All That Outer Space Allows (Apollo Quartet Book 4) (4 page)

If they ask him, he
will
accept—and nothing she can do will prevent him.

#

The telephone rings but before Ginny can get to her feet, Walden is up and striding into the hallway. She hears him answer, and then it is a succession of yes sir, of course sir, I would be honoured sir, yes sir, I’ll be there sir,
yes sir
. Someone from the base, she decides; and returns to her book. Moments later, Walden marches into the lounge and he is grinning fit to break his jaw.

That, he says, was Deke Slayton.

Ginny recognises the name. He is one of the Mercury Seven, although he never flew since he was diagnosed with a heart murmur. She remembers his headshot from page 89 of
Americans into Orbit
.

From astronaut selection at NASA, Walden adds.

She doesn’t need to ask, she can tell from Walden’s expression.

I report in four weeks, he tells her.

You’re going to be an astronaut, she says; and she doesn’t quite believe it. She puts down her book. An
astronaut
, she says again in wonder.

He crosses to her, bends forward, grips her about the upper arms and hauls her to her feet. I am! he crows. I’m going into space!

He wraps her in a tight hug and she can feel the righteousness beating off him like waves of heat. She can also feel where his fingers wrapped her arms and pressed hard enough to bruise.

You might even go to the Moon, she says.

She can’t help it, she’s grinning too now, she is as excited as he is.

Shit, yeah! The Moon! I’m going to the goddamn Moon!

He whirls her around, and she laughs giddily. Then he pulls her in close again and he says, I wanted this, Ginny, I really wanted it, I wanted it so bad.

You deserve it, Walden, she tells him, you’re the best.

She wraps her arms about his neck and pecks him on the cheek—because she’s happy for him,
more
than happy for him, his joy is hers too; and because she loves him.

And later, she knows, he will prove his love for her in his own way.

#

HOUSTON, TEXAS…Nineteen pilots will join the astronaut team early in May, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced today. They will boost the total number of NASA astronauts to 50. Average age of the group is 33.3 years. Average number of college years 5.8, and average flight time is 2,714 hours, of which 1,925 hours is jet time. Two of the new astronauts have doctorates. Two are single. Four civilians are among those selected. Of the remainder, 7 are Air Force officers, 6 are Navy Officers, and 2 are Marine Corps officers.

They include:

Vance D. Brand, 34, an engineering test pilot for Lockheed assigned to the West German F-104G Flight Test Center at Istres, France. Brand, his wife and 4 children live at Martigues, France.

Lt. John S. Bull, USN, 31, a test pilot at the Naval Air Station, Patuxent River, Maryland. Bull, his wife and son live on the base.

Maj. Gerald P. Carr, USMC, 33, Tests Director Section, Marine Corps Air Facility, Santa Ana, California. Carr, his wife and 6 children live in Santa Ana.

Capt. Charles M. Duke, Jr., USAF, 30, instructor at Aerospace Research Pilot School, Edwards Air

Force Base, California. Duke, his wife and one son live in Edwards, Calif.

Capt. Walden J. Eckhardt, USAF, 32, experimental test pilot, Edwards AFB, Calif. Eckhardt and his wife live in Edwards.

Capt. Joe H. Engle, USAF, 33, aerospace research flight test officer assigned as project pilot for X-15, Edwards AFB, Calif. Engle, his wife and two children live in Edwards.

Lt. Cdr. Ronald E. Evans, USN, 32, on sea duty in the Pacific. His wife and two children live in San Diego, Calif.

Maj. Edward G. Givens, Jr., USAF, 36, project officer at the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center for the Astronaut Maneuvering Unit (Gemini experiment D-12). Givens, his wife and two children live in Seabrook (El Lago), Texas.

Fred W. Haise, Jr., 32, NASA project pilot at Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif. Haise, his wife and 3 children live in Lancaster, Calif.

Dr. Don L. Lind, 35, physicist at NASA Goddard Space flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland. Lind, his wife and 5 children live in Silver Spring, Md.

Capt. Jack R. Lousma, USMC, 30, operational pilot at Marine Air Station, Cherry Point, North Carolina. Lousma, his wife and one son live in Newport, N.C.

Lt. Thomas K. Mattingly, USN, 30, student in Aerospace Research Pilot School, Edwards AFB, Calif. He is single and lives on base.

Lt. Bruce McCandless, III, USN, 28, working toward a doctorate in electrical engineering at Stanford University. McCandless, his wife and two children live in Mountain View, Calif.

Lt. Cdr. Edgar D. Mitchell, USN, 35, student in Aerospace Research Pilot School, Edwards AFB, Calif. He has a doctor of science degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mitchell, hs wife and two daughters live in Torrance, Calif.

Maj. William R. Pogue, USAF, 36, instructor in Aerospace Research Pilot School, Edwards AFB, Calif. Pogue, his wife and 3 children live at Edwards.

Capt. Stuart A. Roosa, USAF, 32, experimental test pilot at Edwards AFB, Calif. Roosa, his wife and 4 children live in Edwards.

John L. Swigert, Jr., 34, engineering test pilot for North American Aviation, Inc. He is single and lives in South Gate, Calif.

Lt. Cdr. Paul J. Weitz, USN, 33, squadron operations officer. Weitz, his wife and two children live on Oak Harbor, Washington.

Capt. Alfred M. Worden, USAF, 34, instructor at Aerospace Research Pilot School, Edwards AFB, Calif. Worden, his wife and two daughters live in Edwards.

Recruiting of the new astronauts began Sept. 10, 1965. A total of 351 submitted applications, of which 159 met basic requirements. Of that number, 100 were military, 59 civilian. For consideration, applicants must have been a United States citizen; no taller than 6 feet; born on or after Dec. 1, 1929; have a bachelor degree in engineering, physical or biological sciences; and have acquired 1000 hours jet pilot time or have graduated from an armed forces test pilot school.

Chapter 3

Liftoff

A month after the telephone call, Walden rents a car, leaving the Impala with Ginny, and drives to Houston, where he stays in a motel with some of the other guys from Edwards. Of the nineteen astronauts NASA has selected, nine, including Walden, are from Edwards Air Force Base. Ginny jokes in a letter to Joanna that the air of Edwards is so thick with the “Right Stuff”, with a miasma of testosterone blown this way and that, it drives the wildlife into reproductive frenzies. She’s not entirely joking—she has seen the other wives ballooning with fecundity at, to her, shockingly short intervals. She and Walden have only been here four years, but surely the streets didn’t used to ring quite so loudly and so frequently with the insistent laughter of children?

It is something they have fought about. Ginny is not yet ready to be mired in motherhood, made subservient to her so-called biological clock. Nor is she willing to make a young child a hostage to Walden’s good fortune. It is her most telling argument, her one true defence—she will not agree to children while the chance exists Walden might be killed.

Walden calls her the evening of his arrival in Houston—she has spent the day catching up on correspondence, there are so many people she wants to tell that her husband is now an astronaut; she feels guilty for boasting about it, but oh she feels so
righteous
in her bragging. She and Walden try to plan their immediate future. He will stay in the motel, and in his free time will look for somewhere more permanent to live. And then Ginny will join him.

Two months later, she packs up the Impala, having made arrangements for the contents of the house on 16
^th
Street to go into storage until sent for, and sets off on the 1,600-mile drive to her husband. She heads south to San Diego and spends the night with her mother and step-father in the house his successful landscape gardening firm has given them (though Ginny’s mother is the business brains). Ginny welcomes spending time in a properly organised world, where everything has its place because that’s the
right
place for it, not because military tradition, or orders from on high, say it is. There is a comforting sense of sanctuary, which Ginny feels especially keenly given her and Walden’s abrupt change in circumstances and location—not just the 1,600-mile move, but the glamour, the science, the complex engineering and, above all, the danger of Walden’s new career.

It
is
dangerous, darling, isn’t it? asks mother, conveniently ignoring that test piloting is dangerous, that flying fighter jets in Germany is dangerous, that Ginny’s father was a naval aviator who did not survive the war—and whose haloed absence during her formative years no doubt led Ginny to romanticise pilots and so now she’s been married to one since graduating from SDSU.

No one has died, Ginny tells her. They’ve had all those Mercury flights and Gemini flights, and everyone splashed down safely.

Ginny cannot know she will be proven wrong before a year has passed. On 27 January 1967, no more than six months away, there is a fire in the Apollo 1 command module during a plugs-out test at Launch Complex 34. The crew of three, Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White, all perish. The Apollo program will be delayed for over eighteen months as the spacecraft is redesigned to rectify the defects which led to the tragedy. Ginny will spend that day weeping, like many of the other astronauts’ wives, not only because she knows the three widows, although not closely, and she knows the men, although barely at all, but because she has rudely learnt, as has every astronaut wife, that her husband flirts with jeopardy to a level she has not previously contemplated or wanted to believe.

It is perhaps unfair to characterise Ginny as happily ignorant of the perils of spaceflight, and those specifically of the Apollo space program. She writes about space travel, after all; but in her stories it is all so easy, spaceships flying up into the heavens and zipping about the galaxy as if it were no more onerous than a cross-country flight in a plane or an ocean crossing aboard a liner. But that’s not entirely true—she has learned to live with the daily prospect of a uniformed stranger with a grave expression appearing on her doorstep, much as Lieutenant Colonel Hollenbeck did in the first paragraph of this novel. That incident not only illustrated the danger of Walden’s chosen profession, but showed also that Ginny’s immunity to it is no more than skin-deep, a thin veneer of confidence no thicker than a layer of Revlon’s “Touch & Glow” .

And yet… The romance attached to NASA’s astronauts, to the organisation’s roster of successful space flights, makes Ginny believe her man is indeed safer now. Perhaps she only
wants
to believe it, as she gazes across the split-level lounge at her mother sprawled elegantly on a sofa, gimlet in one hand, cigarette in the other; and Ginny looks down at the gimlet in her own hand, and all she can think of is a softly-moaning desert beneath a sky like a dome of pure blue ceramic, and her imminent drive across three states through a landscape no different, to reach her husband, who may be going to the most desolate desert of them all on the surface of the Moon.

#

Ginny leaves early the next day, setting out on a California July morning that promises freshness but will no doubt soon blur to muggy haze, turning her back on the ocean, though she has not lived within sight of it for many years, and aiming the Impala at Tucson, Arizona. The US Highway 80 runs west out of San Diego, through the chaparral and canyons of the Cucamaya Mountains, across the green checkerboard fields of the Coachella Valley south of the Salton Sea, and down into the Sonoran Desert.

I could perhaps pass quickly over the long drive east, much as Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke does in his autobiography
Moonwalker
: “
Man, I’m an astronaut. I’ve got it made!
I thought to myself as we rolled into Houston.” Or, as Willie G Moseley writes in his biography of Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa,
Smoke Jumper, Moon Pilot
: “the family traveled from California to Houston in a long station wagon”. Or even James Irwin, whose place in the space program Walden Jefferson Eckhardt has taken in this story, who wrote in his book,
To Rule the Night
: “I drove down to Houston in my little Kharmann Ghia and reported in at NASA May 10.”