The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself (Apollo Quartet) Read Free

this is his favourite. He has spent many hours staring at it over the past one hundred days, floating in his compartment, needing solitude, needing time away from Franklin. The photo shows her standing by the French windows of their house in Nassau Bay. The sun shines through the glass behind her, forming a golden halo about her long blond hair. She is smiling, but it is a weary smile. He can no longer remember what day he took the photo or for what reason—perhaps they were going somewhere, a neighbour’s, a restaurant, he cannot recall. Judy always dresses well, the smart dress and heels are no clue. He puts a finger to his wife’s torso, and knows he will see her again. He is coming back, of that he is certain. She was angry when he was given command of Ares 9 and she stayed hurt right up to the moment he launched; but she will forgive him.
    He slides a corner of the photo under an edge of one of the control panels. Judy will watch over him during the next thirty days as he flies towards Mars in this box with walls twice as thick as a soda can’s. Apollo was dangerous—Apollo 13 proved that. But Lovell, Swigert and Haise got home, the pencil-necks brought them home. That was easy, that was local.
    There is no hope of rescue on this mission.
     
    1999
    I see we got a regular hero visiting, says the man in the docking adaptor. The nametag on his constant wear garment reads Parazynski. It is not a name Elliott knows, but then he has been out of the Astronaut Corps for nearly two decades.
    Parazynski puts out a hand and grasps the hatch coaming just behind him. His other hand he raises in a salute. Welcome aboard, sir, he says; and this time his voice has the deference due to a person of Elliott’s rank and achievements.
    A second astronaut appears in the module through the hatch behind Parazynski, a woman. Her dark hair floats about her head like a sable nimbus.
    We got us the first man on Mars here, Parazynski tells her, his gaze still on Elliott.
    The only man on Mars, Elliott corrects. He is trying to keep the tone light, but there is a bite to Parazynski’s words and Elliott wonders what he has done to deserve it.
    Yeah, damn shame we never went back, Parazynski replies.
    Could it be envy? It has been many years since Elliott was a member of NASA and he does not know what narrative has been written internally about his missions, past and present. Ares 9 may have been a one-off, he wants to say; but Americans have visited other stars, there is even an inhabited base on an exoplanet orbiting one.
    Elliott knows this because that is where he is going.
    Parazynski spins about and pushes himself through the hatch, bringing himself to a halt by his fellow astronaut. She has one foot to the floor and one hand to the ceiling—according to Elliott’s orientation, that is. Elliott can now see her name tag: it reads Weber. Another name unfamiliar to him.
    Elliott follows Parazynski and Weber from the docking adaptor and into the module, a long cylinder walled, floored and roofed with lockers and screens and loops of wires. A tied bundle of cables and a slowly undulating fabric duct run along one corner and then dive down and through the hatch at the far end. Weber leads them into another docking adaptor, and as he joins her, Elliott looks up, sees an open hatch and, through it, what appears to be the interior of a Lunar Module. They are hundreds of thousand of miles from the Moon, and no one has been on the lunar surface for almost thirty years. He is about to ask, when Weber arrows down through a hatch in the floor, closely followed by Parazynski. Elliott pulls himself across to the hatch in the floor, then with a yank of both arms propels himself into the module below—
    —and suffers a moment of vertigo as what was a vertical shaft full of clutter abruptly becomes a horizontal tunnel. Weber and Parazysnki have already disappeared through another hatch at the far end, and Elliott wonders how extensive this space station