The Right Stuff (17 page)

Chuck Yeager was in Phoenix to make one of his many public appearances on behalf of the Air Force. By now the Air Force couldn't publicize Yeager, breaker of the sound barrier, enough. Like the other branches of the service, the Air Force now saw that there was nothing like heroes and record holders for getting good press and whining appropriations. The only problem was that, in terms of publicity, every other form of flier was now overshadowed by the Mercury astronauts. As a matter of fact, today, in Phoenix, what was it the local reporters wanted to ask Chuck Yeager about? Correct: the astronauts. One of them got the bright idea of asking Yeager if he had any regrets about not being selected as an astronaut.

Yeager smiled and said, "No, they gave me the opportunity of a lifetime, to fly the X-1 and the X-1A, and that's more than a man could ask for, right there. They gave this new opportunity to some new fellows coming along, and that's what they ought to do."

"Besides," he added, "I've been a pilot all my life, and there won't be any flying to do in Project Mercury."

No flying
?—

That was all it took. The reporters looked stunned. In some way they couldn't comprehend immediately, Yeager was casting doubt on two undisputable facts: one, that the seven Mercury astronauts were chosen because they were the seven finest pilots in America, and two, that they would be pilots on the most daring flights in American history.

The thing was, he said, the Mercury system was completely automated. Once they put you in the capsule, that was the last you got to say about the subject.

Whuh!—

"Well," said Yeager, "a monkey's gonna make the first flight."

A
monkey
?—

The reporters were shocked. It happened to be true that the plans called for sending up chimpanzees in both suborbital and orbital flights, identical to the nights the astronauts would make, before risking the men. But to just
say
it like that!… Was this national heresy? What the hell was it?

Fortunately for Yeager, the story didn't blow up into anything. The press, the eternal Victorian Gent, just couldn't deal with what he had said. The wire services wouldn't touch the remark. It ran in one of the local newspapers, and that was that.

But f'r chrissake—Yeager was only saying what was obvious to all the rocket pilots who had flown at Edwards. Here was everybody talking as if the Mercury astronauts would be the first men to ride rockets. Yeager had done precisely that more than forty times. Fifteen other pilots had done it also, and they had reached speeds greater than three times the speed of sound and an altitude of 126,000 feet, nearly twenty-five miles, and that was just the beginning. This very next month, June 1959, Scott Crossfield would begin the first testing of the X-15, designed for a pilot (a
pilot
, not a passenger) to take up to more than fifty miles, into space, at speeds approaching Mach 7.

All of this should have been absolutely obvious to anyone, even people who knew nothing about flying—and surely it would become clear that anybody in Project Mercury was more of a test subject than a pilot. Two of the people they chose weren't even in Fighter Ops. They had one excellent test pilot from Edwards, Deke Slayton, but he had never been high on the list of those considered for something like the X series. The other Air Force pilot, Grissom, was assigned to Wright-Pat and was doing more secondary testing than prime work. Two of the Navy guys, Shepard and Schirra, were good experienced test pilots, solid men, even though neither had done anything to make anybody's mouth fall open at Edwards. Glenn had made a name for himself by setting the speed record in the F8U, but he had not done much major flight test work, at least not by Edwards standards. Well, hell, what did anybody expect?
Naturally
they hadn't picked the seven hottest pilots they could find. They wouldn't be doing any flying!

Surely all this would become obvious in time… and yet it wasn't becoming obvious. Here at mighty Edwards
itself
the boys could feel the earth trembling. A great sliding of the templates was taking place inside the invisible pyramid. You could feel the old terrain crumbling, and… seven rookies were somehow being installed as the hottest numbers in flying—and they hadn't done a goddamned thing yet but turn up at a press conference!

From the very beginning this "astronaut" business was just an unbelievable good deal. It was such a good deal that it seemed like tempting fate for an astronaut to call himself an astronaut, even though that was the official job description. You didn't even refer to the others as astronauts. You'd never say something such as "I'll take that up with the other astronauts." You'd say, "I'll take that up with the other fellows" or "the other pilots." Somehow calling yourself an "astronaut" was like a combat ace going around describing his occupation as "combat ace." This thing was such an unbelievable good deal, it was as if "astronaut" were an honorific, like "champion" or "superstar," as if the word itself were one of the infinite variety of
goodies
that Project Mercury was bringing your way.

And not just
goodies
in the crass sense, either. It had
all
the things that made you feel good, including the things that were good for the soul. For long stretches you'd bury yourself in training, in blissful isolation, good rugged bare-boned isolation, in Low Rent surroundings, in settings that even resembled hallowed Edwards in the old X-1 days, and with that same pioneer spirit, which money cannot buy, and with everybody pitching in and working endless hours, so that rank meant nothing, and people didn't even have the inclination, much less the time, to sit around and make the usual complaints about government work.

And then, just about the time you were entering a good healthy state of exhaustion from the work, they would take you out of your isolation and lead you up to that balcony that all fighter jocks secretly dreamed of, the one where you walked out before the multitudes like the Pope, and… it actually happened! The people of America cheered their brains out for thirty minutes or so, and then you went back into your noble isolation for more work… or for a few proficiency runs at nailing down the holy coordinates of the fighter jock's life, which were, of course, Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving and the rest of it. These things you could plot on the great graph of Project Mercury in the most spectacular way, with the exception of the first: Flying. The lack of flying time was troubling, but the other items existed in such extraordinary dimensions that it was hard to concentrate on it at first. Any man who wasn't above a little regrouping now and then, to keep the highly trained mechanism from being wound up too tight, to "maintain an even strain," in the Schirra parlance, found himself in absolute Fighter Jock Heaven. But even the rare pilot who was aloof from such cheap thrills, such as the deacon, John Glenn, found plenty of
goodies
to even out the strain of hard work and mass adoration.

Each of them had an eye on Glenn, all right. Glenn's own personal conduct was a constant reminder of what the game was really all about. To all but Scott Carpenter, and perhaps one other, the way Glenn was going about this thing was irritating.

The seven of them were stationed at Langley Air Force Base in the Tidewater section of Virginia on the James River, about 150 miles due south of Washington. Langley had been the experimental facility of the old National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and was now the headquarters of NASA's Space Task Group for Project Mercury. Every morning they could count on seeing John Glenn up early, out on the grounds, in the middle of everything, where nobody could miss him, doing his road-work. He'd be out there in full view, on the circular driveway of the Bachelor Officers Quarters, togged out in his sweatsuit, his great freckled face flaming red and shining with sweat, going around and around, running a mile, two miles, three miles, there was no end to it, in front of everybody. It was irritating, because it was so unnecessary. There had been a vague medical directive to the effect that each of them would engage in at least four hours of "unsupervised exercise" per week, but that was the last that was heard of. The medical staff assigned to Project Mercury were mainly young military doctors, a bit dazzled by the mission, some of them, and they were not about to call an astronaut on the carpet and demand an accounting of his four hours. Fighter jocks, as a breed, put physical exercise very low on the list of things that made up the right stuff. They enjoyed the rude animal health of youth. They put their bodies through dreadful abuses, often in the form of drinking bouts followed by lack of sleep and mortal hangovers, and they still performed like champions. ("I don't advise it, you understand, but it
can
be done"—provided you have the right stuff, you miserable pudknocker.) Most agreed with Wally Schirra, who felt that any form of exercise that wasn't fun, such as waterskiing or handball, was bad for your nervous system. But here was Glenn, pounding through everybody's field of vision with his morning roadwork, as if he were preparing for the championship fight.

The good Marine didn't just do his roadwork and leave it at that, either. Oh, no. The rest of them had their families installed at Langley Air Force Base or at least in the Langley vicinity. Gordon Cooper and Scott Carpenter and their families were packed into apartments on the base, the usual sort of worn-out base housing that junior officers rated. Wally Schirra, Gus Grissom, and Deke Slayton lived in a rather sad-looking housing development on the other side of the Newport News airport. Around the development was a stucco wall of the color known as glum ocher. Alan Shepard and his family lived a little farther away in Virginia Beach, where they happened to be living when he was chosen for Project Mercury. But Glenn… Glenn has his family housed 120 miles away in Arlington, Virginia, outside of Washington, and at Langley he stays in the Bachelor Officers Quarters, the BOQ, and does his running out front in the driveway. If this had been some devilishly clever scheme for him to get away from home and hearth and indulge in Drinking & Driving & so forth, that would have been one thing. But he wasn't the type. He was living in a bare room with nothing but a narrow bed and an upholstered chair and a little desk and a lamp and a lineup of books on astronomy, physics, and engineering, plus a Bible. On the weekends he would faithfully make his way home to his wife, Annie, and the children in an ancient Prinz, a real beat-up junker that was about four feet long and had perhaps forty horsepower, the sorriest-looking and most underpowered automobile still legally registered to any fighter pilot in America. A jock with any natural instincts at all, with any true devotion to the holy coordinates, either possessed or was eating his heart out for the sort of car that Alan Shepard had, which was a Corvette, or that Wally Schirra had, which was a Triumph, i.e., a sports car, or some kind of hot car, anyway, something that would enable you to hang your hide out over the edge with a little class when you reached the Driving juncture on the coordinates several times a week, as was inevitable for everyone but someone like John Glenn. This guy was putting on an incredible show! He was praying in public. He was presenting himself in their very midst as the flying monk or whatever the Presbyterian version of a monk was. A saint, maybe; or an ascetic; or maybe just the village scone crusher.

Being a good Presbyterian, John Glenn knew that praying in public was no violation of the faith. The faith even encouraged it; it set a salubrious example for the public. Nor did John Glenn feel the slightest discomfort because now, in post-World War II America, virtue was out of style. Sometimes he seemed to enjoy shocking people with his clean living. Even when he was no more than nine years old, he had been the kind of boy who would halt a football game to read the riot act to some other nine-year-old who said "Goddamn it" or "Aw shit" when a play didn't go right. This was an unusual gesture even where he grew up, which was New Concord, Ohio, but not so extraordinary as it might have been a lot of other places. New Concord was a sort of town, once common in America, whose peculiar origins have tended to disappear in the collective amnesia as
tout le monde
strives to be urbane. Which is to say, it began as a religious community. A hundred years ago any man in New Concord with ambitions that reached as high as feed-store proprietor or better joined the Presbyterian Church, and some of the awesome voltage of live Presbyterianism still existed when Glenn was growing up in the 1920's and 1930's. His father was a fireman for the B&O Railroad and a good churchgoing man and his mother was a hardworking churchgoing woman, and Glenn went to Sunday school and church and sat through hundreds of interminable Presbyterian prayers, and the church and the faith and the clean living served him well. There was no contradiction whatsoever between the Presbyterian faith and ambition, even soaring ambition, even ambition grand enough to suit the invisible ego of the fighter jock. A good Presbyterian demonstrated his
election
by the Lord and the heavenly hosts through his success in this life. In a way, Presbyterianism was tailor-made for people who intended to make it in this world, as well as on the Plains of Heaven; which was a good thing, because John Glenn, with his sunny round freckled country-boy face, was as ambitious as any pilot who had ever hauled his happy burden of self-esteem up the pyramid.

So Glenn went pounding around the driveway of the BOQ of Langley Air Force Base in his sweatsuit, doing his roadwork, and he frankly didn't care if most of the others didn't like it. The running was good for him on several levels. At thirty-seven he was the oldest of the fellows, and there was a little more pressure on him to demonstrate that he was in good condition. Besides that, he had a tendency to put on weight. From the waist up he was of only average size and musculature and, in fact, had surprisingly small hands. But his legs were huge, real kegs, muscular and fleshy at the same time, and he tended to pack on weight in the thighs. He was pushing 185 when he was selected for this thing, and he could well afford to get down to 170 or even less. As for living in the BOQ… why not? He and his wife, Annie, had bought their house in Arlington because the children would be in excellent public schools there. Why transplant them again when he would be on the road half the time and probably wouldn't see them except on weekends, anyway?