The Right Stuff

13 — The Operational Stuff

July 4 was not the time of year for anyone to be introduced to Houston, Texas, although just what the right time would be was hard to say. For eight months Houston was an unbelievably torrid effluvial sump with a mass of mushy asphalt, known as Downtown, set in the middle. Then for two months, starting in November, the most amazing winds came sweeping down from Canada, as if down a pipe, and the humid torpor turned into a wet chill. The remaining two months were the moderate ones, although not exactly what you would call spring. The clouds closed in like a lid, and the oil refineries over by Galveston Bay saturated the air, the nose, the lungs, the heart, and the soul with the gassy smell of oil funk. There were bays, canals, lakes, lagoons, bayous everywhere, all of them so greasy and toxic that if you trailed your hand in the water off the back of your rowboat you would lose a knuckle. The fishermen used to like to tell the weekenders: "Don't smoke out there or you'll set the bay on fire." All the poisonous snakes known to North America were in residence there: rattlers, copperheads, cottonmouths, and corals.

No, there was no best time to be introduced to Houston, Texas, but July 4 was the worst. And it was on July 4, 1962, that the seven Mercury astronauts moved to Houston. For the prodigious effort that Kennedy's moon program would require, NASA was building a Manned Spacecraft Center on a thousand acres of cattle pasture south of Houston near Clear Lake, which was not a lake but an inlet and was about as clear as the eyeballs of a poisoned bass. The astronauts, Gilruth, most of the Langley and the Cape personnel would move to Houston, although the Cape would continue to be the launching center. The small scale and modest appearance of Langley and the Cape had somehow been perfect for the hell-for-leather mas alla phase that Project Mercury had just been through. They all knew Houston would be bigger. The rest they could never have guessed.

They stepped out of the airplane at the Houston airport and started gulping in the molten air. It was 96 degrees. Not that it mattered particularly; they had been assured that their entry into Houston would be easygoing and casual, Texas-style. There would be a zippy little motorcade through Downtown, just to give the good folks a look-see… and then there would be a cocktail party with a few prominent local figures, during which they could let their hair down and knock back a couple of long cool ones, or whatever, and relax.

Waiting there at the airport is a lineup of convertibles, one for each astronaut and his family with his name on a big paper banner taped to the side. So off they go in a motorcade, all seven of them and their wives and children, except for Jo Schirra, who was still at Langley recovering from some minor surgery. Pretty soon they're moving through the streets of Houston at a good clip, and it seems painless enough, but then all seven cars head down a ramp, into the bowels of an arena called the Houston Coliseum.

A bone-splitting chill hits them. They shudder and shake their heads. They are down inside some vast underground parking lot. The place is air-conditioned Houston-style, which is to say, within an inch of your life. There is a whole army of frozen people waiting down there in the gloaming, endless rows of marching bands in uniform, standing there like ice sculpture, politicians waiting in yet more convertibles, too cold to open their mouths, police men, firemen, National Guard troops, stiff and still as lead, and more bands. Then they turn right around and head out of the underground parking lot, up the ramp, and back out into the blast of sunlight, a hundred degrees of heat, and the asphalt, which was lying there heaving and rippling in the caloric waves. All at once they are at the head of a big parade through the streets of Houston. Well, not quite in the lead. In the lead convertible now is a Texas congressman, a rubicund fellow named Albert P. Thomas, an influential member of the House Appropriations Committee, waving a ten-gallon hat, as if to say, "Look what I brought you!"

It began to dawn on the boys and their wives that these people, the businessmen and the politicians, looked upon the opening of the Manned Spacecraft Center and the arrival of the astronauts as about the biggest thing in Houston history. Neiman-Marcus and all the other high-tone stores, the great banks and museums and other grand institutions, all the class, all the Culture, were in Dallas. By Houston lights Dallas was Paris, once you set your watch to Central Standard, and Houston was nothing but oil and hard grabbers. The space program and the seven Mercury astronauts were going to make Boom Town respectable, legitimate, a part of America's soul. So the big parade began with Representative Albert Thomas's waving ten-gallon hat signaling the start of the redemption of Houston.

The seven pilots and their wives thought they had seen every sort of parade there was, but this one was sui generis. There were thousands of people lining the streets. They did not make a sound, however. They stood there four and five deep at the curbs, sweating and staring. They sweated a river and they stared ropes. They just stared and sweated. The seven lads, each in his emblazoned convertible, were standing up grinning and waving, and the wives were smiling and waving, and the children were smiling and looking around—everyone was doing the usual—and the crowds just stared back. They didn't even smile. They looked at them with a morose curiosity, as if they were prisoners of war or had come from Alpha Centauri and no one was sure whether or not they comprehended the local lingo. Every now and then some very old person would wave and yell something hearty and encouraging, but the rest were just planted there in the sun like tarbabies. Of course, anyone fool enough to stand around in the asphalt mush of Downtown at noon watching a parade was obviously defective to begin with. The parade plowed on, however, through wave after wave of catatonia and rippling lassitude.

After about an hour of this, the fellows and their families noticed with considerable misgiving that the parade was heading back into that hole in the ground underneath the Coliseum. The air conditioning hit them like a wall. Everybody's bone marrow congealed. It made you feel like your teeth were loose. It turned out that this was where the little cocktail party was going to take place: in the Houston Coliseum. They led them up to the floor of the Coliseum, which was like a great indoor bowl. There were thousands of people milling around and some sort of incredible smell and a storm of voices and the occasional insane cackle. There were five thousand extremely loud people on the floor eager to tear into roast cow with both hands and wash it down with bourbon whiskey. The air was filled with the stench of burning cattle. They had set up about ten barbecue pits in there, and they were roasting thirty animals. Five thousand businessmen and politicians and their better halves, fresh from the 100-degree horrors of Downtown in July, couldn't wait to sink their faces in it. It was a Texas barbecue, Houston-style.

First they took the seven brave lads and their wives and children up onto a stage that had been set up at one end of the arena, and there was a little welcoming ceremony in which they introduced them one by one, and a great many politicians and businessmen made speeches. All the while the great cow carcasses sizzled and popped and the smoke of the burning meat was wafted here and there in the chilly currents of the air conditioning. Only the extreme cold kept you from throwing up. The ganglia of the solar plexus were frozen. The wives tried to be polite, but it was a losing game. The children were squirming up on the stage and the wives were getting up and whispering to any locals they could get close to. The children were in extremis. They hadn't been near a bathroom for hours. The wives were frantically trying to find out where the Johns were in this place.

Unfortunately, now came the part where they were just supposed to relax, eat a side of beef and a peck of kidney beans sinking in gravy, drink a little whiskey, and shake hands with the good folks and make themselves at home. So they led them back out onto the floor of the arena, cleared out a space, got some folding chairs for them and some paper plates loaded with huge joints of Texas steer, and then put a lineup of folding chairs around the whole group of them, in a circle, on the order of a stockade, and around the stockade they put a ring of Texas Rangers, facing outward, toward the crowd. The crowd was now lining up, by the hundreds, at the barbecue pits, getting great lubricated hunks of beef on paper plates… and more whiskey. Then they took seats in the stands, thousands of them, and looked down at the stockade floor. This was the main event, the reception, the Big Howdy: five thousand people, VIPs one and all, sitting up in the stands of the Houston Coliseum amid the burning cattle… watching the astronauts eat.

Certain VIPs with clout, however, were allowed to enter the stockade through the ring of Rangers and greet the lads and their wives personally as they juggled the great maroon hunks of meat. It was always someone such as Herb Snout from Kar Kastle, and he would come up and say: "Hi, there! Herb Snout! Kar Kastle! Listen! We're damned glad to have you folks here, just damned glad, goddamn it!" And then he would turn to one of the wives, whose hands were so full of cow meat she couldn't budge, and he would bend down and turn on a huge Karo-syrup grin, to show his deference to the ladies, and say in a suddenly huge voice that would make the poor startled woman drop the reeking maroon all over her lap: "Hi, there, little lady! Just damned glad to see you, too!" And then he'd give a huge horrible wink that would practically implode his eye, and he'd say, "We've heard a lot of good things about you gals, a lot of good things"—all with this eye-wrenching wink.

After a while, there were Herb Snouts and Gurney Frinks all over the place and the huge Hereford joints were sliding down every leg and splashing in the puddles of whiskey on the floor, and five thousand spectators watched their struggling jaws, and the smoke and the babble filled the air and the children screamed for mercy and relief. Just then, when the madness seemed to have outdone itself once and for all, a band struck up and the houselights dimmed and a spotlight searched out the stage and a show began and a mighty hearty voice boomed out over the p.a. system: "Ladies and gentlemen… in honor of our mighty special guests and mighty fine new neighbors, we are proud to present… Miss Sally Rand!"

The band struck up "Sugar Blues"… much raunchy high-hatting of the trumpets… Oh, owwwwwwwwwwahwahwah… and out into the spotlight pranced an ancient woman with yellow hair and a white mask of a face… Her flesh looked like the meat of a casaba melon in the winter… She carried some enormous plumed fans… She began her famous striptease act… Sally Rand!… who had been an aging but still famous stripper when the seven brave lads were in their teens, during the Depression… Oh-owwwwwwwww wahwahwah… and she winked and minced about and took off a little here and covered up a little there and shook her ancient haunches at the seven single-combat warriors. It was electrifying. It was quite beyond sex, show business, and either the sins or rigors of the flesh. It was two o'clock in the afternoon on the Fourth of July, and the cows burned on, and the whiskey roared goddamned glad to see you and the Venus de Houston shook her fanny in an utterly baffling blessing over it all.

Just three years ago Rene had still been in that dogged military wife's frame of mind in which you gladly spent three days sanding a slab of monkeypod, until your hands were raw, to save the fabulous sum of ninety-five dollars. When Scott had run up a fifty-dollar telephone bill calling her from Washington, Albuquerque, and Dayton during the testing back in 1959, it had seemed like the end of the world. Fifty dollars! That was the food budget for a month! That was three years ago. Now she was in the living room of her own house—custom-made, not a tract home—on a lake, underneath the live oak and the pines. She and Annie Glenn had flown down to Houston one weekend from Washington and picked out lots, just like that, but they turned out to be in the best spot in the vicinity of the Space Center, a development called Timber Cove. The Schirras and Grissoms had moved into the same neighborhood. With admirable foresight, as it turned out, they had built their houses so that they opened up in the back to look out on the water and the trees, while on the side facing the street they were practically blank walls of brick. They had barely moved the first stick of furniture in when the tour buses started arriving, plus the freelance tourists in cars. They were extraordinary, these people. Sometimes you could hear the loudspeaker inside the bus. You could hear the tour guide saving, "This is the home of Scott Carpenter, the second Mercury astronaut to fly in earth orbit in outer space." Sometimes people would get out and grab handfuls of grass from your lawn. They'd get back on the bus with the miserable little green sprouts sticking out of their fingers. They believed in magic. Sometimes people would drive up, get out, stare at the house as if waiting for something to happen, and then walk up to the door and ring the bell and say: "We hate to bother you, but do you suppose you could send one of your children out so we could have our pictures taken with him?" And yet they weren't like the fans of movie stars. There was no frenzy. They thought they were really being considerate by not asking you to come out for the snapshot session yourself. They really meant it. They had more of the attitude of being at a living shrine.

This was the first house that Rene and Scott had ever built, the first house that had really seemed theirs. They had turned the page, all right. Things happened so fast now. At one point it looked as if they were going to be given houses completely furnished! The best that $60,000 could buy in 1962, at wholesale! A month after John Glenn's flight, a Houston man named Frank Sharp presented to Leo DeOrsey, as the fellows' business advisor, the following proposition: To show their pride in the astronauts and the new Manned Space Center, the builders, developers, furniture dealers, and others involved in the suburban home business would give each of the seven brave lads one of the homes being built for the 1962 Parade of Homes in Sharpstown. Sharpstown was a housing tract that Frank Sharp himself had been the impresario for. The Parade of Homes was a row of model houses that contractors who expected to do business in Sharpstown were putting up by way of advertising their wares. Sharp would contribute the land, a $10,000 lot to each astronaut; the contractors would contribute the houses; and the furniture and department stores would furnish them from top to bottom. The seven astronauts and their families would live right there on Rowan Drive in the Country Club Terrace section of Sharpstown, between Richmond Road and Bellaire Boulevard, in $60,000 worth of home and hearth each. Since Sharpstown at this point was nothing but maps, signs, bunting, Englishy thatchy tweedy-sounding street names and thousands of acres of wind-swept boondocker gumbo scrubland, Astronauts Row wouldn't be a bad way to start filling in the spaces. Sharp was the Big Howdy through and through, a self-made man and already quite a prominent citizen, close to the mayor, Representative Albert Thomas, Governor John Connally, and Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. He underwrote annual golf trophies and things of that sort. He had the right credentials, or the Houston version thereof, and so DeOrsey had talked it over with the boys, and they all decided the deal was okay. It had nothing to do with the space program and didn't obligate them to anything. It was just an unencumbered goodie, pure and simple. None of them actually wanted to live in Sharpstown, from what they had heard about the area. It was too far from the NASA facility, for a start. So they figured they would accept the houses, shake hands with one and all, and then… sell them. John Glenn was as agreeable to this type of goodie as anybody else. It was that age-old concern of the military officer with the extras. John had been in the Marines for nearly twenty years now. He was too far down that road, had been through too many measly paychecks, to decondition himself anytime soon when it came to the perks, the extras, the irresistible and perfectly honorable and authorized goodies. Therefore, not even John, for all his quite sincere sense of morality, could comprehend the furor that was erupting. Gilruth and Webb and everybody else in the NASA hierarchy were blowing fuses over Frank Sharp's Parade of the Homes of the Astronauts. And that was only the start. It had touched off a true emergency: the Life deal was under review! From what Scott and the others had picked up, the President himself was considering putting an end to all commercial exploitation of astronaut status. The rest of the press had resented the Life deal from the beginning and had argued that it cast a venal shadow on the astronauts' patriotic service. Sharpstown showed you where the exploitation route could lead…

Sharpstown was one thing… but a threat to the Life deal—now, there you had something serious! Unthinkable was the word. The seven pilots, steeped in the honorable goodies tradition of the military, had begun to look upon the Life deal in the same way they looked upon the military pension that you rated after twenty years. It was an immutable condition of the service! It was part of the drill! Regulation issue! Covered in the manual! All holes in the argument were immediately vulcanized by the heat of the emotion. This was no time to sit around waiting for the orders to be posted on the bulletin board. It was only three weeks before Scott's flight, and he was in the thick of training, but on May 3 most of the others went to see Lyndon Johnson at his ranch in Texas to try to straighten the matter out. Webb was there, too. They had quite a conclave. Lyndon Johnson gave them some fatherly discourses on private lives and public responsibility, twisting his great hands around in the air in front of him, as if making imaginary snowballs. This pained him as much as it did them, and so on. The hell of it was that neither Johnson nor Webb would miss a minute's sleep if the Life deal was canceled forthwith. They had both been burned by the astronaut-Life connection during the incident at the Glenns' house in January. In fact, if it hadn't been for Glenn—

Fortunately, there was no getting around John. By now, three months after his flight, John had ascended to a status that only a Biblical scholar could fully appreciate. John was the triumphant single-combat warrior. He had risked his life to challenge the mighty Soviet Integral on the high ground. Through his skill and courage he had neutralized the enemy's advantage, and the tears of joy and gratitude and awe still flowed. In the Bible, first Book of Samuel, eighteenth chapter, it is written that after David slew Goliath and the Philistines fled in terror and the Israelites achieved a mighty victory, King Saul took David into the royal household and gave him the status of an adopted son. It is also written that wherever Saul and David went, people thronged the streets, and the women sang of the thousands Saul had slain and the tens of thousands David had slain. "And Saul was very wroth, and the saying displeased him; and he said, They have ascribed unto David ten thousands, and to me they have ascribed but thousands: and what can he have more but the kingdom? And Saul eyed David from that day forward." And President Kennedy eyed John Glenn. The President had begun to regale John and bring him into the Kennedy family orbit. John was the sort of man a president needed to keep squarely within his camp. A vice-president, too, for that matter. Johnson had gone out of his way to be friendly to John and Annie, and they had genuinely begun to like the man. They wound up inviting Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, for dinner at their house in Arlington, on John's fortieth birthday. And the Johnsons accepted, just like that. Rene and Scott were also invited. "What on earth are you going to serve?" Rene said to Annie.

"My ham loaf," said Annie.

"Ham loaf!"

"Why not? Everybody likes it. I bet you Lady Bird asks for the recipe, too."

The Johnsons stayed until almost midnight. Lyndon had his coat off and his sleeves rolled up and was having a rare old time for himself. As they left, Rene heard Lady Bird ask Annie for the recipe for her ham loaf.

One day John was out on the Atlantic Ocean, beyond the Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, harbor, aboard the President's yacht, the Honey Fitz, when the subject of the Life contract came up. The President wanted to know what John thought of one particular argument against the Life arrangement that was frequently presented; namely, that a soldier in battle—a Marine at Iwo Jima, for example—ran just as great a risk of death as any astronaut and yet did not expect recompense from Time, Inc. John said yes, that was so, but suppose that soldier's or Marine's private life, his background, his house, his way of living, his wife, his children, his thoughts, his hopes, his dreams, became of such intense interest that the press camped on his doorstep and he had to live under glass, as it were. Then he should have the right to receive compensation. The President nodded sagaciously, and the Life contract was saved, right there on the Honey Fitz.

Well, thanks to the Life deal, Scott and Rene could now get mortgage money and afford to build a new house in a nice area like Timber Cove. Or thanks to that and the panting eagerness of the developers to have astronauts in their new developments. It was the best advertisement they could have. They gave the boys close to at-cost deals on the land and the houses, and they let them have the mortgage money at 4 percent, with very little down payment. And for astronauts like John and Scott, who had now flown, they couldn't do enough.

The contractors and developers and the public generally thought Scott and his flight were terrific… but within NASA something… was going on. Scott and Rene had both begun to detect it, although no one ever said anything openly. Scott had gotten all the medals and all the parades and the trip to the White House, but something was up, and not even the other wives would tell Rene what it was.

Scott had flown on May 24, three months. after John. Deke Slayton had been scheduled to take the flight, but then NASA made it known that Deke had a medical problem: idiopathic atrial fibrillation. This was a condition in which the electrical firing sequence of the heart went out of sync occasionally, causing an irregular pulse and a slight lowering of the pumping capacity of the organ. Idiopathic meant that the causes were unknown. The condition had been discovered, said NASA, during centrifuge runs in August 1959. Slayton had been examined at the Philadelphia Navy Hospital and the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine at San Antonio, where the verdict—or so Slayton was told—was that the condition was a minor anomaly and not serious enough to cost him his job as astronaut. But, in fact, one of the Air Force doctors at San Antonio, a highly regarded cardiologist, had written a letter to Webb recommending that Slayton not be assigned to a flight, since atrial fibrillation, idiopathic or not, did reduce the efficiency of the heart to some degree.

Webb just kept the letter on file. Slayton was assigned, in November 1961, to the second orbital flight. Early in January Webb ordered a complete reassessment of the man's heart condition. His argument was that Slayton was an Air Force pilot on loan to NASA, and an Air Force cardiologist had recommended that he not be used for flights. Therefore, the case should be reviewed. Slayton's case now went before two boards, one made up of high-ranking NASA doctors and the other made up of eight doctors convened by the Air Force Surgeon General. Both approved Slayton for the approaching Mercury flight. Nevertheless, Webb bucked the case up to three Washington cardiologists, including Eugene Braunwald of the National Institutes of Health, as a sort of blue-ribbon panel. He also requested an opinion from Paul Dudley White, who had become famous as Eisenhower's cardiologist. Why this was happening so late in the game, three months after Deke had been assigned to the flight, no one could figure. All four doctors came to the same conclusion, apparently out of sheer common sense as much as anything else. Here was a case concerning a pilot with a minor heart defect. He could probably make a space flight or any other flight with no problems. Nevertheless, from the administrator on down, the entire space agency seemed to be agonizing and oscillating and spinning its wheels over the matter, which by now had accumulated a file as thick as your arm. So if Project Mercury had plenty of ready and willing astronauts with no cardiovascular anomalies at all, why not use one of them and have done with it? That was it, so far as Webb was concerned. It was now the middle of March. Two months ago, in his set-to with Glenn, James E. Webb had run up against astropower and had lost. This time he had his way. Slayton was off the flight.

The great Victorian Animal was utterly baffled. The Animal had been dutifully cranking out human-interest stories about Slayton. How could NASA decide now that he was a washout with a bad heart? There was no…proper emotion… for the event.

According to the official NASA wording, Slayton was "keenly disappointed" about the decision That was putting it somewhat delicately. The man was furious. Slayton tried to keep a rein on himself in public statements, however, because he didn't want to jeopardize his chances of reinstatement. He was convinced that the whole thing had somehow been blown up into a specious issue and that they would all come to their senses by and by. Privately he was tying knots in the flagpole. He kept saying that Paul Dudley White had made an operational decision. His argument was that White and the other doctors had first delivered their medical opinion—he was fit to fly—and then they had delivered their operational opinion, which was: "Even so, why not choose somebody else?" They were entitled to their medical opinion; period. But they had made an operational decision! This word, operational, was a holy word to Slayton. He was the King of Operational. Operational referred to action, the real thing, piloting, the right stuff. Medical referred to one of the many accessories to the business at hand. You didn't call in doctors to make an operational decision. The Life reporters knew very well how angry Slayton was, and other reporters had strong hints of it. But the Genteel Beast could find no appropriate… tone… for it. So after a short time they just dropped it. They stuck with the NASA version: "Keenly disappointed." Few of them realized that it went beyond anger. Deke Slayton was crushed. He had not merely lost his ride on the next flight; he had lost everything. NASA had just announced that he no longer had… the right stuff. It could blow at any seam!—and his had blown. Idiopathic atrial fibrillation—it didn't matter! Any seam! His whole career, his ascension from the dour grim tundra of Wisconsin was based upon his indisputable possession of that righteous stuff. That was the most important thing he had ever possessed in this Trough of Mortal Error, and it was plenty. It was the ultimate. And it had blown, just like that! He felt humiliated. This thing would now be rubbed in his face everywhere he turned He couldn't go back to Edwards now, even if he wanted to. The Air Force was not going to use a NASA reject for major flight test work. Flight test? Hell, he couldn't even fly a fighter plane by himself any more! It was true. He could go up only in two-seaters with another pilot—someone who was still intact, with no ruptured seams from which his vital stuff had leaked. There was even the possibility that the Air Force might ground him altogether, notwithstanding the fact that the Surgeon General's board had pronounced him "fully qualified as an Air Force pilot and as an astronaut." Air Force pride was at stake. The Air Force's Chief of Staff himself, General Curtis LeMay, was taking the position that if he wasn't qualified to fly for NASA, how could he be qualified to fly for the Air Force? All this was being said about him, Deke Slayton, who had fought hardest of all to have the astronaut be treated as a pilot, even to the extent of insisting on airplane-style controls for the capsule, or, rather, damn it, spacecraft.

It wasn't likely to make him any happier, either, to know that Scott Carpenter had taken his place. Carpenter had the least flight test experience of any of them, and yet he was replacing Deke Slayton—Deke Slayton, who had stood up before the Society of Experimental Test Pilots and insisted that only an experienced test pilot could do this job correctly. Wally Schirra, a man with real flight test credentials, had been training as Deke's backup. Why had he been passed over in favor of Carpenter? The two buddies, Glenn and Carpenter, were getting the first two orbital flights… and Deke Slayton was being left behind… to hitch airplane rides with other pilots.

Gilruth's opinion, backed up by Walt Williams, was that Carpenter had logged far more flight training, as Glenn's backup, than Schirra could possibly hope to cram in during the ten weeks remaining before the flight. Scott was not exactly ecstatic over having been handed Deke's flight on such short notice. He had trained for six months with John, but the second orbital flight was to be quite a different proposition. NASA's experimental scientists would finally have an inning. The astronaut was supposed to deploy a multicolored balloon outside the capsule in order to study the perception of light in space and the amount of drag, if any, in the presumed vacuum of space. He was supposed to observe how water in a glass bottle behaved in a weightless state and whether or not capillary action was altered. There would be a small glass sphere for that experiment. He would have a densitometer, as it was known, to measure the visibility of a ground flare. He would be trained in the use of a hand-held camera to take weather photographs and pictures of the daylight horizon and the atmospheric band above the horizon and of various land masses, particularly North America and Africa. They had the right man. Scott was intrigued by the experiments. But the addition of all these things to the checklist, which was already undergoing last-minute changes of the operational sort, put him under increasing pressure. In making all of these sightings, for the use of the camera, the densitometer, or whatever, he would be using an entirely new manual control apparatus. It was a system in which you created one pound of thrust if you pushed the hand controller slightly and twenty-five more if you pushed it beyond a small angle. It would be either/or; there would be no turning the capsule gradually like an airplane or an automobile.

The flight went off on schedule on May 24. For the first two orbits Scott had a picnic. He was more relaxed and in higher spirits than any of the three men who had preceded him. He was enjoying himself. His pulse rate, before lift-off, during the launch, and in orbit, was even lower than Glenn's. He talked more, ate more, drank more water, and did more with the capsule than any of them ever had. He obviously loved all the experiments. He was swinging the capsule this way and that way, taking photographs a mile a minute, making detailed observations of the sunrises and horizon, releasing balloons, tending his bottles, taking readings with the densitometer, having a grand time. The only problem was that the new control system used up fuel at a terrific rate. You wanted to pitch or yaw the capsule just ever so slightly, and—bango!—you were over the invisible line and another outsized geyser of hydrogen perixode squirted out of the tanks.

During the second orbit he was warned by several capcoms to start conserving fuel, so that he would have enough for re-entry, but it was not until the third and last orbit that he himself seemed to realize just how low the fuel was. For most of the final orbit he just let the capsule drift and turn in any attitude it wanted to, so as not to have to use any of the thrusters, high or low, automatic or manual. It presented no problems at all. Even when you were upside down in relation to the earth, with your head pointed straight down, there was no feeling of disorientation, no feeling of up or down. Floating in a weightless state was even more enjoyable than swimming underwater, which Scott loved.

The diminished fuel supply was very much on his mind. Still, he couldn't resist the opportunity to experiment. He reached for the densitometer, and his hand hit the hatch of the capsule, and a cloud of John Glenn's "fireflies" appeared outside the window. So he swung the capsule over in a yaw to have a look at the fireflies. To him they looked more like frost or snowflakes, so he banged on the hatch and another cloud flew up and he swung around some more to take a look and used up some more fuel. Whatever they were, they were attached to the hull of the capsule and no doubt emanated from or were created by the capsule and were not some sort of micro-galaxy, all of which aroused his curiosity, and so he banged away and pitched and yawed and tooled around some more, the better to unravel the mystery. All of a sudden it was time to prepare for re-entry, and Scott was already behind in the retro-sequence, as that part of the checklist was known. Also, the fuel situation was beginning to get a little dicey. On top of that, the automatic control system would no longer hold the capsule at the proper angle for re-entry. So he switched to fly-by-wire… but at the same time forgot to throw the switch that cut off the manual system. For ten minutes he was eating up fuel out of both systems. He would have to fire the retro-rockets manually, as Alan Shepard, the capcom in Arguello, California, sounded off the countdown. When Shepard called "Fire one!" the capsule's angle was off about nine degrees and Scott was late in hitting the switch. He had practically no fuel left for controlling the capsule's oscillations during re-entry. By the time he hit the denser atmosphere and the radio blackout began, Chris Kraft and the other flight control engineers feared the worst. Long after radio communication should have resumed—nothing. It looked as if Carpenter had consumed all his fuel up there playing around—and had burned up. They all looked at each other and were already thinking one step ahead: "This disaster is going to set the program back a year—or do worse than that."

Rene was following Scott's re-entry over television inside a rented house in Cocoa Beach. For two days she had been involved in a hide-and-seek operation that had finally become absolutely loony. Bridge dragnets… amok helicopters… Rene had decided that since Life's accounts of the brave wives bravely enduring the ordeal of their husbands' flights were written in the first person, she was actually going to write hers. Loudon Wainwright could edit what she wrote and rewrite the rough spots, but she was going to write the whole thing herself. That being the case, she wasn't going to let herself be imprisoned inside her house at Langley by the television crews and all the rest of that madness. She had seen Annie being driven far crazier from having to play quavering pigeon for the press—and the likes of Lyndon Johnson—than by any fears she had for John. It was an undignified position to be in. Despite the attention lavished on you, you were not treated as an individual but as the anxious loyal mate of the male up on top of the rocket. After a while Rene didn't know whether it was her modest literary ambitions or her resentment of the pat role of Astronaut Wife that made her do it. Life rented a "safe house" for her in Cocoa Beach. Life did things right. They rented a backup safe house as well, in case Rene's presence in the first one was discovered. Rene called up Shorty Powers, who was NASA's official press officer in matters concerning the astronauts, and told him that she was going to the Cape for the launch but wanted privacy and was telling no one where she would be, including him. Powers was not happy. The astronauts' Life contract had already made his job difficult enough. He was cut off from all "personal" material about the men and their families, since that was supposed to go to Life exclusively. And yet when a flight was on, 90 percent of the reporters Powers had to deal with were really interested in only two questions: (1) What is the astronaut doing now and how does he feel? (Is he afraid?); and (2) What is his wife doing now and how does she feel? (Is she dying from anxiety?) One of Powers's main roles was serving the television networks—and telling them where the wife would be during the flight, so that they could congregate for the death-watch camp-out. And this time all he could tell them was that the wife would be at the Cape… somewhere… That did it. The networks took the situation as an insult and a challenge. Before Rene left for the Cape, a correspondent for one of the networks called her and told her they were going to find out where she was staying… They could do it the hard way, if they had to, but they'd rather do it the easy way. So she'd better just tell them. It was like something out of a gangster movie. But sure enough, when she reached the Cape, the networks had people watching every bridge and causeway into Cocoa Beach. Rene knew they would be looking for a car with a woman with four children. So she had the children lie on the floor, and they slipped through. The networks were not going to be foiled that easily. After all, how could they camp on her front lawn and film her drawn shades if they didn't even know where she was? So they hired helicopters and began scouring Cocoa Beach. They went up and down the hardtack beach, looking for congregations of four small children. They would swoop right down on children on the beach until they could read the terror in their eyes. People were running for cover, abandoning their Scotch coolers and telescopes and cameras and tripods, trying to save their children from the amok helicopters. It was crazy, utterly bananas, but by now not knowing where the wife was—it was like not knowing where the rocket was. Finally, Rene was sending her children over to the beach two by two, in order to foil the insane people in the network helicopters.

Came time for the launch, and now Rene and the children watched the countdown on the TV in the safe house, with Wainwright and a Life photographer in attendance. Then the children rushed out and watched part of the rocket's slow ascent through a telescope mounted on a garage roof. The children didn't seem at all apprehensive. Flying was what their father did. They were in high spirits… And now they were following the re-entry, as best they could, on television. They had CBS turned on. There was Walter Cronkite. Rene knew him. Cronkite had become an astrobuff. He had more than the usual reasons to like the astronauts. It was his coverage of John Glenn's flight that, in the strange workings of the television news business, had led to his current eminence among the network anchormen. Cronkite had been explaining Scott's fuel problem as he entered the atmosphere. Then Cronkite's voice began to take on more and more concern. They didn't know where Scott was. They weren't sure he had begun his re-entry at the proper angle. All at once Cronkite's voice broke. Tears came into his eyes. "I'm afraid that…" There was a catch in his voice. His eyes glistened. He had the waterworks turned on. "I'm afraid… we may have… lost an astronaut…" What instincts the man had! There was the Press, the Genteel Gent, coming up with the appropriate emotion… live… with no prompting whatsoever! Rene's children were very quiet, staring at the screen. Yet Rene herself did not believe for a moment that Scott had perished. She was like every military pilot's wife in that respect. If he were merely missing—if no dead body had been found—then he was alive and would come through it all right. There were no two ways about it. Rene had known of a case in which a cargo plane had crash-landed in the Pacific and broken in two on impact, the rear half sinking like a brick. Some men were rescued from the front half, which stayed afloat a few minutes. And yet the wives of the men who had been in the rear of the craft refused to believe that they were lost. They were out there somewhere; it was only a matter of time. Rene had marveled at how long it had taken them to accept the obvious. But her reaction was precisely the same. Scott was all right, because there was no real proof that he wasn't. Cronkite gulped on the television screen. No tears came to her eyes at all. Scott was all right. He would turn up… No two ways about it

As a matter of fact, she was correct. Scott had come through the atmosphere in good shape. The capsule began rocking violently in the dense atmosphere below 50,000 feet, and he had to release his parachute early and by hand, the automatic system being out of fuel. The capsule had overshot the target area by some 250 miles. A reconnaissance plane found him in about forty minutes, but throughout that period the impression created on television was that he might be dead. When a rescue aircraft reached Scott, they found him bobbing contentedly on a life raft beside the capsule. He was very pleased with the whole adventure. When he reached the aircraft carrier Intrepid, he was in terrific spirits. He talked and talked into the night. He wanted to stay up and keep talking about the grand adventure he had been through. He was really pleased about all the experiments he had been able to do, despite the overcrowded checklist he had, and about solving or at least greatly narrowing down the mystery of the "fireflies." He hadn't determined precisely what they were, but he had proved that they were produced by the spacecraft itself; they were not some extraterrestrial material, and so on… He could have gone on all night… He was content… a job well done… He felt that he had helped create one of the most important roles in astronautics: man as scientist in space…

Over the next two weeks Scott received a hero's homage. It was not on the scale of John's, which was understandable, but it was sweet enough. There were parades in the East and parades in the West. He rode in a motorcade through Boulder, his old hometown, and through Denver, which was just down the highway. It was a great day. The sun was out and it was a light fluffy Rocky Mountain day in May, and Rene was beside him, sitting up on the ridge of the seat back in the convertible, wearing white gloves, like a proper Navy wife, and smiling and looking absolutely beautiful and radiant. Well, Scott thought he had just shot the moon.

Back at the Cape, Chris Kraft was telling his colleagues: "That sonofabitch will never fly for me again."

Kraft was furious. The truth was, he had been quietly put out before… about the seven brave lads. As he saw it, Carpenter had ignored repeated warnings from capcoms all around the world about wasting fuel, and this had almost resulted in a disaster, one that might have done irreparable damage to the program. As it was, Carpenter's performance had cast doubt on the capability of the Mercury system to carry out a long flight such as Titov's seventeen orbits. And why had this catastrophe nearly occurred? Because Carpenter had insisted on comporting himself like an Omnipotent and Omniscient Mercury Astronaut. He didn't have to pay attention to suggestions and warnings from mere groundlings. He apparently believed that the astronaut, the passenger in the capsule, was the heart and soul of the space program. All of the resentment that the engineers had about the top-lofty status of the astronauts now crept out of its cage… at least within NASA. Outside of NASA, publicly, nothing was to change. Carpenter, like Grissom before him, was an exemplary brave lad; just a little dicey scrape at the end of the flight, that was all. Very successful flight; go ahead, let him have his medals and his receiving lines.

And now that the wound had been opened, there were those who were only too pleased to see the following line develop concerning the Carpenter flight: Carpenter had not merely wasted fuel while up there playing with the capsule's attitude controls, doing his beloved "experiments." No, he had also become… rattled… when he finally realized he was getting low on fuel. The evidence for this was that he forgot to turn off the manual system when he switched to fly-by-wire and thereby really blew his fuel supply. And then he… panicked!… That was why he couldn't line the capsule up at the right angle and that was why he couldn't fire the retro-rockets right on the button… and that was why he hit the atmosphere at such a shallow angle. He nearly skipped off it instead of going through it… he nearly skipped off into eternity… because… he panicked! There! We've said it! That was the worst charge that could be brought against a pilot on the great ziggurat of flying. It said that a man had lost whatever stuff he had in the most awful manner. He had funked it. It was a sin for which there was no redemption. Damned eternally! Once such a verdict had been pronounced, no judgment was too vile. Did you hear his voice on the tape just before the blackout? You could hear the panic! In fact, they could hear no such thing. Carpenter sounded very much the way Glenn had sounded and a good deal less excited than Grissom. But if one wanted to hear panic, especially in the words that a man had to force out after the g-forces built up, if that was what one was after… then you could hear panic. But, then, Carpenter never had the right stuff to begin with! That much was obvious. He had given up long ago. He had opted for multi-engine planes! (Now we know why!) He had only two hundred hours in jets. He was here only through a fluke of the selection process. And so forth and so on. Certain objective data had to be ignored, of course. Carpenter's pulse rate remained lower, during the re-entry as well as during the launch and orbital flight, than any other astronaut's, including Glenn's. It never rose above 105, even during the most critical point of the re-entry. One could argue that pulse rate was not a dependable indication of a pilot's coolness. Scott Crossfield had a chronically rapid pulse rate, and he was in the league with Yeager. Nevertheless, it was inconceivable that a man in a state of panic—in a life-or-death emergency—in a crisis that did not last for a matter of seconds but for twenty minutes—it was inconceivable that such a man would maintain a heart rate of less than 105 throughout. Even a pilot's heart rate could jump to more than 105 for nothing more than the fact that some cocky bastard had cut into line ahead of him at the PX. One might argue that Carpenter had mishandled the re-entry, but to accuse him of panic made no sense in light of the telemetered data concerning his heart rate and his respiratory rate. Therefore, the objective data would be ignored. Once it had begun, the denigration of Carpenter had to proceed at any cost.

It served many purposes at once. It made the rest of them seem like real pilots after all and not mere riders in a pod. A man either had it or he didn't… in space as in the air. As every pilot knew in his secret heart—deny it, if you wish!—it required washouts to make your own righteous stuff stand out. So was Carpenter, by implication, to be designated the washout? Logic no longer mattered—especially since none of this could be talked of openly in any case: publicly there were to be no flaws in the manned space program whatsoever. Sheer logic would have raised the question: why pick Carpenter and not Grissom? Grissom had lost the capsule and had then come back with the classic pilot's response to gross error: "I don't know what happened—the machine malfunctioned." The telemetry showed that Grissom's heart was on the edge of tachycardia at times. Just before re-entry his heart rate had reached 171 beats per minute. Even after Grissom was safe and sound on the carrier Lake Champlain, his heart rate was 160 beats a minute, his breathing was rapid, his skin was warm and moist; he didn't want to talk about it, he wanted to go to sleep. Here was the clinical picture of a man who had abandoned himself to panic. Then why was not Grissom designated the washout—if anybody cared to find one? But logic had nothing to do with it. One was in the area of magical beliefs now. In his everyday life doughty little Gus lived the life of the right stuff. He was a staunch bearer of the Operational banner. Here Gus's fate and Deke's fate came together. Deke had said all along: You need a proven operational test pilot up there. Gus and Deke were great pals. For three years they had flown together, hunted together, drunk together; their children had played together. They were both committed to the holy word: operational. Schirra was with them on this particular commitment, and Shepard threw his weight toward them, too, as did Cooper.

Deke had plenty to be thankful to Shepard for. One day Al had gotten the other boys together and said, "Listen, we've got to do something for Deke. We've got to do something to give him back his pride." Shepard's suggestion was that Deke be made a sort of chief of the astronauts, with an office and a title and official duties. They all went for the idea and took it to Gilruth, and in no time Deke had the title "Coordinator of Astronaut Activities." There may have been people at NASA who figured this would be a supernumerary make-work job for the fallen astronaut; if so, they underestimated Deke. He was a far shrewder and more determined individual than his Wisconsin tundra manner let on. The job gave him something to channel his tremendous thwarted energy into. The NASA hierarchy was still a political vacuum, and Deke set about filling it… with a vengeance, as it were. Soon Deke was a power within NASA, a man to be reckoned with, and his motivation never varied: the more powerful he became, the better his chances of reversing the decision that prevented him from flying. Justice, simple operational justice… in the name of the right stuff.

Operational; the word had new clout now, and a corollary to the theory of the Carpenter flight began to develop. Carpenter's flight agenda had been loaded with Larry Lightbulb experiments. The scientists, lowest men in the NASA pecking order up to now, had been given their heads on this flight… and the results were there for your inspection. Carpenter had taken all this Mad Professor stuff seriously, and that was what led to his problems. He became so wrapped up in his various "observations" that he fell behind in the checklist and became rattled and then blew it. All this science nonsense could wait. Just now, in the critical operational phase of the program, the crucial period of real flight test, it wasn't just ding-a-ling stuff, it was dangerous. There were too many goddamned doctors involved in this thing, too. (Look what they did to Deke!) On top of that, they had the two psychiatrists to contend with. They were nice enough men personally, Ruff and Korchin were, but they were… in the way! What the hell was all this pissing into bags and hitting little circles with a pencil… after you've just hung your hide out over the edge in a space flight? They hadn't even picked up the fact that Carpenter had panicked. They found him exhilarated, alert, full of energy, ready to take off and do it all over again… The two men were not invited to continue with the program after the move from Langley to Houston. Thanks a lot, gentlemen, and don't let the doorknob hit you in the butt.

Here the outlook of Grissom, Slayton, and Schirra coincided with that of Kraft and Walt Williams. Kraft and Williams also felt that non-operational experiments should be kept to a minimum at this stage of the space program. From now on, whenever anyone said otherwise, one had only to roll his eyeballs and turn his palms up and say: You want another Carpenter flight?

On August 11 and 12 the mighty Integral struck again, and now there was absolutely no stopping the operational theory. On August 11 the Soviets launched Vostok 3 on what at first looked as if it would be a repetition of Titov's day-long flight. But no! Exactly twenty-four hours later the Chief Designer sent up Vostok 4, and the two craft flew together, in tandem, within three miles of each other. Within three miles of one another in the infinity of space! The Soviets spoke of a "group flight," as if the two cosmonauts, Nikolayev and Popovich, were flying in formation. In fact, neither could change his flight path in the slightest, and their proximity was due solely to the precision with which the second Vostok was launched as the first came orbiting overhead—but even this seemed to be a feat of incalculable sophistication. The Genteel Beast and many congressmen seemed to be on the edge of hysteria! Entire formations of Soviet space warriors, hurling thunderbolts at Schenectady… Grand Forks… Oklahoma City… Once again the Chief Designer was toying with them! God knew what his next surprise would be… (It would be a big one.) Well, that settled it. No more densitometers and varicolored balloons and other White Smock accessories. (No more pilots with non-operational stuff!) Which explained the singular nature of Wally Schirra's flight on October 3.

Schirra named his capsule Sigma 7, and there you had it. Scott Carpenter had named his Aurora 7… Aurora… the rosy dawn… the dawn of the intergalactic age… the unknowns, the mystery of the universe… the music of the spheres… Petrarch on the mountain top… and all that. Whereas Sigma… Sigma was a purely engineering symbol. It stood for the summation, the solution of the problem. Unless he had come right out and named the capsule Operational, he couldn't have chosen a better name. For the purpose of Schirra's flight was to prove that Carpenter's need not have happened. Schirra would make six orbits—twice as many as Carpenter—and yet use half as much fuel and land right on target. Whatever did not have to do with that goal tended to be eliminated from the flight. The flight of Sigma 7 was designed to be Armageddon… the final and decisive rout of the forces of experimental science in the manned space program. And that it was.

Schirra cut the jolly fun-loving figure so well that people sometimes failed to notice how formidable he could be. But his emphasis, after all, was on maintaining an even strain. His pranksterish, rib-shaking, wild-driving gotcha intervals gave him plenty of slack when the time came to wind things up tight and get tough. Every bit as much as Shepard, Wally had the instincts of an Academy man, a leader of men, the commander, the captain of the ship. He merely operated in a different fashion. He was cool; he had "the uncritical willingness to face danger," but he wasn't afraid to show his feelings when strategy seemed to dictate it. If it was going to be his show, he insisted on running it; and he was shrewd enough to recognize the political outlines of a situation. Having seen four nights from up close, Wally couldn't help but have noticed that the secret of a successful mission lay in a simplified checklist with white space between tasks. The fewer tasks you had, the better chance you had for a one hundred percent performance. Not only that, if you could control the checklist, then you could give your flight a theme, a clear-cut goal that everyone could immediately appreciate and respond to. Wally's theme for this flight was Operational Precision, which, being translated, meant conserving fuel and landing on target. Now that the operational forces were lined up shoulder to shoulder, it was possible to keep offboard most novel items that engineers or scientists had dreamed up for the flight.

It was decided that one of Wally's major operational tests would consist of powering down all of the attitude-control systems, automatic as well as manual, and just drifting in any attitude the capsule's inertia took it, upside down (in relation to the earth), head over heels, canted this way and that, whatever. Scott heard about it and told Wally that he didn't really think it was necessary. He had drifted for most of his last orbit, in an attempt to conserve fuel for the re-entry, and had proved to his own satisfaction that you could stand the capsule right up on its aerial or let it revolve or put yourself in any other attitude and it was not the least bit disorienting or uncomfortable. Why didn't Wally put the proposed drifting time to other uses? Wally said no, he was going to devote his flight to experimenting with drifting flight and to conserving fuel, in order to prepare the way for missions of long duration.

Scott would learn that planning sessions had been held—and he had not been informed of them. It was not that Scott was supposed to take any official part in the planning for Wally's flight, and it was not unusual in flight test for a pilot to have his own particular circle of colleagues and ground crew he preferred to consult with. But be that as it may, anyone could recall how much Scott had valued John Glenn's counsel before his flight. In fact, one of Scott's concerns had been that John wasn't available more. The demands on John's time in his role as NASA's number-one hero had become enormous. But anytime John was around, Scott—and the engineers, too—wanted John at the meetings. Wally also complained that John wasn't around. He caused quite a flap when he told Walter Cronkite, in a taped interview, that John was off on the banquet circuit so much, he was lost to the program. He didn't complain about the absence of Scott, however. Scott began to conclude that Kraft and Williams were overreacting to the fact that he had overshot the target by 250 miles. The possibility that there were people—pilots—going around saying that he had panicked never even crossed his mind.

Given the goal of the flight—which was to prove that a cool pilot could travel twice as far as Carpenter with half as much fuel consumption and ten times the accuracy—Schirra was terrific. From the moment he got up that morning, he was about as cool and relaxed a human being who ever went out to sit on top of a rocket shaft. A few days ago Wally had played one of his patented gotchas on Dee O'Hara, the nurse. One of her tasks was to collect urine samples. She gives him the usual little bottle and asks him to bring in a sample and leave it on her desk. She comes into her office, and on top of her desk is not a little bottle but a huge beaker holding about five gallons of an amber liquid with a head of foam on top. It couldn't possibly be—but could it possibly be?—and so she puts her hands on the sides of the beaker to see if it's warm, and—

"Gotcha!"

—she wheels about, and there's Wally peeking in the doorway, him and his beaming face and a couple of the boys. He had concocted it of water, tincture of iodine, and detergent. The next day Dee O'Hara presents Wally with a clear plastic bag, a big thing, about four feet long, telling him that it's the urine receptacle for his flight, replacing the little condom device that Grissom, Glenn, and Carpenter had worn. Gotcha! So today, the morning of his flight, here comes Wally down the hallway in Hangar S in his bathrobe, heading for the medical room. Flopping out below the robe and dragging along the floor between his legs is the huge plastic bag. He parades right past Dee O'Hara, as if he were going to suit up that way. Gotcha! And he kept it up. That whole day he was the jolly Wally from beginning to end. He was amazing. He never sounded for a moment like someone under the stress of a novel form of flight test. It was like listening to a good buddy at beer call, recollecting in tranquillity. He practically out-yeagered Yeager. As soon as the escape tower blew off, marking the successful completion of the fully powered part of his ascent, Schirra saw it streaking through the sky and said: "This tower is a real sayonara."

Chris Kraft, the flight director, gave his approval for the first orbit, and Deke Slayton, the capcom at the Cape, told Schirra: "You have a go from Control Center."

Schirra said: "You have a go from me. It's real fat."

Then Slayton said: "Are you a turtle today?"

"Going to VOX recorder only," said Wally. Then he spoke into the tape recorder, whose microphone was not hooked into the open radio circuit.

"You bet your sweet ass I am," he said.

The Turtle Club was one of Wally's gotcha games. If one good buddy who played the turtle game met another good buddy in public—preferably in the company of very proper folk—and challenged him with the question "Are you a turtle?" that good buddy had to answer, "You bet your sweet ass I am," in a loud voice or else treat everybody else to a round of drinks. This was three minutes and forty-one seconds into the flight. Wally was already maintaining an even strain.

He buckled down to the task of conserving hydrogen peroxide. Ordinarily, when the booster rocket separated from the capsule, the capsule was then turned around by the automatic control system, but this consumed considerable fuel. This time Schirra nudged it around manually, using only the low thrusters, the five-pound thrusters, of the fly-by-wire system. Soon he was telling Deke at the Cape: "I'm in chimp mode right now and she's flying beautifully." He started using this phrase chimp mode. On the chimpanzee flights the attitude of the capsule had been controlled automatically throughout. The chimp mode was a little zinger for the benefit of all those on the mighty ziggurat, whether astronauts or X-15 "dream pilots," who were aware of the taunt: "A monkey's gonna make the first flight." Schirra's continual reference to the chimp mode as much as said: "Who cares! Here—I'll wave the bloody monkey in your face." As soon as he could, however, he went into what he called the drifting mode. He just let the capsule twist into any attitude it wanted, as Scott had on his final orbit.

"I'm having a ball up here drifting," said Wally. "Enjoying it so much I haven't eaten yet."

When he came over California during the fourth orbit, John Glenn, acting as capcom at Point Arguello, was instructed to have Wally say something for live broadcast over television and radio.

"Ha, ha," said Wally. "I suppose an old song, 'Drifting and Dreaming,' would be apropos at this point, but at this point I don't have a chance to dream. I'm enjoying it too much." When he was over South America, he was asked to say something in Spanish for live broadcast.

"Buenos dias, you all," said Wally. (And the Latins loved it.)

After nearly four orbits, drifting and yakking and yukking it up, cool, relaxed, a turtle to the last, Wally had used up barely 10 percent of his hydrogen peroxide. He had already traveled one orbit farther than Carpenter or Glenn. He had floated every which way, and (as Scott had told him) there was nothing to it. There was no sensation of up or down in weightless flight. It was obvious that you could send a Mercury capsule on a seventeen-orbit flight, like Titov's, if you wanted. As Schirra came over the Cape, Deke Slayton said, "Flight would like to talk to you now."

"Flight" meant the flight director, Kraft himself, was coming onto the circuit.

"Been a real good show up there," said Kraft. "I think we are proving our point, old buddy!"

Glenn was sitting in front of a microphone in the tracking station at Point Arguello. Scott was sitting in front of a microphone in the tracking station at Guaymas. Kraft had never come on the circuit to say any such thing to either of them. Scott was beginning to see what the point, our point, was.

As he neared the completion of his sixth and last orbit, Wally announced that he had 78 percent of the fuel left in both the automatic and manual systems. He had flown twice as far as Glenn or Carpenter, and he could have gotten through another fifteen orbits or so if he had to. One of Kraft's lieutenants, an engineer named Gene Kranz, came on the circuit and said to Wally: "Now that's what I call a real engineering test flight!"

Scott picked up the message in his central nervous system even before his mind analyzed it. Unlike the last one, the man was saying. There was even a hint of… unlike the last two.

To complete an operational triumph Schirra now had only to land on target. Carpenter had landed 250 miles off the mark. As he began his descent toward the atmosphere, Wally told Al Shepard, the capcom on Bermuda, near the target area, "I think they're gonna put me on the number-three elevator." He was talking about the number-three elevator used for moving aircraft up to the flight deck on the carrier Kearsage, This was a bit of the Schirra metonymy for "squarely on target." Oh, yes! And in fact he landed just 4.5 miles from the carrier. The swabbos crowding the flight deck could see him coming down under his big parachute. Carpenter had found the capsule uncomfortably hot once he splashed down and had crawled out through the neck of the capsule and waited on his life raft for the rescue planes. Glenn had also complained of the heat. Schirra's suit had an improved cooling system, and he was willing to stay in the capsule indefinitely. He refused a helicopter's offer of a lift to the carrier. What was the rush? He stayed in the capsule while a crew of swabbos in a motor-driven whaling boat towed him back to the carrier. Once he was on the Kearsage he told the doctors: "I feel fine. It was a textbook flight. The flight went just the way I wanted it to."

That became the verdict on Schirra's performance: "A textbook flight." He had done everything on the checklist. He had turned in a hundred percent performance. He had successfully proved that a man could ride around the earth six times and barely turn a hand or move a muscle and hardly use an ounce of fuel or expend an extra heartbeat and never, not for a moment, surrender to psychological stress, and ride the ship down to a designated drop in the vastness of the ocean. Sigma, summa, Q.E.D.: Operational!

Wally came back to celebrations in Houston and Florida and a big Wally Schirra day in his hometown of Oradell, New Jersey. The next day he went to the White House for congratulations by President Kennedy, and the President presented him with the Distinguished Service Medal. It all turned out to be rather brief and unceremonious, however, and something of a disappointment. A little chat, a few grins, a few photographs with the Chief Executive in the Oval Office, and that was it. The date was October 16. In time Wally would learn that Kennedy had just seen photographic evidence, from U-2 flights, that the Soviets had set up missile bases in Cuba. The President had kept his appointment with the astronaut only to maintain appearances, to prevent word from getting out about the critical situation that was developing.