They left Cape Canaveral at 0800, landed at Miami Airport at 0845 and took a Pan American non-stop to Manaus, Brazil, where they landed in late afternoon at a fine, clean city eight hundred miles up the Amazon. Officers of the Brazilian navy had launches waiting, and by 1700 that same day Pope and his colleagues were boating on the world’s greatest river.
The Americans could not believe what they were seeing, for in their flights back and forth across the United States they had grown accustomed to the Ohio, the Mississippi and the Missouri, no mean rivers, and the marvelous Colorado, a source of continuing enchantment, so they carried in their minds some concept of what a major river should be, but they were unprepared for a real river like the Amazon.
‘Look at the damned thing!’ Claggett cried, and as the launch pulled away from shore the men could barely see the other side. The Amazon was not big, it was stupendous, a vast moving lake.
‘Gentlemen,’ the Brazilian officer said, ‘on this bank you will notice the line of discoloration, twenty feet up, running along the entire stretch of river.’ He interrupted to tell the astronauts he had received his education at West Point. ‘Now what do you suppose that line represents?’ After some irrelevant guesses were made, he said, ‘That’s how high the Amazon rises every year in its early summer flood.’ The line was incomprehensible, twenty feet higher than where the launch rode the muddy waters.
‘You have cliffs here,’ Claggett pointed out. ‘On the other side, the flood must stretch forever.’
‘It does,’ the officer said, and the Americans looked across that fantastic expanse, trying vainly to imagine what such a flood must be like.
‘Technically,’ the Brazilian said, ‘we’re not really on the Amazon. This is the Negro, a jet-black network coming down out of Colombia and Venezuela. A few miles east of here, the Solomon, bright yellow like his mines. You won’t believe what happens.’
He sped the launch downriver, pointing out to the men the dark color of the stream, and after a while they became aware that off to the right a really tremendous river was about to join, its waters angry from their turbulent trip down from the distant mountains of Peru and Ecuador. By itself it would have formed the largest river in the world; when it joined with the Negro it would be incomparable. Then the Amazon proper would begin.
‘Watch!’ the Brazilian said, and it was apparent that no matter how many times he had taken visitors to see the impending miracle, he was still as thrilled by it as he had been the first time, for from the south came the mighty yellow Solomon, while from the north came the huge, surly black Negro. They met, but they did not blend. Side by side for nearly twenty miles the two majestic rivers shared the same channel, each as separated from the other as if a wall had been erected between them. Yellow and black, they moved toward the ocean side by side, and even when the launches cut through them, again and again, the two rivers maintained their individuality, each carrying an immense load of detritus which gave it color, each pursuing its own course.
And then, as night began to fall, the Americans saw two sights they would never forget. Up the newly formed Amazon came a twenty-thousand-ton ship from Bremerhaven, Germany, its dark flag flying in the jungle breeze, its nose pointed toward Manaus. It was eight hundred miles from the ocean, yet it was steaming full speed ahead, secure in its knowledge that this vast river was as safe as the open sea.
‘We’re in middle Kansas,’ Claggett cried, ‘and here comes an ocean liner.’
Then the dolphin began to leap, blue, silvery beasts frolicking as if they were in the deepest Pacific, leading the ship homeward to its evening haven. Right off the bow of the launches the dolphin rose, twisting in air to spy upon the astronauts, then diving to the unplumbed depths of the Amazon. Six of the dolphin accompanied the launches back to Manaus, and as they leaped in the dying sunlight Pope told the men in his boat, ‘Hey! They’re an omen! Altair’s always been my lucky star!’
‘I don’t get it,’ Cater said.
‘The constellation Dolphin. It protects Altair. You watch! We’ll handle the Amazon.’
The men spent the next day sightseeing in Manaus, to which the governor of the state came to pay his respects. Tucker Thompson’s photographers took many pictures of the ceremonies, after which the governor said, through an interpreter, ‘Gentlemen, we have what I think may be a surprise for you,’ and he led their motorcade to the center of the city, where a jewel of an opera house had been erected by the Amazon rubber barons in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Architecturally it was a gem, a Venetian dream in crystal and silver, and it contained many mementos of the great days when this little town had been a major metropolis.
‘Caruso sang here, and Édouard de Reszke, and Adelina Patti. We had magnificent seasons, with stars from all over Europe coming up our river in German ocean liners. I’m told that Sarah Bernhardt played L’Aiglon on that stage, and Helena Modjeska was here, too. We were the Athens of the jungle.’
It was agreed that the Solid Six would be taken by launch sixty miles up the Rio Solimões, as the Solomon was spelled in Portuguese, there to be led ten miles up a minor tributary, from which local guides would take them five miles into the jungle and leave them. They carried with them nothing but knives, cloth that could be used as a mosquito net, and three radios that would broadcast their position constantly but not receive messages from the outside. If a man broke a leg, he would be rescued automatically, after three days.
The guide into the jungle was mestizo—Indian-black-Portuguese-Spanish—and he said nothing as he led the men into an area from which it would be unlikely that they could extricate themselves. Without saying goodbye, he turned to retrace the confusing path he had taken, but just as he left the group he looked at Pope, winked, and with his head indicated a tree heavy with palm leaves of a sort John had not seen before: ‘Muy bueno, señor,’ he said in Spanish, and disappeared.
The seven men were now ominously alone, seven because they had with them a canny French-Canadian woodsman, master of many tricks, and it would be his job to instruct them in the wily arts of survival. His name was Georges, which the astronauts quickly transformed into Gorgeous Georges. He told them, ‘Anything that moves, grab it. Anything that looks good to eat, let me smell it.’ It was no longer a game; now seven hungry men without weapons had to forage and improvise for three days, and hope to come out alive.
By the close of that first day it was clear that the hero of this expedition was going to be Harry Jensen, the cotton picker from South Carolina, for this hard-grained little fellow had a score of ingenious ideas remembered from his boyhood days in the cypress swamps along the Little Pee Dee in his home state. He could divert a small stream and thus isolate a fish; he could set traps for any animals that might wander by; he devised a snare for birds and another for monkeys; and he said that if anyone spotted a python moving in, to call him.
He was witty, and persistent and lucky, and although he caught nothing that first day, so that the men went to bed hungry, on the second day one of his traps did snare an iguana, but since the others had not found a way to make fire, the astronauts had to eat it raw, which they did eagerly if not with pleasure.
Pope, remembering the signal thrown by the mestizo guide, asked the men what good the palm tree might serve, and Timothy Bell, who had lived on an Allied Aviation expense account and thus knew the better restaurants, said, ‘A very expensive item is hearts of palm salad,’ so Pope and Jensen attacked the tree without knowing where its heart was or what it was supposed to look like.
The palm tree defended its secret stoutly, and the two men were in a drenching sweat by the time their small knives had hacked it apart, but when Jensen passed down the succulent baby leaves the astronauts tore into them, and one of the men said, ‘With a Caesar dressing these could be delicious.’
‘They’re not too bad with raw iguana, either,’ Pope said.
The late afternoons and nights were made unbearable by insects, whose stings were intensified by t
he constant rain of sweat that poured from every crevice. Hickory Lee, an outdoorsman, kept tasting the sweat on the heel of his left thumb, and said ominously, ‘We’re losing our salt at a dangerous rate,’ and when the others made this most useful test they confirmed Lee’s suspicion that their perspiration was turning acid.
Ed Cater, the Air Force major from Kosciusko, Mississippi, told the men of a story he had read about fliers in World War II being lost in the jungles of Guadalcanal: ‘Two bad scenes, Jap snipers and any cut on the legs. You cut your shin in this climate, ninety-nine percent humidity, it never heals. Just rots away.’
‘How soon?’ Claggett asked.
‘Maybe six months.’
‘Good. We’ll live till Christmas.’ Claggett’s humor never riled his companions.
He was a loud Texan, but he was also the best pilot in the group and the one most likely to survive any ordeal. Now he said soberly, ‘Let’s suppose our radios go on the blink. All three. We’re in this jungle and we don’t know a damned thing more than we do right now. How in hell do we get out?’
The astronauts looked instinctively to Gorgeous Georges, who demurred: That’s your job.’
‘The important thing,’ Jensen said, ‘is to sit quietly for about an hour and figure everything you do know.’ And he led the group in an analysis of its situation.
They said they knew they were in Brazil, but he would not allow that. ‘If we crashed in a Gemini capsule, we wouldn’t know where in hell we were.’
‘We’d know we were in South America.’
‘Granted.’ Jensen made it a kind of game, twenty questions, with him the moderator. They did not know they were near the Amazon River, but the humidity and the thickness of the jungle made it likely they were close to some body of water. They knew that so far, at least, what water was available was potable, and they knew they could subsist on hearts of palm for some days; at least it stifled the belly pains.
Gradually they concluded that the imperative thing would be not to guess where the larger body of water was, nor in which direction safety lay, but the construction of a signal which could be seen from search planes. They could not clear the jungle to do this, but they could fasten large white flags made of their cloth to the tops of trees.
‘And how do we get up there?’ Bell asked, and Jensen replied, ‘Simple, you haul your ass up or you die.’
‘Can we be sure that search planes will be looking for us?’ Bell asked.
‘As sure as the sun will rise tomorrow,’ Jensen said. ‘That’s one thing we must never doubt. Their radar will tell them about where the capsule went down. America will never let us rot here. They’d launch a thousand planes if necessary. That we must never doubt.’
Cater said he’d read a story about a naval pilot downed in the waters off Guadalcanal in World War II, right under the nose of Japanese shore guns, and how planes of the Army Air Corps, as it was called then, fought an entire day to save that one flier. ‘And they did,’ he said.
‘But was it a true story?’ Bell asked.
‘I think it must have been,’ Cater said.
When the three days were over, and the radios vectored the rescue teams to where the hungry astronauts were waiting, their faces scarred from mosquito bites, Cater said, ‘Jensen, I don’t know whether you can fly an airplane or not, but if I’m in one that has to crash in a jungle, I want you as my copilot.’
It was a tense moment, for the four other astronauts shared Cater’s assessment of the young fellow, but Jensen reverted to a gag Army men had used when starting their flight training. Spreading his legs as if working the rudders in a trainer, he grabbed an imaginary stick with both hands and cried in horror, looking hard to his right, ‘Sir, sir! How do you pull this thing to make it go up?’
When the bone-tired astronauts reached their quarters in Manaus, Cater cried, ‘My God! It can’t be!’ But it was. Sitting on a bar stool in the lounge was petite Cynthia Rhee, her impudent eyes laughing at them, who had trailed her subjects down the length of Florida and across the Caribbean to the confluence of the Negro and the Solimões, where the Amazon began.
‘I had to see how you looked when you came out of the jungle,’ she said in her lovely accent. ‘You look awful.’ She touched Cater on the cheek. The bites, do they hurt?’ She stared straight into his eyes as she said this.
‘After you get a certain number …’
‘Who assumed control at the bad moments?’ she asked.
‘Guess,’ Cater said, falling onto a stool.
‘I think maybe Jensen from South Carolina.’
‘Now why would you say that?’ Cater asked.
‘Because he would know swampy land. South Carolina has many swamps.’
‘You still have all your marbles,’ Cater said, and Cynthia turned her attention to Claggett.
‘You promised at Cocoa Beach to tell me about your early days,’ she said.
‘Work comes first,’ Claggett said, reaching for a beer.
‘Perhaps the most important work you’ll do outside the flight,’ she said to all the men, ‘is talk to me. Because what you’re doing is very important, and you don’t want it immortalized in the bullshit this man peddles.’ And she pointed to Tucker Thompson hurrying in to protect his charges from this dangerous slant-eye, as he called her.
Despite Tucker’s efforts, she succeeded in leading Claggett to his room, where they engaged in love-making so wild and varied that Randy finally asked, ‘Does the Japanese government give you kids graduate courses?’
‘I’m Korean,’ she said as they lay exhausted after an especially vigorous engagement. ‘You don’t even know where Korea is, do you?’
Claggett smiled. ‘It’s part of China, somewheres. Japan invades it every twenty years.’
‘Why are you Americans—even you bright ones—why are you so ignorant of the rest of the world?’
‘The rest of the world is that flea-bitten jungle out there.’
This made her quite angry. ‘Do you know that Korea is divided in half. Communist and free?’ She jerked the bedclothes up to her chin and glared at her stupid American.
Very quietly Randy droned like a briefing officer: ‘You take off at Fukuoka on the island of Kyushu. It’s a short hop across the Korean Strait to Pusan. Then Taegu, Seoul, west to Inchon, then Kaesong and a hard flight northwest to Pyongyang, where the heavy antiaircraft waits. Then up to the Yalu River and down the east coast to Hungnam, where all hell breaks loose. Then down to K-22 on the Sea of Japan … where I fought the Russians and the Chinese for one hellishly cold winter and dreamed of a beautiful Korean Jo-san I had fallen in love with at Pusan.’
Cynthia Rhee said nothing. With the sheet tucked under her chin, she gazed at Claggett for some moments, then leaned over and kissed him. ‘I apologize. I should know by now not to ask questions before I finish my research.’
‘Can you reach me a beer?’
Deftly she knocked the cap off by wedging it against the bedstead and the wall, marring each. ‘I learned that during the weekends at Yale. But if you were in Korea, then you know how the Japanese despise us. I could take a machine gun to every damned Japanese in the world.’
‘But you went to college there.’
‘I was born there. And my parents were treated like cattle. I have this burning hunger to show the Japanese …’
‘Don’t fight your battles in my bed. Lie down.’
They made love through the night, talking intermittently about Korea, NASA, the jungle. Never before had Claggett met such a woman, one so delicately lovely yet so sternly driven. Usually she was far ahead of him in her shrewd analysis of the astronaut program, and her witty observations on the other men of the Solid Six were startling in their perceptions. ‘If I were Deke Slayton …’ she began.
‘You know Deke Slayton?’
‘It’s my job to know everybody. So if I were Slayton organizing a Gemini flight, I’d want you as commander, and guess who as pilot? In the right-hand seat?’
‘You don’t cotton to the straight arrows, do you?’
She knew the term. In fact, she knew all the terms and their accurate definitions; she had made herself into an astronaut and intuitively she knew how they functioned. ‘Pope would get the capsule down when you blanked out—and that’s what counts. Getting the damned capsule down. Pacific … Atlantic. Desert … jungle. Let’s get the damned thing down.’
As they left the room to join the others for the short flight back to Cape Canaveral—primitive Amazonian jungle to the Moon craft in one short day—Claggett asked, ‘Is it true what Slobber Lips Thompson told us? That you said you intended sleeping with all of us? As an act of research?’
‘Randy, do I ask you “Is it true that on your first test flight you became so excited that things came apart and you wet your drawers?” Shouldn’t people with a fondness for each other take certain things on faith?’
‘Well, did you say it?’
‘No. Did you wet your pants?’
‘Yes.’ And they kissed for a long time.
No one in America, not even the NASA high command, followed more assiduously the country’s adventures in space than Dr. Leopold Strabismus, president of Universal Space Associates and chancellor of the University of Space and Aviation, for he knew in his bones that massive changes were under way in American life and that space was only a fragment of the whole. He suspected that the present surge of interest would finally transform itself into something quite unexpected, and it was necessary for him to be ready for whatever did happen.
His original USA flourished, with more than sixty thousand apprehensive citizens pouring money into his account and receiving in return his constantly improved explanations of what the little men were up to. Ramirez, with an enlarged budget, was able to contract with a Los Angeles printer for a monthly letter done on good stock, with an occasional color diagram explaining how the spaceships from distant planets maneuvered among the Sun’s planets: one popular edition showed a cutaway of a spaceship itself. Strabismus drew the diagrams but used the newfangled appliqué alphabets printed on transparent cellophane for the lettering.
Space: A Novel Page 55