You’re like a distraction, Walden tells her; you are a distraction. I have to give it one hundred percent, I can’t have anything around that affects my focus.
You have to go back to Houston, he says.
She’s been feeling a need to write, prompted by the two novels she’s just read, and by what she’s learnt here at the Cape, so she’s sort of glad the idyll is over. But it still hurts to be told to go away by her husband.
He reaches across the table, takes her hand and squeezes. It’s been real good, Ginny, he says, having you here, but the holiday is over.
She gives a wan smile, picks up her piña colada and sucks on the straw, but then her eyes narrow as something occurs to her. What about the Apollo 11 launch, she asks, can I stay for that?
In just over a week, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins will be heading for the Moon, and four days later they will make the first lunar landing, they will be the first people to set foot on an alien world in the history of humankind.
I think you should go home, Walden says firmly.
Ginny really wants to see the Apollo 11 liftoff, and not on television. But she will not plead, she will not wheedle. There will be other launches. And she is missing her Hermes Baby. Her head is full of ideas, baked to a lustrous finish beneath the sun during her hours on the beach, she has written stories in her head as she sunbathed, has dreamt up plots, narratives, settings, and she wants to get them down on paper before she loses them forever.
I’ll book a flight tomorrow, she says.
Walden’s mood abruptly improves, and he grins and lifts his own scotch and branch water and salutes Ginny.
And she thinks, if only she were so easy to please, if only spousal obedience were enough to make her happy—but Ginny ordering Walden about is almost unthinkable, although there are science fiction stories where women dominate: Francis Stevens even wrote one back in 1918! For now, however, Ginny will have to settle for her husband’s faithfulness.
And she knows she’s richer than many of the other astronaut wives for having it.
Ginny’s impromptu holiday has had a salutary effect on her. Back in El Lago, she spends a day cleaning the house from top to bottom, getting down on her hands and knees to scrub the kitchen floor, polishing the faucets in the bathrooms until they shine like the skin of a LM, taking the rugs out into the yard and beating them until her arm aches. She rearranges the kitchen cupboards, emptying them, wiping down the shelves, and then deciding what will now go where. Walden can never find anything, so it doesn’t matter if everything has moved.
Only when Ginny is satisfied the house is as clean as it will ever be—and she marvels at the pride she is taking in her home, and she thinks of the years at Edwards and the dust that covered everything and how some things, most things, seemed more important than whether the house was neat and tidy and clean… It’s not just her home however, now she even spends time fussing over her appearance, each morning powdering her face and painting her lips, mascara and eyeshadow, plucking her eyebrows, styling her hair, doing it every day; she wears nice dresses, heels that match, keeps her nails shaped and polished… She is well-groomed, and she takes satisfaction in being so.
Ginny’s flying visit to the Cape was also a holiday from Ginny the astronaut wife. That healthy glow she sees in the mirror each morning is not just suntan. But now she is back home, and she has to think about the house and she has to always look presentable, and her head is brimming with ideas for stories she wants to write. For the first time in such a long time, deep in her heart she knows that Mrs Walden J Eckhardt and Virginia G Parker are one and the same person. So she makes herself a jug of iced tea, and she fetches the Hermes Baby and a sheaf of paper from the closet, and still in the white balloon-sleeved blouse and black skirt and waistcoat combination she dressed in that morning she goes to the dining table. She does not need her slacks, she does not need her plaid shirt. (But she does slip off her peep-toe heels.)
When Ginny was in the MSOB being shown one of the altitude chambers, a great steel drum of a room, with thick hatches and small portholes, like something you’d expect to find in the deepest abyss of the ocean… Peering into the altitude chamber, it occurred to Ginny the surface of Mars is no less inimical than the surface of the Moon. She’s read all those stories by Leigh and Catherine, the ones where Mars resembles the Mojave Desert more than the actual Red Planet, but Ginny has an idea for a story about the first mission to a realistic Mars, and she wonders if it is possible to make the journey using the same technology as the Apollo program. But three men—or in her story, women—cooped up in such a tiny space for a week is plausible, it’s what happened on Apollo 8 and 10… But for months? Perhaps even a year or more? She wonders if there are designs for bigger spacecraft on the drawing board somewhere—after all, what is NASA going to do once the Moon flights are over? Mars is the next obvious target.
She doesn’t know enough about the science. Walden’s manuals, the ones that are not general spaceflight texts, are exclusively about the Apollo spacecraft and flights to the Moon. Maybe some sort of space station could be used—it doesn’t have to be large, just big enough for two astronauts and their supplies on a trip of two years or so to Mars and back…
And what would they find there? She needs some sort of twist… And her thoughts spiral back to Catherine and Leigh and their stories and she thinks: ruins! Her Mars astronauts will find ancient alien ruins; and in among them they will discover something which changes the history of humankind, something which… gives humanity the stars. Yes, she likes that idea. Her astronauts find plans for a space drive invented by aliens, who visited Earth and Mars billions of years before…
Ginny tucks one foot under herself and begins typing. She leaves the title blank for now; later, as the story develops, perhaps something suitable will occur to her…
Reporters prowl the streets of El Lago and Nassau Bay; television trucks line the roads. Ginny peers through a gap in the curtains as cars, men in suits, women in smart jackets and skirts, bearing a bewildering array of network logos, pass by. They’re not there for her, but Jan, Joan and Pat. Ginny doesn’t know the three women well, they’re New Nine and the Fourteen, and while she’s met them at the AWC and Jan at the Scotts’, Ginny has remained on the outer edges of Togethersville. Having no children has proven not just a lack of common ground but also a barrier between herself and the other wives. Nor does Ginny go to church, or involve herself in community theatre or local schools. Ginny’s private life, her secret career, is not one she can share with Togethersville.
Early on the morning of 16 July, Ginny sits down to watch the Apollo 11 launch on her own, wishing she were at the Cape to witness the liftoff in person. Afterward, she telephones Mary, Ginny feels she can talk to her since both Joe and Walden were on the support crew for Apollo 10 and Joe is backup LMP on Apollo 14, which means he will fly on Apollo 17, two missions after Walden. Walden and Joe will one day ride a Saturn V into orbit, so Ginny and Mary want Apollo 11 to succeed—and are secretly hoping it might fail.
Not fail catastrophically—Ginny doesn’t think she could handle it if Neil, Buzz and Mike were killed; and she has no desire to wish such a fate upon them, or their families.
I heard, says Ginny, the lunar surface might be like a sea of dust and the LM will just sink into it.
Oh no, breathes Mary, you think so?