Damon Knight - Orbit 18

The dream, the memory, dissolved.

By the time he woke next morning his wife had already left to spend the weekend with friends at a commune upstate. He made breakfast for himself and his son and went outside in the Saturday-morning heat to garden. He was almost forty.

Days he worked in an over-airconditioned building adjacent to the Teaneck Armory. On one wall of his office was a maroon and red square of geometrically patterned fabric framed like a painting. On another was an autographed photo of the President and another photo of himself on the Moon, the landing module and his crewmate Jim Cooper reflected in his face mask. Because the photograph had come off a stack of NASA publicity photos, his autograph was on it. He felt silly about that and had always meant to replace it, but where he worked now there were no NASA photos.

His work was paperwork related to the National Guard. After he had walked on the Moon and declined to command an Air Force base in Nevada, they seemed to have run out of things quite as definite for him to do. He had a plastic wood-grained desk that was generally clean and empty. On the floor was a cheap red carpet, the nap of which he was always carrying home on his shoes.

After the mission his spare time had been filled with interviews and tours and banquets and inconveniences, but with time and other missions, his fame dwindled. At first he welcomed this escape from the public eye; then the pressure of emptiness began to weigh on him, like a column of air on his shoulders. The time he could now spend with his wife and son passed uneasily. He learned to play golf and tennis and spent more time at them than he enjoyed. He started a diary and grew depressed with the banality of his life.

So he took a week off in the early summer of 1975 to sort the drifting fragments of his life: his wife’s departure, the imminent end of his fourth four-year term of service in the Air Force, the dead undying image of the Moon that haunted his dreams, the book he had long planned to write, the mystery of his son, his dwindling fame, the possibility of a life ahead without a wife or son or career or public image... without every base he had come to rely on. He felt he had to consider what he was, what he had been, and what he might become.

When it grew too hot to work in the late morning, and after Kevin had left, Edwards went back into the silent empty house to rest.

The friends he made in NASA had drifted away. The small, manageable sense of community he got from the program lost strength with NASA itself. The lunar astronauts, the dozen or so people he considered friends drifted slowly away from the magnet of Houston, until the terrible clean emptiness of the city compelled Edwards to move too. The city had grown up around the space program, and like most children was just reaching its prime as its father declined. It depressed him terribly. Texas no longer felt like home.

In 1971 Harrison Baker, the command module pilot on Edwards’ mission, moved to New Jersey with his family to become a vice-president in a large oil company, and the Edwardses followed shortly. It was a somewhat irrational impulse that prompted the move—the prospect of friends nearby, and of New York, where each had once wanted to live, and Kevin’s enthusiasm for leaving Texas—all these poor random factors pulled them to the sterile suburb of Teaneck as surely as the most inexorable of destinies. As it turned out, they lived over forty miles from the Bakers, the city lost its appeal after three months, and Kevin talked of going back to Texas for college.

Baker had written a bad book on what it was like to orbit the Moon while his fellow astronauts got all the glory. The book was called Group Effort. It was a humble book by a man who was basically conceited, written with the aid of a hungry young journalist. Edwards had the impression, reading it, that Baker was somehow unconvinced of the Moon’s reality, or at least of its importance, since he himself had not walked there. Edwards disliked the book, or more precisely he disliked the feelings the book aroused in him: he felt he could have done it better if only he had taken the time.

Nonetheless he called Baker one day while he was alone in the house and desperate for company; he called him as he might summon the ghost of old confidence from his past.

“Chris! How are you, you old son of a bitch?” Baker’s voice was hard and distant on the wire. Edwards had quite forgotten that at NASA that had been his nickname.

“Hello, Hank. How are you?”

“Great, just great! Listen, I’ve been meaning to call you, to invite you and Shari up for a weekend.”

“Fine. I’ll keep it in mind, Hank. Actually Charlotte and I haven’t been getting on too well recently.”

“Oh? I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s just one of those things. We’re thinking of separating.” “That’s a shame, Chris. That’s a damn shame. Francie and I always said you were such a good couple.”

“Well, we’ve both been doing some changing. I don’t know, I think it’s for the best. Hell, I didn’t call to cry on your shoulder, Hank. I wanted to ask you something. I’ve been thinking of writing that book that Doubleday asked me to, remember—?”

“Oh, yeah. That sounds like a fine idea. They’re still interested, huh?”

“Well, I don’t know. I should call them, I guess. I assumed they would be.”

“Hm. That’s rough, Chris. I don’t know. The royalties on my book aren’t all they could be. The hardcover’s out of print and the paperback sales are so slow they’re not going to reprint it. Which is too bad, I think. Not that I need the money—we’re getting along fine on my pension, and this job, hell, it’s a real tit job, you know? But the way I feel is, the book’s a kind of historical document and it ought to stay in print, you know, to keep it available for people who want it. But those publishers—they say that people aren’t interested in the Moon anymore. People just don’t care.”

“Well, look at the whole NASA program.”

“Yes. Well. I don’t keep up on it too closely, but I know they’re in trouble.”

Oh, you bastard, Edwards thought. In trouble—! “The manned program has been discontinued, Hank, that’s the trouble they’re in. No more money, no more flights.”

“That so?”

“Yes, that’s so.” There was silence. Static moved on the line, reminding him of the last time Baker’s voice had reached him this way, distant, distorted, on the radio, the Moon. “Hank, I can’t help thinking we did it wrong.”

“Wrong? What do you mean?”

“The landing. We planted the American flag, we left a plaque ... It seems we’re always leaving things, flags or garbage, empty film cans and burned-out rockets . . . The planting of the flag is what really bothered me.”

“Why? What should we have planted? Petunias?” Baker laughed, a short cold sound in the receiver.

“I don’t know. Once I thought the United Nations flag might have been a nice gesture.”

“Oh, shit. Come on, Chris, what’s the UN done for you lately? They sit on their asses and argue and maybe pass a couple of resolutions that say wars are bad. Big fucking deal. We put that rocket on the moon, the United States of America, so why shouldn’t we get the credit for it? Good God, Chris, I thought you of all people would see that, the hero of the fucking mission. What’s the matter with you, son?”

“Nothing. I tell you, I’m just questioning it. Wondering if maybe I did something wrong without thinking about it. I certainly didn’t think about it very much.” The image of such a mistake chilled him, bright and arresting and irrevocable in a barren landscape a quarter million miles away. The flag would not stay unfurled in vacuum so they had braced it with wire.