Blue Gemini

by Mike Jenne

  “Because I discussed it with Gunter, and he’s just about certain that you’re not going to make the intercept insertion with Ourecky’s solution.”

  “Well, I trust Ourecky, so we’re flying his solution,” replied Carson. “Case closed, Major.”

  “Not quite,” answered Russo. “You are aware of the simulation rules, aren’t you, Carson? If you don’t make the rendezvous in the allotted time, we have to repeat this entire profile and we lose an entire week. Are you sure that’s what you want? That doesn’t seem too prudent to me.”

  Making sure that all was in readiness for the maneuver burn, Carson scanned his instrument panel as he pondered a reply. “Are you an idiot, Russo, or are you just trying to irritate me? I’ve been riding this Box for nearly a year now, so I don’t need a lecture on the mission rules, particularly from you.”

  “I don’t like your tone, Major. Order Ourecky to dump the computer and punch in the solution that we read up to him, and we won’t need to discuss this later. You copy me in there?”

  Carson felt something tapping him on the shoulder. Ourecky held up four fingers. Four minutes to the burn. “Yeah, I copied you, Russo, but we’re riding what we have.”

  “Do I need to remind you that I’m senior to you, Carson?”

  “Not in here you’re not. We’re done talking. Switching comms back to Loop One.”

  “What was that about?” asked Ourecky, stowing his slide rule.

  “Nothing. Russo just wanted to know who I was taking to the prom. Ready for the burn?”

  “Ready up.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  Although over an hour had elapsed since the burn, the moment of truth had arrived. If Ourecky’s solution was correct, then they would soon pick up the target in the optical reticle and the acquisition radar. If he was wrong, then there was little to be accomplished by remaining in the Box, since there was virtually no possibility they could execute the intercept in time.

  Carson stared through the optical reticle. They were well into the catch-up phase of the intercept, trailing their target in a slightly lower orbit. This phase was carefully orchestrated so that it would commence right after orbital sunset, so that their target should appear as a faint star against a background of other stars.

  The visual sighting would allow them to lock on to the target with the radar and then complete their ascent to the higher orbit in time to make intercept roughly at orbital sunrise. It was critical that the final phase—a series of braking maneuvers to adjust their speed to coincide with the target’s—take place in daylight conditions.

  “Radar yet?” asked Carson, blinking his eyes several times to moisten them.

  “Nothing yet,” replied Ourecky. He yawned deeply. “Man, Drew, I sure hope that I didn’t lead you astray. I wouldn’t know how to live with myself.”

  “Scott, I don’t take it that way. It was our decision to fly your solution, and we’ll live with the consequences no matter how they play out.”

  “Powering down the radar,” said Ourecky, throwing a pair of switches on the radar panel. “Hey, if you don’t mind, I’d like to close my eyes for a couple of minutes. I’ve been feeling kind of nauseous. Something I ate isn’t agreeing with me. One of those cheese sandwiches had kind of a funky aftertaste.”

  “Okay. I have the controls, buddy.” Carson adjusted the brightness of the illuminated reticle to its dimmest setting and continued to gaze at the current star field, remaining oriented so he could quickly detect any “star” that looked out of place. A few seconds passed before a pale dot, something like a sixth-magnitude star, floated in blackness near the center of the reticle.

  He pulled his head back, blinked his eyes, squinted, and then looked again. The faint object was still there, and it didn’t line up with any known stars, so it had to be it. “Scott?”

  Ourecky awoke with a start. “Yes?”

  “Power up the radar. I think I have a visual here.”

  It took a few moments for the radar to energize and for Ourecky to make adjustments, but then he observed, “Drew, I’m seeing some flicker on the acquisition light. Something’s out there, all right. Stand by, stand by, stand by . . . .”

  Watching the barely perceptible speck in his reticle, Carson held his breath.

  “Solid continuous light. Got it painted,” declared Ourecky, fine-tuning the radar controls. “Target acquisition. Range to target one hundred-seventy-two miles and closing.”

  Both men breathed a sigh of relief. There was still plenty of work yet to be done, but this part was behind them. And best of all, thought Carson, the mission clock showed that it was time for their long awaited fifteen-minute break.

  “Break time in two minutes,” announced Russo. “Are you kids ready to climb out of there?”

  “Yeah,” answered Carson. “Yeah, Russo, we’re both more than ready.”

  As he waited for the hatches to crack open, Carson heard Russo’s voice, in an absolutely deadpan monologue: “Let me introduce myself, Major Carson. I am an Ourecky 9000. The Ourecky 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No Ourecky 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.”

  Taken aback, Carson reached up and switched off the VOX loop. He turned to Ourecky and asked, “Do you have any idea what the hell Russo is yakking about?”

  “2001: A Space Odyssey. You know: HAL 9000. He must think that’s funny. I don’t.”

  “Hey, Carson, I think I’ve figured out the solution to our computer dilemma,” said Russo, laughing. “If MIT can’t deliver the Block Two in time for our first flight, maybe we can figure some way to stuff Ourecky’s head in a box and fly it in lieu of the computer.”

  Carson could see that Russo’s attempts at humor were exactly what Ourecky didn’t need at this point. The engineer’s face was pale from exhaustion, and now he was visibly upset. Yet again, by sheer brainpower and the tenacity to stick to his guns, he had salvaged a mission. Granted, it wasn’t as momentous as saving the machine in Alaska, but Ourecky’s actions spared them the ordeal of re-running the entire scenario next week.

  Instead of Russo lavishing Ourecky with the accolades he deserved, he ladled out ridicule and mocking scorn. Since he was so new to Blue Gemini, maybe his actions could be excused because he just didn’t understand the tremendous mental and physical stresses of flying the Box, but still there was no defense for Russo being such an insensitive jackass.

  “Drew,” said Ourecky meekly, in a quavering voice. “Help me, please. I’m going to be sick.”

  Since Ourecky was fully suited up—including helmet and gloves—for the initial proximity operations, Carson knew that this was no laughing matter. Moving as fast as he could, he got Ourecky’s helmet off. Jamming it down into the footwell, he was suddenly stricken with dread; no one had ever thought to put any airsick bags in the Box for this eventuality. If Ourecky puked on the suit, he would never be able to live it down and the suit techs would never forgive him. Then Carson remembered the coffee and grabbed the plastic bag out of Ourecky’s leg pocket.

  Cradling Ourecky’s head as he held the bag to his mouth, he said, “In here, buddy . . . I promise I’ll buy you another jar of Nescafe if you can just keep it all in this sack.” Thankfully, in one massive retch, Ourecky did just that. Carson did his best to seal up the bag before stowing it away in his food locker. Then he used the squirt nozzle to rinse out Ourecky’s mouth.

  “Thanks, Drew,” murmured Ourecky. “I owe you.”

  “You owe me nothing,” replied Carson, flipping the comms switches to their normal positions. Thankfully, everything was back to normal, or relatively so, before the technicians unlocked and swung open the hatches.

  Ourecky was as close to being physically spent as any man could possibly be; limp as a washrag, he allowed two technicians to extricate him from the cockpit and help him to his feet. Carson swung out of the cockpit and bounded to his fee
t without assistance, as if he had only spent thirty minutes in the Box instead of over thirty hours. Carson spotted Russo, still seated at the CAPCOM console, chatting with a controller. He waved casually at Carson and smiled.

  Seemingly not paying attention to Russo, Carson calmly handed his helmet and gloves to a waiting suit technician. With stiff legs, he gingerly negotiated the metal steps from the elevated platform to the hangar floor. But when his feet hit the floor, he immediately picked up his pace, making a fast beeline toward the first row of consoles. Glancing up from his SIMSUP console, a panicked expression on his face, Heydrich dropped his clipboard and grabbed a phone.

  Without breaking stride, Carson walked directly to the CAPCOM console and snatched Russo by his narrow black tie. He roughly jerked Russo out of his chair and swiftly escorted him to an isolated corner of the hangar, behind one of the mainframe consoles. Floundering, Russo didn’t even have the presence of mind to remove his communications headset; the earphones were abruptly yanked from his head as their cable was pulled tight.

  Still bearing Carson’s helmet and gloves, the suit technician trailed the pair. He had obviously seen the pilot in action and knew what was about to ensue. He pleaded, “The suit, Drew, the suit! Please don’t get any blood on your suit!”

  Carson slammed Russo against the wall. Still grasping the tie with his left hand, he clenched his right hand into a tight fist and reeled it back to his shoulder, poised to let fly into the Russo’s distraught face.

  “Let go of him!” exclaimed Heydrich. “Haven’t you been warned about fighting, Carson?”

  “This ain’t a fight, Gunter,” said Carson. “Because a fight has two sides. This is simply a beating. I’m going to do all the delivering and Ed here is going to do all the receiving.”

  “I said stop it, Major Carson,” said Heydrich. “Now. Let him go.”

  “Sorry, but no, Gunter. This guy’s due a pounding, and I’m going to issue it to him.”

  Carson did not relent. Russo’s face was turning red as an overripe tomato, and his eyes were starting to bulge out. His attention was obviously focused on the knuckles of Carson’s fist that was still aimed squarely at his nose.

  “Let go of him, Major Carson,” Heydrich repeated. “You need to cease and desist, or I’ll . . .”

  “Or you’ll what, Gunter?” snapped Carson defiantly. “Wait until Sheriff Wolcott rides back into town and tattle on me? Do you think I’m worried that Virgil might pull me off the flight roster? That might concern me, if I actually believed we had a chance of ever leaving the ground.”

  Hearing the commotion, Ourecky slowly walked up and stood next to Heydrich. “He’s not worth it, Drew,” he said quietly, in a hoarse voice. “Why don’t you let him go? We still have a few minutes left on break, then we go back in the Box for just two more hours, and then we’ll be done. Let’s not lose that, okay? Go drink your Coke and then let’s finish this.”

  Carson looked at Ourecky and then relinquished his grip on Russo’s tie. He sighed, turned away from Russo, and said, “Yeah, Scott. You’re right. He’s not worth it.”

  Pacific Departure Facility, Johnston Atoll

  9:38 a.m., Friday, December 12, 1968

  Offering intercom headsets to Tew and Wolcott, the officer yelled over the noise of the four turboprop engines, “Since it’s your first visit to the PDF, I’ve asked the pilot to do a fly-by at a thousand feet. We’re a few minutes away from the island right now.”

  The officer was Lieutenant Colonel Ted Cook, the site manager for the Pacific Departure Facility launch complex on Johnston Island. He had spent the past several months overseeing the various construction projects on the island. The hectic schedule, strenuous labor, and Spartan living conditions had left him deeply tanned and spare of frame; Cook could easily pass for a South Pacific castaway in any Hollywood pirate movie.

  Donning his intercom headset, Tew nodded. Following Cook, he and Wolcott pushed themselves out of the red webbing troop seats and went aft so they could look out the round window of the paratroop door on the left side of the C-130. There wasn’t much room to maneuver; the cargo plane was jammed with aluminum pallets stacked high with supplies.

  “Okay, here we are,” said Cook, pointing at a nautical chart with a mechanical pencil and then gesturing out the window. “Those first three spits of land are Hikins, Akau, and Sand Islands. Johnston Island is coming up on our right. We’re roughly seven hundred miles west/southwest of Hawaii. These are coral reef islands, with a total landmass of slightly more than a square mile between the four of them, or roughly 660 acres. Johnston Island itself is roughly 210 acres. The atoll was used as a seaplane and submarine base during World War II.

  “The island was retained as an emergency landing site after the war, and then there were several nuclear tests conducted here during the forties and fifties. Just so you’re aware, they had a bit of a foul-up on a test conducted in 1958, where they launched a couple of Redstone rockets off the island. Each test involved a four megaton warhead that they detonated in space right over the island, so the fallout ended up coming right back down on the island.”

  Cook continued: “They launched several Thor ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads starting in 1962. They had a few mishaps. The worst one involved a Thor that blew up on the pad in July 1962. It scattered radioactive debris everywhere.” He pointed out the window. “That’s the Project 437 Thor launch site right there, further up the island from our site. I suppose you know that it’s still operational.”

  As they passed to the north of Johnston Island, Tew could see that it was roughly rectangular, with its long axis oriented southwest to northeast. A 9000-foot runway ran down its center. He could see the ongoing construction at the PDF complex at the southwest end of the island. The site was dominated by the launch pad, a massive square slab of concrete measuring five feet tall above the surface and approximately a hundred yards on each side. Except for a partially buried concrete blockhouse that would serve as the control station for the launches, the pad was the only permanent visible fixture for the launch site. There was no stationary launch gantry jutting up from the launch pad, like a lonely derrick poking up from a Texas oilfield, nor anything else that could be spotted from a distance.

  Extending into the water from the pad on either side were two steel-framed piers, each perpendicular to the concrete structure. Presently, a World War II vintage Navy LST—Landing Ship, Tank—was docked at each pier, oriented so that their bows pointed at one another. Tew could see that a stevedore party was in the process of unloading a large cylindrical object through the bow gates of one of the landing craft. The metal tube contained a dummy launch vehicle, which simulated a completed Titan II/Gemini-I stack that would have been hermetically sealed in a weatherproof shipping container at San Diego. Once the container was opened, the bottom half—mated into a pivot fixture permanently bolted to the launch pad—would serve as a cradle/gantry to elevate the Titan II to its vertical launch position. The rocket-bearing cradle would be erected by cables connected to a powerful winch on the second LST, which also carried the Titan II’s hypergolic propellants and the pumps for fueling the rocket. The two highly modified LSTs, which also contained temporary berths and dining facilities for the launch crew, were the Navy’s contribution to the Blue Gemini effort.

  “That’s actually the second concrete pad we’ve built,” noted Cook, gesturing at the window. “If you’re not aware, we had to scrap the first pad because the concrete didn’t cure correctly.”

  “We’re aware, Ted,” observed Wolcott, slipping on aviator’s sunglasses. “But this pad’s up to spec, right?”

  “It is, Virgil,” answered Cook. He placed his hand on his heart in an effort to convey grave sincerity. “I would stake my career on it.”

  “I reckon you already have, hoss,” said Wolcott.

  Cook frowned and then continued. “We’ve completed the blockhouse. Most of the guts of it came out of Titan ICBM silos we’re decommissioning. Our lau
nch team is validating the equipment now, and I guess you can see we’re also in the middle of an unloading exercise.”

  “It looks like your drill is going smoothly,” commented Tew.

  “Very much so, General,” replied Cook. “The crew has it all down to a science. Our objective is to unload the stack, break it out of encapsulation, erect it, fuel it, do final preparations, and launch a payload entirely under the cover of darkness. Right now, the guys can safely accomplish all that in less than six hours. It’s amazing to watch them work.”

  “Sounds great,” said Tew. “Excellent work, Cook.”

  “Ditto for me, Ted,” added Wolcott. “Very impressive.”

  “Well, gents, that completes our aerial tour,” Cook announced. “The pilot informs me that he’s preparing to go on final for landing, so you gentlemen need to return to your seats.”

  27

  CHRISTMAS IN NEBRASKA

  Aerospace Support Project

  8:20 a.m., Monday, December 16, 1968

  Scanning a batch of last-minute expenditures, Tew glanced up to observe his staff trudge in for the morning staff meeting. To a man, they looked both weary and tense, like long-distance truckers aimlessly wandering through an all-night truck stop, simultaneously exhausted and yet wired on No-Doz pills and coffee. With Blue Gemini so close to culmination, their crushing workloads had escalated almost beyond the capacity of mere mortals.

  As for himself, last week’s excursion had nearly done him in. Besides visiting the Pacific Departure Facility, he and Wolcott had toured the Horizontal Assembly Facility at San Diego and scouted some prospective new pilots at Edwards Air Force Base.

  He had even spent a night at home with his wife, although in retrospect he wished that he had just stayed away. Instead of the relaxing evening that he longed for, he was subjected to a withering barrage of questions about his steadily declining health. Every line of inquiry circled back around to one question: Just how long did he expect to maintain this pace?