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.
I’m sure you’ll get your chance, she assures him. But she knows the words are empty, as does he, her sympathy won’t get him what he desires most. She’s doing her best, she’s been trying so hard, just look at the way she’s dressed, she goes to the beauty parlour regularly, she attends the AWC meetings and stays on good terms with all the other wives.
This way, Walden says brusquely. And he’s off again down the corridor.
Another building, another gym-sized room. This, explains Walden, is the Apollo Lunar Mission Simulator. There are banks and banks of computers, with flashing lights and reels of tape that abruptly zip clockwise then anticlockwise. There is a great cubical frame of steel girders off to one side, and just visible within it is a grey and cratered diorama. And there are the three simulators, which look like someone opened a giant closet and all the boxes inside just fell out into piles. Walden points over at a large U-shaped console which looks up at one of the simulators.
That’s where the pencil-necks set up the mission parameters, he tells her. It’s all computerised.
There’s a lot of computers, Ginny says.
Yeah, 4.2 million bucks’ worth.
It’s a sum beyond imagining for Ginny, though not, she suspects, inconceivable to those closely involved with Apollo—after all, putting a man into space, putting a man on the Moon, is a hugely expensive endeavour.
This way, says Walden. This is the LM simulator.
He takes Ginny’s arm and leads her up a short flight of red-carpeted stairs to a platform at the back of the piles of boxes, and he steps through an entranceway into the simulator itself. Ginny halts at the jamb and peers in, and she can feel her pulse quicken as she takes in the grey panels of switches and dials and readouts, the two tiny triangular windows, the hand controllers—and it all looks so very real, an actual spacecraft, something that’s designed to operate in space, to land on the surface of another world. Cold fingers run up her spine and she thinks about magazine and book covers and descriptions in prose in short stories and novellas and novels, about spaceship bridges and control rooms, and here she is gazing at a tiny cabin which will carry two men to the Moon, and in no way does it resemble anything her imagination might have created from the science fiction she has read over the years. She looks down at her feet and wonders if she should take off her heels, they might damage the lunar module, she’s heard it is fragile, walls as thin as a beercan’s—but this, of course, is just a simulator, and the floor is good and solid. So she steps inside beside her husband and he tells her she’s at the commander’s position. She grabs a hand controller with each gloved hand and she stares through the window, which is really some kind of screen, at the surface of the Moon, which is really the diorama she saw earlier inside the giant steel framework. Now she’s starting to feel a little faint, she might even swoon, the sheer physicality of this tiny spacecraft cabin, of the grey instrument panels on every available surface, the dials, the switches, the digital readouts, the little blue and black ball bobbing this way and that beneath a glass etched with reticulations, and everything carefully labelled, so meticulously labelled. Her husband could be going to the Moon, she thinks. She knows this, she’s known it for two years now. (Of course, he might never get selected for a flight—there are sixty-one of them now, and not enough missions for all.) Until this moment, it has never quite struck her precisely what this means. Ginny has read science fiction for much of her life, she calls herself a fan, she has written letters to the magazines, she writes stories, many of the science fiction authors whose books she sees in book stores, she considers friends. But it all means nothing when confronted with this. Sense of wonder, imagination, pictures painted with the mind’s eye, it all pales into insignificance, seems to flatten to two dimensions like some painted backdrop, a theatrical flat, when compared to this reality, to Apollo, the lunar module, this machine which will put two astronauts—and one of them could be her husband!—on the surface of an alien planet.
Walden is speaking: See, we fly the LM down from lunar orbit to the surface, it’s mostly all done by the pings but we might have to take over for the last few feet.
Ginny has recovered from her near-fainting fit. She turns to her husband and says, Pings? Like they have in submarines?
But no, that can’t be right—there’s no air in space, so there’s no sound, Ginny knows that much.
Pings, says Walden, P-G-N-C-S, Primary Guidance, Navigation and Control System.
So how does that work? she asks. Explain it to me, like you would to another astronaut.
Another astronaut? asks Walden.
You know what I mean. She grins—and adds, I love it when you talk dirty.