The Right Stuff

15 — The High Desert

By the time of Gordon Cooper's flight, Chuck Yeager had returned to Edwards Air Force Base. He was only thirty-nine, the same age, it so happened, as Wally Schirra and Alan Shepard and two years younger than John Glenn. Yeager no longer had quite the head of dark curly hair that everybody at Edwards saw in the framed photographs of him stepping out of the X-1 in October 1947. And God knows, his face had more mileage on it. This was typical of military pilots by that age and came not so much from the rigors of the job as from taking the sun rays head-on twelve months every year out on the concrete of the flight lines. Yeager had the same trim muscular build as always. He had been flying supersonic fighter aircraft as regularly, day in and day out, as any colonel in the Air Force. So in the ten years since he had made his last record-setting flight here at Edwards, that wild ride to Mach 2.4 in the X-1A, he really hadn't changed too much. You couldn't say the same about Edwards itself.

When Yeager had departed in 1954, Pancho's had still been standing. Today the base was loaded with military and civil-service personnel, every GS-type in the manual, working for the Air Force, for NASA, even for the Navy, which had a small piece of the X-15 program. At four o'clock it was worth your life to be heading upstream during the mad rush from the air conditioners in the office buildings to the air conditioners in the tract homes in Lancaster.

This much Yeager already knew about; this was the part that was easy to take. He had been commanding a squadron of F-100s at George Air Force Base, which was only about fifty miles southeast of Edwards in the same stretch of prehistoric dry-lake terrain. Yeager and Glennis and their four children had lived at Victorville in the same sort of housing development you found in Lancaster; just a bit more barren, if anything, a little grid of Contractor Suburbans lined up alongside Interstate Highway 15. The same old arthritic Joshua trees dared you to grow a blade of grass, much less a real tree, and the cars heading from Los Angeles to Las Vegas hurtled by without so much as a flick of the eye. Not that any of this weighed upon Yeager, however. As commander of a squadron of supersonic fighters he had led training operations and readiness maneuvers over half the world and as far away as Japan. Besides, nobody stayed in the Air Force because of the glories of the domestic architecture. Where he was living was standard issue for a colonel such as himself who after twenty years was making just a little over two hundred dollars a week, including extra flight pay and living allowance… and without magazine contracts or any other unorthodox goodies…

The Air Force had brought Yeager back to Edwards two years ago to be director of flight test operations. Last year, 1962, they created the new Aerospace Research Pilot School and made him commandant. ARPS, as the school became known, was part of big plans the Air Force had for a manned space program of its own. As a matter of fact, the Air Force had envisioned a major role in space ever since the first Sputnik went up, only to be thwarted by Eisenhower's decision to put the space effort in civilian hands. They now wanted to create a military program, quite apart from NASA's, using fleets of ships such as the X-20 and various "lifting body" craft, wingless ships whose hulls would be shaped to give them aerodynamic control when they re-entered the earth's atmosphere, and the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, which would be a space station. Boeing was building the first X-20 at its plant in Seattle. The Titan 3C rocket booster it would require was almost ready. Six pilots had already been chosen to train to take it into orbit.

The X-20 and the MOL were not yet operational, of course. In the meantime, it seemed to be highly important that Air Force pilots be chosen as NASA astronauts. The prestige of the Astronaut absolutely dominated flying, and the Air Force was determined to be the prime supplier of the breed. Four of the nine new astronauts selected in 1962, before ARPS was instituted, had been from the Air Force; that was not considered good enough.

To tell the truth, the brass had gone slightly bananas over this business of producing astronauts. They had even set up a "charm school" in Washington for the leading candidates. The best of the young test pilots from Edwards and Wright-Patterson flew to Washington and were given a course in how to impress the NASA selection panels in Houston. And it was dead serious! They listened to pep talks by Air Force generals, including General Curtis LeMay himself. They went through drills on how to talk on their feet—and that was the more sensible, credible part of the course. From there it got right down to the level of cotillion etiquette. They were told what to wear to the interviews with the engineers and the astronauts. They were to wear knee-length socks, so that when they sat down and crossed their legs no bare flesh would show between the top of the socks and bottom of the pant cuffs. They were told that to drink at the social get-togethers in Houston: they should drink alcohol, in keeping with the pilot code of Flying & Drinking, but in the form of a tall highball, either bourbon or Scotch, and only one. They were told how to put their hands on their hips (if they must). The thumbs should be to the rear and the fingers forward. Only women and interior decorators put the thumbs forward and the fingers back.

And the men went through it all willingly! Without a snigger! The brass's passion for the astronaut business was nothing compared to that of the young pilots themselves. Edwards had always been the precise location on the map of the apex of the pyramid of the right stuff itself. And now it was just another step on the way up. These boys were coming through Chuck Yeager's prep school so they could get a ticket to Houston.

The glamour of the space program was such that there was no longer any arguing against it. In addition to the chances for honor, glory, fame, and the celebrity treatment, all the new hot dogs could see something else. It practically glowed in the sky. They talked about it at beer call at every Officers Club at every air base in the land. Namely, the Astronaut Life. The youngsters knew about that, all right. It existed just over the rainbow, in Houston, Texas… the Life contract… $25,000 per year over and above your salary… veritable mansions in the suburbs, custom-designed… No more poor sad dried-up asbestos-shingle-roof clapboard shacks rattling in the sandstorms… free Corvettes… an enormous free lunch from one side of America to the other, for that matter… and the tastiest young cookies imaginable! One had only to reach for them!… The vision of all the little sugarplums danced above the mighty ziggurat… You bet! A veritable Fighter Jock's Forbidden Dream of the goodies had been brought to life, and all these young hot dogs looked upon it like people who believed in miracles…

It really made some of the older pilots shake their heads. If a man got a piece of tail every now and then, the world wasn't going to come to an end. But to dream of a goddamned aerial nookie circus… What was worse, however, was the Life contract. The way any true Blue-Suiter saw it, to let an experimental test pilot exploit his job commercially was only asking for trouble. If a man had the opportunity to fly machines with incalculable millions of dollars' worth of resources and facilities and man hours built into them, if they put him in a position to make history—that was more than enough compensation.

Yeager had flown the X-1 at straight pay, $283 a month. The Blue Suit!—that was enough for him. The Blue Suit had brought him everything he had in this world, and he asked for nothing else.

And what would all of that mean to these boys, even if someone said it? Not a hell of a lot, probably. Not even the fact that the X-15 project was in its finest hour, right here, for all to see, affected the new order of things. In June the X-15, with Joe Walker at the controls, had achieved Mach 5.92, or 4,104 miles per hour, which brought the project close to the optimum speed—"in excess of Mach 6"—it had been aiming for. In July Bob White had flown to 314,750 feet, or 59.6 miles, 9.6 miles into space (50 miles was now officially regarded as the boundary line) and well above the project's goal of 280,000 feet. These and many less spectacular flights of the X-15 were bringing back data concerning heat buildup (from air friction) and stability upon which the design of all the supersonic and hypersonic aircraft of the future, commercial and military, would be based. The X-15's XLR-99 rocket had 57,000 pounds of thrust. The Mercury-Redstone had 78,000; the Mercury-Atlas had 367,000 pounds; but soon there would be the X-20, and the X-20 would have a Titan 3 rocket's 2.5 million pounds of thrust, and it would be the first ship to go into orbit with a pilot at the controls from beginning to end, a pilot who could land it anywhere he wanted, eliminating the tremendous expense and risk of the Mercury ocean-rescue operations, which involved carriers, spotter planes, helicopters, frogmen, and backup vessels strung halfway around the world.

Yeager's students had a chance to experience something close to what such space piloting would be like. They went "booming and zooming" in the F-104. The F-104 was a fighter-interceptor that had been built to counter the MiG-21, which the Russians were known to be developing. The F-104 was fifty feet long and had two razor-thin wings, each only seven feet long, set far back on the fuselage, close to the tail assembly. The pilot and his guy-in-back were in two seats way up in the nose. The F-104 was built for speed in combat, period. It could climb at speeds in excess of Mach 1 and it could achieve Mach 2.2 in level flight. The faster it went, the steadier it was; it was unstable at low speeds, however, and oversensitive to the controls, with an evil tendency to pitch up and then snap into rolls and spins. At glide speed it seemed to want to fall like a length of pipe. After practicing on an F-104 simulator, Yeager's students would take the ship up to 35,000 feet and open her up to Mach 2 (the boom), then aim her up at about forty-five degrees and try to poke a hole in the sky (the zoom). The g-forces slammed them back in their seats and they shot up like shells, and the pale-blue desert sky turned blue-black and the g-forces slid off and they came sailing over the top of the arc, about 75,000 feet up, silent and weightless—an experience like unto what the brethren themselves had known!—

—and these boys thought that was neat. Maybe it would be nice to fly the X-15 or the X-20, if you didn't make astronaut…

Yeager liked to take the ARPS students up for mock dogfights, hassling, just to… keep the proficiency up… Few of the lads had ever been in combat and they knew little about the critical tolerances of fighter aircraft during violent maneuvers. They knew where the outside of the envelope was, but they didn't know about the part where you reached the outside and then stretched her a little… without breaking through… Yeager waxed their tails with regularity, but they took that in stride. These days the way to the top—meaning the road to test-pilot astronaut—involved being very good at a lot of things without necessarily being "shit-hot," to use the beer-call expression, at anything. A balance of pilot skills and engineering; that was the ticket. Joe Walker's backup pilot in the X-15 project, Neil Armstrong, was typical of the new breed. A lot of people couldn't figure out Armstrong. He had a close blond crew cut and small pale-blue eyes and scarcely a line or a feature in his face that you could remember. His expression hardly ever changed. You'd ask him a question, and he would just stare at you with those pale-blue eyes of his, and you'd start to ask the question again, figuring he hadn't understood, and—click—out of his mouth would come forth a sequence of long, quiet, perfectly formed, precisely thought-out sentences, full of anisotropic functions and multiple-encounter trajectories, or whatever else was called for. It was as if his hesitations were just data punch-in intervals for his computer. Armstrong had been preparing for an X-15 launch from the Smith's Ranch dry-lake bed last year when Yeager, who was director of flight test operations, told him the lake bed was still too muddy from the rains. Armstrong said the meteorological data, considering the wind and temperature factors, indicated the surface would be satisfactory. Yeager received a call from NASA asking him if he would take a small plane over to the lake bed and make a ground inspection. "Hell, no," said Yeager. "I've been flying over these lakes for fifteen years, and I know it's muddy. I'm not going to be responsible for disabling an Air Force plane." Well, would he fly a NASA plane up there? Hell, no, said Yeager; he didn't want that on his record, either. It was finally arranged that he would fly up there backseat, with Armstrong at the controls and therefore responsible for the mission. As soon as they touched down, Yeager could tell that the mud was going to suck up the landing gears like a couple of fence posts, which it did. Now they were hopelessly mired in the muck, and a range of hills blocked radio contact with the base. "Well, Neil," said Yeager, "in a few hours it'll be dark, and the temperature's going down to zero, and we're two guys standing out here in the mud wearing windbreakers. Got any good ideas?" Armstrong stared at him, and the computer interval began, and it ended, and nothing came out. A rescue team from the base, alerted by the loss of radio contact, retrieved them before nightfall—and brought back the story, which entertained the old-timers for a few days.

Nevertheless, the new breed had their share of the proper righteous stuff, same as the stick'n'rudder tigers of yore. Armstrong himself had flown more than a hundred missions off carriers during the Korean War, and had done good work in the X-15. Then you had men like Dave Scott and Mike Adams, who were two of Yeager's ARPS students. They were, practicing low lift-over-drag landings one day in the F-104. In this maneuver, which simulated an X-15 landing, you gunned the afterburner for speed (and stability) and flared the flaps and tried to grease the ship onto the runway at 200 knots. As Scott and Adams neared the ground, the "eyelids" on the afterburner malfunctioned, opening too wide, cutting the thrust down to 20 or 30 percent of maximum. Visually they could tell the ship was sinking too fast. Scott, who had the controls, gunned it but got very little response. They were dropping like a brick. Adams, in back, knew that the tail would hit the runway first, due to the angle of attack they were in, if Scott couldn't regain power. He told Scott over the radio circuit that if the tail hit he was ejecting. The tail hit, and in that moment he pulled his cinch ring and ejected at zero altitude. Scott elected to stay with the ship. The belly smashed onto the runway and the ship went careening down it and off into the mesquite. When the beast finally came to a halt, Scott looked back, and the engine was jammed up into the space where Adams used to be. Both men had made the right decision. Adams had been exploded up into the air and had come down safely by parachute. Scott's ejection mechanism had been broken in the torque of the initial impact and he would have been killed had he pulled the cinch ring, either by the nitroglycerine explosion or by a partial ejection.

Yeager was tremendously impressed by those two decisions by two men in the very mouth of the Gulp. There you had it, with the ante doubled: the right stuff. And when NASA had announced several months ago that a third group of astronauts would be chosen both men immediately applied, although Adams also seemed to have a sincere interest in the X-15 project. The X-15 pilots themselves had their eyes on Houston, for that matter. Armstrong had applied as soon as civilians had been eligible and was now a Group II astronaut. He had Joe Walker's blessing, too. Walker himself had considered applying but figured that his age—he was forty-two—pretty well ruled him out.

That was the way the pyramid was now constructed. The old argument—namely, that an astronaut would be a mere passenger monitoring an automated system—didn't have much sock to it any more. The truth was that there you had a picture of the pilot in practically all the hypersonic vehicles of the future, whether in space or in the atmosphere. The Mercury vehicle had merely been one of the first. Way back in April of 1953, Yeager had made a speech in which he said, "Some of the proposed fighters of tomorrow will be able to find and destroy a target and even return to their home stations and land by themselves. The only reason a pilot will be needed is to take over and decide what to do if anything goes wrong with the electronic equipment." Talking about the Ships of Tomorrow had made it all seem far off. But now, ten years later, they were already bringing such systems into the hardware stage. They were even working on a system to land F-4s automatically on aircraft carriers; the pilot would take his hands off the controls and let the computers bring him down onto that heaving slab. The supersonic transports and airliners would be so automated they would give the pilot an override stick just so he could push on it every now and then and feel like a pilot; it would be a goddamned right-stuff security blanket. They were even developing an automatic guidance system to bring the X-15 back through the atmosphere at a precise angle of attack. Maybe the age of "the flyboys," the stick'n'rudder fighter jocks, was about finished.

All of that Yeager could accept. On the great pyramid there was no steady state. Sixteen years ago, when he came to Muroc, he was only twenty-four, and few other test pilots had ever heard of him, and most people in aviation thought "the sound barrier" was as solid as a wall. Once he flew Mach 1, however, it was a whole new ball game. And now there were cosmonauts and astronauts, and it was a whole new ball game once again. A man could do a pretty good job of being philosophical about it. What finally got to Yeager, however, was the Ed Dwight case.

It had been early this year that Yeager got word from the brass that the President, John F. Kennedy, was determined that NASA have at least one Negro astronaut in their lineup. The whole process was to take place organically, however, as if in the natural order of things. Kennedy was leaning on the Defense Department, Defense was leaning on the Air Force brass, and they tossed the potato to Yeager. The pilot who had been singled out was an Air Force captain named Ed Dwight. He was to go through ARPS and be selected by NASA. The clouds developed soon enough. Dwight was enrolled in the basic flight test course along with twenty-five other candidates. Only the top eleven students could enter ARPS's six-month space-flight course, which had limited facilities, and Dwight did not rank among the top eleven. Yeager didn't see how he could jump him over other young tigers, all of them desperate to become astronauts. Every week, it seemed like, a detachment of Civil Rights Division lawyers would turn up from Washington, from the Justice Department, which was headed by the President's brother Bobby. The lawyers squinted in the desert sunlight and asked a great many questions about the progress and treatment of Ed Dwight and took notes. Yeager kept saying he didn't see how he could simply jump Dwight over these other men. And the lawyers would come back the next week and squint some more and take some more notes. There were days when ARPS seemed like the Ed Dwight case with a few classrooms and some military hardware appended. A compromise was finally struck in which Dwight would be admitted to the space-flight course, but only if every man who ranked above him was also admitted. That was how it came to pass that the next class had fourteen students instead of eleven and included Captain Dwight. Meantime, the White House, apparently, was signaling to the Negro press that Dwight was going to be "the first Negro astronaut," and he was being invited to make public appearances. He was being set up for a fall, because the chances of NASA accepting him as an astronaut appeared remote in any event.

The whole thing was baffling. On the upper reaches of the great ziggurat the subject of race had never been introduced before. The unspoken premise was that you either had the right stuff or you didn't, and no other variables mattered. When the seven Mercury astronauts had been chosen in 1959, the fact that they were all white and all Protestant seemed to be interpreted as wholly benign evidence of their Small-Town American virtues. But by now, four years later, Kennedy, who had been supported by a coalition of minority groups in the 1960 election, had begun to raise the question of race as a matter of public policy in many areas. The phrase "white Protestant" took on a different meaning, so that it was now possible to regard the astronauts as some sort of cadre of whites of northern European racial background. In fact, this had nothing to do, per se, with their being astronauts. It was typical of career military officers generally. Throughout the world, for that matter, career officers came from "native" or "old settler" stock. Even in Israel, which had existed for barely a generation as an independent nation and was dominated politically by immigrants from Eastern Europe, the officer corps was made up overwhelmingly of "real Israelis"—men born or raised from an early age in the pre-war Jewish settlements of the old Palestine. The other common denominator of the astronauts was that they were all first or only sons; yet not even this had any special significance, for studies soon showed that first or only sons dominated many occupations, including scholarly ones. (In an age when the average number of children per family was barely more than two, the odds were two out of three that any male would be a first or only son.) None of which was going to mollify the White House, however, because the astronaut, the single-combat warrior, had become a creature with greater political significance than any other type of pilot in history.

The squinting and hassling was still going on the day the NF-104 arrived. Perhaps that was one reason the monster looked so good to Yeager. All of the world's accumulated political cunning, from Machiavelli to John McCormack, wouldn't be worth a dogscratch in the NF-104 at 65,000 feet. Two extraordinary pieces of equipment were being developed specifically for ARPS. One was a space mission simulator, a device more realistic and sophisticated than the Mercury procedures trainer or any simulator NASA had on the boards. The other was the NF-104, which was an F-104 with a rocket engine mounted over the tailpipe. The rocket engine used hydrogen peroxide and JP4 fuel and would deliver 6,000 pounds of thrust. It was like a super-afterburner. The main engine plus the regular afterburner would take you to about 60,000 feet, and then you cut in the rocket, and that would take you somewhere between 120,000 and 140,000 feet. At least that was what the engineers confidently assumed. The plan was that the ARPS students would run profiles on the space mission simulator, then put on silver pressure suits, space-flight-style, and take the NF-104 up to 120,000 feet or more in a tremendous arc, affording up to two minutes of weightlessness. During this interval they could master the use of the reaction controls, which were hydrogen-peroxide thrusters of the sort used in all vehicles above 100,000 feet, whether the X-15, the Mercury capsule, or the X-20.

The only problem was, nobody had ever wrung out the NF-104. Just how it would handle in the weak molecular structure of the atmosphere above 100,000 feet, what the limits of its performance envelope would be, nobody knew. The F-104 had been built as a high-speed interceptor, and when you tried to do other things with it, it became very "unforgiving," as the expression went. Pilots were already beginning to crunch it with the F-104 simply because the engine flamed out and they fell to the ground with about as much glide as a set of car keys. But Yeager loved the damned ship. It went like a bat. As the commandant of ARPS, he seized the opportunity to test the NF-104 as if it had his name on it.

The main reason he would be testing it would be for use in the school, but there was an extra dividend. Whoever was first to push the NF-104 to optimum performance was certain to set a new world record for altitude achieved by a ship taking off under its own power. The Soviets had set the current record, 113,890 feet, in 1961 with the E-66A, a delta-winged fighter plane. The X-2 and the X-15 had flown higher, but they had to be hauled aloft by a larger ship before their rockets were ignited. The Mercury and Vostok space vehicles were lifted to altitude by automated booster rockets, which were then disengaged and jettisoned. Of course, all aircraft records were losing their dazzle now that space flight had begun. It was getting to be like setting some sort of new record for railroad trains. Yeager hadn't tried to break a record in the skies over Edwards since December 1953, ten years ago, when he had set a new speed mark of Mach 2.4 in the X-1A and had come down the far side of the arc in the most horrendous bout with high-speed instability any man had ever survived. Now Yeager was back on the flight line again to go for broke, out by the shimmering mirage surface of Rogers Lake, under that pale-blue desert sky, and the righteous energy was flowing again. And if the good lads of the prep school could sense through him… and through that wild unbroken beast… a few volts of that righteous old-time religion… well, that would be all right, too.

Yeager had taken the NF-104 up for three checkout flights, edging it up gradually toward 100,000 feet, where the limits of the envelope, whatever they were, would begin to reveal themselves. And now he was out on the flight line for the second of two major preliminary flights. Tomorrow he would let it all out and go for the record. It was another of those absolutely clear brilliant afternoons on the dome of the world. In the morning flight everything had gone exactly according to plan. He had taken the ship up to 108,000 feet after cutting in the rocket engine at 60,000. The rocket had propelled the ship up at a 50-degree angle of attack. One of the disagreeable sides of the ship was her dislike of extreme angles. At any angle greater than 30 degrees, her nose would pitch up, which was the move she made just before going into spins. But at 108,000 feet it was no problem. The air was so thin at that altitude, so close to being pure "space," that the reaction controls, the hydrogen-peroxide thrusts, worked beautifully. Yeager had only to nudge the sidearm hand controller by his lap and a thruster on top of the nose of the plane pushed the nose right down again, and he was in perfect position to re-enter the dense atmosphere below. Now he was going up for one final exploration of that same region before going for broke tomorrow.

At 40,000 feet Yeager began his speed run. He cut in the afterburner and it slammed him back in his seat, and he was now riding an engine with nearly 16,000 pounds of thrust. As soon as the Machmeter hit 2.2, he pulled back on the stick and started the climb. The afterburner would carry him to 60,000 feet before exhausting its fuel. At precisely that moment he threw the switch for the rocket engine… terrific jolt… He's slammed back in his seat again. The nose pitches up to 70 degrees. The g-forces start rising. The desert sky starts falling away. He's going straight up into the indigo. At 78,000 feet a light on the console… as usual… the main engine overheating from the tremendous exertion of the climb. He throws the switch, and shuts it down, but the rocket is still accelerating. Who doesn't know this feeling if he doesn't! The bastards are fantastic!… One hundred thousand feet… He shuts down the rocket engine. He's still climbing. The g-forces slide off… makes you feel like you're pitching forward… He's weightless, coming over the top of the arc… 104,000 feet… It's absolutely silent… Twenty miles up… The sky is almost black. He's looking straight up into it, because the nose of the ship is pitched up. His angle of attack is still about 50 degrees. He's over the top of the arc and coming down. He pushes the sidearm control to bring down the nose of the ship. Nothing happens… He can hear the thruster working but the nose isn't budging. It's still pitched up. He hits the thruster again… Shit!… She won't go down!… Now he can see it, the whole diagram… This morning at 108,000 feet the air was so thin it offered no resistance and you could easily push the nose down with the thrusters. At 104,000 feet the air remains just thick enough to exert aerodynamic pressure. The thrusters aren't strong enough to overcome it… He keeps hitting the reaction controls… The hydrogen peroxide squirts out of the jet on the nose of the ship and doesn't do a goddamned thing… He's dropping and the nose is still pitched up…The outside of the envelope!… well, here it is, the sonofabitch… It doesn't want to stretch… and here we go!… The ship snaps into a flat spin. It's spinning right over its center of gravity, like a pinwheel on a stick. Yeager's head is on the outer edge of the circle, spinning around. He pushes the sidearm control again. The hydrogen peroxide is finished. He has 600 pounds of fuel left in the main engine but there's no way to start it up. To relight the engine you have to put the ship nose down into a dive and force air through the intake duct and start the engine windmilling to build up the rpms. Without rpms there's no hydraulic pressure and without hydraulic pressure you can't move the stabilizer wings on the tail and without the stabilizer wings you can't control this bastard at the lower altitudes… He's in a steady-state flat spin and dropping… He's whirling around at a terrific rate… He makes himself keep his eyes pinned on the instruments… A little sightseeing at this point and it's vertigo and you're finished… He's down to 80,000 feet and the rpms are at dead zero… He's falling 150 feet a second… 9,000 feet a minute… And what do I do next?… here in the jaws of the Gulp… I've tried A!—I've tried B!—The damned beast isn't making a sound… just spinning around like a length of pipe in the sky… He has one last shot… the speed brakes, a parachute rig in the tail for slowing the ship down after a highspeed landing… The altimeter keeps winding down… Twenty-five thousand feet… but the altimeter is based on sea level…He's only 21,000 feet above the high desert… The slack's running out… He pops the speed brake… Bango!—the chute catches with a jolt… It pulls the tail up… He pitches down… The spin stops. The nose is pointed down. Now he only has to jettison the chute and let her dive and pick up the rpms. He jettisons the chute… and the beast heaves up again! The nose goes back up in the air!… It's the rear stabilizer wing… The leading edge is locked, frozen into the position of the climb to altitude. With no rpms and no hydraulic controls he can't move the tail… The nose is pitched way above 30 degrees… Here she goes again… She's back into the spin… He's spinning out on the rim again… He has no rpms, no power, no more speed chute, and only 180 knots airspeed… He's down to 12,000 feet… 8,000 feet above the farm… There's not a goddamned thing left in the manual or the bag of tricks or the righteousness of twenty years of military flying… Chosen or damned!… It blows at any seam! Yeager hasn't bailed out of an airplane since the day he was shot down over Germany when he was twenty… I've tried A!—I've tried B!—I've tried C!… 11,000 feet, 7,000 from the farm… He hunches himself into a ball, just as it says in the manual, and reaches under the seat for the cinch ring and pulls… He's exploded out of the cockpit with such force it's like a concussion… He can't see… Wham… a jolt in the back… It's the seat separating from him and the parachute rig… His head begins to clear… He's in midair, in his pressure suit, looking out through the visor of his helmet… Every second seems enormously elongated… infinite… such slow motion… He's suspended in midair… weightless… The ship had been falling at about 100 miles an hour and the ejection rocket had propelled him up at 90 miles an hour. For one thick adrenal moment he's weightless in midair, 7,000 feet above the desert… The seat floats nearby, as if the two of them are parked in the atmosphere… The butt of the seat, the underside, is facing him… a red hole… the socket where the ejection mechanism had been attached… It's dribbling a charcoal red… lava… the remains of the rocket propellant… It's glowing… it's oozing out of the socket… In the next moment they're both falling, him and the seat… His parachute rig has a quarter bag over it and on the bag is a drogue chute that pulls the bag off so the parachute will stream out gradually and not break the chute or the pilot's back when the canopy pops open during a high-speed ejection. It's designed for an ejection at 400 or 500 miles an hour, but he's only going about 175. In this infinitely expanded few seconds the lines stream out and Yeager and the rocket seat and the glowing red socket sail through the air together… and now the seat is drifting above him… into the chute lines!… The seat is nestled in the chute lines… dribbling lava out of the socket… eating through the lines… An infinite second… He's jerked up by the shoulders… it's the chute opening and the canopy filling… in that very instant the lava—it smashes into the visor of his helmet… Something slices through his left eye… He's knocked silly… He can't see a goddamned thing… The burning snaps him to… His left eye is gushing blood… It's pouring down inside the lid and down his face and his face is on fire… Jesus Christ!… the seat rig… The jerk of the parachute had suddenly slowed his speed, but the seat kept falling… It had fallen out of the chute lines and the butt end crashed into his visor… 180 pounds of metal… a double visor… the goddamned thing has smashed through both layers… He's burning!… There's rocket lava inside the helmet… The seat has fallen away… He can't see… blood pouring out of his left eye and there's smoke inside the helmet… Rubber!… It's the seal between the helmet and the pressure suit… It's burning up… The propellant won't quit… A tremendous whoosh… He can feel the rush… He can even hear it… The whole left side of the helmet is full of flames… A sheet of flame goes up his neck and the side of his face… The oxygen!… The propellant has burned through the rubber seal, setting off the pressure suit's automatic oxygen system… The integrity of the circuit has been violated and it rushes oxygen to the helmet, to the pilot's face… A hundred percent oxygen! Christ!… It turns the lava into an inferno… Everything that can burn is on fire… everything else is melting… Even with the hole smashed in the visor the helmet is full of smoke… He's choking… blinded… The left side of his head is on fire… He's suffocating… He brings up his left hand… He has on pressure-suit gloves locked and taped to the sleeve… He jams his hand in through the hole in the visor and tries to create an air scoop with it to bring air to his mouth… The flames… They're all over it… They go to work on the glove where it touches his face… They devour it… His index finger is burning up… His goddamned finger is burning!… But he doesn't move it… Get some air!… Nothing else matters… He's gulping smoke… He has to get the visor open… It's twisted… He's encased in a little broken globe dying in a cloud of his own fried flesh… The stench of it!… rubber and a human hide… He has to get the visor open… It's that or nothing, no two ways about it… It's smashed all to hell… He jams both hands underneath… It's a tremendous effort… It lifts… Salvation!… Like a sea the air carries it all away, the smoke, the flames… The fire is out. He can breathe. He can see out of his right eye. The desert, the mesquite, the motherless Joshua trees are rising slowly toward him… He can't open his left eye… Now he can feel the pain… Half his head is broiled… That isn't the worst of it… The damned finger!… Jesus!… He can make out the terrain, he's been over it a million times… Over there's the highway, 466, and there's Route 6 crossing it… His left glove is practically burned off… The glove and his left index finger… he can't tell them apart… they look as if they exploded in an oven… He's not far from base… Whatever it is with the finger, it's very bad… Nearly down… He gets ready… Right out of the manual… A terrific wallop… He's down on the mesquite, looking across the desert, one-eyed… He stands up… Hell! He's in one piece!… He can hardly use his left hand. The goddamn finger is killing him. The whole side of his head… He starts taking off the parachute harness… It's all in the manual! Regulation issue!… He starts rolling up the parachute, just like it says… Some of the cords are almost melted through, from the lava… His head feels like it's still on fire… The pain comes from way down deep… But he's got to get the helmet off… It's a hell of an operation… He doesn't dare touch his head… It feels enormous… Somebody's running toward him… It's a kid, a guy in his twenties… He's come from the highway… He comes up close and his mouth falls open and he gives Yeager a look of stone horror…

"Are you all right!"

The look on the kid's face! Christalmighty!

"I was in my car! I saw you coming down!"

"Listen," says Yeager. The pain in his finger is terrific. "Listen… you got a knife?"

The kid digs into his pocket and pulls out a penknife. Yeager starts cutting the glove off his left hand. He can't bear it any more. The kid stands there hypnotized and horrified. From the look on the kid's face, Yeager can begin to see himself. His neck, the whole left side of his head, his ear, his cheek, his eye must be burned up. His eye socket is slashed, swollen, caked shut, and covered with a crust of burned blood, and half his hair is burned away. The whole mess and the rest of his face and his nostrils and his lips are smeared with the sludge of the burning robber. And he's standing there in the middle of the desert in a pressure suit with his head cocked, squinting out of one eye, working on his left glove with a penknife… The knife cuts through the glove and it cuts through the meat of his finger… You can't tell any longer… It's all run together… The goddamn finger looks like it's melted… He's got to get the glove off. That's all there is to it. It hurts too goddamned much. He pulls off the glove and a big hunk of melted meat from the finger comes off with it… It's like fried suet…

"Arrggghhh…" It's the kid. He's retching. It's too much for him, the poor bastard. He looks up at Yeager. His eyes open and his mouth opens. All the glue has come undone. He can't hold it together any longer.

"God," he says, "you… look awful!" The Good Samaritan, A.A.D,! Also a Doctor! And he just gave his diagnosis! That's all a man needs… to be forty years old and to fall one hundred goddamned thousand feet in a flat spin and punch out and make a million-dollar hole in the ground and get half his head and his hand burned up and have his eye practically ripped out of his skull… and have the Good Samaritan, A.A.D., arrive as if sent by the spirit of Pancho Barnes herself to render a midnight verdict among the motherless Joshua trees while the screen doors bang and the pictures of a hundred dead pilots rattle in their frames:

"My God!… you look awful."

A few minutes later the rescue helicopter arrived. The medics found Yeager standing out in the mesquite, him and some kid who had been passing by. Yeager was standing erect with his parachute rolled up and his helmet in the crook of his arm, right out of the manual, and staring at them quite levelly out of what was left of his face, as if they had had an appointment and he was on time.

At the hospital they discovered one stroke of good luck. The blood over Yeager's left eye had been baked into a crustlike shield. Otherwise he might have lost it. He had suffered third- and second-degree burns on his head and neck. The burns required a month of treatment in the hospital, but he was able to heal without disfigurement. He even regained full use of his left index finger.

It so happened that on the day of Yeager's flight, at just about the time he headed down the runway on takeoff, the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, announced that the X-20 program had been canceled. Although the Manned Orbiting Laboratory scheme remained alive officially, it was pretty obvious that there would be no American military space voyagers. The boys in Houston had the only ticket; the top of the pyramid was theirs to extend to the stars, if they were able.

Yeager was returned to flight status and resumed his duties at ARPS. In time he would go on to fly more than a hundred missions in Southeast Asia in B-57 tactical bombers.

No one ever broke the Russian mark with the NF-104 or even tried to. Up above 100,000 feet the plane's envelope was goddamned full of holes. And Yeager never again sought to set a record in the sky over the high desert.