‘No. Thanks.’ Intrigued by Mallory, the girl squatted on the grass beside him. ‘Tell me, how often are you getting the attacks?’
‘Every day. Probably more than I realise. And you…?’When she shook her head a little too quickly, Mallory added: ‘They’re not that frightening, you know. In a way you want to go back.’
‘I can see. Take your wife and leave — any moment now all the clocks are going to stop.’
‘That’s why we’re here — it’s our one chance. My wife has even less time left than I have. We want to come to terms with everything — whatever that means. Not much any more.’
‘Doctor… The real Cape Kennedy is inside your head, not out here.’ Clearly unsettled by the presence of this marooned physician, the girl pulled on her flying helmet. She scanned the sky, where the gulls and swallows were again gathering, drawn into the air by the distant drone of an aero-engine. ‘Listen — an hour ago you were nearly killed. I tried to warn you. Our local stunt pilot doesn’t like the police.’
‘So I found out. I’m glad he didn’t hit you. I thought he was flying your glider.’
‘Hinton? He wouldn’t be seen dead in that. He needs speed. Hinton’s trying to join the birds.’
‘Hinton…’ Repeating the name, Mallory felt a surge of fear and relief, realising that he was committed now to the course of action he had planned months ago when he left the clinic in Vancouver. ‘So Hinton is here.’
‘He’s here.’ The girl nodded at Mallory, still unsure that he was not a policeman. ‘Not many people remember Hinton.’
‘I remember Hinton.’ As she fingered the Apollo signet ring he asked: ‘You’re not married to him?’
‘To Hinton? Doctor, you have some strange ideas. What are your patients like?’
‘I often wonder. But you know Hinton?’
‘Who does? He has other things on his mind. He fixed the pool here, and brought me the glider from the museum at Orlando.’ She added, archly: ‘Disneyland East — that’s what they called Cape Kennedy in the early days.’
‘I remember — twenty years ago I worked for NASA.’
‘So did my father.’ She spoke sharply, angered by the mention of the space agency. ‘He was the last astronaut — Alan Shepley — the only one who didn’t come back. And the only one they didn’t wait for.’
‘Shepley was your father?’ Startled, Mallory turned to look at the distant gantries of the launching grounds. ‘He died in the Shuttle. Then you know that Hinton…’
‘Doctor, I don’t think it was Hinton who killed my father.’ Before Mallory could speak she lowered her goggles over her eyes. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. The important thing is that someone will be here when he comes down.’
‘You’re waiting for him?’
‘Shouldn’t I, doctor?’
‘Yes… but it was a long time ago. Besides, it’s a million to one against him coming down here.’
‘That’s not true. According to Hinton, Dad may actually come down somewhere along this coast. Hinton says the orbits are starting to decay. I search the beaches every day.’
Mallory smiled at her encouragingly, admiring this spunky but sad child. He remembered the news photographs of the astronaut’s daughter, Gale Shepley, a babe in arms fiercely cradled by the widow outside the courtroom after the verdict. ‘I hope he comes. And your little zoo, Gale?’
‘Nightingale,’ she corrected. ‘The zoo is for Dad. I want the world to be a special place for us when we go.’
‘You’re leaving together?’
‘In a sense — like you, doctor, and everyone else here.’
‘So you do get the attacks.’
‘Not often — that’s why I keep moving. The birds are teaching me how to fly. Did you know that, doctor? The birds are trying to get out of time.’
Already she was distracted by the unswept sky and the massing birds. After tying up the cheetahs she made her way quickly to the glider. ‘I have to leave, doctor. Can you ride a motorcycle? There’s a Yamaha in the hotel lobby you can borrow.’
But before taking off she confided to Mallory: ‘It’s all wishful thinking, doctor, for Hinton, too. When Dad comes it won’t matter any more.’
Mallory tried to help her launch the glider, but the filmy craft took off within its own length. Pedalling swiftly, she propelled it into the air, climbing over the chromium rockets of the theme park. The glider circled the hotel, then levelled its long, tapering wings and set off for the empty beaches of the north.
Restless without her, the tiger began to wrestle with the truck tyre suspended from the ceiling of its cage. For a moment Mallory was tempted to unlock the door and join it. Avoiding the cheetahs chained to the diving board, he entered the empty hotel and took the staircase to the roof. From the ladder of the elevator house he watched the glider moving towards the space centre.
Alan Shepley — the first man to be murdered in space. All too well Mallory remembered the young pilot of the Shuttle, one of the last astronauts to be launched from Cape Kennedy before the curtain came down on the space age. A former Apollo pilot, Shepley had been a dedicated but likable young man, as ambitious as the other astronauts and yet curiously na•ve.
Mallory, like everyone else, had much preferred him to the Shuttle’s co-pilot, a research physicist who was then the token civilian among the astronauts. Mallory remembered how he had instinctively disliked Hinton on their first meeting at the medical centre. But from the start he had been fascinated by the man’s awkwardness and irritability. In its closing days, the space programme had begun to attract people who were slightly unbalanced, and he recognised that Hinton belonged to this second generation of astronauts, mavericks with complex motives of their own, quite unlike the disciplined service pilots who had furnished the Mercury and Apollo flight-crews. Hinton had the intense and obsessive temperament of a Cortez, Pizarro or Drake, the hot blood and cold heart. It was Hinton who had exposed for the first time so many of the latent conundrums at the heart of the space programme, those psychological dimensions that had been ignored from its start and subsequently revealed, too late, in the crack-ups of the early astronauts, their slides into mysticism and melancholia.
‘The best astronauts never dream,’ Russell Schweickart had once remarked. Not only did Hinton dream, he had torn the whole fabric of time and space, cracked the hour-glass from which time was running. Mallory was aware of his own complicity, he had been chiefly responsible for putting Shepley and Hinton together, guessing that the repressed and earnest Shepley might provide the trigger for a metaphysical experiment of a special sort.
At all events, Shepley’s death had been the first murder in space, a crisis that Mallory had both stage-managed and unconsciously welcomed. The murder of the astronaut and the public unease that followed had marked the end of the space age, an awareness that man had committed an evolutionary crime by travelling into space, that he was tampering with the elements of his own consciousness. The fracture of that fragile continuum erected by the human psyche through millions of years had soon shown itself, in the confused sense of time displayed by the inhabitants of the towns near the space centre. Cape Kennedy and the whole of Florida itself became a poisoned land to be forever avoided like the nuclear testing grounds of Nevada and Utah.
Yet, perhaps, instead of going mad in space, Hinton had been the first man to ‘go sane’. During his trial he pleaded his innocence and then refused to defend himself, viewing the international media circus with a stoicism that at times seemed bizarre. That silence had unnerved everyone — how could Hinton believe himself innocent of a murder (he had locked Shepley into the docking module, vented his air supply and then cast him loose in his coffin, keeping up a matter-of-fact commentary the whole while) committed in full view of a thousand million television witnesses?