THE RETURN
It was funny, that I should think of childhood for the second time that day (the first being when we’d descended the great tree next to the starship while still in our spacesuits, like kids playing astronaut). Still, there it was—just an image, really, a vignette—in this case a scene from a movie I’d seen at the East Fork Drive-in as a little boy (Escape from the Planet of the Apes, as I recalled, with Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter), the one where the returned astronauts take off their helmets—as Maldano and I had just done—revealing themselves to be not men at all but advanced primates. As a metaphor, it was apropos; we hadn’t shaved since well before the moon.
I looked at the pure, perfect sky and its few scattered clouds, like white cotton candy. “Okay. So it wasn’t a nucle
