'The Master? You mean this guru of Scott's?'
'That's what they all call him. Anyway, Scott asked me to tell you, and I figured you wouldn't be staying long in New Delhi.'
'You came out before dawn to give me that message?' Baedecker looked carefully at the young woman next to him. As they moved farther away from the glaring spotlights, her skin seemed to glow of its own accord. He realized that soft light was tinging the eastern sky.
'No problem,' she said and took his arm in hers. 'My train just got in a few hours ago. I didn't have anything to do until the USEFI offices opened up.' They had come around to the front of the terminal. Baedecker realized that they were out in the country, some distance from the city. He could see high-rise apartments in the distance, but the sounds and smells surrounding them were all of the country. The curving airport drive led to a wide highway, but nearby were dirt roads under multitrunked banyan trees.
'When's your flight, Mr. Baedecker?'
'To Bombay? Not until eight-thirty. Call me Richard.'
'Okay, Richard. What do you say we take a walk and then get some breakfast?'
'Fine,' said Baedecker. He would have given anything at that moment to have an empty room waiting for him, a bed, time to sleep. What time would it be in St. Louis? His tired mind was not up to the simple arithmetic. He followed the girl as she set off down the rain-moistened drive. Ahead of them the sun was rising.
The sun had been rising for three days when they landed. Details stood out in bold relief. It had been planned that way.
Later, Baedecker remembered very little about actually descending the ladder and stepping off the LM footpad. All those years of preparation, simulation, and expectation had led to that single point, that sharp intersection of time and place, but what Baedecker later remembered was the vague sense of frustration and urgency. They were twenty-three minutes behind schedule when Dave finally led the way down the ladder. Suiting up, going over the fifty-one-point PLS checklist, and depressurizing had taken more time than it had in the simulations.
Then they were moving across the surface, testing their balance, picking up contingency samples, and trying to make up for lost time. Baedecker had spent many hours composing a short phrase to recite upon first setting foot on lunar soil — his 'footnote in history' as Joan had called it — but Dave made a joke after jumping off the footpad, Houston had asked for a radio check, and the moment passed.
Baedecker had two strong memories of the rest of that first EVA. He remembered the damned checklist banded to his wrist. They never caught up to the timeline, not even after eliminating the third core sample and the second check of the Rover's guidance memory. He had hated that checklist.
The other memory still returned to him in dreams. The gravity. The one-sixth gee. The sheer exhilaration of bouncing across the glaring, rock-strewn surface with only the lightest touch of their boots to propel them. It awakened an even earlier memory in Baedecker; he was a child, learning to swim in Lake Michigan, and his father was holding him under the arms while he kicked and bounced his way across the sand of the lake bottom. What marvelous lightness, the supporting strength of his father's arms, the gentle rise and fall of the green waves, the perfect synchronization of weight and buoyancy meeting in the ribbon of balance flowing up from the balls of his feet.
He still dreamed about that.
The sun rose like a great, orange balloon, its sides shifting laterally as light refracted through the warming air. Baedecker thought of Ektachrome photos in National Geographic. India! Insects, birds, goats, chickens, and cattle added to the growing sound of traffic along the unseen highway. Even this winding dirt road on which they walked was already crowded with people on bicycles, bullock carts, heavy trucks labeled Public Transport, and an occasional black-and-yellow taxi dodging in and out of the confusion like an angry bee.
Baedecker and the girl stopped by a small, green building that was either a farmhouse or a Hindu temple. Perhaps it was both. Bells were ringing inside. The smell of incense and manure drifted from an inner courtyard. Roosters were crowing and somewhere a man was chanting in a frail-voiced falsetto. Another man — this one in a blue polyester business suit — stopped his bicycle, stepped to the side of the road, and urinated into the temple yard.
A bullock cart lumbered past, axle grinding, yoke straining, and Baedecker turned to watch it. A woman in the back of it lifted her sari to her face, but the three children next to her returned Baedecker's stare. The man in front shouted at the laboring bullock and snapped a long stick against a flank already scabrous with sores. Suddenly all other noises were lost as an Air India 747 roared overhead, its metal sides catching the gold of the rising sun.
'What's that smell?' asked Baedecker. Above the general onslaught of odors — wet soil, open sewage, car exhausts, compost heaps, pollution from the unseen city — there rose a sweet, overpowering scent that already seemed to have permeated his skin and clothes.
'They're cooking breakfast,' said Maggie Brown. 'All over the country, they're cooking breakfast over open fires. Most of them using dried cow dung as fuel. Eight hundred million people cooking breakfast. Gandhi once wrote that that was the eternal scent of India.' Baedecker nodded. The sunrise was being swallowed by lowering monsoon clouds. For a second the trees and grass were a brilliant, false green, made even more pronounced by Baedecker's fatigue. The headache, which had been with him since Frankfurt, had moved from behind his eyes to a point at the base of his neck. Every step sent an echo of pain through his head. Yet the pain seemed a distant and unimportant thing, perceived as it was through a haze of exhaustion and jet lag. It was part of the strangeness — the new smells, the odd cacophony of rural and urban sounds, this attractive young woman at his side with sunlight outlining her cheekbones and setting fire to her green eyes. What was she to his son anyway? How serious was their relationship? Baedecker wished he had asked Joan more questions about the girl, but the visit had been uncomfortable and he had been in a hurry to leave.
Baedecker looked at Maggie Brown and realized that he was being sexist in thinking of her as a girl. The young woman seemed to possess that sense of self-possession, of awareness, which Baedecker associated with true adults as opposed to those who had simply grown up. Looking again, Baedecker guessed that Maggie Brown was at least in her mid-twenties, several years older than Scott. Hadn't Joan said something about their son's friend being a graduate student and teaching assistant?
'Did you come to India just to visit Scott?' asked Maggie Brown. They were on the circular drive again, approaching the airport.
'Yes. No,' said Baedecker. 'That is, I came to see Scott, but I arranged a business trip to coincide with it.'
'Don't you work for the government?' asked Maggie. 'The space people?' Baedecker smiled at the image 'the space people' evoked. 'Not for the past twelve years,' he said and told her about the aerospace firm in St. Louis for which he worked.
'So you don't have anything to do with the space shuttle?' said Maggie. 'Not really. We had some subsystems aboard the shuttles and used to rent payload space aboard them every once in a while.' Baedecker was aware that he had used the past tense, as if he were speaking about someone who had died.
Maggie stopped to watch the rich sunlight bathe the sides of the New Delhi control tower and terminal buildings in gold. She tucked a wayward strand of hair behind one ear and folded her arms. 'It's hard to believe that it's been almost eighteen months since the Challenger explosion,' she said. 'That was a terrible thing.'