The Right Stuff (38 page)

Betty and the boys arrived at the Cape on one of those blinding hot July days that made all of Cocoa Beach feel like a fried concrete parking lot. They were led out to a runway at Patrick Air Force Base along with a lot of NASA and military dignitaries to meet Gus's plane as it came in from Grand Bahama Island. There was a big canopy set up nearby. Under the canopy there would be a press conference. Betty stood out there on the slab with James Webb and some other NASA brass, and she slowly began to realize that…
they were reneging
!

This was going to be it!—a reception out on this brain-frying slab! There was going to be no trip to the White House. Webb—not John Kennedy—was going to give Gus the Distinguished Service Medal… under a dreadful Low Rent tent here on the slab. There was going to be no parade in Washington, no ticker-tape parade in New York—not even a parade in Mitchell, Indiana.
That
… Betty would have loved. To come back to Mitchell and parade down Main Street… But Gus would be getting nothing, just a medal from James E. Webb. They couldn't do this to her!—they were reneging.

But they did, and it was even worse than she feared. The plane comes in, taxis up to the ramp, a big cheer goes up, Gus steps out—and some NASA functionaries take her and the children by the elbows and thrust them forward at Gus like religious objects… Behold, the Wife, the Children… and Gus can hardly even look at Betty as someone he knows. She's merely the ceremonial Solid Backing on the Home Front trundled forward on the concrete slab. Gus mutters hello, hugs the two boys, and they trundle the Wife and the Children back, and then Gus is marched over to the canopy, where they have the press conference. The reporters keep harping on the blown hatch and the lost capsule. The dismal bastards—they haven't gotten the message yet. They haven't picked up the proper moral tone. But being part of the great colonial animal, the Victorian Gent, they would get it all straight in a few days and never mention the damnable hatch again… But for now they gave the event another shot of the poisonous secret… Was that what was responsible for this wretched, shabby, mean little ceremony? Gus struggled with the questions and sweated under the canopy. He kept saying, "I was just lying there minding my own business when the hatch blew. It just blew." Betty could see he was getting angrier and angrier, gruffer and grimmer and darker about the eyes. He hated talking to reporters, as it was. Her heart went out. They were making him squirm. And
this
was the Big Parade! This was what she got out of the compact after all this! It was a travesty. She was… the Honorable Mrs. Squirming Hatch Blower!

The day only got hotter. After the little ceremony, with Webb waxing sonorous, they drove Gus and Betty and the boys to the VIP guesthouse at Patrick Air Force Base. This was supposed to be a big deal. They were told that these were secret quarters where they would be completely screened off from the press and the gawkers. The VIP guesthouse… Betty looked around. Even the military VIP quarters here at Cocoa Beach were Low Rent. This VIP guesthouse was like some musty cabin court from the late 1930's. She looked out the window. Over there was the beach, that amazing hot-brick Cocoa Beach. But between the guesthouse and the beach was Route A1A, with cars roaring back and forth in the screaming heat of mid-July. She would never even make it across the highway to the beach with the children. Well, they could watch TV—but there was no TV; and no pool. Then she looked in the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It was stuffed with food, everything you could imagine. For some reason this made her furious. She could see the afternoon shaping up and the rest of the day and tomorrow, too. She would stay here with the children, cooking and risking her life dragging them to the worst beach in Florida… and Gus would no doubt go to the space center or into town…

Town meant the Holiday Inn, where the other fellows and their wives would be. That's where they would be celebrating and having the good times.

Listen, while you're getting settled, I think I'll—

Suddenly Betty was furious:
She was not staying in this place
! Gus didn't know what had gotten into her.

She said she wanted to go to the Holiday Inn. That was where everybody would be. She told Gus to call the Holiday Inn and get a room.

She gruffed it out with such fury that Gus called the Holiday and pulled the strings and got them a room. If Gus had managed to park her here in this faded VIP mausoleum and vanish, so that she could sit here in the heat of the slab watching the hours go by while he tooled around the pool at the Holiday as the big shot—she would have slit a wrist. That was how grim it was. That was how shabbily they had treated her. That was how grossly they had welshed on the compact. Now… they
truly owed her
.

Since the pooch proved to be unscrewable, officially, and Gus Grissom's flight was therefore on the record as a success, NASA was suddenly in great shape. John Kennedy was happy. "We have started our long voyage to the moon." That was the idea. Neither Shepard's nor Grissom's suborbital flight measured up to Yuri Gagarin's orbit of the earth, but the fact that NASA had completed two successful manned flights seemed to mean that the United States was battling back successfully in the competition for the heavens.

Naturally, true to form, that was the moment the anonymous and uncanny Chief Designer, D-503, Builder of the Integral, chose to show the world who actually ruled the heavens.

Just sixteen days after Grissom's flight, which is to say, on August 6, 1961, the Soviets sent
Vostok 2
into orbit with a cosmonaut named Gherman Titov aboard. Titov circled the earth for an entire day, completing seventeen full orbits, and landing where he had started, on Soviet soil. Three times he came over the United States, 125 miles overhead. Once again, all over the country, politicians and the press seemed profoundly alarmed, and the awful vision was presented: suppose the cosmonaut were armed with hydrogen bombs and flung them as he came over, like Thor flinging thunderbolts… one here, one there… Toledo disappears off the face of the earth… Kansas City .. Lubbock… Titov's flight seemed so awesome it made the Shepard and Grissom flights look terribly insignificant. The Integral and its Chief Designer could apparently do anything they wanted, and at any time.

Seven days later, August 13, 1961, Nikita Khrushchev began the steps that led to the building of a wall, precisely like a penitentiary wall, through the middle of an entire city, Berlin, to prevent the population of East Berlin from crossing over to the West. But the world was still blinking at the radiance of the day-long space flight. "They're a bit brutal—but you have to admit they're geniuses. Imagine keeping a man in space for twenty-four hours!"

So far as NASA was concerned, the Titov flight put an end to the Mercury-Redstone program then and there. The next astronaut in line to ride on top of the Redstone, John Glenn, was now assigned to attempt an orbital flight, using the Atlas rocket, which had done so poorly in unmanned tests. Later there were those who speculated that NASA had been "saving Glenn for the big one" all along. But Glenn did not have that kind of status within NASA. He had learned that to his bitter regret. No, he had only the invisible Chief Designer, Builder of the Integral, to thank for the fact that he was assigned to be the first American to orbit the earth.

After Titov's flight the phrase
the space gap
began to be repeated throughout the American press.
Space gap
was a superstitious condition. It began to seem of urgent importance for NASA to put a man into space before the sands stopped flowing in the hourglass on the last day of the year 1961. The great cowboy rush of the winter of 1960-61 started all over again. The hell with fastidious precautions… For example, the Soviets revealed that Titov had suffered from nausea throughout his flight. Later they changed that to say that he had suffered nausea after "prolonged" flight. They would have probably not revealed even that much, except that they decided to participate in international scientific conferences in order to publicize their space feats. It also came out—although few specifics were given—that the Soviet manned space-flight program, from selection of their cosmonauts (from among military pilots) and their training (centrifuge rides, parabolic rides in jet fighters, and so forth) to capsule design and launching and retro-rocket systems, was remarkably similar to NASA's. Everyone at NASA regarded this as vastly reassuring.
We're on the right track, anyway
! Of course, the Soviet rockets were far more powerful. That was the given. And if a cosmonaut of the Integral had suffered nausea in orbit, then astronauts probably would, too. But there was no time to worry about that now. Find out about it the way Titov did:
up there. Más allá
Over the next hill!

In September NASA successfully launched a Mercury-Atlas capsule with a dummy astronaut aboard and brought it back on target into the Atlantic, near Bermuda, after one orbit of the earth. The press speculated that Kennedy would pressure NASA to put an astronaut on the next flight, but Hugh Dryden and Bob Gilruth managed to hold out for an additional test. They wanted to send a chimpanzee into orbit with the Atlas rocket first.

This time, out at Edwards, the True Brothers didn't even derive a chilly smile from the fact that once more in the exalted Project Mercury an ape would be taking
the first flight
. An ape would make the first orbit of the earth for the U.S.A. The prestige of Project Mercury had by now rendered such considerations meaningless. On October 11, at Edwards, Bob White had made an extraordinary flight in the X-15—and the country hardly noticed. White took the X-15 up to 217,000 feet with the Big Engine—and the press merely nodded perfunctorily. So a man had just flown very high in an airplane; how interesting; and that was that. The fact that White was on top of a rocket, the same sort of rocket as the Redstone or the Atlas, the fact that his flight to 217,000 feet was in effect
piloted space flight
—none of this was likely to impress Kennedy or the public amid the panic over Titov and the
space gap
. White had gone forty miles up, ten miles short of the arbitrarily set boundary of "space." The XLR-99, the Big Engine, had delivered 57,000 pounds of thrust, just 21,000 short of the thrust of the Redstones that took Shepard and Grissom aloft. White's speed reached Mach 5.21, or 3,647 miles an hour; Shepard's and Grissom's rocket velocities were only slightly greater, about 5,180 miles per hour. White was weightless for three minutes during his tremendous arc over the top, as compared to Shepard's and Grissom's five minutes. White saw all the things that Shepard and Grissom saw (and Shepard, only barely)… including the entire blue band of atmosphere at the horizon of the earth. Above all, White was a
pilot
. He controlled his plane's ascent. He used hydrogen-peroxide thrusters to control his attitude once the air became too thin for aileron control—the same system of hydrogen-peroxide thrusters that Shepard and Grissom had used—and he did it all without benefit of any automatic backup. And he brought the ship back down through the earth's atmosphere himself… and
landed
it himself on the holy plateau of Edwards… on the dome of the world. A rocket
pilot
(quoth the brethren), but the national press barely noticed.

So it was with a mainly academic fascination that the boys at Edwards followed the second Project Mercury chimpanzee flight. For nine months the veterinarians at Holloman Air Force Base had been putting their colony of chimpanzees through the operant conditioning regimen in preparation for an orbital flight. The training included all the things that had gone into the training for the first suborbital flight, the centrifuge runs, the weightless parabolas, the procedures-trainer sessions, the heat-chamber and altitude-chamber sessions, plus some intelligence tests. In one test the ape had to be able to judge time intervals. The signal light would go on, and he had to wait twenty seconds before pulling the lever or he would receive the ever-cocked electrical shock. In another the animal was required to
read
the instrument panel and throw a switch. Three symbols would flash on the panel, two of which would be identical, such as two triangles and one square, and the animal had to pull the lever under the odd one or receive the shock in the soles of his feet.

By the beginning of November, twenty veterinarians had moved into Hangar S at the Cape with five chimpanzees. One of them was Ham, thinner and more strung out than ever but still an ace in the procedures trainer, his life dedicated to the avoidance of the invisible volts. Ham was not regarded as the pick of the lot, however. The brightest and quickest member of the colony was a male who had been brought from Africa to Holloman Air Force Base in April of 1960, when he was about two and a half years old. He was known as Number 85. Number 85 had fought the veterinarians and the process of operant conditioning like a Turkish prisoner of war. He fought them with his hands, his feet, his teeth, his saliva, and his cunning. He would shake off each jolt of electricity and give them a hideous grin. When he couldn't take the shocks any more, he would cooperate temporarily, and his hands would fly across the procedures trainer console like E. Power Biggs's at the organ—and
then
he would turn on the vets, making another desperate thrash toward freedom. He was like the slave who wouldn't break. Finally, they shut him up inside a metal box and let him thrash about in there for a week with his feces and urine for company. When they let him out, he was, at last, a different ape. He had had enough. He didn't want any more of the box. His operant conditioning could now begin in earnest. The box was certainly not the course that the good vets of Holloman would have chosen, had the times been normal. No, they had chosen this course in the name of the battle for the heavens and under the pressure of national urgency; Number 85 was the ape that the MA-5 mission (the fifth test of the Mercury-Atlas vehicle) required. He was the quickest study in the universe of the Simia satyrus. They took him up in jet fighters to get him used to the accelerations, the noise, and the disorienting sensations of high-speed flight. They put him in the gondola of the human centrifuge at the University of Southern California and ran him through entire profiles of the proposed first American orbital mission, until he was used to the seven or eight g's he would experience on ascent and on re-entry. Under high g's or low g's Number 85 could operate a Mercury console like no ape that had ever lived. He was so good they used him as the test subject for a laboratory experiment that simulated a fourteen-day orbital mission. For fourteen days Number 85 was on the procedures trainer performing the same tasks he would perform in the 4½-hour MA-5 mission. For MA-5 they had added rewards as well as the punishment of the shocks in the feet. Number 85 had two tubes positioned near his mouth. Out of one came banana-flavored pellets, if he did his tasks correctly, and from the other he could take sips of water. Number 85 could do the tasks so handily, including reading the odd-symbol panel, he could have kept the tubes popping banana pellets and water until he was sated or bilious. He was outstanding.