Eight hundred yards from the road, we crossed the perimeter fence. Crushed by the dunes, long sections of the twentyfoot-high palisade had collapsed, the saw grass growing through the steel mesh. Below us, the boundary road passed a derelict guardhouse and divided into two paved tracks. As we waited at this rendezvous, the headlamps of the wardens’ half-tracks flared across the gantries near the beach.
Five minutes later, a small dark-faced man climbed from the rear seat of a car buried in the sand fifty yards away. Head down, he scuttled over to us.
‘Mr and Mrs Groves?’ After a pause to peer into our faces, he introduced himself tersely: ‘Quinton. Sam Quinton.’
As he shook hands, his clawlike fingers examined the bones of my wrist and forearm. His sharp nose made circles in the air. He had the eyes of a nervous bird, forever searching the dunes and the grass. An Army webbing belt hung around his patched black denims. He moved his hands restlessly in the air, as if conducting a chamber ensemble hidden behind the sand hills, and I noticed his badly scarred palms. Huge weals formed pale stars in the darkness.
For a moment, he seemed disappointed by us, almost reluctant to move on. Then he set off at a brisk pace across the dunes, now and then leaving us to blunder about helplessly. Half an hour later, when we entered a shallow basin near a farm of alkali-settling beds, Judith and I were exhausted, dragging the suitcases over the broken tyres and barbed wire.
A group of cabins had been dismantled from their original sites along the beach and re-erected in the basin. Isolated rooms tilted on the sloping sand, mantelpieces and flowered paper decorating the outer walls.
The basin was full of salvaged space material: sections of capsules, heat shields, antennas and parachute canisters. Near the dented hull of a weather satellite, two sallow-faced men in sheepskin jackets sat on a car seat. The older wore a frayed Air Force cap over his eyes. With his scarred hands, he was polishing the steel visor of a space helmet. The other, a young man with a faint beard hiding his mouth, watched us approach with the detached and neutral gaze of an undertaker.
We entered the largest of the cabins, two rooms taken off the rear of a beach-house. Quinton lit a paraffin lamp. He pointed around the dingy interior. ‘You’ll be… comfortable,’ he said without conviction. As Judith stared at him with unconcealed distaste, he added pointedly: ‘We don’t get many visitors.’
I put the suitcases on the metal bed. Judith walked into the kitchen and Quinton began to open the empty case.
‘It’s in here?’
I took the two packets of $100 bills from my jacket. When I had handed them to him, I said: ‘The suitcase is for the… remains. Is it big enough?’
Quinton peered at me through the ruby light, as if baffled by our presence there. ‘You could have spared yourself the trouble. They’ve been up there a long time, Mr Groves. After the impact’ — for some reason, he cast a lewd eye in Judith’s direction — ‘there might be enough for a chess set.’
When he had gone, I went into the kitchen. Judith stood by the stove, hands on a carton of canned food. She was staring through the window at the metal salvage, refuse of the sky that still carried Robert Hamilton in its rusty centrifuge. For a moment, I had the feeling that the entire landscape of the earth was covered with rubbish and that here, at Cape Kennedy, we had found its source.
I held her shoulders. ‘Judith, is there any point in this? Why don’t we go back to Tampa? I could drive here in ten days’ time when it’s all over—’ She turned from me, her hands rubbing the suede where I had marked it. ‘Philip, I want to be here — no matter how unpleasant. Can’t you understand?’
At midnight, when I finished making a small meal for us, she was standing on the concrete wall of the settling tank. The three relic hunters sitting on their car seats watched her without moving, scarred hands like flames in the darkness.
At three o’clock that morning, as we lay awake on the narrow bed, Valentina Prokrovna came down from the sky. Enthroned on a bier of burning aluminium three hundred yards wide, she soared past on her final orbit. When I went out into the night air, the relic hunters had gone. From the rim of the settling tank, I watched them race away among the dunes, leaping like hares over the tyres and wire.
I went back to the cabin. ‘Judith, she’s coming down. Do you want to watch?’
Her blonde hair tied within a white towel, Judith lay on the bed, staring at the cracked plasterboard ceiling. Shortly after four o’clock, as I sat beside her, a phosphorescent light filled the hollow. There was the distant sound of explosions, muffled by the high wall of the dunes. Lights flared, followed by the noise of engines and sirens.
At dawn the relic hunters returned, hands wrapped in makeshift bandages, dragging their booty with them.
After this melancholy rehearsal, Judith entered a period of sudden and unexpected activity. As if preparing the cabin for some visitor, she rehung the curtains and swept out the two rooms with meticulous care, even bringing herself to ask Quinton for a bottle of cleanser. For hours she sat at the dressing table, brushing and shaping her hair, trying out first one style and then another. I watched her feel the hollows of her cheeks, searching for the contours of a face that had vanished twenty years ago. As she spoke about Robert Hamilton, she almost seemed worried that she would appear old to him. At other times, she referred to Robert as if he were a child, the son she and I had never been able to conceive since her miscarriage. These different roles followed one another like scenes in some private psychodrama. However, without knowing it, for years Judith and I had used Robert Hamilton for our own reasons. Waiting for him to land, and well aware that after this Judith would have no one to turn to except myself, I said nothing.
Meanwhile, the relic hunters worked on the fragments of Valentina Prokrovna’s capsule: the blistered heat shield, the chassis of the radiotelemetry unit and several cans of film that recorded her collision and act of death (these, if still intact, would fetch the highest prices, films of horrific and dreamlike violence played in the underground cinemas of Los Angeles, London and Moscow). Passing the next cabin, I saw a tattered silver space-suit spread-eagled on two automobile seats. Quinton and the relic hunters knelt beside it, their arms deep inside the legs and sleeves, gazing at me with the rapt and sensitive eyes of jewellers.
An hour before dawn, I was awakened by the sound of engines along the beach. In the darkness, the three relic hunters crouched by the settling tank, their pinched faces lit by the headlamps. A long convoy of trucks and halftracks was moving into the launching ground. Soldiers jumped down from the tailboards, unloading tents and supplies.
‘What are they doing?’ I asked Quinton. ‘Are they looking for us?’
The old man cupped a scarred hand over his eyes. ‘It’s the Army,’ he said uncertainly. ‘Manoeuvres, maybe. They haven’t been here before like this.’
‘What about Hamilton?’ I gripped his bony arm. ‘Are you sure—’
He pushed me away with a show of nervous temper. ‘We’ll get him first. Don’t worry, he’ll be coming sooner than they think.’
Two nights later, as Quinton prophesied, Robert Hamilton began his final descent. From the dunes near the settling tanks, we watched him emerge from the stars on his last run. Reflected in the windows of the buried cars, a thousand images of the capsule flared in the saw grass around us. Behind the satellite, a wide fan of silver spray opened in a phantom wake.
In the Army encampment by the gantries, there was a surge of activity. A blaze of headlamps crossed the concrete lanes. Since the arrival of these military units, it had become plain to me, if not to Quinton, that far from being on manoeuvres, they were preparing for the landing of Robert Hamilton’s capsule. A dozen half-tracks had been churning around the dunes, setting fire to the abandoned cabins and crushing the old car bodies. Platoons of soldiers were repairing the perimeter fence and replacing the sections of metalled road that the relic hunters had dismantled.