Phases of Gravity by Dan Simmons Page B

Thirteen hundred one month and that was without really working at it. Joe, he was there for another thing, but he knew a guy who was real good friends with Merle Weaver. So Joe, he told all of us to call him that, he spent the whole two days with us. Went down to the combat zone with us and everything. I mean, he had commitments, but every time he could, he and Merle's friend would go out to dinner with us and pick up a round of drinks and all. A nicer guy you wouldn't want to meet."
    Baedecker was surprised to realize that he recognized his surroundings. He knew that around the next curve in the road there would appear a dairy with a floral clock in the center of the driveway. The dairy came into sight. There was no clock, but the parking lot looked newly paved. The purple-shingled house to the left of the road was the one his mother used to refer to as the old stagecoach stop. He saw the sagging second-floor porch and was sure it was the same building. The sudden superimposition of forgotten memories over reality was disturbing to Baedecker, a sense of déjà vu that did not dissipate. He looked straight ahead and knew that it would be only a long sweep of curve and then another mile before Glen Oak would declare itself as a fringe of trees and a single, green water tower visible above the cornfields.
    "You ever meet Joe Namath?" asked Ackroyd.
    "No, I never have," said Baedecker. On a clear day, from thirty-five thousand feet in a 747, Illinois would be a verdant patchwork of rectangles. Baedecker knew that the right angle ruled the Midwest in the same way that the sinuous, senseless curves of erosion ruled the Southwest where he had done most of his flying. From two hundred nautical miles up, the Midwest had been a smudge of green and brown hues glimpsed between white cloud masses. From the moon
    it had been nothing at all. Baedecker had never even thought to look for the United States during his forty-six hours on the moon.
    "Just a real nice guy. Not stuck-up like some famous people you meet, you know? Damn shame about his knee."
    The water tower was different. A tall, white, metal structure had replaced the old green one. It burned in the rich, slanting rays of the late-summer evening sun. Baedecker felt a curious emotion seize him somewhere between the heart and throat. It was not nostalgia or some resurrected form of homesickness. Baedecker realized that the scalding wave of feeling flowing through him was simple awe at an unexpected confrontation with beauty. He had felt the same surprised pain as a child in the Chicago Art Institute one rainy afternoon while standing in front of a Degas oil of a young ballerina carrying an armful of oranges. He had experienced the same sharp slice of emotion upon seeing his son Scott, purple, bruised, slick, and squawking, a few seconds after his birth. Baedecker had no idea why he felt this now, but invisible thumbs pressed at the hollow of his throat, and there was a burning behind his eyes.
    "Bet you don't recognize the old place," said Ackroyd. "How long's it been since you been back, Dick?"
    Glen Oak appeared as a skirmish line of trees, resolved itself into a huddle of white homes, and widened to fill the windshield. The road curved again past a Sunoco station, past an old brick home, which Baedecker remembered his mother saying had once been a way station on the underground railroad, and past a white sign that read GLEN OAK—POP. 1275—SPEED ELECTRICALLY TIMED.
    "Nineteen fifty-six," said Baedecker. "No, 1957. My mother's funeral. She died the year after my father."
    "They're buried out in the Calvary Cemetery," said Ackroyd as if he were sharing a new fact.
    "Yes."
    "Would you like to go out there now? Before it gets dark? I wouldn't mind waiting."
    "No." Baedecker glanced quickly to his left, horrified at the idea of visiting his parents' graves while Bill Ackroyd sat waiting in his idling Bonneville. "No, thanks, I'm tired. I'd like to check into the motel. Is