The Right Stuff

14 — The Club

By and by Conrad started carrying Glenn's bag, as well as his own, and facing up to the role. It was the only sensible thing to do. Otherwise, the two of them would arrive at some airport, St. Louis, Akron, Los Angeles, wherever, and it would take them five minutes to walk forty feet. The autograph seekers came in waves. Every few steps Glenn would have to put his bag down and sign some more autographs and shake some more hands. Actually he was great at it. That big sunny freckle-faced smile of his lit up the place. People came up to him as if they knew him personally and loved him. He is my protector. He risked his life and challenged the Russians in the heavens for me. They adored him so much it would have been hard for him to brush past them, even had he been of that sort of disposition. So he would put his bag down and sign some more autographs, and the two of them would have to stop.

If Conrad carried both bags, they could keep moving. Glenn could wave and sign autographs and shake hands and chat and beam that terrific smile at everybody in transit without seeming rude. As for Conrad, he was in absolutely no danger of having to stop and put down the bags. He was now an astronaut, officially, but not to the mobs of autograph seekers. They couldn't have cared less. He looked like some little guy who carried bags for John Glenn. What was more, that was what he felt like. That was about all the second group of astronauts was doing: chores for the first, for the one, the only, the Original Seven. Conrad, as part of his training, had been accompanying Glenn in his travels. Now that Project Mercury was drawing to a close, Glenn was supposed to make Project Apollo, the moon program, his "area of specialization." He was visiting the factories of the major contractors, just as he had in the early days of Mercury. Conrad's area of specialization, officially, was "cockpit layout and systems integration"; but mainly he was… with John Glenn. John Glenn visiting the factory took on the aura of the general coming to inspect the troops. He was a magnet for every sort of VIP who could get next to him, particularly congressmen and senators. There were times when senators actually pushed—elbowed! hipped! bellied!—secretaries, stenographers, and other mere gawkers out of the way to get next to Glenn's fabled hide and speak to him and grin a great deal. Standing by, all the while, would be an unknown young man, the single-combat hero's valet, apparently, his batman, as the British Army called military servants. Namely, the anonymous Lieutenant Conrad, Group II Astronaut.

Nevertheless, Conrad had made it this time, and that was the main thing. That was all that any really competitive military pilot upon the great ziggurat could focus on any more: becoming an astronaut. By now, only three years later, any such session as he and Wally Schirra and Alan Shepard and Jim Lovell and the others had gone through at the Marriott motel in February of 1959… it was hard to believe it could have ever taken place. Remember Wally that night? Wally!… adding up the pros and cons and agonizing over what the space program might do to his chances of commanding a squadron of F-4Hs! And now Wally—the same Wally with whom they had gone waterskiing on Chesapeake Bay, with whom they had weathered that bad string at Pax River, the old affable prankster himself—now Wally stood at the very apex of the great invisible pyramid of flying. For the seven Mercury astronauts had become the True Brotherhood. They were so dazzling you couldn't even see the erstwhile True Brethren of Edwards Air Force Base any longer.

In April, when NASA announced it was accepting applications for a second group of astronauts, both Conrad and Jim Lovell had looked like good bets this time around, since they had been among the thirty-one finalists in the original selection process. Conrad was stationed at Mira-mar, California, requalifying for a phase of the Navy fighter jock's training he had already been through, which was night carrier landings. There was a good reason why night carrier landings required requalifying time; even, as in Conrad's case, after training as a test pilot at Patuxent. Night landings were a routine part of carrier operations—and perhaps the best of all examples of how a man's accumulated good works did him no good whatsoever at each new step up the great pyramid, of how each new step was an absolute test, and of how each bright new day's absolutes—chosen or damned—were built into the routine. By 1962 the Navy had already shifted over to light-beam systems using angled mirrors and Fresnel lenses at the end of the flight deck. Conrad and the rest of them going through night carrier training at Miramar did not have to depend on a landing-signal officer standing at the end of the deck in a luminescent orange suit waving a pair of luminescent orange wigwag flags. At night—to the pilot way up there in the dark—there was now a blob of light, known as the meatball, rising and falling on a dimly perceived little slab in the middle of the ocean. The shining blob, the motherless meatball, was rising and falling because the heaving greasy skillet did not stop wallowing in the waves simply out of respect for the night. The carrier was plowing on away from you, into the wind, and therefore into the waves, and therefore was pitching up and down—five, eight, even ten feet at a gulp. On a night when the clouds were low and the moon was obscured, when the sky was black, the ocean was black, and the deck was black, the little meatball (no more than an inch high from up there) and the lights on the ship were like a single low-wattage comet, dim and lurching through the vast blackness of the universe, and the pilot was expected to have the will, the moxie, the illustrious, the all-illuminating stuff to bring a five- or ten-ton jet fighter onto that dim drunken astral plate at 125 knots. In training he had a limited number of passes down the invisible glide path. If he couldn't bring himself to make contact with the deck for so long that his fuel ran low, then the word bingo! sounded over his earphones, and he had to return to land, to the training base, where the landing strip didn't move when you approached it… and where everybody on the flight line would know that another poor sad bingo was coming into a safe haven, having funked it in the business of night carrier landings. A persistent case of the bingos was enough to wash a man out of night carrier landings. That did not mean you were finished as a Navy pilot. It merely meant that you were finished so far as carrier ops were concerned, which meant that you were finished so far as combat was concerned, which meant you were no longer in the competition, no longer ascending the pyramid, no longer qualified for the company of those with the right stuff. To have every recommendation in the book as a test pilot, to have survived bad strings galore, meant nothing when such a thing happened. Chosen or damned! (It could blow at any seam.) There were nights when that little meatball way down yonder on the deck was jumping around like the silver BBs in those maddening games you hold in the palm of your hand, and a pilot would have to drive his F-4, a big fifteen-ton brute, down onto the deck through sheer willpower, drive it down practically like a nail. Anything—even the Great Kaboom!—was better than hearing bingo over your earphones. To bingo out of a carrier landing after eight years of military flying, after completing test-pilot school at Pax River, after becoming the top of the breed… now, there you had something unthinkable.

Conrad had just requalified for night carrier landings, for "all-weather carrier operations," meaning that he was now fully qualified for Navy air combat, when he received his invitation to apply for astronaut. The fact that there was nothing in the role of astronaut that would require one-tenth the piloting skill of night carrier landings did not deter Conrad, Lovell, or anyone else for a second this time around. This time Conrad went through the selection process like Lt. Straight Arrow. As before, there were thirty-odd finalists. They did not have to go through the Lovelace Clinic or the Wright-Patterson Aeromedical Center, however. Instead, they were sent to Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, the Air Force's medical center, for a set of physicals that were time-consuming but on the whole conventional. After five Mercury flights it was obvious that no extraordinary physical hardiness was required for the job.

For the last phase of the testing they took you straight to Olympus, which was now Houston. Part of the testing was a formal interview, across a table, with NASA engineers, plus Deke Slayton, John Glenn, and Al Shepard, concerning technical matters. But part of it seemed to be social. You were expected to go to a cocktail party and a dinner in a private dining room in the Rice Hotel in Houston, with the Mercury astronauts in attendance. Al Shepard was there for a while, and Gus Grissom, Scott Carpenter… and here was Wally. You kept your brain dialed up in all sectors, trying to strike the perfect middle ground between being a good righteous beer-call buddy and showing a good sober respect for the eminence of those already in the club. Maybe I better hold it down to just one drink. It was like a rush party in a fraternity you desperately wanted to belong to.

Naturally Wally talked to Conrad and Jim Lovell as if he were the same old Wally, comrade-in-arms, good old Wally of Group 20. Nevertheless, the difference in their ranks existed in that room like a ray of light which beamed straight upon Walter Schirra, outstandingly successful single-combat warrior; for there were now the seven Mercury astronauts up there at the apex… and all the rest of the pilots in America far below.

Not that the Original Seven's national eminence altered the true and secret nature of things, however. The self-esteem of the fighter jock knew no limits, and the members of Group II were no exceptions to this rule. As soon as they were selected, the boys began looking around and comparing themselves—the Next Nine—with the Original Seven. Here was Neil Armstrong, who had flown the X-15. (What Mercury astronaut had done anything like that?) Here was John Young, who held two world speed-to-climb records. (What Mercury astronaut, other than Glenn, could claim any such distinction?) Here were Frank Borman, Tom Stafford, and Jim McDivitt, who had been flight test instructors at Edwards. (What Mercury astronaut had ever qualified for that, except for Slayton?) The Next Nine were really rolling now. The Original Seven were chosen to withstand stress, period. Look at Carpenter! Look at Cooper! Oh, the Next Nine felt very good about themselves. Nevertheless, the exalted status of the Original Seven was a fact. Once the initial euphoria of being chosen as an astronaut had subsided, Conrad and the others realized that now, for all their righteous stuff, they occupied a somewhat humiliating position in the corps of astronauts. They were like plebes, rookies, fraternity pledges. Gus Grissom had a nice grim ingratiating gruff gus way of telling them—if their paths had to cross here and there—not to get big ideas, not to go around calling themselves astronauts. "You're not an astronaut," he would say, "you're a trainee. You're not an astronaut until you go up." He said it without a trace of a smile. The Next Nine spent their time going to classes, like nine freshmen, like nine primary flight training candidates at Pensacola, which was bad enough, and doing scutwork for the Holy Seven, which was worse.

That was how Conrad had ended up being John Glenn's go-fer and carrying his bags. It could get cold as hell here on Olympus. There were levels upon levels, even here at the top. At the very apex there was John Glenn, and there were others among the Original Seven themselves who could not get over that fact. At the very first press conference, the one introducing the Next Nine to the public, the Original Seven were on hand, and Shorty Powers happened to introduce them in the reverse order of their flights. When he got to Shepard, he said: "And finally, this is Alan Shepard, the man who's been saying for years, 'But I was first!'" Well, that just cracked the place up. Everyone was laughing, with the single and obvious exception of Smilin' Al. He didn't even move a lip. If slow burns gave off needle rays, Shorty Powers would have had two small green holes through his frontal lobes. And you realized all at once that after Glenn's great orbital triumph Shepard—the prime pilot, the first American in space—must have felt like a forgotten man. Nobody ranked with Glenn, however, not even Webb, the administrator of NASA.

One day Glenn dropped by Webb's office in Washington and informed him that there was going to be a change in his personal agenda. He was going to make no more trips for NASA at the request of this or that congressman or senator. He was no longer going to fly halfway across the country, nor would he walk across the street, to stand on a platform to please some congressman who was looking for votes or whatever else. Glenn didn't put it as a request. He was letting Webb know how it was going to be from now on. He was just laying down the law. There was no way for Webb to take it except as a direct contradiction of his authority. Webb answered in a reasonable, if somewhat aroused, manner. Now, listen, John, we don't send you anywhere because some congressman wants you to be there. We send you because NASA wants you to be there. Congressional support is absolutely essential at this point, and this is one of the most important things you could possibly do for the program. To which Glenn says that nevertheless, he is taking no more such trips. Webb's color begins to rise, and he says that if he is instructed to carry out such duties, then he will be obliged to carry them out. To which Glenn says that Webb happens to be mistaken; he will do no such thing. All at once it's practically a shouting match.

Webb didn't push the situation to the brink. He just let the storm wear itself out; and when it was over, it was obvious that the Administrator of NASA was not a chief so long as John Glenn was in the room. Glenn did not back down or apologize. Far from it; he made it obvious who held the cards around here, and that was that

It was John Glenn who had realized from the first that Project Mercury was like a new branch of the armed services, despite its civilian coloration. It would have simplified matters tremendously if NASA had given everybody formal rankings and had done with it. That way people such as Webb would have known where they actually stood. The seven Mercury astronauts could have been designated Single-Combat General, a category with the honors and privileges of five-star general but with none of the duties and obligations of command. After his flight John Glenn, then, would have been promoted to Galactic Single-Combat General, a category ranking slightly above the Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Services and slightly below the Commander-in-Chief. Webb, as NASA administrator, would have been a two-star general and would have known the protocol for dealing with GSC General Glenn. Newly inducted astronauts, such as Conrad, Lovell, and Young, could have been ranked as majors, with rapid promotion promised in the event of the successful completion of flights.

It would have greatly simplified matters for the wives as well. For as much as they would have denied it, had anyone confronted them with the topic, many of the wives of the Original Seven reacted to the arrival of the Next Nine and their wives… precisely like service wives since time was. The classic and often-told story of service wives concerned the wives of a group of Navy pilots who had just been transferred to a new base. A commander designated to give the wives an orientation lecture says: "First, would you ladies please rearrange yourselves by rank, with the highest-ranking wives sitting in the first row and so on back to the rear." It takes about fifteen minutes for the women to sort themselves out and change their seats, since very few of them know one another. Once the process has been completed, the commander fixes a stern glare upon them and says: "Ladies, I want you to know that I have just witnessed the most ridiculous performance I have ever seen in my entire military career. Allow me to inform you that no matter who your husbands are, you have no rank whatsoever. You are all equals, and you should kindly remember to conduct yourselves as such in all dealings with one another." That was not the end of the story, however. The wives stared back at their instructor with looks of utter bemusement and, as if with a single mind, said to themselves: "Who is this idiot and what planet has he been stationed on?" For the inexpressible provisions of the Military Wife's Compact were well known to all. A military officer's wife rose in rank with her husband and immediately took on all the honors and perquisites pertaining thereto, and only a fool or the sort of simple-minded jerk who was assigned to give orientation lectures to wives could fail to comprehend this.

Further, said the code, the wise wife of a junior officer was careful not to make her family's style of living so ostentatious that it outdazzled that of higher-ranking families. It was on just this point that the Next Nine began to rankle some of the wives of the Original Seven and, for that matter, some of the seven astronauts, as well. They were irritated to notice what terrific houses many of the Next Nine immediately bought. Just like that—in Timber Cove even!—they began gobbling up the goodies! For the Original Seven the ascension from the drab life of the junior officer had seemed like a glorious pioneer straggle and part of the prize for winning the contest, for being chosen as the Original Seven. They found something distasteful about the attitude of the new crowd—this notion that as soon as a man was designated an astronaut, he and his family were entitled to stride out upon the golden boulevards of the Celestial City as if they owned the place.

The Group II astronauts immediately produced an agent, their version of Leo DeOrsey, and sat down to negotiate and cut up the Life pie. He was Harry Batten, president of the N. W. Ayer advertising agency in Philadelphia. He was as much of a big leaguer as DeOrsey, and like DeOrsey he agreed to serve as agent without pay. It was a bit too much! People were already treating the Next Nine like the Original Seven! The developers in Timber Cove and Nassau Bay, the second-best development, offered them big houses for small down payments and huge mortgages at low interest—a mortgage of forty to fifty thousand dollars seemed enormous in 1962—and the Next Nine took it all on without even blinking. They were not behaving like junior officers in the presence of the Single-Combat Generals. For, as everyone understood, tacitly, this was no mere civilian agency; this was a new branch of the service.

It was in that spirit that the "A.W.C." was started. Without anyone coming out and saying so, it was understood that Marge Slayton was the C.O.'s wife in this outfit. By now Deke had taken on his job as Coordinator of Astronaut Activities with such determination that he was about to be put in charge of crew selection—meaning that he would be the one man who had the most to say about who flew, and in what order, particularly when it came to the Next Nine. He was about to be made Assistant Director of Flight Crew Operations. He became the equivalent of a commanding officer, making Marge the C.O.'s wife. Marge organized a couple of coffee hours for all the wives, the First Seven and the Next Nine, so they could all get to know each other. By the second time they met, they all realized, without a word—nobody had to say it—what this was. This was… the Officers Wives Club, such as existed at every base in the land. One of the newcomers who seemed absolutely tickled to death about the coffee hours was Sue Borman, the wife of one of the Next Nine, Frank Borman. Borman had been one of the first instructors at the Air Force's new Experimental Test Pilot School at Edwards. He was a short, compact West Point man from Arizona, and his wife, Sue, was the perfect super-efficient officer's wife. She had a fireproof cheeriness about her and a determination to get things organized. They were a great team. "This is fun," she said, speaking of Marge's coffee hours for the wives. "Let's start doing this on an organized basis." So the A.W.C. began. The initials stood for Astronauts Wives Club, of course, but the full name was never used. It was a gaffe for an astronaut or an astronaut's wife to use the word astronaut. Marge herself was always talking about "the fellows." Besides, the full name would make the military analogy too pointed.

The A.W.C. was no great delight to most of the wives of the Original Seven, however. Some of the newcomers, such as Sue Borman, were too gung-ho about it all. That was what they would tell themselves. In fact, the newcomers acted too equal about it all. There was no protocol for showing the deference due Single-Combat Generals' wives. The wives of the Original Seven began attending the monthly A.W.C. hours less and less. Betty Grissom almost never showed up; but then Betty had hated teatime functions from the very beginning. If one was going to feel ill at ease in the cheery chitchat game and not be treated as the Honorable Mrs. Single-Combat General… why bother?

For both the wives and the men there was at first an Oaken Bucket nostalgia for the early days, the Langley era, the pioneer period, the period of youth and idealism and spartan courage and yahoo cowboy disregard for the bureaucratic proprieties. You would even see engineers and support personnel who had moved from Langley and the Cape here to Houston getting misty about those old days… three years ago… The new facility, the Manned Spacecraft Center, was taking shape out in the middle of a thousand acres of absolutely flat gumbo pasture. The buildings were great squat beige cubes set at grandiose intervals from one another and connected by wide roads, veritable highways, lined with aluminum light poles. The place looked like one of those "industrial parks" that were always being touted in the real-estate sections of the Sunday newspapers.

Nevertheless, it was obvious that something of vast proportions was underway; and given a rosy enough picture of what lies down the road, a man could get over a case of homesickness soon enough. Perhaps Houston, the boom town of boom towns, was just the place for the expansion occurring in the space program. After a while you could begin to appreciate Houston's energy and its sense of the grand sweep, the risk-all plunge. And Timber Cove and Nassau Bay and the other new housing developments out by Clear Lake weren't half bad, it turned out. In fact, they were luxury itself compared to what you found around most air bases, and the locals, out here in this erstwhile farming country, were really good folks. Two-thirds of NASA was already geared up for Projects Gemini and Apollo and the great race to beat the Soviets to the moon. Just imagine what waited, here on earth, for the first man to walk on the moon… and the boys could imagine it. You had only to look at John Glenn. Glenn had not been the first man to fly in earth orbit or even the second, merely the first American. Yet he had ascended to a status so extraordinary it had no precedent. Some of the boys were convinced that Glenn had his eyes set on becoming President. (Nor was the notion farfetched; after all, it was David who had succeeded to the throne of Saul.) Glenn now moved in a world full of the Kennedys, the Johnsons, senators, congressmen, foreign dignitaries, heads of corporations, VIPs of every description. Next to John Kennedy himself, John Glenn was probably the best-known and most admired American in the world. Oh, the boys were aware of all that! Just ask Al Shepard!—although of course no one did.

Al was now in training as backup for Gordon Cooper's flight, which would be in May 1963. Gordo, the last in line, had drawn what was shaping up as the final flight in the Mercury series, thirty-four hours, twenty-two orbits, designed to put the United States into the game with the Soviets, who had now achieved flights of seventeen, sixty-four, and forty-eight orbits. The original planning had called for four long-duration flights, with the second one lasting three days. Shepard had been counting on that. He was desperate for an orbital flight. His suborbital flight, as well as Grissom's, now seemed terribly insignificant. As for Gus, he was already getting revved up for the Gemini program, spending a lot of time in St. Louis, where McDonnell was building the Gemini spacecraft. Gus had put the gloom of his flight behind him and was looking ahead to Gemini and Apollo. His friend Deke was in charge of crew selection for the two new programs and was throwing himself heart and soul into the job, and not just because he enjoyed the exercise of his newly found power. The main thing was that he would be on top of every flight from beginning to end, familiar with every detail of every mission. It seemed to be Deke's fervent belief that it would be only a matter of time—following the next physical or the one after that, or the one next year—before he was back on full flight status and into the rotation. And Wally—Wally was riding high. Wally's flight was still the shining example of what an operational space flight should be. It had taken Wally's performance to show that Cooper's twenty-two-orbit flight would be possible. Wally couldn't have been in better shape in the program. He had been as efficient and as cool as they made them.

Wally had come back from his flight and landed in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis. For a week Kennedy and Khrushchev had their showdown, which appeared to bring the world to the brink of a nuclear war, but then Khrushchev backed off and withdrew all Soviet missiles from Cuba. After that things cooled down considerably. Like everyone else, the boys noticed that negotiations for a nuclear test ban and for "cooperation in space," whatever that might prove to be, were in the news a lot. But to tell the truth, it didn't seem like much more than the usual drizzle of words. For that matter, on May 11, four days before Cooper was to go up, Lyndon Johnson drew the lines the same way they had been drawn ever since October of 1957, when the first Sputnik went up. He made a speech answering charges that some congressmen were making about the high cost of the new programs, Gemini and Apollo, and he said: "I, for one, don't want to go to bed by the light of a Communist moon." Christ, that was worse than Sputnik: every night, overhead, sails the silvery moon, occupied by the Russians.

As for Gordo himself, he was already on top of the world. There were those among his brethren who had their doubts about the man, but he never had a moment's doubt about himself. Once more his light shone 'round about him. Was he the last of the seven to be assigned a flight? Well, so what… it wasn't a contest… the press had dreamed up all that crap… Shepard, Glenn, and the others had paved the way for his endurance test. The potential hazards? They didn't bother him in the slightest. They hadn't from the beginning.

Confronted with any feasible form of manned flight, Gordo was a picture of righteous aplomb. This was a side of Cooper that Jim Rathmann understood better than any of his confreres in the corps. Gordo had been in Florida for a long stretch, preparing for his flight, and he saw Rathmann a lot. Thanks to Rathmann, he, like Gus and Wally and Al, had become crazy about automobile racing. Rathmann, in turn, had decided to learn to fly. Cooper took him up in a Beechcraft one day and told him: "Never fly under a sea gull—they'll shit on your airplane." Rathmann made the mistake of laughing, as if he thought Gordo was kidding, whereupon Gordo said, "I'll show you," and headed for a flock of sea gulls flying low over the Everglades. The first thing Rathmann knew, Cooper was down so low he could hear a sound that went whup whup whup whup whup whup whup whup. It was the propellers cutting the marsh grass. For more than a mile old Gordo mowed the marsh grass to make sure he stayed under the sea gulls. Rathmann could hear it the whole time: whup whup whup whup whup whup. By the time they landed, Rathmann was Jell-O. But Cooper just popped open the cockpit door and stood up on the lower frame and pointed triumphantly at the roof and yelled to Rathmann:"Look here—I told you!"

So far as a Mercury flight was concerned, he seemed to regard it as easy enough. He had lobbied as hard as Deke Slayton himself for more pilot control of the spacecraft. But since you didn't have it, why get excited? Why get your bowels in an uproar? Just take the ride and relax.

Early in the morning of May 15, while it was still dark, Gordo was inserted into the little human holster atop the rocket. As usual there was a long hold before the lift-off. The doctors monitoring the biomedical telemetry began noticing something very odd. In fact, they couldn't believe it. Every objective reading of the calibrations and printouts indicated… the astronaut had gone to sleep! The man was up there stacking Z's on top of a rocket loaded with 200,000 pounds of liquid oxygen and RP-1!

Well, why the hell not? Gordo had had plenty of opportunity to see how the launch days always went. You hit the sack in Hangar S about ten or eleven the night before, and then they woke you up about three in the morning, in the dark, and they took you out to the rocket and they laid you down on a contoured couch for two, three, four hours while they tuned in all the systems for the lift-off. You didn't have a damned thing to do, really, during most of this; so why not catch up on all the sleep you'd missed?

Throughout America, throughout the world, untold millions were by their radios and in front of television sets, waiting for the moment of lift-off, wondering, as always: My God, what goes through a man's mind at a moment like this! Scarcely able to believe it themselves, NASA never supplied the answer.

By the moment of lift-off there was quite a circus in progress out front of Gordo's house in Timber Cove. The Genteel Beast was outdoing itself in the death-watch department. One of the television networks had erected a stupendous aerial on the lawn of a house across the way, a gigantic thing, about eight stories high, the better to beam to the world live pictures of the house inside which Astronaut Cooper's wife, Trudy, was maintaining her anxious vigil in front of the TV set. Milling around underneath the aerial and in the street and on the sidewalks was the biggest mob of reporters and camera crewmen you could imagine. Slovenly but nevertheless seemly they were. They treated Trudy Cooper, in their coverage, as if she had stepped right out of Life magazine, as if she were wearing a pageboy bob and playing "Moonlight in Vermont" on the old upright in the family room to keep up the spirits of herself and the children while Gordon's life Was on the line in the longest American mission yet.

That was rich. By now the very presence of the Beast itself had made any such private and personal response to the event impossible, even in households where the marriage was a lot more solid than Gordo and Trudy's. For the astronaut's wife the days of the lonely vigil by the telephone with the little ones tugging at her skirt, Edwards- or Pax River-style, were over. First had come the Danger Wake, as Louise Shepard had experienced it, with a big crowd in the house and a bigger one—the Genteel Animal—out on the front lawn. Since then the Astronaut's Wife had been converted from an individual to a performer, at least for the duration of the flight—ready or willing or good at it or not. It had become an immutable part of the drill: at the completion of the flight the astronaut's wife had to leave the house and confront the Beast and all his cameras and microphones and submit to a press conference and answer questions and be the Perfect Astronaut's Wife with merely the entire world watching. It was this grim prospect that truly lacerated one's heart while Mr. Wonderful was aloft. It was this that gave the test pilot's wife a royal case of nerves in the space age. For the astronaut the flight consisted of riding the rocket and, God willing, not fucking up. For the wife the flight consisted of… the Press Conference.

The questions they asked you were unbelievably simple-minded, and yet there was no smooth way to field them. As soon as you touched one, it popped all over your face like bubble gum.

"What is in your heart?"

"What advice do you have for other women whose husbands have to go through dangerous situations?"

"What's the first meal you plan to cook for [Al, Gus, John, Scott, Wally, Gordon]?"

"Did you feel you were with him while he was in orbit?"

Pick out one! Try answering it!

Problems of protocol had arisen. Sometimes the Genteel Animal besieged the Mother's house as well as the Wife's. John Glenn's mother had been a great hit on television. She looked and sounded like about as ideal a mother as an astronaut could possibly have. She had white hair and a marvelous smile, and when Walter Cronkite, on CBS, cut from the Cape to New Concord, Ohio, to say a few words to her, she said, "Well, Wal-ter Cron-kite!"—as if she were saying hello to a cousin she hadn't heard from in years. But whom should the networks interview first after a flight, the Wife, the Mother, or the President? Opinions varied, and this added to the tension. Regardless of the order, however, there seemed to be no way for the wife to get out of it. Even Rene, after hiding throughout Scott's flight, had dutifully turned up at the press tent on the base at the Cape for the Wife's Press Conference. By now, when the other wives came around to the house of the Wife during a flight, they were not there to hold her hand over the dangers her husband was facing. They were there to hold her hand over the television cameras she would be facing. They were there to try to buck her up for a true ordeal. They liked to do the Squarely Stable routine. One of the wives—Rene Carpenter was good at it—would take the role of Nancy Whoever, TV correspondent, and hold her fist up to her mouth, as if she were holding a microphone and say:

"We're here in front of the trim, modest suburban home of Squarely Stable, the famous astronaut who has just completed his historic mission, and we have with us his attractive wife, Primly Stable. Primly Stable, you must be happy, proud, and thankful at this moment."

And then she would shift her fist over underneath the chin of another wife, and she would say:

"Yes, Nancy, that's true. I'm happy, proud, and thankful at this moment."

"Tell us, Primly Stable—may I call you Primly?"

"Certainly, Nancy, Primly."

"Tell us, Primly, tell us what you felt during the blastoff, at the very moment when your husband's rocket began to rise from the earth and take him on this historic journey."

"To tell you the truth, Nancy, I missed that part of it. I'd sort of dozed off, because I got up so early this morning and I'd been rushing around a lot taping the shades shut, so the TV people wouldn't come in the windows."

"Well, would you say you had a lump in your throat as big as a tennis ball?"

"That's about the size of it, Nancy, I had a lump in my throat as big as a tennis ball."

"And finally, Primly, I know that the most important prayer of your life had already been answered: Squarely has returned safely from outer space. But if you could have one other wish at this moment and have it come true, what would that one wish be?"

"Well, Nancy, I'd wish for an Electrolux vacuum cleaner with all the attachments—"

—and they'd all crack up at the thought of what a dim lummox the Genteel Beast really was. Still… that didn't make it any easier when your time came.

Gordo's flight was to last thirty-four hours, meaning that Trudy would undergo the longest siege by the Beast and have the most protracted danger wake yet. Two sets of wives came by. Louise Shepard brought most of the other Original Seven wives in her convertible. Later on, some of the Other Nine wives came by—Jim Lovell's wife Marilyn, Ed White's wife Pat, Neil Armstrong's wife Jan, and John Young's wife Barbara. Everybody tried to listen to Gordo's transmissions from the capsule over a high-frequency radio receiver Wally Schirra had loaned Trudy. It was the receiver that had been in Wally's capsule during his flight. But about all you could get out of it was static. So they went out on the patio in the back, out of sight of the Animal, and watched the television coverage of the flight, off and on, and ate devil's-food cake. In the true spirit of the wake, friends and neighbors had brought over food. During his ninth orbit, which began about 7:30 p.m., Gordo was supposed to try to go to sleep for a few hours, and Trudy decided that she and their two daughters, Jan and Cam, should try to get some rest, too. In the morning Gordo was still up there, twenty-four hours into the flight, and the Beast was still outside the door, and the danger wake was going strong. About noon, as Gordo began his last four orbits, you could tell from the television reports that his capsule was beginning to develop electrical problems. During the next-to-last orbit they became worse. It now appeared as if Gordo would have to line up the capsule for re-entry manually, without any assistance from the automatic control system at all. Trudy received a telephone call from Deke Slayton. He told her that she and the children shouldn't worry, because Gordo had practiced completely manual re-entries many times on the procedures trainer. "This is what we wanted to do anyway," he said.

Well, Gordo was going to have his hands full. Nevertheless, Trudy couldn't help but jump yet one more step forward in the retro sequence. If Gordo was beginning his re-entry, then very soon… she would have to step out the front door and face the Beast and his cameras and microphones and go through the press conference…

Meantime, aloft, Gordo was having a hell of a time for himself. Right after the lift-off he said to Wally Schirra, who was serving as the capcom, "Feels good, buddy… All systems go." He kept adding things such as "Working just like advertised." The Life Sciences people, who had finally been allowed a few experiments since the flight was so long, were interested in determining the limits of adaptability to weightlessness. They hoped to see what sleep would be like, although they were not sure they could learn anything about this during a thirty-four-hour flight, given the naturally high adrenal excitement of the astronaut. They needn't have worried. Ol' Gordo obliged by falling asleep during his second orbit, even though his suit was overheating and he had to adjust the temperature settings continually. One of his tasks was to provide urine samples at specified intervals. This he dutifully did. Since in a weightless condition it would be impossible to pour the sample from the urine receptacle—it would have floated about the cockpit as globules—Gordo was provided with a syringe to transfer it from the receptacle to a container. But the syringe leaked all over the place, and Gordo had the reeking amber globules floating around, anyway. So he just tried to herd them together into one big blob periodically and went on with his tasks, which included light and photographic experiments, somewhat like Carpenter's. Gordo was really something. He seemed even cooler about the whole thing than Schirra, and nobody had believed that possible. Every now and then he would look out the window and give the folks on the ground a little travelogue, Gordo-style.

"Down there's the Himalayas," he said. He seemed to like the sound of the word. "Ay-yuh… the Himalayas." In Oklahoma lingo Gordo it came out "Himmuh-lay-yuz."

On the nineteenth orbit, with three more to go, Gordo started getting readings of g-force buildups, as if the capsule had begun its re-entry. Sure enough, the capsule started rolling, just as it would have during a re-entry in order to increase stability. The automatic control system had begun the re-entry sequence, even though the capsule was still in orbit and hadn't slowed down in the slightest. The electrical system was shorting out. On the next orbit, the twentieth, the capsule lost all attitude readings. This meant Cooper would have to line it up manually for the re-entry. On the next-to-last orbit, the twenty-first, the automatic control system went out completely. For re-entry Cooper would not only have to establish the capsule's angle of attack by hand, using the horizon as his point of reference, he would also have to hold the capsule steady on all three axes, pitch, roll, and yaw, with the hand controller and fire the retro-rockets by hand. Meantime, the electrical malfunction had done something to the oxygen balance. Carbon dioxide started building up in the capsule and inside Cooper's suit and helmet as well.

"Well… things are beginning to stack up a little," said Gordo. It was the same old sod-hut drawl. He sounded like the airline pilot who, having just slipped two seemingly certain mid-air collisions and finding himself in the midst of a radar fuse-out and control-tower dysarthria, says over the intercom: "Well, ladies and gentlemen, we'll be busy up here in the cockpit making our final approach into Pittsburgh, and so we want to take this opportunity to thank you for flying American and we hope we'll see you again real soon." It was second-generation Yeager, now coming from earth orbit. Cooper was having a good time. He knew everybody was in a sweat down below. But this was what he and the boys had wanted all along, wasn't it? They had wanted to take over the complete re-entry process—become true pilots in this damned thing, bring her in manually—and the engineers had always shuddered at the thought. Well, now they had no other choice, and he had the controls. On top of that, during his final orbit he would have to keep the capsule at the proper angle, by eye, on the night side of the earth and then be ready to fire the retro-rockets soon after he entered daylight over the Pacific. No sweat. Just made it a little more of a sporty course, that was all—and Gordo lined up the capsule, hit the button for the retro-rockets, and splashed down even closer to the carrier Kearsage than Schirra had.

No one could deny it… no brethren, old or new, could fail to see it… when the evil wind was up, ol' Gordo had shown the world the pure and righteous stuff.

Over the next week Gordo became the most celebrated of all the astronauts aside from John Glenn himself. Ol' Gordo!—whose confreres had pictured him as forever bringing up the rear… There he was, sitting on the back of the open limousine, in parade after parade… Honolulu, Cocoa Beach, Washington, New York… And such parades! The ticker-tape parade in New York was one of the biggest ever, Glenn-scale, with signs along the way, saying things such as GORDO COOPER—YOU'RE SUPER-DUPER! in letters three or four feet high. Not only that, he addressed a joint session of Congress, just as Glenn had. A "textbook flight" like Schirra's was all well and good, but there was nothing like a hair-raiser to capture the imagination and stir the gourds. Gordo was also the first American to spend an entire day in space, of course, and he had put the United States back in the ball game with the Soviets. The role of single-combat warrior seemed more glorious than ever.