All That Outer Space Allows (Apollo Quartet Book 4) Read online

  Contents

  Title page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Notes

  You Have Been Reading About...

  Further Reading

  Bibliography

  Online Sources

  ALL THAT OUTER SPACE ALLOWS

  THE FOURTH BOOK OF THE APOLLO QUARTET

  Ian Sales

  Whippleshield Books

  www.whippleshieldbooks.com

  UK

  #

  © 2015 Ian Sales

  All rights reserved.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published by Whippleshield Books

  www.whippleshieldbooks.com

  ISBN 978-0-9931417-3-7 (limited)

  ISBN 978-0-9931417-2-0 (paper)

  ISBN 978-0-9931417-4-4 (ebook)

  Edited by Jim Steelwe

  Cover by Kay Sales (kaysales.wordpress.com)

  Chapter 1

  “We choose to go to the Moon”

  Ginny is at the table on the patio, in slacks and her favourite plaid shirt, tapping away on her Hermes Baby typewriter, a glass of iced tea to one side, a stack of typescript to the other. Something, a sixth sense, she’s developed it during her seven years as an Air Force wife, a presentiment, of what she can’t say, causes her to glance over at the gate to the yard. And there’s Bob, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Lincoln Hollenbeck, cap in hand, his movie-star profile noble with concern. Ginny immediately looks over to her right, across to the Air Force Base and the dry lake. Her hand goes to her mouth. Oh my God my God my God. There’s a line of dark smoke chalked up the endless sky. My God my God my God. She pushes back her chair and lurches to her feet.

  Is it…? she asks.

  Have you seen Judy? Bob replies. She’s not at home.

  Ginny’s heart takes wing. It’s not Walden.

  No, she says and she’s not thinking straight as she knows Judy is out. She’s not at home?

  She has to ask: It’s Scott?

  He ejected in time, Bob explains, but he’ll be laid up for a time.

  The smoke?

  His F-104 hit the ground pretty hard.

  Ginny knows the F-104, the one that looks like a silver missile. With its stubby wings, its sharp-pointed nose and the great burning orifice of its jet-pipe, it could be a starship— no, a star fighter… In fact, that’s not a bad idea. She pushes her sunglasses up onto her crown, picks up a pencil and scribbles a note on a piece of paper.

  I think Judy has gone into Lancaster, she tells Bob. She’ll be back soon.

  I guess I better wait for her, Bob replies. She’ll want to go see Scott in the hospital.

  Is it bad?

  Bob shrugs. Busted leg, he says.

  I got some more iced tea in the refrigerator.

  He shrugs again and settles his cap back on his head. I guess, he says. He seems to realize he’s being unmannerly, and adds, Yes, that would be real fine, Ginny.

  Ginny leaves her writing—now is not the time to fill her mind’s eye with other worlds and other times. She’ll tidy everything away later, once Bob has gone, and before Walden gets home. Walden puts up with it but he doesn’t like it, and he especially doesn’t like to be reminded of it—his wife, the “space cadette”, it was funny, kind of endearing even, back when they were courting at SDSU and afterward, when he was in the Air Force and before she graduated, which she always insisted on doing. Since their marriage, Walden has used her writing far too many times as a weapon, a club with which to browbeat her into submission when they argue, when he wants his way and their stubbornness is equally matched. He’s a liberal guy in many respects and she loves that about him, and perhaps if he had not been Air Force he’d be something wild and crazy; but he’s also a man and he runs roughshod over her wishes and desires every moment of every day. She knows only too well which battles she can fight to the bitter end and which are better served by beating a tactical retreat.

  But sometimes, too many times maybe, Walden gets his way, and her stories are where she puts the victories she feels she should have won. They’re a form of therapy for her, a catharsis, a way of vicariously living out a life the real world can’t give her, though she wants it so much, was brought up to demand it, remembering with pain and sadness her mother’s bitterness as she was marched back into the kitchen when the Second World War ended, “Rosie the Riveter go back home” tattooed on her heart, written in the lines of her face.

  Ginny fetches the jug of iced tea and a pair of fresh glasses, and she and Bob settle down in the lounge, on sofas across from one another, the coffee table between them. Sprawled on its top are half a dozen magazines, the cover of the uppermost depicting a beautiful woman in a bubble helmet exiting a spaceship on an alien world, the name “Alice Eleanor Jones” prominent as the issue’s novella is hers—but then she’s a big-name author and has been for the past ten years. Ginny only wishes she were as good as Jones (and she’s jealous of Jones’s success in the slicks). Bob takes his glass, balances it on one knee, his cap now hung on the other knee. Ginny lifts her sunglasses from her crown, bends forward to put them on the coffee table, and uses the movement as an excuse to scoot the magazines together into a pile and then place the pile on the carpet. There’s a thin dusting of sand on the table-top and a series of smeared rectangles where the magazines sat—she never moves anything here in the desert, fine sand gathers on every surface—so she gives a swipe with the flat of her hand before sitting back.

  For a minute or so, they smile uncomfortably at one another. Ginny likes Bob, he’s a swell guy, but they both know this moment is awkward; and she’s wondering what possessed her to invite him inside to wait for Judy. He would have been happy sitting in his car, it’s not like he can do small talk with a woman, even a “free spirit” like Ginny—that’s how Ginny likes to think the guys on the base think of her. (She knows it’s probably not true and Walden will tell her nothing; and she tries so much to fit in, even with the other wives but sometimes it’s hard and she says something and everyone turns to look at her like she just sprouted a second head.)

  This is nice tea, says Bob. Not too sweet.

  It keeps me going during the day, Ginny says.

  You said Judy went into Lancaster?

  Bob takes another sip of his tea, and then glances at his wristwatch.

  Ginny looks at her own watch. I’m pretty sure it was about three hours ago, she says. I guess she’ll be back any time soon.

  Bob rises to his feet. I ought to go wait outside, he says, so I don’t miss her.

  You’ll hear her drive up from here, Ginny tells him.

  The room is as silent as the desert, Ginny won’t have distractions like the radio playing when she’s writing. Her typewritten words drop into her stories like supersonic jet fighters stooping from the sky.

  She thinks, was I being forward? Was that forward? I don’t want him to read too much into that, maybe I’m being too relaxed. It’s only Bob, but… She sits up straight, prim and proper, despite the slacks and shirt, despite the strappy slingback sandals and the chipped polish all too visible on her toenails, and says, But if you think that’s best…

  Bob nods. I think so, he says.

  His face
is a mask, but Ginny thinks maybe she detects some relief. And she wonders if spending the morning in the head of her story’s heroine is making her see things in that handsome countenance which don’t exist, her imagination spilling over into the real world and laying a deceptive gloss over it. It’s okay when she’s with Walden, she knows him so well, she can read him like, well, like a book. And when there’s company over, she’s usually had all day to prepare for it, to rehearse for the role she must play, dashing from room to room getting them clean and tidy, getting the food ready, getting everything just right like she’s supposed to…

  Bob puts his cap on his head and carefully straightens it. It was nice tea, he says, Thank you, Ginny.

  So she rises to her feet, and says, You’re coming on Sunday, aren’t you? To the barbecue?

  Sure, he replies, Alison and I are looking forward to it. He gives a curt nod. You’ll tell Wal I was here, he says (and it’s clear from his tone it’s not a question).

  Of course, Ginny tells him.

  She sees him to the door, the front door this time, not the patio doors, and she watches as he crosses the road and climbs into his blue sedan. There’s a cough and a dyspeptic rumble as the engine starts, but the car remains in place, motor idling, occupant gazing fixedly forward.

  Ginny closes the door slowly and returns to the lounge. She tidies away the iced tea, rinsing the glasses, drying them and putting them in a cupboard, returning the jug to the refrigerator. It’s getting close to five o’clock and Walden will be home just after six, so she heads out onto the patio to pack up her typewriter and manuscript. She sees the note she scribbled earlier and gazes down at it; and then thinks, Oh my, you silly. F-104. She knows about them, Walden has flown over a hundred hours in F-104s. It’s the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. She knows that, why would she write something as silly as “like a star fighter”. It was Bob, his appearance threw her.

  Ginny gathers up her typescript into a buff folder, and carries it and the typewriter inside. After she has put away her writing things, and the magazines from the lounge, she makes herself ready for Walden. She brushes her hair, puts on lipstick and powder, checks her appearance will pass inspection, and goes to make dinner. It’s all part of the job of being an Air Force wife, presenting a normal home-life so her husband can briefly forget how close he comes to “buying the farm” each day. It’s a small price to pay, she loves Walden, her love remains undiminished from the day they wed—although that doesn’t mean they haven’t argued, they haven’t spent days refusing to talk to each other. Ginny’s mother brought her up to be independent, to have expectations, ambitions and, okay, marrying an Air Force pilot wasn’t the smartest move she could have made in that regard—

  Unlike many of her friends, Ginny didn’t go to university to catch herself a husband, she stayed and matriculated, married Walden a month after she received her Lit degree. She never used her BA, of course, she joined her husband in the United States Air Force. But she has her stories, she has her imagination, and because Walden allows her that she’s willing to play the dutiful Air Force wife for him.

  At six thirty, she hears a car pulling up, and then the tigerish roar it makes as it slides into the carport and the engine-noise bounces off the walls. She smiles, her flyboy is home.

  He strides into the kitchen minutes later, where she’s stirring gravy, puts his arms about her waist, sticks his nose into her hair, breathes in deeply and then plants a kiss on the top of her head.

  You hear about Scott? he says.

  Bob was here, looking for Judy, she replies.

  Damn bad luck. He’s going to be grounded for months with that leg.

  And that’s all Walden says on the matter.

  #

  #

  Ginny exits the house carrying a tray on which sits a platter of raw steaks. The guys are standing about the barbecue—Scott in a chair to one side, busted leg held out stiffly before him in a cast. Walden is making some point emphatically with jabs of a pair of meat tongs. She stops a moment and watches them, watches him, her husband, wreathed in a cloak of grey smoke, her flyboy, in his white T-shirt and tan chinos, aviator sunglasses, that wholesome white-toothed smile. And she thinks, so strange that his parents should name him after a book subtitled “Life in the Woods”…

  They didn’t, of course; I did, I named him Walden for Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 polemic. There is a scene in Douglas Sirk’s 1955 movie All That Heaven Allows—the title of this novel is not a coincidence; the movie is a favourite, and, in broad stroke, both All That Heaven Allows and All That Outer Space Allows tell similar stories: an unconventional woman who attempts to break free of conventional life… There is a scene in the movie in which Ron has invited Cary back to his place for a party. While he and his best friend, Mick, fetch wine from the cellar, Cary is at a loose end and idly picks up a copy of Thoreau’s Walden lying on a nearby table. She opens the book at random and reads out a line: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” Not only is Walden Ron’s favourite book, she is told, but he also lives it—

  Walden Jefferson Eckhardt, however, is indifferent to Thoreau’s book, not sharing his parents’ admiration of it or its message, for all that he is a test pilot; and they see themselves as a breed apart, at the top of the pyramid, men of independence and daring and achievement. Walden stands there with his fellow test pilots—and Ginny knows them all—and though they’re tall and stocky, blond-haired and brunet, craggy-featured and smooth-faced, they all look the same. Cut from the same cloth, stamped from the same mould.

  She starts forward, her heels tock-tock-tock on the patio, because for this gathering she’s playing the dutiful Air Force wife and has dressed accordingly. She approaches the men at the barbecue bearing bloody meat for them to char and broil, and they turn carnivorous grins on her, teeth bright through the smoke, eyes invisible behind aviator shades.

  Hey, Ginny, let me take that, says Al, reaching out with both hands for the tray, the neck of a beer bottle clutched between two fingers.

  She hands him the steaks, then turns to Walden. Chicken next? she asks.

  He has interrupted his anecdote because it’s not for her ears. Sure, hon, he says off-handedly.

  She’s tempted to ask him what he was talking about, but she’s uncomfortable under the mirrored eyeless gazes of the guys, so she gives a faint smile and tock-tock-tocks away.

  The women are sitting about the table at which Ginny likes to write, nursing drinks, their faces powdered and lipsticked, some wearing sunglasses, a couple with fresh hairdos. And it occurs to Ginny there are more stories at that table than there are when she has her typewriter upon it—and they are real stories, not the science fiction she writes, which are set on worlds constructed from, and inhabited by, figments of the imagination; nor are they the stories which appear in Redbook or McCall’s or Good Housekeeping, what Betty Friedan calls stories of “happy housewife heroines”—and it’s those very stories which drove Ginny, and no doubt women like her, to science fiction and its invented worlds. Ginny dislikes words such as “prosaic” and “quotidian” because she believes what she writes employs a dimension beyond that, she believes her stories use science fiction to comment on the prosaic and quotidian without partaking of it.

  But right now the prosaic and quotidian are signalled by a sky like a glass dish hot from the oven and the phatic chatter of four women in bright dresses, the most colour this yard of sparse grass, and its trio of threadbare cottonwoods, has seen for weeks.

  Pam looks up as Ginny approaches, leans forward and slides a martini slowly across the table-top. This one’s for you, she tells Ginny.

  I still have the chicken to bring out, Ginny replies.

  Later, Pam says with a smile. Drink first.

  Alison and Connie add their voices, so Ginny takes the free chair at the table and it’s a relief to stop for a moment. She li
fts the drink and toasts the other women.

  These barbecues are a regular occurrence, though they each take it in turn to play host. Here in the Mojave Desert, the days are bright and blue-skied, endless dust and heat, and so they lead summer lives throughout the year. Ginny sips her martini and lets the chatter of Judy, Alison, Connie and Pam, and in the background the boasting of the men, wash over her. She has maybe fifteen minutes before the steaks are ready and Walden starts demanding the chicken; because when he wants something he expects to get it, she’s here to cater to him after all. Perhaps in private she can make her own demands, set her own limits, but he brooks no dissent on occasions such as this. She takes another sip of her martini and tells herself her “feminine mystique” is for her husband’s eyes and ears only—

  Ginny’s attention is snagged by the rasp of a lighter, and she looks up to see Judy put the flame to a cigarette in her mouth. So Ginny leans forward and asks how she is coping with her invalided husband. In response, Judy sucks in theatrically, eyebrows raised and lips pursed, and then expels smoke in a long plume over the table. The others laugh. It is all too easy to sympathise, they are Air Force wives. Ginny abruptly remembers days in Germany, when Walden flew F-86D Sabre jets for the 514th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron at Ramstein AFB. For all her open-mindedness, her hankering for new horizons, Ginny found Germany a difficult place in which to live, the contrast between life on the base and life outside, life in the US and life in Europe, too stark, too marked for comfort. She was prolific during those two years, her writing helped her cope.

  Walden calls out: Hey, hon, chicken!

  No rest for the wicked, says Alison.

  Ginny gives an exaggerated sigh, drains the last of her martini and then plucks the olive out of the glass. She pops it into her mouth before rising to her feet.

  Later, everyone has repaired to the lounge and the radio is playing quietly in the background. Ginny is sitting on the floor at Walden’s feet when he throws a newspaper down onto the coffee table and says to the other guys, Have you seen this?