Ian Sales - All That Outer Space Allows

As the men reached the dock, they stumbled to a halt and gazed up at the spaceship. They looked this way and that, some put their hands to their brow to shade their eyes. One of them pointed along the length of the dock at something, and suddenly they were slapping each other on the back, shaking hands and looking very pleased with themselves.

“Kristin?” said Suzanne. “Can you come here a moment?”

“What is it, darling?”

Kristin asked Aiko to be quiet with a raised hand, and wormed her way to the front of the bridge to stand beside Suzanne.

“Look at them,” Suzanne told her. “Why are they behaving like that?”

“I’ve no idea,” replied Kristin. “But that humming noise is really starting to get on my nerves.”

“Now what are they up to?”

They watched the men run along the side of the dock to the ramp leading up to the hatch. One of them stepped onto the ramp and hesitantly approached the side of the spaceship.

Five minutes later, Suzanne’s husband arrived panting on the bridge. “What the hell did you do?” he demanded.

All of the women pretended not to know what he meant.

“One of you did something,” he insisted.

“We’ve got absolutely no idea what you’re on about, darling,” declared Kristin.

“The invisibility!” he exclaimed. “It works!”

Another figure appeared in the bridge hatch. It was Layla’s husband. “Did you turn it off?” he asked.

Suzanne’s husband turned to him. “Turn what off?”

“The field. As soon as you entered the ship, it became visible.”

“I haven’t touched anything.”

“I can still hear that hum,” Kristin complained.

“What did you do?” demanded Suzanne’s husband.

“I don’t remember,” replied Aiko, either because she truly didn’t or because she was afraid to admit she had done anything at all.

Suzanne’s husband began to herd the women from the bridge. They trooped along the corridor until they reached the top of the ladder. The two men clambered down it, and the women followed gingerly. Halfway down, the heel of one of Eniola’s scarlet pumps stuck in the edge of a tread. Layla was behind her. While the two struggled, the rest followed the men to the airlock and out of the spaceship onto the ramp. Suzanne saw Kristin’s husband look up in surprise. He grabbed one of the other men and pointed at the women. No, past them. Suzanne looked behind her. What was the problem? There was the UESS Aldridge , looking just as large as life, its grey bulk filling the dock.

Eniola and Layla appeared in the airlock. Eniola was limping, but not because she was injured, and complaining of a run. As the two of them stepped through the hatch and onto the ramp, the men began to talk excitedly amongst themselves.

It took the men less than thirty minutes to determine that the invisibility field only worked when two or more of the women were aboard the spaceship. A single man, however, and UESS Aldridge remained stubbornly visible. It wasn’t just Suzanne, Kristin, Eniola, Layla or Aiko, either. The men fetched secretaries and nurses, and they too triggered the invisibility. But no man could do it. Aiko eventually confessed to having pressed a button, and it proved to be the main power switch for the invisibility field generator. None of the settings had been changed from the last test, which had of course been unsuccessful, before the wives had boarded.

The men began to talk among themselves.

“I don’t understand it at all,” Suzanne’s husband said.

“Something to do with women’s bio-electric field?” suggested Layla’s husband.

“We need to do more tests.”

“We can’t tell the navy it needs to crew all its destroyers with women.”

“They’ll cancel the project.”

“Whoever heard of an all-female space navy? It’s damned ridiculous!”

Kristin took umbrage at this last comment. “Why is it ridiculous?” she demanded. “We can fight as well as men. Women have fought throughout history.”

“The Amazons,” put in Suzanne.

“The Valkyries,” added Kristin.

“Onna-bugeisha,” said Aiko.

“Queen Zenobia,” said Layla.

“And it’s always been visible to you?” Kristin’s husband asked, quickly changing the subject.

The wives nodded.

“Even when we can’t see it?” said Aiko’s husband.

Despite their insistence the UESS Aldridge had remained stubbornly visible to them the entire time, the men seemed reluctant to believe their wives.

At that moment, Betty strolled up. She was wearing her usual flightsuit and had plainly landed minutes before from a test flight. “Hey, what’s going on?” she asked the men.

Suzanne’s husband quickly filled her in. As soon as she heard the UESS Aldridge had actually vanished from sight, she laughed. Then she said, “I watched you as I flew in. The spaceship has been here all along.”

“You didn’t see her disappear?”

Betty shook her head.

“So you can see the ship even when it’s invisible? Just like our wives can?”

Betty nodded and grinned.

Kristin leaned in close to Suzanne. “Just think,” she said, The spaceships are only invisible with women crews. And they’re only invisible to men. It looks like men might be finally out of the war game.”

“Oh no,” said Suzanne, feeling truly happy for the first time since her husband had been assigned to the spaceyard. “If they need us to wage war, I’m sure we can find a better way to sort things out than fighting.”

In August 1967, the Eckhardts move into their new house in El Lago. Ginny is glad to get out of the apartment, but the prospect of keeping such a large house clean is daunting. It’s not as if she were the most house-proud housewife in Houston, and Walden has never been particularly fussy, but they have neighbours now, other members of the astronaut corps and AWC—not just Charlie and Dotty, or Stu and Joan, from their own group, the New Nineteen, but also families from the Original Seven, the New Nine and the Fourteen.

And they might drop in or pop over at any time.

The rest of the year passes in a blur of cleaning and polishing, parties, AWC meetings, visits to the beauty parlour, keeping up appearances, keeping everything primly stable. Walden is there only at weekends, sometimes he’s in Long Island at the Grumman plant, as he’s now specialising in the lunar module, sometimes he’s away on a geology field trip, maybe at the Grand Canyon; but mostly he’s at the Cape. The Hermes Baby sits unused in a closet, there is never enough time to get it out and start writing, there is never enough time to think about what to write. Ginny is even struggling to keep up with her science fiction magazine reading, and she seriously considers letting some of her subscriptions lapse. She has no one to talk to about science fiction, the other wives they only read McCall’s and Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan and Redbook . She looks at herself and she’s turning into one of those robot wives. She wonders how the other wives cope, they seem so self-assured, so organised—a complaint echoed by Mary Irwin in her autobiography, The Moon is Not Enough , “All the other astronaut wives were in the same predicament, but they seemed to be taking it in stride. Or was it that gold-plated image we were encased in and mortally afraid of tarnishing?” Ginny must tread a careful path between the expectations of the public, the bidding of NASA, and peer pressure.

But then ‘The Spaceships Men Don’t See’ appears in the February 1968 issue of Galaxy , alongside stories by Kit Reed, Kate Wilhelm, Jane Beauclerk, Gertrude Friedberg and Sydney J Van Scyoc. The response to the story is positive. Ginny receives approving letters from many of her friends, and it’s enough to motivate her into finally writing all those replies she owes. But seeing the words of her story in the magazine also has a salutary effect on Ginny: she realises she needs to do more than simply keep house if she is to hold onto her sanity here in Togethersville. Being an astronaut wife is not enough, and each passing day Ginny, although not a drinker, has found herself thinking more and more about the drinks cabinet—and she won’t be the first astronaut wife to fall victim to it. She remembers her conversation with Evelyn over ‘The Spaceships Men Don’t See’ and it occurs to her she could take more of an interest in her husband’s endeavours. Not simply support him, as a wife should, she’s been doing that since she moved to Houston, but make an effort to understand what he’s been going through, to better sympathise with the stress he’s under, the strain he faces each day. After all, space travel interests her, it always has done, and here she is on the periphery of the greatest space program the planet has ever known. She knows bits and pieces, she’s sneaked occasional looks at NASA press kits, but she wants to be closer still, to actually touch a real spacecraft, a LM or a CM, maybe even a Saturn V.