The Right Stuff

9 — The Vote

Even the scenery was depressing. There was nothing to see but the snow blowing over the road and the stunted countryside rolling by in slow motion. Between Langley and Arlington even the woods looked stunted. There had been a buzzard the day before, but the landscape was all so raggedy it didn't even look good in the snow. Over the car radio he could hear John F. Kennedy delivering his inaugural address. The reception was poor, and the broadcast kept fading in and out through the static. The announcer, who spoke in hushed tones as if he were describing a tennis match, had said that it was seventeen degrees in Washington and a wind was blowing on Capitol Hill and Kennedy was bareheaded and wore no overcoat. Kennedy had his voice set at a strangely high pitch. He seemed to be screaming to keep warm. He was screaming a great many sonorous rhetorical figures. The words merely drifted by John Glenn, as he drove, like the snow and the stunted scrub pines outside.

That was ironic, because at first Loudon Wainwright thought that Glenn was totally absorbed in the new President's inaugural address. He kept fiddling with the dial, battling the static, trying to make the broadcast come in better. When Wainwright made the occasional comment, Glenn had no response at all. Wainwright was one of the Life writers assigned to the personal stories of the astronauts, and he had come to know Glenn fairly well. At this very moment Glenn was giving him a lift to National Airport before heading home. If John had been determined to digest every single word and nuance of Kennedy's address, it would not have been terribly surprising. John was one of those rare celebrities who came pretty much as advertised. He really was serious about God, country, home, and hearth. He probably even had it in him to take a Presidential inaugural address seriously. But then Wainwright noticed that John not only wasn't reacting to what he said, he wasn't reacting to what Kennedy said, either. He was a thousand miles away, as the saying goes, and not particularly happy to be there.

The curious thing, in light of what happened yesterday, was that for about three months the intense competitive feeling among the seven of them had died down. The entire Mercury project, the astronauts included, had been in serious—no, horrendous—trouble. After the MA-1 fiasco and the Popped Cork fiasco, it had no longer been a question of which one of them was going to get the first flight, but whether any of them would go into space at all, or even continue to bear the title astronaut.

Naturally it would have been crushing to Bob Gilruth, Hugh Dryden, Walt Williams, Christopher Kraft, and all of the NASA brass to have Mercury canceled for delays or ineptness or whatever. But not so crushing as it would have been to the Mercury astronauts! Oh, no! To be pronounced the seven bravest lads in America, the fearless pioneers of space, to be on the cover of Life, to have factory workers in San Diego agonize over your hide and every sweet little Konakai cookie on both shores lust over it… and then to be told, "Thanks a lot, but we've called the whole thing off"… They would become factory seconds! They would be back in uniform, in the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marines, saluting and flapping in the breeze as the seven most laughable duds in the service!

One had only to imagine it… and it was easy to imagine by late 1960. All of them, astronauts, administrators, engineers, technicians, were suddenly in such trouble that a wagon-train phase began. Everyone, from top to bottom, began pulling together like pioneers besieged in the pass. It was now of supreme importance to push the Mercury-Redstone program forward before the new President and his science advisor, Wiesner, had time to go to work on NASA. The frantic hope was to complete some tests that would bring the program so close to the first manned flight that Kennedy could hardly afford to dismantle Project Mercury without letting them have at least one try. So everyone rode hell-for-leather for the top of the next hill, and never mind the ordinary precautions. The number of unmanned tests was cut down drastically. Tests were scheduled one on top of the other, so that the first manned flight might be scheduled within three months. They were ready to try things they would never have thought of doing before. Rather than prepare a new rocket for the next test, they used the one that had been left on the pad after the Popped Cork fiasco. After all, it hadn't blown up; it had merely refused to leave the ground.

That was the spirit of the hour—ride! mas alla! over the next hill! don't look back!—when Bob Gilruth called in Glenn and the other six for a meeting at the office at Langley just before Christmas. Gilrath had always been a sympathetic soul around the seven of them; and now that the cowboy rush was on, his concern for them was written all over his face. The message seemed to be: "It's terrible, but I may have to send one of you boys up without all the precautions that I would like to take." When they assembled in his office, he told them he wanted them to take a little "peer vote," along the following lines: "If you can't make the first flight yourself, which man do you think should make it?" Peer votes were not unknown in the military. They had been used among seniors at West Point and Annapolis for some time. For that matter, during the selection process for astronaut, the groups of finalists at Lovelace and Wright-Patterson took peer votes. But peer votes had never amounted to anything more than what they were prima facie: an indication of how men at the same level regarded one another, whether for reasons of professionalism or friendship or jealousy or whatever. Pilots regarded peer votes as a waste of time, because a man either had the right stuff in the air or he didn't, and a military career, particularly among those with "the uncritical willingness to face danger," was not a personality contest. But there was something about Bob Gilruth's deep concern… They were to think the whole thing over and put their choices down on paper and drop them off at Gilruth's office. The look on Bob Gilruth's face set off a neural alarm.

Even so, the esprit throughout NASA was tremendous over that Christmas holiday. Everyone was working like a zealot. Christmas itself was a mere syncopation in the mad cowboy rush. Bureaucratic lines no longer meant anything. Anyone in Project Mercury could immediately get in to see anybody else about any problem that came up. At Langley, if some GS-14 wanted to get hold of Gilruth face to face, all he had to do was wait around in the cafeteria at lunchtime and walk up to him while he waited in line, edging his tray along the stainless-steel tubing. There weren't enough hours in the day to do all the things that had to be done.

On January 19, the day before Kennedy's inauguration, Gilruth again convened the seven of them in the astronaut office. He said that what he was about to tell them must be kept in strictest confidence. As they all knew, he said, the original plan had been to select the pilot for the first flight on the very eve of the flight itself. But he had thought better of that, because it now seemed clear that the prime pilot should have maximum access to the procedures trainer and other teaming facilities during the final weeks before the flight. So a decision had been made as to who was to be the prime pilot and as to which two men would be the backup pilots for the first flight. In due course, the press would be given the names of all three men, but the fact that the prime pilot had already been chosen would not be revealed. The press and the public would be told only that it would be one of these three men. All three men would go through the same training, and it would seem that the original plan was being adhered to, and the prime pilot would be spared the public pressure that would otherwise bear down on him.

This had been a very difficult decision, he said, because all seven of them had worked with such dedication, and he knew that any of them would make a capable pilot for the first flight. But it had been necessary to come to a decision. And the decision was that the prime pilot would be… Alan Shepard. The backup pilots would be John Glenn and Gus Grissom.

The words hit Glenn like a ray. The cause, effect, and outrageous results thereof came to him in a flash, and he was stunned. Al was staring at the floor. Then Al looked up at him and the rest of them with his eyes gleaming, resisting the temptation to break into a grin of triumph. Yet Al had triumphed! It was unbelievable, and yet it was really happening. Glenn knew what he had to do and he made himself do it. He made himself smile the earnest-looking smile of the runner-up and congratulate Al and shake his hand. Now the other five were doing the same thing, coming up to Al and smiling earnest smiles and shaking his hand. It was a shocking thing, and yet it had happened—Glenn was absolutely sure of it. To get around the agony of having to designate someone to sit up on top of the first rocket—a peer vote! After he, Glenn, had spent twenty-one months doing everything humanly possible to impress Gilruth and the rest of the brass, it had been turned into a popularity contest among the boys.

A peer vote!—it was unbelievable! Every move Glenn had made undoubtedly worked against him like a captured weapon in the peer vote. In the peer vote he was the prig who had risen at the seance like John Calvin himself and told them all to keep their pants zipped and their wicks dry. He was the Eddie Attaboy who had gotten up every morning at dawn and done all that ostentatious running and tried to make the rest of them look bad. He was the Harry Hairshirt who lived like an Early Christian martyr in the BOQ. He was the Willie Workadaddy who drove around in a broken-down Prinz, like a lonely beacon of restraint and self-sacrifice in a squall of car crazies.

But Smilin' Al Shepard—Smilin' Al was the fighter jock's fighter jock, if all you were doing was taking a peer vote. He was His Lordship of Langley and the King of the Cape. He gave off the aura of the hot pilot. Since they had done practically no flying for twenty-one months, there had been no way for Glenn or anyone else to impress the others in the air—and so it came down to a question of which one other than he, Glenn, the Offending Saint, looked the most like a hot pilot. It was not only a popularity contest, it was a cosmetic popularity contest. How else was he to regard it? It was as if the past twenty-one months of training had never happened.

And so now Glenn was driving back home, through the stunted Virginia countryside and the raggedy snowflakes, to tell Annie the secret bad news. And the new President was screaming over the car radio: "Together let us explore the stars…" Shepard would be first! It was incredible. Shepard would be… the first man to go into space! He would be famous throughout eternity! And here was something even more unbelievable: he, John Glenn, for the first time in his career, would be one of those who were left behind.

The astronaut headquarters on the base at the Cape were in the building known as Hangar S. The hangar had been rebuilt inside to house the procedures trainer, a pressure chamber, and most of the other facilities an astronaut would need in the final preparations for a flight. There was a suite of rooms for living quarters, a dining room, a medical examination room, a ready room in which the astronaut would put on his pressure suit, a special doorway where the astronaut would get into a van to be driven out to the launch pad, and so forth. The boys seldom stayed there overnight, however, much preferring the motels in Cocoa Beach—and of course they had yet to use Hangar S for an actual flight. In fact, the first creatures to use Hangar S fully, from procedures trainer to rocket launch, were the chimpanzees. The chimpanzees were already at Hangar S on the morning before the inauguration, when Gilruth told the seven men that Alan Shepard had won the competition for the first flight. The chimpanzees had been there, ready for the first flight for almost three weeks. The veterinarians at Holloman Air Force Base had cut the original field of forty chimpanzees down to eighteen and, finally, to six, two males and four females, and had flown them to the Cape and installed them out back of Hangar S in a fenced-in compound. In the middle were two long, narrow trailer units, each made up of two eight-foot-wide trailers hooked up end to end. Around them was an assortment of other trailers and vans, including a special transfer van for carrying a chimpanzee from Hangar S to the rocket launch pad. The press was not invited into the little trailer park, nor would the good Gent have been interested. The chimpanzee test seemed to be merely one more tedious preliminary to the main event. Not even people at the base had much of an idea what was going on out back of Hangar S. The apes spent most of the day inside the two double-trailer units. The trailers were home and office, cage and operant conditioning cubicle, for the beasts. Inside each unit were three cages, two procedures trainers, and a mockup of the Mercury capsule. The veterinarians in their white smocks and the attendants in their white T-shirts and white ducks had a trailer unit of their own; they were on hand, in shifts, twenty-four hours a day. Within those long skinny trailers the biggest countdown in the brief history of Project Mercury was underway. Every day for twenty-nine days, at the heart of the American space facility, out back of a great moldering hangar, on a stone boondock scrub-pine spit on the point of Cape Canaveral, a tribe of six scrawny apes and twenty humans in white were up in the early morning, on the move, restless, earnest, driven, scratching, flapping, ricocheting through the trailers' innards, yammering at fate and each other. The humans were giving the apes physical examinations and wiring them from top to bottom, sticking eight-inch thermometers up their rectums, imbedding sensors in the thoracic cages, clamping the psychomotor stimulus plates on the soles of their feet, threading them into their restraint harnesses, strapping them into their procedures-trainer cubicles, closing the hatches, pressurizing the cubicles with pure oxygen, inserting the cubicles in the mock Mercury capsules, and then flashing the lights. The apes had to throw their switches on cue or get the dread dose of volts in the soles of the feet. How their scrawny fingers did fly! All six apes were stringy-looking, like those overtrained fleaweight college wrestlers who have run so many laps and taken so many B-12s and diuretics at the training table that they appear to be little dried-up lengths of gristle, nodes, and nerve ganglia. But out back of Hangar S the little bastards could play their Mercury consoles like a dream.

The white-smock humans zapped the apes through their workouts right up to the last. On January 30, on the eve of the flight, they made the final selection. Originally the first astronaut was to have been chosen at this same stage. They chose a male chimpanzee as the prime flier and a female as the backup. The Air Force had bought the male from a supplier in the Cameroons, West Africa, eighteen months ago, when he was about two years old. All this time the animals had been known by numbers. He was test subject Number 61. On the day of the flight, however, his name was announced to the press as Ham. Ham was an acronym for Holloman Aerospace Medical Center.

Before dawn on January 31 they woke Number 61 up and led him out of his cage and fed him and gave him a medical examination and attached his biosensors—and put the zap plates on his feet—and put him in his cubicle and closed the hatch and depressurized it. Another goddamned day with these earnest hard-zapping ballbreaking white-smock humans. The vets put the cubicle in the transfer van, and the chimpanzee was taken to the launch pad, out by the sea. The sun was up now, and a white rocket with a Mercury capsule and an escape tower on top of it stood gleaming, and they took Number 61 in his cubicle up an elevator on a gantry beside the rocket and then put the cubicle in the capsule. There were more than a hundred NASA engineers and technicians nearby, working on the flight, monitoring consoles, and an entire team of veterinarians was monitoring the dials that read the ape's heartbeat, respiration, and temperature. Hundreds more NASA and Navy personnel were strung out across the Atlantic, toward Bermuda, in a communications and recovery network. This was the most crucial test in the entire history of the space program and they were giving it everything they had.

It was four hours before they were able to fire the rocket. The biggest problem was an inverter, a device that was supposed to prevent rogue surges of power in the Mercury capsule's control system. The inverter kept overheating. All the while during the "hold," as they called the delay, Chris Kraft, director for the first ape flight, just as he would be for the first human flight, kept asking how the ape was doing, apparently on the presumption that the long confinement would make the beast anxious. The doctors checked their dials. The ape didn't seem to have a nerve in his body. He was lying up there in his cubicle as if he lived there. And why not? For the ape every hour of the delay was like a holiday. No lights! No zaps! Peace… bliss! They gave him two fifteen-minute workouts with the lights, just to keep him alert. Otherwise it was terrific. "Hold" for an eternity! Don't let anything stop you!

When they fired the rocket, shortly before noon, it climbed at a slightly higher angle than it was supposed to, driving Number 61 back into his couch with a force of seventeen g's, i.e., seventeen times his own weight, five g's more than anticipated. His heart rate shot up as he strained against the force, but he didn't panic for a moment. He had been through this same sensation many times on the centrifuge. As long as he just took it and didn't struggle, they wouldn't zap all those goddamned blue bolts into the soles of his feet. There were a lot worse things in this world than g-forces… He was weightless now, hurtling toward Bermuda, and they flashed the lights in his cubicle, and the ape's pulse returned to normal, to no more than what it was on the ground. The usual shit was flowing. The main thing was to keep ahead of those blue bolts in the feet!… He started pushing the buttons and throwing the switches like the greatest electric Wurlitzer organist who ever lived, never missed a signal… Then the Mercury retro-rockets were fired, automatically, and the capsule came down through the atmosphere at the same angle at which it had gone up. Another 14.6 g's hit Number 61 on the way down, making him feel as if his eyeballs were coming out of his head. He had been through so-called eyeballs-out g's, too, many times, on the centrifuge. It could get a lot worse. There were worse things than feeling as if his eyeballs were coming out… The goddamned zap plates on his feet, for a start… So far as mere space flight was concerned, Number 61 was fearless. The beast had been operantly conditioned, aerospatially desensitized.

The high angle of the launch also caused the capsule to overshoot the planned splashdown area by 132 miles. So it took two hours for a Navy helicopter crew to find the capsule out in the Atlantic and bring it aboard a recovery ship. The capsule and the ape were riding up and down in seven-foot swells. Water had begun to seep in where the landing bag had torn loose in the heavy seas. The capsule was wheezing and gurgling with water and pitching up and down like a ball in the waves. It wouldn't have stayed afloat too much longer. Eight hundred pounds of water had seeped in. For the ordinary prudent human being it would have been two hours of freaking terror. They brought the capsule to a recovery ship, the Donner, and opened it and brought out the ape's cubicle and opened the hatch. The ape was lying there with his arms crossed. They offered him an apple and he took it and ate it with considerable deliberation, as if gloriously bored. Those two hours of being slung up and down in the open sea in seven-foot gulps inside a closed coffin-like cubicle had been… perhaps the best time ever in this miserable land of the white smocks! No voices! No zaps! No bolts, no lengths of hose, no more breaking of his bloody balls…

There was great elation among the astronauts and almost everyone involved in Project Mercury. There seemed to be no way that Kennedy and Wiesner could intervene and keep them from trying at least one manned flight. The pall of the Day the Cork Popped had been removed.

Late the next day they flew Number 61 back to the Cape and Hangar S, where a great mob of reporters and photographers were now waiting out in the compound by the Mercury capsule that had been used for the training. The vets led the ape out of a van. As the mob closed in and the flashbulbs began exploding, the animal—brave little Ham, as he was now known—became furious. He bared his teeth. He began snapping at the bastards. It was all the vets could do to restrain him. This was immediately—on the spot!—interpreted by the press, the seemly Gent, as an understandable response to the grueling experience he had just been through. The vets took the ape back inside the van until he calmed down. Then they led him out again, trying to get him near a mockup of a Mercury capsule, where the television networks had set up cameras and tremendous lights. The reporters and photographers surged forward again, yammering, yelling, exploding more camera lights, shoving, groaning, cursing—the usual yahoo sprawl, in short—and the animal came un-glued again, ready to twist the noodle off anybody he could get his hands on. This was interpreted by the Gent as a manifestation of Ham's natural fear upon laying eyes once again on the capsule, which looked precisely like the one that had propelled him into space and subjected him to such severe physical stresses.

The stresses the ape was reacting to were probably of quite another sort. Here he was, back in the compound where they had zapped him through his drills for a solid month. Just two years ago he had been captured in the jungles of Africa, separated from his mother, shipped in a cage to a goddamned desert in New Mexico, kept prisoner, prodded and shocked by a bunch of humans in white smocks, and here he was, back in a compound where they had been zapping him through their fucking drills for a solid month, and suddenly there was a whole new mob of humans on hand! Even worse than the white smocks! Louder! Crazier! Totally out of their gourds! Yammering, roaring, brawling, exploding lights beside their bug-eyed skulls! Suppose they threw him to these assholes! Fuck this—

At some point in the madhouse scene out back of Hangar S, a photograph was taken in which Ham was either grinning or had on a grimace that looked like a grin in the picture. Naturally, this was the picture that went out over the wire services and was printed in newspapers throughout America. Such was the response of the happy chimpanzee to being the first ape in outer space… A fat happy grin… Such was the perfection with which the Proper Gent observed the proprieties.

Well, there were some big grins, all right, up in the high desert, at Edwards, among the brethren. Here were some men who had something to smile about. Now the whole business of Project Mercury was no doubt clear to everyone. No one, not even in the general public, could possibly miss the point now. It was that obvious. The first flight—the coveted first flight of the new bird—that full-bore first flight that every test pilot strove for—had just been made in Project Mercury. And the test pilot was an ape! An ape made the first flight! "A college-trained chimpanzee"!—to use the very words that they had heard Astronaut Deke Slayton himself use before the Society of Experimental Test Pilots. And the ape had performed flawlessly, done as well as any man could possibly have done—for there was nothing for a man to do in the Mercury system except push a few perfunctory buttons and switches. This any college-trained chimpanzee could do also! He hadn't missed a beat! Give him a signal and he'll toggle you a switch! To see the point—and surely all the world now saw the point—you only had to imagine sending an ape up for the first flight of the X-15. You would have a twenty-million-dollar hole in the ground and a pulverized ape. But in Project Mercury an ape was fine! First-rate! In fact… the ape was an astronaut! He was the first one! Perhaps the female ape who backed him up deserved the next flight. Let her fly, goddamn it! She has earned it as much as the seven human ones—she's been through the same training!… and so forth and so on… The brethren let their beer-call brains soar. Perhaps the ape would go to the White House and get a medal. (Why not!) Perhaps the ape would address the September meeting of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots in Los Angeles. (Why not!—another astronaut had done it, Deke Slayton, without flying at all!) Oh, it was a laugh and a half, the whole thing. For now the truth was out—it was obvious in a way that no one in the world could miss.

And in the days that followed, the first days of February 1961, the True Brothers waited for this revelation to sweep across the press and the public and the Kennedy Administration and the military brass. But, strange to say. there was not even one such sign anywhere. In fact, they could begin to see signs of something quite the opposite. It was incredible, but the world was now full of people who were saying:

"My God, do you mean there are men brave enough to try what the ape has just gone through?"

John Glenn found himself in a ridiculous situation. It was nothing less than a charade. He had to pretend to be in the running for the first flight—and then he would read in the newspapers that he was the front runner. Since he had always been the fair-haired boy of the seven, that was the way it kept coming out. He and Gus Grissom had to tag along with Shepard through the training grind to keep up the fiction that the decision had not yet been made. In fact, Shepard was now the king—and Al knew how to act like the king, His Majesty the Prime Pilot—and Glenn was just a spear carrier.

Yet the charade, which Gilruth himself insisted on, also offered Glenn one last chance. No more than a handful of people knew that Shepard had been chosen for the first flight. Therefore, it was not too late to change the decision, to rectify what Glenn viewed as the incredible and outrageous business of the peer vote. But if this meant going over someone's head in one way or another… well, in the military it was a grave error, a serious breach of all that was holy, to go over the head of a superior unless (1) it was a critical situation and you were in the right and (2) your brash move worked (i.e., those at the top backed you up). On the other hand, there was nothing in the Presbyterian faith, another code Glenn knew very well, that said you had to stand around shy and obedient while the Pharisees waffled and oscillated, making imaginary snowballs. And was not NASA a civilian agency? (God knew it was not run like the Marines.) Glenn seemed to favor the Presbyterian course. He began talking to people in the hierarchy, asking what they thought of the decision.

He did not argue that he should be the one who was chosen, or not in so many words. He argued that the choice could not be made from a narrow perspective. America's first astronaut would not be merely a test pilot with a mission to carry out; he would be a historic representative of America, and his character would be viewed in that light. If he did not measure up to that test, it would be unfortunate not only for the space program but for the nation.

The new administrator of NASA, appointed by Kennedy to replace T. Keith Glennan, was James E. Webb, a former oil company executive and a political grand master in the Democratic Party. Webb was of a valuable breed well known in Washington: the off-the-ballot politician. The off-the-ballot politician usually looked like a politician, talked like a politician, walked like a politician, loved to mix with politicians, moved and shook with politicians, winked with politicians, sighed ruefully with them. He was the sort of man of whom a congressman or a senator was likely to say: "He speaks my language." The ablest and most distinguished of the off-the-ballot politicians, like Webb, were likely to end up with high-level appointments. Webb had been Director of the Bureau of the Budget and Undersecretary of State under Truman. He was also a great friend of Lyndon Johnson and Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, who was chairman of the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences. For six years Webb had been head of a subsidiary of the Kerr family's oil empire. Webb was the sort of man whom corporations doing work for the government, such as McDonnell Aircraft and Sperry Gyroscope, liked to have on their boards of directors. He looked the part. He had big smooth jowls like Glennan's and even better hair, wavy, thick, as if every strand were nailed in, and dark, but graying smartly, and combed straight back in the manner favored by all serious men of the day. He had the sort of record that made him an ideal appointee to commissions like the Municipal Manpower Commission, which had occupied much of his time since 1959. He was known as a man who could make bureaucracies run. He was used to corner offices with terrific views. He was no fool. What would he have made of this business of Astronaut Glenn's dissatisfaction with the selection of Astronaut Shepard for the first Mercury flight? Gilruth said he had made the decision himself; and it was based on a wide range of criteria, many of them quite objective. Shepard had performed best on the procedures trainer, for example. When Gilruth considered all criteria, and not just the peer vote, Shepard ranked first and Glenn ranked second. So what was Glenn objecting to? It was a bit baffling. But one thing was sure: Webb was not likely to start his tenure as administrator of NASA by taking a flying leap into some incomprehensible dogfight among the seven bravest lads in the history of the United States. Astronaut Glenn's objections—and his last chance to become the world's first man in space—simply sank without a bubble one day, and that was that.

By now, late February of 1961, Glenn was not the only supremely miffed astronaut. Gilruth had finally published the names of the men who would make the first three flights—Glenn, Grissom, and Shepard, always in alphabetical order—implying that no decision had been made as to which of them would make the first flight, due to take place within ninety days. So Life ran a big story with pictures of Glenn, Grissom, and Shepard on the cover with the headline: THE FIRST THREE. Life was really excited about the whole thing. They tried to get NASA to label the first three "the Gold Team" and the rest of them "the Red Team." The Gold Team and the Red Team. Jesus! The picture possibilities alone were fabulous.

This being the fraternal bulletin, Life, the notion of "the first three" struck Slayton, Wally Schirra, Scott Carpenter, and Gordon Cooper as a humiliation. In their minds they were now labeled "the Other Four." There were now the First Three and the Other Four. They had been… left behind! In some hard-to-define way, it was the equivalent of washing out.

Life really did it up in the best Life style. They flew the First Three and the First Three Wives and the First Three Children down to the Cape and took a lot of Inseparable Astronaut Family pictures on Cocoa Beach. The results were bizarre evidence of the determination of the Proper Gent to make everything come out in a seemly fashion. For a start, the travel schedules of the astronauts had made an absolute hash of ordinary home life. To show three astronauts having an outing with their families at the same time, even in different locations, would have been stretching the truth considerably. To present such a spectacle at the Cape—which was, in effect, off limits to wives—was an absolute howler. On top of that, if you were going to put astronaut families together for a frolic on the beach, you could scarcely come up with a less likely combination than the Glenns, the Grissoms, and the Shepards—the clans of the Deacon, the Hossier Grit, and the Icy Commander. They would have passed like ships in the night in even the calmest of times, and these were not the calmest of times. Not even Life with all its powers of orchestration (and they were great) could make it come out right. They ran a big double-truck picture of the First Three and their wives and broods, the glorious First Three tribe, out on the hardtack sands of Cocoa Beach, engrossed (the caption would have one believe) in the sight of an exploratory rocket rising from the base several miles away. In fact, they looked like three families from warring parts of our restless globe who had never laid eyes on each other until they were washed up upon this godforsaken shore together after a shipwreck, shivering morosely in their leisure togs, staring off into the distance, desperately scanning the horizon for rescue vessels, preferably three of them, flying different flags.

As for the Other Four, they might as well have dropped through a crack in the earth.

Glenn worked at being backup astronaut and charade master as if these were the roles the Presbyterian God had elected him to play. He gave it "a hundred percent," to use one of his favorite phrases. Besides… if, in the Lord's mysterious workings… it so happened that Shepard was not able to make the first flight, for some reason or another, he would be a hundred percent ready to step in. As a matter of fact, by April it had become blessedly, healingly possible for a fighter jock like Glenn to swallow his personal ambitions and lose himself in the mission itself. A true sense of mission had taken over Project Mercury. The mighty Soviet Integral had just sent two more huge Korabls into orbit with dummy cosmonauts and dogs aboard, and both flights had been successful from beginning to end. The race was coming down to the wire. Gilruth had even considered sending Shepard up in March, but Wernher von Braun had insisted on one last test of the Redstone rocket. The test went perfectly and everyone now wondered, in hindsight, if valuable time had been lost. Shepard's flight was scheduled for May 2, although it was not referred to publicly as Shepard's flight. The charade continued in full force, with Glenn still reading about himself in the newspapers as the likely choice. Around Hangar S there were NASA people who were talking about bringing all three, Glenn, Grissom, and Shepard, out to the launch pad on May 2 in their pressure suits with hoods over their heads, so that no one would know who was taking the first flight until he was inside the capsule. The reason why it should even matter had been long since forgotten.

NASA engineers and technicians at the Cape were pushing themselves so hard in the final weeks people had to be ordered home to rest. It was a grueling time and yet the sort of interlude of adrenal exhilaration that men remember all their lives. It was an interlude of the dedication of body and soul to a cause such as men usually experience only during war. Well… this was war, even though no one had spelled it out in just that way. Without knowing it, they were caught up in the primordial spirit of single combat. Just days from now one of the lads would be up on top of the rocket for real. Everyone felt he had the life of the astronaut, whichever was chosen (only a few knew), in his hands. The MA-1 explosion here at the Cape nine months ago had been a chilling experience, even for veterans of flight test. The seven astronauts had been assembled for the event, partly to give them confidence in the new system. And their gullets had been stuck up toward the sky like everybody else's, when the whole assembly blew to bits over their heads. In a few days one of those very lads would be lying on top of a rocket (albeit a Redstone, not an Atlas) when the candle was lit. Just about everybody here in NASA had seen the boys close up. NASA was like a family that way. Ever since the end of the Second World War the phrase "government bureaucracy" had invariably provoked sniggers. But a bureaucracy was nothing more than a machine for communal work, after all, and in those grueling and gorgeous weeks of the spring of 1961 the men and women of NASA's Space Task Group for Project Mercury knew that bureaucracy, when coupled with a spiritual motivation, in this case true patriotism and profound concern for the life of the single-combat warrior himself—bureaucracy, poor gross hideously ridiculed twentieth-century bureaucracy, could take on the aura, even the ecstasy, of communion. The passion that now animated NASA spread out even into the surrounding community of Cocoa Beach. The grisliest down-home alligator-poaching crackers manning the gasoline pumps on Route A1A would say to the tourists, as the No-Knock flowed, "Well, that Atlas vehicle's given us more fits than a June bug on a porch bulb, but we got real confidence in that Redstone, and I think we're gonna make ft." Everyone who felt the spirit of NASA at that time wanted to be part of it. It took on a religious dimension that engineers, no less than pilots, would resist putting into words. But all felt it.

Whoever had possessed any doubts about Gilruth's powers of leadership dismissed them now. He had all phases of Project Mercury coming together in a coda. His calmness was all at once like a seer's. Wiesner, who had become Kennedy's Cabinet-level science advisor, had ordered a full-scale review of the space program and its progress, meaning of course its lack of progress, and he and a special committee under his jurisdiction kept sending queries and memoranda to NASA about careless planning, disregard of precautions, and the need for an entire series of chimpanzee flights before risking the life of one of the astronauts. At Langley and at the Cape they treated Wiesner and all his minions as if they were aliens. They ignored their paperwork and didn't return their telephone calls. Finally, Gilruth told them that if they wanted that many more chimpanzee flights, they ought to move NASA to Africa. Gilruth seldom said anything cutting or even ironic. But when he did, it stopped people in their tracks.

The launch procedures were now rehearsed endlessly and with great fidelity. The three of them, Shepard, Glenn, and Grissom, were staying in motels in Cocoa Beach, but they would get up early in the morning, before dawn, drive to the base, to Hangar S, have breakfast in the same dining room where Shepard would eat on the morning of the flight, go to the same ready rooms he would use on that morning for the physical exams and for putting on the pressure suit, have the biosensors attached and the suit pressurized, get into the van at the door and ride out to the launch pad, go up in the gantry elevator, get into the capsule on top of the rocket, and go through the procedures training—"Abort! Abort!"—the whole thing—using the actual instrument panel that would be used in flight and the actual radio hookups. All of this was done over and over. They were now using the capsule itself for simulation—just as the chimpanzees had. The idea was to decondition the beast completely, so that there would not be a single novel sensation on the day of the flight itself.

All three of them were taking part, but naturally Shepard, as prime pilot (no other word was used now), had precedence. And he took precedence. The little group in Hangar S now saw Al in both his varieties… and both were king, both the Icy Commander and Smilin' Al. Usually he left the Icy Commander back in Langley and brought only Smilin' Al to the Cape. But now he had both installed at the Cape. As the pressure built up, Al set a standard of coolness and competence that would be hard to top. In the medical examinations, in the heat-chamber sessions, in the altitude-chamber runs, he was as calm as ever. By now the White House had become extremely jittery—fearing what the debacle of a Dead Astronaut would do to American prestige—and so some dress rehearsals were conducted on the centrifuge at Johnsville, with Al and his two charade hands, Glenn and Grissom, taking part, and Al was imperturbable. Likewise, in the eleventh-hour simulations atop the rocket at the Cape. Al showed only one sign of stress: the cycles—Smilin' Al/Icy Commander—now came one on top of the other, in the same place, and alternated so suddenly that the people around him couldn't keep track. They learned a little more about the mysterious Al Shepard here in the eleventh hour. Smilin' Al was a man who wanted very much to be liked, even loved, by those around him. He wanted not just their respect but also their affection. Now, in April, on the eve of the great adventure, Smilin' Al was more jovial and convivial than ever. He did his Jose Jimenez routine. His great grin spread wider and his great beer-call eyes beamed brighter than ever before. Smilin' Al was crazy about a comedy routine that had been developed by a comedian named Bill Dana. It concerned the Cowardly Astronaut and was a great hit. Dana portrayed the Cowardly Astronaut as a stupid immigrant Mexican named Jose Jimenez, whose tongue wrapped around the English language like a taco. The idea was to interview Astronaut Jimenez like a news broadcaster.

You'd say things like: "What has been the most difficult part of astronaut training, Jose?"

"Obtaining de maw-ney, senor."

"The money? What for?"

"For de bus back to Mejico, you betcha, reel queeck, senor."

"I see. Well, now, Jose, what do you plan to do once you're in space?"

"Gonna cry a lot, I theeeenk."

Smilin' Al used to crack up over this routine. He liked to do the Jose Jimenez part; and if he could get someone to feed him the straight lines, he was in Seventh Heaven, Smilin' Al version. Feed him the lines for his Jose Jimenez knock-off, and he'd treat you like the best beer-call good buddy you ever had. Of course, the Cowardly Astronaut routine was also a perfectly acceptable way for bringing up, on the oblique, as it were, the subject of the righteous stuff that the first flight into space would require. But that was probably unconscious on Al's part. The main thing seemed to be the good fun, the camaraderie, the closeness and blustery affection of the squadron on the eve of battle. In these moments you saw Smilin' Al supreme. And in the next moment—

—some poor Air Force lieutenant, thinking this was the same Smilin' Al he had been joking and carrying on with last night, would sing out, "Hey, Al! Somebody wants you on the phone!"—and all at once there would be Al, seething with an icy white fury, hissing out: "If you have something to tell me, Lieutenant… you will call me 'Sir'!" And the poor devil wouldn't know what hit him. Where the hell did that freaking arctic avalanche come from? And then he would realize that… all at once the Icy Commander was back in town.

Of course those few who knew he was the man who was going up first were in a mood to forgive him all… well, save for an astronaut or two… As for the NASA technicians and the military personnel assigned to the mission, they were in a mood of utter adoration of the single-combat warriors, all three of them, for one of them would be placing his hide on top of the rocket. (And our rockets always blow up.) Toward the end the three of them would enter a room for some sort of test… and the technicians and workmen would stop what they were doing and break into applause and beam at them that warm moist smile of sympathy. Without knowing it, they were bestowing homage and applause in the classic manner: before the fact. These little scenes pressed Glenn's powers as charade master to the limit. More of these warm beams would be aimed at him than at either of the other two. He was the one mentioned in the press as the most likely choice. Not only that, he was the warmest of the three, the most consistently friendly toward one and all when he ran into them. It was just about too much. He had to keep smiling and aw-shucking and playing Mr. Modest, just as if it might, in fact, be he who was going up on top of the rocket on May 2 as the first man in the world to risk the mighty shot into space.

And then the omnipotent Integral intervened… a practical joker to the end! Early on the morning of April 12, the fabulous but anonymous Builder of the Integral, Chief Designer of the Sputniks, struck another of his cruel but dramatic blows. Just twenty days before the first scheduled Mercury flight he sent a five-ton Sputnik called Vostok 1 into orbit around the earth with a man aboard, the first cosmonaut, a twenty-seven-year-old test pilot named Yuri Gagarin. Vostok 1 completed one orbit, then brought Gagarin down safely, on land, near the Soviet village of Smelovka.

The omnipotent Integral! NASA had really believed—and the astronauts had really believed—that somehow, in the religious surge of the mission, Shepard's flight would be the first. But there was no putting one over on the Integral, was there! It was as if the Soviets' Chief Designer, that invisible genius, was toying with them. Back in October 1957, just four months before the United States was supposed to launch the world's first artificial earth satellite, the Chief Designer had launched Sputnik 1. In January 1959, just two months before NASA was scheduled to put the first artificial satellite into orbit around the sun, the Chief Designer launched Mechta 1 and did just that. But this one, Vostok 1, in April 1961, had been his piece de resistance. Given the huge booster rockets at his disposal, he seemed to be able to play these little games with his adversaries at will. There was the eerie feeling that he would continue to let NASA struggle furiously to catch up—and then launch some startling new demonstration of just how far ahead he really was.

The Soviets persisted in offering no information as to the Chief Designer's identity. For that matter, they identified no one involved in Gagarin's flight other than Gagarin himself. Nor did they offer any pictures of the rocket or even such elementary data as its length and its rocket thrust. Far from casting any doubt as to the capabilities of the Soviet program, this policy seemed only to inflame the imagination. The Integral! Secrecy was by now accepted as "the Russian way." Whatever the CIA might have been able to do in other parts of the world, in the Soviet Union they drew a blank. Intelligence about the Soviet space program remained very sketchy. Only two things were known: the Soviets were capable of launching a vehicle of tremendous weight, five tons; and whatever goal NASA set for itself, the Soviet Union reached it first. Using those two pieces of information, everyone in the government, from President Kennedy to Bob Gilruth, seemed to experience an involuntary leap of the imagination similar to that of the ancients… who used to look into the sky and see a clump of stars, sparks in the night, and deduce there from the contours of… an enormous bear!… the constellation Ursa Major!… On the evening of Gagarin's flight, April 12, 1961, President Kennedy summoned James E. Webb and Hugh Dryden, Webb's deputy administrator and NASA's highest-ranking engineer, to the White House; they met in the Cabinet room and they all stared into the polished walnut surface of the great conference table and saw… the mighty Integral!… and the Builder!—the Chief Designer!… who was laughing at them… and it was awesome!

In Washington, at Langley, and at the Cape, NASA was deluged with telephone calls from newspapers, wire services, magazines, radio stations—and most callers wanted to know what the astronauts' reaction was to Gagarin's flight. So the First Three, Glenn, Grissom, and Shepard, all prepared statements. Shepard cranked out something that said next to nothing at all; standard government issue. Privately he was put out with Gilruth and von Braun and everyone else for not sending him up in March, as it now appeared they could have.

As usual, it was Glenn whom the press quoted most. He as much as said: "Well, they just beat the pants off us, that's all, and there's no use kidding ourselves about that. But now that the space age has begun, there's going to be plenty of work for everybody." Glenn was considered especially forthright, gracious, and magnanimous. He was big about the thing, as the saying goes—and that seemed especially commendable, since he was still considered the American front runner for the flight that would have made him "the first man in space." He had swallowed his own disappointment like a man.