Ian Sales: The Eye with Which the Universe Beholds Itself

The rest watch impassively as he and Finley argue it out. The major may command the Goddard, but this is Elliott’s mission and he knows it. Elliott calls the shots.

Goddamnit, Finley snaps. Why? Going down there is dumb. If you can’t find the base, there’s no way back up.

We have to know what happened, Elliott says mulishly.

Is this why they picked you for this mission? Finley sneers.

That’s classified, Elliott says.

And that’s it: argument over. Finley has no comeback to that. Reluctantly, he agrees to Elliott’s plan. One of the flight engineers is sent to prep a Command Module for a descent. They will also load it with plenty of supplies.

Elliott returns to his compartment to dress in his spacesuit. He floats beside the sleeping bag attached to the wall. From his PPK, he pulls out a photograph of his wife and gazes at it. This is not the picture he took to Mars. A couple of years ago, he and Judy visited the Grand Canyon, and he snapped this photo in the car park by the Hopi House. He remembers telling Judy about Valles Marineris, and though he never visited the Martian canyon it struck him he’s as much an historical artefact as the Hopi House. He’s the only man on Earth who can talk about Mars and its scenery as someone who has visited there.

In the photograph, Judy is smiling, and it’s one of her rare unguarded smiles. He married her because of that smile—something during her childhood, she never told him what, made her wary and undemonstrative as an adult. But sometimes he surprised her in a display of real happiness, and he treasured those rare genuine smiles. He profoundly regrets he did not make her happy more often. During his darker days, and he has them like anyone else, he wonders if he would have sacrificed Mars for those smiles.

He’s not spoken to her for over a month, not since leaving the house for the Cape, and this photograph is the only one he has. When he went to Mars, they spoke regularly, and her voice kept him going during those 667 days travelling through emptiness. Later, she admitted she’d hated every minute she’d spent in the public eye, hated her own complicity in the media circus, hated herself for believing she was doing it out of loyalty to her husband, and to NASA. One night, she even confessed she’d believed she needed to be loyal to safeguard him during the mission. He has never told her about his long walk back to the MM after he broke the MRV, he has never said how close he came to dying on Mars. It was a poor reward for her loyalty, his dishonesty. But she’s not loyal now, she’s probably already packed up and left. Perhaps he deserves it.

He shoves some clothes into his kitbag and dresses quickly in his spacesuit. He returns to the rec area on the deck above, where Finley waits for him. The major leads him up to the docking adaptor at the top of the module, where the hatch to one of the Command Modules gapes wide. Elliott swims into the CM and brings himself to a halt on the bank of seats. Turning about, he sees Finley hovering in the open hatch.

You sure about this? the major asks.

Elliott nods. He pulls himself about and, holding onto the seat’s struts, pushes himself down until his rear touches canvas. It’s a struggle to get the harness fastened, and so Finley enters the CM to give him a hand. This involves the major putting a foot to Elliott’s chest and pressing him down and then clipping the harness together and tightening the straps. Elliott says nothing about the triangular cleat on Finley’s sole pressing into his sternum, though it’s painful. It feels like the pain is deserved.

Crossfield has loaded up the landing program, Finley says as he returns to the hatch; You shouldn’t have to do anything.

Thanks, says Elliott.

There’s also a radio with the food and water and oxygen in the Lower Equipment Bay. You’ll not want to wear your spacesuit down there, it’s pretty damn hot.

They told me to pack some light clothes, Elliott replies.

Finley laughs. Yeah, he says, Light clothes. He has reached the hatch. He exits, turns about and peers back in. If you want, he says, we can parachute you down an Atlas V. It’s no good to you without a launch pad but, hell, we got boosters to spare.

Elliott shakes his head. If I need one, he replies, I’ll let you know. Let me see what it’s like on the ground first.

Fair enough, Finley says. He pauses a moment, and then adds, Godspeed. If you find them, it could be one day I can say I met the first man to meet aliens.

Even if I don’t find them, says Elliott, you can still tell people that and it’ll be true.

In Moscow, the First Man on Mars meets the First Man on the Moon. They shake hands and exchange pleasantries through interpreters for the watching dignitaries and press. Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov is courteous but guarded. Later, over vodka and caviar, through an English-speaking comrade, Leonov confesses that the lunar landing instruments in his LK threw a persistent error.

I make manual landing, he tells Elliott.

Elliott wonders what would have happened if Leonov had aborted and Armstrong had not. An American would have been the First Man on the Moon.

He toasts the Soviet cosmonaut, and glances across the room at his wife. Judy is speaking to a handsome and well-dressed woman with carefully-coiffured brown hair. It is a moment before he identifies her as Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.

And over there, Bob Walker is talking—via an interpreter—to Oleg Grigoryevich Makarov, the LOK pilot for the second Soviet lunar landing. Bob’s wife, Valerie, is by his side, one arm hooked through his.

This world tour has been hard, but it has been good for the Elliott marriage. The Ares programme almost killed it. Days smiling for the camera, pills every night or she could not sleep. She came so very close to walking away; she has made that abundantly clear to him.

But travelling about the world, parades in every major city, meeting important people, seeing the sights: it’s been… fun. The interminable receptions and banquets, the endless parade of self-important faces—perhaps not. But in the moments they’ve stolen from their busy schedule, they have rediscovered each other.

They have visited Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janiero, Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, Oslo, West Berlin, London, Rome, Ankara, Kinshasa, and now Moscow. It has been hectic but at least they are travelling in style: the President has lent them one of his Boeing VC-137C airliners. Elliott refers to it jokingly as “Air Force One”, though it uses that callsign only if the President is aboard.

Elliott feels profoundly grateful, and not just to the President and NASA. He’s not only lucky to be here, he’s lucky to be alive— No, not luck. It wasn’t luck that got him back to the Mars Module after he broke the wheel on the MRV. He did it himself. He was on reserve air by the time he reached the MM, and he spent his last day on Mars too tired and in too much pain to do anything but lie in his hammock. Then there was the 537-day free-return trip to Earth—and once the high from reaching Mars had gone and the boredom set in, he and Walker carefully avoiding each other, trying to find a way to live together in such close confines during those long days drifting through the lifeless dark, conflicted by disappointment at the mission’s imminent end and a yearning for home and an end to this limitless night…

Re-entry. Splashdown. Lying in their seats unable to cope with Earth gravity. Weak and wasted from over two years in freefall. They had to lift the CM onto the deck of the recovery ship while he and Walker remained inside.

And as soon as they had recovered, off they were sent on this round-the-world press junket.

Afterwards, back in the US, Elliott returns to his military career. Given what he discovered on Mars, the government wants him out of the public eye. Although he’s the only human being to have set foot on an alien world, he is quietly asked to retire from NASA and go back to the Air Force. By 1983, Elliott is flying F-15s out of Ramstein Air Base, Germany. Judy loves Europe. She no longer likes being an Air Force wife, but she can’t get enough of the “old world” charm of nearby German towns like Saarbrücken, and she frequently visits further afield in Europe.