Dan Simmons: Phases of Gravity

Maggie stopped to watch the rich sunlight bathe the sides of the New Delhi control tower and terminal buildings in gold. She tucked a wayward strand of hair behind one ear and folded her arms. 'It's hard to believe that it's been almost eighteen months since the Challenger explosion,' she said. 'That was a terrible thing.'

'Yes,' said Baedecker.

It was ironic that he had been at the Cape for that flight. He had been present for only one previous shuttle launch, one of the Columbia 's first engineering flights almost five years earlier. He was there in January of 1986 for the Challenger disaster only because Cole Prescott, the vice president of Baedecker's firm, had asked him to escort a client who had bankrolled a subcomponent in the Spartan-Halley experiment package sitting in the Challenger 's payload bay.

The launch of 51-L had seemed nominal enough and Baedecker and his client were standing in the VIP stands three miles from Pad 39-B, shielding their eyes against the late-morning sun, when things went bad. Baedecker could remember marveling at how cold it was; he had brought only a light cotton jacket, and the morning had been the coldest he could ever recall at the Cape. Through binoculars, he had caught a glint of ice on the gantries surrounding the shuttle.

Baedecker remembered that he had been thinking about getting an early start to beat the leaving crowds when the loudspeaker carried the voice of NASA's public affairs officer. 'Altitude four point three nautical miles, down-range distance three nautical miles. Engines throttling up. Three engines now at one hundred four percent.' He had thought fleetingly of his own launch fifteen years before, of his job relaying data while Dave Muldorff 'flew' the monstrous Saturn V , until he was returned to the present as the loudspeaker carried Commander Dick Scobee's voice saying, 'Roger, go at throttle up,' and Baedecker had glanced toward the parking lots to see how congested the roads would be and a second later his client had said, 'Wow, those SRBs really create a cloud when they separate, don't they?' Baedecker had looked up then, seen the expanding, mushrooming contrail that had nothing to do with SRB separation, and instantly had recognized the sickening orange-red glow that lit the interior of the cloud as hypergolic fuels ignited on contact as they escaped from the shuttle's destroyed reaction control system and orbital maneuvering engines. A few seconds later the solid rocket boosters became visible as they careened mindlessly from the still-expanding cumulus of the explosion. Feeling sick to his stomach, Baedecker had turned to Tucker Wilson, a fellow Apollo -era pilot who was still on active duty with NASA, and had said without any real hope, 'RTLS?' Tucker had shaken his head; this was no return to launch site abort. This was what each of them had silently waited for during their own minutes of launch. By the time Baedecker had looked up again, the first large segments of the destroyed orbiter had begun their long, sad fall to the waiting crypt of the sea.

In the months since Challenger , Baedecker had found it hard to believe that the country had ever flown so frequently and competently into space. The long hiatus of earthbound doubt in which nothing flew had become the normal state of things to Baedecker, mixing in his own mind with a dreary sense of heaviness, of entropy and gravity triumphant, which had weighed upon him since his own world and family had been blasted apart some months earlier.

'My friend Bruce says that Scott didn't come out of his dorm room for two days after Challenger blew up,' said Maggie Brown as they stood in front of the New Delhi air terminal.

'Really?' said Baedecker. 'I didn't think that Scott had any interest in the space program anymore.' He looked up as the rising sun suddenly was obscured by clouds. Color flowed out of the world like water from a sink.

'He said he didn't care,' said Maggie. 'He said that Chernobyl and Challenger were just the first signs of the end of the technological era. A few weeks later, he made arrangements to come to India. Are you hungry, Richard?' It was not yet six-thirty in the morning but the terminal was filling with people. Others still lay sleeping on the cracked and filthy linoleum floors. Baedecker wondered if they were potential passengers or merely people seeking a roof for the night. A baby sat alone on a black vinyl chair and cried lustily. Lizards slid across the walls.

Maggie led him to a small coffee shop on the second floor where sleepy waiters stood with soiled towels over their arms. Maggie warned him not to try the bacon and then ordered an omelette, toast and jelly, and tea. Baedecker considered the idea of breakfast and then rejected it. What he really wanted was a Scotch. He ordered black coffee.

The big room was empty of other customers except for one table filled with a loud crew of Russians from an Aeroflot liner Baedecker could see out the window. They were snapping fingers to call over the tired Indian waiters. Baedecker glanced at the captain and then looked again. The big man looked familiar — although Baedecker told himself that a lot of Soviet pilots have such jowls and formidable eyebrows. Nonetheless, Baedecker wondered if he had met him during the three days he had toured Moscow and Star City with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project crew. He shrugged. It did not matter.

'How is Scott?' he asked.

Maggie Brown looked up and a slightly guarded expression seemed to settle over her like a fine veil. 'Fine. He says that he's never felt so good but I think he's lost some weight.' Baedecker had an image of his stocky son, in crew cut and T-shirt, wanting to play shortstop on the Houston Little League team but being too slow, fit only for right field. 'How is his asthma? Has this humidity caused it to kick up again?'

'No, the asthma's cured,' said Maggie levelly. 'The Master cured it, according to Scott.' Baedecker blinked. Even in recent years, in his empty apartment, he had found himself listening for the coughs, the raspy breathing. He remembered the times he had held the boy like an infant through the night, rocking him, both of them frightened by the gurgling in his lungs. 'Are you a follower of this . . . of the Master?' Maggie laughed and the veil seemed to slip from her green eyes. 'No. I wouldn't be here if I were. They don't allow them to leave the ashram for more than a few hours.'

'Hmmm,' said Baedecker and glanced at his watch. Ninety minutes until his flight left for Bombay.

'It'll be late,' said Maggie.

'Oh?' Baedecker wasn't sure of what she was talking about. 'Your flight. It'll be late. What are you going to do until Tuesday?' Baedecker had not thought about that. It was Thursday morning. He had planned to be in Bombay this same afternoon, see the electronics people and their earth station on Friday, take the train to Poona to visit Scott over the weekend, and fly out of Bombay for home on Monday afternoon.

'I'm not sure,' he said. 'Stay in Bombay a couple of extra days, I suppose. What was so important about this retreat that Scott couldn't take some time off?'

'Nothing,' said Maggie Brown. She drank the last of her tea and set the cup down with an abrupt movement that held the hint of anger. 'It's the same stuff as always. Lectures from the Master. Solitude sessions. Dances.'

'Dances?'

'Well, not really. They play music. The beat picks up. Faster and faster. They move around. Faster and faster. Finally they collapse from exhaustion. It cleanses the soul. That's part of the tantra yoga thing.' Baedecker could hear her silences. He'd read some about this ex-philosophy professor who had become the most recent guru to young rich kids from so many well-to-do nations. According to Time, the Indian locals had been shocked at reports of group sex at his ashrams. Baedecker had been shocked when Joan told him that Scott had dropped out of graduate school in Boston to go halfway around the world. In search of what?