Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above (Apollo Quartet) (2 page)

He’s going to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

As near as he can figure it, they’re some seventy-five miles north of San Juan, somewhere above the Puerto Rico Trench, and there’s around 27,000 feet of water under the USS White Sands’ keel. McIntyre is not happy. The Terni pressure-sphere is only rated to 20,000 feet and he’s wondering if the guy running this operation knows that—

Which would be Commander Brad Mooney, commander of the Integral Operating Unit, and all he’s told McIntyre is that the USNS De Steiguer found the target weeks ago after ten days steaming up and down the search zone, while the IOU was making test dives off San Diego; and they got to move fast as the deep ocean transponder batteries have a guaranteed life of only one month. No one’s said what the “target” is yet, what it is McIntyre’s supposed to be bringing up from the sea-bed. The Rube Goldberg contraption Perkin-Elmer have bolted to the front of the Trieste II—he’s heard it called a “hay hook” and a “kludge”—looks like it might work, but McIntyre’s sceptical, he knows the bathyscaphe; and for something that’s as simple as a steel ball hung beneath a float filled with gasoline, she’s temperamental and fragile and she knows how to make her commander’s life hell. He thought he’d given her up back in 1967, when he transferred out to NEDU but here he is again, two years later, flown in because the bathyscaphe’s current commander busted a leg on the journey bringing Trieste II from San Diego to Puerto Rico. So he guesses she’s not ready to say goodbye just yet.

McIntyre was all over the bathyscaphe the day before, reminding himself of her systems and workings, and she looks pretty goddamn shipshape, but they need to get her out into the water. They’ve got a week of fine weather forecast and maybe it will hold. McIntyre holds out a hand and feels the sun beating down on his palm; and there’s not a breath of wind, the sea surface is a gelid swell lapping noisily against the hull of the auxiliary repair dock.

Earlier, he spotted a pair of suits lurking about, so he’s guessing this is some CIA operation. Maybe the flyboys went and lost another H-bomb, a “Broken Arrow” type thing; or perhaps a Soviet sub sank here, one of their nuclear attack ones, a “Victor”. Cuba is only five hundred miles north east, and McIntyre is reminded of October 1962...

He flicks his cigarette out into the sea, checks the Omega Seamaster on his wrist, and then settles his cap more firmly on his head. This is where he gets to learn what he’s diving for: the suits have scheduled a briefing. He’s looking forward to it, he likes the idea of pulling the CIA’s nuts out of the fire.

There’s six of them gathered in the ward room, it’s hot and the two open scuttles are doing nothing to stir the still air. The two spooks have ditched their jackets and their white shirts don’t look so starched now. One has loosened his tie, the other slips off his spectacles every few minutes and polishes them with a handkerchief. Both have buff folders on the table before them. McIntyre and the two bathyscaphe crew, Lieutenants Phil C Stryker and Richard H Taylor, take seats alongside Mooney, across from the CIA guys.

What do you know about spy satellites? the one with glasses asks.

Nothing, says McIntyre. They’re secret, right?

The spook gives an unamused smile. The KH-4B Corona, he says, is what we use to keep an eye on the bad guys, on the things they don’t want us to see and we don’t want them to know we can see. Let’s just say you don’t need to know more than that.

He pulls a piece of paper from his folder and slides it across the table. This, he tells them, shows how we get the film down from orbit.

The piece of paper is a diagram in colour: a rocket above the earth, a line of capsules falling from it in an arc and sprouting a parachute, while beneath waits a plane trailing a hook.

We send out a C-130 from the 6549
th
Test Group out of Hickam AFB and they catch the bucket, says the guy with glasses.

You lost one of them buckets, says McIntyre.

The other spook nods. We think maybe a malfunction kicked it out early, he says. We didn’t get a plane in the air in time.

From Hickam? McIntyre asks. Hawaii, right? Dropping it in the Atlantic instead of the Pacific is some malfunction. So now it’s below us? In the Puerto Rico Trench? You know that’s 27,000 feet deep, right? The Trieste can only dive to 20,000 feet. We go any deeper than that— He forms a sphere with two cupped hands and then suddenly, and loudly, claps his palms together:
crack!
— Deeper than 20,000 feet and we go like that.

The guy with the tie at half-mast answers, It’s on a shelf about 19,500 feet down, it’s pretty flat and level—

He opens his folder and pulls out half a dozen black and white photographs. The USNS De Steiguer took these, he says, with the camera on the search fish.

He slides the photographs across to McIntyre, who fans them out across the tabletop. The bucket is a circular metal structure, surrounded by a halo of debris. To the right, a light on a cable illuminates the object and throws a pencil line of shadow off the left edge of the picture. The sea-bed looks flat and smooth, like a powdery desert.

It’s intact? McIntyre asks.

We think so, the spook says. It hit the sea at a pretty good clip but we think it held together.

And that contraption you’ve bolted on the front of the Trieste, that’s supposed to just scoop up this bucket from the sea-bed? McIntyre asks.

Mooney speaks up: You’re in on this late, John. Phil and Dick already ran a bunch of test dives back in San Diego. The hay hook works.

The other spook adds, The USNS De Steiguer dropped a transponder about eight feet from the bucket so it should be easy to find.

McIntyre is not convinced: there’s no light down there thousands of feet below the surface, only what the bathyscaphe carries—and her search lights don’t illuminate much. He remembers previous dives, sitting in that cold steel ball and looking out at a blurred and ghostly landscape which seemed to stretch only yards in each direction before darkness took over, before reality ran out of substance...

And every time, he felt like an astronaut peering out at that grey sand, gazing out at a world which would kill him in a heartbeat.

UP

The first thing Jackie Cochran does the moment she’s settled into her office at the Langley Research Center, the new home of Project Mercury, is send the astronauts make-up from her Jacqueline Cochran Cosmetics range and comprehensive instructions laying out how the Mercury 13 must dress when appearing in public. They’re about to go into space, to do something men have never done, and the Head of the Astronaut Office is telling them to keep their seams straight, their hair dressed and to wear powder and lipstick at all times. But none of them complains. Cobb remembers two years ago, approaching Oklahoma City at the end of her non-stop distance record flight from Guatemala City, trying to get out of her flight suit and into dress, stockings and high heels without losing control of her Aero Commander. It’s expected of them, it’s expected of women.

Proudly displayed on the wall of Cochran’s office is the cover of Life magazine with the thirteen astronauts in evening gowns, one of the photographs taken before the dinner with President Eisenhower. And there, in large white letters next to the masthead, are the words “Jackie’s Space Girls”. Cochran loves it—My space girls, she says proudly. Hart grimaces but won’t rise to the bait. Some of the others, the Dietrich twins, Irene Leverton and K Cagle, gather round the framed cover, reaching out to touch the glass, putting fingers to the evening gowns they wore—they didn’t get to keep them—and there’s laughter and happy compliments, and Cobb sees the group is beginning to fracture.

Cobb knows she will fly, and if it means doing what Cochran tells her to do, then it’s a price worth paying.

When Cochran calls the astronauts into her office halfway through their training, five months after they all moved to Langley, Cobb suspects the worse. If she thought the first flight was hers—she was the first to pass the tests, she has the most flying hours, she and Janey Hart did all the campaigning that made this happen—if Cobb expects the first flight to be hers no questions asked... well, there are rumours flying around that say different. This meeting in Cochran’s office, it has to be about that.

The thirteen of them enter the room. Cochran is behind her desk, she doesn’t rise to her feet. At her shoulder is Walter T Bonney, the PR director. A few of the women have turned up in flightsuits, fresh from training; some are in slacks. They stand around, eager to hear the news, giving each other speaking glances, and Hart reaches out and gives Cobb a sisterly touch on the arm. That hurts, that Hart could think Cobb will be passed over.

But no. Cochran opens her mouth and out spills a lecture, a rant, liberally dosed with expletives, about the need to keep up standards of dress. No flightsuits in the classroom; make-up at all times unless they’re in a cockpit, and even then they put some on before they deplane. She complains she has seen astronauts looking slovenly about the building, and she won’t have it. This is not 1943, it is 1963. The engineers and the scientists, a lot of them are men and they expect women to look and behave like women. The women engineers and scientists, they’re not role models like the Mercury 13, they’re not the reason why this programme exists.

It is a bizarre and filthy-worded tirade, and Cobb can see she is not the only one in the room astonished by it.

Now, says Cochran, visibly calming, I asked you here for another reason. We’re about ready to announce who’s going to be the first American in space.

If there is a senior astronaut, it’s Cobb, but she and Cochran don’t like each other, and they’d argue all the time if Cobb weren’t so unwilling to speak up, even after all the speechifying which got the thirteen of them here. They all know the score, they all know Cobb deserves the first flight, but there’s no real surprise when Cochran says, I’ve spoken to all your instructors, and I’ve even been to see dear old Wernher, and we think, we think the first American in space should be... K.

For several seconds, the room is silent.

Cochran puts her hands together and applauds. Well done, K, she says.

The others crowd around Cagle and congratulate her, hugs and pecks on the cheek. Cobb looks down, feeling like an outsider; she’s disappointed, it’s heartfelt, a burning sensation deep inside, but she comforts herself with the knowledge that God has something greater for her to do yet. She catches a few sympathetic glances thrown her way, then crosses to Cagle and wishes her luck.

Cagle turns to Cochran at her desk and she says, Miss Cochran, thank you so very much. I’m
your
girl, I believe in you, I trust your judgement in any situation. You have proved we can get what we want, not by pushing, but by winning.

It’s no less astonishing an outburst than Cochran’s, but at least afterwards Cagle has the grace to look embarrassed. Cochran has a smug expression on her face; Cobb refuses to meet her gaze.

Jerrie, Cochran says, I want you as backup for K.

Only if I get the next one, Cobb replies.

Cochran glowers, she opens her mouth but closes it without speaking. She looks down at her desk. You get the next one, she says in a clipped voice, I had you down for the next one, so don’t you go playing games with me.

Later, Cobb thinks it may not be 1943 but it is
like
it. The men have all gone to war and the Rosie the Riveters are back in the factories, back “picking up the slack”. There’s no WASP because women can’t fly jet fighters or jet bombers, the F-103 and F-107, the B-49 flying wing and supersonic B-59; but women have once again stepped out of the kitchen.

Now that the schedule is set for the first two flights, the nature of the training changes. Cagle and Cobb are busier than ever. In Cobb’s Aero Commander, they fly down to the McDonnell Aircraft plant in St Louis to have a look at the Mercury spacecraft. It’s a frighteningly small vehicle in which to brave the unknown dangers of space, but Cagle fits in it with room to spare. She’ll be wearing a pressure suit, of course, one made to measure. The two of them look in through the hatch and Cobb tries to imagine some hefty jet fighter pilot squeezed into its tight confines.

It’s really happening, Jerrie, isn’t it, says Cagle.

Cobb nods, though she’s wondering why there’s no control stick.

They alternately spend hours in a mock-up of the capsule, learning the function of every switch and dial, not that there are many of them, far less in fact than on the instrument panel of Cobb’s Aero Commander. How to use the periscope, how the environmental control system works, operating the earth-sky camera... They practice on the Air-Lubricated Free-Attitude Trainer, the Multiple-Axis Space Test Inertia Facility, the egress trainer, even flights on the “vomit comet” to experience weightlessness...

This first flight into space by an American will only be a suborbital hop. The Russians have put two men into orbit, but NASA wants to play it safe. The next flight, Cobb’s flight, will be orbital...

On hearing this news she knows that God is still looking out for her.

DOWN

It is just past 2200 hours by the time they’ve filled the float with 67,000 gallons of aviation fuel, loaded thirty-two tons of steel shot, checked out all the onboard systems, and loaded the plot onto the NAVNET computer. McIntyre is on the fairwater deck abaft of the sail, at ease as the bathyscaphe rolls gently in the swell. He leans against the mast, the US flag snapping above his head, and pines for a cigarette—but with all this gasoline beneath his feet, it’s not safe. Hollow knocks and the murmur of conversation, evidence of industry in some abyssal realm, echo up the access tube. The USS White Sands sits on station two hundred feet away, far enough not to be caught in the conflagration should the Trieste II’s aviation fuel ignite. Somewhere behind the auxiliary repair dock lies the USS Apache, but her running lights are occluded. There’s a fifteen-foot boat containing a pair of sailors a dozen feet away, and a sailor up on the bow of the Trieste II checking out the steering thruster there. It’s a warm breezy night, a river of stars running across a black sky, a velvety blackness that shrouds the planet from horizon to horizon, blending softly into the slowly rolling waves. It’ll be blacker down below, and it’ll also be cold. Those steel walls may protect against the pressure, but they’re no defence against the chill. Not even all the equipment in the pressure-sphere, not even three guys in close proximity for hours, can stave it off.