The future, his personal future and the nation’s, was more cloudy than ever before.
Marcus White asked to meet him at the KSC Visitors’ Center. He parked his car and walked through the Kennedy rocket park. Hadamard remembered how you used to be able to see the rockets as you approached the Visitors’ Center, sprouting from the far side of the freeway, white and silver, like the ash-coated stumps of burned-out trees, tied to the ground by their stay-wires.
Now, though, those silver treestumps were almost all fallen; those that hadn’t been dragged away to be dismantled lay against the hot ground like discarded matches.
He was early.
The old Visitors’ Center was deserted — the ticket booths closed up, the once-sparkling VR displays of the Moon and Mars just empty stages — but the main work of dismantling the place hadn’t yet begun, and as Hadamard walked the click of his patent leather shoes on the floor echoed.
He walked around the old-fashioned displays of real hardware: Gemini, Mercury, Apollo. The Mercury capsule — America’s first manned spaceship — was just a cone of corrugated metal, packed with equipment, enclosed in a glass sheath; the controls were glass and Bakelite and metal toggles, clunky and crude. It looked as if it dated from the 1930s, not the 1960s. It was hard to see how a man in a pressure suit could get inside there, let alone fly the thing into space.
Even the Apollo Command Module seemed small, dingy and primitive: impossibly cramped, with the metal frames of those three couches jammed in together. The interior finish had faded to a muddy yellow. There was big chunky machinery on the hatch, and tiny, thick windows, and Velcro patches everywhere.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
The gravelly voice in his ear made him jump. He turned. In the dimmed lights he made out the tough leather face of Marcus White.
“I know what you’re thinking. How the hell did they go to the bathroom in there? Well, I’ll tell you. You had to strip naked, see, and then take this plastic bag and clamp it to your ass. And when the turds came out you had to hook them down into the bag with your finger, through the plastic. No gravity; nothing to make stuff fall by itself, right? And then—”
Hadamard forced a smile. “Marcus,” he said, “I know how Apollo astronauts went to the bathroom.”
“So you came to see these old birds before they are taken out for scrap?”
“They’re not being scrapped, Marcus,” Hadamard said patiently. “As you know. They’ll be put in storage, here at the Cape or at Langley or Vandenburg. It’s just—”
“I know. Nobody wants to see this old junk any more. Right? So, you believe that too, Jake?”
Hadamard shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know any more, Marcus. Most of the population is too young to remember Apollo anyhow. And the opinion polls say most of them don’t believe it ever happened, that it was all faked, a Cold War stunt. Attendances here have dropped right off. What do you want to see me about?”
White let his mouth drop open. “You don’t know what’s going on here — you, the big cheese?”
“I don’t get to hear everything.”
“Sure. Not since Maclachlan took the oath, right?”
Hadamard stiffened. “So tell me.”
White made an odd, growling sound at the back of his throat. “I’ll show you. I was called in to do a VR recording. For the new arcade. They called us all in, those who are left alive. Pete, Neil… Quite a reunion.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Not really.” They walked on, past more mummified, dust-covered 1960s hardware. “You know, I see these guys once every five or ten years. And all I can think is, once you could bounce around on the Moon as light as a feather, and now, my God, look what all this gravity has done to you…
“Anyhow, come on. You won’t believe your fucking eyes.”
The new arcade was a lot smaller and more compact than the old, sprawling Visitors’ Center — it had an atmosphere more like a chapel, in fact, as opposed to the old center’s VR whizz-bang. There were no Geminis suspended from the ceiling, no wax dummies of spacewalking astronauts, no Jim Lovell spacesuits or Lunar Rovers on faked-up moonscapes. There were a few simple decorations — abstract paintings of the Earth, Moon and stars — and a discrete row of VR booths, almost like confessionals.
White pulled back the curtain on the first booth. It showed a simulated Buzz Aldrin, as he’d been when aged around seventy: tanned, seated, relaxed in a sports shirt and slacks. As the curtain opened he went into action.
…I remember reading about Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing when they got to the summit of Everest, in 1955,the VR said. They just had a few minutes on the peak. Hillary acted like a conqueror. He took pictures down the sides of all the ridges, to prove to everyone that they had made it. But Tenzing knelt down and hollowed out a little place in the snow, and filled it with offerings to his God. You see, for him, it was more like a pilgrimage.
If anyone was going to top that for a pilgrimage to a strange and remote place, it was Neil and me.
We had a quiet moment, after we’d settled down from the post-landing checks. In my Personal Preference Kit I’d packed away a little flask of wine, a chalice and some wafers. There was a little fold-down table just under the keyboard that worked the abort guidance computer. I keyed my mike, and said something like, “This is the LM pilot. I want to ask everybody listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way.” So I poured out my wine; I remember how slowly it rolled out of the flask in that gentle gravity, and curled up against the side of the cup. And I read, silently, from a small card where I had written out a quote from the book of John: “I am the wine and you are the branches / Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit / For you can do nothing without me…”
“Are these recordings?” Hadamard asked.
White shrugged. “Some recordings, some cleaned-up and digitized, some straightforward faked-up sims. The story about Buzz’s communion on the Moon is true, though. Look at this next one.” He pulled back a second curtain; another spectral simulation popped into life.
My name is Jim Irwin, and in 1971 I travelled to the mountains of the Moon. I was captivated — from my first footsteps off the LM, when I nearly tipped over, and found myself staring back up at the sparkling blue of Earth. When I stepped into that distant, untrodden valley, I felt buoyant, elated; I felt like a little child again. The Lunar Apennines weren’t grey or brown as I had expected, but gold, in the light of the early lunar morning. Golden mountains. They looked a little like ski slopes, actually. Others called that place stark and desolate; I have to say I found it warm, friendly, welcoming. The mountains surrounded our little base like a hand cradling a droplet of water, of life. I felt at home on the Moon… At one point we had a problem deploying our ALSEP, our science station, that we had never encountered in training. The cord that was supposed to deploy the central station broke. Well, I prayed for guidance; as I often did during those three days, I recited a phrase from the Psalms which goes: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills / From whence cometh my help? / My help cometh from the Lord.” And you know, I knew straight away that the answer was to get down on my knees and to pull that cord with my hands. And it worked. I had this glow inside me; I felt we could solve anything that came up, that nothing could go wrong. I sensed that God was near me, even in that remote place… I knew then that God had a plan for me, to leave the Earth and to come back to share the adventure with others, so that they could be lifted up in turn…