Ann-Marie MacDonald - Way the Crow Flies

Hal is drafted by the kids to adjudicate the start of a pickup game of softball. Steve and Vic slip into the house for more beer, and Jack stands chatting with Henry Froelich. “What’s your background, anyhow, Henry? Math? Science?”

A couple of beers in the Centralia summer evening and Hamburg 1943 is awfully far away — Jack can see nothing wrong in getting to know his neighbour. And Froelich doesn’t appear to mind the question, seems relaxed despite his tie and long-sleeved shirt.

“My subject was engineering physics,” he says, then raises his eyebrows as though gauging the degree of Jack’s interest.

“Wow,” says Jack. “What the heck is that?”

Froelich smiles and Jack tips the wine bottle over the man’s glass. “Go ahead, Hank, I’m all ears.”

“Well….” Froelich crosses his arms and Jack can see him in a lecture hall — the axle grease under his nails could just as easily be chalk. “I studied, and then I taught, how things go.”

“What things? Planes, trains, automobiles?”

“There are applications for all these, yes, and others. Propulsion, you see. But I was a very theoretical young man. I did not — um — dirty my hands, as they say.”

“Not like now,” says Jack, gesturing with his thumb at Froelich’s motley-looking old jalopy across the street.

Froelich nods. “Yes, I grow pragmatic with age.”

“I’m going to take a wild guess, Henry. You were a professor, am I right?”

“Yes I was.”

“A doctor of … engineering physics.”

“Ja, genau.”

“Well what the heck are you doing teaching the multiplication table out here in the middle of nowhere?”

Froelich laughs. Vic joins them. “What’s so funny?”

Jack is about to dodge the question, not wishing to put Froelich on the spot if he’d rather not discuss his past, but Froelich answers, “Physics. My first love.”

“No kidding, you a science buff, Henry?”

“He’s a PhD,” says Jack.

Steve joins them with a fresh beer.

“That’s not too shabby,” says Vic. “Nuclear?”

“Engineering.”

Vic shakes his head. “If I had my life to live again, that’s what I’d do, that’s where the action is, eh? Avionics. Jet propulsion. Rockets.”

It’s on the tip of Jack’s tongue to ask Vic if he didn’t get enough of “things that go boom” during the war, blasting away in the back of a Lanc, but he remembers Froelich and says instead, “I’d be an astronaut.”

“What do you want to do that for?” says Vic. “That’s not flying, that’s just sitting on a big bomb and praying.” Froelich breaks a smile and nods. “‘To the moon, Alice!’” cries Vic.

The others chuckle but Froelich looks a bit bewildered. Is it possible he has never seen The Honeymooners?

Steve muses, “The moon is an ideal setting for golf. Imagine how much longer it would take to play eighteen holes in zero gravity.”

Jack knows Steve is two years younger than himself. But even without that information, he would know by Steve’s particular brand of insouciance that he’s not a veteran. Not that veterans can’t be insouciant — Simon, case in point. But Simon’s insouciance has an edge. Like Vic’s bonhomie — he is still drinking in every moment, grateful to be alive. Like Hal Woodley, over in the field behind the house, pitching for the kids. This is what they fought for.

Jack says, “Well we better get there quick or you know what we’ll find on the moon.”

“What?” says Steve.

“Russians.”

Vic and Steve laugh.

“Wernher von Braun said that and he oughta know.”

“Who’s he?” asks Steve.

Vic rolls his eyes, and Jack spells it out. “Von Braun is Mr. Ballistic Missile. Grand Pooh-bah of the American space program. NASA to you.”

“Oh that von Braun,” says Steve. “Had you going, didn’t I?”

“Stee-rike!” cries one of the kids, and out in the field the teams trade places.

Steve says, “Why would anyone want to go the moon, anyhow? It’s cold up there.”

Like Moscow, thinks Jack, reminded of Simon’s comment last summer. He takes another swig of beer. “Well what are we going to do, let the Russkies beat us at everything? At the rate they’re going, they’ll be there in ’65.”

Vic says, “The moon is, it’s … the holy grail, it’s the brass ring….”

Froelich sighs. “Forget the moon just now, we are talking here about space, yes? A band of cold and dark one hundred miles above the surface of the earth, worthless—”

“Yeah,” says Steve.

“—apart from that it is an extension of air space and this is where the next war will be decided.” Jack pours Froelich more wine. “From up there”—Froelich points—“the Soviets can interfere with Western satellites, they can — how do you say—?”

“Neutralize,” says Jack.

“J a , neutralize missiles before they will leave the ground or the submarine. They also can launch a space station, they can arm it like a garrison and make extraordinary reconnaissance of earth. The moon is somewhat a minor scene, a….”

“A sideshow.”

“ Genau .”

“USAF wants to make the moon itself into a permanent base.”

“That’s what the Russians are shooting for,” adds Vic. “That’s why they’re ahead.”

“But we’re not in it for the same reasons,” says Jack. “NASA is a civilian agency. Pure research.”

“If pure research is the point,” counters Steve, “why don’t they just make a space station for experiments, why bother going to the moon?”

“Because the moon is something we all understand,” says Jack. “Even a tribesman in darkest Africa can look up and marvel at what a feat that would be, and that’s real power, when you capture the world’s imagination. The U.S. needs to demonstrate its superiority to the world, and not just for show, for very practical reasons. You can’t have the Third World looking to the Soviet Union for—”

“That’s right.” Vic gestures with his beer. “When you’re sitting in a banana republic with a tinpot dictator—”

“And the Communists have got a man on the moon,” says Jack, “and they’re promising a chicken in every pot—”

“Sputnik was just the tip of the iceberg—”

“Look at Vostok III and IV —”

“What are their names? Nikolayev?”

“And Popovich,” says Froelich.

Jack nods. “The ‘heavenly twins.’”

The Russian cosmonauts have just completed a feat straight out of science fiction: a dual orbit of the earth in separate space capsules, passing within an incredible one hundred miles of one other for a total of 112 orbits, more than five times the distance to the moon. The Americans will be lucky to achieve a mere six orbits next month. The logical next Soviet step: a fantastic manoeuvre involving the mooring of two spaceships, and from there, complete control of space and target earth.

“And those are just the flights we know about,” says Jack.

Hal Woodley joins them. They make room for him, imperceptibly straightening up.

“Think what else they got up their sleeve,” says Vic.

“Nowadays,” says Jack, “the real battles get fought in the press and in front of the TV cameras.”

“So that’s what happened to Nixon,” says Woodley, and they all laugh.

Jack opens another beer, offers it to Hal. “Cheers, sir.”

“Prost . Call me Hal, Jack.” The others raise their glasses but, with the exception of Henry, avoid calling Hal Woodley anything at all, “sir” seeming overly formal for the setting, and “Hal” being inappropriate unless expressly invited.

“Think of the disappointment, eh?” says Jack with a grin. “You’re a great Russian hero, a cosmonaut. You orbit the earth like a god, the whole world down below is your oyster, and where do they take you when you parachute down? Back to some godforsaken desert in the middle of Kazakhstan!”