'Where would you be going?' he asked. He needed a second to form a polite rejection.
'I'll be leaving Delhi tomorrow,' she said brightly. 'I'll fly to Varanasi, then to Khajuraho, a stopover in Calcutta, then Agra and back to Poona later in the week.'
'What's in Agra?'
'Only the Taj Mahal,' said Maggie and leaned toward him with a mischievous look in her eyes. 'You can't see India and not see the Taj Mahal. It's not allowed.'
'Sorry. I'll have to,' said Baedecker. 'I have an appointment in Bombay tomorrow and you say Scott will be back Tuesday. I need to fly home no later than a week from Friday. I'm stretching this trip out as it is.' He could see the disappointment even as she nodded.
'Besides,' he said, 'I'm not much of a tourist.'
The American flag had looked absurd to Baedecker. He had expected to be stirred by it. Once in Djakarta, after being away from the States for only nine months, he had been moved to tears by the sight of the American flag flying from the stern of an old freighter in the harbor. But on the moon — a quarter million miles from home — he could think only of how silly the flag looked with its wire extended stiffly to simulate a breeze in the hard vacuum.
He and Dave had saluted. They stood downsun of the television camera they had erected and saluted. Unconsciously, they had already fallen into the habit of leaning forward in the low-gee 'tired ape' position Aldrin had warned them about in briefings. It was comfortable and felt natural, but it photographed poorly.
They had finished the salute and were ready to lope off to other things, when President Nixon talked to them. For Baedecker it had been Nixon's patched-in, impromptu phone call that had pushed an unreal experience into the realm of the surreal. The president obviously had not planned what he would say during his call, and the monologue wandered. Several times it seemed that he had ended his sentence and they would begin to reply only to have Nixon's voice come in again. The transmission lag added to the problem. Dave did most of the talking. Baedecker said, 'Thank you, Mr. President,' several times. For some reason Nixon thought that they would want to know the football scores from the previous day's games. Baedecker loathed football. He wondered if this prattle about football was Nixon's idea of how men talked to men.
'Thank you, Mr. President,' Baedecker had said. And all the time he stood there in the camera's eye, facing a frozen flag against a black sky and listening to the static-lashed maunderings of his nation's chief executive, Baedecker was thinking about the unauthorized object he had hidden in the contingency sample pocket above his right knee.
The Delhi-Bombay flight was three hours late getting off. A British helicopter salesman sitting next to Baedecker in the terminal said that the Air India pilot and flight engineer had been having a feud for weeks now. One or the other would hold up the flight every day.
Once airborne, Baedecker tried to doze, but the incessant chiming of call-buttons kept him awake. They had no sooner taken off than every other person on the aircraft seemed to be ringing for the saried stewardesses. The three men in the row ahead of Baedecker were loudly demanding pillows, demanding drinks, and snapping their fingers in an imperious manner that went against his Midwestern, egalitarian grain.
Maggie Brown had left him shortly after breakfast. She had scribbled her 'Grand Tour Itinerary' on a napkin and stuffed it into the coat pocket of his suit. 'You never know,' she said. 'Something might happen to change your mind.' Baedecker had asked a few more questions about Scott before she drove off in a black-and-yellow cab, but his overall impression was of a girl who had mistakenly followed her lover to a strange and alien land and who no longer knew how he felt or thought.
They were flying in a French Air Bus. Baedecker noticed with a professional eye how the wings flexed with greater latitude than a Boeing product and noted with some surprise the steep angle of attack the Indian pilot chose. American airlines would not allow their pilots to horse the machine around like that for fear of alarming their passengers. The Indian passengers did not seem to notice. Their descent toward Bombay was so rapid that it reminded Baedecker of a ride he had hopped into Pleiku in a C-130 where the pilot had been forced to drop in almost vertically during the final approach for fear of small-arms fire.
Bombay seemed composed totally of shacks with tin roofs and factories rotting with age. Then Baedecker caught a glimpse of high-rise buildings and the Arabian Sea, the plane banked at a fifty-degree angle, a plateau rose to greet them out of the shacks, and they were down. Baedecker nodded a silent compliment to the pilot.
The cab ride from the airport to his hotel was almost too much for Baedecker's exhausted senses. Immediately beyond the gates of Bombay's Santa Cruz Airport the slums began. Dozens of square miles of tin-roofed shacks, sagging canvas lean-tos, and narrow, muddy lanes stretched on either side of the highway. At one point a twenty-foot-high water pipeline cut through the tangle of hovels like a garden hose through an anthill. Brown-skinned children ran along the top or reclined on its rusty sides. Everywhere there was the dizzying movement of uncountable bodies.
It was very hot. The humid air pouring in the open windows of the taxi hit Baedecker like a steam-heated exhaust. Occasionally he caught glimpses of the Arabian Sea to his right. A huge billboard in the suburbs proclaimed 0 DAYS TO THE MOONSOON but there was no cooling rain from the low ceiling of clouds, only a reflection of the terrible heat and an ominous sense of weight that settled on his shoulders like a yoke.
The city itself was even more dizzying. Every side street became a tributary of white-shirted humanity pouring into ever-larger streams and rivers of population gone insane. Thousands of tiny storefronts offered their brightly colored wares to the millions of thronging pedestrians. The cacophony of car horns, motors, and bicycle bells wrapped Baedecker in a thick blanket of isolation. Gigantic, lurid billboards touted movies starring actors with pink cheeks and actresses with raven hair, bee-stung lips, and a purplish cast to their complexions.
Then they were on Marine Drive, the Queen's Necklace, and the sea was a pounding, gray presence to their right. To his left, Baedecker caught glimpses of cricket fields, open-air crematoriums, temples, and high-rise office buildings. He thought that he could see a thin cloud of vultures circling above the Tower of Silence, waiting for the bodies of the Parsee faithful, but when he looked away, the specks continued to circle in the periphery of his vision.
The blast of air-conditioning inside the Oberoi Sheraton made his sodden skin tremble. Baedecker hardly remembered registering or following the redcoated porter to his room on the thirtieth floor. The carpets smelled of some sort of carbolic, antiseptic cleanser, a group of loud Arabs in the elevator reeked of musk, and for a second Baedecker thought that he was going to be sick. Then he was slipping a five-rupee note to the porter, the drapes were drawn across the wide window, the door was closed, sounds were muffled, and Baedecker tossed his seersucker coat on a chair and collapsed on the bed. He was asleep in ten seconds.
They had taken the Rover almost three miles, a record. It was a bumpy ride. The powdered moondust flew out from each wheel in an odd, flat trajectory that fascinated Baedecker. The world was bright and empty. Their shadow leaped ahead of them. Beyond the crackle of the radio and the internal suit sounds, Baedecker sensed a silence cold and absolute.