quote:Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom walks to the podium. It has been more than three decades since he stood on the lunar surface. His hair, black then, is now an iron gray. He wears a black suit of a fine weave and his astronaut pin catches the light filtering in through the cathedral windows.
"Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen," he says. "Tonight we gather to honor the memory of a friend, a colleague, and a pioneer whose legacy will be difficult to match for decades to come. Tonight, we bid farewell to Alan B. Shepard." At this he pauses and looks across at the sea of faces that stare back at him in silence. He has rehearsed this speech in front of his wife, Betty, but now it seems all wrong. He considers this for a moment, then continues.
"Al was the first American in space. He was the first commander of a Gemini mission. He was my backup commander on Apollo 1. And in October 1968, Al was slated to be the fifth man to walk on the moon. Neil Armstrong and I beat him by a few months, but Al still acquired more firsts than anyone else in the astronaut corps.
"Many of you knew Al. He was NASA's brightest star. Many of you know of Big Al Shepard's major league baseball career just before the United States entered the Second World War." Gus pauses again, looking for the words. "But today I want to tell you a story that most of you don't know. I want to tell you about how a wild pitch Al took during his playing year endangered his moon landing, and the effect it had on his Apollo 13 mission a quarter century later.
"I was CAPCOM during the launch of Apollo 13, and as we all remember, that mission seemed cursed from the start . . ."
Jamie Todd Rubin is a science fiction writer and blogger with stories appearing in Analog, InterGalactic Medicine Show, Apex Magazine and 40K Books. He wrote the "Wayward Time Traveler" column on science fiction for SF Signal, and occasionally appears on the SF Signal podcast. Jamie also writes occasional book review and interview columns for InterGalactic Medicine Show.
His interest in the history of science fiction led him to begin his Vacation in the Golden Age, a series of biweekly posts reviewing each issue of Astounding Science Fiction from July 1939 through December 1950.Posts: 14554 | Registered: Dec 1999
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quote:It isn’t often that a writer gets to write a pure wish fulfillment story and see it published. For me, telling a good story is my most important job, and that sometimes means setting aside what I wish would happen, and allowing the narrative to unfold in such a way as to make the best possible story. In the case of “Big Al Shepard” I tried my best to tell a good story, and it turned out to also allow me to play for the Red Sox and fly to the moon.
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