his face down and held his breath, bringing his arms out in front of him, straightening his legs, holding his body in a single plane, rigid but relaxed.

And he floated.

'There, it's easy, isn't it?' said his father. 'Go on. I'll catch you if you get in trouble.' Baedecker floated higher, rising easily above the rock and pine summit of the butte, floating with no effort on the gentle currents, and when he looked below, his father was gone.

Baedecker let out a breath, took in a breath, struck out calmly with arms and legs, and swam upward with long, sure strokes. The currents were warmer higher up. He passed between two flat-bottomed cumuli and continued on, feeling no need to rest. He swam higher, seeing the mountain dwindle below until it was only a dark pattern glimpsed between the carpet of clouds, indistinguishable from the geometries of plains and forests and rivers and other mountains. When the currents grew noticeably stronger and colder, Baedecker paused to tread the thick, buoyant air with easy motions of arms and legs. The wonderful light allowed him to see very well. The long, graceful curve of the horizon to the south and east offered no obstacle to his sight.

Baedecker looked and saw the space shuttle sitting on its pad with gantries pulled away and the blue crest of the Atlantic beyond it. The people in the bleachers by the tall white building were all standing now, many with their arms raised above them, as brilliant flames ignited under the rocket and caused it to rise, slowly at first on its pillar of clear flame, then very quickly, arching like a great, white arrow fired from the earth's bow, turning now as it climbed, the fire from its passing dividing into long columns and billows of fragrant smoke. Baedecker watched the white ship soar on until it turned away from him, falling confidently over a far curve of sea and air, and then he turned his gaze back to find Scott in the multitude of watchers, found him easily, and saw then that Scott's arms were also raised, fists closed, mouth open in the same silent prayer the others were offering as they helped the white arrowhead of the spacecraft on its way, and Baedecker could see the tears on his son's joyous face.

He swam higher. He could feel the cold biting at him now, but he ignored it, working hard to overcome the riptides and pressures, which threatened to pull him back. And then, suddenly, there was no further need for effort and Baedecker hovered far up, seeing the planet again as the blue-and-white ball it was, curtained in black velvet, small enough and beautiful enough for him to put his arms around. Closer, tantalizingly close, was the great white-and-gray serrated curve of his other world. But even as he pivoted and prepared to stroke across the short distance remaining, he knew that this one thing was denied to him. No, not denied he realized, for once it had been allowed. Only return was denied. But then, as if in recompense, he was floating over the familiar white peaks and shadowed craters, and he could see even more clearly than before.

He could see the gold-and-silver devices his friend and he had left, dead metal, useless now, their minimum warmth and mindless activity leeched away by years of baking days and freezing nights. But he also saw the more important things they had left, his friend and he, not the tumbled flag or dust-covered machines, but their footprints, as deep and sharp-edged as the second they had lifted their boots away, and a few true artifacts catching the rising sun — a small photograph, a belt buckle set to face the crescent earth.

Then, before returning, chilled and shivering, Baedecker saw one more thing. Crossing the band between light and dark where knife-black shadows cut ragged holes in the faint earthlight, Baedecker saw the lights. Strings of lights. Circles of lights. Lights of cities and transportways and quarries and communities, some burrowing, some spreading proudly across the dark mare and highlands, all waiting tenaciously for the dawn.

And then Baedecker returned. He paused a few times, paddling to stay in place, but mostly he allowed the great tug of the earth to pull him in, gently, inexorably. It was only then, holding his breath for a short while at the end, floating gently above the high shoal of the butte and seeing the blue pickup stop below, watching the young woman emerge and break into a run up the tiny trail . . . it was only then that he finally accepted the pull of the earth and saw clearly that it was more than the mindless call of matter to matter. And with that realization, Baedecker felt the same energy in himself, flowing through him and from him, bringing together and binding people as well as things.

Baedecker hovered there, but even as he did so he felt the return of the warmth of the sun on his face, knew that he was sleeping, heard the familiar voice calling in the distance, and knew that in a second he would wake and rise and call back to Maggie. But for a few more seconds he was content to hover there, neither earthbound nor free, waiting, knowing there was much to be learned and happy to be waiting and willing to learn.

Then Baedecker touched the mountain, smiled, and opened his eyes.