And then there was silence. The mighty monolith with its fragile, tiny cargo—the ants that had wrought it as their creature and subordinate but were now infinitely at its mercy—stood erect and alone, abandoned by its scores of scurrying attendants. For a moment it remained thus, a voiceless temple to man's ingenuity and pride, for a brief instant eternal in its stillness. Then from within the belly of the beast came the rumblings of destiny. Smoke poured from its base and the red arms that had held it captive swung away. Fire and ice showered the earth that this behemoth scorned by its very existence. The metal monster shivered and shuddered, and slowly, slowly its unwieldy and yet graceful mass rose, defying that greatest of all foes: the gravitational pull of the rock beneath it. With its needle-capped tip pointed towards the heavens it began its impossible ascent, and the roar of its passage was the sound of ten thousand years of cumulative human triumph.
MWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMThe last trail of white vanished, and Al let out a breath that he had not realized he was holding. He felt long-nailed fingers take hold of his arm, firm and proud as if revelling in his exultation at the sight he had just witnessed.
The cheers of the other spectators began to die away. Al tore his eyes away from the now-empty sky to find Elsa gazing up at him.
"I have seen so many launches that I thought I could not be impressed by one," she murmured, cuddling against him on the hard bench of the bleachers. "But to you it is new. It is magical."
"Very magical," Al breathed, wrapping his arm around her.
"You really do want to go into space, don't you?" she said. "It is the most important thing to you."
"A guy has to have something to reach for," Al said.
"Commander Calavicci! Could you give us a couple minutes?" an obnoxious voice with a familiar cadence called out.
Al looked down towards the crowd of reporters gathering nearby. He sighed. This was getting pretty old. He was sick and tired of evading question after question about his years as an M.I.A. It was getting to the point where he almost wanted to spill his guts about the whole thing just so they'd go away, but he knew full well that he would never forgive himself if the story of those lost years of anguish and terror found its way onto the front page of the New York Times.
Elsa patted his arm and wrinkled her nose wryly. She hated it no less than he did, and resented the intrusion upon their life. Since the wedding—just over two months now—some of the pressure had been transferred to her. From the major fashion magazines gushing over her wedding dress to the home and garden people snooping around the house, Elsa had a lot of garbage to put up with—and the undeniably "good little wife" slant that the media seemed bent on putting to her drove her up the wall. Only a couple of California papers, anxious to claim her as their own, and the ever-candid Boston Globe had even mentioned her role in the space program.
To his surprise she smiled a little now. "Were it done, when it's done, do it quickly," she said.
Al laughed, both at the sentiment and the awkward misquote. "We givin' them what they want, today?" he asked.
Elsa shrugged as they got to their feet. "That depends what they want!" she said.
He chuckled again as he climbed down past the other spectators, most notably Roosa's wife, who had come out from Houston for the launch. Al reached up to offer Elsa a hand as she stepped nimbly after. To his surprise she clung to his shoulder in a very photogenic way as he approached the crowd of ravening coyotes. He wrapped a grateful hand around the supple curve of her waist. Apparently they were going to play the America's Favorite Couple game today.
"Good morning, gentlemen!" he said brightly, blinking against flashbulbs.
"Lieutenant Commander! What are your feelings about the launch?" one of them asked eagerly.
"Well, I think it's a triumph!" Al said, sending the note-taking types scribbling and the microphone-bearing types scrambling for a clear field. "Not just for those men in that capsule, or the people who fought so hard for Apollo's funding, but the American people, all of mankind—"
Elsa thumped her hand against his chest.
"I'm sorry," Al said; "I meant to say all of humankind. All of humankind. It took us centuries—thousands of years to progress to the point where we can do something like this, and every time we send up another mission we show it's not just a fluke. It's a new skill, a new ability that we have."
There was some more gratuitous photo-snapping.
"Commander! How do you respond to critics who say that the Apollo program has outlived its usefulness, and we should pour all of our energy into the proposed Shuttle?"
"First of all, it's not a proposed Shuttle. It's actually happening," Al said. "I think it will serve its purpose for science, but it's never going to be the tool for unity and pride that Apollo is. And unity is important. I think this country deserves something it can feel proud about!"
That was a tactical error.
"You mean after the fiasco in Vietnam!" some carrion-fowl shouted.
Al fell back on stock responses. Now and then Yardley replenished his supply.
"Vietnam wasn't a fiasco. We did some very important things, and we made some very terrible mistakes, but it wasn't a fiasco," he said. "It's an experience that I think will prove to be an important chapter in our journey to becoming a mature nation."
The floodgate was opened. "As a former prisoner of war, how do you feel about activists like Jane Fonda who called servicemen like yourself baby-murders and criminals?"
Elsa hugged Al more tightly as he stiffened against this one. You black air pirate. You make crimes of aggression against peace-loving people of Vietnam. Confess bad crimes, we forgive. Continue obstinate and be serious punished… A forced laugh reached his lips.
"Well, hell, the VC said that all the time!" he quipped. "I gotta tell you, Jane Fonda has better legs than Ho Chi Mihn!"
The reporters laughed appreciatively. A woman in an unnecessarily pink suit jostled for their attention.
"Mrs Calavicci! Our readers want to know when the first bundle of joy can be expected!"
Elsa tossed her head so that her earrings sparkled. "We are both too busy for babies right now," she said. "Al has to get to the moon, and I am busy trying to get him there. Our duty to the State must come before any little children!"
Cameras clicked madly. "Commander Calavicci! Will you be on the crew of Apollo 20?"
"The roster hasn't been announced," Al said. "But I'm going to do my damnedest to qualify!"
"But do you think you'll be chosen?"
"I hope so!" Al said. "Who wouldn't want to go to the moon?"
MWMWMWMWMWMWM
A similar circus was held eight days later, when Roosa and his crew splashed down with picture-perfect precision after a gloriously successful flight. It was strange, but Al seemed to garner more media attention than the returning astronauts. Everybody wanted his opinion on everything from the mission to Jane Fonda's latest flick. That comment about her legs had made the headlines in at least three papers, although most of them had the decency to latch onto the more PR-sanctioned remarks about maturing as a nation (brain-child of one of Yardley's protégés in Washington). It wasn't until two days after splashdown that Al was confronted with the ugliest by-products of the launch interview.
It was Jim Taggert who finally had the decency to tell him. He cornered Al as he left the simulator hangar after a successful lunar landing.
"Hey, Al," he said, producing a stack of papers. "The guys… everybody was scared to tell you, but I think you ought to know before the scabs try and spring it on you."
"Know what, Jimbo?" Al asked. The young lieutenant was the closest thing he had to a friend among the astronauts, though he honestly couldn't see why Taggert liked him.
"What the supermarket rags are saying."
"About me?" Damn, he could see it now. Claustrophobic Astronaut!, Former POW Has Flashbacks in the Simulator!, Calavicci Claims "The Vietcong are Aliens"!
Jim shook his head. "About Elsa."
He held out a stack of tabloids. On top as a copy of the National Enquirer, adorned with a snap of him helping Elsa descend the bleachers. Her head was tilted at an odd angle so that her eyebrows seemed to arc, Vulcan-style, straight towards her hairline. The headline read "Duty to the State" Comes Before Duty to Husband. Al frowned and grabbed the next one. It had a different cutting-room reject of the two of them clinging to each other, Elsa's face lowered in a private smirk, probably just after the Jane Fonda quip. Astronaut's Wife a Soviet Spy, the headline screamed. The whole stack followed in the same vein: War Hero Playing House With Ruskie Informer; KGB Agent Vows "No Kids for Calavicci"; Commie Bride Pulls Wool Over POW's Eyes.
Al looked up at Taggert, who was watching him anxiously. Al chuckled. "This is great!" he said.
Jim stared at him in disbelief. "Great? Al, they're saying she's a—"
"A Soviet spy, yeah, I know. It's 'cause she said "State" instead of "States"! This is hilarious! She's gonna get a kick out of it!"
"You're kidding, right?" Jim said anxiously. "You're trying to laugh it off. I mean, Elsa's an American citizen and everything! This is just disgusting!"
"It's just drivel, is what it is," Al chuckled. "They could have said she was an alien warrior-queen, or a reincarnation of Ivan the Terrible, or a cross-dressing VC sergeant in a bad wig! It's not like anti-Soviet sentiment's riding high: they're just trying to start a conspiracy theory. We'll laugh about it: you'll see!"
MWMWMWMWMWMWM
Elsa stared at the papers spread across the dining room table. Her hands trembled. Watching from his seat near the sideboard, Al reflected that maybe they weren't going to laugh about it after all. Finally, Elsa found her voice.
"Are the good papers saying it, too?" she asked.
"Huh?"
"The Times and the Herald and the Tribune. Are they saying these terrible lies?"
"What? No! No, of course not! Yesterday's Tribune had a story about my Golden Globe championship match, and I think the Times might actually be getting bored of interviewing men who knew me from the camps." Al puffed on his cigar and grinned. "It's just the bottom of the barrel trying to sell birdcage linings."
"Mmh…" Elsa said distractedly, staring at the one that identified her specifically with the KGB. Al got to his feet and curled his hand around her waist, drawing her backwards against him and rocking from side to side.
"Whaddaya say you and I go and have a nice, long, hot bath," he suggested in a sultry voice, exhaling a cloud of cigar smoke around her. She loved the smell 'cause it reminded her of her father.
Elsa spun in his arms and suddenly she was grabbing the back of his neck with one hand and groping down the front of his shirt for his dog tags with the other, kissing him madly. She had a thing for his dog tags: holding them, stroking them. Sometime she'd kiss them. It was hilarious to think of a patriotic little trick like her as a Soviet agent. Just too bad she didn't see it that way.
MWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWM
Two weeks before Christmas NASA held a press conference to announce that the internal damage to the S-II that should have gone up with Apollo 19 had finally been deemed insufficient to pose serious risk to space flight, and that the module would be refurbished for use in Apollo 20. As usual when such proclamations came down Al featured prominently on the panel, in this case more to ensure ample attendance by the media than because he had anything even remotely useful to say on the matter. After the pertinent questions had been taken by Yardley and his fellow astronautical engineers the snoops inevitably turned their attention on Calavicci, the hottest paper-seller to come out of NASA since the glory days of the Apollo 13 crisis. It was usually at this point that the more odious questions about Vietnam would surface. Today, however, the first question to ring out was in quite a different vein.
"Lieutenant-Commander Calavicci! How do you respond to the rumors that your wife is in fact a Soviet spy?"
Al leaned forward into his microphone. "How would you react to a rumor like that?" he asked.
"It's ridiculous!" Yardley cut in. "Elsa Calavicci is an upstanding woman and a fine scientist. She's been a citizen of this country for twelve years now. Next question!"
The reporters didn't catch the hint that the Associate Administrator didn't want this topic brought up again.
"But Commander, isn't it true that she's a native of a Red country?"
"That's right, she was born in Hungary," Al said.
"Why did you marry her?"
"Why does anybody get married?" Al asked. He rolled his eyes and said with good-natured sarcasm; "I always wanted to kiss a Commie!"
Everyone laughed.
MWMWMWMWMWMWMWM
The day after that the astronauts started in with crisis training again, and Al saw very little of Elsa, except in the mornings when she was running the LEMS. He fared much better than he had the last time, which meant that a year of intensive psychotherapy had to be working. Nevertheless, he wasn't sorry to see the back of the Kennedy Space Center as he headed home at the end of that grueling, sleepless week.
The house that they had bought was a costly split-level, for which Al had shelled out a hundred and ten thousand dollars of cold, hard compensation cash. No mortgages for the Calaviccis! Elsa had furnished it from a fund to which they had both contributed. All of the furniture she had chosen was dark, heavy neo-Victorian stuff, incredibly expensive and as far as Al was concerned, vulgar as hell. He would have liked to decorate the house in bright colors and plastics, maybe a couple of beanbag chairs and some Day-Glo velvet paintings. However, a woman's home was her castle, and after all Al just lived there. It was a quantum leap up from some accommodations this sailor had seen in his lifetime, anyway.
Elsa had obviously gone to bed, and Al was too tired to eat, so he opted to forego the ordeal of feeding himself. He did take his milk like a good little astronaut, however, and then ascended the short flight of stairs to the bedroom.
Elsa was sitting up in bed, wearing the black silk negligee with the spring-loaded ribbon to which she had introduced him on the morning after the Great Wedding Fight. Of all her lingerie it was Al's absolute favorite. She had a copy of Sense and Sensibility in her hand, and she was so rapt in the story that she didn't seem to hear him come in.
"Hey, beautiful," Al said, peeling off his uniform. She didn't respond. "It's been one hell of a week, and I'm dog tired," he continued; "but I'm glad you don't think I'm too worn out for a little hanky-panky."
She turned the page with a crisp snap.
"Jim and I, we were saying that if they base the roster on this week, it'll be me and Simmons and Jacobs. I hope not. Simmons is a great guy, but that redneck gets under my skin," Al continued. Still, Elsa didn't seem to hear him.
Having finished stripping down, Al climbed into bed next to his wife and kissed her neck. She didn't respond. Then with one hand he gently drew the book out of her grasp, while the other found the ribbon and tugged it.
Elsa slapped him full across the face. "Don't you touch me!" she snapped. "Don't you touch me, telling the reporters I'm a Commie!" She followed this up with a Hungarian insult Al hadn't been privileged to hear before.
"What?" Al said, bewildered. "I didn't—" Then he remembered. Yeah, he had cracked a joke like that, hadn't he?
Elsa threw a copy of the National Enquirer at him. The headline read Calavicci Views Red Marriage as Adventure.
"You say you like to kiss me because I am a Communist!" Elsa accused, her accent thickening and her diction deteriorating as they always did when she was angry. "Well, I am not a Communist, so I guess you can just not kiss me, stupid nozzle!"
Al stroked her arm. "Baby, it was just a joke. Everybody knew it, and—"
"Did you say it, or didn't you?" she demanded.
Al frowned. "Well, yeah, sort of, but it wasn't like that. These tabloids, they're more fiction than fac—"
With an indignant snort that was almost a sob, Elsa threw her head down on the pillow, turning her back to him and screwing her eyes tightly closed.
For a minute Al hesitated, his hand hovering over her beautifully browned shoulder. But he was tired, he was exhausted, and he just couldn't make up tonight. He turned off the bedside lamp and lay down.
At first he thought that he couldn't sleep because the fight had upset him. But as time dragged by and he tossed and turned next to Elsa's peacefully slumbering form, he began to realize that that wasn't it at all. It was the bed. The mattress was pressing painfully against him. His back ached from resting in an S-conformation. His skin tingled painfully, dissatisfied with the softness of the cotton sheets. The gentle warmth of the clean, fragrant blankets was oppressive and miserable. No matter how he turned in the springy comfort of the bed he just couldn't settle. He just couldn't. His eyes were wet with tears of frustration and sheer exhaustion, but whatever way he turned the softness was unbearable.
He had to sleep. His body craved sleep. His mind was sobbing and begging for it. He had hardly slept at all this week. He was so tired, but they wouldn't let him sleep. It was harder to resist them when you were hallucinating. This place they had left him, with the warm, soft, soothing surroundings and the consolation of another body beside him, it was just a trick. A trick. He couldn't sleep here. It was a trick.
Before he knew what he was doing Al got out of bed. In the darkness, his bare feet found their way to the bedroom door. He needed to sleep. God, God, how he needed to sleep! He had to find somewhere that he could be safe. Somewhere, anywhere, where he could sleep just a little…
The tile in the kitchen was cold and firm against his toes. There was a table, a pine wood table with chairs tucked around it. He pulled one chair out and crawled through the space left by it. Then he dragged it back. The legs of the chairs formed bars all around him. A cage. Somehow his exhausted mind took comfort from this, from the presence of slats keeping him in and the world out. Quivering with exhaustion he lay down, curling his limbs in toward his body. The hard surface below him was familiar, though cold and bitterly uncomfortable. At last, his weary mind released its anxieties and let him rest, and he drifted off into a slumber of utter enervation.