The Ackroyds had turned in hours earlier. The house was silent. Baedecker closed the door to block any hint of light and waited for the stars to come out.
They did. One by one they emerged from the darkness. There were at least several hundred of them. The sunlit hemisphere of the earth, three diameters above the lunar peaks, also had been swabbed with phosphorescent paint. The moon's surface glowed in a gentle bath of reflected earthlight. The stars burned. Craters threw impenetrable shadows. The silence was absolute.
Baedecker lay back on the boy's bed, careful not to muss the spread. He thought about the coming day. After he got to Chicago and registered, he would look up Borman and Seretti. With any luck they could get together that night for an informal dinner where they could kick around the Air Bus deal before the convention really got under way.
After dinner, Baedecker would call Cole Prescott at his home in St. Louis. He would tell Prescott that he was resigning and work out the details of the quickest transition possible. Baedecker wanted to be out of St. Louis by early September. By Labor Day if he could.
Then what? Baedecker raised his eyes to the earth shining in a star-deepened sky. The swirls of cloud masses were brilliant. He would trade in his four-year-old Chrysler Le Baron for a sports car. A Corvette. No, something as sleek and powerful as a Corvette but with a real gearbox. Something fast and fun to drive. Baedecker grinned at the profound simplicity of it all.
Then what? More stars were becoming visible as his eyes adapted. The boy must have worked for hours, thought Baedecker and stared at the ceiling, seeing distant galaxies resolving themselves in great, glowing strands of stars. He would head west. It had been many years since Baedecker had driven across the continent. He would visit Dave out in Salem, spend some time with Tom Gavin in Colorado.
Then what? Baedecker raised his wrist and let it lie on his forehead. There were voices in his ears, but the background interference made them unintelligible. Baedecker thought of gray headstones in the grass and of dark forms scurrying between the rusted springs of a ‘38 Hudson. He thought of sunlight striking Glen Oak's water tower and the terrible beauty of his newborn son. He thought of darkness. He thought of the lights of the Ferris wheel turning soundlessly in the night.
Later, when Baedecker closed his eyes and slept, the stars continued to burn.
Part Three
Uncompahgre
'Are we all set to climb the mountain?'
Richard Baedecker and the other three hikers stopped in their last-minute adjustments of backpacks and hip belts to look up at Tom Gavin. Gavin was a small man, barely five foot seven, with a long face, short-cropped black hair, and a piercing gaze. When he spoke, even to pose a simple interrogative, his voice seemed propelled up out of his small frame by a wire-taut sense of urgency.
Baedecker nodded and bent over to shift the weight of his pack. He tried again to buckle the padded hip belt, but it would not go. Baedecker's stomach was just ample enough, the belt just short enough, that the metal teeth on the buckle would not secure on the webbing.
'Damn,' muttered Baedecker and tucked the belt back out of sight. He would make do with the shoulder straps, although already the weight of the pack was plucking a cord of pain on some nerve in his neck.
'Deedee?' asked Gavin. His tone of voice reminded Baedecker of the thousands of checklists he and Gavin had read through during simulations.
'Yes, dear.' Deedee Gavin was forty-five, the same age as her husband, but she had entered that ageless state which some women disappear into between their twenty-fifth and fiftieth birthdays. She was blond and bantam-thin, and although she was constantly animated, her voice and movements held none of the sense of tightly controlled tension that marked her husband's demeanor. Gavin usually appeared to be slightly frowning, as if preoccupied or mentally wrestling with some internal conundrum. Deedee Gavin showed no such signs of intellectual unrest or activity. Of all the various astronauts' wives Baedecker had known, Deedee Gavin had always seemed the least well matched. Baedecker's ex-wife, Joan, had predicted the Gavins' imminent divorce almost twenty years earlier after the first time the two couples had met at Edwards Air Force Base in the spring of 1965.
'Tommy?' asked Gavin.
Tom Gavin Jr. looked away and nodded tersely. He was wearing tattered denim shorts and a blue-and-white Campus Crusade for Christ T-shirt. The boy was already over six feet tall and still growing. At the moment he carried anger like a palpable thing, weighing on him like a second backpack.
'Dick?'
'Yo,' said Baedecker. His orange backpack held a tent and rain fly, food and water, extra clothes and rain gear, backpack stove and fuel, mess gear and first-aid kit, rope, flashlight, insect repellent, a Fiberfill sleeping bag and ground cloth, foam pad, and an assortment of other trail necessities. He had weighed it on the Gavins' bathroom scale that morning and it checked out at twenty-eight pounds, but Baedecker was sure that someone had surreptitiously added a few bowling balls and an extensive rock collection to the load since then. The pinched nerve on his neck felt like an overtightened guitar string. Baedecker idly wondered what kind of noise it would make when it snapped. 'Ready to go,' he said.
'Miss Brown?'
Maggie took a last tug at her pack's shoulder strap and smiled. To Baedecker it seemed that the sun had just come out from behind a cloud even though the Colorado sky had been cloudless all day. 'All set,' she said. 'Call me Maggie, Tom.' She had cut her hair since Baedecker had seen her in India three months earlier. She wore cotton shorts and a soft-looking plaid shirt open over a green halter top. Her legs were tan and muscular. Maggie carried the lightest load of any of them, not even a frame pack, just a blue canvas daypack with her goose-down sleeping bag tied beneath it. While everyone else wore massive hiking boots, Maggie wore only her short-topped Nikes. Baedecker half expected her to float away like an untethered balloon while the rest of them continued to trudge along like deep-sea divers.
'Okay, then,' said Gavin, 'let's get going, shall we?' He turned and led them away from their parked car at a brisk pace.
Above the meadow the road became something less than a jeep trail as it switched back and forth through stands of ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, and occasional aspen groves. Deedee rushed to keep up with her husband. Maggie fell into an easy gait a few paces behind. Baedecker worked hard to keep up, but at the end of the first three hundred yards of hill he was red-faced and staggering, his lungs laboring to find more oxygen than was available in the thin air at nine thousand feet. Only Tom Jr. lagged farther back, occasionally throwing a stone at a tree or carving something into an aspen with the sheath knife from his belt.
'Come on, let's keep up the pace,' called Gavin from the next switchback. 'We're not even on the trail yet.' Baedecker nodded, too winded to speak. Maggie turned around and bounded back downhill toward him. Baedecker mopped his face, shifted the pack against the sweat-soaked shirt on his back, and wondered at the sheer insanity of anyone going downhill when they would just have to turn around and go back up again.
'Hi,' she said.
'Hi,' managed Baedecker.
'It can't be too long before we camp,' she said. 'The sun'll be behind the ridge in forty-five minutes or so. Besides, we'll want to stay in the lower part of the canyon tonight, the terrain gets pretty steep in another two miles.'
'How do you know that?' Maggie smiled and pulled a strand of hair back over her ear. It was a gesture Baedecker remembered well from India. He was glad to see that her shorter haircut hadn't eliminated the need for the motion. 'I looked at the topo map Tom showed you last night in Boulder,' she said.