Dan Simmons - Phases of Gravity

'Uh-huh,' said Dave, 'and that's Timberline Lodge where they did the exterior shots for The Shining .'

'Mmmm,' said Baedecker.

'Did you see the movie?' asked Dave over the intercom. 'No.'

'Read the book?'

'No.'

'Ever read any Stephen King?'

'No.'

'Jesus,' said Dave, 'for a literate man, Richard, you're incredibly poorly versed in the classics. You do remember Stanley Kubrick, don't you?'

'How could I forget him?' said Baedecker. 'You dragged me to see 2001: A Space Odyssey five times the year it was at the Cinerama theater in Houston.' It was not an exaggeration. Muldorff had been obsessed with the movie and had insisted on his crewmates repeatedly seeing it with him. Before their flight, Dave had talked enthusiastically about smuggling an inflatable black monolith along only to 'discover it' buried under the lunar surface during one of their EVAs. A shortage of inflatable black monoliths had frustrated that plan so Dave had contented himself with having Mission Control awaken them at the end of each sleep period by playing the opening chords of Also Sprach Zarathustra . Baedecker had thought it mildly amusing the first few times.

'Kubrick's masterpiece,' said Dave and banked the Huey to the right. They flew low over a pass where tents and camper-trailers huddled around a small mountain lake, late afternoon sunlight dappling the water, and then the land was falling away from them, the pine forest looked less green to Baedecker, and low brown hills became visible to the south and east. They flew on at a steady five thousand feet as the land changed to irrigated farmland and then to high desert. Dave spoke softly into his microphone to traffic control, joked once with someone at a private airport south of Maupin, and then switched back to the intercom. 'See that river?'

'Yeah.'

'That's the John Day. Scott's guru bought up a little town to the southwest of there. The same one Rajneesh put in the papers a few years ago.' Baedecker flipped open a navigation map and nodded. He unzipped his goosedown coat, poured coffee from a thermos, and handed Dave his cup.

'Thanks. Want to take the stick for a while?'

'Not especially,' said Baedecker.

Dave laughed. 'You don't like helicopters, do you, Richard?'

'Not especially.'

'I don't know why not,' said Dave. 'You've flown about everything with wings including VTOLs and STOLs and that damn Navy pogo plane that killed more men than it was worth. What do you have against helicopters?'

'Do you mean other than the fact that they're treacherous, untrustworthy pieces of shit just waiting to slam you into the ground?' said Baedecker. 'You mean other than that?'

'Yeah,' said Dave and laughed again. 'Other than that.' They dropped to three thousand feet and then to two. Ahead of them, their sides golden and chocolate in the horizontal light, a small herd of cattle moved sluggishly across a wide expanse of dry grassland.

'Hey,' said Dave, 'remember that press conference we went to before Apollo 11 to watch Neil, Buzz, and Mike show their stuff?'

'Which one?'

'The one right before the launch.'

'Vaguely,' said Baedecker.

'Well, Armstrong said something during it that really pissed me off.'

'What was that?' asked Baedecker.

'That reporter — what's-his-name, he's dead now — Frank McGee asked Armstrong a question about dreams and Neil said he'd had a recurring dream since he was a boy.'

'So?'

'It was the dream where Neil could hover off the ground if he held his breath long enough. Remember that?'

'No.'

'Well, I do. Neil said that he'd first had the dream when he was a little kid. He'd hold his breath and then he'd begin to hover, not fly, just hover.' Baedecker finished his coffee and set the Styrofoam cup into a trash bag behind his seat. 'Why did that piss you off?' he asked.

Dave looked over at him. His eyes were unreadable behind his sunglasses. 'Because it was my dream,' he said.

The Huey nosed over and dropped until they were flying only three hundred feet above the rough terrain, well below FAA minimum altitude requirements. Sagebrush and piñon pines flicked by, reasserting a sense of speed to their passage. Baedecker looked down past his feet, through the chin bubble, and watched a lone house flash by. It had been brown and weathered, its tin roof rusted, its barn collapsed, its only access suggested by two drifted ruts stretching off to the horizon. There had been a new, white satellite dish next to the shack.

Baedecker clicked on the intercom. There was no intercom floor switch for the left seat, so he had to reach out and touch the switch on the cyclic each time he wanted to talk. 'Tom Gavin told me that you were pretty sick last spring,' he said.

Dave glanced to his left and then looked back at the ground rushing past them at one hundred knots. He nodded. 'Yeah, I was having some problems. I thought I had the flu — just running a fever with swollen glands in my neck. Instead, my doctor in Washington said I had Hodgkin's disease. I didn't even know what it was until then.'

'Serious?'

'They grade the thing on a four-point scale,' said Dave. 'Level One is take some aspirin and mail in the forty dollars. Level Four is GYSAKYAG.' Baedecker did not have to ask about the abbreviation. During the hundreds of hours they had shared in cramped simulators, there had been too many times when he had heard Dave's suggested response to some newly inserted emergency as GYSAKYAG — grab your socks and kiss your ass good-bye.

'I was a Level Three,' said Dave. 'Caught fairly early. They got me feeling better with medication and a couple of chemotherapy sessions. Took out my spleen for good measure. Everything looks real good now. If they get it on the first pass, they generally get it for good. I passed my flight physical three weeks ago.' He grinned and pointed to a town just visible to the north. 'That's Condon. Next stop, Lonerock. Home of America's future Western White House.' They crossed a gravel county road and Dave banked sharply to follow it, dropping to fifty feet. There was no traffic. Short, sagging telephone poles ran along the left side of the road, looking as if they had stood there forever. There were no trees; the barbed wire fences had some sort of metal boilers or discarded water heaters as fence posts.

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.'