by Ian Sales
The sustainer engine cuts off as programmed, and Cobb is no longer pressed hard into her seat, it’s almost as if she’s falling forward. She relaxes her arms and her hands float up to hang before her. She starts to smile: zero-G. She made it, she’s in orbit, she’s above the sky. The capsule turns around and she sees the curve of the Earth below her, it’s so very blue and it glows and it’s streaked with clouds; and she can’t help saying, Oh the view is tremendous.
And there’s the booster, she can see it tumbling away, glinting as sunlight flashes from its white sides, a pencil of brightness against the blue, falling back to Earth, unable to escape as she has done.
You have a go, Hart tells her, for at least seven orbits.
Cobb closes her eyes, clasps her hands before her and bows her head as much as she is able in the helmet. She reflects on the glory of God’s creation and her current heavenly perspective upon it, she thinks of the part He has played in her life, she thinks of everything she went through, everything she did, to be here in orbit, the second American, the second woman, in space, and the first American to travel about the Earth 160 miles above its surface.
I’m coming back, she tells God silently. This is my first visit but it will not be my last.
She may have to fight Cochran for a second or third flight, or even more, but she will prevail. He will make sure of that.
DOWN
The trail ball, hanging thirty-five feet beneath the Trieste II’s keel, tells them they’ve reached bottom, so McIntyre orders some ballast dropped to give them neutral buoyancy. Taylor is busy trying to get a signal on the Straza Industries Model 7060 deep ocean transponder interrogator from any of the dots, but he’s having no luck. McIntyre kneels and peers out through the window—there’s not much to see, only the expected blurred and powdery sand of the bottom, tan shading to grey and then black thirty feet away at the limits of the search lights’ radiance. If there’s life down here, he can’t see it—and he tries to imagine what could survive with a pressure of four tons per square inch pressing on skin and eyeballs, compressing internal organs and cells...
Hey, wait a minute, he says.
He’s just seen something, a dark shape looming in the blackness on the edge of the light from the search lights. He can’t tell what it is—it’s not the wall of the trench, they’re more than half a mile from that; and another three hundred yards from the drop-off to the Puerto Rico Trench’s true floor.
You got anything on the sonar? he asks Taylor.
It’s unlikely: the minimum range on the sonar is thirty yards, so anything close enough for him to see is not going to be on its screen.
Got what? says Taylor. Hey, that’s strange. Multiple contacts. They just kind of appeared.
But McIntyre is still trying to figure out what it is he’s looking at. He lifts a hand and signals for Stryker to use the bow thruster to swing the bathyscaphe to port, and the sea bottom beneath the pressure-sphere rolls smoothly away to one side, the undulations seeming to propagate like waves across stationary sand.
Give her one third ahead on the centreline motor, he says.
The bottom current is about a quarter knot, but it’s pulling the bathyscaphe to starboard, so Stryker compensates.
Something vertical and sheer and flat looms out of the darkness.
Full stop, McIntyre orders, hold us steady.
It’s the hull of a ship, a tall slab of darkness covered in lumpy streaks of red and brown, rendered in washed-out greyish pastels by the Trieste II’s search lights. McIntyre can see a line of portholes, black circular maws in the steel.
Take us up about sixty feet, he says, and reel in the trail ball to fifteen feet.
What you got? Stryker asks.
It’s a ship, replies McIntyre. Looks like some kind of freighter.
They are above the gunwale now, and light from Trieste II spreads across an area of deck, revealing the dark shafts of cargo hold hatches, ventilators covered in knobbly lines of rust laid one upon the other like wax on a candle, and bollards mysteriously clean and untouched. He briefly wonders what it would be like to swim through the shattered corpse of this ship, to eel in and out of the gaping hatches, explore her passages and compartments by flashlight—but that’s nearly 600 atmospheres out there. The muted reds and oranges and browns and greens of whatever it is that covers the steel, the depth and richness of it, the wax-like runnels hanging from the rails and yardarms, he’s guessing this ship has been down here for more than a couple of decades. He’s not surprised it’s not on the charts—who would look for wrecks this deep?
I’m getting more, Taylor says.
More what? asks McIntyre.
More sonar contacts. Looks like there’s a whole damn fleet down here.
McIntyre doesn’t understand. The bottom should be clear here, the USNS De Steiguer never mentioned any wrecks, nor did the photographs she took with her search fish show any.
What the hell is going on? he demands. We’re still on the plot, right?
He checks the NAVNET computer himself and yes, they’re still within the search triangle they plotted back up on the surface, and though Taylor has yet to find dot zero using the Straza, they can’t be all that far from it.
McIntyre can see the freighter’s superstructure, what’s left of it, most of it has collapsed into itself leaving only a tall triangle of steel at one corner, jagged and thick with those streaks of rusty brown, its edges fading into blurred darkness. The rail passes below the pressure-sphere and now there’s darkness beneath—
No, McIntyre can see something else spearing up out of the blackness at the limit of the bathyscaphe’s search lights. It’s no ship but it looks man-made. He stares at it, trying to make sense of the shape, of the play of darkness and shadow. It’s some kind of fin, a thin vertical triangle... and beyond it another triangle and beneath both what looks like a narrow cylinder...
He orders Stryker to release some of the gasoline, and they sink until the echo sounder tells them they’re 50 feet above the bottom. McIntyre can see what it is much better now, it glows in the bathyscaphe’s search lights. The cylinder depends from the rear of a boat-shaped hull, and he’s still puzzled until he realises the two flat stubs on the top of the hull are all that remain of wings. The shape swims into focus, the cockpit, the nose and its ball turret—
An airplane, he says. It’s a goddamn airplane. What the hell is an airplane doing down here?
What sort of airplane? asks Stryker.
A flying boat, McIntyre replies, a Martin PBM, I think.
He sits back from the window and rubs one palm up and down his cheek. Damn it, he says, it’s like a goddamn junkyard out there, we’ll never find the bucket in this. And I’m not risking finding our way through it on the bottom. Phil, drop some more shot, let’s go up to about 100 feet, then we’ll be clear of the wrecks and maybe we can see where we’re going.
But he’s still worried they have yet to get a signal from the zero dot and he hopes it doesn’t mean the battery on it has gone dead. Because their mission has just become a thousand times more difficult, now they’ve discovered the bucket landed in some abyssal graveyard of ships and planes...
And that prompts a thought—Bermuda is due north of here and Miami north-west and San Juan due south, and that puts this stretch of the Puerto Rico Trench firmly within the triangle formed by those three places...
UP
Cobb reaches up and unlatches the hatch, struggling in the inflated spacesuit to work the mechanism. She unfastens her seat harness and pushes herself up. Gently, she floats from the spacecraft, through the open hatch and...
Her previous flight could not compare. Then she saw the Earth through a tiny window, but this... She hangs in space, the inflated bladder of the spacesuit forcing her arms out from her sides, and she’s uncomfortably warm but she ignores it. Below her curves a cerulean plain—she can see from horizon to horizon, she can see the Earth is a globe, a jewelled globe hanging in Creation. She feels a sens
e of ineffable serenity steal over her, the same peace she feels deep in her heart when she kneels before the altar in her Oklahoma City apartment. The presence of God is palpable, His handiwork is plain in all she can see, and the joy of it threatens to bring tears to her eyes.
She reaches out but it proves too tiring to keep her arms up before her. She wants to hold the Earth in her arms—she knows it is safe in God’s hands, but she wants the world to share her awe, her love of God, the purity of purpose she now feels. She floats there beside the Gemini capsule, basking in the light of Creation, a world unto herself, and she feels the nearest to God she has ever felt. It is all the more heartfelt because she is lucky to be here—
Her Mercury flight was a success and she was celebrated for it. Like Cagle before her, there was no ticker-tape parade but she got to meet President Kennedy. And Jackie too, of course. For a while, Cochran—magnanimous in the reflection of Cobb’s glory and what it said about her management of the astronaut corps—was even complimentary: I knew you were the right one for this flight, she told Cobb.
But there were another eleven astronauts to fly before Cobb got a second flight, and even then Jean Hixson and Gene Nora Stumbough found themselves with no Mercury spacecraft available. Which gave them priority on flights in the Gemini programme, the new two-person spacecraft. Cagle, of course, commanded the first flight, with Stumbough beside her, but Cobb is commander of this second one, Gemini 4, and Hixson is sitting in the left-hand seat...
Cochran has looked after her charges well, even Cobb has to admit as much. When Cobb asked Max Faget to add a window to the Mercury capsule, Faget said it was impossible, the weight penalty was too much. But Cochran made calls and marshalled her contacts, and pretty soon Faget changed the design. What Cochran wanted, Cochran got; and what Cochran’s “space girls” wanted, Cochran got. The men are away fighting and the women go up into space, and thanks to Jackie Cochran the Mercury 13 are treated like real pioneers, like astronauts.
Someone is talking to her. Cobb blinks and tries to focus.
It is Hixson: Jerrie, they want you to come back in now.
Back in?
Back in.
A minute longer, Cobb replies, please.
Mission Control say you have to come in now, Jerrie.
Hixson’s worry is audible—it is enough to remind Cobb of her mission, of what she was sent up here to do. She doesn’t want to leave, she wants to stay out here. The pure freedom of it is intoxicating, she is mistress of her own destiny, beholden to none, it is a tiny echo of this freedom Rosie the Riveter must feel. It is surely what God intended for her, to experience this, to see the entire Earth in its glory rolling sedately beneath her.
You still have two and a half more days to go, says Hixson.
I know, Cobb replies, I’m coming.
She takes hold of her umbilical with both hands, and uses it to turn herself about until she faces the capsule. Pulling herself hand over hand along the golden rope, her hands aching from the stiff gloves, her forearms burning with strain. This is so much harder than flying a four-engined bomber, that B-17 she flew to Paris when she was twenty-two. She nears the open hatch of the spacecraft.
Okay, ready on top, says Hixson.
Now I can enter, says Cobb. This is the saddest moment of my life.
It is a struggle to get herself back into her seat. The inflated spacesuit restricts her flexibility and though she hangs onto the rim of the hatch, she can’t swing her hips to get her legs inside. She lets go with one hand and tries again, her legs stiff and immobile and in they go but now her grip is beginning to slip... She’s standing on the seat, she slides her feet below the instrument panel, her rear is on the seat now and she reaches down to fasten her harness. She’s breathing heavily from the exertion by the time she’s buckled into her seat and the hatch above is shut and locked. She’s still feeling stunned from the experience of floating alongside the spacecraft, the freedom of it, the oneness, the revelatory sense of it all.
The spacecraft is coming up on Carnarvon now and they can once again talk to the ground. Though Cobb is commander, she has yet to recover fully from her EVA so Hixson reports in:
We are back inside the spacecraft. We are repressurised to five psi.
Roger, understand, says capcom. How are you feeling?
Everybody’s fine, says Hixson, feeling great.
Capcom requests battery readouts, and Hixson obliges. The numbers flowing back and forth between the spacecraft and the ground remind Cobb of her situation, act to centre her in this ejection seat in this capsule the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, causes the wonder she felt out there to recede so it no longer overwhelms her. She hears capcom say:
We’re going to give you a go for 6-4. I’ll update a 4-4 load for you with manoeuvre and 6-4 without manoeuvre time.
Cobb speaks before Hixson can answer: We are ready right now.
Okay, says capcom, transmitting a TR.
Got it, says Cobb.
Okay, we are ready to copy your times.
Ready to go.
Capcom says, 4-4: 153. 3 + 18. 21 08 57. 3 + 00. 8 + 43.
Hixson reads back capcom’s figures, and the business of powering-down the spacecraft’s manoeuvring system to conserve fuel for their remaining time in orbit provides a routine Cobb can use to focus on the here and now. She looks up from the instrument panel and sees the Jacqueline Cochran Cosmetics Company Perk-Up Stick back-up commander Wally Funk has taped there as a joke; and she peers through the window in the hatch before her and now they’re in darkness she can see the continents of the black Earth below patterned and limned in lines of light. It is even more jewel-like than the Earth in daylight, but the hand of Man is written across it in that tracery of artificial light and she feels perversely disappointed that God’s creation should be spoiled so...
And yet she would not be right here right now, 170 miles above it all, if it were not for Man’s ingenuity.
DOWN
This is weird; this, he can’t think of an explanation for it. The USNS De Steiguer’s search fish took photographs of an abyssal desert, a sea-bottom clear of rock formations and life, just an endless expanse of grey-tan soft and floury sand. And now the Trieste II floats above a graveyard of ships and planes, different ships, different planes, passing in and out of the globe of light the bathyscaphe has brought down with her from the surface. Though McIntyre can only see out to thirty feet in the light from the search lights, the darkness beyond seems to possess a texture hinting at yet more wrecks. He speculates maybe some current swept the ships and planes here into the trench, but he’s more angry than curious— No, maybe “angry” is too strong; he’s thinking how are they going to find the bucket given the zero dot isn’t responding to the Straza and there’s all this metal littering the ocean floor.
If the plot on the NAVNET computer is to be believed, they can’t be too far from the bucket. They’ve been down here over two hours now, the chill has seeped through the steel of the pressure-sphere, he’s shivering and they’ve covered no more than two nautical miles. No one expected them to descend right on top of the bucket, but maybe a few hundred feet away wasn’t too much to hope for—
I have one of the dots, says Taylor. Number three.
McIntyre consults his plot. They’re about 2,000 feet away, but if they follow a line between dot #3 and where they think the zero dot is... well, maybe they’ll find the bucket. Now they have some data, some idea of their relative position, it’s going to be a hell of a lot easier. McIntyre remembers the photograph from the search fish and he hopes the bucket is far enough from any wrecks to give a clear sonar contact.
They drive toward dot #3, passing over more wrecked ships, more cracked fuselages of planes, and McIntyre peers out through the window at these shadowed shapes in the depths and he feels a chill more profound than that brought on by the cold abyss through which the bathyscaphe propels herself. Pensate profunde, he thinks; but now he doesn’t want to think too deeply about anything
except the mission objectives, about finding the goddamned bucket and heading up to the sunlight and air and the beating rays of the sun.
The sterns of ships drift by, fading into and out of the light, their names clearly legible on scarred and discoloured transoms: Cyclops and Cotopaxi and Sandra and Marine Sulphur Queen... And spread all about, the warped and broken bodies of aircraft: a C-54 Skymaster... a Constellation or maybe a Super Constellation, its livery unrecognisable... a C-119 Flying Boxcar... and even a jet, a Boeing 707— no, he can see a USAF roundel, a KC-135 then...
When the Straza tells them they’re within six feet of dot #3, Stryker puts the Trieste II on a course due north, compensating for the bottom current, and they drive forward at one knot. The echo sounder tells them every time they pass over a wreck, but they’re staying well above them and they’ve shortened the trail ball cable so it won’t snag, McIntyre is keeping watch through the window for masts or funnels or anything they might hit or catch. The sonar at least is working beautifully, with each ship and plane showing up clearly on the screen, and now the contacts are starting to thin out a little, not just hundreds of feet apart but hundreds of yards. And as they sail over one more freighter, with a complex and tangled arrangement of derricks half-collapsed across her main deck and streaked with wax-like runnels of brown and red, McIntyre thinks maybe one day someone should come down here and explore this place thoroughly.
As the wreck slips beneath the pressure-sphere, McIntyre orders Stryker to reduce speed, and he can now see clear uninterrupted sea-bottom out to the thirty-foot limit of the search lights. As he watches, the sphere of light to port appears chopped off, as if a chord has been cut from it and it’s a second or two before he realises what he’s seeing is the edge of the shelf.
The bucket should be somewhere around here, he thinks; it’s not going to be easy to find without the deep ocean transponder working, but at least the bottom is clear and if they take their time they should be able to cover the search area. So they inch forward at half a knot, Taylor bent over the sonar, and McIntyre staring out through the window at the abyssal waters, both in their own way passing their searching gaze over the undulations of the ocean floor.