Dan Simmons - Phases of Gravity

'She's a good ship,' said Hollister. He punched a button and the displays changed. 'Safe as sitting on Grandma's back porch. But fun . . . naw.' He proceeded to show Baedecker details of the Automatic Flight Control System, the Engine Indicating and Crew Alert System, and the computerized color radar displays that incorporated maps of their position relative to VHF Omni-Range stations, waypoints, and Instrument Landing System beams. The same map showed the location of weather fronts, kept a running count of wind velocity, and let them know which direction they were flying at all times. 'It'll tell me who my wife's sleeping with if I ask it real politely,' said Hollister. 'So how does this stack up with the gear you took to the moon?'

'Impressive,' said Baedecker, not telling Hollister that he had worked for a company producing military avionics light-years ahead of even this system. 'To answer your question, we had a lot of crude gauge and dial instrumentation and the LM computer we depended on to guide our butts to the surface had a total capacity of only thirty-nine thousand words . . .'

'Sweet Christ,' said Hollister and shook his head.

'Exactly,' said Baedecker. 'Your FMCS here can work rings around our old PGNS. And most of ours was locked in. If a new problem came up, we could only call on a couple of thousand words.'

'It makes you wonder how we got there at all,' said Hollister. He took the controls, threw a switch high on the instrument board, and set his right hand on the throttles. 'Want to take it a second?'

'Won't United shit a brick?' asked Baedecker.

'No doubt about it,' said Hollister. 'But the only way they're going to find out is if they hear our voices on the black-box flight recorder, and it won't make any difference to us then. Want it?'

'Sure,' said Baedecker.

'You've got it.'

Baedecker handled the yoke gingerly, thinking of the hundred-some passengers juggling their coffee cups behind him. Far ahead, the clouds were dissipating enough that the brown line of the horizon was visible.

'Was it true that Dave Muldorff wanted to name the lunar module The Beagle ?' asked Hollister.

'Sure was,' said Baedecker. 'He almost had them convinced, too. He said it was in the tradition of Darwin, voyage of the Beagle and all that. You see, when the crews first started naming the machines, they had names like Gumdrop and Spider and Snoopy . Then after Neil and the- Eagle -has-landed and all that, the names kept getting more serious and pretentious . . . Endeavor and Orion and Intrepid and Odyssey . At the last minute they didn't trust Dave's intentions and strongly suggested that he go with Discovery .'

'What was wrong with Beagle ?' asked Hollister.

'Nothing,' said Baedecker, 'but they knew Dave and they were right. He'd worked out a whole shtick starting with, ‘Houston, the Beagle has landed,' and getting worse. He was trying to get Tom Gavin to go with Lassie for the CM. He would've called our wheeled lunar vehicle Rover and told everybody it was a reliable little son of a bitch. We would probably have gone down in NASA history as the Beagle Boys. No, they were right to head him off at the pass, Charlie.' Hollister laughed. 'I remember watching that Frisbee thing you two did up there. Jesus, that must have been a fun time to be flying.' The copilot returned with Styrofoam cups of coffee for each of them. Baedecker returned the controls to Hollister, gave up his seat to Knutsen, and stood a minute, leaning on the back of the copilot's seat and looking out at the vast expanse of cloud and sky. 'Yes,' he said and raised his cup in a silent toast and drank some of the rich, black coffee. 'It was fun.'

The Rapid City Airport appeared to be a landing strip in search of a town. The approach took them over weathered pastureland, dry streambeds, and ranches. The single runway sat atop a grassy mesa, which held only a tiny terminal, low tower, and an almost-empty parking lot.

As Baedecker settled into his rented Honda Civic, he decided that he had had enough of scheduled flights and rental cars. He would use the bulk of his savings to buy a 1960 Corvette and have done with it. Better yet, when the money came in, a nice little Cessna 180 . . .

It was a forty-minute drive from Rapid City along Interstate 90 to the Sturgis exit. The highway ran along the foothills separating the dark mass of the Black Hills in the south from the prairie and pastureland stretching north to the horizon. The housing developments and mobile home parks perched on hillsides along the way looked as raw as open wounds on the landscape.

It was twelve-thirty when Baedecker asked directions at a Conoco station near the I-90 exit and almost one P.M. by the time he drove under a wooden arch and down a long lane to the Wheeler Ranch.

The woman who approached him as he got out of the car and stretched reminded him somewhat of Miz Elizabeth Sterling Callahan of Lonerock, Oregon. In her seventies, at least, but still fluid in her movements, this woman had her long, gray hair tied back in a scarf and wore a red mackinaw jacket over dark blue pants. Her face was lined but placid. A collie trotted at her heels. 'Hello there,' she called. 'Can I help you?'

'Yes, ma'am. Are you Mrs. Wheeler?'

'Ruth Wheeler,' said the woman as she came close. There were deep laugh lines around eyes as startlingly green as Maggie's.

'My name's Richard Baedecker,' he said and offered his hand for the collie to smell. 'I'm hunting for Maggie.'

'Richard . . . oh, Richard!' said the woman. 'Oh, my, yes. Margaret has mentioned your name. Well, welcome, Richard.'

'Thank you, Mrs. Wheeler.'

'Ruth, please,' she said. 'Oh, my, Margaret will be surprised. She's gone right now, Richard. She went into town to run some errands. Won't you come in the house for some coffee while we wait for her. She should be back soon.' On the verge of accepting, Baedecker felt a tremendous impatience seize him, as if he could not rest, could not stop until a long voyage was finished. 'Thank you, Ruth,' he said. 'If you have an idea where she might be, I think I'll run into town and try to find her.'

'Try the Safeway in the shopping center or the hardware store on Main,' she said. 'Margaret's driving our old blue Ford pickup with a big, red generator in the bed. It has my Dukakis sticker on the rear bumper.' Baedecker grinned. 'Thank you, ma'am. If I don't find her and she gets back first, tell her I'll be back soon.' Mrs. Wheeler walked up and put her hand on the open window after he turned the Civic around. 'One other place she might be,' she said. 'Margaret likes to stop by Bear Butte. It's a big old hill just outside of town. Just go to the north end and follow the signs.'

The blue pickup was not in the Safeway lot or parked along Main Street. Baedecker drove slowly back and forth through the small town, half expecting to see Maggie step out of a doorway at any moment. The one-thirty news on the radio talked about the secret launch of the space shuttle that should be lifting off sometime in the next two hours. The reporter incorrectly referred to the KSC as 'Cape Kennedy' and reported that the area had high clouds but that the weather should hold for the launch.

Baedecker turned around in the parking lot of a beef jerky plant and drove back through Sturgis, following the green signs to Bear Butte State Park.

The small lot was empty of cars. Baedecker parked the Civic near a closed-up information building and looked up at Bear Butte. It was an impressive hill. If his geology training still served, Baedecker estimated that the mountain was a well-weathered volcanic cone rising in a long ridge to a summit he guessed to be at least eight hundred feet above the surrounding prairie, perhaps more. The mountain was separated from the foothills to the south and it leaped out of the grasslands quite dramatically. Baedecker had to use his imagination to see a bear in the long hill, and when he did it was a bear hunkered forward with its haunches in the air.