Ian Sales - All That Outer Space Allows

And having Walden in her bed every night, it’s doing both of them good, the sex is better than it has been for a long time. Walden is more relaxed, he flashes that aviator grin of his more often; Ginny feels wanted, no longer an accessory, but a partner . They talk, and it’s silly stuff, trivial chatter, they laugh and joke, they have fun together. Walden, for the first time, tells her a little bit about what he’s doing, and he’s surprised and delighted when she understands some of it.

Remember when I showed you the LM simulator, he says, I thought you were going to fly the damn thing all the way to the Moon.

I wish I could, she says wistfully.

They’re lying in bed, only just covered by rumpled sheets, the lights are off and the room glows with moonlight the same colour as the polished skin of a command module. Ginny smiles indulgently. She rolls onto her side, facing Walden, and props her head on her palm. He is gazing up at the ceiling and he’s talking but she’s not taking in the words. She spent today on the beach, basking beneath the sun, and she can feel the heat she took in radiating from her, she is golden with it, and she doesn’t feel like a member of the Astronaut Wives Club for the first time since moving to Houston, she feels like a wife . Grateful, she bends forward and pecks her husband on the lips, silencing him.

The “couple of days” turns into a week. Ginny has seen all there is to see at the Cape, but she is enjoying her husband’s company too much to want to return to the empty house in El Lago. She explores the surrounding area but there is little of interest, people come here for the beach and the astronauts. She finds a small book store with a reasonable science fiction selection, buys a couple of new paperbacks—one by Kate and one by Marion—and reads them as she lays on the beach, for the first time in her life finding pleasure in pure indolence, enjoying the way the heat soaks into her body, causing her to gently and effortlessly perspire, and, though she would never admit it, she is even gratified by the speculative looks she receives from passing men.

But it has to end, she’s known since the first night it would end, she can’t stay here forever. Walden tells her over drinks in the Riviera Lounge:

The other guys, he says, they don’t like it if the wives stay too long. You have Houston, we have the Cape. You put us off our training.

But I’m interested in all this, she protests.

Yeah, you see, he says, that’s what wrong. I mean, I never said anything about your stories, about your women’s magazines, with their spaceships and robots. I mean, hell, it’s all make-believe, right?

He adopts the serious face he likes to use when he’s about to tell her something he thinks she doesn’t know but is secretly afraid she already does. She has never had the heart to tell him he is usually right to be scared—but marriages survive on the discretion of wives.

You’re like a distraction, Walden tells her; you are a distraction. I have to give it one hundred percent, I can’t have anything around that affects my focus.

You have to go back to Houston, he says.

She’s been feeling a need to write, prompted by the two novels she’s just read, and by what she’s learnt here at the Cape, so she’s sort of glad the idyll is over. But it still hurts to be told to go away by her husband.

He reaches across the table, takes her hand and squeezes. It’s been real good, Ginny, he says, having you here, but the holiday is over.

She gives a wan smile, picks up her piña colada and sucks on the straw, but then her eyes narrow as something occurs to her. What about the Apollo 11 launch, she asks, can I stay for that?

In just over a week, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins will be heading for the Moon, and four days later they will make the first lunar landing, they will be the first people to set foot on an alien world in the history of humankind.

I think you should go home, Walden says firmly.

Ginny really wants to see the Apollo 11 liftoff, and not on television. But she will not plead, she will not wheedle. There will be other launches. And she is missing her Hermes Baby. Her head is full of ideas, baked to a lustrous finish beneath the sun during her hours on the beach, she has written stories in her head as she sunbathed, has dreamt up plots, narratives, settings, and she wants to get them down on paper before she loses them forever.

I’ll book a flight tomorrow, she says.

Walden’s mood abruptly improves, and he grins and lifts his own scotch and branch water and salutes Ginny.

And she thinks, if only she were so easy to please, if only spousal obedience were enough to make her happy—but Ginny ordering Walden about is almost unthinkable, although there are science fiction stories where women dominate: Francis Stevens even wrote one back in 1918! For now, however, Ginny will have to settle for her husband’s faithfulness.

And she knows she’s richer than many of the other astronaut wives for having it.

Ginny’s impromptu holiday has had a salutary effect on her. Back in El Lago, she spends a day cleaning the house from top to bottom, getting down on her hands and knees to scrub the kitchen floor, polishing the faucets in the bathrooms until they shine like the skin of a LM, taking the rugs out into the yard and beating them until her arm aches. She rearranges the kitchen cupboards, emptying them, wiping down the shelves, and then deciding what will now go where. Walden can never find anything, so it doesn’t matter if everything has moved.

Only when Ginny is satisfied the house is as clean as it will ever be—and she marvels at the pride she is taking in her home, and she thinks of the years at Edwards and the dust that covered everything and how some things, most things, seemed more important than whether the house was neat and tidy and clean… It’s not just her home however, now she even spends time fussing over her appearance, each morning powdering her face and painting her lips, mascara and eyeshadow, plucking her eyebrows, styling her hair, doing it every day ; she wears nice dresses, heels that match, keeps her nails shaped and polished… She is well-groomed, and she takes satisfaction in being so.

Ginny’s flying visit to the Cape was also a holiday from Ginny the astronaut wife. That healthy glow she sees in the mirror each morning is not just suntan. But now she is back home, and she has to think about the house and she has to always look presentable, and her head is brimming with ideas for stories she wants to write. For the first time in such a long time, deep in her heart she knows that Mrs Walden J Eckhardt and Virginia G Parker are one and the same person. So she makes herself a jug of iced tea, and she fetches the Hermes Baby and a sheaf of paper from the closet, and still in the white balloon-sleeved blouse and black skirt and waistcoat combination she dressed in that morning she goes to the dining table. She does not need her slacks, she does not need her plaid shirt. (But she does slip off her peep-toe heels.)

When Ginny was in the MSOB being shown one of the altitude chambers, a great steel drum of a room, with thick hatches and small portholes, like something you’d expect to find in the deepest abyss of the ocean… Peering into the altitude chamber, it occurred to Ginny the surface of Mars is no less inimical than the surface of the Moon. She’s read all those stories by Leigh and Catherine, the ones where Mars resembles the Mojave Desert more than the actual Red Planet, but Ginny has an idea for a story about the first mission to a realistic Mars, and she wonders if it is possible to make the journey using the same technology as the Apollo program. But three men—or in her story, women—cooped up in such a tiny space for a week is plausible, it’s what happened on Apollo 8 and 10… But for months? Perhaps even a year or more? She wonders if there are designs for bigger spacecraft on the drawing board somewhere—after all, what is NASA going to do once the Moon flights are over? Mars is the next obvious target.