Ginny cannot know she will be proven wrong before a year has passed. On 27 January 1967, no more than six months away, there is a fire in the Apollo 1 command module during a plugs-out test at Launch Complex 34. The crew of three, Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White, all perish. The Apollo program will be delayed for over eighteen months as the spacecraft is redesigned to rectify the defects which led to the tragedy. Ginny will spend that day weeping, like many of the other astronauts’ wives, not only because she knows the three widows, although not closely, and she knows the men, although barely at all, but because she has rudely learnt, as has every astronaut wife, that her husband flirts with jeopardy to a level she has not previously contemplated or wanted to believe.
It is perhaps unfair to characterise Ginny as happily ignorant of the perils of spaceflight, and those specifically of the Apollo space program. She writes about space travel, after all; but in her stories it is all so easy, spaceships flying up into the heavens and zipping about the galaxy as if it were no more onerous than a cross-country flight in a plane or an ocean crossing aboard a liner. But that’s not entirely true—she has learned to live with the daily prospect of a uniformed stranger with a grave expression appearing on her doorstep, much as Lieutenant Colonel Hollenbeck did in the first paragraph of this novel. That incident not only illustrated the danger of Walden’s chosen profession, but showed also that Ginny’s immunity to it is no more than skin-deep, a thin veneer of confidence no thicker than a layer of Revlon’s “Touch & Glow” .
And yet… The romance attached to NASA’s astronauts, to the organisation’s roster of successful space flights, makes Ginny believe her man is indeed safer now. Perhaps she only wants to believe it, as she gazes across the split-level lounge at her mother sprawled elegantly on a sofa, gimlet in one hand, cigarette in the other; and Ginny looks down at the gimlet in her own hand, and all she can think of is a softly-moaning desert beneath a sky like a dome of pure blue ceramic, and her imminent drive across three states through a landscape no different, to reach her husband, who may be going to the most desolate desert of them all on the surface of the Moon.
Ginny leaves early the next day, setting out on a California July morning that promises freshness but will no doubt soon blur to muggy haze, turning her back on the ocean, though she has not lived within sight of it for many years, and aiming the Impala at Tucson, Arizona. The US Highway 80 runs west out of San Diego, through the chaparral and canyons of the Cucamaya Mountains, across the green checkerboard fields of the Coachella Valley south of the Salton Sea, and down into the Sonoran Desert.
I could perhaps pass quickly over the long drive east, much as Apollo 16 astronaut Charlie Duke does in his autobiography Moonwalker: “Man, I’m an astronaut. I’ve got it made! I thought to myself as we rolled into Houston.” Or, as Willie G Moseley writes in his biography of Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa, Smoke Jumper, Moon Pilot: “the family traveled from California to Houston in a long station wagon”. Or even James Irwin, whose place in the space program Walden Jefferson Eckhardt has taken in this story, who wrote in his book, To Rule the Night: “I drove down to Houston in my little Kharmann Ghia and reported in at NASA May 10.”
Journeys, however, are important in people’s lives, although they are probably accorded more importance than they strictly deserve in fiction. They’re not simply, in narrative terms, a relocation but also a metaphor for change—and for Ginny and Walden, great change has indeed entered their lives. This lonesome drive across Arizona and Texas is a threshold moment for Ginny. She is alone in the car, often alone on the road, in the desert, with nothing but herself and perhaps intermittent radio stations for company. She has been briefly enfolded in the maternal bosom, but now she is once again independent, her own woman—albeit linked to her husband of almost eight years by a strong thread of love and respect, and still identified in official correspondence as Mrs Walden J Eckhardt, as if she possesses no name of her own, no history prior to her marriage. Perhaps the landscape she drives through reflects her changing moods, perhaps it triggers trains of thought which speed alongside the Impala as it follows the endless asphalt, accompanied only by the hum of the car’s tyres, the throb of its engine and the whistle of the wind. She wonders if the surface of Mars resembles this near-lifeless land, she considers writing a story about the Red Planet. She remembers a serialised novel in Analog last year which was set on a desert world, where tribes from the deep desert fought Imperial occupiers who had seized their planet to control a unique substance required for interstellar travel. The author’s name was Frances, but they all knew it was a man—editor Kay Tarrant, conscious of her magazine’s readership, felt a female pen-name more appropriate.
The Impala is not fitted with air-conditioning and once out of the mountains the interior of the car quickly heats up. Even with the windows down, the air is close and seems to possess a hot and smothering weight. Ginny has anticipated this and is wearing a pair of white cotton shorts, but when the backs of her thighs begin to stick to the seat she realises she has chosen badly. She feels quite invisible in this vast empty landscape, a brightly-coloured mote adrift on a sea of sand grains… But she proves sadly all too visible when she stops for gas at a station on the outskirts of Tucson. The shorts, her bare legs, attract male attention, not just eyes she can feel creeping all over her, but comments and whistles too. She’s not in California now, she has spent too long in military society, it has slipped her mind the impact a lone woman, especially an under-dressed one, might have among male strangers. She pays for her gasoline quickly, eager to return to the solitude of the road.
The route from San Diego to Houston is very different in 2015 to how it existed in 1966. A single Interstate, I-10, now stretches from Santa Monica, California, to Jacksonville, Florida, crossing the state of Texas at its widest point. Much of I-10 was built during the 1970s and so predates Ginny’s migration—and sometimes not everything required for research can be found online. This is one of the perils of writing a story set in the past and in another nation, “a different country” in both senses of the phrase.
Ginny spends the night in a motel in El Paso, and the following morning she dresses more comfortably, and modestly, in a mid length checked cotton skirt. She takes to the road early, driving south out of El Paso, scrubby desert to either side and the road running runway-straight through it, and off to her right a line of dark green marking the fertile valley of the Rio Grande, and beyond it the tumbled purple blocks of the Sierra Madre louring on the horizon. She finds the scenery bleak and oppressive and elects to push on, thirteen straight hours behind the wheel; and though San Antonio promises a welcome haven when she reaches the city in the evening, she presses on and arrives in League City just after nine at night.
Walden seemed unconcerned at the prospect of her “solo flight”, and his directions to the apartment he has rented in League City are perfunctory—she has to forgive him, he has other things on his mind—but she finds the Cardinal Apartments easily enough, turning off the Gulf Freeway onto Main Street, and there it is, on the other side of US 75 in one of the new subdivisions, at the top of Texas Avenue, two or so miles from the junction.
She slips her bare feet into her sandals, clambers from the Impala and stretches. Pulling her sunglasses from her crown, she throws them onto the car’s bench seat, and then turns about and regards her surroundings. The Cardinal Apartments, looking more like a motel than an apartment complex, with a balcony giving access to second floor apartments. But the area is certainly greener than she has been used to, greener than the Mojave around Edwards with its bent and twisted Joshua trees, greener than the scrubby garden of their house on 16th Street, greener than the desert she has spent the last day driving through. She can see the black clouds of trees against the glowing night sky across the street, and hear the conspiratorial whisper of their leaves in the faint breeze. From somewhere over the trees, the hum of traffic faintly intrudes. The temperature is about eighty, a little warmer than Edwards. She turns back to the apartment building, and is hit by a flood of tiredness. In a single moment, she feels all those hours of driving, and her lack of motion gives her a sharp and momentary sense of vertigo, a brief spin of nauseating dizziness.