by Daniel Kraus
No one was more humiliated than Alan Shepard. Three months earlier, in a secret meeting attended by big brass, the Seven, and yours truly, Gilruth had revealed that Shepard would be the one to get the historic first flight. It had been a jolt; Shepard had assumed with the rest of us that Glenn’s endless jogging would jog him right into the capsule. That might have happened if not for a last-minute “peer vote,” in which each Astro was asked to name the other Astro most deserving of the honor. Glenn’s unpopular moralistic diatribes had sunk him.
I’d perched upon the edge of my seat, hot to watch Glenn lose his composure. As always, he had disappointed. He’d ground his teeth to powder, gulped it down, stuck out his hand, shaken with Shepard, left the room, and jogged and jogged and jogged.
Even I, frequent target of Shepard’s slander, felt a pinch of frustration. He would’ve scooped Gagarin by days if NASA hadn’t opted for a final test run with another chimponaut. (Or as those animal lovers at NASA put it, a “biological payload.”) Up went Ham, a laid-back little guy who pulled his levers correctly and gobbled his banana pellets as if space flight were a real yawner. The Astros, enraged then, were downright livid now, questioning aloud everything that had brought them to this seedy beach burg. They certainly felt like biological payloads.
Good fortune, however, came just five days after Gagarin’s flight, courtesy of the Bay of Pigs invasion. How could the botched CIA-sponsored overthrow of Fidel Castro’s Communist Cuba, during which Americans were killed and jailed, be construed as fortunate? Politics, Reader! In the aftermath, JFK, hitherto a space shrugger, needed to demonstrate American supremacy posthaste, and threw his weight behind those four-eyed goons at NASA.
Our brief, shining moment had come. Butterflies found a hole in my abdomen and wiggled inside—how else to explain the flutter of nerves I had on May 5 as I and the Seven (minus Shepard, already installed at the tip of the missile) were driven to the launch site. The Astros gasped, and to be honest, I had to suppress the same reaction. You couldn’t see the sand, so thick were the beaches with so-called “spaceniks” hoisting signs reading U.S.A. FOREVER and GO, AL, GO! while others, descendants of the brimstoners who used to picket Dr. Whistler’s Gallery of Suffering, kneeled in prayer, closed eyes to the sun.
The Astros were gods, mused I, being rocketed toward Gød.
What might happen when the twain should meet?
Mission Control pumped me with nostalgia. It smelled like Rig’s hotel room, the warm pepper of coffee and cigarettes, except cut through with antiseptic bleach. Entering the large central facility, I was glad for my shades, for I was walloped with flood lights, tintinnabulary shouts, disorienting axes of motion. I halted, clogging the passage of fellow attendants. Two tiers of spectator chairs looked out over banks of consoles from which controllers consumed telemetry data from both capsule and Shepard’s body. The room was fronted by a triptych display just smaller than a drive-in screen, showing a map of North America across which the flight plan was graphed.
Men behind me cleared throats but, as usual, did not dare touch. How far I’d come, mused I, practically a space-distance, born to a world without indoor plumbing, autos, or radios, and now beset by the unfathomable fruits of technology, blink-blinking, whirring, and meeping. But Mrs. Leather had blink-blinked, too; German machine guns had whirred; Clown, limping in pain, had meeped. Everything changed because change was the only known directive, and yet not a damn thing changed. Humans nosed into darkness, disregardful of what might bite that nose off, and we’d insist upon “improving” ourselves in this manner until every last one of us was dead—and my apparent job, assigned by Boss Man Gød, was to serve as witness.
The concept behind the impossibly complicated CapCom system was, in fact, quite simple. Once a capsule was in orbit, a series of sixteen tracking stations across the globe would pass to one another the relay baton of exchanging updates with the Astro. For Shepard’s chip-shot, only one CapCom was needed, and Gordo was at the mic, already chewing the fat with Shepard, who waited in his craft, Freedom 7.
“You see my knife in there?” drawled Gordo. “Best knife ever made. Ought to be stowed to your left. You’re saying it ain’t there? Is that right? Well, what kind of two-bit operation we got going—Aw, stop pulling my leg, Al!”
Gordo pounded the table in delight. Suits to either side jumped.
Everyone took seats, fussed, fidgeted, and hypothesized. Having no one with whom to converse, I imagined that Rig was seated next to me. I could picture his nervy, knocking knee, the vein in his temple pulsing beneath beads of sweat. Shepard’s flight was delayed, then delayed again, but if Shepard had to wait—and wait he did, eventually obtaining permission to piss inside his pressure suit—then so would Fake Rig. I caught myself smiling and snuffed it. My colleagues needed no new reason to believe me batty.
It was Shepard, at last, who kicked Mission Control in the groin. His voice crackled from overhead speakers.
“Why don’t you fellows solve your little problems and light this candle?”
Gordo clapped his palms and gave an Oklahoma whoop.
“All right, cowpokes,” boomed he, “you heard the man!”
In response, a shot fired across the room:
“T-minus thirty-five! Commence filling liquid oxygen!”
“Roger that. Liquid oxygen tank now taking fuel!”
“Begin final systems check!”
“Roger, roger. Final systems check is a go!”
The room caught fire (relax, Reader, it is a metaphor). Male choirs of voices sang that system after system was “go”; hundreds of console lights exploded; thousands of earthquakes rumbled underfoot as Suits barged about with teletype printouts; and millions of human pores leaked stinky worst-case scenarios. T-minus twenty minutes, ten, five, four, three, two, one, and the best that I, Zebulon Finch, could do for Alan Shepard, who despite blackballing me with his fellow Astros and instigating my rift with Rig, was nothing less than a national hero, was hold up a mental placard opposite the one I’d seen on the beach: CRASH, AL, CRASH!
Freedom 7 barreled toward launch, too close now to stop, switching to internal power, ejecting the connector tubes, firing its boosters. Fake Rig, discovered I, hadn’t left me, indeed had clutched my forearm. His tension affected me; wasn’t he in the same sunken boat as I? Shepard had jeered him, NASA had cashiered him, and yet his blood ran an unrinseable American Red. This was bigger than all of us. Bigger even, perhaps, than my love of ruinous glitches. Fake Rig clenched fake paper coffee cups in fake fists, muttering pleas that our first man in space would make it.
T-minus ten seconds: Hear the transmission of faith.
T-minus five seconds: Unbuckle the pressure suit of pride.
T-minus zero seconds: Float in the microgravity of magnanimity.
“C’mon, Al,” whispered I.
The words shook me more than the blastoff of the Redstone. There was pure white light at the rocket’s base, a tempest of silver smoke, a Sahara shimmer of heat, a slow-motion rise, chairs squeaking all around me as sitters became standers, a pale-yellow line of burned fuel, the farewell bid of “Gødspeed,” a toylike diminishing, another gaseous umbilical, applause and cheers and the rich cologne of celebratory cigars being brought out of drawers, the Gød-given right to smoke returned to us at last. Rig, the real one, would’ve loved it.
X.
IT BECAME GOOD TO BE an Astro. Three days after being lifted from waters off the Bahamas by the crew of the USS Lake Champlain, Shepard, salt water still dribbling from his ears, got a Distinguished Service Medal pinned upon his lapel by JFK while the rest of the Seven grinned like groomsmen. Kennedy then held an Oval Office meeting with the Astros while their wives got to live out the fantasy of kibitzing with First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Finally there was a tickertape parade, the kind I’d hoped for in vain after World War I, with Shepard as the nucleus of a New York City in mitotic delirium, every celebrant adding to the confetti whiteout by tossing anything they had at h
and: paychecks, love letters, university degrees, final wills and testaments. Nothing was more important than our Seven.
What impressed me, despite my jealousy, was how Shepard had believed. He’d believed in the Suits, he’d believed in Freedom 7, he’d believed in NASA, he’d believed in America. Even from the lonesome BOQ, where I had switched channels between TV reports of the Mississippi Freedom Riders and a dadaist exercise about a talking horse named Mr. Ed, I had known that true belief was one power source I’d never be able to tap. A familiar, unpleasant twitching coursed through my dead nerves—restlessness.
It was suitable that his name was Shepard—the whole country flocked before his risen staff. Two weeks later, JFK demanded to Congress that the space program be expanded with the wacky goal of putting men on the moon by decade’s end. In NASA parlance, it was All Systems Go. Gus Grissom, not John Glenn, would pilot the second suborbital flight, though Glenn was slated for the third. I thought the golden boy’s latest rebuff would invigorate me, but it was no use. Each night, while the Cape slept, I gathered my few belongings and contemplated slinking away into the night. If I could no longer confidently root against those who’d rooted against me, what was the point of sticking around?
On July 21, Liberty Bell 7 launched.
“Gødspeed,” they told Grissom.
But there were details, and the Devil got into them. Grissom’s splashdown was a fiasco, with the capsule’s explosive hatch—the one the Astros had insisted upon—firing off, forcing Grissom to slither out into the ocean, at which point choppers swept in to try to rescue the capsule, while Grissom nearly drowned. Had Liberty Bell 7 suffered a glitch? Or had Grissom panicked and blown the hatch? It was clear where the brass came down. There was no medal ceremony with the president, no tickertape parade.
Glenn’s two rolls of snake eyes, it turned out, were boxcars in disguise. NASA decided that Glenn’s flight would be the first one to go orbital, three full revolutions around Earth. The mighty Atlas rocket, however, still scared the bejeesus out of everyone, and so they employed a final chimponaut, one named Enos, to get his anthropoid butt up there and make sure it could be done.
On November 29, Mercury Atlas 5 launched.
“Gødspeed,” they told Enos.
The flight was riddled with malfunction. The capsule overheated, rolled out of position, and was emergency-aborted after two orbits, while the levers Enos used to respond to tests went glitchy and dispensed not banana pellets but rather electric shocks. Reentry was bumpy, the landing was off-course, and Enos waited for seventy-five minutes before being rescued, during which time he tore through his belly panel, ripped apart the sensors, and yanked out his catheter.
What might go wrong when the primate was John Glenn?
His would be a pallet of wreckage I’d rather not examine. Enough dithering. I gathered what few effects I had, stuffed them into a confiscated bathroom bag, turned for the door, and only then paused, seeing in my mind’s own 16mm projector Junior and Franny White’s faces melting off from nuclear-bomb radiation. I stopped the projector, let the filmstrip burn. Who was I kidding? I had no role in the staving off of Armageddon.
I would have been out the door for good if the TV, which I always had blaring, hadn’t caught my attention with chance congruity: Mr. Ed was volunteering to be the first horse in space, complete with a four-legged pressure suit. I watched to the closing credits, standing stupefied, at which point a night secretary appeared with word that I was to report to the Space Task Group boardroom ASAP. In all my time at Lovelace, Wright-Patterson, and Cape Canaveral, I’d never received a private summons, and my last flake of vanity compelled me to set down the bathroom bag and attend, if only as the arrivederci I was owed.
But I could not have predicted the esteemed cast of characters I’d see when the secretary opened the door: Project Mercury Director Robert Gilruth, Associate Director Charlie Donlan, Associate Director W. C. Williams, and Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel John Glenn.
Fists were already flying, and everyone was bruised.
“By the time Enos was over Zanzibar,” Donlan was saying, “his electrocardiogram readings were all over the map.”
“You know as well as I that those weren’t ventricular contractions at all,” snapped Glenn. “The docs put the CVP tube too close to his heart. It was his heartbeat, Charlie.”
“We’re not prepared to say that. It could be an issue with the ECS. You want to get caught up there with an oxygen leak?”
Glenn was famous for never losing his coxswain cool, but his temper now nudged red just like the Isolator’s needle. How appropriate that the topic was oxygen.
“You just get me up there. I’ll hold my breath if I have to. You delayed Al too long, and look what happened. You want another Gagarin? Finally we’re ready to orbit, and you send a chimp up first. Well, fine, that’s done, but I will not be quiet while you send this . . . sack of potatoes up there instead of me!”
Glenn fired an implicating finger in my direction.
These madmen, realized I, wished to chuck me into orbit.
I grappled for a chair, a wall, anything to keep me standing.
“Now, look here, John,” said Gilruth. “There’s a whole lot we don’t know. I don’t need to tell you that cosmic rays pass right through the capsule. Let’s say we send you up there and there’s a solar flare. You’d be at twenty times normal radiation. You really want to come back to Annie sick in some way we could’ve prevented?”
“Don’t do that, Bob. Don’t play my wife like a card.”
“You have to look at this from our point of view. It costs hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to operate this program. You know what a dead astronaut would do to that money? Forget the money—do you know what a dead astronaut would do to this country?”
“What’s our country going to say when this news gets out?”
“It won’t, John. I can promise you that. We launch in the middle of the night. No advance word to the press. After the fact we say it was an old, unmanned prototype we were practicing on. No one’s ever going to know the truth.”
“I’ll know, dammit!”
Glenn delivered a right hook to an easel upon which rested an oversized pad scrawled with calculations. The frame snapped in two, and the whole thing collapsed like one of the umpteen failed launches we’d watched. Everyone cringed, including me, but Glenn only laughed bitterly and rubbed a palm over his face.
“Maybe it’ll take a week, a year, ten years, twenty years. But people will find out. They’ll know. They’ll know I wasn’t the first.”
He was, and as of this writing still is, a man of perspicacity and prescience. Thirty-odd years later and it has happened: The truth is written and now belongs to my Dearest Reader.
Flushed skin does not wear well on our freckled brethren. Glenn extended an inhale long enough to chronicle his career of doing what superiors instructed, and then lifted his sharp chin so that, quite terrifyingly, he stared straight at me. He walked past Gilruth, Donlan, and Williams, jawbones bulging, and faced me as squarely as he might any other living man. He squinted those crystal-blue pilot eyes, trying to find in the blood bursts of my cheek from Mrs. White’s slap, in the soft flap of my sleeve hiding my stump, in my skin where Chernoff’s taxidermy had shriveled, some evidence that I was worth the second look. I could not hold his eyes. I knew he wouldn’t find that evidence, and I knew he’d hate both of us for it.
“I got hit by antiaircraft fire over Korea,” he said softly. “I’m coming in on a target with napalm when at eight-thousand feet there’s a bang and the whole plane rolls off-course. That’s how fast it happens. The pilot behind me gets on the radio and says I’m hit, he can’t see anything but smoke. I’m probably going down. I know that. But I’m over Communist territory. If I crash there, they get me and my plane—what’s left, anyway. So I decide to try to make it to water, so our Navy has a chance for salvage. I push upward, fifteen-thousand feet. It ought to tear the plane apart. I don’t h
ave trim control. That ought to do it, too. Three feet of my right wing disappear. That definitely ought to do it. But I keep pushing. Not because I’m any genius flyer. Because I’m trained, and somewhere, not in my head because there’s no time to think, but somewhere in my body, in my hands and my feet, the muscles just know what to do, and thanks to a crazy headwind I make it to our base in Pohang and make a dead-stick landing.”
Glenn’s forehead beseeched toward his buzzcut.
“I’m not trying to scare you. I’m not trying to be ugly. I’m just trying to understand if you’re ready to do what we, what any of us pilots, are ready to do. Every one of us has seen a friend get melted into his wreck. A friend—and now he’s just gristle and hair. And we’re ready for the same thing to happen to us. We don’t have to think about it. It’s embarrassing to even be talking about it. But we’re ready for the sacrifice. What I need to know is if you’re ready. Tell me you are, and I’ll believe it. I’ll shake your hand and say good luck. Just tell me you’re ready.”
No one could keep a room rapt like Glenn. Even NASA brass was thunderstruck. My usual tactic to shirk shame was to forage for hatred, but I couldn’t amass the energy. Glenn’s simple request was unassailable, even admirable. Perhaps he was like Church after all. He was trying as hard as he could to believe in what he’d always believed, that Gød had a plan for all of us, including Zebulon Finch.
Evidence of Glenn’s reaction was there if you were close enough to see it: a doggish exhale through his nostrils, the slight drop of his shoulders, cauls of resignation slid over his eyes. He nodded once to himself, ducked his head, and without further utterance exited the room. Before the door thudded shut, I heard the pause, then the resumption of late-shift secretary gossip.
Gilruth was apologizing and motioning me forward. I locomoted on legs that felt as phantom as my missing arm. Throats were cleared, binders cracked open, and pens unsheathed, while unconvincing overtures were made in regard to my contributions to that point and especially those soon to come. I would be able to perform test maneuvers beyond those of any chimp, and it was noble of me to volunteer for such selfless service, so Christian, so American.