Dan Simmons - Phases of Gravity

'That's it then, that's the problem,' said Baedecker. 'Nothing changed.' Dave laughed and grasped Baedecker's upper arm through the thick jacket. 'Are you serious, Richard?' he said softly. 'Do you remember who you were and have any idea who you are now?' Baedecker shook his head.

Dave said nothing. He jumped out to dump the last of the embers, bury them carefully in the sand, and stow the gear in the back of the jeep. He came around to Baedecker's side. 'Move over,' he said. 'You're driving. I'm too drunk.' Baedecker, who had matched Dave beer for beer through the afternoon and evening, nodded and shifted to the driver's side.

The jeep's headlights picked out sagebrush and scrub pines as they drove slowly back. Clouds obscured the stars and the full moon would not rise for hours yet.

'Tom Gavin will never understand,' said Dave. 'The poor son of a bitch is so desperate for the sacramental element that he'll never find it. I've seen him on TV talking about being born again in lunar orbit. Shee-it. He talks about it and talks about it and doesn't have the least fucking idea of what being born again means. You were the one, Richard. I saw it.' Baedecker shook his head slowly. 'No,' he said. 'I didn't feel it. I don't know what any of it meant.'

'You think a newborn knows what it all means?' asked Dave. 'It just happens and then you go about the mean business of being alive. Awareness comes later, if it comes at all.' They emerged from the canyon and headed across the last ridge before the switchbacks. Baedecker shifted into first gear and crept along the narrow jeep trail as slowly as the vehicle would allow. He felt sober, but he kept seeing rattlesnakes wiggling at the edge of the headlight beams.

'Being born again doesn't mean that you've arrived somewhere,' said Dave. 'It means you're ready to start the trip. The pilgrimage to more places of power, the doomed quest to keep the people and things you love from being caught by the weeds and dragged under. Stop here, please.' Baedecker stopped and watched while Dave leaned over, was quietly sick over the side of the jeep, and sat up to clean his mouth with water from an old canteen under the seat. Dave slumped back down, burped once, and pulled his cap low over his eyes. 'Thus endeth the gospel according to Saint David. Drive on.'

Baedecker slowed the jeep on the ridge before the switchbacks leading to the last canyon. Lonerock was visible two miles below, a few lights glowing between dark trees.

'Flick your headlights a few times,' Dave said. Baedecker did.

'Okay, drive on.'

'Does Miz Callahan think the aliens drive UFOs with headlights?' said Baedecker.

Dave shrugged without lifting his cap. 'Maybe they take EVAs.' Baedecker shifted down, missed his shift, ground gears, shifted again. 'Mmm, smooth,' said Dave. 'What did you think of my book idea?'

' Frontiers ?' said Baedecker. 'I liked it.'

'You think it's a worthwhile project?'

'Definitely.'

'Good,' said Dave. 'I want you to help me write it.'

'Why, for chrissakes? You're doing fine.'

'No, I'm not,' said Dave. 'I can't write the parts about the people for shit.

Even if my work on the Hill gave me time to travel and do the research — which it won't — I couldn't write that part.'

'The part about the Russian, Belyayev, was great,' said Baedecker.

'I picked up all that crap when I was over there for the ASTP,' said Dave. 'The most recent parts are ten years old. The important part of the book will be what the four American guys are up to. And I don't want any of that Reader's Digest pap either — 'Lieutenant Colonel Brick Masterson has since left the Agency to pursue a successful career combining his Austin beer distributorship and his part ownership in a string of lesbian mud-wrestlers.' Uh-uh, Richard, I want to know what these suckers are feeling . I want to know what they don't tell their wives in the middle of the night when they can't sleep. I want to know what moves them right down to the seat of their meat. I don't care how inarticulate we poor ex–jet jockeys are, I expect you to get in there with your little epistemological proctoscope . . . damn, that's good . . . I can't be too drunk if I can say that, huh? I want you to get in there and find out what we need to know about ourselves, okay, Richard?'

'I don't think so . . .' began Baedecker.

'Shut up, please,' said Dave. 'Think about it. Let me know by, say, right after the baby's born. We're coming back out to Salem and Lonerock a few weeks after that. Think about it until then. That's an order, Baedecker.'

'Yassuh.'

'Jesus,' said Dave. 'You ran over that poor snake back there and it wasn't even a rattler.'

Lying on the sleeper sofa in Dave's study, Baedecker watches rectangles of light from passing cars move across the bookshelves and he thinks about things. He remembers Dave's comment, 'I guess that's about as happy as I've ever been,' and he tries to remember a comparable point in time for himself. Dozens of memories come to mind — from childhood, with Joan in the early years, the night Scott was born — but, as important and satisfying as each one is, it is ultimately rejected. Then he recalls a single, simple event that he has carried with him over the years like a well-worn snapshot, bringing it out in times of loneliness and displacement.

It was a minor thing. A few minutes. He was flying back to Houston from the Cape some time during the last months of training. He was alone in his T-38 — just as Dave had been a week ago — when, on an impulse, he overflew the sprawling subdivision in which he lived. Baedecker remembers the perfect timing of the emergence of his wife and seven-year-old child, the clarity with which he saw them from an altitude of eight hundred feet at five hundred miles per hour. He remembers the sunlight dancing on the Plexiglas canopy as he pulled the T-38 into a victory roll, and then another, celebrating the sky, the day, the coming mission, and his love for the two small figures seen so far below.

Someone in the household coughs loudly and Baedecker starts from the edge of sleep, conditioned by years of listening for his son's labored breathing in the night. He watches a rectangle of white light moving across the dark line of books and tries to relax.

Eventually he sleeps. And the dream comes.

It is one of only two or three dreams that Baedecker has that he knows is not a dream. It is a memory. He has had it for years. When he comes awake, gasping and clutching at the headboard, he knows immediately that it has been the dream . And, sitting up in the darkness of Dave's study, feeling the sweat already drying on his face and body, he knows that this time — for the first time — the dream has been different.

Until now the dream had always been the same. It is August of 1962 and he is taking off from Whiting Field near Pensacola, Florida. It is a sickeningly hot day, muggy beyond belief, and it is a relief when he is sealed into the cockpit of the F-104 Starfighter and begins breathing cool oxygen. He is not involved in flight-testing. There is nothing untested about this F-104; the chrome-alloyed aircraft is all stock-block equipment, scheduled to join an Air Force squadron at Homestead Air Force Base south of Miami. Baedecker has spent two weeks ferrying it cross-country on an 'interservice courtesy call,' his first political job for NASA, giving rides to Navy and Army VIPs curious about the new first-line fighter. A retired admiral here at Pensacola — a hulk of a man too fat for his flight suit and almost too fat for the rear seat — had patted Baedecker on the back after his joyride and proclaimed, 'Absolutely first-rate flying machine.' Like most pilots who had flown the F-104, Baedecker did not totally agree. The aircraft was impressive for its power and brute force — indeed, it was used out at Edwards as a proficiency trainer for the X-15 that Baedecker had flown for the first time earlier that summer — but it was not a first-rate flying machine; it was an engine with an ejection seat attached, two seats in this case, and two stubby wings offering about as much lift surface as fins on an arrow.