All That Outer Space Allows (Apollo Quartet Book 4) (10 page)

“The Amazons,” put in Suzanne.

“The Valkyries,” added Kristin.

“Onna-bugeisha,” said Aiko.

“Queen Zenobia,” said Layla.

“And it’s always been visible to you?” Kristin’s husband asked, quickly changing the subject.

The wives nodded.

“Even when we can’t see it?” said Aiko’s husband.

Despite their insistence the UESS
Aldridge
had remained stubbornly visible to them the entire time, the men seemed reluctant to believe their wives.

At that moment, Betty strolled up. She was wearing her usual flightsuit and had plainly landed minutes before from a test flight. “Hey, what’s going on?” she asked the men.

Suzanne’s husband quickly filled her in. As soon as she heard the UESS
Aldridge
had actually vanished from sight, she laughed. Then she said, “I watched you as I flew in. The spaceship has been here all along.”

“You didn’t see her disappear?”

Betty shook her head.

“So you can see the ship even when it’s invisible? Just like our wives can?”

Betty nodded and grinned.

Kristin leaned in close to Suzanne. “Just think,” she said, The spaceships are only invisible with women crews. And they’re only invisible to men. It looks like men might be finally out of the war game.”

“Oh no,” said Suzanne, feeling truly happy for the first time since her husband had been assigned to the spaceyard. “If they need us to wage war, I’m sure we can find a better way to sort things out than fighting.”

Chapter 6

First Stage Separation

In August 1967, the Eckhardts move into their new house in El Lago. Ginny is glad to get out of the apartment, but the prospect of keeping such a large house clean is daunting. It’s not as if she were the most house-proud housewife in Houston, and Walden has never been particularly fussy, but they have neighbours now, other members of the astronaut corps and AWC—not just Charlie and Dotty, or Stu and Joan, from their own group, the New Nineteen, but also families from the Original Seven, the New Nine and the Fourteen.

And they might drop in or pop over at any time.

The rest of the year passes in a blur of cleaning and polishing, parties, AWC meetings, visits to the beauty parlour, keeping up appearances, keeping everything primly stable. Walden is there only at weekends, sometimes he’s in Long Island at the Grumman plant, as he’s now specialising in the lunar module, sometimes he’s away on a geology field trip, maybe at the Grand Canyon; but mostly he’s at the Cape. The Hermes Baby sits unused in a closet, there is never enough time to get it out and start writing, there is never enough time to
think
about what to write. Ginny is even struggling to keep up with her science fiction magazine reading, and she seriously considers letting some of her subscriptions lapse. She has no one to talk to about science fiction, the other wives they only read
McCall’s
and
Ladies Home Journal
and
Good Housekeeping
and
Cosmopolitan
and
Redbook
. She looks at herself and she’s turning into one of those robot wives. She wonders how the other wives cope, they seem so self-assured, so organised—a complaint echoed by Mary Irwin in her autobiography,
The Moon is Not Enough
, “All the other astronaut wives were in the same predicament, but they seemed to be taking it in stride. Or was it that gold-plated image we were encased in and mortally afraid of tarnishing?” Ginny must tread a careful path between the expectations of the public, the bidding of NASA, and peer pressure.

But then ‘The Spaceships Men Don’t See’ appears in the February 1968 issue of
Galaxy
, alongside stories by Kit Reed, Kate Wilhelm, Jane Beauclerk, Gertrude Friedberg and Sydney J Van Scyoc. The response to the story is positive. Ginny receives approving letters from many of her friends, and it’s enough to motivate her into finally writing all those replies she owes. But seeing the words of her story in the magazine also has a salutary effect on Ginny: she realises she needs to do more than simply keep house if she is to hold onto her sanity here in Togethersville. Being an astronaut wife is not enough, and each passing day Ginny, although not a drinker, has found herself thinking more and more about the drinks cabinet—and she won’t be the first astronaut wife to fall victim to it. She remembers her conversation with Evelyn over ‘The Spaceships Men Don’t See’ and it occurs to her she could take more of an interest in her husband’s endeavours. Not simply support him, as a wife should, she’s been doing that since she moved to Houston, but make an effort to understand what he’s been going through, to better sympathise with the stress he’s under, the strain he faces each day. After all, space travel interests her, it always has done, and here she is on the periphery of the greatest space program the planet has ever known. She knows bits and pieces, she’s sneaked occasional looks at NASA press kits, but she wants to be closer still, to actually
touch
a real spacecraft, a LM or a CM, maybe even a Saturn V.

So she approaches Walden one evening:

We have the house how we want it now, Ginny says, do you think I’d be allowed to see inside the Manned Spacecraft Center?

Allowed? replies Walden. Sure, you want me to take you round?

You can do that?

Sure, Walden assures her offhandedly.

And the Cape, I’d like to see that too, the launch pad and everything.

Hey, small steps, hon, Walden says. I’ll take you in one day next week for a tour of the MSC, how about it?

It takes him several reminders before he eventually arranges something. On the day, Ginny drives to the MSC around mid-morning. The guard on the gate has obviously been informed and waves her straight through. She directs the Impala to where she’s been told to park, and soon spots a figure in a pale blue flight jacket striding across the lot toward her. Even from this distance, even in clothing much like that worn by all the astronauts, she can tell from the way he moves it’s her husband. Once Walden reaches her, he looks her up and down, vetting her appearance, although he has made no mention of a dress code. But what she has chosen she thinks he won’t criticise, a double-breasted dress, belted, with pleated skirt, in a nice sober blue, and matching heels. She’s even wearing gloves, white cotton ones, she hasn’t worn a pair since she was a teenager, though she has seen other wives in gloves on their way to church on a Sunday.

You look nice, says Walden—but it’s perfunctory.

He doesn’t even peck her on the cheek, just turns about and heads back toward the nine-storey building from which he came. She trots after him, walking faster than normal to keep up. She wonders what’s wrong, why this treatment, but as they step inside the building she sees Walden appears neither vexed nor impatient nor annoyed. He is smiling, he looks confident, he looks at ease.

This way, hon, he says.

He walks beside her, perhaps a pace or two in front, he doesn’t hold her, he doesn’t touch her, but he still seems to possess her. She can feel it like a forcefield extending about her, warding off all curiosity—because she is Mrs Walden J Eckhardt. At times like this she wishes Virginia G Parker were not a secret, she’s sure a male science fiction writer, though there are only a handful of them, would have been given VIP treatment.

#

What building is this? Ginny asks. Engaging her husband in conversation, she hopes, might slow his pace.

Administration, he replies.

How many buildings are there?

Hell if I know. Twenty, twenty-five, I guess.

Where are we going?

They exit the rear of the Administration Building, back out into the sunlight. Ginny stumbles, taken by surprise—she’s heard the MSC described as a campus, and she’s imagined something like her alma mater, SDSU, a tightly-packed complex of inter-connected buildings and small dark courtyards. Not this great park like a golf course, with three irregular lakes, scattered trees and low rolling hills of grass. Lined about its circumference are white office blocks, most no more than two or three storeys tall, and some buildings which resemble hangars or large storage sheds with blank aluminum sides and flat roofs.

Walden has halted at the abrupt double-tap of Ginny’s heels on the asphalt path, and looks back at her. She gives him a wan smile and says, It’s very pleasant.

Walden shrugs. Mission Control Center first, he tells her.

She can see his heart is not in this tour, perhaps he hoped she’d forget her request. But she knows some of the other wives have been to the MSC, have seen what it takes to put their husbands into space, keep them alive up there, and then bring them back safely to Earth. She thinks she knows what to expect, she’s seen photographs of the MCC, although she can’t remember where. Not in any of her science fiction magazines—though they may support the space program, the fact it’s a wholly male undertaking rankles with the magazines’ chiefly female readerships. Ginny has seen as much in letter columns, a kind of reverse snobbery which suggests the imaginary space missions of science fiction fans are somehow a greater achievement than actually putting a man on the Moon—

And Walden ushers Ginny into a shed-like building, along a corridor and through a door—there was a sign on it, but she didn’t manage to read it—and she finds herself standing in a viewing gallery at the back of a room the size of a high school gym. But it’s not filled with ropes and benches, or young men in vests and shorts running back and forth between a pair of baskets… There are instead eight lines of large consoles, four to either side of a central aisle, and they’re stepped so all have a good view of the five giant screens on the opposite wall. Half a dozen people sit at each of the consoles, and they’re all men, all young, in short-sleeved white shirts and sombre ties and spectacles, and she just knows every one of them is an engineer, they
look
like engineers. What’s that phrase Walden uses, Ginny thinks; and then as it comes to her she puts a hand to her mouth to hide a snort of laughter: “pencil-necks”. Those guys there, they’re pencil-necks. Walden and the other astronauts seem to hold them in some small contempt—and some not so small respect too, because they know their lives are in their hands.

Wow, says Ginny.

She steps down to the window and peers this way and that, puts a gloved hand up to the glass, and she’s staring at the consoles, trying to make out what the scrolling lines of white-on-black numbers on the monitors might mean, she’s marvelling at the thick manuals splayed open or piled on every surface, she’s impressed by the earnestness and confidence with which these pencil-necks operate their screens and buttons and switches.

Something about the Mission Control Center strikes Ginny as bizarrely familiar, and it’s a moment before she figures out what: one-upmanship. It seems to seep through the glass, a miasma of intellectual Darwinism, it’s there to see in the desperate way the engineers grab manuals and point out something on a page, the urgency with which they scribble notes and calculations, the need for approval evident in every bespectacled gaze in the MCC. It’s nothing like the testosterone which coloured the air at Edwards, or perhaps it’s a less potent version of it, but there is still a sense that not only do these engineers know they’re the best at what they do but they also feel an addict’s compulsion to demonstrate it time and time again.

Walden walks down to join her at the glass, and Ginny abruptly realises most of the men in the MCC have turned about and are now staring at her as if they’ve never seen a woman before. She feels Walden slide an arm around her waist and she gives an abashed smile, looks to her husband, back again into the MCC… and sees the pencil-necks’ gazes have now shifted to Walden—and from their expressions alone Ginny knows that her husband is
an
astronaut
.

Is there anything happening? she asks him.

She’s beginning to feel like an exhibit in a zoo, one of a mating pair of exotic animals when, really, she’s the one on the
outside
looking
in
.

Walden makes a face. There’s an unmanned flight of the Apollo stack scheduled for next month, he tells her, so they can man-rate the Saturn V.

That’s the one that’s going to take you to the Moon?

He manhandles her about, none too gently, and with a hand to the small of her back, directs her up the steps to the exit from the gallery. Out in the corridor, she pulls away from him, and she can sense him simmering.

Not me, he snaps. I’m just one of the greenhorns, I’ve not even been asked to support a flight.