Dan Simmons - Phases of Gravity

'Was he right?'

'Nope. Missed it by about twenty miles,' said Dave. 'The town's lying in ruins over the hill there. Sam's buried down there.' He pointed to a narrow trail leading down a steep section of hillside.

'Why Stonehenge?' asked Baedecker.

Dave shrugged. 'We all want to leave monuments. Sam borrowed his. He was in England during World War I when the experts thought that Stonehenge had been a sacrificial altar. Sam made this into a sort of antiwar memorial.' Baedecker went closer and could see names set into the stones. What first had appeared to be rock was actually cement.

They walked to the south of the circle and looked out over the river. The lights of a town and bridge glowed several miles to the west. The wind gusted strongly, bending brittle spears of grass on the hillside, carrying the cold scent of autumn with it.

'The Oregon Trail ends a few miles down there,' said Dave, pointing toward the lights. A little later he said, 'Did you ever wonder why they would come so far, pass up two thousand miles of perfectly good land, just to follow a dream?'

'No,' said Baedecker. 'I don't think I have.'

'I do,' said Dave. 'I've wondered that since I was a kid. Christ, Richard, I drive across this country and can't imagine crossing it on foot or in those pis-sant wagons, at an ox's pace. The more I see of it, the more I realize that any man who wants to be president of the United States is committing the ultimate hubris. Wait here a minute, I'll be right back.' Dave walked back through the circle of stones, and Baedecker stood at the edge of the cliff, letting the breeze cool him, listening to the sounds of some night bird far below. When Dave returned, he was carrying a Frisbee that glowed slightly from its own fluorescence.

'Jesus,' said Baedecker, 'that's not the Frisbee, is it?'

'Sure enough,' said Dave. During their last EVA, while performing for the TV camera on the rover, Dave had produced a Frisbee from his contingency collection bag, and he and Baedecker had tossed it back and forth, laughing at its tumbling in a vacuum and its odd trajectory in one-sixth g. Great fun at the time. When they came home four days later, they returned to the Great Frisbee Controversy. NASA was upset because Dave had used the term Frisbee — a brand name — thus providing priceless advertising to a company not affiliated with NASA. Media newscasters and commentators generally approved of the frivolity, one calling it 'a rare human touch in an otherwise heartless undertaking,' but questioned the need for a manned lunar exploration program and pointed to the Soviet robot probes as a cheaper and more sensible approach. A Connecticut senator had discussed 'the six-billion-dollar Frisbee tournament,' and black leaders were incensed, calling the event both callous and insensitive to the needs of millions. 'Two white college boys playing games in space at the taxpayers' expense,' said one black leader on the Today show, 'while black babies die of rat bites in the ghettos.' Capcom had radioed up some of this during their daily news update at the end of their sleep period four hours before reentry. Then the communicator asked if any of them had any opinion on the whole affair or any suggestions for mollifying the agency's critics.

'This channel secure?' Dave had asked. Houston assured him that it was.

'Well, fuck ‘em all,' Dave had said laconically, thus going down — at least for the astronaut corps — into the program record books for the first live-mike use of that particular pilot's term. It had also almost certainly cost Dave a future ride in the Skylab program. Nonetheless, he had waited five more years for a flight, watching Skylab end and the single, obsolete gesture of Apollo-Soyuz go by before finally resigning.

Now Dave tossed the Frisbee to Baedecker. The phosphorescent plastic glowed green-white in the bright moonlight. Baedecker backed up ten steps and snapped it back.

'Works better in air,' said Dave.

They threw the glowing disk back and forth silently for several minutes. Baedecker felt a tide of affection tug at him.

'Do you know what I think?' Dave said after a while. 'What do you think?'

'I think old Sam and all those others had the right idea. You pass all those other places by and keep on going because the place you're headed is perfect.' He caught the Frisbee and held it two-handed. 'But what they didn't understand is that you make it that way just by dreaming about it.' Dave walked to the edge of the cliff and briefly held the Frisbee toward the stars, an offering. 'Everything ends,' he said and pulled back, pivoted, and threw the disk hard out over the drop-off. Baedecker stepped up next to him and the two watched as the Frisbee soared an impossible distance, banked gracefully in the moonlight, and silently fell into the darkness above the river.

Baedecker walked from the cabin to the dock where his son sat on the railing looking out over the lake. The radio had been filled with commentary about the grace of Nixon's resignation and speculation about Gerald Ford. Several reporters had commented glowingly about a statement by Ford that after all of his years in Congress, he had not made a single enemy. Baedecker understood the reporters' relief — after years of abiding with Nixon's obvious belief that he was surrounded by enemies, the change was welcome — but Baedecker remembered his father telling him that you can judge a man by his choice of enemies as well as or better than by his choice of friends, and he wondered if Ford's disclaimer was truly a recommendation of integrity.

Scott was sitting on the railing at the far end of the dock. His white T-shirt glowed slightly in the light from the waning moon. The dock itself sagged in several places and had a stretch of missing railing. Baedecker remembered the new-wood smell of it when he had stood there talking to his own father seventeen years before.

'Hello,' said Baedecker.

'Hi.' Scott's voice was no longer sullen, only distant. 'Let's forget that blowup, okay?'

'Okay.'

Baedecker leaned against the railing and the two looked out at the lake for several minutes. Somewhere an outboard motor growled, the sound coming flat and pure across the still water, but no running lights showed. Baedecker could see lightning bugs flickering on the far shore like the flash of small arms fire.

'I visited your granddad here once not long before he died,' said Baedecker. 'The lake was smaller then.'

'Yeah?' There was little interest in Scott's voice. He had been born eight years after Baedecker's father had died and rarely showed any curiosity about him or his grandmother. Scott's other grandparents were both alive and well in a Florida retirement community and had happily spoiled the boy since birth.

'Tomorrow I thought we'd clear out the last of the old furniture in the morning and take the afternoon off. Want to go fishing?'

'Not especially,' said Scott.

Baedecker nodded, trying not to give in to his sudden flush of anger. 'All right,' he said. 'We'll work on the driveway in the afternoon.' Scott shrugged and said, 'Are you and Mom going to get divorced?' Baedecker looked at his ten-year-old son. 'No,' he said. 'What on earth gave you that idea?'

'You don't like each other,' said Scott, still assertive but with a slight quaver in his voice.

'That's not true,' said Baedecker. 'Your mother and I love each other very much. Why are you saying these things, Scott?' The boy shrugged again, the same one-shouldered little motion Baedecker had seen too many times when Scott had been hurt by a friend or had failed at some simple task. 'I don't know,' he said.

'You know why you said it,' Baedecker said. 'Tell me what you're talking about.' Scott looked away and flipped the hair out of his eyes with a snap of his head. His voice was high but not yet a whine. 'You're never home.'