'You take care, too, Dad,' said Scott and, ignoring the offered handshake, threw his arms around Baedecker and hugged him.
Baedecker put his hand on his son's strong back and closed his eyes.
Baedecker caught a 7:45 A.M. United flight out of O'Hare. It was bound for Seattle but had a scheduled stop in Rapid City, South Dakota, which was as close as Baedecker could get to Maggie's grandparents' ranch near Sturgis without bailing out. Tired as he was, Baedecker noticed that the aircraft was one of the new Boeing 767s. He had not flown in one before.
They served breakfast somewhere over southern Minnesota. Baedecker stared at the tray of reheated scrambled eggs and sausage and decided that appetite or no appetite, it was time to eat after almost three days. He could not do it. He was sipping coffee and looking down at glimpses of brown landscape between the clouds when the stewardess came up to him and said, 'Mr. Baedecker.'
'Yes?' said Baedecker and felt a stab of alarm. How did she know his name? Had something happened to Scott?
'Captain Hollister wonders if you would like to come up to the flight deck.'
'Sure,' said Baedecker and followed her forward through the first-class section with relief slowing his heart rate. He searched his memory, trying to recall if he had met an airline pilot named Hollister. He could remember no one with that name, but he did not trust his memory.
'Here you are, sir,' said the stewardess and opened the door for him. 'Thank you,' said Baedecker and stepped through.
The pilot looked up and grinned. He was a florid-faced man in his early forties with thick hair, a boyish grin, and a pleasant, Wally Schirra-like expression. 'Welcome, Mr. Baedecker, I'm Charlie Hollister. This is Dale Knutsen.' Baedecker nodded a greeting at both men.
'Hope we didn't disturb your breakfast,' said Hollister. 'I noticed your name on the passenger list and just wondered if you'd like to see how our new baby here compares to your Apollo hardware.'
'My God,' said Baedecker. 'I'm amazed you made the connection with my name.' Hollister smiled again. Neither pilot nor copilot appeared to be involved with flying the aircraft.
'Here,' said Knutsen and released his straps. 'Have my seat, sir. I'm going back to the galley for a minute.' Baedecker thanked him and settled into the fleece-lined right seat. Except for the yoke in place of a hand-controller, the cockpit could have been a close relative of the space shuttle's. Video display terminals flashed instrument readings, lines of data, and colored maps onto three screens in front of him. A computer keyboard filled the console between Hollister and him. Baedecker looked out at the blue sky, distant horizon, and layer of clouds far below. He looked back at the pilot. 'I am surprised that you made the connection,' he said. 'We haven't met, have we?'
'No, sir,' said Hollister. 'But I know all of the names from the various missions and remember seeing you on television. The only thing I ever really wanted in life was to be an astronaut myself, but, well . . .' Baedecker extended his hand. 'Let's drop the sirs,' he said. 'They make me feel a little old. My name's Richard.'
'Howdy, Richard,' said Hollister as they shook hands across the computer.
Baedecker glanced at the flashing data screens and moving yoke. 'The aircraft seems to be flying itself pretty well,' he said. 'Does it let you do anything?'
'Not much,' said Hollister with a rueful laugh. 'She's a doozy, ain't she? State of the art. I can program her on the ground at O'Hare and wouldn't have to do a thing until we're setting down in Seattle. Only thing she can't do herself is lower the gear.'
'You don't actually go on full automatic like that, do you?' asked Baedecker.
Hollister shook his head. 'We argue that we need to keep our hand in, and the union supports us. The airline argues back that they bought the seven-six-seven so that the Flight Management Computer System will save money on fuel and that every time we take over manual, we piss that away. Fact is, they're right.'
'Is it fun to fly?' asked Baedecker.
'She's a good ship,' said Hollister. He punched a button and the displays changed. 'Safe as sitting on Grandma's back porch. But fun . . . naw.' He proceeded to show Baedecker details of the Automatic Flight Control System, the Engine Indicating and Crew Alert System, and the computerized color radar displays that incorporated maps of their position relative to VHF Omni-Range stations, waypoints, and Instrument Landing System beams. The same map showed the location of weather fronts, kept a running count of wind velocity, and let them know which direction they were flying at all times. 'It'll tell me who my wife's sleeping with if I ask it real politely,' said Hollister. 'So how does this stack up with the gear you took to the moon?'
'Impressive,' said Baedecker, not telling Hollister that he had worked for a company producing military avionics light-years ahead of even this system. 'To answer your question, we had a lot of crude gauge and dial instrumentation and the LM computer we depended on to guide our butts to the surface had a total capacity of only thirty-nine thousand words . . .'
'Sweet Christ,' said Hollister and shook his head.
'Exactly,' said Baedecker. 'Your FMCS here can work rings around our old PGNS. And most of ours was locked in. If a new problem came up, we could only call on a couple of thousand words.'
'It makes you wonder how we got there at all,' said Hollister. He took the controls, threw a switch high on the instrument board, and set his right hand on the throttles. 'Want to take it a second?'
'Won't United shit a brick?' asked Baedecker.
'No doubt about it,' said Hollister. 'But the only way they're going to find out is if they hear our voices on the black-box flight recorder, and it won't make any difference to us then. Want it?'
'Sure,' said Baedecker.
'You've got it.'
Baedecker handled the yoke gingerly, thinking of the hundred-some passengers juggling their coffee cups behind him. Far ahead, the clouds were dissipating enough that the brown line of the horizon was visible.
'Was it true that Dave Muldorff wanted to name the lunar module The Beagle?' asked Hollister.
'Sure was,' said Baedecker. 'He almost had them convinced, too. He said it was in the tradition of Darwin, voyage of the Beagle and all that. You see, when the crews first started naming the machines, they had names like Gumdrop and Spider and Snoopy. Then after Neil and the-Eagle-has-landed and all that, the names kept getting more serious and pretentious . . . Endeavor and Orion and Intrepid and Odyssey. At the last minute they didn't trust Dave's intentions and strongly suggested that he go with Discovery.'
'What was wrong with Beagle?' asked Hollister.
'Nothing,' said Baedecker, 'but they knew Dave and they were right. He'd worked out a whole shtick starting with, ‘Houston, the Beagle has landed,' and getting worse. He was trying to get Tom Gavin to go with Lassie for the CM. He would've called our wheeled lunar vehicle Rover and told everybody it was a reliable little son of a bitch. We would probably have gone down in NASA history as the Beagle Boys. No, they were right to head him off at the pass, Charlie.' Hollister laughed. 'I remember watching that Frisbee thing you two did up there. Jesus, that must have been a fun time to be flying.' The copilot returned with Styrofoam cups of coffee for each of them. Baedecker returned the controls to Hollister, gave up his seat to Knutsen, and stood a minute, leaning on the back of the copilot's seat and looking out at the vast expanse of cloud and sky. 'Yes,' he said and raised his cup in a silent toast and drank some of the rich, black coffee. 'It was fun.'