Maggie looked down and brushed her hair back behind her ear in a gesture that was already becoming familiar to Baedecker. 'There's a place near where my grandparents live in western South Dakota,' she said. 'A volcanic cone north of the Black Hills, on the edge of the prairie. It's called Bear Butte. I used to climb it when I was little while Grandad and Memo waited for me down below. Years later I learned that it was a holy place for the Sioux. But even before that — when I stood up there and looked over the prairie — I knew it was special.' Baedecker nodded. 'High places do that,' he said. 'There's a place I like to visit — a little Christian Science college — way out in the boonies on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, not far from St. Louis. The campus is right on the bluffs over the river. There's a tiny chapel right near the edge, and you can walk out on some ledges and see halfway across Missouri.'
'Are you a Christian Scientist?' The question and her expression were so serious that Baedecker had to laugh. 'No,' he said, 'I'm not religious. I'm not . . . anything.' He had a sudden image of himself kneeling in the lunar dust, the stark sunlight a benediction.
The autorickshaw had been stuck in traffic behind several trucks. Now it roared around to pass on the right, and Maggie had to almost shout her next comment. 'Well, I think it's more than the view. I think some places have a power of their own.' Baedecker smiled. 'You could be right.' She turned to him and her green eyes were also smiling. 'And I could be wrong,' she said. 'I could be full of shit. This country will turn anybody into a mystic. But sometimes I think that we spend our whole lives on a pilgrimage to find places like that.'
Baedecker looked away and said nothing.
The moon had been a great, bright sandbox and Baedecker was the only person in it. He had driven the Rover over a hundred meters from the landing module and parked it so that it could send back pictures of the lift-off. He undid the safety belt and vaulted off the seat with the one-armed ease that had become second nature in the low gravity. Their tracks were everywhere in the deep dust. Ribbed wheel tracks swirled, intersected themselves, and headed off to the north where the highlands glared white. Around the ship itself the dust had been stamped and packed down like snow around a cabin.
Baedecker bounced around the Rover. The little vehicle was covered with dust and badly used. Two of the light fenders had fallen off, and Dave had jerry-rigged some plastic maps to keep clods of dirt from being kicked up onto them. The camera cable had become twisted a dozen times and even now had to be rescued by Baedecker. He bounced easily to the front of the Rover, freed the cable with a tug, and dusted off the lens. A glance told him that Dave was already out of sight in the LM.
'Okay, Houston, it looks all right. I'll get out of the way here. How is it?'
'Great, Dick. We can see the Discovery and . . . ahh . . . we should be able to track you on the lift-off.' Baedecker watched with a critical eye as the camera pivoted to the left and to the right. It aimed at his waist and then tracked up to its full lock position. He could imagine the image it was sending. His dusty space suit would be a glare of white, broken by occasional straps, snaplocks, and the dark expanse of his visor. He would have no face.
'Good,' he said. 'Okay. Well . . . ah . . . you have anything else you want me to do?'
'. . . tiv . . .'
'Say again, Houston?'
'Negative, Dick. We're running a little over. Time to get aboard.'
'Roger.' Baedecker turned to take one last look at the lunar terrain. The glare of the sun wiped out most surface features. Even through his darkest visor the surface was a brilliant, white emptiness. It matched his thoughts. Baedecker was irritated to find his mind full of details — the prelaunch checklist, storage procedures, an irritatingly full bladder — all crowding in and not allowing him to think. He slowed his breathing and tried to experience any last feelings that he might be harboring.
I'm here, he thought. This is real.
He felt silly, standing there, breathing into his mike, running the schedule even further behind. The sunlight on the gold insulating foil around the lander caught his eye. Shrugging slightly in his bulging suit, Baedecker bounced effortlessly across the pocked and trampled plain toward the waiting spacecraft.
The half-moon rose above the jungle. It was Maggie's turn to putt. She bent over, knees together, her face a study in concentration. The lightly tapped ball rolled too quickly down the concrete ramp and bounced over the low railing.
'I don't believe this,' Baedecker said.
Khajuraho consisted of a landing strip, a famed group of temples, a tiny Indian village, and two small hotels on the edge of the jungle. And one miniature golf course.
The temple compound closed at five P.M. Entertainment other than the temples themselves consisted of a hotel-sponsored elephant ride into the jungle during tourist season. It was not tourist season. Then they had strolled out behind the small hotel and found the miniature golf course.
'I don't believe this,' Maggie had said.
'It must have been left behind by a homesick architect from Indianapolis,' said Baedecker. The hotel clerk had frowned but provided them with a choice of three putters, two of them bent beyond repair. Baedecker gallantly had offered Maggie the straightest of the lot and they had charged out to the links.
Maggie's missed putt rolled into the grass. A thin green serpent slid away toward higher grass. Maggie stifled a scream and Baedecker held his putter out like a sword. Ahead of them in the humid dusk were peeling plywood windmills and decarpeted putting strips. Cups and concrete water hazards were filled with lukewarm water from the day's monsoon rains. A few yards beyond the last hole stood a real Hindu temple, seemingly part of the miniature montage.
'Scott would love this,' laughed Baedecker.
'Really?' asked Maggie. She rested her weight on her putter. Her face was a white oval in the dim light.
'Sure. This used to be his favorite sport. We used to get a season pass to the Cocoa Beach Putt-Putt course.' Maggie lowered her head and sank a ten-foot putt across pebbly cement. She looked up as something eclipsed the moon.
'Oh!' she said. A fruit bat with a wingspan of three feet or more floated out of the trees and coasted black against the sky.
It was the mosquitoes that drove them inside from the fourteenth hole.
Woodland Heights. Seven miles from the Johnson Space Flight Center, flat as the Bonneville Salt Flats and as devoid of trees save for the precariously supported saplings in every yard, the homes of Woodland Heights stretched in curves and circles under the relentless Texas sun. Once, flying home from a week at the Cape, early on in the training for the Gemini flight that was never to be, Baedecker banked his T-38 over the endless geometries of similar houses to find his own. He finally picked it out by the repainted green of Joan's old Rambler.
Impulsively, he put the little trainer into a dive and leveled off at a satisfying and illegal two hundred feet above the rooftops. The horizon banked, sunlight prismed off Plexiglas, and he brought the jet back for another run. Pulling out, he kicked in the afterburner and brought the T-38 up into a steep climb, arched it into a tight loop, culminated by the sight of the somehow miraculous emergence of his wife and child from the white ranch house.
It had been one of the few moments in Baedecker's life that he could point to and say that he was truly happy.
He lay awake and watched the strip of moonlight move slowly up the wall of the hotel room in Khajuraho. Baedecker idly wondered if Joan had sold the house or if she was still holding it as rental property.