Rude Astronauts (18 page)

So it was all slick Hollywood-Nashville bullshit, the exact opposite of everything we wanted our music to be, manufactured by twits and nerds with a cynical outlook on what people wanted. (
Shakes his head.
) Well, you can’t sell people what they don’t want. Even though the concerts were almost all sell-outs, from up on the stage we could see people wincing, frowning, leaving their seats and not coming back. I stopped reading the reviews after awhile, they were so grim. And
Kings of the High Frontier
was DOA in the record stores, of course.

It ended in Baton Rouge at the tail-end of the tour. It had been another hideous show, and afterwards, while all the session players were drinking and screwing around in the hotel, the three of us slipped out and caught a cab to an all-night diner somewhere on the edge of town. At first all we wanted was to get an early morning breakfast and to escape from the Nashville bozos for a little while, but we ended up staying there until dawn, talking about everything that had happened over the past few months, talking about what had happened to us.

We knew that we were sick of it all—the stardom, making crap records, touring—so there was practically no argument over whether we should break up the band. We didn’t even try to think of ways to salvage something from the wreckage—all we wanted to do was to give the Mars Hotel a mercy killing before it became more embarrassing.

No, what we discussed was why things had turned so sour so quickly, and somehow in the wee hours of the morning, drinking coffee in the Louisiana countryside near the interstate, we came to the conclusion that we had been doomed from the moment we had left Mars.

It wasn’t just the way
Kings of the High Frontier
had been made, or that we were doing George Jones instead of David Bromberg or Willie Nelson instead of Bob Dylan because someone had decided that we should have the Nashville sound, whatever that is. No, it was the fact that we had been playing music that had been born on Earth, but we were doing it on Earth. What had made the Mars Hotel different many months before had been the fact that we were playing Earth music … on Mars.

It was a strange notion, but it made more sense the longer we considered it. We had taken a bit of human culture to Mars, and then exported it back. It was the same culture, we hadn’t changed the songs, but what was different was that it had been performed by people living on another world. Back here, we were just another band doing a cover of “Sea Cruise.” People take culture with them wherever they go, but what makes a frontier a home is when they start generating a culture of their own. We had been proving, without really realizing what we were doing, that it was possible to do something else on Mars besides make rocket fuel and take pictures of dead volcanos.

It was then that Tiny surprised Joe and me. He pulled out of his jacket pocket a small notebook and opened it. I had seen him, now and then during the tour, sitting by himself and writing in it, but I had never really paid attention. Now he showed us what he had been doing—writing songs.

They weren’t bad. In fact, they were pretty good. There was one called “Olympus Mons Blues,” and another piece that hadn’t yet been titled, about running from a sandstorm. Not sappy or stilted, but gritty, raw stuff. Great Mars Hotel material.

“But this isn’t for us,” he said when I commented that we should try playing them before we ended the tour. “At least this isn’t anything that can be played here. I’ve got to go back there for this stuff to make sense, or if I’m going to write anything else about it.”

It was ironic. While we had been on Mars, Tiny hadn’t been able to write a thing about the place. It took coming back to Earth for the words to finally come out. But his memories were beginning to dry up, the images were beginning to fade. Tiny knew that he had to go back if he was going to produce any more Mars songs. Nor would anyone appreciate them if they were sung from any place else but Mars.

He had the notion to apply for another duty-tour with Uchu-Hiko, since Skycorp obviously would be displeased if he tried to get his old job back from them. Joe was also up for it, but I wasn’t. I liked breaming fresh air again, seeing plants that weren’t growing out of a hydroponics tank. They didn’t hold that against me, so we decided that, once we had fulfilled our contract obligations by finishing this tour, we would formally dissolve the band.

Afterwards, I moved back up to New Hampshire and started a small restaurant in North Conway with the money I had made. On weekends I play bass with a small bluegrass jug-band on the weekends, but otherwise I lay low. I got postcards for a while from Tiny and Joe, telling me that they were now working for the Japanese and were being trained at the Cape for another job at Arsia Station.

A month before they left for Mars on the
Enterprise
—by coincidence, the pilot was to be Billy De Wolfe, who had gotten us into this mess in the first place—I got a final card from Tiny: “We still need a bass player. Please reconsider. C’mon down and we’ll make room for you.”

I didn’t write back, figuring that he was just being cute. The shuttle up to Columbus Station and the
Enterprise
launched from the Cape a few days later, and Joe and Tiny were on their way back …

(
Long pause.
) Funny. I almost said, “On their way back home.” I guess it was. I guess it always will be now.

Billy DeWolfe:

When Tiny and Joe climbed through the hatch into the manned lander, I never thought for an instant that I would be the last person to see them alive. I would have been piloting the lander down myself, if it weren’t that I had to close down the
Enterprise
and bring the cargo lander down. I suppose I should consider myself lucky.

There weren’t any great last words from either of them that I can recall, only Joe grinning and saying, “See you later,” just before I shut and dogged the airlock hatch. I remember both of them being happy as hell to be back, though. During the two days since they had come out of the zombie tanks, while we were on our final approach and Mars was getting bigger and bigger, they had been talking about music, working on a song together—and they had been talking about making music, not just playing the oldies. (
Laughs.
) They said that when they were ready, they would give me a new tape to take back to Earth with me, as long as I didn’t take it to Nashville.

And y’know … suddenly, they were gone. I was on the command deck safeing everything for the return flight when Arsia Control came over the comlink saying that they had lost telemetry with the lander.

Alan Gass:

We buried them where we found them at the crash site, northeast of the Tharsis Montes range just above the equator. We wrapped Joe and Tiny, along with the three other people who had been in the lander, in the parachutes that had tangled after aerobraking, and buried their bodies under piles of rocks. I went back a few weeks later to place markers we had made from pieces of the wreckage. The floor of the desert shifts around a lot, so I don’t know if the graves are even visible anymore.

Billy found their instruments in the cargo lander, and they’re now in the Mars Hotel, hanging on the walls. Some country music museum wanted us to ship them back, so we could put Tiny’s guitar and Joe’s mini-synth on display, but we refused. It’s more appropriate that they stay on Mars …

It’s funny that you ask. A few days ago I got a letter from a friend who’s still stationed there, telling me that somebody’s been playing Tiny’s guitar. Guy from Florida, who wanted to try it out and thought it was okay to take it down from the hooks. I don’t think anyone minded very much. Besides, my friend says he’s pretty good.

T
HE FIRST FLIGHT WITH
a rocket using liquid propellants was yesterday at Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn … Even though the release was pulled, the rocket did not rise at first, but the flame came out, and there was a steady roar. After a number of seconds it rose, slowly, until it cleared the frame, then at express-train speed … It looked almost magical as it rose without any appreciable greater noise or flame, as if it said, “I’ve been here long enough; I think I’ll be going somewhere else, if you don’t mind.”

—Diary of Robert H. Goddard

March 17, 1926

The first major step toward the conquest of space occurred with that rocket launch from the top of Pakachoag Hill. The rocket, a barely streamlined apparatus of pressure chambers and tubes, weighed about ten and one-half pounds loaded with its fuel of liquid oxygen and gasoline. It only rose forty-one feet and traveled one hundred eighty-four feet before crashing back into the snow-covered hillside; the flight lasted about two and one-half seconds. Yet in retrospect, it was as significant an achievement in the history of flight as the Wright brothers’ first flight on the sands of Kitty Hawk in North Carolina.

There’s now a monument on the site of that launch, erected in 1960 by the American Rocket Society. Asa and Effie Ward’s farm is long gone from the hilltop; although the farmhouse remains, it has been replaced by the Pakachoag Park golf course. A historical marker near the road directs one to a small white granite obelisk, four feet tall, which stands between the first hole tee and the ninth hole fairway.

The obelisk is nicked on the top and sides from the impacts of stray balls. On one side are the carved the words:

SITE OF THE LAUNCHING OF WORLD’S FIRST LIQUID PROPELLANT ROCKET BY DR. ROBERT H. GODDARD 16 MARCH 1926.

If you look at old pictures of that historic day, you can see that, except for the golf course, the site has changed remarkably little. The rolling hills in the background are still there, of course, but so is the gnarled old willow tree fifty feet away and the low rock wall which runs alongside the ninth hole fairway.

As the first rocket launch site, Pakachoag Hill is not terribly impressive. It pales in comparison to the high-tech spaceport on Merritt Island at Cape Canaveral, Florida. As a historical site, it is not as impressive as the monument at Kitty Hawk to the Wright brothers’ first flight; that monument is many times larger, and on a clear evening it can be seen for miles on Cape Hatteras by its spotlights. You could break your kneecap on the Goddard monument while searching for it in the golf course on a dark night. Like the man himself, one can only appreciate Goddard’s contribution in an intellectual rather than physical context.

Many people thought he was crazy, the thin, balding physics professor from Clark University. Six years earlier, his sponsor for the early rocket experiments, the Smithsonian Institution, had published one of Goddard’s monographs, “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” in which he had proclaimed the feasibility of sending a rocket to the Moon. For making this speculation he was hooted at by the press and by some of his fellow faculty members at Clark. Thus, even though his wife, Esther, recorded the preliminary stages of the launch on a motion picture camera (unfortunately, she ran out of film before the flight itself), newspapermen were not invited to Pakachoag Hill. No one remembers the names of the cynical newspaper columnists and the Clark professors who used to condescendingly ask him about his “moon-going rocket.”

The reconstructed remains of that first successful liquid-fuel rocket and its test stand are displayed today in the main lobby of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, near the Apollo, Gemini and Mercury space capsules, next to a mockup of the Viking Mars lander which touched down on Mars fifty years after Goddard’s launch. There are few spacecraft among those on exhibit which do not owe something directly to Goddard’s achievement.

One might say that, in view of the lasting effects of Goddard’s accomplishment, there should be a taller monument on Pakachoag Hill. Goddard was a quiet man, however; if he were alive, such a monument would probably embarrass him. Besides, there’s a certain irony to having a golf course on the site of the beginning of the space age. After all, it was astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American in space, who smuggled a golf club and a ball onto the Apollo 14 spacecraft, and played golf on the grey sands of the Moon.

A
MORNING IN WARTIME:
May 26, 1944, 5:15 a.m. PST. Day is barely breaking over the California coastline; for the crew of the B-24 Liberator
Hollywood Babe
, it’s the fifth hour of their mission. The bomber has been holding a stationary position since midnight over the ocean southeast of the Baja Peninsula, flying in narrow circles at 25,000 feet. Its classified mission has been simple: watch the skies. The vigil is about to end.

Gazing through the cockpit windows, the captain notices a thin white vapor trail zipping across the dark purple sky. Many miles above and due west of his plane’s position, the streak is hopelessly out of the
Hollywood Babe
’s range, even if the bomber were ordered to intercept the incoming object. Becoming alert, he glances over his shoulder at the civilian in the jump seat behind him.

“Sir, is that what you’re looking for?” the captain asks.

The civilian, an agent of the Office of Strategic Services, quickly leans forward and stares at the streak. “Son of a bitch,” he murmurs under his breath. For a moment he can’t believe what he’s seeing. Only yesterday he had been telling someone that MI-6 must be getting shell-shocked, because now they were sending science fiction yarns to the OSS. But, incredible or not, this was exactly what the OSS man had been told to watch for.

He turns to the radio man in the narrow compartment behind the cockpit. “Sergeant, alert White Sands now!” he yells over the throb of the B-24’s engines. “It’s on its way!”

Many miles away, warning klaxons howl at a top-secret US Army facility in the New Mexico desert. Around a spotlighted launch pad, technicians and engineers scurry away from the single-stage, 75-foot winged silver rocket poised on the pad. Cold white oxygen fumes venting from the base of the rocket billow around the steel launch tower. The gantry is towed back along railroad tracks by a locomotive, and fuel trucks race away to a safe distance where the ground crew and several soldiers wait, their eyes fixed on the pad.