Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above (Apollo Quartet)

by Ian Sales

  UP

  The first thing Jackie Cochran does the moment she’s settled into her office at the Langley Research Center, the new home of Project Mercury, is send the astronauts make-up from her Jacqueline Cochran Cosmetics range and comprehensive instructions laying out how the Mercury 13 must dress when appearing in public. They’re about to go into space, to do something men have never done, and the Head of the Astronaut Office is telling them to keep their seams straight, their hair dressed and to wear powder and lipstick at all times. But none of them complains. Cobb remembers two years ago, approaching Oklahoma City at the end of her non-stop distance record flight from Guatemala City, trying to get out of her flight suit and into dress, stockings and high heels without losing control of her Aero Commander. It’s expected of them, it’s expected of women.

  Proudly displayed on the wall of Cochran’s office is the cover of Life magazine with the thirteen astronauts in evening gowns, one of the photographs taken before the dinner with President Eisenhower. And there, in large white letters next to the masthead, are the words “Jackie’s Space Girls”. Cochran loves it—My space girls, she says proudly. Hart grimaces but won’t rise to the bait. Some of the others, the Dietrich twins, Irene Leverton and K Cagle, gather round the framed cover, reaching out to touch the glass, putting fingers to the evening gowns they wore—they didn’t get to keep them—and there’s laughter and happy compliments, and Cobb sees the group is beginning to fracture.

  Cobb knows she will fly, and if it means doing what Cochran tells her to do, then it’s a price worth paying.

  When Cochran calls the astronauts into her office halfway through their training, five months after they all moved to Langley, Cobb suspects the worse. If she thought the first flight was hers—she was the first to pass the tests, she has the most flying hours, she and Janey Hart did all the campaigning that made this happen—if Cobb expects the first flight to be hers no questions asked... well, there are rumours flying around that say different. This meeting in Cochran’s office, it has to be about that.

  The thirteen of them enter the room. Cochran is behind her desk, she doesn’t rise to her feet. At her shoulder is Walter T Bonney, the PR director. A few of the women have turned up in flightsuits, fresh from training; some are in slacks. They stand around, eager to hear the news, giving each other speaking glances, and Hart reaches out and gives Cobb a sisterly touch on the arm. That hurts, that Hart could think Cobb will be passed over.

  But no. Cochran opens her mouth and out spills a lecture, a rant, liberally dosed with expletives, about the need to keep up standards of dress. No flightsuits in the classroom; make-up at all times unless they’re in a cockpit, and even then they put some on before they deplane. She complains she has seen astronauts looking slovenly about the building, and she won’t have it. This is not 1943, it is 1963. The engineers and the scientists, a lot of them are men and they expect women to look and behave like women. The women engineers and scientists, they’re not role models like the Mercury 13, they’re not the reason why this programme exists.

  It is a bizarre and filthy-worded tirade, and Cobb can see she is not the only one in the room astonished by it.

  Now, says Cochran, visibly calming, I asked you here for another reason. We’re about ready to announce who’s going to be the first American in space.

  If there is a senior astronaut, it’s Cobb, but she and Cochran don’t like each other, and they’d argue all the time if Cobb weren’t so unwilling to speak up, even after all the speechifying which got the thirteen of them here. They all know the score, they all know Cobb deserves the first flight, but there’s no real surprise when Cochran says, I’ve spoken to all your instructors, and I’ve even been to see dear old Wernher, and we think, we think the first American in space should be... K.

  For several seconds, the room is silent.

  Cochran puts her hands together and applauds. Well done, K, she says.

  The others crowd around Cagle and congratulate her, hugs and pecks on the cheek. Cobb looks down, feeling like an outsider; she’s disappointed, it’s heartfelt, a burning sensation deep inside, but she comforts herself with the knowledge that God has something greater for her to do yet. She catches a few sympathetic glances thrown her way, then crosses to Cagle and wishes her luck.

  Cagle turns to Cochran at her desk and she says, Miss Cochran, thank you so very much. I’m your girl, I believe in you, I trust your judgement in any situation. You have proved we can get what we want, not by pushing, but by winning.

  It’s no less astonishing an outburst than Cochran’s, but at least afterwards Cagle has the grace to look embarrassed. Cochran has a smug expression on her face; Cobb refuses to meet her gaze.

  Jerrie, Cochran says, I want you as backup for K.

  Only if I get the next one, Cobb replies.

  Cochran glowers, she opens her mouth but closes it without speaking. She looks down at her desk. You get the next one, she says in a clipped voice, I had you down for the next one, so don’t you go playing games with me.

  Later, Cobb thinks it may not be 1943 but it is like it. The men have all gone to war and the Rosie the Riveters are back in the factories, back “picking up the slack”. There’s no WASP because women can’t fly jet fighters or jet bombers, the F-103 and F-107, the B-49 flying wing and supersonic B-59; but women have once again stepped out of the kitchen.

  Now that the schedule is set for the first two flights, the nature of the training changes. Cagle and Cobb are busier than ever. In Cobb’s Aero Commander, they fly down to the McDonnell Aircraft plant in St Louis to have a look at the Mercury spacecraft. It’s a frighteningly small vehicle in which to brave the unknown dangers of space, but Cagle fits in it with room to spare. She’ll be wearing a pressure suit, of course, one made to measure. The two of them look in through the hatch and Cobb tries to imagine some hefty jet fighter pilot squeezed into its tight confines.

  It’s really happening, Jerrie, isn’t it, says Cagle.

  Cobb nods, though she’s wondering why there’s no control stick.

  They alternately spend hours in a mock-up of the capsule, learning the function of every switch and dial, not that there are many of them, far less in fact than on the instrument panel of Cobb’s Aero Commander. How to use the periscope, how the environmental control system works, operating the earth-sky camera... They practice on the Air-Lubricated Free-Attitude Trainer, the Multiple-Axis Space Test Inertia Facility, the egress trainer, even flights on the “vomit comet” to experience weightlessness...

  This first flight into space by an American will only be a suborbital hop. The Russians have put two men into orbit, but NASA wants to play it safe. The next flight, Cobb’s flight, will be orbital...

  On hearing this news she knows that God is still looking out for her.

  DOWN

  It is just past 2200 hours by the time they’ve filled the float with 67,000 gallons of aviation fuel, loaded thirty-two tons of steel shot, checked out all the onboard systems, and loaded the plot onto the NAVNET computer. McIntyre is on the fairwater deck abaft of the sail, at ease as the bathyscaphe rolls gently in the swell. He leans against the mast, the US flag snapping above his head, and pines for a cigarette—but with all this gasoline beneath his feet, it’s not safe. Hollow knocks and the murmur of conversation, evidence of industry in some abyssal realm, echo up the access tube. The USS White Sands sits on station two hundred feet away, far enough not to be caught in the conflagration should the Trieste II’s aviation fuel ignite. Somewhere behind the auxiliary repair dock lies the USS Apache, but her running lights are occluded. There’s a fifteen-foot boat containing a pair of sailors a dozen feet away, and a sailor up on the bow of the Trieste II checking out the steering thruster there. It’s a warm breezy night, a river of stars running across a black sky, a velvety blackness that shrouds the planet from horizon to horizon, blending softly into the slowly rolling waves. It’ll be blacker down below, and it’ll also be cold. Those steel walls may protect
against the pressure, but they’re no defence against the chill. Not even all the equipment in the pressure-sphere, not even three guys in close proximity for hours, can stave it off.

  They don’t call it the abyssal zone for nothing. The abyss. Eternal darkness, temperature 35º to 37º Fahrenheit, pressures up to five tons per square inch. Yet there is an even deeper zone, the hadal zone, down in the trenches, past 20,000 feet, where the pressure reaches seven tons per square inch. There are only a handful of places on the planet that qualify—and the Puerto Rico Trench is one. If the bucket from that spy satellite had not landed on a shelf, but sank all the way to the bottom...

  He remembers the French Navy descended to the floor of the Puerto Rico Trench five years ago, and their Archimède could maybe have retrieved the bucket. Back in 1960, the old Trieste, she went all the way down to Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the earth’s oceans, 36,000 feet beneath the surface. But the Trieste II is not the same boat, she doesn’t have the same pressure-sphere from that record-breaking dive, she doesn’t have the same float, the same systems. She’s a real operational submersible now, though she can no longer go as deep.

  Abruptly, the sea about the bathyscaphe lights up, a ghostly radiance beneath the surface, as if the water itself has turned luminescent. McIntyre leans out and looks down, and he can see the flank of the Trieste II curving away beneath the waves, pale and spectral, blurred in the softly stirring water, a phantom whale basking in the night sea. He shivers at the thought—they’re only testing the bathyscaphe’s search lights, but the fancy makes something unearthly of it.

  Ten hours it took them to ready the Trieste II, after they had flooded the USS White Sands’ aft dock well and towed the bathyscaphe out into the Atlantic; and soon they’ll be spending hours in the depths of the ocean, hunting for the bucket from this spy satellite. A long day— No, a long night. McIntyre was glad to give up nights like this when he transferred to the Navy Experimental Diving Unit, but he has to admit that right now he’s feeling a little of the old excitement.

  He checks his Seamaster, they’re scheduled to dive at 2230, around twenty minutes from now. The water about the Trieste II suddenly turns black, and one of the sailors in the boat shouts something but McIntyre misses it. The boat’s outboard fires up with a cough and a roar, and then burbles away throatily. The boat bounces on a wave, its bow slapping down onto the sea surface.

  Whatever the problem was it’s gone, sir, says the sailor from the steering thruster.

  He’s standing by the small boat standoff now, hanging onto the rail, as the boat noses in close to the bathyscaphe.

  Right, McIntyre replies, we’ll be all done below in about ten minutes.

  The boat is near enough so the sailor scrambles into it. The prow swings away and the boat moves out to a position thirty feet away, its outboard still snorting and gurgling. McIntyre gives a wave, then enters the sail and climbs into the access tube. He shuts and locks the hatch above him, then descends the ladder to the pressure-sphere. Stryker and Taylor turn round and look up at him as he appears, and he’s struck anew at how small the sphere is and that he’s going to have to spend maybe six or seven hours in a space four feet by four feet square and five feet nine inches high. With two other guys.

  All set? he asks.

  Taylor nods and then speaks quietly into the mike of the headset he is wearing. McIntyre worms through the hatch, then he and Stryker swing it closed and seal it.

  Flood the access tube, McIntyre orders.

  He peers through the window in the hatch and watches as water splashes against the thick glass and quickly climbs up it. McIntyre settles on the low stool beneath the hatch, hands on knees, and says, I guess this is it. Phil, flood forward and aft water ballast tanks, let’s go see what it’s like down there.

  Stryker is pilot for this dive and Taylor is on sonar duty. McIntyre’s handling the navigation, which for the moment is straight down. And then they’ll have to creep around on the sea bed 19,500 feet below, hunting the deep ocean transponder dropped next to the bucket because the bathyscaphe descends in a spiral.

  He picks up the underwater telephone handset and informs the USS White Sands that the dive has commenced. See you in the morning, he says.

  He puts the handset down and thinks, this is not diving. He’s wearing his khakis, he’s bone dry and will remain that way, and the nearest he’ll get to the water is looking at it through a window four inches in diameter and 5.9 inches thick. He’s been down to a simulated 1,000 feet in the NEDU pressure chamber, and spent a week there; he’s dived to 600 feet in the North Atlantic, and spent six days in decompression afterwards. The chipmunk-voice from breathing helium-oxygen, air so thick it’s a struggle to pull it into his lungs... 260 psi... 18 atmospheres... Ascend to the surface too fast and the bends is the least of his worries.

  Sitting in this steel ball is not real. The sea has been a part of his life for decades, he works in it, it’s something he can touch and feel and in which he can immerse himself, it’s something he can become a part of. But this, there’s an air of falsity to it, experiencing the water mediated by technology and cold steel, separated from it. He doesn’t feel like a visitor to this submarine realm, he feels like an invader. Now, belatedly, he realises why he joined NEDU, why he turned his back on the Trieste II and walked away from her.

  Strange, then, that he should only discover this by returning to her.

  UP

  Cobb lies on her back in the Mercury capsule she has named Destiny and waits patiently for the countdown to begin. It’s been over three hours since they bolted the hatch but she knows patience, she’s been in situations like this before. Not lying on her back in a pressure suit, of course, though she has done this in simulations; nor those long, silent and black hours in the sensory deprivation tank at the Oklahoma City Veterans’ Hospital three years ago—and when she heard some of the other lady astronauts spent even longer in the tank than she did, she wanted to do it all over again. No, her mind is drawn to the time she flew across the Caribbean through burning blue skies for Fleetway, the time the engine of the T-6 she was delivering to Peru went “pop” and threw oil all over her canopy and more oil seeped into the cockpit, over her instruments and herself. Though Jack Ford was there flying alongside, insisting she ditch, she prayed she’d make it safely to land. And so she did. She’s always known God is there for her, that these things happen to her because He makes them happen and He brings her through them.

  Remembering that flight, she thinks of Jack, who passed eight years ago, he’d directed her into a landing at Montego Bay International Airport and told he’d loved her. And for two years they had shone so brightly together.

  She can hear the blockhouse and the control centre speaking to each other in her helmet headset, but she tunes it out. The gantry has been rolled back and she can see blue sky through the capsule’s window. She recalls the excitement she felt when she watched Cagle’s Mercury-Redstone 3, America, lift from the launch-pad, rising up through a pale and hazeless Florida sky on a column of fire and thunder, such a pure and wonderful sight. Cobb doesn’t feel that thrill now, she is focused on her upcoming mission; she feels only a need to get everything right, to show Cochran and the others that she deserves to be right here right now.

  The delay drags on. Through the periscope she can watch grey waves scudding across the Atlantic; in a mirror by the window, she sees the grey blockhouse. Below her, she hears pipes whine and creak, and then everything shakes and bangs as the ground crew check the engines’ gimbal mechanism. She thinks about the new president’s speech back in June—after Cagle’s flight President Kennedy was talking to Congress and he said they should set as a national goal “landing an American on the Moon and returning them safely to the Earth before ten years are up”, and she’s already thinking past this flight. She hasn’t even been into space yet but that’s what she wants: to be the first American to walk on the Moon’s surface.

  The order comes through to top of
f the lox tanks. This is it. The countdown is finally going ahead. Minutes later, Cobb hears an infernal thunder as the main engines light and the hold-down clamps release with a decisive thud. The rocket begins to rise, slowly, ponderously, balanced atop its roaring pillar of flame. The top of the gantry slides past the window. Cobb offers up another silent prayer, this time one of thanks. She has much to be grateful for and she knows it—she was not first, but the Russians beat America to that, anyway. But she will beat the Russian record for number of orbits about the Earth.

  The Mercury-Atlas rolls and shudders a little. Forty-eight seconds have passed, the rocket hits max-Q and the capsule vibrates, the dials and gauges before her blur. She wills herself to remain calm, none of this is unexpected, Cagle remarked on it happening during her flight. But that noise, that hellish roar, and the G-forces pressing her down into her seat, it makes it all real, this is no simulation. Oh this is what she wanted, this is what she prayed for—she feels such a sense of peace, despite the shaking and the demonic clamour and the weight upon her.

  Twenty-four seconds later, the vibrations abruptly cease, the ride is smooth and clear and Cobb knows she is at last reaching for the heavens. After a minute, the booster engines cut off and the G-forces drop back to one as the boosters fall away. The sustainer engine continues to fire and the Gs build up once again, pushing Cobb back into her seat. The sky outside the window is black, and she says as much to Hart, the flight’s capsule communicator.

  Cabin pressure holding at 6.1, she adds. Coming up on two minutes, fuel is 101-102, oxygen is 78-102, Gs are about six now.

  Reading you loud and clear, replies Hart. Flight path looked good.

  The jettison rockets on the escape tower fire, she sees it tumble away, and relays the fact to mission control. Capsule is in good shape, she reports.

  Roger, you’re going for it, Jerrie, says Hart. Twenty seconds to SECO.