April 1970 and Apollo 13 puts the space program back on the front page, but not for the right reasons. Halfway to the Moon, an oxygen tank in the service module explodes and suddenly the crew of three, Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, could die in space. Once again, the streets are mobbed with reporters, and they’re at their thickest around the houses of Marilyn and Mary (Jack is one of the program’s few bachelors). Togethersville swings into action, and even Ginny finds herself running groceries into the besieged Lovell home in Timber Cove; and she does her best to sympathise with Marilyn, but like all the astronaut wives she’s privately glad it’s not Walden up there.
But NASA shows what it’s made of, and they get the guys home safely, the command module splashes down in the South Pacific, southwest of Samoa and only four miles from the recovery ship.
In September of that year, the dream dies a little when Apollo 18 through 20 are cancelled, and even the promise of a space station, Skylab, can’t lessen the hurt. Some of the rookies who were down for those cancelled missions, they’re angry and disappointed, and Ginny hears it from their wives. It’s worse for the scientists, who are especially bitter that Apollo will forever remain the preserve of test pilots and fighter pilots. Man should go to the Moon for science, NASA should send scientists, but that’s not going to happen now.
So Walden and Dave have to learn the science if the scientists are going to get any useful data out of the mission, and that means trip after trip to Hawaii, the San Gabriel Mountains, the Coso Hills, even back to the Mojave Desert, to learn geology. When Walden is home on his infrequent stay overs, he complains he’s a pilot not a rock hunter, but as the weeks and months pass his attitude changes and he surprises Ginny by getting excited as he talks geology. He’s learnt something new, something completely outside the world in which he has lived his entire life, and the wonder of it animates him whenever he discusses it. Now he wants to go to the Moon not because it’s there, not because it will put him at the top of the pyramid, not because putting a man on the lunar surface is such a bold enterprise… No, he wants to go because he might find some really exciting rocks on the Moon.
By the end of January 1971, when Apollo 14 launches, Togethersville is undergoing changes. There have been two intakes of astronauts since Walden and Ginny arrived, but plenty of people have also left, and that sense of community, the one Ginny never quite plugged into, it’s slowly fading away. Only Al, who is commanding Apollo 14, and Deke, who has never flown, remain from the Original Seven. Neil is retiring and Frank has left from the Next Nine; of the Fourteen, Buzz and Wally Cunningham are going, and Mike has already gone. No one from the Original Nineteen, Walden’s group, has spoken of leaving NASA, but with so many astronauts, so few flights and so much uncertainty about what comes next, Ginny thinks more will go in the next couple of years. In fact, what will she and Walden do after he’s flown on Apollo 15? It’s scheduled for that summer—will he want to stay in the astronaut corps, or return to USAF? It’s no good asking him, she drops a few hints on the infrequent weekends he’s home, but he doesn’t know how to answer. His head is full of Apollo and geology, and he’s so tightly focused on his mission he can’t even conceive of a world after it.
Ginny is having her own problems imagining a world for her stories. Perhaps that’s why she’s having so little success selling them, the world in which they’re set is the real world, more or less. It’s not the Mars of Northwest Smith, nor Ursula’s Ekumen. Take this one she’s currently working on, about a flight to the Moon which turns into disaster when the spacecraft runs out of fuel and in a decaying orbit. It’s an Apollo spacecraft—the astronauts aboard it are on their way to a Moon base, although she suspects there will never be a Moon base, the cancellation of all the flights after Apollo 17 has seen to that. But who knows what the future will bring? Despite this, she has set her story in 1985. Fifteen years into the future. Perhaps space flight will be routine by then—or rather, more routine than the press seems to be treating Apollo 14.
After nearly five years in Houston as an astronaut wife—the AWC meetings for coffee and cake at the Lakewood Yacht Club ended before Apollo 11 launched—but Louise Shepard is someone Ginny barely knows at all. She’s an Original Seven wife, and a Boston Brahmin, and she moves in completely different circles. The Shepards don’t even live in Nassau Bay, El Lago or Timber Cove, but in River Oaks. Al Shepard, a man Walden respects but does not like, is going to walk on the Moon, and everyone knows he trod on plenty of people to get there. Ginny watches the Apollo 14 EVA on television, just like the rest of America, marvelling at the colour footage broadcast direct from the lunar surface.
Yet for all the realness of the television pictures, in stark contrast to the blurred black-and-white of the Apollo 11 landing—and the picture quality for Apollo 14 is not that good, a bit blurry, the picture occasionally breaking up—but there’s a seriousness to the way Al and Ed go about their activities on the lunar surface, and to Ginny it’s like something is missing… the excitement, the wonder, the fun.
So she rises from the sofa, turns her back on the television, and goes into the yard. The sky is clear but it’s only mid-morning and she can’t see the Moon, not even a ghostly presentiment of it, the temperature is in the mid-fifties and the air is still. She hugs her torso and she shivers as she realises only a few months and Walden will be up there, a quarter of a million miles away. She thinks about the cost of the Apollo program, the deaths and broken marriages, and her own loneliness for much of that time. With Ramstein and Edwards, it has been a mostly lonely life since she left SDSU, just Walden and herself, her science fiction pen pals, the handful of wives she’s become friends with, in USAF and NASA…
And via some chain of thought she cannot explain, she wonders if it was wrong to deny Walden, to deny herself, children. She was sensible about it, she prided herself on her good sense, and she was grateful their childlessness allowed her to live her own life… of sorts. But Walden has been away so much since he joined NASA, and even more so these last two years after being assigned to Apollo 15, and she wonders now if she made a mistake.
No, damn it. If she has dreams, they’re of visiting other planets, not of diapers and pacifiers. She turns on her heel and re-enters the house. Apollo 14 is still on the television, but she ignores it. She stalks to the bedroom, takes the typewriter and paper from the closet, her folder of stories from her dressing table, and sets herself up at the dining table. She flicks through the stories she has written, and finds the one about the spacecraft in the decaying lunar orbit.