'Besides,' he said, 'I'm not much of a tourist.'

The American flag had looked absurd to Baedecker. He had expected to be stirred by it. Once in Djakarta, after being away from the States for only nine months, he had been moved to tears by the sight of the American flag flying from the stern of an old freighter in the harbor. But on the moon — a quarter million miles from home — he could think only of how silly the flag looked with its wire extended stiffly to simulate a breeze in the hard vacuum.

He and Dave had saluted. They stood downsun of the television camera they had erected and saluted. Unconsciously, they had already fallen into the habit of leaning forward in the low-gee 'tired ape' position Aldrin had warned them about in briefings. It was comfortable and felt natural, but it photographed poorly.

They had finished the salute and were ready to lope off to other things, when President Nixon talked to them. For Baedecker it had been Nixon's patched-in, impromptu phone call that had pushed an unreal experience into the realm of the surreal. The president obviously had not planned what he would say during his call, and the monologue wandered. Several times it seemed that he had ended his sentence and they would begin to reply only to have Nixon's voice come in again. The transmission lag added to the problem. Dave did most of the talking. Baedecker said, 'Thank you, Mr. President,' several times. For some reason Nixon thought that they would want to know the football scores from the previous day's games. Baedecker loathed football. He wondered if this prattle about football was Nixon's idea of how men talked to men.

'Thank you, Mr. President,' Baedecker had said. And all the time he stood there in the camera's eye, facing a frozen flag against a black sky and listening to the static-lashed maunderings of his nation's chief executive, Baedecker was thinking about the unauthorized object he had hidden in the contingency sample pocket above his right knee.