Rude Astronauts Read online

  In one sense, we’re all rude astronauts, getting ripped on a strange beach near the edge of space and time.

  Your guess is as good as mine as to how the future will be. A few years from now, swamps in southern Georgia may indeed be roamed by genetically recreated dinosaurs; on the other hand, the Okefenokee could be soon populated by clones of Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Dan Quayle. Stories about near-future space colonization are currently considered to be unfashionably optimistic; a reviewer for a British SF magazine once spent most of her time mocking the cover blurb of one of my novels for invoking the “dream” of space exploration, leaving me to wonder if she reads newspapers, for anything I’ve written about space may seem as quaint and old-fashioned as Arthur C. Clarke’s projection that communication satellites would be placed in orbit sometime shortly before the end of the 20th century.

  There are two great lessons which science fiction teaches us, each contradicting the other one. Anticipate the best, prepare for the worst; that’s the most obvious lesson. Yet the second is more subtle, although it is the exact opposite: when you expect the worst to happen, things will likely become much better than you believed they would be. It’s the old philosophical test. Is the glass half empty or half full? What does this random ink blot mean to you?

  And what did you dream about last night?

  It’s midnight. I’ve got a six-pack of ice-cold beer in the refrigerator and a pack of cigarettes. There’s nothing on the tube worth watching except an old Dr. Who episode we’ve all seen a dozen times. Everything around us looks dull and stupid …

  But just past this horizon, over on the next block, I can hear one hell of a blowout going on. Liquor, loud music, lewd women … might be worth checking out.

  Let’s go.

  The party’s just getting started. Want a beer?

  —The Rocket Farm, St. Louis, Missouri January 31, 1993

  PART ONE

  Near Space

  On the Road: Eulogy

  IN THE END, FOR everyone, there was the image which was replayed endlessly, both in TV news film-clips and as a memory, like an afterimage ghostly printed on the retina of the mind’s eye: a fireball, a great blossom of smoke shot through with yellow and crimson, followed by two forking trails of solid-rocket boosters and tiny contrails of debris falling toward the ocean below. The image was played over and over, both on television and in the individual imaginations of those who were stunned by the occurrence. Everyone affected by that image has given it a label: the day the space shuttle Challenger blew up.

  A few hours after it happened, I was having a cigarette in the company’s lunchroom when I had a sudden, vivid recollection. The year before, I had been a news correspondent in Washington, D.C., writing for a couple of daily papers in Missouri and Vermont. Because I had always been a fan of the space program, I managed to talk the editors of those papers into letting me cover a space shuttle launch from Cape Canaveral. In this instance it was Mission 51-D on the shuttle Discovery, the one famous for sending Sen. Jake Garn into orbit. Two days before the launch, however, I had watched the shuttle Challenger being rolled from its hangar in the Orbiter Processing Facility to the mammoth Vehicle Assembly Building.

  It was pushed out backwards by a tractor on that morning in April while a dozen or so photographers snapped pictures from the roadside nearby. It was a routine event, overshadowed by the upcoming launch of the Discovery, and the early morning hour in which the roll-out occurred accounted for the scarcity of reporters at hand, but for those of us who were there, it was a stirring moment. Challenger still bore the marks of its last mission; its re-entry tiles looked worn, its overall color was off-white, but it was still a majestic space vehicle. You couldn’t help but be awed by its beauty, its grace. Another orange tractor hooked up to its forward landing gear and began to pull it slowly toward the VAB a couple of hundred feet away, and as it was towed at a walking pace toward the massive building where it would be mated with its external fuel tank and solid-propellant boosters, I strode alongside it for awhile. I remember feeling a thrill when its right wing tip passed over my head, and thinking: this is a creature which has gone into space, felt starlight on its skin … this is what it feels like to be so close to a piece of history. It was a moment which I would not have forgotten even if it had not been later marred by horror and sudden death.

  Many months later, on the afternoon after the fireball, that moment would come back to me even as I tried to pull together a localized account of the disaster’s impact on the community. Few people seemed to be in their offices when I called. In a strange moment, I found myself on the phone with Worcester mayor John Anderson—a young reporter and the top city official conversing—with both of us shocked, saying to each other, “Oh, my God, what happened?” I remember walking through the Galleria at Worcester Center, noting that the usual midday crowd had thinned, and those who were there looked as if each had been given news of a sudden death in their families. On the Park Avenue bus going home from work, riders either pored over evening newspaper accounts of the event or stared out the windows. There were not even the usual paranoid glances at the passengers on either side, or the socially acceptable instant gazes into nothingness. Everyone had something on their minds that night, and it was not hard to see that behind the thoughtful eyes gazing at the passing streetlights was the image of a supersonic fireball arching over the Atlantic. New England, the United States, the world mourned its passage, along with the deaths of six NASA astronauts and a New Hampshire schoolteacher. The extent of the shock was enough to reach even a hardened city like Worcester, which was not the hometown of any member of the crew.

  In the long run, perhaps this is what makes us worthy, as a species, of reaching out beyond our own planet. We can empathize with the deaths of those whom we’ve never personally known. We can dream of going places even though we, as individuals, may never, ever go there ourselves. Perhaps this is how we’ve come to the point of building spaceships instead of squatting in mud huts by firelight. We’ve learned how to reach out with our hearts and minds, and we’ve learned how to hurt in an existential way from the deaths of others. Our town felt part of that pain.

  It hurts, but it’s better than feeling like you’ve had nothing to lose.

  Walking on the Moon

  OVER THE NEXT COUPLE of decades, the three of them would get together once every few years, usually with their families for an afternoon or an evening. Once they had moved away from the Cape, all three had relocated to different parts of the country, so their reunions were normally arranged during vacations. They would spend a few hours in each other’s company, eating, drinking, telling funny stories, trading business tips, admiring each other’s wives and children, sometimes reminiscing about the glory days. They rarely, however, talked about walking on the Moon.

  A year after Roy and Irene moved to rural New Hampshire following Roy’s early retirement from Citicorp, Roy put out phone calls to Dick and Howard, inviting them to come up next Fourth of July for a barbecue. Both men agreed, naturally. It had been a little over two years since the last time they had seen each other during a ceremony in Washington, D.C., at the National Air and Space Museum, not really a get-together for them since they had been surrounded, and kept apart, by NASA brass, congressmen, various dignitaries and reporters. Roy figured that it was time for another, more private reunion.

  Howie and Beth were living in Syracuse, New York, so New Hampshire was only a half-day drive away. Howie wasn’t teaching any classes during the university’s summer semester, so he simply had to pack Beth, the twins Jackson and Veronica, and their outdoor gear into the Bronco; the stop at Roy’s lakeside cabin would be on their way to a camping trip in the White Mountains.

  Dick was a different story. Although he had long since retired from the Air Force, he was still working for NASA as a civilian consultant at the Johnson Space Center, so he had to fly all the way up from Houston. Roy had to mince around the subject of family while talking on the phon
e with Dick. Word on the grapevine was that Dick’s home life had gone to hell lately; Grace, his wife of twenty-four years, had just divorced him, and Richard Jr. had been last seen hitchhiking around the country, coasting from one Grateful Dead concert to the next.

  Trouble at home had always made Dick irritable, and Roy had half-expected his former teammate to turn down the invitation, but to his surprise Dick eagerly agreed to come up for the weekend. He caught an American flight out of Houston, connected in New York with a commuter flight to New Hampshire, and arrived at the tiny Manchester municipal airport on the morning of July 4. His rented Ford Escort pulled into Roy’s unpaved driveway only fifteen minutes before the arrival of the Happy Howie clan.

  There were the usual joyous, yet vaguely uncomfortable, first minutes of greeting each other again. The three men embraced, laughed, pounded each other’s backs, then stood back and mumbled at each other while noticing the changes—receding hairlines, touches of grey, thicker stomachs, new mustache and beard on Dick’s face, old mustache missing from Roy’s, Howie’s slight limp from when he had busted his leg last November on his ice-covered front walk. Meanwhile Irene and Beth, old rivals from their days in the Astronauts’ Wives Club, were carefully sizing each other up after quick hugs of their own: Irene noticing the deep crow’s-feet around Beth’s eyes, Beth deciding that Irene was definitely getting lumpy. Howie’s twins didn’t pay a bit of attention to any of this, of course; Roy’s friendly old collie, Max, came bounding out of the woods to meet them, and soon Jack and Ronnie were chasing the dog down to the lakeshore.

  Another summer afternoon, another barbecue. They all changed into their swimsuits and went down to the dock to swim and admire Roy’s second-hand Chris-Craft cabin cruiser which he was gradually restoring. Roy, Dick, and Howie attempted to play softball with Jackson and Veronica, giving up when Howie popped a fly ball into the dense woods behind the house, losing it so thoroughly that even Max couldn’t find it. By this time, Irene had started the charcoal in the grill on the backyard deck while Beth had fixed the salad, so Roy put the steaks on the grill and opened the case of Coors he had tucked in the refrigerator.

  They ate on the deck while across the still twilight waters of the lake local teenagers shot off bottle rockets and firecracker strings. When dinner was over, Irene and Beth cleared the table and carried the remains into the kitchen. Max lay down on the deck and gnawed at a T-bone Howie had tossed his way. Jackson found the carved-wood Saturn V model in the living room and tried to take it out into the front yard before Roy stopped him and gently removed the prized model from the child’s grasp; the kids found their toys in the Bronco and ran back down to the dock with the dog.

  Wives gossiping in the kitchen—thank God, they had finally learned to get along with each other after all these years—kids torturing the dog, the sun setting behind the distant hills, Roy, Dick, and Howie sat together on the deck, chugging beer. As the photosensor switched on the backyard lights, their talk finally turned to space.

  As usual, the grapevine stuff came first, stories about what other ex-astronauts were doing. Glenn was making another re-election run in the Senate; no doubt his constituents in Ohio would let him keep his seat (“But, Christ, you’d think he would have switched parties by now”). Collins was publishing another book (“He knows how to write, but if he wants another bestseller, he’d better do fiction like that Tom Clancy guy”). Armstrong was maintaining a low profile again after his stint on the Rogers Commission (“You gotta admire the guy. He could have opened shopping centers for the rest of his life”), and Bean was solidifying his reputation as a fine artist (“He ain’t no Rembrandt, but his stuff sure is pretty”).

  Then there were the old yarns about themselves, retold countless times, always worth hearing again: the time when Dick had been chewed out for doing low-altitude aerobatics over the Cape in his T-38 trainer; when Howie had let a urine sample “slip” out of his hands to splatter all over a flight doctor’s penny loafers; when Roy, flying a Gulfstream over Merritt Island just before the Apollo 14 launch to check the weather conditions, had buzzed a Soviet spy trawler operating just outside the ten-mile coastal limit. There were other stories they all knew—like when Howie had played “Moon River” on a Jew’s-harp while in lunar orbit, just to annoy CapCom—but these weren’t brought up. Stories about being up there meant, eventually, that they would talk about walking on the Moon.

  Yet there are subjects which cannot be ignored for long. As night settled on the New England countryside, an alabaster crescent began to rise over the distant shoreline, tinting the lake with silver beams. The three men gradually fell silent and gazed at the Moon, each absorbed with their own thoughts. Through the cabin’s open windows they could hear the unintelligible voices of Irene and Beth from the living room, just under the electronic beep-boop-beep of the kids playing a computer game on Roy’s Macintosh. The collection of dead beer bottles had grown around them and Roy was beginning to wish he had picked up a second case the day before, while the stores had been open, when Dick committed a heresy.

  “Don’t you sometimes wish you were back there?” he said.

  Happy Howie looked at him with his habitual deadpan expression. “Back where?” he asked. “Oh, you mean Cincinnati … no, no, I never really wanted to go back. Why?”

  “I don’t mean your home town. I mean …” Dick tipped his beer bottle toward the Moon. “Don’t you find yourself thinking about that sometimes?”

  “Oh, that. Sure. I love beer. Can’t get enough of it.”

  Roy chuckled. Dick glared at Howie. “You know what I’m talking about. The Moon. It’s been more than twenty years now. Don’t you … y’know … ever wish you could go back?”

  “Jesus, Dick.” Howard sighed. “Y’know, once each term, I get a kid in my office at the university, some sophomore from the campus paper who thinks he’s made the biggest discovery … one of the engineering profs used to be a real, live astronaut, he once walked on the Moon. This kid sits there wide-eyed, just like one of the newshounds who used to hang around the Cape, and he always asks me in this solemn voice …”

  Roy picked it up, from long familiarity with the same tired question. “‘Don’t you wish you could go back to the Moooooooooon?’”

  All three of them laughed; post-flight press conferences had made them all irreverent about the press. “And I look across my desk at this future Pulitzer winner,” Howard continued, “and I say, ‘Hell no, now ask me another question!’”

  “And they always get flustered after that,” snickered Roy, “because that’s usually their best shot.” He shook his head. “I don’t miss talking to reporters, not one bit.”

  “Amen, brother,” Howie said.

  Dick took a swig from his beer and settled his feet on the deck’s railing. “Well, I’m no news hack, and I want a straight answer from you guys. Do you ever wish you could go back to the Moon?”

  Howie balanced his beer on his stomach and stared into the foamed amber glass. “Straight answer, huh?” he said slowly, and paused to think it over. “Yes. No. What day of the week is it? Monday? Okay, the answer’s yes. Tomorrow’s Tuesday, so the answer then is going to be no.”

  Dick blew out his cheeks. “What kind of swabbie answer is that?” Howie was a former Navy man. “Are you trying to tell me you never thought about it?”

  “Of course, I’ve thought about it,” Howie replied. “Jeez, I wanted to go back the minute the capsule splashed down. Even after going without water for two days and living in the same underwear for a week, I wanted to go back that minute. Going up was the greatest thrill of my life.”

  He sloshed the beer around in the bottle, laughed and nodded his head. “When Spiro Agnew said the next goal was going to Mars, I was all set to sign up. Just back from the Moon, and I was ready to volunteer for the Mars shot in 1976. I’d make my name bigger than Neil’s. Gimme more, gimme more.”

  “Uh-huh. So what happened?”

  Howie coughed, grew sober. “You
know what happened. The program went into the friggin’ toilet. Proxmire, Mondale, even damn Nixon … they got their wish. By the time the shuttle got things moving again, I was over the hill.”

  “You know what can happen if you think about it too much,” Roy said. “I mean, look at Buzz. He had a lot of problems after he got back and it took him a long while to get over it.”

  Howie nodded vigorously, pointing his finger at Roy. “That’s exactly what I mean. It’s kinda depressing, if you let it get to you. Besides … hell, when you’re over the hill, there ain’t no turning back.”

  But Dick shook his head. “Bullshit. Young’s gone up in the shuttle, and we were with him back during Gemini. You’re no more over the hill than he is.”

  “Yeah, well …” Howie picked up his beer. “Space is a young man’s game, my friend, and I’m not young anymore.”

  “No pun intended, of course,” Roy intoned.

  “No pun intended, of course,” Howie replied, and the three of them chuckled. “Sure, I think about it sometimes. I look at that picture of myself I have on my wall, standing there on the Moon. I look at it when I’m swamped with term papers from the kids. I think, ‘Man, I’d give my right nut to be there again, right now.’” He shrugged. “Then reality sets in. I’m a college teacher. I fly a desk now. I wouldn’t know what to do with a LEM if my life depended on it again.”

  “Hmmm.” Dick was quiet for a moment, then he looked over at Roy. “What about you, Eject?”

  Roy grinned from ear to ear. “Been a long time since anyone’s called me that.” He picked up his empty bottle. “Anyone want a refill?”