CHAPTER 3

Everything in space obeys the laws of physics. If you know these laws and obey them, space will treat you kindly.
--Wernher von Braun

10 May

Astronaut Reis gazed at the two white solid rocket boosters that stood like Greek pillars propping the fat, rust-brown external tank between them. Attached to the ET by only three bolts, the shuttle orbiter hung like a stuffed, corpulent sea gull, its white, black, and grey wings outstretched in the spring sunshine.

She hated the sight of it.

She also knew that it constituted humanity's only path to Space. Not because it was the best. Not because it was the cheapest or most efficient. Simply because NASA was stuck with it and permitted no competition. So Tamara Reis served NASA with a fierce devotion, because she worshipped Space as one would a god, and NASA stood between the two as the priest she must entreat for passage to heaven. She strove to repress the memory of a time before NASA, but the fresh ocean breeze and the sight of the towering rocket awakened a remembrance of youth, of many springs earlier, and of the first time she saw a flame leap into the sky.

3 May, 1975

She was eight, with dark, long hair braided into a ponytail that flew in the breeze as she raced through the park. Her blouse rivaled the few clouds in the sky for purity of white, her blue denim overalls rubbed crisp and new against her legs.

Cool air, descending from the Santa Cruz mountains, carried with it the scent of pine trees and of the ocean beyond the hills. The sun warmed her skin, the verdant grass tickled the soles of her bare feet. She never felt as fully alive as when she ran beneath the great blue vault of the sky. Up and over the small hills she sped, tumbling down the slopes to the bottom then leaping up to ascend the next peak. She breathed great ferocious bites of air and drank in the view of grass, oak trees, and mountains.

Los Gatos -- a small California town straddling a freeway -- possessed all the traits of a more rural community: a vital main street comprising a drug store, movie theater, barber shop, five-and-dime, and radio shop; a town hall, library, and community center; and townspeople who knew one another and shouted greetings across the street without hesitation. People still rode horses down unpaved University Avenue and old men could still sit on their front porches cleaning shotguns without police swarming the area.

In such a Norman Rockwell world of near-perfection just on the border of adolescent freedom, no thought of past or future entered young Tammy's mind, just the glorious joy of unbridled existence. She crossed the final hill of Oak Meadow Park, the one that stood just before the marshland of Vasona Creek.

At the shore of the tiny wetland she saw two groups: a small cluster of boys, five in all, gathered around something that momentarily held their interest. A few hundred feet away to the right sat a dozen or so of the few remaining pure-bred hippies, colorful people from up in the Santa Cruz mountains that sometimes still gathered in the park. With them sat a few of the first wave of punkers, dressed in black leather, razored t-shirts, and safety-pinned flesh. Though Los Gatos fit the image of an almost rural town, it lay just a few miles from San Jose, a growingly cosmopolitan city.

A cloud of smoke drifted from the center of the cross-generational gathering. It blew Tammy's way, carrying a sweet, burnt-rope smell that nonetheless made her sneeze. They laughed and reeled, swaying to the music on a portable radio. They seemed ferociously, monomaniacally happy, as if they could not force out any more laughter without rupturing vital organs.

The knot of boys laughed, too. Mean-spirited laughter, the sort that might be elicited from bullies vivisecting one of the frogs that lived in the marsh. They backed away and Tammy saw the object of their amusement. On a small metal launching pad sat an eight-inch-tall model rocket of very simple design, nothing more than a tube half an inch in diameter standing on three triangular fins and surmounted by an unpainted balsa nose cone. Wires ran out of its rear end and into a small control box twenty feet away. The boys now clustered about it and began to argue.

"Me!" one shouted. "My turn!"

"You did the last one!"

"Did not!"

"Well, you did one and I ain't done any!"

"Me neither! Gimme that!"

The argument continued for a few more turns until the biggest boy, who had a large belly and walked with it shoved forward like the prow of a ship, grabbed the control box and stabbed a finger at the switches. "Fire!" he shouted with a belch.

The rocket sat on the pad for a second or two. Then, much to Tammy's startlement, it simply exploded with a bang that knocked over the launcher. Rather than disappointing the boys, this event prompted a round of gleeful howls. They lost interest in the box and ran back to the pad to investigate the damage. Tammy realized that their desire had not been in launching the rocket, only in arguing about who would. And their subsequent argument now centered about who would get to blow up the next one.

Off to her left, she heard a strange whooshing sound that dropped in pitch as it dropped in volume. She turned her head to see a thin column of white smoke arc into the blue morning sky. At the top of the column she caught the barest glimpse of a black and red rocket. Suddenly, before it lost too much speed, a second blast of smoke erupted from beneath it, propelling it higher into the air with a hiss that reached her ears a second later. When the vehicle achieved the apex of its flight and nearly vanished from sight, she saw it break in half to release a red-and-white parachute.

She followed the dissipating smoke trail back to its source. There, on a hillock near the marsh and far from those clustered around the remains of the demolished rocket, stood a boy alone. Not too tall for his age, which looked to be about twelve or thirteen, he nonetheless watched the sky as if surveying his personal property, like the young master of a vast estate. His fists rested on his belt, from which hung bulging army surplus ammo pouches. He stood straight as the rod atop the carbon-seared launch pad a few feet beyond him. The breeze tousled his restless blond hair and rustled his khaki shirt and matching corduroys.

To Tammy, he looked as if he could easily fly upward to touch the rocket as it soared.

He watched it, though, quietly, with some internal calculation apparent. Ignoring the boisterous knot of other boys, he picked up his launch pad and walked toward the descending parachute. Tammy followed, never letting her vision stray from the scene she witnessed. Her gaze encompassed the slowly falling parachute, the halves of the rocket dangling beneath its lines, and the moving figure of the golden boy. They seemed connected somehow, as if they moved as one, as if he could control even the law of gravity. The two approached each other. The boy picked up speed as he neared the touchdown zone. The parachute hung just twenty feet above the ground as he was ten feet down range. It continued to fall; his hand reached up. In one smooth motion, he plucked the missile out of the air and let the parachute drape around it. He turned, grinning.

Finally aware of Tammy's existence, he held the split rocket aloft as if in salute. Tammy ran up to him without introduction, without any social qualms. For her, no society existed in that moment. The entire universe consisted only of the two of them, and the rocket.

"How high did it go?" she asked.

He shook his head into the breeze to remove a few wild strands of flaxen hair from his eyes. "About seven hundred feet. The first stage takes it up to three hundred, then the second stage takes it up the other four hundred." He handed her the crimson and ebony halves of the rocket, detaching and keeping the parachute.

"Is the second stage more powerful?"

He shook his head. "No. But by the time it fires, the first stage rocket has burned up and ejected, so the same-rated motor pushes less mass and can provide greater acceleration." He sat down on the grass. Tammy followed.

"I could put a larger motor in this design," he said. "Would you like to see that?"

Tammy nodded eagerly.

They spent the rest of the day launching the rocket over and over. The pouches on his belt contained a seemingly limitless supply of rocket motors, little cardboard tubes that looked more than anything else like big firecrackers, yet contained a controlled power to burn, not explode. He showed her how to reassemble the rocket, fold and load the parachute, insert the motors with all the necessary packing, and connect the electric ignition wires to the solid rocket fuel. Tammy watched this last operation with near awe. She had always been fascinated by fireworks, the way they lit up the night with color and sound. Fireworks, though, were something that her father controlled. He would light them and then back nervously away. Her mother would tell Tammy to cover her ears and shield her eyes. Tammy never obeyed. She stood brazenly unprotected to watch the roaring, whistling, shrieking fires, wanting desperately to control -- just once -- the joyous power they released.

"Put the wire in there," the boy said, pointing. With a mixture of excitement and anticipation, she placed the thin heating element inside a narrow, tapering hole in the black, tarry rocket fuel. He handed her the wadding to place in after it. "Now mount it on the rod." Gently she cradled the foot-long spacecraft, carrying it to the launch pad. She raised it up above the yard-long stainless-steel wire.

"The rod stabilizes the attitude of the rocket," he said, as if he were teaching an important skill, as any other boy might talk about one's grip on a baseball bat. "The first three feet of flight are critical. That's when the rocket gains enough velocity for the fins to become effective. After that, it's all ærodynamics. If the rocket is built badly, it's going to fail in flight. If it's built well, you can punch a hole in the sky."

Tammy placed the guiding tube, glued precisely straight on the side of the rocket, over the tip of the rod and mated the two, then carefully lowered the rocket to the launch pad, a six-inch-wide stainless steel disc. The missile rested on its three shark fins to point toward the heavens. She took a moment to gaze closely at it.

It was nothing more than a pair of cardboard tubes with balsa fins on the lower half and a nose cone on the upper, yet the boy had constructed it flawlessly. The tube and nose cone fitted together without an apparent seam, though she knew there had to be one. The fins had been attached with the same precision, each exactly one hundred twenty degrees away from the other two. Though the balsa had received some dents and scratches from multiple launches and landings, she could tell that it had been pristine when first created. She rose and stepped back.

He handed her the control box and walked away without saying a word. She knew that this was the highest honor he could grant her. He had permitted her to fold the parachute and pack it, assemble the rocket, load the motors, wire them, and place the entire spacecraft on the launch pad. After this solemn ritual of preparation, she held in her hands the power of flight.

The fire control looked like a toy. Perhaps it was, to minds more wizened. It consisted of a black plastic box with a doorbell button, a plastic keyhole, and a light; the keyhole, marked arm, had the red light; the button was marked FIRE. She inserted the plastic key hanging from a red ribbon into the arm switch and turned it. The light glowed. She looked up at the boy one hundred eighty feet behind her. He smiled and nodded, holding up a protractor with a string kept taut by a small fishing weight at the other end. He sighted along the flat end toward the rocket.

"Fire in the hole!" she yelled at the top of her lungs, and pressed and held down the button marked FIRE.

The rocket did nothing for an agonizing moment as the batteries in the control box poured electricity into the heating wire tamped inside the motor. Unseen, the wire grew hotter and hotter until an unstoppable chemical reaction took hold. The propellant ignited furiously, with a pop and a hiss that spewed smoke and fire across the steel disc. Instantly, the red-black missile screamed along the steel rail, the fins biting air to stabilize the flight.

Faster nearly than sight, the rocket shot upward to become a part of the sky, trailing a straight, narrow cloud that could only have been made by human intent. Tammy watched gleefully, her hands tightly gripping the control box. Her heart pounded as it had at every launch that day. This time, though, she felt an even greater thrill, the powerful emotion of ownership. This launch belonged to her. He made her a gift of his power, and she made it hers by exercising it. She had not abused it by sloppy preparation, she had not defamed it with false humility, she claimed it by the only right that made it hers: she launched a perfect flight.

The boy followed the ascent with the edge of the protractor. The hanging string ticked off degrees. When the second stage reached its apogee and the parachute blossomed, he pinched his thumb over the string and lowered the protractor to read the angle and ran back to Tammy.

"Eleven-hundred twenty feet. A new record!"

Face flushed with excitement, she raced toward where the rocket descended. Her feet flew over the grass, her gaze locked solidly on the wind-borne missile. Every muscle in her body responded to her command, concentrating upon only one goal: to pluck the rocket out of the sky. She ran faster than the wind, laughing with an infinite joy that drank in the entire sweet sky and thirsted for more. Closer now, closer -- the red and white checkered hemisphere of thin plastic drifted down toward her. She maneuvered to keep pace with it. Over her now, it dropped gently into her hands just as her toe rammed against an exposed root, tripping her. Panicked, she twisted about so that her back would take the brunt of the fall. The rocket lay cradled in her hands.

She hit. The earth knocked the wind from her and streaked the back of her blouse with emerald grass stains and deep chocolate smears of mud. She ground to a halt and hoisted the rocket aloft in triumph.

Its creator arrived laughing. "You're a mess," he said.

Tammy smiled and stood to hand over the precious cargo. "Not a scratch."

He did not take the rocket back. "You rescued it. It's yours."

Her eyes widened. "But it's so pretty, so perfect..."

"I know you'll treat it well." He brushed dirt and grass off her back. "Look at that. Your mom'll kill you."

She shrugged and held the rocket close to her, feeling a warmth greater than the sun provided. "Are you sure you want to give this to me?"

He headed back toward the launch pad. "Sure. I'm working on a three-stage model. Want to see it?"

She nodded, walking beside him, but said, "It's almost sundown. I've got to get home."

"What's your name?"

"Tammy Reis."

"Like wild rice?"

"Spelled differently. What's yours?"

"Paul Volnos."

"Are you with them?" she asked, pointing toward the cluster of boys busily setting fire to a rocket they had stomped flat. She realized the instant she said it that he could not possibly be.The darkening sky hid her flush of embarrassment.

Paul shook his head. "The fire department won't let us launch unless we're part of a supervised group."

"Where's your supervisor?"

Paul pointed toward the circle of hippies and punkers. "There."

A man -- probably not more than twenty-two, though short hair and glasses made him look older -- rose from the snickering, beclouded group. He wore the only white shirt with a button-down collar, though he staggered a bit as he walked toward them, hollering.

"Paul! Where the hell were you? You know we have to stay in a group if we're going to--" He squinted. "Hey, who you got there?" Off to his right, the flaming rocket exploded with a sickly pop and fizzle. He turned and stumbled toward the other boys, cursing in a most unteacherly manner.

"I'll be over in a second, Mr. Woolsey!" Paul brushed a strand of blond hair from his eyes and looked at Tammy with a smile. "Mr. Woolsey's a senator's son. Lives out here with his mom while he teaches Civics at junior high. He doesn't give a spit about the club, but he needs brownie points for his college degree." He shook his head in amusement. "Robert Goddard had to deal with idiots, too."

"Who's Robert Goddard?"

"The father of American rocketry. Don't you know?"

She shook her head. "But I want to learn. I want to learn everything!"

***

That evening she walked home by way of the library and checked out as many books on rocketry as she could carry, plus a novel entitled Space Ship "Goddard" by someone named Rex Ivarson. Night had fallen, and she walked under a canopy of stars. A crescent moon hung over the west like an encouraging smile. For the first time she thought about the Moon as more than just something that lit up the sky. She thought of it as a planet, as a place that could be reached, touched, walked upon. The idea evoked in her a strange emotion, something that tightened her throat as if she were about to cry or shout; as if some great pain urged to explode outward and only with its release would come true happiness. She walked faster, the Moon keeping pace with her stride.

Tammy was intensely aware of the space program, as were most people her age. She dutifully raised her hand whenever teachers asked who would like to live there. Now, though, she read through the books and began to ponder the question. What were her chances of living on the Moon or in Space? Only one woman, she noticed immediately, had ever made it into Space: a Soviet named Valentina Tereshkova, and she had not exactly made a career of it. The books about Your Future In Space, she thought, should be titled Boys' Future In Space, for most lacked any illustrations of women.

She lay in bed that night, frowning at the books arranged around her on the comforter. Then she gazed up at the red and black rocket perched atop her dresser and remembered the ease with which Paul admitted her to his world. That was the way it should be. She thought about Paul and saw only the image of him standing on the hillock, fists on his hips, gazing into the blue at a rocket's trail. To her, it became the symbol of everything good and right, something she wanted to experience every day: the heady emotion of continual triumph.

***

Tammy knew her choice involved risk. She redoubled her effort to be worthy and prepared. Fighting the nausea that threatened to engulf her, she stumbled out of the stainless steel enclosure and staggered to the exit.

The sharp tang of ocean air hit her, restoring her stamina. One more time; she could endure one more time. This had been her mantra for the past five trials. She strode to the entryway and presented another ticket to the operator.

"Hey, hey, little girl," the craggy old man said. "You're startin' to look green."

"I can take it," she said, climbing into the roller coaster seat and yanking the lap bar down with both hands.

The Giant Dipper, on the boardwalk at Santa Cruz Beach, was the wildest ride within an hour of Los Gatos, at least ever since Playland-at-the-Beach closed down in San Francisco years before. At her pestering, her older brother Spence drove her there when he went to spend the day surfing. She would join him in the water later, when the time came to practice splashdown drills. For now, Tammy worked on pulling gees.

Slowly the train pulled out of the station. Climbing the initial hill, Tammy looked around from the blue-grey Pacific on her right to the pine-green Santa Cruz mountains on her left. The cars paused at the top. For an instant, Tammy -- in the front seat -- thrilled to hang over the precipice. Then the rear caught up and shoved her forward and downward with delicious acceleration.

The roller coaster, an ancient beast built of whitewashed wood and rust-dripping steel bolts, creaked and shuddered every time the cars took a curve or pulled out of a dive. Tammy screamed, then realized that astronauts never screamed, and clamped her mouth shut. She shrieked inside, though, with exhilaration and terror and pure riotous joy.

The Tilt-A-Whirl came next. To train for tumbling space capsules.

* * *

Not all her weekends centered around the Boardwalk. Most she spent in the park with Paul, launching rockets without supervision until the park ranger galloped over to them to threaten mayhem if they did not scram immediately. Tammy suspected that the old man with the handlebar moustache and the Smoky Bear hat -- a World War One veteran, she later learned -- actually liked to watch the rocket flights and only shooed them away when his own superiors insisted.

On the weekends that she neither launched rockets nor suppressed launching lunch, she ventured by bicycle to tiny Reid-Hillview Airport on the southeast edge of San Jose. It was a fourteen mile trip that took her over an hour. And when she got there, almost nothing ever happened.

She leaned her red Murray bike against the corrugated steel of a Quonset hut and sat on a rough wooden bench from which colorful layers of paint curled and flaked away. For hours she watched aircraft come and go: Common Cessnas, Pipers, Beeches, the occasional Taylorcraft. Now and then, a Stearman biplane or some older vintage airplane flew in and out again.

The pilots fascinated her: young men only a few years older than Paul, acne-spotted and grinning; grizzled old men in worn leather A-2 flying jackets; middle-aged professionals of her father's generation, dressed in suits and flying their planes on business trips. Women, too. The wives of pilots, some looking annoyed at another Sunday squandered watching their husbands tinker with spruce spars, clecoes, sheet aluminum, and recalcitrant engines, others appearing to enjoy the outings. No girls her age, though. And no women pilots.

Then, one summer Saturday, the air above Reid-Hillview vibrated with an odd buzz unlike the throaty cough of a radial engine or the steady drone of a Lycoming, more like an angry hornet than an aircraft engine. She looked toward the Eastridge Mall, a huge enclosed shopping center under the glide path to Reid-Hillview that she loved to walk around in because it evoked in her a feeling of living on the Moon. Above it soared a swift white shape that looked for all the world as if it flew backward.

Tammy jumped to her feet and ran to the flight line to get a better look. It could not be flying backward, yet it was! The propeller sprouted from the rear of the plane, as did its wings. On the front, two short, slender extensions looked like the elevators one would see on a normal plane's empennage. It had no rudder anywhere, though the two large wings bent up at the outer edges. Tammy stared in wonderment. The backward little plane was simply the most astounding thing she had ever seen outside a rocketry book.

It buzzed downward at a high rate and touched the runway on two fixed landing gear positioned under the rear-swept wings. She could see now that it was not flying backward; the pilot faced forward and the wings were obviously designed for flight in that direction. But what a design!

After a very short roll-out, the nose of the plane descended to the runway. In a moment of terror, Tammy thought that the nosegear had not dropped and that disaster was imminent. The aircraft, though, continued to roll forward. Only then did she notice the smallest of wheels making contact between the runway and the underside of the plane.

It taxied to the tie-down area by the airport café. Tammy was not the only one rushing out to inspect the strange contraption. Half the airport bustled over to surround the visitor as if a flying saucer had just landed.

The bubble canopy popped open, hinged at the front. The pilot stood and stretched. Tammy's jaw dropped. The pilot of the bizarre, futuristic airplane was a woman!

She knew about Amelia Earhart and Jacqueline Cochran and Harriet Quimby and a dozen other historical aviatrices. Here, though, stood a real one.

Her dusky auburn hair curled down past her shoulders. She wore a flight suit of Nile green that clung to her figure and whose color only made her hair appear redder. All the men watched as she bent over to tie down the wings. The older woman's body exuded as much youthful vigor as Tammy's.

"Hi, boys!" the pilot called out to the mostly male cluster. "Who wants to buy a Coke for a thirsty gal?"

Tammy followed the airport wolves into the café, enthralled. Most everyone else stayed outside, ogling the airplane.

"Whose little girl are you?"

Tammy stared upward, surprised at being addressed by the woman when a dozen attentive men surrounded her. She simply shrugged.

"Well, come and sit with me. I'm sure one of these handsome pilots'll buy you a soda. Won't you, boys?"

The drinks appeared almost instantly. The two sat down in one of the burgundy vinyl booths. The pilot smiled at the young woman across from her. "What's your name again?"

"Tammy." She thought that the woman purposely ignored the men around her, as though far more interested in Tammy's company than in theirs.

"My name's Winnie Mae. My daddy named me after an airplane. Isn't that silly?"

Tammy shook her head. "Winnie Mae's a pretty name."

"Well, you can just call me Winnie. Everyone else does. What are you doing here?"

"Watching the planes."

"Is your mama a pilot?"

Tammy shook her head.

"Your daddy?"

"No."

Winnie sipped at the Coke. "Out here on your own?" She winked up at the waitress, a stout woman with a weary smile and her hair in a bun.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Ooh, and polite, too. You like airplanes?" Seeing Tammy's eager nod, she downed the rest of her drink and pounded the table. "Then let's go take a check flight."

"Huh?"

"It's built for two. Think your folks would mind?"

Tammy's eyes nearly bugged out of her head. "Who cares?"

Winnie strode through the café crowd, which parted like the waters before Moses. "Hey!" she hollered to the people around her plane. "Look but don't touch!"

"What the hell is it?" somebody asked.

Winnie grinned. "It's called a Vari-Eze. Pusher prop, forward canard with a higher angle-of-attack so it stalls out first, drops the nose, increases the airspeed. Stallproof. Well, almost." Her grin grew wicked as she pulled a few business cards from her breast pocket. "Built it myself from plans. Guy named Burt sells em. Here's the address."

Everyone tried for the five she held out, then gathered in a knot around the lucky ones, pens clicking into action to copy the information. She undid the tie-down chains.

"Pudknockers," she muttered under her breath to Tammy as she lifted the girl into the rear tandem seat. "Pardon my Anglo-Saxon. Half of them'll write or call Burt, a tenth of them will order plans, and maybe two or three'll actually start to build one. Maybe one will finish it."

"Why's that?" Tammy asked, strapping the five-point harness where Winnie pointed, then tightening the belts down to her size.

"Just lazy. Just dreamers. Dreams without action ain't nothin' but happy sleep. You know what happy sleep is?"

Tammy shook her head. Winnie slid catlike into the pilot's seat and strapped in.

"Happy sleep is how most people live until they die. They're content, even if they gripe about day-to-day stuff."

She reached down to remove her slip-on deck shoes. "I fly barefoot. Know why?"

Tammy shook her head.

"Better contact with the pedals. I can feel the plane better. Gets cold sometimes, though. That's why I like warm weather." She turned her head to the right to shout "Clear!" Everyone backed away. The engine buzzed into life, the bubble top lowered and locked. They taxied to the run-up area.

Tammy could not believe what was happening to her. First the worry that she had broken the parental taboo against speaking to strangers, let alone the one about going anywhere with anyone at all. Then the fear of the unknown. Then, warming through her like a stolen sip of New Year's champagne, the thrill of sudden and utterly spontaneous adventure. She had run off to join the ærial circus!

"Okay, honey, now I have to talk to the tower and concentrate on takeoff, so keep quiet till I tell you."

Tammy nodded silently. The pilot went through her checklist, testing all the control surfaces, running up the engine, checking the radio, magnetos, oil pressure, compass, and more. Tammy tried to see all of this over the woman's shoulder, but was too low in the seat.

"Niner five four eight Sierra, requesting clearance for takeoff."

"Roger, four eight Sierra," a voice over the loudspeaker said. "What sort of a weird bug is that?"

"Ask the boys in the diner, tower, over."

"Roger, four eight Sierra. Clear for takeoff."

"Hang on back there!" Winnie slid the throttle forward and the plane bounced down the runway, picking up speed until the nose suddenly lifted off the ground. They rolled for a few more yards that way and then suddenly the bouncing ended and Tammy knew they were airborne.

Her stomach dropped giddily away. This was better than the Giant Dipper! The Vari-Eze climbed steadily, swiftly, yet Tammy -- staring out of the canopy in reverent awe -- had little visual clue to their speed. The urban sprawl of San Jose spread beneath them, yet their movement over it seemed slow and majestic, totally unlike roller coasters or even cars, where telephone poles whipped past at a blurry rate.

A sea gull sculled air above and ahead of them. They tore past it at a velocity that made it look like a backward-flying missile. Now that was speed! The airplane banked and turned toward the golden hills to the north.

"I'm gonna level off at three thousand, Tammy, then you can take the controls." She said it so matter-of-factly that Tammy was not quite sure she heard correctly over the constant buzz of the engine.

"The controls?"

"Sure. Fly her a bit. I never saw a kid hanging around a little gimcrack airport who didn't want to be a pilot. Am I right?"

Tammy, without even thinking, blurted out the secret she had only shared with Paul: "I also want to be an astronaut."

Winnie craned her head around. Her smile, broad and genuine, revealed twin curves of perfect teeth glinting pure white.

"That's fantastic, honey! If I weren't so old, I'd be trying out for a seat on that new Space Shuttle thing they're building." She turned her attention back to the instrument panel but continued to speak. "I'm a forty-plus semi-rich widow, though, so I'll probably just keep tooling around airports like yours, flying low and clipping treetops or flying high and teasing warbirds...

"You know why I picked you up?" Her voice turned from wistful to serious.

"No, ma'am."

"Because I can read people. That's my best quality. All those guys clustered about me and the plane? There's only three kinds of pilots. One's gotta touch every plane he sees and one's gotta touch every woman. And then there's you and me and a few others. We've just gotta fly. I saw that in you. Stay away from the ones who want to touch you or your plane. They'll be gone the next morning and you'll just have to clean pawprints off your fuselage. Find someone who wants to fly with you because flying's something in the blood. You gettin' this?"

Tammy shook her head.

"Don't worry. It'll come back to you when you need it. I fly across the country dispensing priceless wisdom from a woman who's seen it all and done most of it at altitude. Here. Keep her straight and level. There's less turbulence over water."

They passed over the hills and flew above the Calaveras Reservoir. Tammy took the side-mounted stick in her small left hand and gripped it. Her short legs strained to reach the pedals that controlled the winglet rudders. She knew the instant Winnie let go because the controls suddenly ceased to move and were now under her command.

"The trick to flying is easy movements. Never jerk the stick or pound the pedals. You're moving tons of air mass. Sudden movements are as ineffective as slamming a board against a mound of clay. Do it fast enough and the board breaks. Press slowly, and the clay moves."

Winnie put her through the paces of straight-and-level flight, then a few easy turns. When the plane banked, Tammy looked out of the canopy to see the sparkling blue water below her. For only an instant she wondered what would happen if the airplane failed her, if she were to fall toward that shimmering surface into the cold depths below. Then Winnie brought the plane slowly out of the turn and the fear dissipated.

Heading back to Reid-Hillview, Winnie put the Vari-Eze through some very mild ærobatics. For the first time in her life, Tammy felt two seconds of genuine weightlessness as the plane performed a parabolic dive. Then she felt the crush of g-force as the plane pulled gently out.

The landing thrilled her with the suddenly renewed impression of speed. The runway tarmac blurred past as they touched down on the rear wheels. When the nose lost its lift and descended firmly to earth, she saw the end of the runway with the tower and diner rushing up toward them. Then the aircraft turned and they slowed to a halt in the tie-down circle.

"Hop out, honey," Winnie said as she cut the engine and flipped a few switches. "The first one's free, then your hooked."

"Huh?"

"Do you want to be an astronaut? Then learn to fly as soon as you can. Don't waste a minute. You can't solo until you're fourteen, but the next five or six years you should start saving for lessons, read all you can, and find someone trustworthy who'll ignore the dumb laws and teach you on the sly. That's the way to make it in this world. Ignore the dumb laws. And follow the common-sense laws because they're common sense, not because they're laws. Now give your Aunt Winnie a kiss; I've gotta go refuel and fly home."

"Where's home?"

"The desert, honey. The deep desert where nobody bothers me and I can fly whenever I want." She unclipped the fob from her keychain. "Here -- 'A' is for Astronaut." She handed Tammy the metal trinket, a white letter A with white wings sprouting from either side, on a circle of red. "It was a gas station giveaway, but it fits, doesn't it?"

Tammy grasped the medallion tightly as if it were the greatest honor she had ever received and kissed Winnie Mae on the cheek. Her nostrils caught the scent of jasmine and baby powder and magnolias amid the surrounding aroma of av-gas and vinyl. She pulled back; Winnie yelled "Clear," lowered the canopy, waved, and gunned the engine into life.

Tammy watched her taxi over and fuel up at the pump, hop back in, and fly away into the clear blue.

She never saw Winnie Mae again, but Tammy knew that the feeling that day of excitement and camaraderie and future triumph would carry her through adversity for the rest of her life.

***

Nearly two decades later, astronaut Tamara Reis stood staring at the Space Shuttle feeling nothing but a cold sensation of failure. When the three huge main engines ignited and the solid boosters flared a brilliant white, the physical impact of the rocket blast slammed like a door in humanity's face; a massive door -- nearly impossible to swing open -- that she and a few others squeezed through over the years. This door, though, would never, ever, be thrown wide. She felt like screaming at that barricade built thick with compromise and latched tight with bureaucracy. She stood by the door, though, ready to pass through again and ready to slam it in the face of others, but she hated it and despised its every slow, narrow swing.

She held the scream inside her, permitting the demon roar to surround her but never to penetrate her own barriers. She would serve this beast, but would never permit it into her heart.


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