12 — The Tears

Since the pooch proved to be unscrewable, officially, and Gus Grissom's flight was therefore on the record as a success, NASA was suddenly in great shape. John Kennedy was happy. "We have started our long voyage to the moon." That was the idea. Neither Shepard's nor Grissom's suborbital flight measured up to Yuri Gagarin's orbit of the earth, but the fact that NASA had completed two successful manned flights seemed to mean that the United States was battling back successfully in the competition for the heavens.

Naturally, true to form, that was the moment the anonymous and uncanny Chief Designer, D-503, Builder of the Integral, chose to show the world who actually ruled the heavens.

Just sixteen days after Grissom's flight, which is to say, on August 6, 1961, the Soviets sent Vostok 2 into orbit with a cosmonaut named Gherman Titov aboard. Titov circled the earth for an entire day, completing seventeen full orbits, and landing where he had started, on Soviet soil. Three times he came over the United States, 125 miles overhead. Once again, all over the country, politicians and the press seemed profoundly alarmed, and the awful vision was presented: suppose the cosmonaut were armed with hydrogen bombs and flung them as he came over, like Thor flinging thunderbolts… one here, one there… Toledo disappears off the face of the earth… Kansas City… Lubbock… Titov's flight seemed so awesome it made the Shepard and Grissom flights look terribly insignificant. The Integral and its Chief Designer could apparently do anything they wanted, and at any time.

Seven days later, August 13, 1961, Nikita Khrushchev began the steps that led to the building of a wall, precisely like a penitentiary wall, through the middle of an entire city, Berlin, to prevent the population of East Berlin from crossing over to the West. But the world was still blinking at the radiance of the day-long space flight. "They're a bit brutal—but you have to admit they're geniuses. Imagine keeping a man in space for twenty-four hours!"

So far as NASA was concerned, the Titov flight put an end to the Mercury-Redstone program then and there. The next astronaut in line to ride on top of the Redstone, John Glenn, was now assigned to attempt an orbital flight, using the Atlas rocket, which had done so poorly in unmanned tests. Later there were those who speculated that NASA had been "saving Glenn for the big one" all along. But Glenn did not have that kind of status within NASA. He had learned that to his bitter regret. No, he had only the invisible Chief Designer, Builder of the Integral, to thank for the fact that he was assigned to be the first American to orbit the earth.

After Titov's flight the phrase the space gap began to be repeated throughout the American press. Space gap was a superstitious condition. It began to seem of urgent importance for NASA to put a man into space before the sands stopped flowing in the hourglass on the last day of the year 1961. The great cowboy rush of the winter of 1960-61 started all over again. The hell with fastidious precautions… For example, the Soviets revealed that Titov had suffered from nausea throughout his flight. Later they changed that to say that he had suffered nausea after "prolonged" flight. They would have probably not revealed even that much, except that they decided to participate in international scientific conferences in order to publicize their space feats. It also came out—although few specifics were given—that the Soviet manned space-flight program, from selection of their cosmonauts (from among military pilots) and their training (centrifuge rides, parabolic rides in jet fighters, and so forth) to capsule design and launching and retro-rocket systems, was remarkably similar to NASA's. Everyone at NASA regarded this as vastly reassuring. We're on the right track, anyway! Of course, the Soviet rockets were far more powerful. That was the given. And if a cosmonaut of the Integral had suffered nausea in orbit, then astronauts probably would, too. But there was no time to worry about that now. Find out about it the way Titov did: up there. Mas alla Over the next hill!

In September NASA successfully launched a Mercury-Atlas capsule with a dummy astronaut aboard and brought it back on target into the Atlantic, near Bermuda, after one orbit of the earth. The press speculated that Kennedy would pressure NASA to put an astronaut on the next flight, but Hugh Dryden and Bob Gilruth managed to hold out for an additional test. They wanted to send a chimpanzee into orbit with the Atlas rocket first.

This time, out at Edwards, the True Brothers didn't even derive a chilly smile from the fact that once more in the exalted Project Mercury an ape would be taking the first flight. An ape would make the first orbit of the earth for the U.S.A. The prestige of Project Mercury had by now rendered such considerations meaningless. On October 11, at Edwards, Bob White had made an extraordinary flight in the X-15—and the country hardly noticed. White took the X-15 up to 217,000 feet with the Big Engine—and the press merely nodded perfunctorily. So a man had just flown very high in an airplane; how interesting; and that was that. The fact that White was on top of a rocket, the same sort of rocket as the Redstone or the Atlas, the fact that his flight to 217,000 feet was in effect piloted space flight—none of this was likely to impress Kennedy or the public amid the panic over Titov and the space gap. White had gone forty miles up, ten miles short of the arbitrarily set boundary of "space." The XLR-99, the Big Engine, had delivered 57,000 pounds of thrust, just 21,000 short of the thrust of the Redstones that took Shepard and Grissom aloft. White's speed reached Mach 5.21, or 3,647 miles an hour; Shepard's and Grissom's rocket velocities were only slightly greater, about 5,180 miles per hour. White was weightless for three minutes during his tremendous arc over the top, as compared to Shepard's and Grissom's five minutes. White saw all the things that Shepard and Grissom saw (and Shepard, only barely)… including the entire blue band of atmosphere at the horizon of the earth. Above all, White was a pilot. He controlled his plane's ascent. He used hydrogen-peroxide thrusters to control his attitude once the air became too thin for aileron control—the same system of hydrogen-peroxide thrusters that Shepard and Grissom had used—and he did it all without benefit of any automatic backup. And he brought the ship back down through the earth's atmosphere himself… and landed it himself on the holy plateau of Edwards… on the dome of the world. A rocket pilot (quoth the brethren), but the national press barely noticed.

So it was with a mainly academic fascination that the boys at Edwards followed the second Project Mercury chimpanzee flight. For nine months the veterinarians at Holloman Air Force Base had been putting their colony of chimpanzees through the operant conditioning regimen in preparation for an orbital flight. The training included all the things that had gone into the training for the first suborbital flight, the centrifuge runs, the weightless parabolas, the procedures-trainer sessions, the heat-chamber and altitude-chamber sessions, plus some intelligence tests. In one test the ape had to be able to judge time intervals. The signal light would go on, and he had to wait twenty seconds before pulling the lever or he would receive the ever-cocked electrical shock. In another the animal was required to read the instrument panel and throw a switch. Three symbols would flash on the panel, two of which would be identical, such as two triangles and one square, and the animal had to pull the lever under the odd one or receive the shock in the soles of his feet.

By the beginning of November, twenty veterinarians had moved into Hangar S at the Cape with five chimpanzees. One of them was Ham, thinner and more strung out than ever but still an ace in the procedures trainer, his life dedicated to the avoidance of the invisible volts. Ham was not regarded as the pick of the lot, however. The brightest and quickest member of the colony was a male who had been brought from Africa to Holloman Air Force Base in April of 1960, when he was about two and a half years old. He was known as Number 85. Number 85 had fought the veterinarians and the process of operant conditioning like a Turkish prisoner of war. He fought them with his hands, his feet, his teeth, his saliva, and his cunning. He would shake off each jolt of electricity and give them a hideous grin. When he couldn't take the shocks any more, he would cooperate temporarily, and his hands would fly across the procedures trainer console like E. Power Biggs's at the organ—and then he would turn on the vets, making another desperate thrash toward freedom. He was like the slave who wouldn't break. Finally, they shut him up inside a metal box and let him thrash about in there for a week with his feces and urine for company. When they let him out, he was, at last, a different ape. He had had enough. He didn't want any more of the box. His operant conditioning could now begin in earnest. The box was certainly not the course that the good vets of Holloman would have chosen, had the times been normal. No, they had chosen this course in the name of the battle for the heavens and under the pressure of national urgency; Number 85 was the ape that the MA-5 mission (the fifth test of the Mercury-Atlas vehicle) required. He was the quickest study in the universe of the Simia satyrus. They took him up in jet fighters to get him used to the accelerations, the noise, and the disorienting sensations of high-speed flight. They put him in the gondola of the human centrifuge at the University of Southern California and ran him through entire profiles of the proposed first American orbital mission, until he was used to the seven or eight g's he would experience on ascent and on re-entry. Under high g's or low g's Number 85 could operate a Mercury console like no ape that had ever lived. He was so good they used him as the test subject for a laboratory experiment that simulated a fourteen-day orbital mission. For fourteen days Number 85 was on the procedures trainer performing the same tasks he would perform in the 4?-hour MA-5 mission. For MA-5 they had added rewards as well as the punishment of the shocks in the feet. Number 85 had two tubes positioned near his mouth. Out of one came banana-flavored pellets, if he did his tasks correctly, and from the other he could take sips of water. Number 85 could do the tasks so handily, including reading the odd-symbol panel, he could have kept the tubes popping banana pellets and water until he was sated or bilious. He was outstanding.

By now, November of 1962, he had been through 1,263 hours of training—the equivalent of 158 eight-hour days. For the equivalent of 43 days he had been strapped in one simulator or conditioning apparatus or another, whether the centrifuge, the jets, or the procedures trainer. He was a marvel. The only problem was his blood pressure. Back in June of 1960, two months after his training began, they had put a blood-pressure cuff on him and obtained a reading of from 140 to 160 systolic. This was certainly high, but it was hard to tell with Number 85. He had fought every medical examination as if it were an assault. It took two or three people just to restrain him. Three months later they were getting readings from 140 to 210; by now they were running from 190 to 210. The blood pressures of all five chimpanzees out back of Hangar S had mounted steadily over the past two years, although none was so elevated as Number 85's. Well, maybe it was the pressure cuff, which he didn't see very often and which probably struck him as a big black restraining mechanism. After all, Number 85 was excitable. Perhaps they would find out more during the flight. There had been no way to read the blood pressure of the other ape, Number 61, during his Mercury-Redstone flight. But for this one they put catheters in a main artery and a main vein of Number 85's legs to provide pressure readings before the launch and throughout the flight. They also put a catheter in his urethra to collect urine.

Number 85 went through procedures trainer drills out in the vans behind Hangar S right up to the eve of the flight. He was still the pick of the litter. He must have been wound up tighter than a window-shade spring, judging by the systolic readings.

Just before the flight his name was announced to the press as Enos. Enos meant man in Hebrew.

The flight did not attract much interest. The public, like the President, was impatient with the tests, especially since it was already November 29 when the ape was launched and it was becoming clear that there would be no manned launch before the year was over. The year would end without a manned flight. Number 85 was supposed to make three orbits of the earth. The launch went perfectly, with Number 85 pulling his levers a mile a minute. The Atlas rocket delivered 367,000 pounds of thrust, nearly five times what Shepard and Grissom had experienced, but neither the noise nor the vibrations fazed Number 85 in the slightest. He had heard and felt worse in the centrifuge runs with their piped-in sound. And since he had no window, he did not know he was leaving the earth, and for that matter the noise, the vibrations, or departure from this globe, was preferable to the box. He kept working his levers as fast they could light up the panel. The capsule went into a perfect orbit. Throughout the first orbit Number 85 performed like a dream, not only hitting the levers on cue and in complicated sequences, but also taking six-minute rest periods when signaled to… or at least lying motionless, the better to avoid the juice.

During the second orbit the wiring went haywire. When Number 85 did the odd-symbol exercise, he started getting electrical shocks in his left foot even when he pulled the correct lever. He kept pulling the correct levers, nonetheless. He was unstoppable. His suit started overheating. He didn't even slow down. Now the automatic attitude controls began malfunctioning, so that the capsule kept rolling over forty-five degrees before the thrusters on either side would correct it. It kept rolling back and forth. Didn't throw Number 85 out of his routine for a second. He kept reading the lights and flipping the levers. It would have to get a whole lot worse than this before it was as bad as the box.

Because the rolling was using up too much hydrogen peroxide—they had to be sure there was enough left to position the capsule correctly, blunt end down, for reentry—they brought the capsule down after two orbits, into the Pacific, off Point Arguello, California. Number 85 bobbed around and the capsule bobbed around in the ocean for an hour and fifteen minutes before a ship arrived to retrieve them. The capsule had an explosive hatch, but it did not "just blow." Nor had Number 85 thrown up (like Titov) because of weightlessness or erratic motion. He had been weightless for a full three hours during the flight. He was calm when they removed him from the capsule. There was evidence, however, that he had had a merry old time for himself out there in the water. He hadn't just cooled his heels. The little bastard had ripped through the belly panel of his restraint suit and removed most of the biomedical sensors from his body and damaged the rest, including those that had been inserted under the skin. He had also yanked the urinary catheter out of his penis. To just pull it out like that must have hurt like hell. What came over him?

The flight had been a great success, all things considered. But one thing bothered the NASA Life Sciences people. The animal's blood pressure had been badly elevated. It had run from 160 to 200 throughout—even when his pulse rate was normal and he was watching his lights and pulling his levers with great efficiency. Was this some sort of morbid and unforeseen effect of prolonged weightlessness? Were astronauts in earth orbit going to be candidates for apoplexy? The Holloman veterinarians hastened to reassure them that Number 85—er, Enos—had registered high-blood-pressure readings for two years now. It seemed to be the nature of the beast. The NASA folk nodded… although 200, systolic, was awfully goddamned high…

Privately, the situation had the Holloman scientists thinking, and not about space flight, either. The readings they had gotten from Number 85 in the past with the cuff may or may not have been reliable. But there was no mistaking the readings of the catheters during the flight and just before it. Once they were inserted, Number 85 wasn't even aware of them. They were giving true readings. His blood pressure had not gone up because of the stresses of the flight. He took the flight with the utmost aplomb; his heart and respiratory rates and body temperatures were actually below the readings obtained during the centrifuge runs. In fact, his blood pressure had not gone up at all. It had been up there all along. A theory with implications for man-on-earth, not man-in-space, was beginning to form… Number 85, smartest of the Simia satyrus, prince of the lower primates, had swallowed so much rage over the past two years, thanks to the operant-conditioning process, it had begun pumping out through his arteries… until every heartbeat was about to blow his eardrums out for him…

There was even a press conference at which the chimpanzee appeared. "Enos" he was, of course. At the press conference Bob Gilruth announced that John Glenn would be the pilot for the first manned orbital flight, with Scott Carpenter as the backup pilot. Deke Slayton would take the second flight, with Wally Schirra as the backup pilot. All the while the astronaut who took the first flight was sitting right there at the table (quoth the brethren, sotto voce). Number 85 stole the show, which was only just. He took the flashbulbs and all the talk and hubbub without blinking or even fidgeting, as if he had been waiting all along for his moment in the spotlight. Of course, the ape had been, as it were, overtrained for such a moment and was long past being able to let such things alter his behavior. Number 85 had been in rooms full of bright lights and large numbers of human beings before. Noise, vibrations, oscillations, weightlessness, space flight, fame—what earthly difference did it make compared to the shocks and the box?


At the outset neither Glenn nor his wife, Annie, foresaw the sort of excitement that was going to build up over his flight. Glenn regarded Shepard as the winner of the competition, since he looked at it the way pilots had always looked at it on the great ziggurat of flying. Al had been picked for the first flight, and there was no getting around that. He had been the first American to go into space. It was as if he were the project pilot for Mercury. The best Glenn could hope for was to play Scott Crossfield to Shepard's Chuck Yeager. Yeager had broken the sound barrier and become the True Brother of all the True Brothers, but at least Crossfield had gone on to become the first man to fly Mach 2 and, later on, the first man to fly the X-15.

Not even when reporters began arriving in New Concord, Ohio, his old hometown, and pushing his parents' doorbell and roaming and foaming over the town like gangs of strays, looking for anything, scraps, morsels of information about John Glenn—not even then did Glenn fully realize just what was about to happen. The deal with Life kept all but Life reporters away from him, and so the other fellows were out trying to root up whatever they could. That seemed to be the explanation. The Cape hadn't turned into a madhouse yet. As late as December, Glenn could go out to the strip on Route A1A in Cocoa Beach with Scott Carpenter, who was training with him as backup man, out to that little Kontiki Village joint, whatever the name of it was, and listen to the combo play "Beyond the Reef." John got a kick out of "Beyond the Reef." By early January, however, it was madness to try to get to the Kontiki joint or anywhere else in Cocoa Beach. There were now reporters all over the place, all of them rabid for a glimpse of John Glenn. They would even pile into the little Presbyterian church when John went there on Sunday and turn the service into a sort of muffled melee, with the photographers trying to keep quiet and muscle their way into position at the same time. They were really terrible. So John and Scott now stuck pretty much to the base, working out on the procedures trainer and the capsule itself. At night, in Hangar S, John would try to answer the fan mail. But it was like trying to beat back the ocean with a hammer. The amount of mail he was getting was incredible.

Nevertheless, the training regimen created a curtain around John, and he didn't really have as clear an idea of the storm of publicity… and the passion of it all… as his wife did. At their house in Arlington, Virginia, Annie was getting the whole storm, and she had practically no protection from it and few happy distractions. John's flight was first scheduled for December 20, 1961, but bad weather over the Cape kept forcing postponements. He was finally set to go on January 27. He was inserted into the capsule before dawn. Annie was in a state. She was petrified. This had little to do with fear for John's life, however. Annie could take that kind of pressure. She had been through the whole course of worrying over a pilot. John had flown in combat in the Pacific Theater in the Second World War and then in Korea. In Korea he was hit seven times by flak. Annie had also been through just about everything that Pax River had to inflict upon a pilot's wife, short of the visit of the Friend of Widows and Orphans at her own door. But one thing she had never done. She had never had to step outside after one of John's flights and say a few words on television. She knew that would be coming up when John flew, and she was already dreading the moment. Some of the other wives were at her house for the Danger Wake, and she asked them to bring some tranquilizers. She wouldn't need them for the flight. She would take them before she had to step outside for the ordeal with the TV people. With her ferocious stutter—the thought of millions of people, or even hundreds, or even five… seeing her struggling on television… She had been in front of microphones with John before, and John always knew how to step in and save the day. She had certain phrases she had no trouble with—"Of course." "Certainly." "Not at all." "Wonderful." "I hope not." "That's right." "I don't think so." "Fine, thank you," and so on—and most of the questions from the television reporters were so simpleminded she could handle them with those eight phrases, plus "yes" and "no"—and John or one of the children would chime in if any amplification was called for. They were a great team that way. But today she would have to solo.

Annie could see the impending catastrophe easily enough. All she had to do was look at the television screen. Any channel… it didn't matter… she could count on seeing some woman holding a microphone covered in black foam rubber and giving a declamation on the order of:

"Inside this trim, modest suburban home is Annie Glenn, wife of Astronaut John Glenn, sharing the anxiety and pride of the entire world at this tense moment but in a very private and very crucial way that only she can understand. One thing has prepared Annie Glenn for this test of her own courage and will sustain her through this test, and that one thing is her faith: her faith in the ability of her husband, her faith in the efficiency and dedication of the thousands of engineers and other personnel who provide his guidance system… and her faith in Almighty God…"

In the picture on the screen all you could see was the one TV woman, with the microphone in her hand, standing all by herself in front of Annie's house. The curtains were pulled, somewhat unaccountably, inasmuch as it was nine o'clock in the morning, but it all looked very cozy. In point of fact, the lawn, or what was left of it, looked like Nut City. There were three or four mobile units from the television networks with cables running through the grass. It looked as if Arlington had been invaded by giant toasters. The television people, with all their gaffers and go-fers and groupies and cameramen and couriers and technicians and electricians, were blazing with 200-watt eyeballs and ricocheting off each other and the assembled rabble of reporters, radio stringers, tourists, lollygaggers, policemen, and freelance gawkers. They were all craning and writhing and rolling their eyes and gesturing and jabbering away with the excitement of the event. A public execution wouldn't have drawn a crazier mob. It was the kind of crowd that would have made the Fool Killer lower his club and shake his head and walk away, frustrated by the magnitude of the opportunity.

Meanwhile, John is up on top of the rocket, the Atlas, a squat brute, twice the diameter of the Redstone. He's lying on his back in the human holster of the Mercury capsule. The count keeps dragging on. There's hold after hold because of the weather. The clouds are so heavy they will make it impossible to monitor the launch properly. Every day for five days Glenn has psyched himself up for the big event, only to have a cancellation because of the weather. Now he has been up there for four hours, four and a half, five hours—he has been stuffed into the capsule, lying on his back, for five hours, and the engineers decide to scrub the flight because of the heavy cloud cover.

He's drained. He makes his way back to Hangar S, and they start taking the suit off and unwiring him. John is sitting there in the ready room with just the outer covering of the suit off—he still has on the mesh lining underneath and all the sensors attached to his sternum and his rib cage and his arms—and a delegation from NASA comes trooping in to confront him with the following message from on high:

John, we hate to trouble you with this, but we're having a problem with your wife.

My wife?

Yes, she won't cooperate, John. Perhaps you can give her a call. There's a phone hookup right here.

A call?

Absolutely befuddled, John calls Annie. Annie is inside their house in Arlington with a few of the wives, a few friends, and Loudon Wainwright, the writer from Life, watching the countdown and, finally, the cancellation on television. Outside is the bedlam of the reporters baying for scraps of information about the ordeal of Annie Glenn—and resenting the fact that Life has exclusive access to the poignant drama. A few blocks away, on a quaint Arlington side street, in a limousine, waits Lyndon Johnson, Vice-President of the United States. Kennedy had appointed Johnson his special overseer for the space program. It was the sort of meaningless job that Presidents give Vice-Presidents, but it had a symbolic significance now that Kennedy was presenting manned space flight as the very vanguard of his New Frontier (version number two). Johnson, like many men who have had the job of Vice-president before him, has begun suffering from publicity deprivation. He decides he wants to go inside the Glenn household and console Annie Glenn over the ordeal, the excruciating pressure of the five-hour wait and the frustrating cancellation. To make this sympathy call all the more memorable, Johnson decides it would be nice if he brought in NBC-TV, CBS-TV, and ABC-TV along with him, in the form of a pool crew that will feed the touching scene to all three networks and out to the millions. The only rub—the only rub, to Johnson's way of thinking—is that he wants the Life reporter, Wainwright, to get out of the house, because his presence will antagonize the rest of the print reporters who can't get in, and they will not think kindly of the Vice-President.

What he does not realize is that the only ordeal that Annie Glenn has been going through has been over the possibility that she was going to have to step outside at some point and spend sixty seconds or so stammering a few phrases. And now… various functionaries and secret-service personnel are calling on the telephone and banging on the door to inform her that the Vice-President is already in Arlington, in a White House limousine, waiting to pull up and charge in and pour ten minutes of hideous Texas soul all over her on nationwide TV. Short of the rocket blowing up under John, this is the worst thing she can imagine occurring in the entire American space program. At first Annie is trying to deal with it gracefully by saying that she can't possibly ask Life to leave, not only because of the contract, but because of their good personal relationship. Wainwright, being no fool, doesn't particularly care to get caught in the middle like this and so he offers to bow out, to leave. But Annie is not about to give up her Life shield at this point. Her mind is made up. She's getting angry. She tells Wainwright: "You're not leaving this house!" Her anger does wonders for her stutter. It flattens it right out temporarily. She's practically ordering him to stay. Annie's stutter often makes people underestimate her, and Johnson's people didn't realize that she was a Presbyterian pioneer wife living in full vitality in the twentieth century. She could deal with any five of them with just a few amps from the wrath of God when she was angry. Finally, they're getting the picture. She's too much for them. So they start trying to bend arms at NASA to get someone to order her to play ball. But it has to be done very rapidly. Johnson is sitting out there a few blocks away in his limousine, fuming and swearing and making life hell for everyone within earshot, wondering, in so many words, why the fuck there isn't anybody on his staff who can deal with a housewife, f'r chrissake, and his staff is leaning on NASA, and NASA is bucking the problem up the chain, until in a matter of minutes it's at the top, and the delegation is trooping into Hangar S to confront the astronaut himself.

So there's John, with half his mesh underlining hanging off his body and biosensor wires sprouting from out of his thoracic cage… there's John, covered with sweat, drawn, deflated, beginning to feel very tired after waiting for five hours for a hundred tons of liquid oxygen and RP-1 kerosene to explode under his back… and the hierarchy of NASA has one thing on its mind: keeping Lyndon Johnson happy. So John puts in the call to Annie, and he tells her: "Look, if you don't want the Vice-President or the TV networks or anybody else to come into the house, then that's it as far as I'm concerned, they are not coming in—and I will back you up all the way, one hundred percent, and you tell them that. I don't want Johnson or any of the rest of them to put so much as one toe inside our house!"

That was all that Annie needed, and she simply became a wall. She wouldn't even discuss the matter any further, and there was no question any longer about Johnson getting in. Johnson, of course, was furious. You could hear him bellowing and yelling over half of Arlington, Virginia. He was talking about his aides. Pansies! Cows! Gladiolas! Webb could scarcely believe what was going on. The astronaut and his wife had shut the door in the Vice-President's face. Webb had a few words with Glenn. Glenn wouldn't back down an inch. He indicated that Webb was way out of line.

Way out of line! What the hell was this? Webb couldn't figure out what was happening. How could the number-one man, himself, the administrator of NASA, be way out of line? Webb called in some of his top deputies and described the situation. He said he was considering changing the order of the flight assignments—i.e., putting another astronaut in Glenn's place. This flight required a man who could comprehend the broader interests of the program better. His deputies looked at him as if he were crazy. He'd never get away with it! The astronauts wouldn't stand for it!… They had their differences, but on something like this the seven would stand together like an army… Webb was beginning to see something he had never quite figured out before. The astronauts were not his men. They were in a category new to American life. They were single-combat warriors. If anything, he was their man.

One could imagine what would happen if Webb tried to exercise his authority nonetheless… Here comes the showdown… the seven Mercury astronauts on the TV… explaining that in the very moments when their lives are on the line, he, Webb, is meddling, trying to curry favor with Lyndon Johnson, being vindictive because John Glenn's wife, Annie, would not let the hideous hand-wringing Texan into her living room to emote all over her on nationwide television… He sits in his office suite in Washington while their hides are up on the tip of the rocket… One could see the lines drawn in just that way. Webb would be issuing denials, furiously… Kennedy would be the umpire—and it wasn't too hard to figure out which way the decision would go. The changing of the assignments was never mentioned again.

Not long thereafter an old friend visited Webb in his corner office, and Webb unburdened himself.

"Look at this office," he said, making a grand gesture across a room with all the trappings of Cabinet-level rank known to the General Services Administration syllabus. "And I… cannot… get… a… simple… order… carried out!"

But in the next moment his mood changed. "All the same," he said, "I love those guys. They're putting their lives on the line for their country."

Dryden and Gilruth decided to postpone the launch for at least two weeks, to the middle of February. Glenn made a statement to the press about the delays. He said that anybody who knew the first thing about "the flight test business" expected delays; they were all part of it; the main thing was not to involve people who became "panicky" when everything didn't go just right… Glenn went home to Arlington for a three-day weekend. While he was there, President Kennedy invited him to the White House for a private get-together. He did not invite Webb or Johnson to join them.


On February 20 Glenn was once again squeezed inside the Mercury capsule on top of the Atlas rocket, lying on his back, whiling away the holds in the countdown by going over his checklist and looking at the scenery through the periscope. If he closed his eyes it felt as if he were lying on his back on the deck of an old ship. The rocket kept creaking and twisting, shaking the capsule this way and that. The Atlas had 4.3 times as much fuel as the Redstone, including 80 tons of liquid oxygen. The liquid oxygen, the "lox," had a temperature of 293 degrees below zero, so that the shell and tubing of the rocket, which were thin, kept contracting and twisting and creaking. Glenn was at the equivalent of nine stories up in the air. The enormous rocket seemed curiously fragile, the way it moved and creaked and whined. The contractions created high-frequency vibrations and the lox hissed in the pipes, and it all ran up through the capsule like a metallic wail. It was the same rocket lox wail they used to hear at dawn at Edwards when they fueled the D-558-2 many years before.

Through the periscope Glenn could see for miles down the Banana River and the Indian River. He could just barely make out the thousands of people along the beaches. Some of them had been camping out along there in trailers since January 23, when the flight was first scheduled. They had elected camp mayors. They were having a terrific time. A month in a Banana River trailer camp was not too long to wait to make sure you were here when an event of this magnitude occurred.

There were thousands of them, off on the periphery as Glenn looked out. He could only see them through the periscope. They looked very small and far way and far below. And they were all wondering with a delicious shudder what it must be like to be in his place now. How frightened is he! Tell us! That's all we want to know! The fear and the gamble. Never mind the rest. Lying on his back like this, with his legs jackknifed up above him, stuffed blind into the holster, with the hatch closed, he couldn't help but be aware of his own heartbeat from time to time. Glenn could tell that his pulse was slow. Out loud, if the subject ever came up, everyone said that pulse rates didn't matter; it was a very subjective thing; many variables; and so on. It had only been within the past five years that biosensors had even been put on pilots. They resented them and didn't care to attach any importance to them. Nevertheless, without saying so, everyone knew that they provided a rough gauge of a man's emotional state. Without saying so—not a word!—everyone knew that Gus Grissom's pulse rate had been somewhat panicky. It kept jumping over 100 during the countdown and then spurted up to 150 during the lift-off and stayed that high throughout his weightless flight, then jumped again, all the way to 171, just before the retro-rockets went off. No one—certainly not out loud—no one was going to draw any conclusions from it, but… it was not a sign of the right stuff. Add to that his performance in the water… In his statement about people who get panicky over the flight test business, Glenn had said you had to know how to control your emotions. Well, he was as good as his word. Did any yogi ever control his heartbeat and perspiration better! (And, as the biomedical panels in the Mission Control room showed, his pulse never went over 80 and was holding around 70, no more than that of any normal healthy bored man having breakfast in the kitchen.) Occasionally he could feel his heart skip a beat or beat with an odd electrical sensation, and he knew that he was feeling the tension. (And at the biomedical panels the young doctors looked at each other in consternation—and then shrugged.) Nevertheless, he was aware that he was feeling no fear. He truly was not. He was more like an actor who is going out to perform in the same play yet once again—the only difference being that the audience this time is enormous and highly prestigious. He knew every sensation he would feel once the event began. The main thing was not to… "foul up." Please, dear God, don't let me foul up. In fact, there was little chance that he would forget so much as a word or a single move. Glenn had been the backup pilot—everyone said pilot now—for both Shepard and Grissom. During the charade before the first flight, he had gone through all of Shepard's simulations, and he had repeated most of Grissom's. And the simulations he had gone through as prime pilot for the first orbital flight had surpassed any simulations ever done before. They had even put him in the capsule on top of the rocket and moved the gantry away from the rocket, because Grissom had reported the odd sensation of perceiving the gantry as falling over, as he witnessed the event through his periscope, just before lift-off. Therefore, this feeling would be adapted out of Glenn. They put him in the capsule on top of the rocket and instructed him to watch the gantry move away through his periscope. Nothing must be novel about the experience! On top of all that, he had Shepard's and Grissom's descriptions of variations from the simulations. "On the centrifuge you feel thus-and-such. Well, during the actual flight it feels like that but with this-and-that difference." No man had ever lived an event so completely ahead of time. He was socketed into the capsule, lying on his back, getting ready to do precisely what his enormous Presbyterian Pilot self-esteem had been dying to do for fifteen years: demonstrate to the world his righteous stuff.

Exactly that! The Presbyterian Pilot! Here he is!—within twenty seconds of lift-off, and the only strange thing is how little adrenalin is pumping when the moment comes… He can hear the rumble of the Atlas engines building up down there below his back. All the same, it isn't terribly loud. The huge squat rocket shakes a bit and struggles to overcome its own weight. It all happens very slowly in the first few seconds, like an extremely heavy elevator rising. They've lit the candle and there's no turning back, and yet there's no surge inside him. His pulse rises only to 110, no more than the minimum rate you should have if you have to deal with a sudden emergency. How strange that it should be this way! He has been more wound up for a takeoff in an F-102.

"The clock is operating," he said. "We're underway."

It was all very smooth, much smoother than the centrifuge… just as Shepard and Grissom said it would be. He had gone through the same g-forces so many times… he hardly noticed them as they built up. It would have bothered him much more if they had been less. Nothing novel! No excitement, please! It took thirteen seconds for the huge rocket to reach transonic speed. The vibrations started. It was just as Shepard and Grissom said: it was much gentler than the centrifuge. He was still lying flat on his back, and the g-forces drove him deeper and deeper into the seat, but it all felt so familiar. He barely noticed it. He kept his eyes on the instrument panel the whole time… All quite normal, every little needle and switch in the right place… No malevolent instructor feeding Abort problems into the loop… As the rocket entered the transonic zone, the vibration became intense. The vibrations all but obliterated the roar of the engines. He was entering the area of "max q," maximum aerodynamic pressure, in which the pressure of the shaft of the Atlas forcing its way through the atmosphere at supersonic speed would reach almost a thousand pounds per square foot. Through the cockpit window he could see the sky turning black. Almost 5 g's were driving him back into his seat. And yet… easier than the centrifuge… All at once he was through max q, as if through a turbulent strait, and the trajectory was smooth and he was supersonic and the rumble of the rocket engines was more muffled than ever and he could hear all the little fans and recorders and the busy little kitchen, the humming little shop… The pressure on his chest reached 6 g's. The rocket pitched down. For the first time he could see clouds and the horizon. In a moment—there it was—the Atlas rocket's two booster engines shut down and were jettisoned from the side of the shaft and his body was slammed forward, as if he were screeching to a halt, and the g-forces suddenly dropped to 1.25, almost as if he were on earth and not accelerating at all, but the central sustainer engine and two smaller engines were still driving him up through the atmosphere… A flash of white smoke went up past the window… No! The escape tower was firing earlybut the JETTISON TOWER light wasn't on!… He didn't see the tower go… Wait a minute… There went the tower, on schedule… The JETTISON TOWER light came on green… The smoke must have been from the booster rockets as they left the shaft… The rocket pitched back up… going straight up… The sky was very black now… The g-forces began pushing him back into his seat again… 3 g's… 4 g's… 5 g's… Soon he would be forty miles up… the last critical moment of powered flight, as the capsule separated from the rocket and went into its orbital trajectory… or didn't… Hey!… All at once the whole capsule was whipping up and down, as if it were tied to the end of a diving board, a springboard. The g-forces built up and the capsule whipped up and down. Yet no sooner had it begun than Glenn knew what it was. The weight of the rocket on the launch pad had been 260,000 pounds, most of it oxidizer and fuel, the liquid oxygen and RP-1 fuel. This was being consumed at such a furious rate, about one ton per second, that the rocket was becoming merely a skeleton with a thin skin of metal stretched over it, a tube so long and light that it was flexing. The g-forces reached six and then he was weightless, just like that. The sudden release made him feel as if he were tumbling head over heels, as if he had been catapulted off the end of that same springboard and was falling through the air doing forward rolls. But he had felt this same thing on the centrifuge when they ran the g-forces up to seven and then suddenly cut the speed. At the same moment, right on schedule… a loud report… the posigrade rockets fired, throwing the capsule free of the rocket shaft… the capsule began its automatic turnabout, and all the proper green lights went on in front of him, and he knew he was "through the gate," as they said.

"Zero-g and I feel fine," he said. "Capsule is turning around…"

Glenn knew he was weightless. From the instrument readings and through sheer logic he knew it, but he couldn't feel it, just as Shepard and Grissom had never felt it. The turnaround brought him up to a sitting position, vertical to the earth, and that was the way he felt. He was sitting in a chair, upright, in a very tiny cramped quiet little cubicle 125 miles above the earth, a little metal closet, silent except for the humming of its electrical system, the inverters, the gyros, the cameras, the radio… the radio… He had been specifically instructed to violate the Fighter Jock code of No Chatter. He was supposed to radio back every sight, every sensation, and otherwise give the taxpayers the juicy stuff they wanted to hear. Glenn, more than any of the others, was fully capable of doing the job. Yet it was an awkward thing. It seemed unnatural.

"Oh!" he said. "That view is tremendous!"

Well, it was a start. In fact, the view was not particularly extraordinary. It was extraordinary that he was up here in orbit about the earth. He could see the exhausted Atlas rocket following him. It was tumbling end over end from the force of the small rockets throwing the capsule free of it.

He could hear Alan Shepard, who was serving as capcom in the Mercury Control Center at the Cape. His voice came in very clearly. He was saying, "You have a go, at least seven orbits."

"Roger," said Glenn. "Understand Go for at least seven orbits… This is Friendship 7. Can see clear back, a big cloud pattern way back across toward the Cape. Beautiful sight."

He was riding backward, looking back toward the Cape. It must be tremendous, it must be beautiful—what else could it be? And yet it didn't look terribly different from what he had seen at 50,000 feet in fighter planes. He had no greater sense of having left the bonds of earth. The earth was not just a little ball beneath him. It still filled his field of consciousness. It slid by slowly underneath him, just the way it did when you were in an airplane at forty or fifty thousand feet. He had no sense of being a star voyager. He couldn't see any stars at all. He could see the Atlas booster tumbling behind him and beginning to grow smaller, because it was in a slightly lower orbit. It just kept tumbling. There was nothing to stop it. Somehow the sight of this colossal great tumbling cylinder, which had weighed more than the average freighter while it was on the ground and which now weighed nothing and had been discarded like a candy wrapper—somehow it was more extraordinary than the view of earth. It shouldn't have been, but it was. The earth looked the way it had looked to Gus Grissom. Shepard had seen a low-grade black-and-white movie. Through his window Glenn could see what Grissom saw, the brilliant blue band at the horizon, a somewhat wider band of deeper blues leading into the absolutely black dome of the sky. Most of the earth was covered in clouds. The clouds looked very bright, set against the blackness of the sky. The capsule was heading east, over Africa. But, because he was riding backward, he was looking west. He saw everything after he had passed over it. He could make out the Canary Islands, but they were partly obscured by clouds. He could see a long stretch of the African coast… huge dust storms over the African desert… but there was no sense of taking in the whole earth at a glance. The earth was eight thousand miles in diameter and he was only a hundred miles above it. He knew what it was going to look like in any case. He had seen it all in photographs taken from the satellites. It had all been flashed on the screens for him. Even the view had been simulated. Yes… that's the way they said it would look… Awe seemed to be demanded, but how could he express awe honestly? He had lived it all before the event. How could he explain that to anybody? The view wasn't the main thing, in any case. The main thing… was the checklist! And just try explaining that! He had to report all his switch and dial readings. He had to put a special blood-pressure rig on the arm of his pressure suit and pump it up. (His blood pressure was absolutely normal, 120 over 80—perfect stuff!) He had to check the manual attitude-control system, swing the capsule up and down, side to side, roll to the right, roll to the left… and there was nothing novel about it, not even in orbit, a hundred miles above the earth. How could you explain that! When he swung the capsule, it felt the same as it did in a one-g state on earth. He still didn't feel weightless. He merely felt less cramped, because there were no longer any pressure points on his body. He was sitting straight up in a chair drifting slowly and quietly around the earth. Just the hum of his little shop, the background noises in his headset, and the occasional spurt of the hydrogen-peroxide jets.

"This is Friendship 7," he said. "Working just like clockwork on the control check, and it went through just about like the procedures-trainer runs."

Well, that was it. The procedures trainer and the ALFA trainer and the centrifuge… He noticed that, in fact, he seemed to be moving a little faster than he had been on the ALFA trainer. When you sat in the trainer, cranking your simulated hydrogen-peroxide thrusters, they ran films on the screen of the earth rolling by below you, just the way it would be in orbital flight. "They didn't roll it by fast enough," he said to himself. Not that it mattered particularly… The sensation of speed was no more than that of being in an airliner and watching a cloud bank slide by far below… The world demanded awe, because this was a voyage through the stars. But he couldn't feel it. The backdrop of the event, the stage, the environment, the true orbit… was not the vast reaches of the universe. It was the simulators. Who could possibly understand this? Weightless he was, in the vacuum of space, humming around the earth… but his center of gravity was still back in that Baptist hardtack Low Rent stretch of sand and palmetto grass in Florida.

Ahhhh—but now this was truly something. Forty minutes into the flight, as he neared the Indian Ocean, off the east coast of Africa, he began sailing into the night. Since he was traveling east, he was going away from the sun at a speed of 17,500 miles an hour. But because he was riding backward, he could see the sun out the window. It was shaking the way the moon sinks out of sight as seen on earth. The edge of the sun began to touch the edge of the horizon. He couldn't tell what part of the earth it was.

There were clouds everywhere. They created a haze at the horizon. The brilliant light over the earth began to dim. It was like turning down a rheostat. It took five or six minutes. Very slowly the lights were dimming. Then he couldn't see the sun at all, but there was a tremendous band of orange light that stretched from one side of the horizon to the other, as if the sun were a molten liquid that had emptied into a tube along the horizon. Where there had been a bright-blue band before, there was now the orange band; and above it a wider dimmer band of oranges and reds shading off into the blackness of the sky. Then all the reds and oranges disappeared, and he was on the night side of the earth. The bright-blue band reappeared at the horizon. Above it, stretching up about eight degrees, was what looked like a band of haze, created by the earth's atmosphere. And above that… for the first time he could make out the stars. Down below, the clouds picked up a faint light from the moon, which was coming up behind him. Now he was over Australia. He could hear Gordon Cooper's voice. Cooper was serving as the capcom at the tracking station in the town of Muchea, out in the kangaroo boondocks of western Australia. He could hear Cooper's Oklahoma drawl.

"That sure was a short day," said Glenn.

"Say again, Friendship 7," said Cooper.

"That was about the shortest day I've ever run into," said Glenn. Somehow that was the sort of thing to say to old Oklahoma Gordo sitting down there in the middle of nowhere.

"Kinda passes rapidly, huh?" said Gordo.

"Yessir," said Glenn.

The clouds began to break up over Australia. He could make out nothing in the darkness except for electric lights. Off to one side he could make out the lights of an entire city, just as you could at 40,000 feet in an airplane, but the concentration of lights was terrific. It was an absolute mass of electric lights, and south of it there was another one, a smaller one. The big mass was the city of Perth and the smaller one was a town called Rockingham. It was midnight in Perth and Rockingham, but practically every living soul in both places had stayed up to turn on every light they had for the American sailing over in the satellite.

"The lights show up very well," said Glenn, "and thank everybody for turning them on, will you?"

"We sure will, John," said Gordo.

And he went sailing on past Australia with the lights of Perth and Rockingham sliding into the distance.

He was over the middle of the Pacific, about halfway between Australia and Mexico, when the sun began to come up behind him. This was just thirty-five minutes after the sun went down. Since he was traveling backward, he couldn't see the sunrise through the window. He had to use the periscope. First he could see the blue band at the horizon becoming brighter and brighter. Then the sun itself began to slide up over the edge. It was a brilliant red—not terribly different from what he had seen at sunrise on earth, except that it was rising faster and its outlines were sharper.

"It's blinding through the scope on clear," said Glenn. "I'm going to the dark filter to watch it come on up."

And then—needles! A tremendous layer of them—Air Force communications experiment that went amok… Thousands of tiny needles gleaming in the sun outside the capsule… But they couldn't be needles, because they were luminescent—they were like snowflakes—

"This is Friendship 7," he said. "I'll try to describe what I'm in here. I am in a big mass of some very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they're luminescent. I never saw anything like it. They're round, a little. They're coming by the capsule, and they look like little stars. A whole shower of them coming by. They swirl around the capsule and go in front of the window and they're all brilliantly lighted. They probably average maybe seven or eight feet apart, but I can see them all down below me also."

"Roger, Friendship 7." This was the capcom on Canton Island out in the Pacific. "Can you hear any impact with the capsule? Over."

"Negative, negative. They're very slow. They're not going away from me more than maybe three or four miles per hour."

They swirled about his capsule like tiny weightless diamonds, little bijoux—no, they were more like fireflies. They had that lazy but erratic motion, and when he focused on one it would seem to be lit up, but the light would go out and he would lose track of it, and then it would light up again. That was like fireflies, too. There used to be thousands of fireflies in the summers, when he was growing up. These things were like fireflies, but they obviously couldn't be any sort of organism… unless all the astronomers and all the satellite recording mechanisms had been fundamentally wrong… They were undoubtedly particles of some sort, particles that caught the sunlight at a certain angle. They were beautiful, but were they coming from the capsule? That could mean trouble. They must have been coming from the capsule, because they traveled along with him, in the same trajectory, at the same speed. But wait a minute. Some of them were far off, far below… there might be an entire field of them… a minute cosmos… something never seen before! And yet the capcom on Canton Island didn't seem particularly interested. And then he sailed out of range of Canton and would have to wait to be picked up by the capcom at Guaymas, on the west coast of Mexico. And when the Guaymas capcom picked him up, he didn't seem to know what he was talking about.

"This is Friendship 7," said Glenn. "Just as the sun came up, there were some brilliantly lighted particles that looked luminous that were swirling around the capsule. I don't have any in sight right now. I did have a couple just a moment ago, when I made the transmission over to you. Over."

"Roger, Friendship 7."

And that was it. "Roger, Friendship 7." Silence. They didn't particularly care.

Glen kept talking about his fireflies. He was fascinated. It was the first true unknown anyone had encountered out here in the cosmos. At the same time he was faintly apprehensive. Roger, Friendship 7. The capcom finally asked a polite question or two, about the size of the particles and so on. They obviously were not carried away by this celestial discovery.

All of a sudden the capsule swung out to the right in a yaw, out about twenty degrees. Then it was as if it hit a little wall. It bounced back. Then it swung out again in the yaw and hit the little wall and bounced back. Something had gone out in the automatic attitude control. Never mind the celestial fireflies. He was sailing over California, heading for Florida. Now all the capcoms were coming alive, all right.

President Kennedy was supposed to come on the radio as Glenn came over the United States. He was going to bless his single-combat warrior as he came over the continental U.S.A. He was going to tell him the hearts of all his fellow citizens were with him. But that all went by the boards in view of the problem with the automatic controls.

Glenn went sailing over Florida, over the Cape, starting his second orbit. He couldn't see much of anything down below, because of the clouds. He no longer cared particularly. The attitude control was the main thing. One of the small thrusters seemed to have gone out, so that the capsule would drift to the right, like a car slowly skidding on ice. Then a bigger thruster would correct the motion and bounce it back. That was only the start. Pretty soon other thrusters began acting up when he was on automatic. Then the gyros started going. The dials that showed the angle of the capsule with respect to the earth and the horizon were giving obviously wrong readings. He had to line it up visually with the horizon. Fly by wire! Manual control! It was no emergency, however, at least not yet. As long as he was in orbit, the attitude control of the capsule didn't particularly matter, so far as his safety was concerned. He could be going forward or backward or could have his head pointed straight at the earth or could be drifting around in circles or pitching head over heels, for that matter, and it wouldn't change his altitude or trajectory in the slightest. The only critical point was the re-entry. If the capsule were not lined up at the correct angle, with the blunt end and the heat shield down, it might burn up. To line it up correctly, fuel was required, the hydrogen peroxide, no matter whether it was lined up automatically or by the astronaut. If too much fuel was used keeping the capsule stable while it sailed around in orbit, there might not be enough left to line it up before the re-entry. That had been the problem in the ape's flight. The automatic attitude control had started malfunctioning and was using up so much fuel they brought him down after two orbits.

Every five minutes he had to shift his radio communications to a new capcom. You couldn't receive and send at the same time, either. It wasn't like a telephone hookup. So you spent half the time just making sure you could hear each other.

"Friendship 7, Friendship 7, this is CYI." That was the Canary Islands capcom. "The time is now 16:32:26. We are reading you loud and clear; we are reading you loud and clear. CYI."

Glenn said: "This is Friendship 7 on UHF. As I went over recovery area that time, I could see a wake, what appeared to be a long wake in the water. I imagine that's the ships in our recovery area."

"Friendship 7… We do not read you, do not read you. Over."

"Friendship 7, this is Kano. At G.M.T. 16:33:00. We do not… This is Kano. Out."

"Friendship 7, Friendship 7, this is CYI Com Tech. Over."

Glen said: "Hello, Canary. Friendship 7. Receive you loud and a little garbled. Do you receive me? Over."

"Friendship 7, Friendship 7, this is CYI Com Tech. Over."

"Hello, Canary, Friendship 7. I read you loud and clear. How me? Over."

"Friendship 7, Friendship 7, this is CYI Com Tech. Over."

"Hello, CYI Com Tech. Friendship 7. How do you read me? Over."

"Friendship 7, Friendship 7, this is CYI, CYI Com Tech. Do you read? Over."

"Roger. This is Friendship 7, CYI. I read you loud and clear. Over."

"Friendship 7, Friendship 7, this is CYI Com Tech, CYI Com Tech. Do you read? Over."

"Hello, CYI Com Tech. Roger, read you loud and clear. Over."

"Friendship 7, this is CYI Com Tech. Read you loud and clear also, on UHF, on UHF. Standby."

"Roger. Friendship 7."

"Friendship 7, Friendship 7, Friendship 7, this is Canary capcom. How do you read? Over."

"Hello, Canary capcom. Friendship 7. I read you loud and clear. How me?"

Finally, the Canary Islands capcom said: "I read you loud and clear. I am instructed to ask you to correlate the actions of the particles surrounding your spacecraft with the actions of your control jets. Do you read? Over."

"This is Friendship 7. I did not read you clear. I read you loud but very garbled. Over."

"Roger. Cap asks you to correlate the actions of the particles surrounding the vehicle with the reaction of one of your control jets. Do you understand? Over."

"This is Friendship 7. I do not think they were from my control jets, negative. Over."

There—exactly five minutes to get one question out and one answer. Well, at least they finally showed an interest in the fireflies. They wondered if they might have something to do with the malfunctioning thrusters. Oh, but it was a struggle.

In any case, he was not particularly worried. He could control the attitude manually if he had to. The fuel seemed to be holding out. Everything hummed and whined and buzzed as usual inside the capsule. The same high background tones came over the radio. He could hear the oxygen coursing through his pressure suit and his helmet. There was no "sensation" of motion speed at all, unless he looked down at the earth. Even then it slid by very slowly. When the thrusters spurted hydrogen peroxide, he could feel the capsule swing this way and that. But it was like the ALFA trainer on earth. He still didn't feel weightless. He was still sitting straight up in his chair. On the other hand, the camera—when he wanted to reload it, he just parked it in the empty space in front of his eyes. It just floated there in front of him. Way down there were little flashes all over the place. It was lightning in the clouds over the Atlantic. Somehow it was more fascinating than the sunset. Sometimes the lightning was inside the clouds and looked like flashlights going on and off underneath a blanket. Sometimes it was on top of the clouds, and it looked like firecrackers going off. It was extraordinary, and yet there was nothing new about the sight. An Air Force colonel, David Simons, had gone up in a balloon, alone, to 102,000 feet, for thirty-two hours and had seen the same thing.

Glenn was now over Africa, riding over the dark side of the earth, sailing backward toward Australia. The Indian Ocean capcom said: "We have message from MCC for you to keep your landing-bag switch in off position. Landing-bag switch in off position. Over."

"Roger," said Glenn. "This is Friendship 7."

He wanted to ask why. But that was against the code, except in an emergency situation. That fell under the heading of nervous chatter.

Over Australia old Gordo, Gordo Cooper, got on the same subject: "Will you confirm the landing-bag switch is in the off position? Over."

"That is affirmative," said Glenn. "Landing-bag switch is in the center off position."

"You haven't had any banging noises or anything of this type at higher rates?"

"Negative."

"They wanted this answer."

They still didn't say why, and Glenn entered into no nervous chatter. He now had two red lights on the panel. One was the warning light for the automatic fuel supply. All the little amok action of the yaw thrusters had used it up. Well, it was up to the Pilot now… to aim the capsule correctly for re-entry… The other was a warning about excess cabin water. It built up as a by-product of the oxygen system. Nevertheless, he pressed on with the checklist. He was supposed to exercise by pulling on the bungee cord and then take his blood pressure. The Presbyterian Pilot! He did it without a peep. He was pulling on the bungee and watching the red lights when he began sailing backward into the sunrise again. Two hours and forty-three minutes into the flight, his second sunrise over the Pacific… seen from behind through a periscope. But he hardly watched it. He was looking for the fireflies to light up again. The great rheostat came up, the earth lit up, and now there were thousands of them swirling about the capsule. Some of them seemed to be miles away. A huge field of them, a galaxy, a microuniverse. No question about it, they weren't coming from the capsule, they were part of the cosmos. He took out the camera again. He had to photograph them while the light was just right.

"Friendship 7." The Canton Island capcom was coming in. "This is Canton. We also have no indication that your landing bag might be deployed. Over."

Glenn's first reaction was that this must have something to do with the fireflies. He's telling them about the fireflies and they come in with something about the landing bag. But who said anything about the landing bag being deployed?

"Roger," he said. "Did someone report landing bag could be down? Over."

"Negative," said the capcom. "We had a request to monitor this and to ask you if you heard any flapping, when you had high capsule rates."

"Well," said Glenn, "I think they probably thought these particles I saw might have come from that, but these are… there are thousands of these things, and they go out for it looks like miles in each direction from me, and they move by here very slowly. I saw them at the same spot on the first orbit. Over."

And so he thought that explained all the business about the landing bag.

They gave him the go-ahead for his third and final orbit as he sailed over the United States. He couldn't see a thing for the clouds. He pitched the capsule down sixty degrees, so he could look straight down. All he could see was the cloud deck. It was just like flying at high altitudes in an airplane. He was really no longer in the mood for sightseeing. He was starting to think about the sequence of events that would lead to the retrofiring over the Atlantic after he had been around the world one more time. He had to fight both the thrusters and the gyros now. He kept releasing and resetting the gyros to see if the automatic attitude control would start functioning again. It was all out of whack. He would have to position the capsule by using the horizon as a reference. He was sailing backward over America. The clouds began to break. He began to see the Mississippi delta. It was like looking at the world from the tail-gun perch of the bombers they used in the Second World War. Then Florida started to slide by. Suddenly he realized he could see the whole state. It was laid out just like it is on a map. He had been around the world twice in three hours and eleven minutes and this was the first sense he had had of how high up he was. He was about 550,000 feet up. He could make out the Cape. By the time he could see the Cape he was already over Bermuda.

"This is Friendship 7," he said. "I have the Cape in sight down there. It looks real fine from up here."

"Rog. Rog." That was Gus Grissom on Bermuda.

"As you know," said Glenn.

"Yea, verily, sonny," said Grissom.

Oh, it all sounded very fraternal. Glenn was modestly acknowledging that his loyal comrade Grissom was one of the only three Americans ever to see such a sight… and Grissom was calling him "sonny."

Twenty minutes later he was sailing backward over Africa again and the sun was going down again, for the third time, and the rheostat was dimming and he… saw blood. It was all over one of the windows. He knew it couldn't be blood, and yet it was blood. He had never noticed it before. At this particular angle of the setting rheostat sun he could see it. Blood and dirt, a real mess. The dirt must have come from the firing of the escape tower. And the blood… bugs, perhaps… The capsule must have smashed into bugs as it rose from the launch pad… or birds… but he would have heard the thump. It must have been bugs, but bugs didn't have blood. Or the blood red of the sun going down in front of him diffusing… And then he refused to think about it any more. He just turned the subject off. Another sunset, another orange band streaking across the rim of the horizon, more yellow bands, blue bands, blackness, thunderstorms, lightning making little sparkles under the blanket. It hardly mattered any more. The whole thing of lining the capsule up for retrofire kept building up in his mind. In slightly less than an hour the retro-rockets would go off. The capsule kept slipping its angles, swinging this way and that way, drifting. The gyros didn't seem to mean a thing any more.

And he went sailing backward through the night over the Pacific. When he reached the Canton Island tracking point, he swung the capsule around again so that he could see his last sunrise while riding forward, out the window, with his own eyes. The first two he had watched through the periscope because he was going backward. The fireflies were all over the place as the sun came up. It was like watching the sunrise from inside a storm of the things. He began expounding upon them again, about how they couldn't possibly come from the capsule, because some of them seemed to be miles away. Once again nobody on the ground was interested. They weren't interested on Canton Island, and pretty soon he was in range of the station on Hawaii, and they weren't interested, either. They were all wrapped up in something else. They had a little surprise for him. They backed into it, however. It took him a while to catch on.

He was now four hours and twenty-one minutes into the flight. In twelve minutes the retro-rockets were supposed to fire, to slow him down for re-entry. It took him another minute and forty-five seconds to go through all the "do you reads" and "how me's" and "overs" and establish contact with the capcom on Hawaii. Then they sprang their surprise.

"Friendship 7," said the capcom. "We have been reading an indication on the ground of segment 5—1, which is Landing Bag Deploy. We suspect this is an erroneous signal. However, Cape would like you to check this by putting the landing-bag switch in auto position, and seeing if you get a light. Do you concur with this? Over."

It slowly dawned on him… Have been reading… For how long?… Quite a little surprise. And they hadn't told him! They'd held it back! I am a pilot and they refuse to tell me things they know about the condition of the craft! The insult was worse than the danger! If the landing bag had deployed—and there was no way he could look out and see it, not even with the periscope, because it would be directly behind him—if it had deployed, then the heat shield must be loose and might come off during the re-entry. If the heat shield came off, he would burn up inside the capsule like a steak. If he put the landing-bag switch in the automatic control position, then a green light should come on if the bag was deployed. Then he would know. Slowly it dawned!… That was why they kept asking him if the switch were in the off position!—they didn't want him to learn the awful truth too quickly! Might as well let him complete his three orbits—then we'll let him find out about the bad news!

On top of that, they now wanted him to fool around with the switch. That's stupid! It might very well be that the bag had not deployed but there was an electrical malfunction somewhere in the circuit and fooling with the automatic switch might then cause it to deploy. But he stopped short of saying anything. Presumably they had taken all that into account. There was no way he could say it without falling into the dread nervous chatter.

"Okay," said Glenn. "If that's what they recommend, we'll go ahead and try it. Are you ready for it now?"

"Yes, when you're ready."

"Roger."

He reached forward and flipped the switch. Well… this wash—

No light. He immediately switched it back to off.

"Negative," he said. "In automatic position did not get a light and I'm back in off position now. Over."

"Roger, that's fine. In this case, we'll go ahead, and the re-entry sequence will be normal."

The retro-rockets would be fired over California, and by the time the retro-rockets brought him down out of his orbit and through the atmosphere, he would be over the Atlantic near Bermuda. That was the plan. Wally Sohirra was the capcom in California. Less than a minute before he was supposed to fire the retro-rockets, by pushing a switch, he heard Wally saying: "John, leave your retropack on through your pass over Texas. Do you read?"

"Roger."

But why? The retropack wrapped around the edges of the heat shield and held the retro-rockets. Once the rockets were fired, the retropack was supposed to be jettisoned. They were back to the heat shield again, with no explanation. But he had to concentrate on firing the retro-rockets.

Next to the launch this was the most dangerous part of the flight. If the capsule's angle of attack was too shallow, you might skip off the top of the earth's atmosphere and stay in orbit for days, until long after your oxygen had run out. You wouldn't have any more rockets to slow you down. If the angle were too steep, the heat from the friction of going through the atmosphere would be so intense you would burn up inside the capsule, and a couple of minutes later the whole thing would disintegrate, heat shield or no heat shield. But the main thing was not to think about it in quite those terms. The field of consciousness is very small, said Saint-Exupery. What do I do next? It was the moment of the test pilot at last. Oh, yes! I've been here before! And I am immune! I don't get into corners I can't get out of! One thing at a time! He could be a true flight test hero and try to line the capsule up all by himself by using the manual controls with the horizon as his reference—or he could make one more attempt to use the automatic controls. Please, dear God… don't let me foul up! What would the Lord answer? (Try the automatic, you ninny.) He released and reset the gyros. He put the controls on automatic. The answer to your prayers, John! Now the dials gibed with what he saw out the window and through the periscope. The automatic controls worked perfectly in pitch and roll. The yaw was still off, so he corrected that with the manual controls. The capsule kept pivoting to the right and he kept nudging it back. The ALFA trainer! One thing at a time! It was just like the ALFA trainer… no sense of forward motion at all… As long as he concentrated on the instrument panel and didn't look at the earth sliding by beneath him, he had no sense at all of going 17,500 miles an hour… or even five miles an hour… The humming little kitchen… He sat up in his chair squirting his hand thruster, with his eyes pinned on the dials… Real life, a crucial moment—against the eternal good beige setting of the simulation. One thing at a time!

Schirra began giving him the countdown for firing the rockets. "Five, four—"

He nudged it back once more with the yaw thruster. "—three, two, one, fire."

He pushed the retro-rocket switch with his hand. The rockets started firing in sequence, the first one, the second one, the third one. The sound seemed terribly muffled—but in that very moment, the jolt! Pure gold! One instant, as Schirra counted down, he felt absolutely motionless. The next… thud thud thud… the jolt in his back. He felt as if the capsule had been knocked backward. He felt as if he were sailing back toward Hawaii. All as it should be! Pure gold! The retro-light was lit up green. It was all going perfectly. He was merely slowing down. In eleven minutes he would be entering the earth's atmosphere.

He could hear Schirra saying: "Keep your retropack on until you pass Texas."

Still no reason given! He couldn't see the pattern yet. There was only the dim sense that in some fashion they were jerking him around. But all he said was: "That's affirmative."

"It looked like your attitude held pretty well," said Schirra. "Did you have to back it up at all?"

"Oh, yes, quite a bit. Yeah, I had a lot of trouble with it."

"Good enough for government work from down here," said Schirra. That was one of Schirra's favorite lines.

"Do you have a time for going to Jettison Retro?" said Glenn. This was an indirect way of asking for some explanation for the mystery of keeping the retropack on.

"Texas will give you that message," said Schirra. "Over."

They weren't going to tell him! Not so much the thought… as the feeling… of the insult began to build up.

Three minutes later the Texas capcom tracking station came in: "This is Texas capcom, Friendship 7. We are recommending that you leave the retropackage on through the entire re-entry. This means that you will have to override the zero-point-oh-five-g switch, which is expected to occur at 04:43:53. This also means that you will have to manually retract the scope. Do you read?"

That did it.

"This is Friendship 7," said Glenn. "What is the reason for this? Do you have any reason? Over."

"Not at this time," said the Texas capcom. "This is the judgment of Cape Flight… Cape Flight will give you the reason for this action when you are in view."

"Roger. Roger. Friendship 7."

It was really unbelievable. It was beginning to fit—

Twenty-seven seconds later he was over the Cape itself and the Cape capcom, with the voice of Alan Shepard on the radio, was telling him to retract his periscope manually and to get ready for re-entry into the atmosphere.

It was beginning to fit together, he could see the pattern, the whole business of the landing bag and the retropack. This had been going on for a couple of hours now—and they were telling him nothing! Merely giving him the bits and pieces! But if he was going to re-enter with the retropack on, then they wanted the straps in place for some reason. And there was only one possible reason—something was wrong with the heat shield. And this they would not tell him! Him!—the pilot! It was quite unbelievable! it was—

He could hear Shepard's voice.

He was winding in the periscope, and he could hear Shepard's voice: "While you're doing that… we are not sure whether or not your landing bag has deployed. We feel it is possible to re-enter with the retropackage on. We see no difficulty at this time in that type of re-entry."

Glenn said, "Roger, understand."

Oh, yes, he understood now! If the landing bag was deployed, that meant the heat shield was loose. If the heat shield was loose, then it might come off during the re-entry, unless the retropack straps held it in place long enough for the capsule to establish its angle of re-entry. And the straps would soon burn off. If the heat shield came off, then he would fry. If they didn't want him—the pilot!—to know all this, then it meant they were afraid he might panic. And if he didn't even need to know the whole pattern—just the pieces, so he could follow orders—then he wasn't really a pilot! The whole sequence of logic clicked through Glenn's mind faster than he could have put it into words, even if he had dared utter it all at that moment. He was being treated like a passenger—a redundant component, a backup engineer, a boiler-room attendant—in an automatic system!—like someone who did not have that rare and unutterably righteous stuff!—as if the right stuff itself did not even matter! It was a transgression against all that was holy—all this in a single limbic flash of righteous indignation as John Glenn re-entered the earth's atmosphere.

"Seven, this is Cape," said Al Shepard. "Over."

"Go ahead, Cape," said Glenn. "You're ground… you are going out."

"We recommend that you…"

That was the last he could hear from the ground. He had entered the atmosphere. He couldn't feel the g-forces yet, but the friction and the ionization had built up, and the radios were now useless. The capsule was beginning to buffet and he was fighting it with the controls. The fuel for the automatic system, the hydrogen peroxide, was so low he could no longer be sure which system worked. He was descending backward. The heat shield was on the outside of the capsule, directly behind his back. If he glanced out the window he could see only the blackness of the sky. The periscope was retracted, so he saw nothing on the scope screen. He heard a thump above him, on the outside of the capsule. He looked up. Through the window he could see a strap. From the retropack. The straps broke! And now what! Next the heat shield! The black sky out the window began to turn a pale orange. The strap flat against the window started burning—and then it was gone. The universe turned a flaming orange. That was the heat shield beginning to burn up from the tremendous speed of the re-entry. This was something Shepard and Grissom had not seen. They had not re-entered the atmosphere at such speed. Nevertheless, Glenn knew it was coming. Five hundred, a thousand times he had been told how the heat shield would ablate, burn off layer by layer, vaporize, dissipate the heat into the atmosphere, send off a corona of flames. All he could see now through the window were the flames. He was inside a ball of fire. But!—a huge flaming chunk went by the window, a great chunk of something burning. Then another… another… The capsule started buffeting… The heat shield was breaking up! It was crumbling—flying away in huge flaming chunks… He fought to steady the capsule with the hand controller. Fly-by-wire! But the rolls and yaws were too fast for him… The ALFA trainer gone amok, inside a fireball… The heat!… It was as if his entire central nervous system were now centered in his back. If the capsule was disintegrating and he was about to burn up, the heat pulse would reach his back first. His backbone would become like a length of red-hot metal. He already knew what the feeling would be like… and when… Now!… But it didn't come. There was no tremendous heat and no more flaming debris… Not the heat shield, after all. The burning chunks had come from what remained of the retropack. First the straps had gone and then the rest of it. The capsule kept rocking, and the g-forces built up. He knew the g-forces by heart. A thousand times he had felt them on the centrifuge. They drove him back into the seat. It was harder and harder to move the hand controller. He kept trying to damp out the rocking motion by firing the yaw thrusters and the roll thrusters, but it was all too fast for him. They didn't seem to do much good, at any rate.

No more red glow… he must be out of the fireball… seven g's were driving him back into the seat… He could hear the Cape capcom:

"… How do you read? Over."

That meant he had passed through the ionosphere and was entering the lower atmosphere.

"Loud and clear; how me?"

"Roger, reading you loud and clear. How are you doing?"

"Oh, pretty good."

"Roger. Your impact point is within one mile of the up-range destroyer."

Oh, pretty good. It wasn't Yeager, but it wasn't bad. He was inside of one and a half tons of non-aerodynamic metal. He was a hundred thousand feet up, dropping toward the ocean like an enormous cannonball. The capsule had no aerodynamic qualities whatsoever at this altitude. It was rocking terribly. Out the window he could see a wild white contrail snaked out against the blackness of the sky. He was dropping at a thousand feet per second. The last critical moment of the flight was coming up. Either the parachute deployed and took hold or it didn't. The rocking had intensified. The retropack! Part of the retropack must still be attached and the drag of it is trying to flip the capsule… He couldn't wait any longer.

The parachute was supposed to deploy automatically, but he couldn't wait any longer. Rocking… He reached up to fire the parachute manually—but it fired on its own, automatically, first the drogue and then the main parachute. He swung under it in a huge arc. The heat was ferocious, but the chute held. It snapped him back into the seat. Through the window the sky was blue. It was the same day all over again. It was early in the afternoon on a sunny day out in the Atlantic near Bermuda. Even the landing-bag light was green. There was nothing even wrong with the landing bag. There had been nothing wrong with the heat shield. There was nothing wrong with his rate of descent, forty feet per second. He could hear the rescue ship chattering away over the radio. They were only twenty minutes away from where he would hit, only six miles. He was once again lying on his back in the human holster. Out the window the sky was no longer black. The capsule swayed under the parachute, and over this way he looked up and saw clouds and over that way blue sky. He was very, very hot. But he knew the feeling. All those endless hours in the heat chambers—it wouldn't kill you. He was coming down into the water only 300 miles from where he started. It was the same day, merely five hours later. A balmy day out in the Atlantic near Bermuda. The sun had moved just seventy-five degrees in the sky. It was 2:45 in the afternoon. Nothing to do but get all these wires and hoses disconnected. He had done it. He began to let the thought loose in his mind. He must be very close to the water. The capsule hit the water. It drove him down into his seat again, on his back. It was quite a jolt. It was hot in here. Even with the suit fans still running, the heat was terrific. Over the radio they kept telling him not to try to leave the capsule. The rescue ship was almost there. They weren't going to try the helicopter deal again, except in an emergency. He wasn't about to attempt a water egress. He wasn't about to hit the hatch detonator. The Presbyterian Pilot was not about to foul up. His pipeline to the dear Lord could not be clearer. He had done it.


Annie Glenn had already had a taste of what it was going to be like. But the other six and their wives were not ready for it. It was as if some enormous tidal wave were heading for the Cape and the entire U.S.A. from out in the Atlantic, from the vicinity of Grand Bahama Island, where John was being debriefed. Riding the crest, like Triton, was the Freckled Face God, John himself. Word got back that the sailors on the Noa, the ship that hauled the capsule, with John in it, out of the water, had painted white lines around his footprints on the deck after he walked from the capsule to a hatchway. They didn't want his footprints on their deck to ever disappear! Well, it just seemed like some sort of goony swabbo sentimentality. But that was only the beginning.

Al Shepard and Gus Grissom didn't know what the hell was happening. Poor Gus—all he had gotten after his flight was a medal, a handshake, a gust of rhetoric from James Webb, out on a brain-frying strip of asphalt at Patrick Air Force Base, plus a few attaboys from a crowd of about thirty. For John—well, the mobs that had showed up for the launch, for the fireworks, barely seemed to have thinned out at all. Cocoa Beach was still full of the crazy adrenalin of the event. Out-of-towners were still tooling around all over the place in their automobiles and asking where the astronauts hung out. They didn't want to miss a thing. They knew that John would be flying back to the Cape after the debriefing. The next thing they knew, Lyndon Johnson was in town. He was going to meet John at the landing strip at Patrick. Underlings like Webb would just be part of the scenery. Then they learned that the President was coming, John F. Kennedy himself. Glenn wasn't going to him, in Washington—he was coming to Glenn.

Something quite extraordinary was building up. It was a wave and a half, and the other six and their wives were more surprised than anybody else. It was ironic. They had all assumed that Al Shepard was the big winner. Al had won out in the competition for the first flight. Al had been invited to the White House to receive a medal, whereas Gus had gotten his about eight steps from the palmetto grass, because Al was the certified number-one man in this thing and had taken the first flight. But even before John got back to the Cape from Grand Bahama Island, there was a note of worshipful swooning in the air that indicated that Al had not made the first flight, after all. He had merely made the first suborbital flight, which now looked like nothing at all. He was now more like Slick Goodlin to John's Chuck Yeager. Slick Goodlin had, technically, made the first flight of the X-1. But it was Yeager who made the flight that counted, the flight in which they first tried to push the bird supersonic. As Slick Goodlin to John's Chuck Yeager—what was Al supposed to do, cheer about it? And Betty Grissom—who never even got a parade down the poor dim dowdy main street of Mitchell, Indiana—was she supposed to be tickled pink about the Glenns, who were going to be paraded up and down every high road in the United States? But there was precious little time to brood. Once John's plane touched down at Patrick on February 23, the wave became so big it simply carried everyone along with it. The fellows and the wives and the children were all out at Patrick, waiting for John's plane, and the Vice-President was on hand, along with about two hundred reporters. Johnson was right up there at the head of the mob with Annie and the two children. He had gotten next to her at last. Johnson was right beside her now, out at Patrick, oozing protocol all over her and craning and straining his huge swollen head around, straining to get at John and pour Texas all over him. The plane arrives and John disembarks, a tremendous cheer goes up, a cry from the throat, from the diaphragm, from the solar plexus, and they bring Annie and the two children forward… the holy icons… the Wife and the Children… the Solid Backing on the Home Front… and John is too much! He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a handkerchief and dabs his eye, wipes away a tear! And some little guy from NASA stretched out his hand and took the used handkerchief… so that it could be preserved in the Smithsonian! (With this handkerchief Astronaut John H. Glenn, Jr., wiped away a tear upon being reunited with his wife after his historic earth-orbital flight.) From that moment on, Al and Gus were also-rans, minor leaguers. And they didn't even have time to fume! The events, day by day, were becoming like something elemental, like a huge change in the weather, a shift in the templates, the Flood, the Last Day, the True Brother Entering Heaven…

John did not merely get a parade through Washington and a trip to the White House and the medal from the President. Oh, he got those things, all right. But he also addressed a special joint session of Congress—the Senate and the House met together to hear John, the way they had for presidents, prime ministers, kings. There was John standing up there at the podium, with Lyndon Johnson and John McCormack seated behind him, and the rest of them looking up at him from their seats. In absolute adoration, too! That was where the tears started! The tears—they couldn't hold them back. John's great round freckled face was shinning with glory. He knew just what he was doing. He was the Presbyterian Pilot addressing the world. He said some things that nobody else in the world could have gotten away with, even in 1962. He said, "I still get a lump in my throat when I see the American flag passing by." But he pulled it off! And then he lifted his hand up toward the gallery—this was in the House side of the Capitol—and five hundred pairs of congressional eyes swung up with his hand toward the gallery, and he introduced his mom and dad from New Concord, Ohio, and a few aunts and uncles for good measure, and then his children and, finally, "… above all, I want you to meet my wife, Annie… Annie… the Rock!" Well, that did it. That turned on the waterworks. Senators and representatives were trying to clap and reach for their handkerchiefs at the same time. They were dabbing their eyes and cheering through the fluttering ends of their handkerchiefs. Their faces glistened. Some fought back the tears and a couple let go. They applauded, cheered, snuffled, wheezed… A couple of them said, "Amen!" They said it out loud; it just came popping out of their good hardtack cracker evangelical dissenting Protestant hearts as the Presbyterian Pilot lifted up his eyes and his hand to the Rock and the eternal Mother of us all…

And that was just the start. In a way that was nothing compared to the ticker-tape parade in New York. After all, a ceremonial joint session of Congress is a tailor-made event, a command performance. But the parade in New York was an amazing event, so amazing that anyone, even Al or Gus, could only blink and shake his head and ride the wave. John had the good sense to invite Al and Gus and "the Other Four," Wally, Scott, Deke, and Gordo, and their families to join him and Annie and the children in the parade. John could have called the shot any way he wanted it. There was nobody in NASA or in the U.S. government, with the exception of Kennedy himself, who could have arranged it any way John didn't want it. So everybody came along for the show, the whole gang.

Despite the tide of cheers and tears that had already started in Washington, none of them knew what to expect in New York. Like most military people, including those in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, they didn't really consider New York part of the United States. It was like a free port, a stateless city, an international protectorate, Danzig in the Polish corridor, Beirut the crossroads of the Middle East, Trieste, Zurich, Macao, Hong Kong. Whatever ideals the military stood for, New York City did not. It was a foreign city full of a strange race of curiously tiny malformed gray people. And so forth and so on. What they saw when they got there bowled them over. The crowds were not only waiting in the airport, which was not surprising—a little publicity was all it took to get a mob of gawkers to an airport—but they were also lining the godforsaken highway into the city, through the borough of Queens, or whatever it was, out in the freezing cold in the most rancid broken-down industrial terrain you have ever seen, a decaying landscape that seemed to belong to another century—they were out there along the highway, anywhere they could squeeze in, and… they were crying!—crying as the black cars roared by!

People were crying, right out in the open, as soon as they laid eyes on John, and perhaps the rest of them, too. They were all swept up in the wave now. The wave was too enormous for fine distinctions. When they reached the city proper, Manhattan, and came in off the expressway, the FDR Drive, there were people hanging over the railings, twenty or thirty feet up above the ramp, and they were crying and waving little flags and pouring their hearts out.

And that was just the beginning. The parade started in lower Manhattan and headed up Broadway. Each astronaut was in an open limousine. John led the lineup, of course, with Lyndon Johnson, Vice-President, in the seat beside him. It was cold as hell, seventeen degrees, but the streets were mobbed. There must have been millions of people out there, packed from the curbings clear back to the storefronts, and there were people hanging out of all the windows, particularly along lower Broadway, where the buildings were older and they could open the windows, and they were filling the air with shreds of paper, every piece of paper they could get their hands on.

Sometimes the pieces of paper would flutter right in front of your face—and you could see that they were tearing up their telephone books, just ripping the pages out and tearing them to bits and throwing them out the window as homage, as garlands, rose petals—and it was so touching! This horrible rat-gray city was suddenly touching, warm! You wanted to protect these poor souls who loved you so much! Huge waves of emotion rolled over you. You couldn't hear yourself talk, but there was nothing you could have said, anyway. All you could do was let these incredible waves roll over you. Out in the middle of the intersections were the policemen, the policemen they had all heard about or read about, New York's Finest, big tough-looking men in blue greatcoats—and they were crying! They were right out in the intersections in front of everybody, bawling away—tears streaming down their faces, saluting, then cupping their hands and yelling amazing things to John and the rest of them—"We love you, Johnny!"—and then bawling some more, just letting it pour out. The New York cops!

And what was it that had moved them all so deeply? It was not a subject that you could discuss, but the seven of them knew what it was, and so did most of their wives. Or they knew about part of it. They knew it had to do with the presence, the aura, the radiation of the right stuff, the same vital force of manhood that had made millions vibrate and resonate thirty-five years before to Lindbergh—except that in this case it was heightened by Cold War patriotism, the greatest surge of patriotism since the Second World War. Neither the term nor the concept of the single-combat warrior did they know about, but the sheer patriotism of that moment—even in New York, the Danzig corridor!—was impossible to miss. We pay homage to you! You have fought back against the Russians in the heavens! There was something pure and rare about it. Patriotism! Oh, yes! Here you saw it in a million-footed form, before your very eyes! Most of the seven had been around the Kennedys at one time or another, with Jack or with Bobby, and knew the way a crowd reacted to them—but it was something different from this. Around the Kennedys you saw a fan's hysteria, involving a lot of shrieking and clutching, with people reaching out to grab souvenirs and swooning and squealing, as if the Kennedys were movie stars who happened to be in power. But what the multitudes showed John Glenn and the rest of them on that day was something else. They anointed them with the primordial tears that the right stuff commanded.

The seven righteous families were put up in suites at the Waldorf-Astoria, which as far as they knew was still the grandest hotel in America. Suites!—two bedrooms and a living room! For junior officers in the military it was an experience from a fable. They were still soaring on what they had just been through, but they were afraid to try to put the right name on it, afraid of what it might reveal about what was going through their minds. They were beginning to ask themselves the question "What, precisely, have we become?"

Henry Luce gave a dinner for them at the Tower Suite, the restaurant at the top of the Time-Life Building. After dinner on the spur of the moment, the whole bunch of them went to see a play, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which was a big hit at the time. John and Annie and the children, all of the other fellows and their wives and children, plus the bodyguards and some NASA people and some Time-Life people, quite an entourage—and all of it arranged at the last minute. The start of the play was held up for them. People in the audience gave up their seats, so the astronauts and their party could have the best seats in the house, a whole bloc. Just like that they gave up their seats. When John and the others walked into the theater, everybody else was already seated, because by now the play was a good thirty minutes late starting—and the audience rose and cheered until John sat down. Then a member of the cast came out in front of the curtain and welcomed them and congratulated John and praised the fellows as great human beings and humbly hoped that the little diversion about to be offered would please them. "And now the play will commence!"

Then the lights went down and the curtain went up, and you had to be pretty dense not to realize what this was: a command performance! Royal treatment, point for point, right down the line, and they were the royal families. And it didn't stop there. They had rewritten some of the lines, rewritten them in an hour or so—to make the jokes contain references to space and John's flight and putting a man on the moon and so on. When they left the theater, there were still other people outside, waiting, hundreds more people, waiting in the cold, and they started yelling in those horrible twisted rat-gray New York street voices, but everything they said, even the wisecracks, was full of warmth and admiration. Christ, if they owned even New York, even this free port, this Hong Kong, this Polish corridor—what was not theirs now in America?

Somehow, extraordinary as it was, it was… right! The way it should be! The unutterable aura of the right stuff had been brought onto the terrain where things were happening! Perhaps that was what New York existed for, to celebrate those who had it, whatever it was, and there was nothing like the right stuff, for all responded to it, and all wanted to be near it and to feel the sizzle and to blink in the light.

Oh, it was a primitive and profound thing! Only pilots truly had it, but the entire world responded, and no one knew its name!


Not long after that, Kennedy brought the seven astronauts to the White House for a smaller, more personal visit. Kennedy's father was there, Joseph Kennedy. The old man had had a stroke, and half his body was paralyzed, and he was sitting in a wheelchair. The President took the seven astronauts in to meet his father, and the first one he introduced him to was John. John Glenn!—the first American to orbit the earth and challenge the Russians in the heavens. The old man, Joe Kennedy, reaches up with his one good hand to shake hands with John, and suddenly he starts crying. But the thing is, only half his face is crying, because of the stroke. One half of his face isn't moving a muscle. It's set, absolutely impassive. But the other half—well, it's blubbering, that's the word for it. His eyebrow is curling down over his eye, the way it does when you're really bawling, and the tears are streaming out of the crevice where his eyebrow and his eye and his nose come together, and one of his nostrils is quivering and his lips are writhing and contorting on that side, and his chin is all pulled up and pitted and trembling—but just on the one side! The other side is just staring at John, as if he saw right through him, as if he were just another Marine colonel whose career had somehow led him briefly into the White House.

The President would lean down and put his arm around the old man's shoulders and say: "Now, now, Dad, it's all right, it's okay." But Joe Kennedy was still crying when they left the room.

Obviously if the man hadn't had a stroke, he wouldn't have burst out crying. Until his stroke he had been a bear. Nevertheless, the emotion was there, and it would have been there whether he had had a stroke or not. That was what the sight of John Glenn did to Americans at that time. It primed them for the tears. And those tears ran like a river all over America. It was an extraordinary thing, being the sort of mortal who brought tears to other men's eyes.

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