Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  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 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.

  What Pope was not prepared for was that when he left his austere bachelor quarters on the base and drove his Mercury convertible to the ferry, crossed it and climbed into Tim Claggett’s Chevy, he found Penny waiting for him in Debby Dee’s front room. Randy had driven hellbent to Washington to bring her down for the gala night.

  His heart stopped when he saw her—straight, neat, hair trim against her well-shaped head, her eyes wide, her broad face glowing with delight at seeing her husband again. ‘Penny,’ he cried. ‘How did you find this place?’

  ‘The Flying Gorilla,’ she said, pointing to Claggett, who was once more playing the Texas beetworker from Central Mexico: ‘I breeng you Señorita, sir. My seestair, very pretty, very clean, three dollars.’

  The Navy wives made a fuss over Penny, who with her working experience in Washington was able to fit in immediately with women whom instinctively she liked: ‘I have no children, dammit, and I think it’s that clown’s fault.’

  ‘No, no, memsahib!’ Claggett shouted. ‘In Korea our boy Pope had three children. The fault ain’t his’n.’

  The Navy wives liked Penny and spent much time trying to discover what it was she did in Washington, and she explained that because of her law degree she had been able to land this demanding job as secretary to the Senate committee that dealt with aviation and space: ‘You might say that I help men like Lyndon Johnson and my boss Michael Glancey find the money that keeps places like’ Patuxent River functioning.’

  ‘Bless that girl!’ Debby Dee cried, and she asked Penny if she wanted anything to drink.

  ‘A beer,’ Penny said, and Debby Dee shrieked, ‘Us beer drinkers got a new convert.’

  The party continued till dawn, and as the sun came up over the Chesapeake, Debby Dee led the Popes to one of the borrowed houses, told all the late drinkers to scram, and put the new test pilot and his beautiful Washington wife to bed. ‘Get some kids,’ she told them. ‘It ain’t legal to be a test pilot without kids.’ Her own son Tim was still driving the ramshackle Chevy back and forth to the landing as the test pilots made their way across the river and back to their jobs.

  Penny was so delighted with Pax River, and especially with the Claggetts, that she made plans to leave Washington on most weekends, sleeping over at either Solomons or Town Creek, and the more she saw of the orderly yet frenzied life of the test pilots, the more she loved it and the more she respected the men and women who participated in it. She was very proud of her husband and saw that most of the other wives were proud of theirs, and she was staying with one of the families at Town Creek when one of the new test pilots who had graduated with John augered in, reducing a great plane to a compact mass of metal and bone and blood. He was the first of the fifteen to die.

  Then she appreciated doubly the meaning of her husband’s occupation, for the entire base—admiral in charge, Captain Penscott in charge of the school, tech reps from the manufacturers, young men who had come aboard as beginners in the new class—coalesced about the stricken home to make death bearable, if not understandable.

  On her weekends Penny came to know the older test pilots, who were either still working on the base or returning to it to compare notes or drink beer with their earlier associates, and she saw that John Glenn, quiet and sober, was much like her husband, a true straight arrow, and from watching Glenn, she came to know John better. Al Shepard was all dignity and power, while Scott Carpenter was relaxed and amiable. She had difficulty believing Pete Conrad had ever gone to Princeton. She was overawed by Bill Lawrence, perhaps the ablest flier, all things considered, that Pax River was to produce—if she excluded Randy Claggett and her husband—but she was grateful for a rowdy, talkative type like Gerry O’Rourke, who kept things moving with his irreverent comedy. It was a splendid group of men, and she could not believe rumors that the Air Force parallel types at Edwards in California excelled. ‘They may fly higher,’ she told the Senate committee, ‘but they cannot fly any better.’

  She was sleeping at the Claggetts’ one Friday night, tired from her week’s work and the speedy trip south, when she heard a loud explosion across the river and awoke to see flames leaping toward the sky. She was terrified, because her husband was engaged in night flying that week, and for a dreadful half-hour she supposed that it had been his plane which had ‘bought the ranch.’

  Clag
gett was not doing any night flying, so he and Debby Dee were present to console her, and the latter said, from long experience, ‘We’ll get a phone call. We always do.’

  ‘You mean they’ll tell me about it over the phone?’

  ‘Good God, no!’ Debby Dee blurted out. ‘They send the chaplain, or one of the fliers in uniform. If nobody comes up that walk— You’d be able to hear the launch, too.’

  They waited a long time, talking of inconsequentials, with Penny Pope starting even when a cricket’s rasping legs gave noises that could be interpreted as the start of a phone ringing, and then they waited longer still for the sound of the launch, but in the end it was John Pope on the phone: ‘Hello, kiddo. You get down here all right? Just called to see.’

  When Penny replaced the phone she looked for a moment at her companions, sitting there in the semi-darkness, not exulting with her, for her gain was the dreadful loss of someone equally precious. And then she collapsed. ‘Oh, Debby Dee! I love him so much.’ And in a flood of words this capable, self-directed committee secretary told of their courtship under the stars in Clay, when John was already interested in astronomy, and of their nights together in the university observatory with Dr. Anderssen, and of their courtship while John was at Annapolis, and of the generous way he encouraged her, and of her love which grew deeper with every year.

  ‘You have kids,’ she told the Claggetts, ‘and so do all the others. John and I have tried, and maybe failure cements us even closer.’

  ‘Why don’t you quit your job and move down here?’ Debby Dee asked, hoping to ease her into less-hysterical conversation.

  ‘Whatever you do, it’s never right,’ Penny said, so they gave her two stiff drinks and put her to bed.

  Now, when she visited with her husband over the weekends or during a Senate break, she loved him increasingly, for at last she understood what impelled him: ‘You want to be the best, don’t you? You want to drive yourself always to the maximum performance.’

  ‘I’ll never be the test pilot Randy is.’

  ‘You’re twice as knowledgeable about airplanes,’ she said forcefully.

  ‘Specifications, yes. But what makes one fly and another falter, no.’

  ‘Are you making a mystery of it, a religion?’

  ‘It is a mystery. At the farthest edges when you’re up there with a plane that’s never been really tested, it is a mystery.’ He hesitated, for he must next speak about things that the test pilots would usually voice only to other test pilots, but he loved this strong-willed girl from the plains as none of the other pilots loved their wives; she was part of him, the measure of his life—and he wanted to share everything with her.

  ‘Since we started our tour, three men just as well trained as I am have flown their planes into the ground, and statistics predict that four more will before we’re through. Every one of them knew his plane. Every one talked slowly and clearly into his mouthpiece as things began to fall apart. And every damned one of them did the first right thing, and then the second and then the fifth and sixth, and nothing worked, and they were still trying to figure things out when they hit. Randy Claggett would have saved every one of those planes. At step three he’d have figured something, something never in any book. And that’s the difference.’

  She drew in her breath, then asked, ‘You? Would you have brought them down?’

  ‘I might have figured it out by step five, but then it could have been too late. But I promise you this, Penny, if they do come up the lane one day, the chaplain and the others, you can be positive that I was about to try step six.’

  Once he allowed her to see the mimeographed instructions Grumman sent to the men testing the F11F-1, a plane in which the Navy had placed great faith when it issued the original contract, but which was proving a dismal disappointment:

  LATERAL CONTROL

  Purpose: To determine aileron force gradient.

  Procedure:

  1. Trim out in the desired condition.

  2. Roll into a left or right turn to an angle of bank 45°.

  3. When the turn is stable hold the rudder fixed in the trim position and abruptly apply a given amount of aileron and hold it until the airplane has reached a 45° bank in the opposite direction.

  4. Record the time to roll the 90° and note aileron force required.

  Important Note:

  Make this check at ¼, ½, ¾ and full throw aileron displacements, first left, then right.

  Further Application:

  Make checks at various altitudes and air speeds to determine rate of roll at various Mach numbers and their equivalent air speeds.

  Caution: Watch out for flutter. If it occurs, lower speed instantly.

  When she leafed through the booklet she found that her husband was obligated to perform more than eighty such tests with their Further Applications and Cautions as to when the wings might fly off. ‘How many planes are you men testing?’

  John rattled off the names of twenty-six on the field at this moment, including many that would prove useless when subjected to tests like the above but also those noble workhorses of the fleet, those planes upon whose predecessors the safety of this nation had once depended: the Douglas dive bombers, the Grumman fighters, the great Chance-Vought F4U series, which the Marines had used to repel the Japanese and which Pope had used in Korea against the Chinese.

  He shared with her, as a virtual member of the Senate committee, the two scandals at Pax River: ‘There never was a plane more difficult than the old F4U. Birdcage so high the pilot couldn’t see to land it on a carrier. Had a really nasty way of snap-rolling at high G’s. But we never had a better plane. It was made of concrete. Could not be shot down by anything but a three-inch shell. An absolutely marvelous plane, and I flew it all through Korea, the Chance-Vought Corsair, my love.

  ‘So now the same company with the same engineers builds the Navy the F7U, the Cutlass. And it’s a disaster. There doesn’t seem to be a thing right about it, especially the engines. Pilots call it the Gutless Cutlass, and men like Claggett have sent in a dozen reports on what has to be done, and they can’t seem to fix it. You know, 1 suppose, that Claggett refuses to fly it any more. Calls it the Widow Maker.’

  ‘Do you fly it?’

  ‘I fly anything.’ Without further comment he told her of the F3H planes, first and second series. ‘The poor old F3H-1, maybe the worst disaster of modern times. The Ensign Killer. Had a J-40 engine, I think, and performed so dismally they sent the last forty of them down the Mississippi on barges. Too dangerous to fly. So they brought out an improvement—F3H-2 with an Allison J-71 engine. We named it the Screamin’ Demon, and it broke our hearts to see how at so many critical points it failed. A great plane on paper, it never quite made it. I found its air-to-air missile system elegant. First in the world that will kill an oncoming target head-on. But dammit, both the plane and the engine failed us. Claggett and I have sent in dozens of reports. But most of the faults can’t be corrected.’

  ‘But you still fly it?’

  ‘That’s our job. We’re testing them. And if we don’t test them, the Navy buys them and then the young pilots get killed expecting them to perform properly.’

  ‘Is it really rough?’

  ‘Thirty days, thirty flights, maybe fifty, not a thing happens. Plane goes into a spin, you note the numbers, you bring it out of the spin, you note the numbers.’

  ‘Are spins dangerous?’

  ‘Not if you bring the plane out.’

  ‘And if you don’t?’

  ‘Then you try something, and something else, and always you find something.’

  When she returned to Washington after discussions like this, she had increased admiration for the men all down the line who made aviation possible: the big companies that made the planes, the Senate committees that paid for them, the generals and admirals who fought to get the right ones, the gallant young men who flew them, and then that special breed of quiet supermen who drank beer in the kitchen on Saturday nig
ht and tested the untried planes on Monday morning.

  In recent months two more men in their thirties had been killed: one testing a plane that should never have left the factory; the other in a plane which was as good as any nation in the world was making, but which on this particular day over the Chesapeake Bay behaved erratically, and the young fellow in it panicked and lost his life and a plane that any of the other pilots on the test line could have brought down easily.

  The more Penny saw of the pilots, the more reassured she was about their essential sanity: there were no daredevils in this group, and any youngster who sought to achieve that reputation was either dropped completely or disciplined by the oldsters like John Glenn or Randy Claggett, and it was peculiarly effective when the lanky Texan assumed the role of taskmaster. He never attacked the young show-off directly, or in front of others, for he realized that a test pilot required all the self-esteem and bravado available, nor did he denigrate the man’s basic ability, for the young man would not have been chosen for Pax River if he was not competent, but what he did do, and most directly, was challenge the man’s professionalism.

  ‘You know, Forbes, this ain’t much of a report.’

  ‘The facts are there.’

  ‘But ifn a report ain’t done good style—I mean slam-slam-slam, one point directly after the other—and I mean in order, goddammit, just like the book says …’

  ‘It’s all there.’

  ‘It ain’t all there, goddammit. It ain’t there ifn I cain’t find it.’

  ‘What do you want me to do? Become a professor of English?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Claggett would say with great warmth. Then, putting his arm about the man, he would say, ‘Forbes, you’re one of the hottest pilots on this here line. I reckon you can be the very best in your group. Ability? Unbounded. But whippin’ that plane around the sky is only one-third of this job. The other two-thirds is feedback. You tellin’ the brain boys what’s what. And this you must do in precise … orderly … fashion. I spend one hour testin’, two hours reportin’. It’s called professionalism, son, and ifn you ain’t got that, you ain’t got nothin’.’