Hawk shook his head impatiently. “I don’t think it’s moving. Leastways it’s not following after us. Look, it’s falling behind.”
They lapsed into silence again. Tim felt uncomfortable. He didn’t like it when Hawk was sore at him.
Apologetically, he said, “Maybe you’re right. The old man was most likely a little crazy.”
“A lot crazy,” Hawk said. “And we’re just as crazy as he was. The weather don’t change like that. It’s just not possible. There never was a Flood. The world’s always been like this. Always.”
Tim was shocked. “No Flood?”
“It’s one of them myths,” Hawk insisted. “Like sea monsters. Ain’t no such thing.”
“Then what did we see back there?”
“I dunno. But it wasn’t no sea monster. And the weather don’t change the way the Prof said it’s goin’ to. There wasn’t any Flood and there sure ain’t goin’ to be any ice age.”
Tim wondered if Hawk was right, as their boat sailed on and the glittering stainless steel stump of the St. Louis Gateway Arch fell farther and farther behind them.
BROTHERS
Over my desk is a page from a collection of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories. The page contains a brief sketch, set in a town in Spain in the 1920s. Two old bullfighters are watching the young matador who is supposed to be the star of that afternoon’s corrida de toros. But the young star is drunk, dancing in the street with gypsies, staggeringly drunk, in no condition to face the bulls.
“Who will kill his bulls?” one of the older matadors asks the other.
“We, I suppose. . . . We kill the savage’s bulls, and the drunkard’s bulls, and the riau-riau dancer’s bulls.”
The point is, some people get the job done and some people don’t. A successful writer gets the job done. No matter what is happening around him or her. No matter family or weather or finances, a writer writes. The world can collapse and the writer writes. No excuses. No delays. No waiting for inspiration or the right moment or the proper phase of the Moon. A writer works at it. The rest is all talk.
Humphrey Bogart made somewhat the same point when he said, “A professional is a guy who gets the job done whether he feels like it or not.”
“Brothers” is a story about two professionals, doing two very different jobs that needed to be done on a certain day in November 1971.
5 November 1971: Command Module Saratoga, in Lunar Orbit
Alone now, Bill Carlton stopped straining his eyes and turned away from the tiny triangular window. The landing module was a dwindling speck against the gray pockmarked surface of the barren, alien Moon.
He tried to lean his head back against the contour couch, remembered again that he was weightless, floating lightly against the restraining harness. All the old anger surged up in him again, knotting his neck with tension even in zero gravity.
Sitting here like a goddamned robot. Left here to mind the store like some goddamned kid while they go down to the surface and get their names in the history books. The also-ran. Sixty miles away from the Moon, but I’ll never set foot on it. Never.
The Apollo command module seemed almost large now that Wally and Dave were gone. The two empty couches looked huge, luxurious. The banks of instruments and controls hummed at him electrically. We can get along fine without you, they were saying. We’re machines, we don’t need an also-ran to make us work.
This tin can stinks, he said to himself. Five days cooped up in here, sitting inside these damned suits. I stink.
With a wordless growl, Bill turned up the gain on the radio. His earphones crackled for a moment, then the robotic voice of the Capcom came through.
“You’re in approach phase, Yorktown. Everything looking good.”
Wally’s voice answered, “Manual control okay. Altitude forty-three hundred.”
Almost three seconds passed. “Forty-three, we copy.” It was Shannon’s voice from Houston. Capcom for the duration of the landing.
Bill sat alone in the command module and listened. His two teammates were about to land. He had traveled a quarter million miles, but would get no closer than fifty-eight miles to the Moon.
5 November 1971: U.S.S. Saratoga, in the Tonkin Gulf
Bob Carlton tapped the back of his helmet against the head knocker and held his gloved hands up against the canopy’s clear plastic so the deck crew could see he was not touching any of the controls. The sky-blue paint had been scratched from the spot where the head knocker touched the helmet. Sixty missions will do that.
Sixty missions. It seemed more like six hundred. Or six thousand. It was endless. Every day, every day. The same thing. Endless.
The A-7 was being attached to the catapult now. It was the time when Bob always got just slightly queasy, staring out beyond the edge of the carrier’s heaving deck into the gray mist of morning.
“Cleared for takeoff,” said the launch director’s voice in his earphones.
“Clear,” Bob repeated.
