Space

by James A. Michener

  The flight they liked best was from Houston to Cape Canaveral, for this meant that they were headed toward the mystical site from which they would one day soar off into space, and with a kind of reverence, they approached the sandy spit on which the launching pads waited. “This is for real,” Claggett cried one day as he took his T-38 far out to sea before landing.

  Also, several of the most effective simulators were located at the Cape, and the astronauts never wearied of climbing into these extraordinary devices and going through imaginary flight procedures. NASA had developed a simulator for everything, Claggett said, “except tying your shoes, and the minute that becomes important, presto, they’re gonna have one.”

  There was a simulator for launch, another for coming back through the atmosphere. There was one for the guidance system, another for the computers. There was an amazing simulator for aborting a flight, and a Rube Gold berg type, all angles and elbows, for landing on the Moon. [428] There was a simulator covering every conceivable emergency, but the best of all was operated by a tall. mournful doctor in engineering from Purdue University who had a kind of Fu Manchu beard and whom everyone called Dracula.

  His job was to anticipate disaster, to imagine the worst possible outcome of every step his astronauts would take and then to simulate the disasters they might encounter. Halfway into the launch on his simulator, power in three rockets would be lost and a set of highly sophisticated telemetry devices would register every mistake the agitated pilot made. Or just at the crucial moment the two main computers would blow, and every wrong move made by the pilot in the right-hand seat would be coldly registered. Engines would catch fire; the ablative shield would burn off; the drogue parachute wouldn’t pull out the main; when Dracula was on the scene, playing his simulators like a violin, disaster was omnipresent.

  And when the test flight was over, he would meet with the two pilots and read them his scorecard: “At 00:01:49 into the flight compression was lost.” The bastard never said, “I cut compression.” It was always an impersonal compression that acted poorly. “The commander made two wrong responses before he hit the right one and the mission crashed. At 00:05:23 an exaggerated pogo began. Pilot attempted correction using procedure abandoned four months ago and mission crashed.” It sometimes seemed as if Dracula could never be content until the imaginary Gemini spacecraft plunged into the Atlantic, killing both pilots, but when real flight began and absolutely no crisis eventuated for which Dracula had not prepared his crews, the astronauts began to generate a real affection for him. But he was, as Claggett said, “a real bastard,” which the Twins verified one morning.

  Dracula was a genius at devising sight-and-sound spectaculars that exactly duplicated what the astronauts would see in the flight. Motion picture cameras displayed the heavens which would surround the men at a particular moment; the seasick motion of the descending capsule could be evoked with gimbals; noises were easy to duplicate-so that by the time Claggett and Pope had flown the various simulators for well over a hundred and fifty hours. [429] they believed with some reason that space could hold no surprises for them.

  In that mood they climbed into the main simulator one morning after it had been mysteriously shut down for three weeks, and as they listened to the countdown numbers coming over their earphones-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-blast off-they grew tense, as always, awaiting Dracula’s next disaster.

  But on this day the simulator was playing for real. It blew up. There was a terrible explosion, wild noises, with flame and smoke invading the capsule as it simulated lifting into the air atop its Titan rocket. To his credit, Claggett in the left-hand seat took every step calculated to diminish the consequences of the explosion, and in his right-hand seat Pope did what he could to control the fire. The flames, from whatever cause, were extinguished, so that the simulator, badly damaged, could be repaired and used again.

  And then the two astronauts realized that it had all been faked. Dracula had devised a set of excellent motion pictures, a new sound system and a machine which would rock the simulator while giving off flame and smoke. At the debriefing the gloomy man droned: “At 00:01:09 one of the main rockets exploded. Commander and pilot responded with all the right procedures except emergency control of oxygen, so the mission crashed.” When headquarters asked Claggett and Pope how they had reacted to the unexpected explosion, the latter retreated to his test-pilot training and said, “I tried this and it failed. I tried step two and it failed. But step three proved effective.” Claggett was more direct: “I was scared shitless.”

  Senator Grant did not propose to do the Republican dirty work on the Space Committee for the Democrats Lyndon Johnson and Michael Glancey without getting something for his state in return, but when the time came to identify the quid pro quo he ran into difficulty. Eastland of Mississippi had cornered most of the easy plums controlled by the Senate, while Mendel Rivers of South Carolina commandeered so many posts and establishments that an admiral had once growled, “Mendel, if we give you one m7ore base, Charleston will sink.”

  [430] Of the NASA assignments, Johnson was taking care of Texas, and Glancey was protecting Red River with multiple contracts. Trying to combat such patronage crocodiles was difficult, but Grant was not powerless, and when he threatened revolt, the Democratic leadership had to consider ways to placate him.

  “Norman,” Glancey said one morning prior to a committee meeting, “Air Force and NASA both could use another airfield west of the Missouri, and we’ve decided to place it just north of your hometown. Very convenient when you get your own plane.” Glancey also persuaded General Funkhauser to locate a branch of Allied Aviation next to the industrial city of Webster, and Grant was mollified except for one additional boon in which he had a personal interest.

  “Glancey, our astronomer at Fremont State has talked some well-to-do people into giving us a planetarium. His name’s Anderssen, splendid scholar. I think it would be proper if this new bunch of astronauts reported there for their star studies.”

  “Well ... you know, Norman ... we’ve been sending our men to Chapel Hill in North Carolina. They do an excellent job.”

  “I’m sure they do,” Grant said crisply, “but I’m equally sure Anderssen can do as well.”

  Nothing came of this exchange, but Grant was so eager to have six astronauts walking on the streets of his college town that he returned twice to the matter, and in the end Glancey surrendered: “I’ll speak to NASA,” and when those officials said that although North Carolina was doing a fine job, they could see no reason why Anderssen at Fremont State couldn’t do as well, the indoctrination was moved west. At his first meeting in the new planetarium the old man told the astronauts:

  “When a man has studied the heavens for ten thousand nights he is entitled to make certain generalizations. Space is without limit or definition. There is no east or west, no north or south, no down or up, no in or out. It is truly boundless and must be respected as such. It cannot be measured or comprehended. All we can do is behave in accordance with its laws as we dimly perceive them.

  [431] “It is those laws I wish to speak about, and I need not exhort you to master them, for the day is not far off when you, and each of you, will be soaring in outer space, with the welfare of this nation and indeed of all mankind depending upon how you perform.

  “This is a galaxy. [And he flashed on the heavens of the planetarium a stunning photograph of M-51, the Whirlpool.] There are about one billion stars in that galaxy, and about one billion galaxies in the universe as we are allowed to know it at this moment. That means that we may have as many as a billion billion different stars. I shall now increase the light so that you can write on your pads a billion billion. That’s the figure one followed by eighteen zeros.

  [He lowered the light and showed the astronauts a beautiful photograph of the galaxy in Coma Berenices known as NGC-4565, an elongated mass of stars and galactic dust.] “If we could see our Galaxy, spelled always with a capital G, from a vast distance it would look like this, a c
ollection of some four billion stars arranged about a central core. I want each of you to guess where our Sun, one of those stars, is situated within the Galaxy.

  [He replaced 4565 with an artist’s conception of our Galaxy as viewed from above, and with a flashlight-pointer indicated how the Sun stood far off to one side, well away from the vital center.] “We are attached to a star of only average size, in a galaxy of only average size, far from the center of action where new stars are being born, far from those centers of the universe where new galaxies are being born. Never, never, young men, believe that we stand at the center of things, or even close to the center of anything.

  “But the position we do occupy within our marvelous Galaxy is a magnificent one whose complexities will occupy you for the rest of your lives. I have spent sixty years, as a boy in Norway and an astronomer in this country, endeavoring to penetrate the mysteries of our planetary system, and I suppose I know [432] as much about it as anyone living but I do not know its precise origin, or the construction of any component except Earth, always spelled with a capital E, or the mechanics which ultimately hold the system together, or its final destiny.

  “I stand before you an ignorant old man terribly jealous of the astounding opportunity you have to explore our system and most eager to help you acquire the tools to accomplish that exploration. To perform your task, you must know the stars.”

  The next thing he showed them, with the aid of special devices on the planetarium instrument, was the ecliptic, that arbitrary band of the heavens through which the Moon and the planets moved and along which the Sun appeared to move, and when this imaginary line was fixed in the men’s minds, he threw upon it handsome streamlined interpretations of the zodiacal signs, immemorially ancient in origin, the signposts of the heavens.

  “I have studied the zodiac in five different languages, and with every known mnemonic device, but a child’s rhyme fashioned in England long ago remains the best help so far devised. It’s printed in your material and I shall expect you to memorize it by tomorrow. I use it almost every night, and so will you.” And he recited the childish rhyme which helps astronomers organize their work, pointing with his light-wand to the curious collection of figures associated with the words:

  “The Ram, the Bull, the Heavenly Twins.

  Next the Crab, and the Lion shines.

  The Virgin and the Scales.

  The Scorpion, Archer and He-Goat,

  Then the Man with the Watering Pot,

  And the Fish with the glittering scales.”

  Having made the circuit once, he returned the heavens to Aries and cried, “Now all together,” and like a group of kindergartners, the six astronauts recited the nursery rhyme.

  Professor Anderssen was rigorous in demanding that the astronauts master the navigational stars situated along; [433] the ecliptic, for some of these would usually be visible, but they were not conspicuous, their names were unfamiliar, and they gave the young men much trouble: “You simply must learn the easy ones by tomorrow. Spica, Antares, Aldebaran, Pollux, Regulus.”

  When these were mastered he turned to the difficult ones, some scarcely visible to unpracticed eyes: “Nunki in Sagittarius, easy to find in the group that looks like a Tea Kettle; Deneb Algedi in Capricornus, not easy to find. Hamal in Aries, very difficult to find. But the most difficult of all, either to find or say, this one in Libra, Zubeneschamali.”

  He was having some difficulty with Randy Claggett, who gave the star names his own pronunciation. The Big Dipper became Ursula Major, Zubeneschamali was Reuben Smiley, and the important navigational star Nunki became Nooki. “Am I correct in thinking, Major Claggett, that the word Nooki has sexual overtones?”

  “Well ... it means ... you’re getting some.”

  “Then I think we’d better call that star by its right name, Nunki,” but when in oral review Anderssen pointed his wand at Sagittarius and asked Claggett to identify the principal star, he bellowed, “Nooki.” For a brief spell the professor thought of disciplining the Texan, but he observed that Claggett was learning the stars faster than anyone else except Pope, who had a Ph.D. in related fields, so he tolerated him, and once when he was trying to teach the more difficult stars he shouted, “Learn it! It’s difficult! It’s Reuben Smiley!” and the class applauded.

  When the northern stars were mastered, he convened his students in the planetarium and told them something they would often refer to when they talked among themselves. He was proving to be an inspired teacher, one whose obvious enthusiasm brightened his subject; when he said that he had studied the stars for ten thousand nights he meant just that, three long nights of observation each week for sixty years:

  “We have mastered, I think, the northern stars, the easy bright ones especially, and we have seen how fortuitous it was that God or nature placed Polaris at the precise spot where it would be most useful, at the North Pole. Now look at the South Pole and see [434] how empty it is. Look at the entire southern hemisphere and see how few bright stars we have to guide us.

  [He allowed the sky to move slowly, majestically through three complete days, speaking a few words now and then to impress upon the men the emptiness of the southern regions and the obligation they faced of being just as familiar with these few helpful stars as with the more numerous and conspicuous ones of the north.]

  “When I was a boy in Norway and had mastered the northern stars, as you have done, I used to stand on my hill and rage at the heavens, pleading with them to shift so that I could see the southern stars, which I knew to be hidden below the horizon. “Canopus,” I shouted. “Come forth! I know you’re down there. Southern Cross, let me see you!”

  “Think of it, gentlemen. We seven are among the well educated, and not one of us has ever seen the stars that guide the south. Now we shall learn them, but I cannot convey how jealous of you I shall be when you leap into space and fly beyond the shadow of the earth and see in all their glory the southern stars which I have never seen.

  [Quietly he moved into his heavens the Magellanic Clouds which had so captivated the Portuguese explorer, the Southern Cross which had guided and delighted Captain Cook, the brilliance of Centaurus and the cold beauty of Canopus, second brightest star in the heavens.]

  “I will expect you to know all the easy stars by tomorrow morning. Then we shall drop down to the difficult ones.”

  And they were difficult: Achernar, Al Na’ir and crazy stars that not even Pope had ever heard of: Miaplacidus and Atria. But as Anderssen insisted: “They’re essential because at some crucial moment up there, it may be only this part of the heavens that you will be able to see, and if you do not know these stars, you will be lost.”

  [435] In his concluding lecture, when he was satisfied that his six students had learned in their 120 hours of assigned time more than he had known at the end of five years of study, he told them:

  “You are prepared to identify the stars which will give you the data you need to navigate to the Moon, or Mars, or Jupiter. You must now move on to master the computers which will absorb these data and tell you exactly where you are. But in a larger sense, none of us will ever know where we are. We are lost in the stars, in our little Galaxy, among the billions of other galaxies that help to control us within a universe we can neither define nor comprehend. The steps you brave young men take with your marvelous machines will push back the veil of ignorance a little way, and then our concern will be with the newly revealed and greater ignorances which will dominate us until others like you, with their own machines and understandings, push their veils aside to reveal the new imponderables. How I envy you.”

  Tucker Thompson was enjoying such a great run with the six astronauts that his magazine advertised his work as “a better job than Life,” and the astronauts applauded this because according to their contract with Folks, each man stood to make about $23,000 extra income if the series was sold abroad. The fliers therefore worked closely with Tucker and encouraged their wives to do the same, but all of the women rese
nted Thompson’s invasion of their privacy, and he had some trouble getting them to do the things that the American public had a right to expect of their heroines.

  Thompson had particular cause to worry about Cocoa Beach, the explosive town to the south of Canaveral which had once contained 2,600 people and would soon have many times that number. Never a pretty town, in the old days it had served as a winter resort for snow-birds who flocked south each December from places like Maine, Minnesota and especially Ontario. Those with wealth continued on to Palm Beach, a hundred and twenty-five miles farther south; only those on budgets parked their caravans at Cocoa Beach. The houses tended to be one story, frame, [436] unheated and dusty, the stores two-storied and jumbled. There had been bars, most of which were shuttered during the summer, and living quarters for a small permanent population whose men commuted to jobs north along the coast to Daytona Beach or inland to Orlando.

  Like Canaveral itself, the little town huddled on the outer chain of islands and expanded not like a lovely rose which flowered in all directions, but rather like a radish which elongated at each end but stayed the same in the restricted middle. Yet the town had a wild beauty, for to the east roared the somber Atlantic.

  When the astronauts flew in to Cape Canaveral on duty assignments, which was constantly, austere bachelor quarters were provided in NASA buildings, but they preferred the livelier scene at Cocoa Beach, twenty miles to the south, and if they brought their wives along, which they often did, it became the custom for them to take rooms at a new and glossy motel called the Bali Hai, a name borrowed by many joints across the country from a popular song that was supposed to be tropical and sexy. This Bali Hai had been built by Canadians, who seemed always to have an uncanny sense of which Florida beach was going to become popular next, but it was run by a pessimistic married couple from Maine who had spent one winter too many among the snowdrifts of that igloo.