Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘What do I rely on?’ Claggett asked.

  ‘The computer. I’ll be your computer, talking to you over the headphones.’

  And when Claggett was seated in his Jeep, with the headphones adjusted, he could hear Mott’s metallic voice feeding him instructions, and rendezvous became so easy it was magnificent, a subtle adventure in nine or ten different dimensions.

  At the close of three additional days of drilling his two astronauts, Computer-Mott said with some pride, ‘You men will complete a perfect rendezvous.’

  But Randy, who became an automobile when he was driving or a plane when flying, had a gut premonition which warned him that he still lacked some vital understanding, and he asked, ‘Doc, suppose that with all I know personally, the on-board computer goes out.’

  ‘You have a backup.’

  ‘And suppose it goes out. There I am, bare-ass in space. Can I, with my own intelligence, eyeball it carefully and achieve rendezvous?’

  ‘Not in a million years.’

  ‘Jesus! Those computers better work.’

  ‘No sweat, because the duplicate computers in Houston can send you the required data.’

  ‘And if it’s my bad day, and the radio goes out, too?’

  Mott studied this for some time, forming diagrams in space with his fingers. ‘Knowing you, Randy, you’d make one futile try, then another, then another. And when you realized that since they failed, all the rest would fail, you’d bellow “Aw shit!” and drift off into space … permanently … forever.’

  And it was only then that the two astronauts appreciated the delicate symbiosis of man-machine-computer that would enable them to make this flight and this rendezvous.

  At 0415 on Tuesday morning the two astronauts were awakened in the isolation quarters, where extra precautions had kept them from contamination by colds or measles, for if they came into contact with either, the sixteen-day flight might have to be aborted. Dressed in slacks and T-shirts they had a carefully evaluated breakfast calculated to produce a minimum of urine and fecal matter.

  When the time came for assistants to dress them, and they climbed into the ingenious underwear with its arrangements for handling urine and bowel movements, Claggett studied the condom-like affair that fitted over his penis and was reminded of the story about how Winston Churchill had rescued the honor of the Allies at the meeting with Stalin at Teheran:

  ‘Stalin wanted to throw a psychological scare into the Americans, so he said to Roosevelt in private, “Our greatest need to keep the morale of our fighting men high is rubbers. We just don’t have any.” And Roosevelt told him grandly, “We’ll send you five hundred thousand. What size?” Without blinking, Stalin said, “Sixteen inches long. Our standard size.”

  ‘Roosevelt confided that night to Churchill that Stalin was throwin’ darts, but good old Churchill never blinked an eye. “Make ’em up and send ’em. But stamp each one, in English and Russian, Texas medium.” ’

  Claggett told his dresser that for his urine-catcher, ‘my motorman’s friend’ he called it, he would take a Texas super, and the dresser said, ‘You do that, my bucko, and you’ll be lying in piss the whole flight.’

  At dawn the two astronauts, fully suited, climbed with help into a waiting white van, which moved quietly past lines of people who had come to see the launch and across the marshes where alligators spawned, to the rim island where the majestic Titan rocket waited on end, with the almost minute passenger capsule on top.

  The entire assembly reached 109 feet into the air, and seemed enormous as the first rays of the sun broke upon it, but when the waiting spectators, two hundred thousand of them, focused on only the capsule, they were aghast at how trivial it seemed, only nineteen feet long and ten feet across, outside measurements. Thus in flight, 82 percent of the total vehicle would break away and plunge into the sea.

  The two men and their helpers moved with utmost precision because of a peculiarity of this flight: since they desired to make rendezvous with two different Agenas parked long ago in two different orbits, trajectory specialists like Dr. Mott had had to calculate to the second the proper moment for blast-off at Canaveral so that the Gemini capsule would reach the precise altitude (116 miles straight up) at the precise speed (18,000 miles an hour) at the precise moment (85 minutes 16 seconds after takeoff). Also, the relative position of the second Agena had to be cranked into the data, and when this was done, it was found that Claggett and Pope had a window for proper takeoff of only nine seconds, which meant that all things had to come together properly for ignition within a nine-second interval, and if for any reason it was missed, the astronauts would have to wait another eleven days.

  As a matter of fact, at the final briefing Dr. Mott, sitting with his charts and his computer, had said, The optimum allows us a window of exactly two seconds, within the endurable nine. If we miss the two, we can still go, but we’ll have to waste a lot of fuel to correct.’

  If one remembered the endless delays of the early rocket flights, the sad disappointments of men sitting alone in their capsules atop some giant rocket for hours at a time, and the repeated postponements of the same rocket, so that no flight seemed ever to take off within hours of the time planned, the probability of getting this rocket off within a two-second window seemed remote.

  An elevator carried the men up the gantry, alongside the glistening body of the rocket and onto the walkway that provided entrance to the capsule, and now the endless hours of simulation paid off, because had the two men seen their prison for the next sixteen days cold turkey, and realized that they would have to lie side-by-side in that minute space for all those days, they might have panicked, and once a man allowed himself even to think of claustrophobia, he would be incapacitated. The space was so unbelievably cramped that when the astronauts were suited up in those bulky white Eskimo outfits, they lay literally touching, even pressing upon each other, in their narrow couches.

  Claggett, as commander, slipped into the porthole first, adjusted himself to the sloping bed conformed in a soft, sturdy material to his particular body, then gave the signal for Pope to ease himself into the right-hand seat, and when all the elbows and knees and hips were adjusted, the two men occupied a space shockingly smaller than a very narrow single bed, and much shorter, too, for heads and toes exactly touched the limits of the capsule’s interior. Men had been fitted into a specific contour for a specific mission to answer a specific question: Can two healthy men survive and work in such surroundings for sixteen days?

  The hatch was closed and bolted shut. The bodies were eased this way and that. The quiet voice of fellow astronaut Mike Collins as CapCom started the countdown, and the two-second window approached.

  ‘You have ignition,’ CapCom said steadily. ‘You have lift-off,’ and it was good that he told them, for the men in the capsule atop the mighty rocket could barely feel the moment of firing, so smooth were the engines with their 430,000 pounds of upward thrust, sustained for moment after moment.

  ‘Gentle as a baby’s kiss,’ Claggett reported, and then, with unbelievable persistence, the powerful engines kept thrusting upward, ever more powerfully, until at last the astronauts realized they were truly on their way to space.

  Now the first stage of the rocket shut down, and for tantalizing seconds—hours it seemed—the rocket continued its climb in silence, but then the powerful second stage blasted off with 110,000 pounds of thrust, and this force acting on the relatively frail Gemini produced a sudden impact of seven full G’s, so that Pope was jammed back into his contoured couch.

  ‘Sayonara!’ Claggett cried into his mike, and everyone in Mission Control realized that this was a phrase of farewell, elegantly appropriate, which Cindy Rhee had taught him.

  ‘Houston!’ Pope broke in. ‘We have pogo.’

  ‘We see it, Gemini,’ CapCom said. It was a tradition that when astronauts were cooped in their tiny quarters, hundreds of miles from anything and thousands of miles into an orbit, only one person on ground must
be allowed to communicate with them lest there be confusion in commands or a babel of voices, and that one person must be a fellow astronaut, preferably one who had already flown. Each flight tended to have four CapComs, coming on at intervals, and it was a second tradition that the CapCom maintain a steady volume, a steady emphasis, a kind of bland streetcar-conductor tone, so that no accidental excitement be transferred across the vast spaces.

  ‘How much pogo?’ CapCom asked quietly.

  ‘Vibration pronounced,’ Pope reported. There was nothing that could be done to alleviate the bone-shattering pogo-stick leaping of the vast machine; it was as if a monster accordion player were activating the Titan rocket and its Gemini capsule.

  And here was an anomaly of NASA. With the best brains in the world, it was as yet unable to prevent pogo or even to determine exactly what caused it. The violent, shaking contractions had appeared in the first Gemini flight and had continued through the tenth. Now it was assaulting this flight, and all the brilliance of NASA could not diminish it. The men could only hold tight and hope that it would go away, and after a while it did.

  ‘Stand by for engine shutdown,’ CapCom said. He was the final link in a tremendous chain of persons and machines around the world. At Mission Control in Houston hundreds of highly skilled men traced every item of the flight with their computers and charts. At radio stations in Australia, Spain, Madagascar and across America men listened to signals which assured them that this Gemini was sailing serenely, and on all the oceans ships kept silent watch.

  Also, in the headquarters of every one of the 319 private companies that had supplied parts for the flight, men waited on call to provide immediate analysis if one of their parts failed to function, and in some ways they were the most expert of all, because they had made the parts and were intimately familiar with them.

  Finally, at each of the many simulators in Houston or Canaveral or the other sites across America, men familiar with their operation waited in case it was necessary to visualize just what was going wrong in the capsule. At a signal, they would jump into the simulators and feed in data which would place them in a jeopardy imitating the one aloft.

  When Ferdinand Magellan explored the Earth’s oceans he and his men traveled alone in their frail ships, out of touch for years with their supporters in Spain, but when Claggett and Pope sought to explore the oceans of the upper sky they had immediate call upon about four hundred thousand assistants, and at times it was difficult to determine who was doing the exploring, Claggett and Pope or the men like Stanley Mott on the ground who fed them their information and their commands.

  When pogo stopped, as mysteriously as it had begun, shutdown followed and the time came for Claggett to detonate the explosives which would separate the Titan rocket from the capsule, and after checking with Houston, he did so at the exact second dictated by the computer that was masterminding this intricate flight. There was a shattering explosion, a ripping away and a violent change in acceleration, after which the little capsule floated serenely into an elliptical orbit, 116.7 × 164.6 miles above the surface of the Earth. Somewhere ahead lay the first target, Agena-A.

  Now began one of the most curious experiences of mankind in recent decades. Agena-A was locked into its own secure orbit, which it had been following blindly, coldly for more than a year, and it was the job of this particular Gemini to enter that orbit, to fall in line behind the target, and slowly overtake it, thrusting the nose of the Gemini into the Agena-A and making a lock, all at a speed of 18,000 miles an hour. It sounded difficult, but it was made immeasurably more so by the fact that an added dimension of complexity had to be taken into account.

  At 00:02:21:36 into the flight (days-hours-minutes-seconds) Claggett informed Houston: ‘I see the little stinker,’ and Mike Collins at CapCom said quietly, ‘We find you thirteen miles below and twenty-two miles ahead,’ and Pope responded, ‘Our computer says exactly the same.’

  Coolly, as if he had performed the feat a hundred times, which in a sense he had, Randy made a series of the most delicate adjustments, which brought his spacecraft gently upward, at 18,000 miles an hour, until it found the orbit Agena-A was following. Deftly he edged the massive Gemini forward until it was close to the speeding target.

  ‘Houston,’ Pope said triumphantly. ‘Would you believe it? At 02:22:07 into the flight we’ve made perfect rendezvous.’

  ‘Proceed to dock,’ CapCom said, and then a miracle of space occurred. The Gemini, traveling at an incomprehensible speed and weighing 8,400 pounds, edged inch by inch up to the Agena, weighing 1,700 pounds and also traveling at fantastic speed, and with the delicacy of a surgeon sewing together a torn heart, Claggett brought the two craft together and made a secure lock. The secret was simple: if both craft were flying at the same basic speed, docking was as easy as moving a car into a garage, for the relative speed could be kept to two or three miles an hour.

  They docked and undocked three times to prove the practicality of this maneuver, and then Claggett told Houston: ‘I want the right-hand seat to make the dock next time,’ and CapCom, a new man now but an astronaut, agreed: ‘Roger.’ And Pope, with his heartbeat showing a slight increase on the monitor at Houston, eased his Gemini into position, then edged it forward, and made a perfect rendezvous. The pathway to the Moon was open; men could take two or more vehicles into space and rendezvous them, if their computers could place them in the right orbit at the right time.

  For this very long flight the astronauts had agreed to keep their watches on Houston time, CST, and as this first long day ended after its flawless takeoff within the two-second window and the even more gratifying docking with Agena-A, the men went to sleep. Their craft was within two miles of Agena, but round and round the Earth they sped, these two massive vehicles, making a complete circuit of a twenty-four-hour Earth day of sunrise-sunset-sunrise every hour and twenty-six minutes.

  And as they lay there, sleeping fitfully, they became indeed twins. If one rolled over, the other did also, because neither wished to breathe in the other’s face. They had to plan every action so that it would not interfere with the man in the next couch, and even when one had to relieve himself, he did so with his face less than a foot from his companion’s. And this would continue for sixteen days.

  By the third day the Twins had adjusted rather well to their cramped quarters. Everything movable had been stowed, sometimes in the most ingenious way, and often the men gave thanks to that genius who invented Velcro, the miracle fabric with a million fingers that enabled them to attach pens and compasses and data books arbitrarily to any spot on the interior surface which had been covered with Velcro. The capsule looked like a room in the doll-house of a very careless child.

  They had almost no trouble with null gravity, except that they had to be extremely careful when they ate, lest crumbs float permanently about them. Liquids, if spilled, formed beautiful droplets, or if in large quantity, globules the size of a fist. But even in these first days they began to appreciate what Dr. Julius Feldman, their expert on health in space, had told them: ‘The most dangerous part of weightlessness, especially in a Gemini capsule, is the fact that you don’t exercise your legs. Let them remain motionless long enough and your muscles will atrophy so badly that they’ll be too weak to support you when you try to walk after splashdown.’ To prevent this, he had provided bungee cords, a device into which they could slip their feet and against which they could exert extreme pressures, thus providing the exercise the legs were not otherwise getting. Fortunately, such vigorous effort also diminished the likelihood of embolisms forming in the legs.

  For the astronauts flew flat on their backs, day after day, with not nearly enough headroom, considering the couches and gear, to permit walking about. But they were able to climb out of their heavy suits, with extreme difficulty, taking about forty minutes to do the job, so that they flew in loose garments in relative comfort. It was interesting for one man to watch another emerge from his suit and stow it painfully under his couch
. ‘Hello, Chrysalis,’ Claggett greeted Pope after one such exercise, and the latter broke into laughter as he said, ‘I was thinking about those poor soft-shell crabs in the Chesapeake. Penny and I gorged on them when I was at Annapolis. The poor things struggle like this to get out of their shells, and as soon as they succeed, some cook plops them into a hot pan and sautés them.’

  ‘How do you and Penny hack it, you in Houston, she in Washington?’

  ‘We’re a Navy family. Lots of good people live like us.’

  ‘She’s mighty good people. When she first stayed with us on Solomons Island, I found her a mite aloof.’

  ‘I find her that way myself, sometimes. She holds down a complex job, you know?’

  ‘She has class. She has mighty class. She’s gonna be somebody one of these days.’

  ‘She’s somebody now. Randy, have you heard anything about Inger Jensen?’

  ‘Two kids, Army pension. What else do you need to know?’

  ‘How long was Debby Dee a widow before you married her?’

  ‘Six months, eight months.’

  ‘I hope somebody like you comes along for Inger.’

  ‘I’d like to come along for that one. But I don’t think I was such a catch for Deb. In many ways I’m a complete horse’s ass.’