All That Outer Space Allows (Apollo Quartet Book 4) (8 page)

What do you mean? she asks.

Evelyn elaborates, You tell the story from the wife’s perspective, and you drop plenty of hints she’s the solution, but you don’t actually explain the consequences of what happens. You need a twist, Ginny; readers need to know there’s a reason it’s her story and not his.

“The reason for how the story ends…” Ginny realises not only is Evelyn right about the story but her words describe Ginny’s own life here in Texas equally well. The Apollo flight schedule has been postponed while the Apollo 1 fire is investigated and the Block II command modules brought up to scratch. Though it has been six months, a pall continues to hang over Houston, adding a bite of melancholy to the ever-present pollution. Impatience too—the astronauts are not so foolish to rush into anything which may jeopardise their lives, but they’re keen to start flying again. In Ginny’s case, the lack of flights has meant the astronaut wives have been getting on with their own lives: avoiding the press, church work, community theatre, substitute teaching, charitable activities and so on. Ginny has none of these, she has only Walden and her science fiction—and the house being built, arguing with the contractor, only for Walden to apologise to him on his next visit home, angering her at his disloyalty and prompting yet another fight…

So Suzanne, says Ginny, referring to the heroine of her story, you think Suzanne needs to figure out why things happen the way they do?

No, that won’t work, you’ve made it clear she’s no scientist, Evelyn points out. But there’s an obvious consequence to what happens in your story and you need to spell that out. Perhaps you should put Suzanne’s husband closer to the mystery, make him an engineer or something?

But, Ginny thinks, Walden is a pilot, not an engineer; he’s not involved in the design of the Apollo spacecraft, although he does need to understand how their every part functions. While his inability to see so many things which are clear to Ginny provided the inspiration for the story, perhaps she should do as Evelyn suggests and give her protagonist’s husband more of an investment in the success of the invisibility project. Yes, she likes that idea, and as she works through the ramifications of that change, the perfect ending suddenly comes to her, one that turns everything on its head—

I think I have it, she tells Evelyn.

She describes her idea, without going into too much detail as she knows the narrative will shake itself out as she puts the words down on the page, and right now the new direction of ‘The Spaceships Men Don’t See’ is little more than an unmarked path leading to “The End”.

Evelyn laughs. She likes the idea, there’s an irony there she says her readers will recognise. Do that, she tells Ginny, write it like that and send it me. As soon as you can. I want that story for my magazine.

Ginny puts the telephone down. She’s happy she’s sold a story, but it is bittersweet as she thought the original version good enough. No, now she thinks about it, she realises Evelyn is right—this new version is much, much better.

She returns to the lounge.

Who was that, hon? asks Walden, not looking away from the television.

Just one of the other wives, Ginny replies.

Once a month, the wives of the engineers and administrators gathered at the social club for coffee and conversation. Being confined for months on end to the spaceyard, due to its remoteness, was no fun. They all went a little stir-crazy after a time. The men had their work... but what did the women have?

So the wives put on their best dresses, congregated in a back-room at the social club, and gossiped. They oohed and ahhed over the latest fashions in their electronic magazines, and they pretended their coffees didn’t contain something a little extra.

Suzanne was looking forward to the social, just as she did every month—although perhaps more this time. Her husband, a project engineer, had been especially distant during the past few weeks. Each evening, he came home from work, and she took his portable computer and his coat from him, and put them away. He said nothing, not even a thank you, just went into his study and closed the door. And the next day, the level of liquid in the whiskey bottle he kept in there had dropped a couple of inches. His work wasn’t going well. Suzanne didn’t need to be an engineerto see that.

The first person Suzanne spotted when she entered the room at the social club was Kristin, whose husband was one of the spaceyard’s senior administrators. Suzanne was immediately taken with Kristin’s dress in rich purple, complimented her on it, and was praised in turn for her own pink, orange, gold and green paisley dress. Kristin had also dyed her hair a silvery blonde. “It’s very sophisticated, don’t you think, darling,” she told Suzanne, patting her abundant curls with one hand. “My man loves it, he says I look like a tri-dee star or something.”

Kristin could afford to boast—not only was she beautiful and wore the loveliest clothes, but her husband wielded a lot of power in the spaceyard. It wasn’t that Suzanne felt grateful for Kristin’s friendship—she
liked
Kristin, and knew the sentiment was returned—but sometimes she couldn’t help feeling a little resentful at Kristin so frequently calling attention to her many advantages.

They moved further into the room, greeting the other wives in their dresses of yellow and blue and red and other colors, and made their way to the table where the coffee and cakes were laid out. While Kristin poured them both drinks, Suzanne complained about her husband’s recent surliness.

“He hardly speaks to me when he gets home,” she said. “One evening, he complained his steak knife wasn’t sharp enough and went to get another from the kitchen. He couldn’t find them and flew into a terrible rage. It was awful. And do you know where the steak knives were? In the first drawer he looked in!”

“Men are always like that,” Kristin said knowingly. “We’ve been in our apartment for five years now, and my man still can’t find the electronic dishwasher.”

“And if I ask him to fetch something of mine,” Suzanne continued, “like a pair of shoes or some jewellery, he can never find them—even if I give him exact directions!”

Kristin nodded in agreement. She leaned in and lowered her voice conspiratorially. “They’re under stress, darling. It’s this project they’re working on,” she murmured. “Project Philadelphia it’s called.”

“What’s that?” Suzanne knew nothing about her husband’s work. She was aware the spaceyard built ships for the navy, for the war against the Regulans; but that was all she knew.

“I shouldn’t tell you this,” said Kristin, “but…” She placed her purse on the table, slipped a small bottle of whiskey from it and added a dash of liquor to her coffee. “They’re trying to make spaceships invisible. They’ve got a destroyer ship down in a special dock, and they’ve built all this weird equipment into it. It’s supposed to make the spaceship completely invisible. He says the theory all adds up, but no matter what they do everyone can still see the spaceship.”

Kristin sipped her coffee, frowned, and added a few more drops of whiskey. “There’s even been a couple of ‘accidents’, something about a crewman getting phased into the decking or something.” She shuddered. “It all sounded very gruesome, darling.”

By this time, several of the other women had gathered round them, and soon they all had whiskey in their coffees and had been told all Kristin knew about Project Philadelphia. Some of the other wives added details to Kristin’s account, learned from their own husbands.

Of course, all this knowledge meant nothing. Suzanne couldn’t help her husband with his work, but at least she now understood the reason for his bad mood each evening. She even felt a little sympathetic. It must be difficult to work so hard on a project, only for it to repeatedly fail.

After the social had ended, Suzanne waited in the room for her husband, but he didn’t appear. He had told her he would come and fetch her. After ten minutes, she went looking for him. She checked her porta-phone but he hadn’t called her, and although she briefly considered ringing him she didn’t want to seem impatient or demanding. So she left the room and headed for the club foyer. As she passed the archway leading into the main bar, she happened to glance through it.

And there he was, standing at the bar with the spaceyard’s only female test pilot, Betty, who was still dressed in her flightsuit.

Betty turned toward Suzanne as she approached her husband and gave her a flat, hard stare. He, however, hadn’t noticed her and didn’t turn around until she stood beside him.

“Oh hi, honey,” he said. “You know Betty.”

He put his whiskey on the bar, turned and pecked his wife perfunctorily on the cheek.

“I thought you were coming to fetch me?” she asked, trying hard not to sound petulant.

“I couldn’t find you,” he replied. “I swear I looked in every damn room but I couldn’t find any of you.” He shrugged. “I figured you’d walk past the bar on the way out so I came in here to wait.”

He couldn’t have looked very hard. He needed only to find a room full of women in their best outfits, and there she would be.

“I must be going,” Betty said abruptly. She drained her tumbler, put it on the bar, nodded at Suzanne’s husband and strode from the room.

“I guess you’re ready to go too,” he said.

Suzanne smiled wanly.

Her husband finished off his whiskey and took her by the elbow.

The spaceyard lights were on night-cycle, and the stars shone brightly through the forcefield dome. Somewhere out there was Earth, too far away to be visible with the naked eye. Even the Sun was an unremarkable point of light in a heaven of stars. Suzanne shivered. She gripped one of her husband’s arms and hugged it. During the day, when the lights shone so bright they hid the emptiness of outer space on the other side of the dome, it was easy to forget the spaceyard was sited on a chunk of rock somewhere on the outer edges of the Solar System. Its exact location was, of course, a closely-guarded secret.

Suzanne’s husband put an arm about her shoulders and crushed her to him. He was humming some tune under his breath. Perhaps he’d had more than one whiskey in the bar. Or perhaps his good mood was a consequence of Betty’s presence. Suzanne wasn’t sure she liked Betty, since the test pilot never mixed with the wives and treated them with the same level of detachment as the husbands. If there was any bond there due to their shared gender, it was well hidden.

In bed that night, Suzanne’s husband was more loving than usual. He didn’t turn his back on her and go to sleep as he usually did. Suzanne tried to persuade herself it was because she’d prettied herself up for the social and her appearance had awoken his slumbering affections. But she suspected she was only fooling herself.

The guard had to ring ahead, and once Suzanne had been cleared, he gave her a security pass to wear. The route from the yard’s entrance to the building containing her husband’s office was clearly signposted, and she had no difficulty finding her way. The site was very secure—no one could get in unless they were supposed to. In fact, her presence drew several questioning glances from various people, but they said nothing after spotting the security pass pinned to a lapel of her lemon-yellow cardigan style jacket. And they were people she knew, friends of her husband and husbands of her friends. Inside the building, she found herself walking along a corridor lined with windows overlooking the docks, so she stopped to take in the view. Each of the docks, a rectangular pit some six hundred feet long and a hundred feet wide, was identified by large numerals painted onto the concrete before it. The spaceyard was busy: the docks were filled with spaceships in various stages of construction. She spotted a dock off to one, and wondered if that was Project Philadelphia. But the spaceship berthed within it looked no different to any of the others.

Suzanne’s husband looked up in surprise when his secretary ushered Suzanne into his office. He frowned on seeing who it was, then came around from his desk and put a concerned hand to her shoulder. “What’s up, hon?” he asked. “Is there something wrong?”

“There’s nothing wrong,” she assured him. “I’m here for the guided tour.”