All That Outer Space Allows (Apollo Quartet Book 4) by Ian Sales Read Free Book Online

care to make all the right noises. And this astronaut thing is too new—she’s read books on Mercury and Gemini, she’s seen the photographs of the missions in Life magazine, the space walk last year; but a connection between that and this room full of smartly-dressed women seems too fanciful to willingly suspend disbelief.
    She feels a fraud, perhaps because she dressed up especially for the AWC, and she’s awkwardly aware Walden shares a deeply competitive camaraderie with these women’s husbands which defines all their lives, men and women alike; but she also knows she’s considered little more than some sort of domestic technician by NASA, just another government employee, engineering the home—what’s that phrase in The Feminine Mystique ? “women whose lives were confined, by necessity, to cooking, cleaning, bearing children”. By necessity . There to keep the astronaut home running smoothly, her own wants and needs, her “mystique” not a factor in the equation, not mentioned in any scientific papers or training manuals, not part of the plan to put a man on the surface of the Moon. And return him safely to the Earth.
    Much as Ginny would like to avoid the AWC and its monthly meetings, she knows she has no choice.
    She is an astronaut wife now.
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    Ginny has been thinking about a story, prompted by something she read in a book, Invisible Horizons by Vincent Gaddis, a paperback, with a waterspout prominent on its cover, the title above it in bright green letters. Where did she find this book? I don’t know—perhaps she bought it in the Edwards AFB commissary, although I don’t know if they sell books; perhaps it was the same place she found a copy of Americans into Orbit , a book store on a weekend trip to Los Angeles, or on a visit to her mother and step-father in San Diego. While I own Americans into Orbit , the 1962 Random House hardback edition, I know very little about Invisible Horizons as I’ve not been able to find a copy, I can state only that it was originally published in 1965 by Chilton Books, the same publisher who took a chance on Frank Herbert’s Dune in that year. Ginny’s edition of Invisible Horizons is the Ace paperback also published in 1965. One chapter in the book caught her interest, an alleged experiment in 1943 to turn a US Navy destroyer invisible—which will later enter occult science mythology on the publication of Charles Berlitz’s book The Philadelphia Experiment in 1979, Berlitz being best-known at that time for his 1974 book on the Bermuda Triangle. None of this, of course, is known to Ginny, who has simply happened upon something in a book which she thinks might make a good premise for a science fiction story.
    And so she wonders what it might be like to be aboard a ship as it fades from sight while beside her the contractor tries to explain how the house will look once built; but she’s gazing out across an empty plot of land staked out by wooden posts where one day walls and windows and doors and roof will materialise, as if brought into being by the passage of time, and the invisible warship in her mind’s eye morphs into a spaceship. She turns to the contractor, flashes him a smile as if she has heard, understood and agrees with every word he has spoken. As he leads her across the plot toward the dirt road, where his Dodge D Series pickup truck sits behind her Impala, and he swings out an arm and says something about a kitchen, it occurs to her that her story would be more interesting if she told it as her story, as a wife’s story. Ginny has stood in a kitchen, wondering if her husband will come home that day, knowing that every morning as he leaves for work he might be killed or injured. She has tried to make a sanctuary for him of their home for that very reason—and for all her independence and need for “mystique”, she loves Walden too much to jeopardise the fragile balance between his work and his home, his sanity and his safety, or even the good