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THE DEAD ASTRONAUT
By J. G. BALLARD
CAPE KENNEDY has gone now, its gantries rising from the deserted dunes. Sand has come in across the Banana River, filling the creeks and turning the old space complex into a wilderness of swamps and broken concrete. In the summer, hunters build their blinds in the wrecked staff cars; but by early November, when Judith and I arrived, the entire area was abandoned. Beyond Cocoa Beach, where I stopped the car, the ruined motels were half hidden in the saw grass. The launching towers rose into the evening air like the rusting ciphers of some forgotten algebra of the sky.
"The perimeter fence is half a mile ahead," I said. "We'll wait here until it's dark. Do you feel better now?"
Judith was staring at an immense fu
"What about the money?" she asked. "They may want more, now that we're here."
"Five thousand dollars? Ample, Judith. These relic hunters are a dying breed – few people are interested in Cape Ke
Her thin fingers were fretting at the collar of her suede jacket. "I… it's just that perhaps I should have worn black."
"Why? Judith, this isn't a funeral. For heaven's sake, Robert died twenty years ago. I know all he meant to us, but…"
Judith was staring at the debris of tires and abandoned cars, her pale eyes becalmed in her drawn face. "Philip, don't you understand, he's coming back now. Someone's got to be here. The memorial service over the radio was a horrible travesty – my God, that priest would have had a shock if Robert had talked back to him. There ought to be a full‑scale committee, not just you and I and these empty night clubs."
In a firmer voice, I said: "Judith, there would be a committee – if we told the NASA Foundation what we know. The remains would be interred in the NASA vault at Arlington, there'd be a band – even the President might be there. There's still time."
I waited for her to reply, but she was watching the gantries fade into the night sky. Fifteen years ago, when the dead astronaut orbiting the earth in his burned‑out capsule had been forgotten, Judith had constituted herself a memorial committee of one. Perhaps, in a few days, when she finally held the last relics of Robert Hamilton's body in her own hands, she would come to terms with her obsession.
"Philip, over there! Is that –"
High in the western sky, between the constellations Cepheus arid Cassiopeia, a point of white light moved toward us, like a lost star searching for its zodiac. Within a few minutes, it passed overhead, its faint beacon setting behind the cirrus over the sea.
"It's all right, Judith." I showed her the trajectory timetables penciled into my diary. "The relic hunters read these orbits off the sky better than any computer. They must have been watching the pathways for years."
"Who was it?"
"A Russian woman pilot – Valentina Prokrovna. She was sent up from a site near the Urals twenty‑five years ago to work on a television relay system."
"Television? I hope they enjoyed the program."
This callous remark, uttered by Judith as she stepped from the car, made me realize once again her special motives for coming to Cape Ke
As she waited, her back to the sea, I drove the car into the garage of an abandoned night club 50 yards from the road. From the trunk I took out two suitcases. One, a light travel case, contained clothes for Judith and myself. The other, fitted with a foil inlay, reinforcing straps and a second handle, was empty.
We set off north toward the perimeter fence, like two late visitors arriving at a resort abandoned years earlier.
It was 20 years now since the last rockets had left their launching platforms at Cape Ke
A year later, Robert Hamilton was dead. He had returned to Cape Ke
A dozen astronauts had died in orbital accidents, their capsules left to revolve through the night sky like the stars of a new constellation; and at first, Judith had shown little response. Later, after her miscarriage, the figure of this dead astronaut circling the sky above us re‑emerged in her mind as an obsession with time. For hours, she would stare at the bedroom clock, as if waiting for something to happen.
Five years later, after I resigned from NASA, we made our first trip to Cape Ke
Already, too, the relic hunters were at Cape Ke
These blackened fragments of collarbone and shin, kneecap and rib, were the unique relics of the space age, as treasured as the saintly bones of medieval shrines. After the first fatal accidents in space, public outcry demanded that these orbiting biers be brought down to earth. Unfortunately, when a returning moon rocket crashed into the Kalahari Desert, aboriginal tribesmen broke into the vehicle. Believing the crew to be dead gods, they cut off the eight hands and vanished into the bush. It had taken two years to track them down. From then on, the capsides were left in orbit to burn out on re‑entry.
Whatever remains survived the crash landings in the satellite graveyard were scavenged by the relic hunters of Cape Ke