Derek Lambert: The Red Dove

When she heard the car she ran across their patch with its top-heavy sunflowers and bolting lettuces, the only part of Padre Island that he didn’t seem to care about. When she saw his face she put a hand to her mouth as though in pain herself, then opened her arms to him.

As they walked across the patch she said to him: ‘We have a visitor.’

‘Yeah? Who?’

‘A man called Reynolds,’ she said.

The green dossier lay on the cracked glass surface of the cane table standing between them. Reynolds tapped it with one finger and said: ‘I want to level with you; that’s why I want you to read it.’

The dossier was marked TOP SECRET and bore the coding SI 202, Massey’s name and, in the bottom right hand corner, a round coffee stain. Massey picked it up and flipped the pages, 183 of them.

‘Didn’t you always level with me?’ he asked.

‘I don’t want to discuss anything now. I want you to read that, then we’ll talk tomorrow.’

‘Why the hell would you suddenly want to level with me after all this time?’

‘Tomorrow,’ Reynolds said.

Massey poured himself whisky from a half-full bottle of J & B. Reynolds sipped an orange juice. After bathing Massey’s face Rosa had gone into town to buy groceries; the only other occupant of the shack was an old green turtle crippled with oil-tar that two boys had brought to be cleaned up. Outside the wind pushed at the fragile walls of the shack and played music in the bamboo roof.

‘Now,’ Massey said. He sat down opposite Reynolds.

Reynolds shrugged. ‘I’ve got a favour to ask,’ he said.

‘So, you’ve got a favour to ask. The man ruins my life and then comes round to ask a favour!’

‘It’s vitally important,’ Reynolds said. ‘That’s why you’ve got to read the dossier. Otherwise you won’t believe me.’

Massey stared at Reynolds; the innocence was still there, just as it had been in 1974 when he had been Deputy Director (Operations) of the CIA: but the innocence was a deception, like everything about Reynolds; it derived, Massey had long ago decided, from that brand of patriotism that is viewed through a gunsight, the illusion compounded by the silver hair so soft that it stirred in the draughts creeping through the walls.

Massey went into the kitchen and fetched a bowl of water, washing-up liquid and a dish-cloth. He knelt beside the turtle and squirted some of the liquid on to its scarred old shell; in the morning he would take it to Ila Loetscher.

‘Believe you? You’ve got to be kidding. I’d only believe you if you told me you were lying.’ Delicately he cleaned the polished, jig-saw patterns on the head of the turtle. ‘You’re wasting your time, Reynolds. Go find yourself some other lunatic.’

‘That’s just the point,’ Reynolds said, ‘you weren’t crazy.’

The turtle, who had been enjoying the rhythmic movements of Massey’s hand looked up, head bobbing, when the movements stopped.

Massey splashed more whisky into his glass. Finally, he said softly: ‘What the fuck are you talking about, Reynolds? You said I was crazy, everyone said I was crazy.’

Pointing at the dossier, Reynolds said: ‘It’s all in there, read it.’ He finished his juice and stood up. ‘I’ll be back in the morning. Early.’

‘What makes you think I’ll be here waiting?’

‘I know you’ll be here waiting.’

Massey started cleaning the turtle again; it lowered its head contentedly.

Reynolds opened the door. In the wind-blown dusk Massey fancied he could see another man standing outside but he couldn’t be sure. The wind charged the room. ‘Until tomorrow,’ Reynolds said, shutting the door behind him.

A flake of bamboo parchment fluttered round the room before settling on the table beside Massey’s empty glass. Massey picked up the dossier, put it down again and said to the turtle: ‘I’m more interested in getting you clean than reading this bullshit,’ which was a lie.

Nevertheless, he finished cleaning the turtle; then he took the dossier into the bedroom, lay on the big sighing bed and, while Rosa, who had returned from the store, clattered about in the kitchen, began to read.

As he turned the pages his hands trembled. The words became pictures and fearfully he joined them.

Massey had always known that the perils of space flight were not confined to the obvious, accidents which NASA always described as malfunctions. There were more insidious dangers locked inside the minds of the astronauts. The Earth-bound lives of some of those early, crewcut pioneers had been totally disrupted; they had parted from their wives, plunged into manic depressions, taken to drink; a lucky few had become evangelists as though in space they had seen God.

Massey had triumphantly passed the early medicals in which ear, nose and throat disorders, faulty eyesight, internal diseases, neuro-circulatory weakness and motion sickness were the most common causes of rejection. His reactions to hypoxia and loss of atmospheric pressure in a chamber simulating an altitude of 38,000 feet had also been excellent.

The tests he feared most were the vestibular checks designed to examine balance and orientation in space. Some astronauts had experienced illusions which could prove fatal. ‘You might be making a lunar trip but you don’t want to be a lunatic,’ a comical scientist had observed. Funny. When he had completed the tests sweat was running from his body; but he had passed according to the electrodes attached to his body, according to his voice patterns.

Then he had gone to school. Space navigation, astronomy, meteorology, geography and technical preparation – manual control, life-support system, etcetera – for the moon shot in a mock-up of Apollo. He had also been prepared for weightlessness, simulated by immersion in water, free-fall parachuting and, briefly, in a curving flight in a supersonic jet, and introduced to the phenomenon of acceleration on launch and re-entry in a flight chamber where scientists monitored fifty physical and mental reactions.

He joined the other two crew members for lunar education – how to operate on the Moon in one-sixth gravity conditions – but, as he was piloting the command module, it was unlikely that he would ever follow in the footsteps of Neil Armstrong who on Monday, 21 July 1969, became the first man to step on to the moon.

During the final medicals Massey’s mind was re-examined. How would he relate to the other crew members? How would he react to an emergency? How high was his level of emotional stability? To ascertain the latter they isolated him in a soundproof chamber – and questioned his wife, Helen. She, having an extremely high emotional stability, confirmed that he was ‘cool’.

It took three and a half years to train Massey, and all the time he sensed that somewhere there was a flaw in the system. A hidden place in his subconscious – his soul? – that no electrode, no voice stress analyser, no computer, had reached.

In his shack on North Padre Island Robert Massey turned a page of the dossier. Rosa came into the bedroom, undressed and stood for a moment naked beside the bed before slipping into bed and kissing him; then she turned away from him because she knew he was somewhere else.

Massey was in orbit round the Moon. Alone.

On the Moon, on the fringe of the Sea of Serenity, the commander and a geologist were collecting samples in the Lunar Rover.

So far everything was proceeding as planned except for a Master Alarm warning which, as far as they and Houston could determine, was without foundation. But every astronaut still remembered the explosion amid the oxygen tanks that had, in 1970, ripped open Apollo 13. A warning during testing had gone unheeded, according to Commander Jim Lovell.

But Massey wasn’t worried. The reverse, in fact: he was euphoric. Below the pocked surface of the Moon was silver green, ahead in the darkness another moon was inching over the horizon, only this wasn’t a moon, it was the Earth. A repeat of the Earthrise photograph that Frank Borman had taken on Christmas Day, 1968.