The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  Had Rig been there, he would have acted as agent, manager, and lawyer, pressing them with questions, concerns, and alternate ideas, but alone I drifted atop their warm-breath currents, nodding at half-heard details: how the flight would double as a test for weight capacity, how it would carry enough fuel for eighteen orbits, though I was authorized to perform only three, how I would not have to do anything but sit there while Mission Control ran autopilot, performed diagnostics. It was a good deal less, promised they, than had been asked of Enos.

  Better me shot up there than an animal, thought I—my soul was dirtied and scuffed. Long into the night, NASA leaders supplied other details, but few registered. The only man I saw in that room was John Glenn; the only words I heard were his challenge; the only conviction I felt was his about Gød. What did register over the duration of that long December night, was a path down which I might alter my role, not just at NASA but forever and ever. My launch was set for the stroke of midnight on January 12, 1962, and I resolved that, on that day, one month away, the story of Zebulon Finch would fork, if not conclude altogether.

  XI.

  WORLD EVENTS COLLUDED TO KEEP our cloak-and-dagger secret. While I was being briefed, JFK was freighting two thousand troops to a new Communist battleground in Southeast Asia. By the third week of December, these troops were discharging weapons; a week later, fourteen of them were dead. Was it a war? It stank like one, like engine oil and urine. Even the country’s name felt portentous, that daggering first letter, that hopeless, fading second syllable: Vietnam.

  To throw the hounds off our scent, Kennedy delivered his second State of the Union the same night as our launch. At T-minus 360 minutes, with all cameras trained on the House of Representatives, I was driven past empty, black beaches churning with silver surf. At Hanger S, as was tradition, Project Mercury’s Air Force dietician prepared a “low-residue” breakfast (translation: a lower chance for defecation) for the Astro to enjoy with a select few friends. I, of course, sat at the table alone, regarding the filet mignon, scrambled eggs, and strained orange juice for what it was: a death-row prisoner’s last meal.

  Not even for a corpse did the Suits scrimp on biomedical sensors. While one performed the comedy schtick of my vitals (“Respiration rate: irregular. Neck flexibility: irregular. Thyroid: irregular.”), a second glued suction cups to my wrecked torso and inserted thermometers into the usual orifices, plus a few extra offered by my gaping wounds. NASA’s chief physician, long-suffering when it came to the Fail-safe, tore the stethoscope from his neck and delivered a final analysis to the waiting Donlan.

  “His heart is like a chunk of granite, his veins are like plastic, and his lungs are glutted with dead tissue. In all my years as a medical professional, I’ve never seen a specimen this bad.”

  Donlan nodded.

  “All right. Suit him up.”

  It felt like mummification. My limbs were threaded through modified long underwear and wiggled into the skintight rubber of my custom-made one-armed pressure suit, while biometric wires were braided through a thigh port. There were boots, heavy as cinderblocks. A thick glove was zipped onto the end of my sleeve. My helmet was latched to the neck ring and the faceplate secured. It was twenty-five pounds of matériel, futile in its role of providing oxygen and so rigid that I couldn’t see how Shepard or Grissom had managed to walk. I, on the other hand, knew rigor mortis. A stiff suit was nothing.

  Next they had to inflate the suit with five pounds per square inch of pressure. I knew this but made them explain it to me and then explain how I had to recline in a specialized couch. I made them explain absolutely everything, for it was vital that I appear as docile, dull, and dumb as they’d always believed, because for once the opposite was true. At long last, I knew exactly what I was doing.

  To everyone at the Cape, my behavior over those final weeks had appeared as disreputable as ever. I was sluggard: Half the time, I didn’t show up for meetings. I was antisocial: when I saw a Suit coming, I headed the other way. I was disengaged: while the Astros exercised or studied, I hid behind Playboy centerfolds. But all of it had been a ruse. I’d skipped meetings so I would have more time to devote to my plan. I’d avoided Suits and Astros alike so neither would become suspicious. And the three-page fold-outs of nightgowned, nippled nubility? They’d concealed another type of publication altogether.

  It was called SEDR (Systems Engineering Department Report), but its longer title was Project Mercury Familiarization Manual, four hundred pages of descriptions, diagrams, instructions, inventories, blueprints, flowcharts, schemata, tables, and tabulations, a soup-to-nuts handbook on how the hell one pilots a Mercury capsule. I had but four weeks to absorb what had taken the Seven entire careers, but math was on my side. Four weeks equals thirty days equals 720 hours, which, if you factor in the sleep, sustenance, and weekends off required by a run-of-the-mill human being, is equal to roughly one hundred days.

  And that, Dearest Reader, is nearly a college semester. I studied as both Abigail Finch’s tutors and OSS’s Allen Rigby could have only dreamed, until the SEDR was loose-leafed and crimped. The Mercury capsule had ten thousand parts, but I had the advantage of being able to ignore those I’d never need. Section IV, “Environmental Control System,” was inconsequent. Section VIII, “Escape and Jettison Rocket System,” would never come into play. Only the actionable chapters did I cogitate upon until the bland prose usurped my daydreams.

  H202 enters the thrust chamber upon actuation of the solenoid valve . . .

  The radiance difference is approximately 3.003 watts/cm2-steradian . . .

  The zener diodes used in these circuits are 1/4 watt units, which regulate within 5% . . .

  Not since John Quincy’s bootlegging had I experienced the hard-won contentment of learning a trade. Even if my intellectual achievement was measurable in inches, it was miles beyond what the Suits expected of their latest biological payload, and this time their underestimation would cost them.

  At T-minus 120 minutes, I was vanned across the Pad 14 tarmac under a sugar-sprinkled chocolate sky and helped onto an industrial elevator, which lifted me nine stories up the gantry past an endless cliff-face of silver steel, twelve painted letters plunging past in reverse order: S, E, T, A, T, S, D, E, T, I, N, U. The lift clanged to its summit, pistons hissing, and I lurched onto a gangplank, gripped a railing, and gazed down at Suits as tiny as the stars above. The tower atop which I stood was bathed in scarlet light through which roiled white jets of liquid oxygen and sliced yellow cutlasses of search beams.

  Hippodromic heights of light, sight, and sound, even for this most covert of undertakings! In a utility pocket I’d tucked the Excelsior. Even through the pressure suit, the second hand crashed about like a mjölnir. I put my hand over it, felt the bunny-thump of Wilma Sue’s heart as I’d once known it flesh to flesh. Even while charging a line of a thousand Huns, I hadn’t been as nervous as I was at that instant.

  Rig had been right: had I exceeded five-foot-eleven by even an inch, I wouldn’t have fit into the washing-machine-sized capsule. Engineers secured me as if for electric-chair execution (shoulder harness, crotch harness, chest strap, lap belt, toe guards), asked for final words I did not have, then fit the hatch into place and began bolting it shut. In the tiny, reverberant space, it sounded like a coffin lid being hammered, or, come to think of it, this cubby hole of mine beneath the World Trade Center while Héctor was walling me inside.

  Hysteria might overwhelm anyone in such a setting, so I busied myself reconciling the SEDR diagrams I’d studied with the real-life control panel. Like Mrs. White’s Kitchen of Tomorrow, it was a futuristic display: altimeter dial, attitude vector, retrograde timer, voltage meter, pressure gauge, Mayday toggle. A technician’s voice broke into my helmet’s ear speakers and began plodding through pre-launch checklists. Uninterested in safeguards, I simply parroted whatever he said.

  “Auto retro jettison switch. Arm?”

  “Roger. Auto retro jettison switch. Arm.”

>   “Retro heater switch. Off?”

  “Roger. Retro heater switch off.”

  “Landing bag switch. Auto?”

  “Roger. Landing bag switch. Auto.”

  These perfectly dispassionate transactions were cut short at T-minus fifteen minutes to pipe in the Navy chaplain’s customary prayer. Dammit—I had forgotten to forbid it! I daren’t listen to one empathetic word, not if I wished to uphold marble resolve. Helmet speakers, however, made covering one’s ears impossible. In quick defense, I roused a reserve of hostility.

  “Gracious Gød . . .”

  Hah! Will He be so gracious when I’m through with Him?

  “. . . as a precious human life is propelled into the heavens . . .”

  Precious? It’s funny, Gød, how you never treated me as such.

  “. . . may success crown our efforts to explore not only an expanding universe . . .”

  I had no intent to explore. Only to hunt.

  “. . . but a more peaceful one in which we may live with ourselves and with thee. Amen.”

  “Amen!” cried I into my helmet mike. “Amen, amen!” I was cracked in half by laughter bursting like putrescent gas from a People Garden partygoer; Suits reported tremors from my biosensors.

  My speakers snarled as Scott Carpenter went live. The Seven had been spread across the worldwide network to man the tracking stations, and though for Glenn they’d have been happy to do it, for Finch the obligation required the gobbling of vast smorgasbords of pride. Carpenter, the most obedient Astro, had pulled duty as my Mission Control CapCom.

  “Harpocrates 7, is everything go?”

  Shepard and Grissom had been permitted to name their crafts, but NASA, justifiably worried that I might call mine Fuck Off 7, had applied the standard Greek signature, though nothing so rousing as “Mercury” or the upcoming “Gemini” and “Apollo.” I merited no better than Harpocrates, the god of silence. To them, it was a nod to the mission’s confidentiality; to me, it was a thorned souvenir of a NASA career hamstrung by acquiescence.

  “A-OK,” replied I.

  Eighty-three years on Planet Earth shredded itself down to seconds. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one—

  —and, like that, my fate was my own once again.

  A million seagulls flapping at once: it was the racket of rocket flames effervescing from beneath the fins of the Atlas. The capsule shook and my skeleton began to rattle, bone off bone, until a low-pitched howl engulfed that noise and everything else. Concentrate, Zebulon! The SEDR had told me to what? To what? To start the manual clock! I punched it with my gloved fist.

  “Roger,” cried I. “Liftoff and the clock is running!”

  Quakes overwhelmed sensations of ascent for thirty seconds, or as it seemed to your humble narrator, thirty billion years, before I could feel Harpocrates 7 begin to rise. The bright coins of tarmac light softened to a daisy glow and then evaporated altogether beneath whipping white clouds. The rib I’d snapped above Berlin, realized I, felt pinched. I looked down. It was my harness, digging into my suit like a giant, clenched hand. Could I still speak? I tried, and to my own shock, rehearsed words burbled out in proper order.

  “This is Harpocrates 7. One-point-two g, cabin fourteen psi, fuel is go, oxygen is go, over.”

  “Roger that, Harpocrates 7.” Carpenter sounded a tad impressed. “Over.”

  The capsule hit supersonic speed at sixty seconds, and when it hit the zone of highest pressure began shuddering like a cocktail shaker. The control panel blurred, and I felt my organs squish against my spine. Being intimate with my innards, I recognized each weight like an old foe: the tantrum fists of kidneys, the indolent shove of intestines, the gung-ho slug of liver. There came a penetrating whine. Here it was, the inevitable glitch; the capsule was disintegrating and next would come a spindrift of sparks, the scream of ruptured steel, a fireball par excellence, and the full-body gasp of being ripped into chunks and spat into the void.

  But the ride evened. Carpenter’s voice reached through the cacophony, asking for updates, did I copy, did I copy, and without thought I reported four g, cabin pressure five-point-five, isolated battery twenty-nine, fuel still a go, oxygen still a go. Carpenter said he heard me, he heard me loud and he heard me clear, and there was a relieved break in his voice suggesting that, despite the new miles between us, he and I were tied more closely than ever, and as of this moment I was not Major Redundant, not the Fail-safe, but rather a real Astro, part of the Mercury Eight. I had a tearful urge to thank him, but I chewed and swallowed it. Now was the time to cut such tethers, not tighten them.

  T-plus two minutes and twenty-two seconds and I passed from purple sky to black. The thrusters tapered, the Marman Clamp released, the posigrade rockets fired, and with a grumble the capsule and missile separated. I crooked my neck and from the edge of the window watched the massive, fantastical tower of the missile arc off into space, leaving my tiny spacecraft all alone. Separation would have created a trail of smoke, my very own umbilical, but at night had anyone down below seen it? If they hadn’t, was my separation real?

  G-forces equalized, and I felt the drowsy tumble of antigravity. The SEDR had assured me that I’d be traveling at Mach 7 (that’s five thousand miles per hour, Civilian), but the sensation was a paradoxical stillness. After a long existence overfull with motion, it was an astonishing thing, purer than the mute heights of Montana, a nothingness befitting a Nothing in Particular. Carpenter, realized I, spoke more softly now, but was still asking for the requisite thirty-second updates. How could I possibly comply beyond the hokum of A-OK, A-OK, A-OK? I was no longer being hurled by robot arms; I was Kal-El and I was flying.

  Three boosters fired, one after the other, whooshing like faucets, and I nearly sobbed into my mike for them to stop it, stop it, stop it! They could keep their service medals, motorcades, parades, receptions, speeches, and game-show guest spots; all I wanted was this glorious stasis, this physicalization of la silenziosità, this neither-here-nor-there deliverance from everything I’d done wrong and had had done wrong to me, to last but a few seconds longer.

  NASA’s remote control steering was indifferent to pleas. I could tell by the meadow of star-flowers scrolling past that Harpocrates 7 had begun its turnaround maneuver to position itself for smooth orbiting and eventual reentry. My feeling of peace peeled away to resentment. I was being pushed across a chess board like a pawn. Hadn’t I concocted some great big plan to reject this?

  Into my sightline, like a cresting whale, rose the Earth.

  It was an object of immense, blinding clarity, a brilliant blue sphere frosted with clouds. Below me was a land mass that couldn’t be America, for it was tidy and pocket-sized, hardly the boundless, gnarly morass through which I’d hacked and blazed. But America it was, full-breasted like an early bird, Florida its worm-getting beak, the radiant aqua of tropical waters its puffed plumage.

  “Harpocrates 7,” said Carpenter. “You have a go for three orbits. Over.”

  I swore that I could see individual sea swells, the boughs of the tallest redwoods, the bones of dinosaurs bleaching in badlands. Such pristine depth of focus sharpened my own focus. Everything about my mad, masterly plan rushed into my hollow spaces. Three orbits, CapCom? So quotidian a sortie. No, the flight of Harpocrates 7 was going to do a lot more than that.

  The Atlantic Ocean spread its sparkling cape into the Western Hemisphere’s sun, proving beyond doubt that swaggering cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had been a nearsighted nitwit. After his pacesetting orbit, he’d been quoted as saying, “I didn’t see Gød.” How could he have missed Him? Gød, that blatherskite, couldn’t help but be the Barker of His own Pageant, casting His spectacle across land, water, and ozone. He could claim this land if He had created it, fair enough. But I was a Columbus searching for port, and the ship I captained was riddled with interstellar smallpox.

  You recall the April 9, 1959, introduction of the Mercury Seven? One newsman’s question had been cheeky: “Could I
ask for a show of hands of how many are confident that they will come back from outer space?” All hands had gone up; Glenn had displayed good humor by lifting both palms. I’d been too busy stewing over my back-row assignment to make the pertinent observation that the opposite of “come back” was not “die.” It was “keep going.” And that, Dearest Reader, was precisely what I planned to do.

  Funny, isn’t it, that Mission Control had failed to wish me “Gødspeed” when I was the only Astro bent on attaining it?

  XII.

  THE SEVEN HAD DEMANDED THAT the Mercury capsules be fitted with manual controls, and it was thanks to their obstinacy that I, over African skies, was able to enact what I’d come to think of as Phase One. Wally Schirra was on the headset at the tracking station in Kano, Nigeria, and it was with the unflappable evenness of the fighter jock that he gave expression to our little problem.

  “Harpocrates 7, this is KNO. The time is now 2:14:27 GMT. We’re picking up nonstandard signals from your gyros. Please confirm. Over.”

  “A-OK,” murmured I.

  “Harpocrates 7, that came through a bit garbled. I’m on UHF. Repeat, on UHF frequency. Over.”

  “A-OK, A-OK.”

  “Harpocrates 7, stand by. I’ve got a relay from Mission Control. You have engaged manual override and need to resume automatic pilot, copy? Repeat: resume automatic pilot. Do you copy? Over.”

  “A-OK, A-OK, A-OK.”

  “Harpocrates 7. Now, look. They’re getting a little worked up at the Cape. Terminate manual handle. Do you copy? Over.”

  The beautiful thing about space travel was the imperceptible but incredible speed—no single Earth location could connect with me for longer than five minutes. Wally suffocated in static, and I entered the blackout zone of the Indian Ocean. I secured my gloved hand around the joisted steering rod and whispered to myself what I’d studied: back and forth for pitch, side to side for roll, twist for yaw. I moved the stick; the outer jets spat like llamas before doing what I said. It was exquisite how the best-laid plans of hundreds of geniuses could be disrupted by a single seize of dead muscle.