Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  But he also stressed what Mott already knew, that these men were determined to succeed. ‘Every one is a super-achiever, driven by the most profound determination to do things right. Cowardice, recalcitrance, the temptation to do sloppy work, all suppressed. Their capacity to do extra work is unbelievable, so if you’re to be in charge of their education, don’t fear to pile it on. These men will learn ten times as much as the average A student. Ten times as much as you or I could have mastered. These are super machines.’

  When Mott queried him about one peculiarity shared by the six, Crandall grew expansive. The point you raise worried me at first. Twenty-two astronauts—twenty-two of the best young men in America and not an outstanding athlete among them. Why? Well, I did a lot of double-doming and came up with a batch of fancy explanations. “Boys with the amount of drive they have don’t waste their time with games.” Or maybe “Engineering and science require so much lab work, there’s no time for daily football practice.” Or perhaps “In athletics the motivations are all external. What the coach says. What the rules say. In the fields these men work in, the disciplines are internal.” I had half a dozen other goodies, and when I discussed them with faculty members some of the teachers were rather pleased that in this most demanding of life tests, the superathletes did not do poorly. They did nothing. Blank.’

  He raised his hands as if to confess his bewilderment, then broke into a cheerful laugh. ‘Stupid me! I had overlooked one simple fact which explained it all. In each successive selection, we’ve picked smaller men. So they can fit into the machines we’re building. If we had selected the really bright football linemen, and there are some, believe me, they’d have stood six feet four and weighed two hundred and fifty. One of those gorillas would require more space than two of our men like Grissom and Young. As a matter of fact, the engineers who build the machines wish we’d keep the maximum height something less than five-eight and the weight no more than one-sixty.’

  Mott said, ‘I seem to remember that John Pope did pretty well in football. Claggett, too.’

  ‘They all played games,’ Crandall conceded. ‘And some were pretty good. But not one of the first twenty-two was what you’d call a superjock, and very sneakily I weasel back to my first guess. They weren’t because men like these do not waste their time on sports, for the good reason that the goals they’ve set for themselves will not permit that extravagance.’

  He made two other warning points. ‘Astronauts by an enormous margin are first-born children. They’ve been pampered. They have powerful egos. Their parents may have driven them too hard, but they also loved them. These men expect to be cared for. Do not brush them off. On the other hand, no astronaut, regardless of the pressure we put him under, has ever developed a gastric ulcer. These sonsabitches know something you and I haven’t learned. Work like hell all day, but turn it off at night. Eat a good meal and get a good night’s sleep. So you don’t have to treat them like china. These bastards are tough.’

  He had more statistical analyses which he might have shared with Mott, but he felt that since the salient points had been covered, it was time to bring in a man with whom Mott would be forced to work in close tandem. ‘I want you to meet Tucker Thompson, chief honcho for Folks magazine. He’s primarily responsible for breaking the stranglehold Life had on the astronauts, and he’s got to make good on these six or get fired.’

  Before Mott could say ‘I’ve already met Thompson,’ the editor burst eagerly into the room, smiling enthusiastically, and Mott had an opportunity to inspect more closely the man with whom he would be working. He was tall, bronzed, about fifty, and when he extended his hand, his cuff disclosed an imposing link made of a large gold nugget. He wore a button-down collar and a tie of rich solid color, a pair of exquisitely pressed black trousers, an expensive white jacket and, of course, tasseled shoes. He was slightly bald, a fact which showed to good advantage when he smiled, for then his large face seemed enormous—a vast expanse of tanned skin, shimmering eyes and very white teeth.

  ‘I’m Tucker Thompson,’ he said, starting to step forward. But then he stopped, drew back, and pointed at Mott with a long forefinger. ‘Hey! I know you. I met you in Senator Grant’s office. You’re …’ He hesitated. ‘You’re Dr. Mott.’

  He brought with him a set of the family photographs already taken by his magazine, and when he spread them on the desk, Dr. Crandall added an obvious point: ‘Yes, I forgot to say. These young men were never afraid to marry the prettiest girl in town. No psychological hang-ups about the conflicting roles of husband and wife. Boom! They’re in bed.’ And with a pencil he identified the wives.

  ‘Four normal. Two problems. The Swede Jensen married the Swede Inger. All-American, all-Americans. The Tennessee boy they call Hickory married a daughter of a Tennessee hillbilly, and every man should be so lucky. Outdoor type, has her own horse, her own used car. But when she dresses up! Get back in line, you guys.’

  Mott studied Mrs. Lee’s photograph and marveled at how far she had progressed from the rather awkward girl he had known at Huntsville. ‘She was a friend of my wife’s. Look at those steely eyes. That one can do anything she puts her mind to.’

  ‘The civilian Bell,’ Dr. Crandall continued, ‘the lad so highly recommended by Senator Glancey, found himself a real doll, as you can see. Probably the best mother of the group.’

  ‘She photographs like a million,’ Tucker Thompson said. ‘With or without the three kids.’

  ‘Ed Cater, the Air Force man from Mississippi, married himself a woman who is most deceptive. Looks like Miss Confederacy but ran a mortgage firm before she married Ed. Bright as they come.’

  ‘I don’t see any problems there,’ Mott said, adjusting his glasses. ‘Except my own. Keeping my mind on the job.’

  ‘The problems hit us with these two,’ Thompson said, ‘and if I’d have been on the selecting committee, I don’t think I’d’ve allowed these two in. They damage our case.’

  He pointed to the photograph of Debby Dee Claggett: loose-fitting blouse, sandals, blond hair somewhat awry, smoking a cigarette. ‘Frankly, she looks blowzy. We had a board meeting to decide how we should play her. She’s not an outdoor type. She’s not a cover girl. And she has two real significant drawbacks. Two of her kids are by another man. He’s dead, of course. They were legally married. And I find she has the habit of calling anyone she doesn’t like, or likes a great deal, “that sonnombeech.” ’

  Distastefully he turned Debby Dee’s photograph face downward and in its place produced a real horror. ‘Our makeup people decided to see what they could do with Debby Dee. What do you think?’ In her improved version Debby Dee wore frills about her throat, dangling green earrings, a bouffant hair style, and a smile displaying more than twenty teeth, two of which had been filled with gold.

  Nobody spoke, and after a while Tucker Thompson confided: ‘When she saw the photo she said, “That sonnombeech looks like a Shanghai whore.” We have a problem with Debby Dee.’

  ‘What did your board decide?’ Mott asked.

  ‘We can play her two ways. Texas wholesome. We can claim her father owned a large ranch.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘Nobody knows where he is.’ He coughed. ‘Or what I proposed, we can stress the death of her first husband.’

  ‘But you said his being the father of two of the kids was a drawback,’ Crandall said.

  ‘In our business you often take a weakness and make an asset of it. Throw it right in the public’s face. We’ve been checking the record, and she seems to have behaved with extraordinary courage when her husband went down. We have some pictures. We can claim that Claggett was the closest family friend. Proposed immediately to care for the orphans, all that jazz. We convert a liability into an asset.’

  ‘Your best bet,’ Crandall said, ‘is to play her as a windblown original.’

  ‘Dangerous,’ Thompson warned. ‘Very dangerous. Because you never know how the American public is going to react to an original. Especi
ally a female original. Now you take two all-time winners, Gertrude Stein and Amy Lowell. God, you couldn’t get two zanier women than that, but we took them to our hearts. Now we sell automobiles with Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein. We might have the same phenomenon with Debby Dee, but we might not, too.’

  ‘Can we prohibit her from saying sonnombeech in public?’ Crandall asked.

  ‘I’m not sure that Debby Dee will take correction,’ Thompson said, and with this he turned to his last photograph, Mrs. John Pope, legal counsel to the Senate Space Committee. She appeared in office garb, a neat red skirt falling just below her knees, a white Peter Pan collar and a string of beautiful imitation pearls. Her hair was pulled back and fastened with a barrette, but it was her dark eyes which commanded attention.

  ‘We saw her, you know,’ Mott reminded the editor, ‘in Senator Grant’s office.’

  ‘I remember. In an office she’s great. But in our effort, she could turn out to be poison.’

  ‘Why?’ Mott asked. ‘She fills your bill completely, I’d say. Small town. Attends church. Childhood sweetheart.’

  ‘She’s a time bomb, gentlemen,’ Thompson said from long experience. ‘What has Life discovered with its astronauts? On the day the flight takes off you want a news photo of the wife waiting at home, or maybe praying in church. The kids. The white picket fence. The distressed neighbors on whom she leans. If one of the sons has a skateboard, so much the better, but a bicycle’s best of all. The daughter with a doll, not a teddybear. This tears at the heart, makes the space shot much more real than the pictures of the rocket blasting off.

  ‘Now what the hell do we photograph if Astronaut John Pope takes off on a dangerous mission? His wife in her Washington office biting a pencil? She ought to be miles from Washington in some small town in a white house with a picket fence. And dammit, she doesn’t have any children. Everything about this capable woman adds up wrong. And do you know what I fear? These damned professional women. During the flight, when we can’t keep the ordinary press away from her, she’ll say something. “Why aren’t there any Colored in the program?” “When will they take women up the way the Russians have just done?” God knows what she’ll say, but you can bet it’ll be counterproductive.’

  He tapped the handsome photograph with his pencil and predicted: That woman’s a nuclear bomb. Planted right at the heart of my program.’

  ‘The obvious story,’ Mott said, ‘is that this brave girl works in the very office, et cetera, et cetera.’

  ‘In my business,’ Thompson said, ‘you’re not to be too clever. Stick to the little house and the white fence. And do you know why? Two-thirds of our readers are women, and they instinctively despise bright young women like Penny Pope who hold jobs and keep their weight down.’

  ‘Except for Debby Dee,’ Mott pointed out, ‘your first four are rather thin.’

  ‘But they’re also pretty. Like models. Women expect models to be thin. And none of them is contaminated by having a job.’ With a broad sweep of his hand he indicated the entire gallery. ‘If a woman is pretty, thin is beautiful. If she has an administrative job, thin is avaricious and mean-spirited. You tell me what to do with this one.’ And he pointed accusingly at Penny Pope.

  All such questions became vital to Rachel Mott when NASA employed her to act as a kind of cicerone to the families of the six new astronauts. She got the exciting assignment because of the excellent record being compiled by her husband, but everyone who knew her realized that she was perfectly suited for such a task. She was a mature forty-three, always well groomed, a fine housekeeper with children of her own, and a Bostonian with a strong sense of obligation.

  When she and Stanley took up residence near the new space headquarters in Houston, she was distressed when Millard elected to remain in California with the young men of the surfboard coterie, but she was pleased to see how easily Christopher, now thirteen, adapted himself to life in Texas. What gratified her especially was the respect shown her husband by everyone at NASA, where he was recognized not only as the mentor of the new astronauts but also as one of the most brilliant of the permanent staff. It seemed that he moved from one important ad hoc committee to another, serving first as an engineer on some highly technical problem, then as a scientist on matters dealing with outer space.

  His principal energy, however, was directed toward inducting the six young men into the mysteries of NASA, and within a week of their reporting to Houston he had them scheduled into a round of learning situations which resembled advanced work in some fine engineering university, except that the men had two hours a day of theory and ten hours of laboratory. This schedule would continue for about six months, after which they would move into specialized applications.

  Such concentrated work left the wives free to follow their own obligations and interests, and this was where Rachel Mott’s responsibilities began.

  Tucker Thompson saw to it that the wives were photographed regularly at those occupations which would best represent the female half of the NASA effort. Since three of the women had strong church affiliations—with the most respectable denominations, not the Holy Roller type that flourished in the South—there was a fruitful opportunity for shots of a reassuring nature: Sunday School, picnics, suppers for old folk, standing outside the church with the other parishioners on Sunday morning. He was also very strong on family outings when the astronauts were in Houston and on Little League baseball games; he had a low opinion of basketball: ‘Mostly a Colored game these days. Baseball is what our readers have faith in.’

  Rachel saw the women at their more normal tasks, and although at first they had been suspicious of her, judging her to be a NASA spy, they came in time to respect her professionalism and her force of character. She was both sympathetic and persuasive and was never reluctant to express a strong opinion if she felt it needed. Her neatness, her command of English and her taste in clothes were impressive to these young women, who were equally attentive to their own appearances.

  She had a hard time with Debby Dee, who was only six years younger and not disposed to pay much attention to what anyone presumed to tell her, but Rachel did not brood upon this failure, for she found the Texas woman far too brash for her taste and the Claggett children even less disciplined than her own. The Claggetts were not a family she would have sought out, and she was somewhat gratified when her husband reported that he was not having much success with Major Claggett. ‘He finishes his work faster than others and he knows airplanes inside out, but he’s very difficult to communicate with. Fends everything off with a joke.’

  Like everyone else, Rachel found herself in love with the Swedes, Harry and Inger Jensen, for they were attractive, bright and extremely eager to please. ‘Perpetual Boy Scouts,’ someone described them, and Harry had indeed been an Eagle Scout. They were a pair easy to identify in that each had blond hair and a narrow triangular face. Their eyes were blue; they smiled incessantly; and they were in love.

  She worried about the civilian couple, for they seemed to lack the harsh fiber that characterized the military families, even though Stanley assured her that Tim Bell was one of the hottest pilots private industry had so far produced. ‘General Funkhauser of Allied Aviation does not recommend a man who can’t cut the mustard. Look for the wife’s good qualities, not her weakest ones.’ The trouble with the Bells, as Rachel saw it, was that the husband was inordinately good-looking, while the wife had that baby-doll prettiness which often spelled danger. Since she photographed magnificently, and since her husband looked more like a hotshot test pilot than any of the other men, their pictures were widely distributed, and in time Mrs. Mott came to agree that despite their possible weaknesses, the Bells were a considerable asset to the program.

  She found it easy to like the three pretty Southern wives, Cater, Jensen, Lee; they conducted themselves well, assisted whenever called upon, and seemed indistinguishable from the millions of resilient wives who had accompanied their husbands in ages past when the latter we
nt forth with Julius Caesar to the frontiers of empire, or with Robert Clive to the pacification of India, or with Douglas MacArthur to his occupation of Japan. They were professionals, and since she had made herself one at El Paso and Huntsville, she respected them.

  Gloria Cater, the one-time business woman from Mississippi, was a constant surprise, a combination of Southern ante-bellum beauty and a tough sense of self-protection. Inger Jensen was frail, talkative and great fun to be with. But the gem of the Dixie contingent, in Rachel Mott’s opinion, had to be tomboy Sandra Lee from the hills of central Tennessee.

  She had been extremely fond of this self-directed beauty and saw with approval that Sandy apparently assessed the NASA experience with neat accuracy. She could turn on whatever mood Tucker Thompson and his photographers wanted, then walk away untouched by the nonsense. Rachel enjoyed hearing her tell how Hickory had wound up an astronaut: ‘My boy tore Vanderbilt apart. Straight A’s. Earned a commission in the Army, then his wings, then a master’s in aeronautical engineering at MIT, straight A’s again.’ But Rachel noticed that one could approach the Lees only so far; then the mountain couple retreated; they did not permit anyone to know them intimately.

  Rachel felt her closest identification with Penny Pope, of Washington, for in this competent, self-directed woman she saw the kind of efficiency she tried to maintain in her own life, plus a high degree of personal charm which she herself had never been able to generate. Also, Mrs. Pope was obviously more gifted intellectually than the other five and therefore more rewarding to talk with on the few occasions when she left her duties with the Senate to visit with her husband. Rachel did not feel, like some other NASA personnel, that ‘this Pope dame is a cool customer,’ for she sensed the strong opinions and great warmth Penny was capable of, but she did know that the perfectly groomed young woman from the West was going to present problems quite different from those offered by the Southern belles. Rachel Mott liked Penny Pope, liked her enormously, but she also feared her.