Space

by James A. Michener

The tension was broken when Kolff’s secretary ran up, crying, “You better get to the field. The Pentagon men are going ape.” And when Kolff reached the storage area he found that the engines on which he had worked with undeviating devotion for nearly twenty years were being dismantled: “We can’t run the risk of any hanky-panky. This base is now limited to two hundred miles and these Jupiters are under wraps.”

  By the time Dieter could get back home Liesl and Magnus knew of the disaster, but even before they could offer condolences, he said, “We’ll buy no woods. We’ll send no one to camp. In fact, I don’t know what we’ll do.”

  “Can we stay here?” Liesl asked.

  “I think we shall have to sell the house and move.”

  Liesl stifled a sob, then asked, “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  When Lieutenant John Pope, USN, reported to Patuxent River for training as an advanced airplane test pilot, he found his Korean fly-mate Captain Randy Claggett, USMC, living in a helter-skelter paradise.

  Pax River was one of America’s finest military installations, a set of airfields located at the far tip of a peninsula jutting out into the Chesapeake Bay and roughly equidistant from Richmond, Annapolis, Washington and Wallops Island. The last two relationships were important because if administrators of the base got into trouble, they could always have easy access to the high command in the nation’s capital, and if airplanes on test flights had really difficult maneuvers to perform, they could fly out over the [280] Atlantic, using Wallops Island as their point of reference and their refuge if emergency landings or refuelings became necessary. Pax River was a beautiful, well-run base staffed by some of the world’s most expert fliers.

  Because of its enviable location, incoming pilots could choose among four locations in which to live: barracks on base which only the squares elected; miserable private digs just outside the gate which everyone tried to avoid; an attractive group of newly built homes at a settlement called Town Creek, where married couples could raise their children safely; and a remarkable frontier area across the Patuxent River at a Navy small-boats base called Solomons Island, so inconvenient, primitive and rowdy that only the toughest pilots married to the most resilient wives elected to live there.

  Randy Claggett lived at Solomons, and in order to report for duty in the morning, he had to either drive thirty miles upriver, cross over and drive thirty miles back or take an old motor launch run by the Navy between its two bases. This launch could take no cars, so a pilot who lived at Solomons had to own three automobiles: a real one for the wife and kids, a broken-down hack to carry himself from barracks to the launch, and another crate parked across the river to use for getting from the opposite landing to the test center. Only the first was licensed.

  As soon as Pope reported, Claggett took over: “Amigo, no self-respectin’ front-runner ever lives on base, and the town rentals are unspeakable. Only horses’ asses live in suburban grandeur at Town Creek, so the only possible place is Solomons. Come with me.”

  They went to a parking lot, where Claggett jumped into a Chevrolet fourteen years old. “I paid me a hundred and six dollars for this affair, but with a little work I got it to run.” It barely held together, but since it was needed only to get Claggett from the landing to base and back, plus runs to the liquor store now and then, it sufficed. The launch looked as if it would positively sink in midstream. but it chugged across the river to the left bank, where an unbelievable 1939 Chevy waited.

  “This’n cost me forty dollars and three weeks of work but hell, it only runs two miles each way, no plates, no nothin’.” This astonishing vehicle carried the two pilots to [281] a row house on the Navy base where toys and various children’s vehicles covered the sandy weed-grown lawn.

  Banging his way into the house, Claggett shouted, “Debby Dee, the sonnombeech is here!” And from the kitchen appeared a handsome, blowzy blonde who appeared to be a few years older than her pilot husband. Like Randy, she was from Texas, and like him, she had an infectious good will toward the world, large eyes which smiled enthusiastically and an obvious windblown charm. She used an exaggerated Texas drawl and did her hair in a preposterous way. She was careless about her dress and even more indifferent about the raising of her children, so far as Pope could discern, because she alternately bellowed at them or consoled them passionately if they came to harm. She had two sons and a daughter, but as she explained right at the start: “The boys aren’t Randy’s. He was good enough to marry me when Frank was killed in flight trainin’.”

  “The sonnombeeches are mine now,” Claggett said, as he belted one of the lads for hauling a pedicycle into the room. Both he and Debby Dee assured Pope that there was only one place to live. “Solomons has everything. Wonderful neighbors. Great parties Saturday night. and a pretty good Methodist church for Sundays.”

  Randy insisted on taking Pope to a garage off base where the owner had a pathetic Ford for thirty dollars-“Hell, John, you and I could rebuild this bale of bolts in five days, run you perfect home to the landing.” The man also had a rather better Ford at ninety dollars-“I’d recommend it, John, because you’ll need something reliable to move about the base.” But what Pope appreciated, then and years later, was another discovery Claggett made: “John, isn’t that a 1949 Mercury over there?”

  The body of the convertible had been wrecked beyond repair, but the canvas top looked as if it had escaped serious damage, and when the two pilots inspected it, they found that with some care it could be removed from the wreck and installed in place of the self-made job Pope had been using on his car. The owner would not sell the top, absolutely refused, but he would sell the whole car for twenty-five dollars, and when the pilots had transferred the top he bought back the rest of the hulk for ten dollars.

  “With epoxy to touch up the scars, you’ve got a new top, [282] good for decades,” Claggett said. And then Pope deliverer the unwelcome news: “I’m going to live in quarters ... on base.”

  “Oh, for Christ sake!” Claggett exploded. “Only worms live on base. At least buy a decent house out at Town Creek.” The Claggetts felt so strongly about this that they called several of their pilot friends and lined up two rather nice houses, but even when Pope saw how attractive they were, and how congenial the military families who lived nearby seemed to be, he stood firm: “My wife’s working in Washington, for the time being, and we won’t need a house.”

  It was Debby Dee who took him aside, cigarette dangling from her full lips. “Pope-san, if you’re strapped for cash, Randy and I could ...”

  “It’s not cash at all, Debby Dee. It’s just that I don’t need a house.”

  “But the owner’ll sell this excellent-Look, clown, this house has three bedrooms. It’s only thirteen thousand dollars and he’ll give you a twenty-year mortgage at five point three percent.”

  “I don’t want a house. All I want to do is test planes.”

  She stepped back and saluted. “Join the brotherhood, you sonnombeech. And I suppose you know the password? Professionalism.”

  It was certainly Randy Claggett’s beacon. He could horse around at home on Solomons, or at weekend parties, or when tinkering with his three cars, and he could talk Tex-Mex, but when he approached a new airplane whose characteristics were unknown and to be proved, he became a kind of self-contained god, a being totally immersed in the task at hand, and he believed with reason that no one on Earth could discharge that job better than he, for he was a professional, best in the business.

  Everyone at Pax River aspired to that reputation, and when Pope’s incoming class of fifteen assembled in the Test Pilot classroom, Captain Penscott, who would be their supervisor for five months of basic training, greeted them without emotion: “Gentlemen, you’ve been chosen because you’re the best military pilots in the nation. You know far more about airplanes than those you served with, and by this time next year two of you will be dead because you didn’t know enough.”

  And during the fifth week the sirens so
unded, [183] because a Navy lieutenant with 1,400 hours in his Aviator’s Flight Logbook had augered in an F7U-3-flown it nose-first right into the tarmac at three hundred miles per hour. He had one of the new houses at Town Creek, and Debby Dee was the first wife to come across on the launch from Solomons to take care of the widow and her two kids.

  When Pope was handed his first Flight Test Procedures for Stability and Control Evaluation, mimeographed by Douglas Aircraft to guide military pilots in testing the A4D-3, a light attack bomber which might or might not go into full-scale production, he was astonished by the complexity of the tests he was supposed to conduct and about which he was obligated to furnish written reports. The booklet identified thirteen almost unrelated aspects of the airplane which had to be tested under flight conditions, such as:

  How does the plane behave in a stall?

  Does it have dynamic longitudinal stability?

  What are the characteristics of its high-speed dive recovery?

  How do its lateral controls respond in critical situations?

  What is its dynamic stability?

  In simpler terms, the test pilot was supposed to put his plane into every conceivable kind of jeopardy, bring it out safely, and record precisely what happened before, during and after the crisis. It was in this written reporting that many test pilots failed, and Pope was profoundly impressed by the meticulous care with which Randy Claggett wrote his reports. He might sound illiterate during a Solomons beer bash, but when he brought a test plane back to Earth, he wrote with the precision of a writer for Scientific American: “The company engineers have to know exactly what happened, and only you can tell them.” When he saw Pope’s first reports, he showed his contempt: “Too wordy. Too imprecise. How? How much? How long before the response?” And always he wanted to know how Pope had felt when the strange things were happening: “That’s a better guide than all the telemetry the engineers invent. Not what you thought. Not what the instruments showed. But how your guts felt when the plane yawed [284] unexpectedly. How did your ass feel when it started to slide? Did you feel your eyes drifting? Goddammit, Pope, you’re the most expensive instrument they’ll ever put in those planes and the most complicated, so trust your reflexes.”

  At one party Claggett reverted to this theme, and with a beer can in one hand, he directed a conversation with six other pilots; they were in the kitchen, of course, while their wives were in the front room discussing shopping markets and kindergartens. “We’re the end of a long line, gentlemen.” (He was imitating Captain Penscott.) “The end of a long process of Darwinian selection.” And he invited the pilots to offer their guesses as to the statistics he wanted.

  “If you got into Annapolis or West Point, you were one in five hundred who thought they were eligible. If you graduated, only thirty percent were allowed into flight training. Only sixty percent of that number made it to completion. Advanced training washed out a good twenty percent. And a hell of a lot didn’t live through the squadron. MiG guns or their own carelessness did them in. I understand that about a hundred of the best fliers in the world apply for test-flight training every class, here or Edwards, which leads me to think that each of us represents something like one in two hundred thousand.”

  “How in hell did you get that?” asked one of the pilots who had been doing his own figuring.

  “Because it’s a good round number. Now let’s look at the costs. High school, four thousand dollars. Annapolis, four years, forty-eight thousand dollars. Flight training, including the smashed SNJs, a hundred and fifty thousand. Advanced flight and peacetime squadron, three hundred thousand dollars. Korea, three years, the banged-up planes, a million eight hundred thousand dollars. Pax River, three years all told, another five hundred thousand dollars. What’s that add up to? A lot of mazoola.”

  Pope studied with interest the dogged way in which Claggett pursued his career, and he listened carefully to his suggestions: “I heard Captain Penscott say you were one of the best. If so, make your moves with the most careful attention. You must get into Flight Test. That’s where we do the real work, testing the hottest things that fly ... in the abstract ... philosophically. If you can’t make that, Service Test is acceptable, but it’s a step down. You [285] take the plane when I’m through with it and see bow it fits Navy requirements. If you’re obviously not a first-class stick man, they’ll put you in Electronic Test, which is all right if you grew up wiring Heathkits. Armament Test is the same thing-avoid it. A guy like you, known as a straight arrow, faces one fatal temptation. They’ll want to keep hold of you as a teacher in the Test Pilot School, and if you let them ... farewell, poor Yorick, I knew him in the old days when he was a pilot.”

  “Can I get into Flight Test?”

  “You have to get in, it’s that simple.”

  Claggett had two other bits of advice which he deemed vital, for when he shared them he kept hold of Pope’s arm, bringing him close as if he were whispering recondite information shared only by the professionals. “John, never become too close to the manufacturer’s field representatives. They’re business. We’re military. And if you’re seen suckin’ up to them, the rest of us will figure you’re trying to land a civilian job when you’re through here, and men who do that are beneath contempt.

  “Also, John, never hobnob with the VR types, the pilots testing the transport prototypes. It’ll be obvious that you’re hoping for a later job with Pan American or United. To hell with them. They fly boxcars. We fly airplanes.”

  And when Pope’s five months of intensive training drew to a close, Claggett cautioned him again: “I think you’re gonna be one of the great ones, John. Normally I despise men who bunk on base just to save a few bucks, and I really don’t like straight arrows, but dammit, you know airplanes as well as I do. You really do. The one unforgivable sin in your work for the next two years is to crack up a prototype aircraft. Kill yourself, that’s okay, and screw the commander’s wife, that’s okay, too. But you’re here to protect that aircraft, and if you auger one in, you’ve failed your test.

  “And don’t allow yourself to become too attached to one type. Remember, the airplane has no affection for you. To it, one pilot’s as good as another. Test the goddamned thing and walk away from it.” Proudly he showed Pope his Aviator’s Flight Logbook, which recorded his pilot’s experience in seventy-one different kinds of aircraft, even some of the despised VR types, and in the final days of his own preparatory training Pope watched with admiration the [286] brazen way in which Claggett gained access to the newer planes as they arrived at Patuxent River.

  He would wait till someone landed a prototype, go over to it, kick the tires and ask casually, “How do you start this bundle of bolts?” A pilot could have 3,000 hours in the air with all types of planes and still not be able to guess how the next manufacturer had decided to hide the ignition system on his new plane. When Claggett found out, he would ask the returning pilot, “Anything oddball about this one?” And always one pilot would help another, warning him of special problems.

  Off Claggett would go, sometimes with only the vaguest permission from the tower, but after he had put the new plane through its maneuvers and made voluminous notes as to its performance, he would land and seek out one or two pilots who had flown it before and spend perhaps three hours comparing notes on the most intimate details of this plane’s behavior. Only then would he meet with the team in charge of the plane and with the manufacturer’s representatives to report in astonishing detail on the strengths and weaknesses of their product.

  “I have one failing you should avoid,” Claggett confided on the evening before Pope’s graduation from the school part of the Patuxent River program. “I’m a sucker for any kind of cross-country flight. I’ll even go commercial. So I take every trip that comes along, and pilots who do this put themselves in grave danger. Fly out to the big factories in Los Angeles. Edwards Air Force Base to test their new planes. Maybe over to England to meet with the British at Boscombe Downs.”


  “What’s the danger?”

  “You become known as a giddy-biddy, a goody-grabber, and when you come home you find that someone who’s been tending to his knitting has drawn all the good assignments, and you’re no longer in the mainstream. You get none of the new planes.”

  “How do you protect yourself?”

  Claggett looked around him as if fearing spies, then said, “By being the best damned pilot on the lot. By writing the best reports. By flying the ass off anything they let you climb into.” He laughed. “I’ll never be cured. I love that Pax-Jax-Lax routine.” He was referring to the field designations of Patuxent River, Jacksonville, Los [287] Angeles. “My heart grows double when the engine revs up and I’m on my way. At thirty thousand feet the world is mine.”

  Next day John Pope graduated as a full-fledged test pilot, and Captain Penscott, recognizing his ability, invited him to become head of instruction in the training school: “It’s a long-term job, Pope, one that carries with it real distinction. You could purchase a house and live well.”

  “I would be honored,” John said. “But you know my wife works in Washington, and I was hoping I’d get Flight Test.”

  “Has Claggett been poisoning your mind?” Penscott asked amiably.

  “Well, he has said two things,” Pope lied. “That to become a permanent instructor was about the best a man could hope for. And that hard drivers tried to get into Flight Test.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that,” Penscott said. “Flight Test it’ll be.”

  That night Randy and Debby Dee Claggett threw a graduation party at Solomons, with the ancient launch working overtime to carry the people from Town Creek across the river and young Tim Claggett driving the broken-down Chevy round-trip from the pier to the three row houses his mother had borrowed for the bash. By this time Pope was well enough acquainted with the Pax River people to know what to expect: no alcoholism whatever in the entire crew, no talk of books or art, the loudest possible hi-fi music, politics never mentioned, men in the kitchen, wives in the front room, models of aircraft fastened to all the walls, and the warm-hearted camaraderie of men who had spent the last dozen years risking their lives and who hoped to spend the next dozen doing exactly the same.