by Tom Wolfe
“How you doing?”
And she says: “So-so, how you doing?”
“I ain’t doing any more,” he says. “It’s dragging in the mud and it won’t come up”—and since this doesn’t get a rise out of her, he says it again: “It’s dragging in the mud and it won’t come up,” and she just clamps a burglar-proof look of aloofness across her face—and all this was bound to make you smile, because here you were, listening to the merry midnight small talk of the hardiest hardtack crackers of the most Low Rent stretch of the Cape, and just twelve hours ago you were leaning across a table in the White House, straining to catch the tiny shiny pearls of tinytalk from the most famous small talker in the world—and somehow you belonged and thrived in both worlds. Oh, yes, it was the perfect balance of the legendary Edwards, the fabled Muroc, in the original Chuck Yeager and Pancho Barnes days … now brought forward into the billion-volt limitless-budget future.
The truth was that the fellows had now become the personal symbols not only of America’s Cold War struggle with the Soviets but also of Kennedy’s own political comeback. They had become the pioneers of the New Frontier, recycled version. They were the intrepid scouts in Jack Kennedy’s race to beat the mighty Integral to the moon. There was no way they could be regarded as ordinary test pilots, much less test subjects, ever again.
For Gus Grissom that was a very fortunate thing.
Gus was assigned to the second Mercury-Redstone flight, scheduled for July. He would be in a newer capsule, one in which certain changes had been made—all of them in response to the astronauts’ insistence that the astronaut function more like a pilot. It had been too late to renovate the capsule Shepard used, but Grissom’s had a window, not just portholes, and a new set of hand controllers designed to let the astronaut control the capsule’s attitude in a manner that was more like an aircraft pilot’s, and a hatch with a set of explosive bolts that the astronaut could blow in order to get out of the capsule after the splashdown. Nevertheless, the flight would be a repetition of Shepard’s, a suborbital lob three hundred miles out into the Atlantic. Gus himself encouraged certain changes in the flight plan. Since he would be taking the next flight, he had sat in on Shepard’s debriefing sessions on Grand Bahama Island. Nobody, not even within NASA, was about to criticize Al openly for anything he did, but there was implied criticism of what he did toward the end of the flight when the g-forces built up faster than he expected them to and he was desperately staring out of his two portholes trying to find some stars. Some character from the Flight Systems Division kept asking him if he hadn’t left a manual control button on after he shifted over to automatic control. This would have wasted hydrogen peroxide, the fuel that operated the attitude-control jets. It didn’t particularly matter on a fifteen-minute suborbital flight, but it could have made a difference if it had been an orbital flight. Al kept saying he didn’t think he had left the button on but he really couldn’t say for sure. And this character kept coming back in and asking the question all over again. This was the first indication that the fellows had about a major truth concerning space flights. You didn’t “take” the capsule off the ground, you didn’t bring it up to altitude, you didn’t alter its course, and you didn’t land it; i.e., you didn’t fly it—and so your performance was not going to be rated on how well you flew the craft, as it would be in flight test or combat. You could be rated only on how well you covered the items on your checklist. Therefore, the fewer items you had on your checklist, the better shot you had at a “perfect” flight. Each flight was so expensive there would always be people on the ground—engineers, doctors, and scientists—who wanted to load up your checklist with all sorts of things to try, their little “experiments.” The way you handled this problem was to allow “operational” items on your list and growl, gruff, and otherwise balk over the rest. Testing the attitude-control system was acceptable, because that had “operational” written all over it. That was like flying an airplane. By the time he took off, Gus’s checklist had been pared down to the point where he could concentrate on the new hand controller that had been installed.
Gus stayed at the Holiday Inn until practically the day before his flight, maintaining an even strain. He cut down a little on the waterskiing, which was his main form of exercise, and on the nocturnal proficiency runs on the highways, in order to avoid getting banged up on the eve of the flight, but otherwise life went on pretty much as usual at the Cape, here in Fighter Jock Heaven.
One night just before the flight, when he was in the cocktail lounge evening out the strain a bit, who should Gus run into but Joe Walker. NASA had given Joe a few days off from Edwards to attend the launch, and so here he was. By this time, July 1961, Walker and Bob White had been flying up a storm in the X–15. In April, White had set a new speed record of Mach 4.62, which was just over 3,000 miles an hour, and in May Joe Walker had topped that by going Mach 4.95, and White had come right back in June and flown Mach 5.27. The X–15 now had the Big Engine, the XLR–99, with its 57,000 pounds of thrust. The True Brothers were ready to go all-out toward their goal of exceeding Mach 6 and an altitude of more than fifty miles … in piloted flight. Piloted! These developments could be found in the press … if one cared to look for them … but they were obscured by Gagarin’s flight, followed by Shepard’s flight … the single combat for the heavens. As a matter of fact, Joe Walker had taken the X–15 to Mach 4.95, the highest speed in the history of aviation, on the same day that Kennedy addressed Congress to propose the race for the moon … Next to the notion of a moon voyage Walker’s Mach 4.95 was pretty pedestrian stuff. But surely the truth would dawn on them eventually! It was with that in mind … the simple truth! … that Joe Walker happened to run into Gus Grissom at the Holiday Inn’s cocktail lounge.
Both Gus and Joe had knocked back a few, it being after dark, after all, and Joe starts in with a little Yeager-style country-boy banter about how Gus and his pals had better hurry up or him and his boys would pass them on the way up. Oh, yeah, says Gus, how’s that? Well, says Joe Walker, we’ve got a 57,000-pound rocket engine now, and the Redstone that shoots your little peapod up there only puts out 78,000, so we’re almost up with you—and we fly the damn thing. We actually fly it and we land it. Joe Walker meant to keep it light and just rag Grissom a little bit, but he couldn’t hold back a note in his voice concerning where things actually stood in the true scheme of things, on the real pyramid of flying competition. Everybody is looking at Grissom, the astronaut, to see what he’s going to say. Grissom, who is a tough little nut when he wants to be, stares at Walker … and then he breaks into a grin and starts a kind of gruff-gus chuckle. Oh, I’ll be looking over my shoulder the whole time, Joe, and if you come by, I swear I’ll wave.
And so much for Joe Walker and the True Brothers! It was all right there in that scene, the new simple truth. Grissom didn’t even feel angry. There was nothing that Joe Walker could say or do—and nothing that even Chuck Yeager himself could say or do—that would change the new order. The astronaut was now at the apex of the pyramid. The rocket pilots were already … the old guys, the eternal remember-whens … Oh, it didn’t even have to be said! It was in the air, and everyone knew it. Hell, when they started flying jets and rocket planes at Muroc, somewhere there must have been the old guys, the bitter old bastards, the remember-whens, who could just fly the hell out of a propeller plane and were still insisting that that was what it was all about. Flying wasn’t a competition like baseball or football. No, in flying any major advance in technology could change the rules. The Mercury rocket-capsule system—the word “system” was now on everybody’s lips—was the new cutting edge. No, Gus had no need to get excited any more over Joe Walker or anybody else at Edwards.
Gus seemed like a pretty relaxed man all the way around. He would get a little irritated at the engineering sessions he sat in on during the last couple of weeks before the flight and would give them a few gusgruff growls if they seemed to want to tinker with this and that at the last minut
e, but that seemed to be sheer eagerness to get on with the flight. There was even a bit of the old boondock Edwards broomstick-and-baling wire spirit about the whole thing. Just two nights before the flight it dawned on one of the doctors that they had never made provisions for a urine receptacle for Gus, to avoid the sort of thing Shepard had experienced. That was a hell of a note. They figured they could make do with an ordinary rubber condom for the receptacle. But what would hold it in place and keep it from coming off? Dee O’Hara, the nurse, helped out. She drove into Cocoa Beach and bought a panty girdle, and they rigged that up with the condom. The goddamned girdle gave you a hell of a tight grip on the groin, but Gus figured he could get by with it. All in all, he seemed pretty loose, a test pilot of the old school. He even had a foretaste of the mental atmosphere of the real thing, just as Shepard had. On July 19 he was inserted into the capsule, and the hatch was sealed, when the flight was canceled because of bad weather. The flight finally took place on July 21. Judging by his pulse rate and respiration, which were transmitted via his body sensors, Gus was more nervous than Shepard during the countdown. These rates, taken by themselves, didn’t mean a great deal, however, and no one would have thought twice about it except for what happened at the end of the flight. The flight itself was very nearly a duplicate of Shepard’s, except that Grissom’s capsule had a window, not just a periscope, giving him a much better view of the world, and he had a more sophisticated hand controller. His pulse stayed up around 150 throughout the five minutes he was weightless—Shepard’s pulse had never reached 140, not even during liftoff—and went up to 171 during the firing of the retro-rockets before the re-entry through the earth’s atmosphere. The informal consensus among the program’s doctors was that if an astronaut’s pulse rate went above 180, the mission should be aborted. The capsule splashed down almost precisely on target, just as Shepard’s had, within three miles of the recovery ship, the carrier Randolph. The capsule hit the water, then keeled over on one side, just as Shepard’s had, and took its own sweet time righting itself. Grissom thought he heard a gurgling noise inside the capsule—as had Shepard—and began looking for water seeping in, but didn’t see any. The recovery helicopter, designated Hunt Club I, was over the capsule within less than two minutes. Grissom was still in the seat, resting on his back, as he had been at the outset of the flight, and the capsule was bobbing around in the water.
Over his microphone Grissom said, “Okay, give me how much longer it’ll be before you get here.”
The helicopter pilot, a Navy lieutenant named James Lewis, said, “This is Hunt Club I. We are in orbit now at this time, around the capsule.”
Grissom said, “Roger, give me about another five minutes here, to mark these switch positions here, before I give you a call to come in and hook on. Are you ready to come in and hook on any time?”
Lewis said, “Hunt Club I, roger, we are ready any time you are.”
There was a chart on which the astronaut was supposed to record the switch positions (on or off) with a grease pencil.
Five and a half minutes later Grissom radioed Lewis in the helicopter again:
“Okay, Hunt Club, this is Liberty Bell. Are you ready for the pickup?”
Lewis said, “This is Hunt Club I, this is affirmative.”
Grissom said, “Okay, latch on, then give me a call and I’ll power down and blow the hatch, okay?”
“This is Hunt Club I, roger, will give you a call when we’re ready for you to blow.”
Grissom said, “Roger, I’ve unplugged my suit so I’m kinda warm now … so …”
Lewis said, “One, roger.”
“One, roger.”
“Now if you tell me to, ah, you’re ready for me to blow, I’ll have to take my helmet off, power down, and then blow the hatch.”
“One, roger, and when you blow the hatch, the collar will already be down there waiting for you, and we’re turning base at this time.”
“Ah, roger.”
As the helicopter pilot, Lewis, looked down on the capsule, it shaped up as a routine retrieval, such as he and his co-pilot, Lieutenant John Reinhard, had practiced many times. Reinhard had a pole with a hook on it, like a shepherd’s crook, that he was going to slip through a loop at the neck of the capsule. The crook was attached to a cable. The helicopter could hoist up to 4,000 pounds in this fashion; the capsule weighed about 2,400 pounds. Lewis had swung out and was making a low pass toward the capsule when suddenly he saw the capsule’s side hatch go flying off into the water. But Grissom wasn’t supposed to blow the hatch until he told him he had hooked on! And Grissom—there was Grissom scrambling out of the hatch and plopping into the water without even looking up at him. Grissom was swimming like mad. Water was pouring into the capsule through the hatch and the damned thing was sinking! Lewis wasn’t worried about Grissom, because he had practiced water egress with the astronauts many times and he knew their pressure suits were more buoyant than any life preserver. They even seemed to enjoy playing around in the water in the suits. So he gunned the helicopter down to the level of the water to try to snare the capsule. By now only the neck of the thing is visible above the water. Reinhard goes to work with the shepherd’s crook, leaning out of the helicopter, desperately trying to hook on. He finally hooks on, as the capsule disappears under the water and starts sinking like a brick. Lewis is now down so low all three wheels of the helicopter are in the water. The helicopter is like a fat man squatting over a tree stump, trying to pull it out of the ground. Full of water, as it is, the capsule weighs 5,000 pounds, 1,000 over the helicopter’s capacity. Lewis already has a red-light warning of impending engine failure—so he signals for a second helicopter, which is already nearby, to pick up Grissom. He finally pulls the capsule up out of the water, but he can’t make the helicopter move forward toward the carrier. He’s just hanging there in the air like a hummingbird. Red lights are lighting up all over the panel. He’s about to lose the ship as well as the capsule. So he cuts the capsule loose. It drops and disappears forever. The water is three miles deep at that point.
They turn away finally. Grissom is still in the water. He’s waving. He seems to be saying, “I’m okay.” The second helicopter is moving in to lower the horse collar.
In fact, Gus’s waves were saying, “I’m drowning!—you bastards—I’m drowning!”
As soon as Gus scrambled out of the hatch, he had begun swimming for his life. The goddamned capsule’s going under! His suit caught momentarily on some sort of strap outside the capsule, probably leading to the dye canister. It was like a parachute!—it would pull him under!—He’d drown! The drowning man … No question about it … By this point he was neither an astronaut nor a pilot. He was the drowning man. Get away from the death capsule!—that was the idea. Then he calmed down a little. He was swimming around in the ocean under the roar of the helicopter blades. He wasn’t sinking, after all. The pressure suit kept him bobbing in the water, as high as his armpits. He looked up. The horse collar was hanging out of the helicopter. The horse collar that gets him out of this! But they were pulling away from him!—they were going to the capsule! He could see the man named Reinhard leaning out of the helicopter trying to snag the loop of the capsule. Only the neck of the capsule was out of the water. He started swimming back to the capsule. It was hard swimming in the pressure suit, but it kept him up. He bobbed right up to his armpits when he stopped swimming. Little swells kept breaking over his head and he swallowed some water. He felt out of control. He was floundering around in the middle of the ocean. He looked up again and there was another helicopter. He kept waving and waving, but nobody seemed to pay any attention. And now he wasn’t bobbing up so high any more. The pressure suit was losing its buoyancy. It was getting heavier … starting to drag him down … The suit had a rubber diaphragm that rolled up around his neck like a turtleneck sweater to keep the water from seeping down inside the suit. It didn’t fit tight enough … air was escaping … No!—it was the oxygen inlet valve! He had completely forgot
ten! The valve allowed oxygen into his suit while he was in flight. He had unhooked the tube but forgotten to close the valve. The oxygen was bubbling out down there somewhere … the suit was becoming dead weight, pulling him down … He reached down and closed the valve underwater … But now his head kept going under and he had to fight to get to the surface and then the swells broke over his head and he swallowed more water and he’d look up at the helicopters and wave and they’d just wave back—the bastards!—how could they not know! In the window of one of the helicopters was a man with a camera, merrily taking pictures of him—they were waving and taking snapshots! The stupid bastards! They were going crazy over the goddamned capsule and he was drowning before their very eyes … He kept going under. He’d fight his way back up and swallow some more water and wave. But that drove him back under. The suit—he seemed to be packed in two hundred pounds of wet clay … The dimes!—and all that other shit! Christ, the dimes and those goddamned trinkets! Down there in his knee pocket … He’d had the bright idea of carrying a hundred one-dollar bills on the flight as souvenirs, but he didn’t have a spare hundred dollars to his name—so he decided on two rolls of fifty dimes each—and he had put in three one-dollar bills for good measure and a whole bunch of little models of the capsule—and now this big junkheap of travel sentiment stuffed in his knee pocket was taking him under … Dimes! … Silver deadweight!
Deke! … Where was Deke! … Surely Deke would be here! … He had done as much for Deke. Somehow Deke would materialize and save him. Deke and Wally and him had been down at Pensacola practicing water egress, and somehow Deke, in his whole pressure suit, with his helmet on, had fallen off his raft and was going under and couldn’t do a goddamn thing about it, but he and Wally had been nearby with their swimming flippers on, and they had swum straight to him and held him up until one of the Navy swabbos could reach them with the raft, and it was no sweat, because they had been by his side, and surely … Deke! … Or somebody! Deke!
