The Huey passed over the lip of a canyon. One second they were fifty feet above a gravel road, and the next instant they were eight hundred feet above a hidden valley where a stream ran through cottonwood groves, and fields lay pregnant with winter wheat and grass. There was a ghost town in the center of the valley. Here and there a tin roof poked above bare branches or fall foliage and at one place a church steeple was visible. Baedecker noticed a large old school looking west from high ground above the town. It was only five P.M., but it was obvious that the valley had been in shadow for some time.
Dave kicked the Huey over in a diving turn that had the rotor blades almost perpendicular to the ground for several seconds. They flew low over a main street that appeared to consist of five abandoned buildings and a rusted gas pump. They banked left and passed over a white church, its spire dwarfed by a jagged tooth of a boulder behind and beyond the churchyard.
Baedecker's intercom clicked. 'Welcome to Lonerock,' said Dave.
Most of the friends and mourners are gone by the time Baedecker returns to Dave and Diane's house in Salem. The snow he had seen near Mt. St. Helens now falls as a light drizzle.
Tucker Wilson greets Baedecker at the door. Before that morning, he had not seen Tucker since the day of the Challenger disaster two years earlier. An Air Force pilot and a backup member of the Apollo team, Tucker had finally commanded a Skylab mission a year before Baedecker had left NASA. Tucker is a short man with a wrestler's build, rubicund face, and only a trace of sandy hair left above the ears. Unlike so many test pilots who tended to speak with southern or neutral accents, Tucker's speech was accented with the flat vowels of New England. 'Di's upstairs with Katie and her sister,' Tucker says. 'Come on in Dave's den for a drink.'
Baedecker follows him. The book-lined room with its leather chairs and old rolltop desk is a study rather than a den. Baedecker sinks into a chair and looks around while Tucker pours the Scotch. The shelves hold an eclectic mix of expensive collectors' editions, popular hardbacks, paperbacks, and stacks of journals and papers. On a stretch of clear wall near the window are a dozen or so photographs: Baedecker recognizes himself in one, smiling next to Tom Gavin as Richard Nixon stiffly extends his hand to a grinning Dave.
'Water or ice?' asks Tucker.
'No,' says Baedecker. 'Neat, please.'
Tucker hands Baedecker his glass and sits in the antique swivel chair at the desk. He seems uncomfortable there, picks up a typewritten sheet on the desk, puts it down, and takes a long drink.
'Any problems with the flight this morning?' asks Baedecker. Tucker had flown in the missing man formation.
'Uh-uh,' says Tucker. 'But there might've been if that overcast had got any lower. We were frying chickens in the barnyard as it was.' Baedecker nods and tastes his Scotch. 'Aren't you in line for a ride after the shuttle program resumes?' he asks Tucker.
'Yep. Next November if things get back on track the way they're supposed to. We're carrying a DOD payload so we'll get to skip all that conquering heroes preflight press conference crap.' Baedecker nods. The Scotch is The Glenlivet, unblended, Dave's favorite. 'What do you think, Tucker,' he says, 'is the thing safe to fly?' The shorter pilot shrugs. 'Two and a half years,' he says. 'More time to fix things than the hiatus after Gus and Chaffee and White died in Apollo 1. Of course, they gave the SRB fix to Morton Thiokol and they're the ones who certified the O-rings safe in the first place.' Baedecker does not smile. He had seen the strange, incestuous dance between contractors and government agencies and, like most pilots, was not amused. 'I hear they'll have the new escape system in place for the first flight.' Now Tucker does laugh. 'Yeah, have you seen it, Dick? They've got a long pole stowed in the lower bay, and while the command pilot holds the ship straight and level and subsonic, the crew hitches up and slides out like trout on a line.'
'Wouldn't have helped Challenger,' says Baedecker.
'It reminds me of the AIDS joke about the heroin junkie who isn't afraid of catching anything when he uses dirty needles because he's wearing a condom,' says Tucker. He drinks the last of his Scotch and pours more. 'Well, hell,' he says, 'there are more than seven hundred Criticality One items in the shuttle stack, and my guess is that the goddamn O-rings are the only ones we don't have to worry about.'
Baedecker knew that a Criticality One item was a system or component, which had no reliable backup; if that item failed, so did the mission. 'You won't be landing at the Cape anymore?' says Baedecker.
Tucker shakes his head. On his first shuttle mission, Wilson had landed Columbia on the long strip at Cape Canaveral only to have a tire blow and two brakes wear to the rim. 'They know now that it's too damn risky,' he says. 'We'll be ferrying from Edwards or White Sands for the foreseeable future.' He takes a long drink. 'But what the hell,' he says and grins, 'no guts, no glory.'
'What's the thing like to fly?' asks Baedecker. For the first time in days, he is able to think about something other than Dave.
Tucker leans forward, animated now, his hands making open-fingered gestures in the air. 'It's damned incredible, Dick,' he says. 'Coming down is like trying to deadstick in a DC-9 at Mach 5. You have to argue with the damn computers to make them let you fly it, but, by God, when you're flying it you're really flying. Have you been in the updated simulator?'
'Had a tour,' says Baedecker. 'Didn't take time to sit in the left seat.'
'You've got to try it,' Tucker says. 'Come down to the Cape next fall and I'll clear some time for you.'
'Sounds good,' says Baedecker. He finishes his drink and turns the glass in his hands, allowing it to catch the lamplight. 'Did you see Dave much down at the Cape?' Tucker shakes his head. 'He hated the idea of all those congressmen and senators getting free rides while us ex-fighter pukes waited years for another go. He was on all the right committees and worked hard for the program, but he disagreed with the Teacher in Space and Journalist in Space crap. He said the shuttle was no place for people who put their pants on one leg at a time.' Baedecker chuckles. The allusion was to one of the first incidents to get Dave in trouble with NASA. During Muldorff's first flight in an Apollo module, an earth-orbital engineering flight, Dave had held a live TV broadcast for the folks at home. Tucker Wilson had been there with him when Dave said something to the effect, 'Well, folks, for years we astronaut-types've been telling you that we're just regular folks. Not heroes, but just like everybody else. Guys who put their pants on one leg at a time like everyone else. Well, today I'm here to show you otherwise.' And with that Muldorff had pirouetted in zero-g, wearing only his in-flight 'long johns' and Snoopy cap, and with a single, graceful move, had tugged on his flight coveralls . . . two legs at a time.
Baedecker crosses to a bookshelf and pulls out a volume of Yeats. Half a dozen slips of paper serve as markers.
'You learn anything this afternoon?' asks Tucker.
Baedecker shakes his head and slides the book back. 'I talked to Munsen and Fields. They're just getting around to transferring the last of the wreckage up to McChord. Bob's going to arrange it so I can hear the tape tomorrow. The Crash Board has some preliminary ideas already but they're taking tomorrow off.'