The chief filled his lungs. Being in a smallish town, he knew a little about the persons involved. “Uh, favor number two, Mr. Quarters. I understand you’re a friend of the family. When she learns what’s happened, could you, well, sort of take over? Help her out? Andwhat the psychiatrist saidI’d suggest you try and get her to end her marriage. He’s nothing more than a body now. She ought to make a new life for herself …
“Okay, thanks, Mr. Quarters. Thanks a lot. Goodbye.”
He hung up. “Excuse me,” he said to the fire chief, who sat opposite him. “What were you saying when he rang?”
The fire chief shrugged. “Nothing much. Just that we’ve sifted the ruins pretty thoroughlya
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The Unicorn Trade
sensational case like this, we’d betterand found nothing to cast any doubt on Quarters’ story.”
“Bones?” asked the police chief suddenly.
“Huh?” The fire chief was startled. “Why, yes, chicken bones in the ashes of the kitchen. Why not?” A silence lengthened which he decided should be filled. “People don’t realize how incombustible a human or animal body is. Crematoriums use far higher temperatures than any ordinary fire reaches, and still they have to crush the last pieces mechanically. Didn’t you know that, Bob?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why’d you ask?”
“Oh … I dunno. I guess Tronen simply lost his mind.” The police chief stared out the window. “His raving made me think we might find a clue in his fireplace. But there was only burnt wood and paper. Nothing else at all.”
Poul and Karen Anderson
APOLLO 1: JANUARY 27, 1967
/ hope the people in the’ United States are mature enough that when we do lose our first crews they accept this as part of the business. Frank Barman, astronaut, 1965
GRISSOM: .. . There’s always a possibility that
you can have a catastrophic failure.
Of course, this can happen on any
flight. It can happen on the last
one as well as the first one.
WHITE: … I think you have to understand
the feeling that a test pilot has.…
There’s a great deal of pride involved.
CHAFFEE: … This is our business, to find out if this thing will work for us.
Interview, December 1966
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The Unicom Trade
Gus Grissom, your name is as familiar to me as my own. I have a yellowed newspaper picture of your liftoff, nearly six years ago, that has spent that time mounted on the inside of one of my kitchen cabinet doors. It is accompanied by pictures of John Glenn and Yuri Gagarin. I wanted something to buck me up at dishwashing. You meant a hell of a lot to me
Goodbye, Gus.
Ed White, you were my special astronaut. I sat within a few yards of you a year ago, watching and hearing you comment on the movies of your spacewalk, manoeuvres in space, and the rest. I even exchanged half-a-dozen words with you and got your autograph in Oberth’s bookbut you had never heard of Oberth. It made me wonder if you had The Dream: if you could understand how I hung on every word you said, and prayed my wordless agnostic prayers that I might somehow get to where you’d been.
Goodbye, Ed.
Roger Chaffee, they say you had The Dream. You weren’t a test pilot. You were a pioneer, and you wanted to go as far as you could. Did you ever do a flit with the Gray Lensman? Did you go with D. D. Harriman to the moon? I think you did. I think you and I spoke the same language.
Goodbye, Roger.
APOLLO 1: JANUARY 27, 1967
159
“Well, Mars and Jupiter are there, and so are the starsdo we have to go to them, too?” he was asked. “Of course we do,” Chaffee replied as if shrugging off a silly question.
Karen Anderson
PLANH ON THE DEATH OF WILLY LET: JUNE 23, 1969
Only a month before the dream comes true That all his life was shaped to, and his labor, Death unannounced as lightning from the blue Has struck his hand from the cup about to
brim.
If nought exists but what we touch and see, Nor hells nor heavens there where the pulsars