Ginny dresses quickly, almost feverishly. She gets an old pair of sandals out of the closet. She fetches her Hermes Baby, and a stack of typing paper, from her dressing-room, and carries them reverently into the lounge. It is late afternoon, she has a lonely evening stretching ahead of her, normally she’d make herself a salad or something light and then curl up in front of the television, maybe with a magazine to read.
Not tonight. She makes herself a scotch, with plenty of water, not the iced tea which used to fuel her when she was writing, and she sits at the table and holds her hands in readiness over the keys—
Something about going to the Moon, she’s going to write a story about a mission to the Moon. And she’s going to make it accurate and full of realistic detail, a new sort of science fiction, rigorous and backed up by real science and engineering.
A cynical reader might observe Ginny’s evolving relationship to science fiction, and it’s not the science fiction we know, as illustrated by the names of the published writers, all of which are real science fiction authors, which have been mentioned in this novel—Ginny’s changing thoughts and dreams on, and of, the genre, as influenced by her husband’s new career, by this great new adventure the USA is undertaking, recapitulate this quartet’s relationship to science fiction. It would be disingenuous to claim this is happenstance—Ginny is a fictional construct and her life created toward a particular end. And a particular resolution. But there is a wider point to make here: “motif” and “theme” are synonyms for “pattern”, and human beings are predisposed to find patterns, even where they do not exist. It takes little to suggest a higher purpose at work—some carefully-placed hints, an element of serendipity, an insistence that some of the topics explored by literature are universal…
Ginny has learnt for herself that “universal” is not quite so all-encompassing a term the dictionary definition claims. Critical studies of science fiction are almost non-existent: perhaps some Lit student somewhere has written a thesis on the fiction of Margaret St Clair or Alice Norton, but Ginny does not know of any. Science fiction is genre fiction, women’s fiction, not deemed worthy of study. And men control the literature departments of American universities, Ginny knows this for herself (nothing has changed since she graduated). Male professors are not interested in fiction read and written by women.
And yet… Ginny looks down at her hands poised over the typewriter keys, and considers what she is about to do. She is going to take an endeavour which has been presented to the world as the very pinnacle of male achievement—for all of Betty Skelton’s accomplishments, it is only men who have the “Right Stuff”—and she is going to colonise, no, occupy it, in the name of women. She is going to take from men something they have quite deliberately kept for themselves—and it is by no means the only such thing—and she is going to re-invent it for her gender…
The audacity of her plan intimidates her.
Ginny’s empty promise earlier in the year proves prophetic when Walden is chosen for the Apollo 12 backup crew by Dave Scott. The rotation schedule means he will get to fly on Apollo 15—David Scott, Commander; Alfred Worden, Command Module Pilot; Walden Eckhardt, Lunar Module Pilot. An all Air Force crew—not just their friend and neighbour back in California, Al; but Dave was also at Edwards when he was selected by NASA in 1963 (the Eckhardts knew of him back then but they did not socialise).
NASA makes the announcement about Apollo 12 in April of 1969, and while all the attention is rightly directed at Pete Conrad, Al Bean and Dick Gordon, the Apollo 12 prime crew, a few weekends after the press release, Ginny and Walden are invited to Dave and Lurton’s ranch-style home in Nassau Bay for a celebration. Al is there, but not Pam, the two have been separated for about six months—and there are some in the Astronaut Wives Club who feel that should make Al ineligible for a flight, they’ve stuck by their men through thick and thin, good and bad, they have made sacrifices, and Pam has let them all down. But Ginny is not one of them. She was sad to see Pam leave, she always liked her, they were friends, if not especially close ones—Ginny’s closest friends she has never actually met in person, they’re the people she corresponds with and whose names she sees in the pages of the magazines she reads.
Back in Edwards, everyone partied hard, but the mantle of responsibility laid across the astronauts’ shoulders by the nation has left them subdued and more inclined to work off their frustrations in the privacy of their own homes. For Ginny, this has meant fights, nights where Walden silently and sullenly chugs beer, the two of them occasionally sleeping in separate bedrooms and reproachful apologies the following morning. She knows Walden is under pressure, that the work is hard—she is trying herself to understand what NASA is asking of him… although she has not yet worked up the courage to tell him so.
Dave has been in space twice before, on Gemini 8 and Apollo 9, and Walden has admitted to her he couldn’t have asked for a better commander. The Apollo 11 crew were later described by Michael Collins as “amiable strangers”, but the Apollo 15 crew are as close as long-time colleagues. Tied together by shared memories of Edwards, by careers that have trod similar paths, they are alike enough to be comfortable in each other’s presence, and yet different enough not to cavil at their enforced closeness. In Falling to Earth, Al Worden describes Dave Scott as “the quintessential professional”, Jim Irwin as “restrained and reticent” and Scott’s “yes-man”; and in reference to his own role: “[Scott] wanted things his way, but on a few occasions I had to tell him, ‘Well, Dave, I am not sure I want to do it like that.’” The crew had, in Worden’s words, “a bond of competence and professionalism”. Imagine a similar dynamic at play with Walden J Eckhardt in Jim Irwin’s place. When Walden’s conversation becomes peppered with “Dave” and “Al”, Ginny is at first glad everything seems to be going so well; but it soon palls. She looks forward to the days when Walden is at the Cape, and she will not be sharing the bed with her husband and the ghosts of his crew-mates.
The Scotts’ party takes the form of a luau, though neither Ginny nor Walden have been to Hawaii and so can’t vouch for its authenticity. The shirts are certainly Hawaiian—the Scotts have provided suitable garments for Al and Walden. And there are pineapples and a barbecue with far too much meat. Ginny is no stranger to barbecues, they were regular occurrences at Edwards, but there is something desperately festive about this one. It’s not just the ridiculous paper leis, or the paper lanterns strung across the garden, or even the cake with the Moon drawn in blue icing on its top.
Ginny sits alone at a table, in a plain red top and white capri pants—her concession to the theme, though several of the other wives are in muumuus, but now she thinks about it maybe they wore capri pants in Girls! Girls! Girls! and not Blue Hawaii—and sips from some fruity cocktail which boasts a pair of swizzle sticks and a paper umbrella, Lurton told her the name but she can’t remember it. And she’s thinking about the short story she finished a few days ago, the third since she discovered how to write again, the third since she started to make good on her epiphany in the LM simulator all those months ago, the third since she’s been working her way secretly through her husband’s training manuals. Not all of the stories have worked, often some vital narrative element seems just beyond her grasp, and the one she has sent out has not sold, the rejections sadly uninformative on the story’s flaws.