Sleeping Gods

by Matt Eaton

  * * *

  Borman stared out the window at the curvature of the Earth as it loomed large in the capsule window. “Oh, here we go. Hang on.”

  “We should have nought point oh five gees,” said Lovell. Point oh five gee, roll to EMS.”

  “Right. Okay, gang,” said Borman, priming them for re-entry.

  “They're building up,” Lovell told him.

  “Call out the gees,” Borman yelled.

  “We're one gee. Ohhh! Five gees. Six. Four. She's doing a great job,” Lovell replied.

  “Cabin temperature is still holding real good,” said Anders. “Quite a ride, huh?”

  “Damnedest thing I ever saw,” said Borman. “Gemini was never like that, was it Jim?”

  “No, it was a little faster than this one.”

  “I assure you I've never seen anything like it,” said Anders. But his face darkened as he stared back at the console. “Cabin temperature's starting to spike. Looks like the primary evaporator has crapped out. Secondary's not much better.”

  “We're back to two gees and falling,” said Lovell.

  They were skipping back out into space. Their descent had been too shallow. They weren’t slowing down.

  “The drogues,” Borman yelled, “get them out.”

  Lovell looked at him like he was mad, but he flicked the switch.

  “Nothing. They're not firing. Repeat. Not. Firing.”

  “We've got to abort. Abort. Abort. Eject.”

  “Frank, we can't eject. We’re still in space.”

  “Abort. ABORT,” Borman screamed. “Pull up. Pull up Elliot. Get your nose up. You're gonna hit the roof. For God’s sake man, pull up. Too late. Eject! Eject!”

  “Fire!” yelled Lovell. “We have a fire.”

  “Eject. Houston, can you hear me? Houston?”

  Borman sat bolt upright on his bunk. He was sweating. It took him the best part of a minute to work out where he was. For most of that time he was trying to work out who had rescued him from the capsule and how he came to be here. Finally it dawned on him he had been having a nightmare.

  They were back safe. All accounted for. No mistakes, no mishaps.

  No deaths.

  This time.

  The room was dark. He vaguely recalled a lamp on his bedside table, reached over and turned it on. He could feel the thrum of the Yorktown’s massive propellers vibrating through the ship’s hull. It was good to be back on Earth.

  Since he joined the space program in 1962, eight of his fellow astronauts had been killed. Ted Freeman was the first. Crashed his T-38 jet trainer in 1964 when a goose flew into the jet’s port side air intake and caused instant engine failure on final approach to Ellington Air Force Base in Houston.

  Elliot See and Charlie Bassett died together in their T-38 in February ’66. Pilot error was blamed for their crash. They’d been the primary crew on Gemini IX and they almost took the whole space program with them when they died. Elliot came out of cloud too low and too fast on approach to the McDonnell plant in Missouri. He continued his approach and decided way too late to abort the landing. They clipped the roof of McDonnell Building 101 where the Gemini IX and X were still under construction. A few more feet and he’d have taken out both spacecraft along with hundreds of the McDonnell experts who were building them. They found Charlie Bassett’s severed head jammed into the rafters.

  A year later, February 21, 1967, came the tragedy nobody in the space program, least of all Borman himself, would ever forget — the Apollo 1 fire. Three brave men died that day: Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. Their rocket never left the ground.

  Sometimes, late at night, Borman awoke with the sound of their screams ringing through his head.

  They weren’t the last to die. In June ’67, Ed Givens was killed in a car crash. He’d been support crew for Apollo 7. Then in October ‘67, mechanical failure in another T-38 took the life of Clifton Williams while he was flying to Alabama to visit his parents. He never got to see them and he never made it into orbit.

  Eight dead astronauts.

  Since the original Mercury seven, there had been five more intakes into the program. Knowing the dangers involved, NASA had chosen 66 men to train for space. They wanted bold men; risk takers. But with risk came mishap. Based on the odds so far, the chance of dying was better than one in 10. Even for test pilots those aren’t the sort of odds you’d choose to bet your life on.

  Yet that’s precisely what Borman had been doing for the past six years, and it was wearing thin. He’d done what he set out to achieve. But he knew before lift-off that Apollo 8 would be his last flight.

  If he had to pin it down, it was burying Ed, Gus and Roger that did it. Ed White’s loss had been particularly hard to take. He’d been a good friend and their wives were very close. When they first heard about the fire, he and Susan had driven straight over to Pat White’s house to be with her. That was nigh on two years ago, but it still seemed like yesterday. Borman had flown to Cape Kennedy the next morning to help with the investigation. That night, after seeing how those men had died, it was one of the few times in his life he’d gotten drunk.

  NASA sent him to Washington to defend the Apollo program, which by then was facing the very real risk of permanent shutdown. It’s one thing to die in a plane crash. It’s another thing entirely to be burnt alive inside your space capsule on the launch pad. They learnt their lessons from the fire. He convinced Congress NASA knew what it was doing, that America needed to win the space race. Such a catastrophe would never happen again, he assured them.

  But he wasn’t entirely certain he believed that. Isn’t that what any government agency said when it was being blamed for a disaster that might have been avoided? People always wanted to believe the lessons of history had been learnt, right up until the next time another peculiar set of circumstances contrived to prove them wrong.

  He’d been aware they were having problems with Apollo 1. It was the first launch in the program, so that was to be expected. They had also shown, time and again, they had the manpower and the ingenuity to get past any problem.

  But if he had been harbouring any doubt about retirement, this morning’s dream had told him all he needed to know about his state of mind. He was done. It was time to quit while he was ahead. Time to stop putting his wife through the pain and suffering. To thank God for His blessings and make the most of life with his feet firmly planted on the ground.

  Just a few months ago they’d been a split second away from losing Neil Armstrong in an LLTV, their Lunar Landing Test Vehicle. Neil was one of the best performers in the lunar trainer, he’d logged more hours than anyone else — a dangerous necessity for anybody harbouring the ambition of landing on the Moon. But on that day it got away from him. He was only about 100 feet off the deck, plenty high enough to kill you if you fall but low enough to make ejecting exceedingly dangerous. He made it just in time for his parachute to slow his descent. The LLTV crashed to Earth and exploded. Neil drifted to the ground nearby and walked away. Later, they worked out if he had waited another two-fifths of a second to eject he would have died. After that near miss they asked Armstrong if it might be safer to call a halt to LLTV training. He insisted it was a risk they had to take, that the LLTV was by far the best way to prepare for landing on the Moon.

  Borman couldn’t be at all sure he’d have given them the same answer. He’d logged almost no time at all in the LLTV and he knew one thing for certain — he didn’t want to start now. More astronauts were going to die, of that he was positive. Maybe not this year or the next. Hopefully not before they set foot on the Moon. But everything they had done in the Apollo program and everything they would do from this day forward was being done for the first time.

  He opened the door to his room slowly, but heard no movement from Lovell or Anders. They must be still asleep. He had no idea what time it was or how long he might have slept, but figured it must have been at least five or six hours. He hadn’t slept for that long in almost a we
ek. His rest periods in space had been stilted and broken, and never lasting more than two or three hours at most. He’d felt sick for much of the trip.

  But he felt good now. Alert. Remembering to pick up the report Menzel had given him, he made his way as quietly as possible out of the sleeping quarters to the conference table in the adjoining room. He plucked a banana from a fruit bowl, pulled out a chair at the end of the table furthest away from where Lovell and Anders were sleeping and began to read.

  The Condon committee’s report was a weighty document. Clearly some heavy duty work had gone into it. He had been aware of the University of Colorado UFO Project’s formation back in ’66 and knew there would be intense interest in its conclusions.

  There had been early whispers that the head of the operation, Dr Edward Condon, had made his mind up on the subject from the outset. However, any serious scientific analysis would have to be conducted with rigour or those involved would leave themselves open to accusations of fraud or prejudice. He knew enough about Condon to believe the man was too smart for that.

  He flicked through the index, noting headings that caught his interest. At the back of his mind was the section that referred specifically to the object he and Lovell had spotted while orbiting the Earth in Gemini VII. He didn’t find that reference immediately but noticed that the committee’s overall conclusions were front and centre in the early pages of the report.

  The Condon committee’s work had been set in train by the findings of an Ad Hoc Committee of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board in March 1966. That committee, which included the renowned scientist Dr Carl Sagan and was headed up by Dr Brian O’Brien, had declared the US Air Force program dealing with UFO sightings, called Project Blue Book, was well organised, but under resourced. The O’Brien advisory board recommended Blue Book be strengthened to allow for scientific investigation of selected sightings in more detail.

  Borman remembered this ruffled a few feathers at the time. The inside word was their finding hadn’t been well received by the higher echelons of the Air Force, which had been looking for a way to shut Blue Book down. The so-called UFO phenomenon had been a headache for the Air Force since the early 1950s. In 1953, a scientific body called the Robertson Panel, formed by the CIA to examine the subject’s troublesome public profile, concluded the best way to shut it down as a topic of debate was to declassify every UFO report in the Government’s possession.

  Needless to say, this never happened.

  In the years that followed, the public’s interest in strange visitors and foreign flying objects had grown dramatically. In the glare of such a bright public spotlight, the Air Force advisory board’s findings in 1966 were a sensation. The Condon committee was formed to tackle the beast head-on. They were tasked with examining whether deeper study of unidentified flying objects might in any way broaden scientific knowledge.

  Seeing in print their summary dismissal of that suggestion put a wry smile on Borman’s face. They had been clever in framing the question that way. It meant they didn’t have to tackle anything uncomfortable or sensitive. They only had to evaluate the evidence at hand in relation to whether it held any promise in expanding upon the bounds of current scientific knowledge.

  But the Condon’s committee’s findings on that point were, to say the least, troublesome. Firstly, they declared that a serious mistake was made in 1953 in not declassifying the entire UFO subject as recommended by the Robertson Panel. At the same time, they acknowledged that intelligence in this area deemed top secret was not under their purview and could play no role in their deliberations.

  So on what basis could they possibly conclude that the refusal to declassify was a mistake when they themselves had not seen that information? The only possible answer was that they had begun with an assumption that all so-called UFOs had a rational and Earthbound explanation. From the outset they had dismissed any possibility of extraterrestrial involvement. But how could that starting point be justified when they didn’t have all the facts?

  The Condon report declared that 21 years of scientific study of UFO cases had revealed nothing of value. Unspoken in this conclusion was the fact that anything even remotely interesting on the subject very quickly fell into military hands and was then unavailable for analysis by the broader scientific community. Ironically, in light of this, the Condon committee was probably justified in its conclusion that further scientific study on UFOs could not be justified.

  But Condon seemed to be using that conclusion as a way of inferring that the entire topic was devoid of interest. The report noted that since 1947 officers of the US Air Force had consistently dismissed any possibility that UFOs were a hazard or threat to national security. In saying this, the committee at least acknowledged its own limitation in assessing the validity of the Air Force’s official position.

  Borman, however, knew for a fact the Air Force’s official public position on UFOs was a crock of shit. Its concerns had for many years been deep and genuine. If Menzel was with Navy intelligence, he would surely know that too. It was similarly hard to believe the man was not smart enough to spot the flaws in the Condon committee’s argument. It was nothing more than a well-constructed smokescreen aimed at shutting down public interest in the subject.

  Menzel was right about one thing — the serious media and the scientific community would eat this up. Sober consideration of the UFO phenomenon had just been thrown out the window like a paper plane tied to a rock.

  “What are they doing up there, that’s what I wanna know,” said Lovell. He and Bill Anders had made themselves coffee and joined Borman at the conference table, looking much more calm and relaxed after a decent amount of sleep.

  “Clearly their presence is no great surprise to the folks in defence intelligence,” said Anders. “Who briefed you, Frank? Was it the same guy who spoke to us?”

  Borman was non-plussed. “He was ISR. Tall feller, jet black hair, thick-rimmed glasses. Said his name was Warren Frizell, but I figured that was probably a made-up name.”

  The Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency was generally tasked with gathering strategic information for combatant commanders. But like all arms of the security and intelligence community, the lines of jurisdiction were often blurred.

  “Frizell. Same guy I spoke to,” said Lovell.

  “Me too,” said Anders. “Did he tell you much, Frank?”

  “He didn’t say what to look out for, just that we might see something out there on the far side after LOS. He also told me not to talk about it with anyone, including you two. But heck, we all saw it, whatever it was.” He thought about it for a moment, half wondering whether to say any more. But he’d been through too much with these guys to hold back now. “I think they’re mostly concerned about us saying anything publicly, or to anyone else at NASA.”

  “You don’t think NASA knows about this?” asked Anders.

  Borman shook his head. “This sort of information is very closely held. It’s highly classified. You can’t keep control of those sorts of secrets if they’re being passed around inside an organisation as big as NASA.”

  “Someone’s going to ask us whether we thought it was the Russians,” said Lovell.

  “The Russians would be rubbing our noses in it if they had that kind of capability,” said Borman.

  “Whoever, whatever they are, it looked to me like they’re operating from some sort of base out there on the far side,” said Anders. “Maybe ISR already knows that much. But I bet they don’t know a whole lot more. They’ll want us to assure them there’s no security threat.”

  “If that bogey posed a genuine threat, I’m guessing we wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation,” said Borman.

  “What did Frizell want you to do with the spy camera?” asked Lovell.

  “He said I’d be contacted when we get back to Houston.”

  “It’s all a bit haphazard, isn’t it,” said Anders.

  “I guess the mission happened so quic
kly they didn’t have a lot of time to work out a better plan. We threw this flight plan together in a couple of months. That must’ve caught them by surprise,” said Borman.

  NASA’s decision to send Apollo 8 to the Moon had been made on the run. Their initial flight plan was to remain in orbit around the Earth to test docking and undocking with the lunar module. Except production of the LM was behind time. Then Apollo manager George Low had the bright idea to head to the Moon sooner – they couldn’t land, but they could be the first manned mission to go into orbit. That was back in August. A little more than three months later, Apollo 8 was heading to the Moon.

  “So where exactly does Donald Menzel fit into the picture?” asked Anders.

  “He’s a renowned UFO sceptic,” said Lovell. “He’s written a couple of books debunking the whole thing. But after our little encounter this morning, I can’t help wondering if there’s more to him than meets the public eye.”

  “You heard him — he’s involved in secret aviation project development,” said Anders. “He’s not your typical scientist, he’s got an agenda.”

  “It can’t be a coincidence he’s here now, waving around the Condon committee report,” Borman acknowledged. “He must know what the ISR knows.”

  “But he can’t possibly know for sure that we saw something,” said Anders. “We haven’t told anyone. You figuring on letting the cat out of the bag, Frank?”

  “Jim might have done that already with his little Santa Claus reference,” said Borman irritably.

  Lovell shrugged sheepishly. “That was just a bit of capcom banter.”

  “I don’t plan on saying anything if I don’t have to,” said Borman. “We’ve been ordered not to talk, remember? Maybe Menzel himself would prefer it that way. He’s already made it clear it’s in our interests to keep our mouths shut and he can’t have it both ways. No, I’m not telling him a damn thing.”

  Lovell had begun flicking through the Condon report, perhaps initially to escape Borman’s ire, but the conclusions quickly caught his attention. “This thing’s a whitewash. They had their minds made up from the get-go.”

  “That’s right,” said Borman. “It’s a crock. But Menzel is doing us a favour, giving us the heads up on it. I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t see anything to be gained by going against the flow. Particularly if either of you are still harbouring ideas about heading back up there on later missions.”

  “I’d go back in a heartbeat,” said Lovell.

  Anders nodded in resigned agreement.

  “If I know one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt, it’s that Deke Slayton will drop you both like hot pebbles if we go out there and start talking about strange lights chasing us on the far side of the Moon.”

  “Or telling people we believe in Santa Claus?” Lovell quipped.

  “Exactly who was that line intended for, by the way?” Borman asked him.

  “Me and a few of the boys got to talking before the launch. We worked out a code,” said Lovell.

  Borman bristled. “Tell me you didn’t mention your talk with Frizell?”

  “No, of course not. We were just shooting the breeze.”

  “And who precisely is ‘we’?”

  “Gordo and Buzz, Pete Conrad and Edgar Mitchell. We were talking about what we’d seen, what we believed. It was Gordo who asked the question. Eventually we decided that with it being Christmas, I could mention Santa as a way to let them know if we saw anything strange out there.”

  Borman wasn’t happy. “You do realise people are going to ask you about that? It’s on the mission log, and it’s a screwy thing for an astronaut to say from the Moon.”

  “Oh I don’t think so, Frank,” said Lovell. “It’s easy enough to laugh it off. Hell, at one stage I was considering saying we’d seen a large black monolith.”

  He was referencing Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which had been a hit among the astronauts. The monolith had been one of the movie’s more enduring moments of weirdness.

  “I figured Santa was more in keeping with the moment,” said Lovell.

  Seeing that his commander wasn’t at all convinced, Lovell reached over and patted him on the arm. “It’s OK, Frank. All I need to do is tell people it was my way of saying the TEI burn had gone as planned and we were on our way home. Nobody will ever know any different.”

  “When we get back,” said Borman, “you have to find a way to tell those guys to back off without spilling the beans. I mean it, Jim. Because if you don’t, the Air Force will wipe the floor with all of us.”

  “We’re national heroes,” said Lovell. “They can’t do that.”

  “Heroes can be shuffled off into retirement very quickly,” said Borman. “Look what happened to Scott Carpenter. He upset Chris Kraft with his poor focus on Aurora 7. He lands 250 miles off course, makes an offhand remark to a reporter about NASA losing sight of his ship on re-entry, which wasn’t true, and Kraft’s so angry he says he never wants him on another space mission. Sure enough, he never flew again. You get on the wrong side of the Flight Director and it’s all over, boy.”