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

by Ian Sales

  A shadow flutters in the bottom current off to starboard, just on the edge of the search lights, and McIntyre at first takes it for sea-bottom flora... before he remembers that down here, 19,500 feet below the surface, there’s no light and so no plant-life. He orders Stryker to swing the Trieste II to starboard and the bathyscaphe creeps up on the dancing swaying living thing. As they near it, McIntyre sees it is a strip of nylon webbing attached to a piece of bent metal, and it looks fresh, like it hasn’t been down here very long. Debris from the bucket, he decides; it’s debris from the bucket, some piece of it that broke off as it sank. And he knows they’re near their target now, it’s somewhere around here, hidden by the darkness, invisible beneath the blackness that presses down around them at four tons per square inch...

  And though they’ve been down here now for over five hours, he’s thinking it won’t be much longer before he gets to see the sun once again.

  UP

  After disengaging from the Agena, mission control tells Cobb and Gorelick they have a new target for them to rendezvous. The Gemini 10 spacecraft is in an orbit with an apogee with 167 miles, but now they have to get higher and meet up with an object at 240 miles. Capcom is being cagey and won’t divulge what the object is, Cobb thinks it might be the Agena from Gemini 8 but she thinks that’s in a much higher orbit.

  When she asks capcom just says, We’re not at liberty to discuss it at this time.

  It’s been over a year since her flight on Gemini 4 and her EVA. Cobb was the first American to spacewalk, but it was another record the Russians beat them to. She has learned to be resigned about it. There’s still the Moon, beckoning silver in the sky every night, and she prays each day for the opportunity to tread its airless seas of grey dust. Gemini 10’s mission is a step toward that dream, they are up here to practice the rendezvous techniques which will be required for a flight to Luna.

  And now the Gemini spacecraft is in the higher orbit, their target is on the radar, and the rendezvous will have to be by eye—but even then capcom won’t say what it is. They’re close enough to make out what they’re aiming for, but Cobb still can’t tell. A satellite? It looks a bit like an Agena, a bright cylinder with a nose cone. But it is devoid of markings, and without those it’s impossible to judge size or distance.

  Gorelick fires the thrusters to bring the Gemini spacecraft in phase with the rendezvous target, and twenty minutes later fires them again to put them on the same orbital plane. Cobb is busy on the computer, calculating an intercept trajectory, and once she has the figures, she puts a hand to the joystick between the two seats. Gorelick reads out the range to the target and the range rate, the difference in velocity between their spacecraft and their target.

  What’s R dot? asks Cobb, staring intently at the approaching target.

  Eighty-three feet per second, replies Gorelick.

  What should it be?

  About seventy.

  I’m going to brake.

  Range is two miles. You’ve got sixty-five R dot at two miles.

  The spacecraft draws closer. Though they have simulated such manoeuvres, and this is their second rendezvous of the flight, it still requires intense concentration and a delicate hand on the controls.

  Twenty-nine R dot, range 0.8 miles, says Gorelick.

  R dot is now eleven, says Gorelick, eleven still, holding eleven... nine... seven... 700 feet... 600... holding 600 feet...

  Cobb brings the Gemini spacecraft alongside the target, matching its velocity, and now they’ve rendezvoused she gets her first proper look at it. It’s definitely not an Agena target vehicle. She estimates it’s around twelve feet long, much shorter than the Agena’s twenty feet; in shape, it’s a short cylinder topped by a long cone with a rounded tip. Cobb has no idea what it is. Man-made certainly, but she cannot tell if it is American or Soviet.

  We’re here, she tells capcom. Are you going to tell us what it is?

  There is a moment of silence.

  It’s secret, whatever it is, says Gorelick.

  Capcom says, I need you to look in your checklists binder, right at the back.

  Puzzled, Cobb reaches for the checklists floating from a hook on the instrument panel and flips through the binder. The last page should be the postlanding checklist, but another has been added, and she reads it with mounting disbelief. She shows the page to Gorelick and says, Look at this.

  According to the 33/8 by 8 inch card, the vehicle they have rendezvoused is a Corona KH-4B spy satellite. They are also instructed not to mention this over the radio, but to refer to the target as the “alternate Agena”.

  Acknowledge, please, says capcom.

  It’s an alternate Agena, says Cobb obligingly.

  Gorelick looks at Cobb and raises her eyebrows. For a moment, they stare at each other, at their faces framed within their white pressure helmets. They’re wearing helmets because firing the manoeuvre thrusters shakes up the interior of the spacecraft, throwing dust and lint and small debris up into the air, and they need to keep their visors shut until it settles back down. They’re not wearing make-up, no astronaut ever has done so in space, and even Cochran stopped whipping that particular horse, especially after she sold her controlling shares in the Jacqueline Cochran Cosmetics Company back in 1966. It’s taken six years, eleven Mercury flights and eight Gemini flights, but they’re no longer “astronettes” or “space girls”, they’re astronauts. They’re the only Americans who have flown in space, and they’ve been beating the Russians in endurance flights for the past three years. There are some advantages to having a women-only astronaut corps, even the scientists and engineers say as much.

  They’re not front-page news any more, and that suits them just fine because they’re just doing a job, something they love, and they’ve proven to pretty much everybody’s satisfaction they can do it and do it well. Only last year, Cobb and Funk, the youngest of the Mercury 13, went on a trip to see the troops in Korea, and everyone over there seemed happy to have real live astronauts visiting them. The pilots were quizzing Cobb on what it was like in space, how did she fly the spacecraft, they wanted to know everything. And all she could say in reply was, it’s the greatest feeling in the world, it’s like down here doesn’t matter anymore, it’s like you want to stay up there forever. Of course, she didn’t mention spending days in a tiny spacecraft, unable to bend her knees until she thinks her legs will never straighten again, the diapers and catheters and being poked and prodded by doctors before and after every flight, the G4C spacesuit with its six layers of nylon and Nomex which pinch and rub... It was all about the wonder and the going higher, further, faster. Even so, she was never very good with words and has always been a reluctant speaker, and she was uncomfortable with all the attention.

  But now she peers out through the tiny window in the hatch at the spy satellite and she wonders what they’re doing here and when mission control is going to tell them.

  Cobb asks capcom if they’re expected to EVA.

  At this time no EVA is indicated, capcom replies. Can you confirm the alternate Agena looks to be in good order?

  Gorelick in the right-hand seat is nearer to the KH-4B. She lifts the visor on her helmet and leans forward until her nose is only a few inches from the window before her.

  It doesn’t look damaged, she says, it looks fine.

  Cobb is wondering if she’s looking at the future of the space programme: will they be no more than orbital repair technicians, rendezvousing with satellites and fixing them in situ? The exercise with the real Agena is all part of the plan to go to the Moon. Next year, the first of the new Apollo spacecraft leaves the North American Aviation factory in San Diego, and though there’s one more Gemini flight planned, it’s expected Apollo I will launch in early 1969.

  But to what end? For what purpose?

  DOWN

  Though he never said anything, McIntyre was surprised when the kludge worked as intended and scooped up the bucket from the ocean bed. The bucket is not exactly intact—it
hit the sea surface pretty goddamned hard, has split down one side, and long snakes of film have escaped from the stacks and now hang down through the bars of the kludge. McIntyre tells Stryker to drop the shot ballast—not all at once, because they don’t want to strain the damaged bucket too much or give the kludge an excuse to drop what it carries. And as the Trieste II begins its effortless rise from the ocean bottom, so McIntyre feels his spirits begin to lift, and his mind flies across the miles to the Washington Navy Yard and he knows more than ever he made the right move when he transferred to the Navy Experimental Diving Unit. He’s not enjoyed this dive and he feels no real sense of accomplishment at having retrieved the bucket. The Trieste II is too fragile a mistress, and though this descent has gone relatively smoothly—nothing broke!—he remembers all too well others where one damn thing after another went on the fritz. Which is not to say saturation dives are always snafu-free, or that mistakes and malfunctions cannot also prove fatal.

  But, he has to admit, spending hours inside a steel ball seven feet in diameter cannot compare with the freedoms of saturation diving, the ability to move about underwater unrestricted, chained only by an umbilical—because at those pressures air in bottles would last mere minutes—limited only by his own physical endurance. True, the Trieste II can take him so much deeper—he’s here now on his way back up from 19,500 feet beneath the surface!—while the deepest he’s dived on helium-oxygen is 600 feet, and he had to spend six days in a steel can decompressing afterwards.

  He looks across the pressure-sphere at the tiny window which gives the only direct view the three men have on the world outside. It’s a circle of inky blackness in the curved steel, and his eyes play tricks and he sees it as a pool of infinite depth, an opening without end in the steel, a shaft through the abyss and the hadal zone into who-knows-where and who-knows-what...

  Then, nine hours later, as they near the surface and reach the depth at which sunlight can penetrate the water, the black window begins to pale and fade to blue, day dawning on their submarine world, and it glows ethereally like a beacon signalling sanctuary. So McIntyre gets down on his knees and peers through the window, and there’s the kludge and trapped in its tines the bucket, and strips of films are hanging out of it like those fronds of rusty growth on the wrecks deep below, but they’re fluttering like kelp in the vortices generated by the bathyscaphe’s ascent.

  At thirty feet, Taylor pays out the cable on the kludge, so when the Trieste II breaches the surface, the bucket will stay thirty-five feet below, where perhaps it will remain intact and not suffer the battering it would receive at the surface. McIntyre, still looking out through the window, sees a column of boiling white turbulence arrow down past the pressure-sphere. The bubbles evaporate to reveal a diver, who gives McIntyre a thumbs-up and then turns to the bucket in the kludge. And as they both watch, a strip of film separates from a film stack and snakes its way downwards, returning to the depths.

  Taylor pumps the access tube free of water, and he and McIntyre open the hatch, while Stryker sets about turning off the onboard systems they won’t need now they’re on the surface. The tube is cold and smells of brine and something infernal, and then the stink generated by three men in a sealed steel sphere overwhelms it. He hears a clanging from above and worms his way into the tube and cranes his neck to look up just as someone opens the hatch and a shaft of clear blue morning sky spears down, causing him to blink and put a hand to his brow. He scrambles upright and clambers up the ladder, and moments later he steps out of the sail onto the bathyscaphe’s fairwater decking. He can’t help pulling in a deep breath of sea air, and he grins at the USS White Sands rocking on the swell a hundred feet away, and the USS Apache on station beside the auxiliary repair dock, and the boat butting up against the Trieste II’s float with a pair of divers hanging from its gunwales.

  He wants to say, By God, it’s good to be back; but he guesses his face says it for him anyway.

  He hears the slap of waves against the bathyscaphe, the bump and scrape of the boat’s prow against the fairwater decking, the guttural burble of its idling outboard; and the sunlight bounces from the restless sea surface in fractured sheets of brightness, and there’s a depth—it’s not the right word but nothing else springs to mind—a depth to the colours, to the aquamarine of the water, the scuffed whiteness of the fifteen-foot boat, the implacable grey of the USS White Sands and USS Apache, the ineffable blueness of the sky...

  McIntyre stands on the Trieste II, his hand to his brow, he wants a cigarette but that’s going to have wait until he’s back aboard the USS White Sands, and he feels a bit like one of those Ancient Greeks or Romans who journeyed into the Underworld but escaped back to the surface, only he can’t remember the guy’s name and he can’t remember where he came across the story and he can’t really recall the details of it, just something about the woman he went to fetch deciding to stay with her husband...

  But he sort of feels like him, anyhow.

  UP

  Cobb has missed out on the firsts so far, for all that she felt she deserved them. The Mercury 13—though there are only a dozen left in the programme, since Hart retired after her one flight to work directly for the women’s movement—was her doing, after all. She was the first American to orbit the Earth, but the Russians did that first; she was the first American to spacewalk, but again after a Russian had done it before her. The only first left, the one not even the Russians can beat, is the first human being to walk on the Moon. That’s what the Gemini and Apollo programmes are for, and Cobb is the most senior astronaut in the corps. That is her dream.

  Only now they’re taking it away from her.

  The Korean War is finally over, MacArthur chased the Chinese over the border sixteen years ago, and the war dragged on and on, lasting four times longer than the Second World War, eating up men and materiel, and through it all the USA put thirteen women into space on a regular basis. But now the soldiers are returning home, and Cobb has heard that NASA intends to train men as astronauts and rumour has it some of those will go to the Moon. She’s been doing this for seven years, this is her fourth flight into space, and they expect her to step down from the programme and let the men take the lead. She saw this happening more than twenty years ago, after the Second World War, when Rosie the Riveter had to hang up her rivet gun and put her apron back on. Cobb was too young to fly in Cochran’s WASP, but when the men came home and women went back into the kitchen, she knew it wasn’t for her and became a pilot instead—even though it was hard, really hard, for her to find jobs. Now... Now, she has flown three types of spacecraft, she has even flown supersonic jets, she’s not giving this up. God put her here on this Earth for a reason and it is not to “pick up the slack” after the men have had their go.

  NASA have already pulled back on their plans. Though they have four years to go, it’s clear they’re not going to make the president’s aim of putting an American on the Moon in time. So Apollo II has been tasked with an orbital rendezvous with a spy satellite in order to perform in situ repairs. That Gemini 10 rendezvous, that was just proof of concept, Irene Leverton and Jan Dietrich did the same in Gemini 11. Cobb had hoped to be given command of Apollo I, but that went to Cagle, Cochran’s favourite, it was just a short flight to prove the hardware. Once again Cobb is second, as she has been in everything, and she’s commander of Apollo II, with B Steadman as pilot and new recruit Betty Miller as flight engineer. Miller was one of the eighteen who took the Lovelace Clinic tests back in 1961, she failed then but the selection requirements were relaxed given the experiences of the Mercury 13. It’s not like Miller is unqualified—she was the first woman to fly solo across the Pacific, from California to Australia, six years ago, she even received the FAA Gold Medal from the president for it. Her lucky troll, Dammit, sat in the simulator during the training for this mission, but it’s not up here in orbit in the real spacecraft.

  The KH-4B spy satellite is in an orbit with a perigee of 95 miles and an apogee of 240 miles, and
has already been boosted once before the atmosphere captured it and caused its orbit to decay. Apollo II’s mission is to fix a jammed spool on the intermediate roller assembly, the mechanism which feeds the film from the cameras to the film stacks in the recovery vehicles. Whatever the spy satellite has been photographing, it must be important to go to all this trouble, though now that the Moon is slipping out of reach perhaps Cobb should be grateful Apollo II has reason to be thrown into orbit.

  Once they’ve matched orbits with the satellite, Cobb needs to go EVA. All three are still in their spacesuits, so they attach gloves and helmets and switch the oxygen to the suit circuit. They each verify their helmets and visors are locked and adjusted, their O2 connectors are locked, and their relief valves open.

  SUIT GAS DIVERTER pull to egress, says Miller, reading from the EVA checklist. SUIT CABIN RELIEF –SUIT CIRCUIT RELIEF to close, CABIN GAS RETURN open.

  Their suits are at 3.7 psi, they’ve depressurised the command module, and Steadman pulls down on the handle on the crew access hatch; and in eerie silence, there’s only the sound of her own breath in her helmet, Cobb watches the battens withdraw, the hatch pop its seal and swing open to reveal the luminous blue that is the Earth below.

  It’s beautiful, says Miller.

  Help me, B, says Cobb.

  She takes the rim of the hatch in either hand and pulls herself up and out and abruptly she’s no longer floating horizontally but standing upright, half in and half out of the command module’s hatch. The silvery bright cone that is the Apollo spacecraft stretches before her, her ghostly white reflection smeared across it. She turns about and she can see the curve of the Earth, and at the horizon the radiant band of atmosphere which girdles it. She can see clouds drifting across the face of the world and she thinks, I want to do this forever. She remembers her first EVA on Gemini 4 and her reluctance to return to the spacecraft, and she’s lost none of the awe she felt then, if anything it now seems even more focused, more spiritual, more affirming.