TWINS

WHEN Stanley Mott took his seat at the table during the first meeting of the selection committee and saw the list of the hundred and ten applicants for the six available spots in the astronaut program, he went immediately to the chairman and said, “I think I must disqualify myself. I know one of these men.”

“Which one?”

“Number forty-seven. Charles Lee, Army test pilot. It he uses the nickname Hickory, I know him. He worked for me as gate-guard at Huntsville.”

“What did you think of him?”

“Real Tennessee hillbilly. Finest kid I ever knew. My wife thought the same about his wife, another hillbilly called Sandra. I told him to quit his guard’s job and get himself an education.”

“Did he?”

“Yep. My wife found his wife a nursing job. He went to Vanderbilt. Graduated with honors.”

“That’s the kind of man we’re seeking. Stay here and share your opinion with us.”

“I won’t vote when his name comes up.”

“If he’s that good, you won’t have to.”

So Mott had stayed, had studied each of the competitors, and had voted strongly for Randy Claggett of Texas and John Pope of Fremont, both of whom were accepted. His [407] rugged testimonial on behalf of Hickory Lee enabled that young man to make the list also, but his three other choices were rejected.

After the six winners had been introduced to the public at a large press conference, NASA officials handed Mott a radical new assignment, but one which would give him great satisfaction during the next decade: “You’re a sensible man. Know a lot about engineering and science. We want you to look after the indoctrination and education of these young men. The way things are going, they’ll form the backbone of our program some years down the line and we want them to be in top shape.”

The first thing Mott did was to check his impressions of the six new astronauts against the more technical knowledge of the psychiatrist who had supervised the analyses of the original hundred and ten, dismissing about thirty out of hand, and he found Dr. Loomis Crandall of a clinic in Denver a most engaging fellow. A chain-smoker, prematurely gray, he was in his early forties, a graduate of the University of Chicago with advanced work in Vienna and Rome and solid experience as an Air Force psychologist at Colorado Springs. His youthful energy, coupled with his gray hair, lent him exactly the proper combination of erudition and street smarts for working with brash young test pilots.

He did not speak jargon. “What you’ve got to work with, Dr. Mott, are six of the most highly motivated young men in America. Look at their faces. Look at their records.” And he spread on the table six large photographs of the winners, each with a three-line summary:

Randolph Claggett, 1929. Texas A & M. Major, USMC. Patuxent River.

Charles ‘Hickory’ Lee, 1933. Vanderbilt Univ. Major, US Army. Edwards.

Timothy Bell, 1934. Univ. of Arkansas. Civilian. Allied Aviation test pilot.

Harry Jensen, 1933. Univ. of Minnesota. Captain, US Air Force. Edwards.

Edward Cater, 1931. Mississippi State. Major, US Air Force. Edwards.

John Pope, 1927. Annapolis. Cmdr., US Navy. Patuxent River.

[408] Mott checked this list as Dr. Crandall recited his conclusions: “Pope’s the oldest, Bell’s the youngest, the rest are nicely bunched. Homogeneous in most other ways, too. All Protestant. All from small towns. All married and all with at least two kids, except Pope. All from the Midwest or South.

“Now, that last point’s significant. To have passed our strict surveillance, these men must have had a central tendency in their lives. Good behavior, bravery, a certain religious bent. The whole mix. And what do you suppose is the best name for that? Patriotism. Old-fashioned patriotism. And where do you find that these days? Mainly in the South. In the Civil War country. Mott, if you took one thousand of the men who really run the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, you’d find that seventy percent of them come from the South, which has only ... what? Thirty percent of the population. Totally out of proportion, but that’s because the heroic occupations have always appealed to the Southern man ... and the Southern woman. Look at the list. Texas, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi. And the chap who graduated from Minnesota was born in South Carolina. Went north only because his family was Swedish and they wanted him in Minnesota surroundings.”

Mott asked why the astronauts so far contained no Catholics, and Crandall had a prompt answer: “What have we insisted on in these first groups? Training in math, engineering, science, test-piloting most of all. And what does test-piloting demand? Training in math, engineering, science. And what do the great Catholic schools emphasize? Anything but math, engineering and science. So up to now a young man trained in the Catholic tradition has simply not been eligible.

“Hell, I’m Catholic. I desperately wanted a Catholic in this batch, especially since none appeared in the first groups. But where to find one? Not at Notre Dame. Not at Villanova.” He pushed his papers back and said enthusiastically, “We’ve got some great leads for a couple of hotshot Catholics in the next batch.”

Crandall emphasized the conspicuous fact that almost all the astronauts so far, and certainly all of this group, came from small towns. “I’ve pondered this, and it can’t [409] be genetic, or a matter of aptitude. It must be a socioeconomic factor. Boys from small towns tend to live close to their parents. They’re urged to take things seriously. Their families encouraged them to study, join the Boy Scouts, play games. These men, all of them, had character ingrained in them by the time they were ten.

“You can get that in the city, but more often you’re led into other channels. Business. Manipulative professions like the one I’m in. Political management.” He paused. “I’ll tell you one thing, Mott, I’d hate to live in a country governed by these astronauts. Very conservative. Very unimaginative in any field outside their own. They’re all Republicans, you know.”

But he also stressed what Mott already knew, that these men were determined to succeed. “Every one is a super-achiever, driven by the most profound determination to do things right. Cowardice, recalcitrance, the temptation to do sloppy work, all suppressed. Their capacity to do extra work is unbelievable, so if you’re to be in charge of their education, don’t fear to pile it on. These men will learn ten times as much as the average A student. Ten times as much as you or I could have mastered. These are super machines.”

When Mott queried him about one peculiarity shared by the six, Crandall grew expansive. “The point you raise worried me at first. Twenty-two astronauts-twenty-two of the best young men in America and not an outstanding athlete among them. Why? Well, I did a lot of double-doming and came up with a batch of fancy explanations. “Boys with the amount of drive they have don’t waste their time with games.” Or maybe “Engineering and science require so much lab work, there’s no time for daily football practice.” Or perhaps “In athletics the motivations are all external. What the coach says. What the rules say. In the fields these men work in, the disciplines are internal.” I had half a dozen other goodies, and when I discussed them with faculty members some of the teachers were rather pleased that in this most demanding of life tests, the super-athletes did not do poorly. They did nothing. Blank.”

He raised his hands as if to confess his bewilderment, then broke into a cheerful laugh. “Stupid me! I had over looked one simple fact which explained it all. In each [410] successive selection, we’ve picked smaller men. So they can fit into the machines we’re building. If we had selected the really bright football linemen, and there are some, believe me, they’d have stood six feet four and weighed two hundred and fifty. One of those gorillas would require more space than two of our men like Grissom and Young. As a matter of fact, the engineers who build the machines wish we’d keep the maximum height something less than five-eight and the weight no more than one-sixty.”

Mott said, “I seem to remember that John Pope did pretty well in football. Claggett, too.”

“They all played games,” Crandall conceded. “And some were pretty good. But not one of the first twenty-two was what you’d call a superjock, and very sneakily I weasel back to my first guess. They weren’t because men like these do not waste their time on sports, for the good reason that the goals they’ve set for themselves will not permit that extravagance.”

He made two other warning points. “Astronauts by an enormous margin are first-born children. They’ve been pampered. They have powerful egos. Their parents may have driven them too hard, but they also loved them. These men expect to be cared for. Do not brush them off. On the other hand, no astronaut, regardless of the pressure we put him under, has ever developed a gastric ulcer. These sonsabitches know something you and I haven’t learned. Work like hell all day, but turn it off at night. Eat a good meal and get a good night’s sleep. So you don’t have to treat them like china. These bastards are tough.”

He had more statistical analyses which he might have shared with Mott, but he felt that since the salient points had been covered, it was time to bring in a man with whom Mott would be forced to work in close tandem. “I want you to meet Tucker Thompson, chief honcho for Folks magazine. He’s primarily responsible for breaking the stranglehold Life had on the astronauts, and he’s got to make good on these six or get fired.”

Before Mott could say “I’ve already met Thompson,” the editor burst eagerly into the room, smiling enthusiastically, and Mott had an opportunity to inspect more closely the man with whom he would be working. He was tall, bronzed, about fifty, and when he extended his hand, his cuff disclosed an imposing link made of a large gold [411] nugget. He wore a button-down collar and a tie of rich solid color, a pair of exquisitely pressed black trousers, an expensive white jacket and, of course, tasseled shoes. He was slightly bald, a fact which showed to good advantage when he smiled. for then his large face seemed enormous-a vast expanse of tanned skin, shimmering eyes and very white teeth.

“I’m Tucker Thompson,” he said, starting to step forward. But then he stopped, drew back, and pointed at Mott with a long forefinger. “Hey! I know you. I met you in Senator Grant’s office. You’re …” He hesitated. “You’re Dr. Mott.”

He brought with him a set of the family photographs already taken by his magazine, and when he spread them on the desk, Dr. Crandall added an obvious point: “Yes, I forgot to say. These young men were never afraid to marry the prettiest girl in town. No psychological hang-ups about the conflicting roles of husband and wife. Boom! They’re in bed.” And with a pencil he identified the wives.

“Four normal. Two problems. The Swede Jensen married the Swede Inger. All-American, all-Americans. The Tennessee boy they call Hickory married a daughter of a Tennessee hillbilly, and every man should be so lucky. Outdoor type, has her own horse, her own used car. But when she dresses up! Get back in line, you guys.”

Mott studied Mrs. Lee’s photograph and marveled at how far she had progressed from the rather awkward girl he had known at Huntsville. “She was a friend of my wife’s. Look at those steely eyes. That one can do anything she puts her mind to.”

“The civilian Bell,” Dr. Crandall continued, “The lad so highly recommended by Senator Glancey, found himself a real doll, as you can see. Probably the best mother of the group.”

“She photographs like a million,” Tucker Thompson said. “With or without the three kids.”

“Ed Cater, the Air Force man from Mississippi, married himself a woman who is most deceptive. Looks like Miss Confederacy but ran a mortgage firm before she married Ed. Bright as they come.”

“I don’t see any problems there,” Mott said, adjusting his glasses. “Except my own. Keeping my mind on the job.”

“The problems hit us with these two,” Thompson said, [412] “and if I’d have been on the selecting committee, I don’t think I’d have allowed these two in. They damage our case.”

He pointed to the photograph of Debby Dee Claggett: loose-fitting blouse, sandals, blond hair somewhat awry, smoking a cigarette. “Frankly, she looks blowzy. We had a board meeting to decide how we should play her. She’s not an outdoor type. She’s not a cover girl. And she has two real significant drawbacks. Two of her kids are by another man. He’s dead, of course. They were legally married. And I find she has the habit of calling anyone she doesn’t like, or likes a great deal, ‘that sonnombeech.’ ”

Distastefully he turned Debby Dee’s photograph face downward and in its place produced a real horror. “Our makeup people decided to see what they could do with Debby Dee. What do you think?” In her improved version Debby Dee wore frills about her throat, dangling green earrings, a bouffant hair style, and a smile displaying more than twenty teeth, two of which had been filled with gold.

Nobody spoke, and after a while Tucker Thompson confided: “When she saw the photo she said, “That sonnombeech looks like a Shanghai whore.” We have a problem with Debby Dee.”

“What did your board decide?” Mott asked.

“We can play her two ways. Texas wholesome. We can claim her father owned a large ranch.”

“Did he?”

“Nobody knows where he is.” He coughed. “Or what I proposed, we can stress the death of her first husband.”

“But you said his being the father of two of the kids was a drawback,” Crandall said.

“In our business you often take a weakness and make an asset of it. Throw it right in the public’s face. We’ve been checking the record, and she seems to have behaved with extraordinary courage when her husband went down. We have some pictures. We can claim that Claggett was the closest family friend. Proposed immediately to care for the orphans, all that jazz. We convert a liability into an asset.”

“Your best bet,” Crandall said, “is to play her as a windblown original.”

“Dangerous,” Thompson warned. “Very dangerous. [413] Because you never know how the American public is going to react to an original. Especially a female original. Now you take two all-time winners, Gertrude Stein and Amy Lowell. God, you couldn’t get two zanier women than that, but we took them to our hearts. Now we sell automobiles with Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein. We might have the same phenomenon with Debby Dee, but we might not, too.”

“Can we prohibit her from saying sonnombeech in public?” Crandall asked.

“I’m not sure that Debby Dee will take correction,” Thompson said, and with this he turned to his last photograph, Mrs. John Pope, legal counsel to the Senate Space Committee. She appeared in office garb, a neat red skirt falling just below her knees, a white Peter Pan collar and a string of beautiful imitation pearls. Her hair was pulled back and fastened with a barrette, but it was her dark eyes which commanded attention.

“We saw her, you know,” Mott reminded the editor, “in Senator Grant’s office.”

“I remember. In an office she’s great. But in our effort, she could turn out to be poison.”

“Why?” Mott asked. “She fills your bill completely, I’d say. Small town. Attends church. Childhood sweetheart.”

“She’s a time bomb, gentlemen,” Thompson said from long experience. “What has Life discovered with its astronauts? On the day the flight takes off you want a news photo of the wife waiting at home, or maybe praying in church. The kids. The white picket fence. The distressed neighbors on whom she leans. If one of the sons has a skateboard, so much the better, but a bicycle’s best of all. The daughter with a doll, not a teddybear. This tears at the heart, makes the space shot much more real than the pictures of the rocket blasting off.

“Now what the hell do we photograph if Astronaut John Pope takes off on a dangerous mission? His wife in her Washington office biting a pencil? She ought to be miles from Washington in some small town in a white house with a picket fence. And dammit, she doesn’t have any children. Everything about this capable woman adds up wrong. And do you know what I fear? These damned professional women. During the flight, when we can’t keep [414] the ordinary press away from her, she’ll say something. “Why aren’t there any Colored in the program?” “When will they take women up the way the Russians have just done?” God knows what she’ll say, but you can bet it’ll be counterproductive.”

He tapped the handsome photograph with his pencil and predicted: “That woman’s a nuclear bomb. Planted right at the heart of my program.”

“The obvious story,” Mott said, “is that this brave girl works in the very office, et cetera, et cetera.”

“In my business,” Thompson said, “you’re not to be too clever. Stick to the little house and the white fence. And do you know why? Two-thirds of our readers are women, and they instinctively despise bright young women like Penny Pope who hold jobs and keep their weight down.”

“Except for Debby Dee,” Mott pointed out, “your first four are rather thin.”

“But they’re also pretty. Like models. Women expect models to be thin. And none of them is contaminated by having a job.” With a broad sweep of his hand he indicated the entire gallery. “If a woman is pretty, thin is beautiful. If she has an administrative job, thin is avaricious and mean-spirited. You tell me what to do with this one.” And he pointed accusingly at Penny Pope.

All such questions became vital to Rachel Mott when NASA employed her to act as a kind of cicerone to the families of the six new astronauts. She got the exciting assignment because of the excellent record being compiled by her husband, but everyone who knew her realized that she was perfectly suited for such a task. She was a mature forty-three, always well groomed, a fine housekeeper with children of her own, and a Bostonian with a strong sense of obligation.

When she and Stanley took up residence near the new space headquarters in Houston, she was distressed when Millard elected to remain in California with the young men of the surfboard coterie, but she was pleased to see how easily Christopher, now thirteen, adapted himself to life in Texas. What gratified her especially was the respect shown her husband by everyone at NASA, where he was recognized not only as the mentor of the new astronauts but also as one of the most brilliant of the permanent staff. [415] It seemed that he moved from one important ad hoc committee to another, serving first as an engineer on some highly technical problem, then as a scientist on matters dealing with outer space.

His principal energy, however, was directed toward inducting the six young men into the mysteries of NASA, and within a week of their reporting to Houston he had them scheduled into a round of learning situations which resembled advanced work in some fine engineering university, except that the men had two hours a day of theory and ten hours of laboratory. This schedule would continue for about six months, after which they would move into specialized applications.

Such concentrated work left the wives free to follow their own obligations and interests, and this was where Rachel Mott’s responsibilities began.

Tucker Thompson saw to it that the wives were photographed regularly at those occupations which would best represent the female half of the NASA effort. Since three of the women had strong church affiliations-with the most respectable denominations, not the Holy Roller type that flourished in the South-there was a fruitful opportunity for shots of a reassuring nature: Sunday School, picnics, suppers for old folk, standing outside the church with the other parishioners on Sunday morning. He was also very strong on family outings when the astronauts were in Houston and on Little League baseball games; he had a low opinion of basketball: “Mostly a Colored game these days. Baseball is what our readers have faith in.”

Rachel saw the women at their more normal tasks, and although at first they had been suspicious of her, judging her to be a NASA spy, they came in time to respect her professionalism and her force of character. She was both sympathetic and persuasive and was never reluctant to express a strong opinion if she felt it needed. Her neatness, her command of English and her taste in clothes were impressive to these young women, who were equally attentive to their own appearances.

She had a hard time with Debby Dee, who was only six years younger and not disposed to pay much attention to what anyone presumed to tell her, but Rachel did not brood upon this failure, for she found the Texas woman far too brash for her taste and the Claggett children even less [416] disciplined than her own. The Claggetts were not a family she would have sought out, and she was somewhat gratified when her husband reported that he was not having much success with Major Claggett. “He finishes his work faster than others and he knows airplanes inside out, but he’s very difficult to communicate with. Fends everything off with a joke.”

Like everyone else, Rachel found herself in love with the Swedes, Harry and Inger Jensen, for they were attractive, bright and extremely eager to please. “Perpetual Boy Scouts,” someone described them, and Harry had indeed been an Eagle Scout. They were a pair easy to identify in that each had blond hair and a narrow triangular face. Their eyes were blue; they smiled incessantly; and they were in love.

She worried about the civilian couple, for they seemed to lack the harsh fiber that characterized the military families, even though Stanley assured her that Tim Bell was one of the hottest pilots private industry had so far produced. “General Funkhauser of Allied Aviation does not recommend a man who can’t cut the mustard. Look for the wife’s good qualities, not her weakest ones.” The trouble with the Bells, as Rachel saw it, was that the husband was inordinately good-looking, while the wife had that baby-doll prettiness which often spelled danger. Since she photographed magnificently, and since her husband looked more like a hotshot test pilot than any of the other men, their pictures were widely distributed, and in time Mrs. Mott came to agree that despite their possible weaknesses, the Bells were a considerable asset to the program.

She found it easy to like the three pretty Southern wives, Cater, Jensen, Lee; they conducted themselves well, assisted whenever called upon, and seemed indistinguishable from the millions of resilient wives who had accompanied their husbands in ages past when the latter went forth with Julius Caesar to the frontiers of empire, or with Robert Clive to the pacification of India, or with Douglas MacArthur to his occupation of Japan. They were professionals, and since she had made herself one at El Paso and Huntsville, she respected them.

Gloria Cater, the one-time business woman from Mississippi, was a constant surprise, a combination of [417] Southern ante-bellum beauty and a tough sense of self-protection. Inger Jensen was frail, talkative and great fun to be with. But the gem of the Dixie contingent, in Rachel Mott’s opinion, had to be tomboy Sandra Lee from the hills of central Tennessee.

She had been extremely fond of this self-directed beauty and saw with approval that Sandy apparently assessed the NASA experience with neat accuracy. She could turn on whatever mood Tucker Thompson and his photographers wanted, then walk away untouched by the nonsense. Rachel enjoyed hearing her tell how Hickory had wound up an astronaut: “My boy tore Vanderbilt apart. Straight A’s. Earned a commission in the Army, then his wings, then a master’s in aeronautical engineering at MIT, straight A’s again.” But Rachel noticed that one could approach the Lees only so far; then the mountain couple retreated; they did not permit anyone to know them intimately.

Rachel felt her closest identification with Penny Pope, of Washington, for in this competent, self-directed woman she saw the kind of efficiency she tried to maintain in her own life, plus a high degree of personal charm which she herself had never been able to generate. Also, Mrs. Pope was obviously more gifted intellectually than the other five and therefore more rewarding to talk with on the few occasions when she left her duties with the Senate to visit with her husband. Rachel did not feel, like some other NASA personnel, that “This Pope dame is a cool customer,” for she sensed the strong opinions and great warmth Penny was capable of, but she did know that the perfectly groomed young woman from the West was going to present problems quite different from those offered by the Southern belles. Rachel Mott liked Penny Pope, liked her enormously, but she also feared her.

“Well, what do we have?” Tucker Thompson asked at the beginning of the fourth week, when his magazine was preparing its initial presentation of the six wives. “What I’m looking for is a theme to hand the American public, and especially the American housewife. Because these are ‘her girls’ and we’ve got to keep them that way.”

“They’re beautiful. Your photographers should have an easy time.”

“But we’ve got to show them as more than beautiful. [418] We’re after their collective soul, and in this game first impressions are fatal.”

“They’re intelligent. There’s not a dummy in the lot. Even Debby Dee Claggett is as sharp as a pin, in her own way.”

“Intelligence is a negative factor when you’re trying to sell a group of women. One woman, like Oveta Culp Hobby, yes. The public can take pride in an exception. But not six. We’re looking for the theme that will make America’s heart sing. We do not have an easy job, Mrs. Mott, and I’d appreciate some serious help from you.”

“Start with the beauty, Tucker, but call it ‘The well-scrubbed American look,’ and then make a virtue of their diversity. Use Tomboy Sandra. Use cool, efficient Mrs. Cater, and contrary to your fears, I think you have a real goody in Mrs. Pope’s quietly helping to make decisions that enable her hero husband to fly his dangerous missions. Unity in diversity is your theme, Tucker. Or maybe it’s diversity in unity.”

There were several exhaustive meetings on the subject of how to present the wives, but in the end, it was Rachel Mott’s ideas about the cover which prevailed: “A small American flag in the center, blowing in the breeze, surrounded by the six wives shown in the most carefully chosen vignettes. Sandy Lee with an Indian sweatband around her head. Gloria Cater chewing an executive pencil. Penny Pope standing before a Senate eagle. Cluny Bell with her left hand framing her fragile face. Inger Jensen in an Eton collar being her adorable self. And Debby Dee Claggett-”

She stopped. How could the big Texas woman best be depicted? Tentatively she suggested, “With a martini glass, a cigarette ...”

“One thing for sure,” Thompson said, “our psychological studies prove that in a circular picture, people will usually overlook the eight-o’clock position. Lower left-hand corner. Debby Dee comes in at eight o’clock.”

The cover was a sensation, the handsome American flag surrounded by six of its most appealing daughters. As soon as customers started writing in for copies without printing so they could be framed, Folks ran off two hundred thousand and sold them for twenty-five cents each, and when [419] the lot was gone and the six wives properly presented, Thompson had one of his secretaries summarize the mail:

Most comment on: Inger Jensen, the one everyone would like to have as their daughter. Least comment on: Penny Pope, who struck readers as indifferent and why wasn’t she with her husband? Most liked: Debby Dee Claggett, who looked like the best mother in the lot. Consensus: An American bouquet the nation can be proud of.

Rachel Mott felt, with some justification, that she had played a helpful role in getting her six debutantes properly launched into the American social season, but on the day when Virgil Grissom and John Young made their historic first flight in the new spacecraft Gemini, she discovered that she was living in a fool’s paradise. It was a tense moment in space history, when the fate of the national program hung in the balance and when the safety of two astronauts-not one, as before-was at stake. All NASA was on edge, and Tucker Thompson felt that this might be a good moment for the general press to see how the new wives reacted to the machine in which their own husbands would shortly be flying. He called Mrs. Mott: “Rachel, where are the girls?”

“I believe four of them are watching the television at Gloria Cater’s.”

“Marvelous. That’ll make a great shot. But why only four?”

“Mrs. Pope’s in Washington, as usual. And Inger Jensen’s visiting her folks in Minnesota.”

“Damn! She’s the most photogenic of the lot. That little-girl charm. Well, we’ll go with what we have. Meet me at the Caters’.” He was about to hang up, but asked hurriedly, “It’s got a picket fence, hasn’t it?”

When they reached the Cater home Thompson explained to the waiting newsmen the ground rules governing the interviews and photography: “These women are under extreme tension. They’ve gathered here for mutual support. No harsh questions. Nothing at all about what would happen if the mission failed.”

Rachel should have gone into the cottage first to alert [420] the wives, but she stayed outside to coach the women reporters on the personalities of the four wives, and this meant that Tucker got to the living room first. He almost fainted, for he found the women with their shoes off, playing gin rummy and drinking martinis, while the television droned on, with no one paying attention. Mrs. Claggett and the hostess, Mrs. Cater of Mississippi, were smoking cigarettes.

“Good God!” Thompson cried. “A sacred moment in history. Men’s lives in the balance. And you’re playing poker.”

“Gin,” Mrs. Cater said.

“The press is out there. Reporters from all over the nation, all over the world. Get your shoes on.”

Sandy Lee took charge, and in her most efficient manner swept up the cards, hid the martinis and whisked away all sights of debauchery. Then, with the utterly disarming charm that she could turn on when needed, she went to the door and said quietly, “Persons from the major wire services and two reporters from overseas may come in for fifteen minutes. Then we’ll come out and meet with you for as long as you wish. Because this is a historic moment and we feel deeply proud to play even a minor part in it.”

With graciousness unbounded she escorted the five selected newspeople into the cottage, then smiled bravely at the sixty or seventy others as she closed the door and moved to where Gloria and Cluny and Debby Dee were staring at Walter Cronkite on the television screen.

The program for which the new astronauts had been selected was named Gemini because for the first time two men were to fly the spacecraft in a compartment so restricted that one man lay almost touching his partner and remained there immobilized for periods of up to fourteen days. When Dr. Mott actually inspected the capsule, he appreciated what Crandall had said about NASA’s restraints on the height and weight of its astronauts; no two men of normal-large dimension could possibly wedge themselves into this confined space, and even highly trained men like the lean astronauts had trouble doing so.

Gemini was a form of exploration unprecedented in world history, and it demanded men of agility, bravery and enormous competence.

[421] At the beginning of the six-month indoctrination, Deke Slayton, lean and mean, appeared before the astronauts with a stack of basic manuals and specific flight plans twenty-seven inches thick. “By the time your name is called for a flight, you will have memorized everything in boldface and understood the rest.”

The basic manuals were like intricate games for grownup children, in that each depicted in the most carefully analyzed form the operation of some one system of the Gemini craft: in one, colored diagrams showed the movement of electricity through literally miles of wiring; in another, the most elegant break-away drawings of the type developed in World War II to facilitate the repair of airplanes showed how the hydraulic system worked; in yet another, four cleverly printed sheets of transparent plastic lay one atop the other to allow the astronaut to see inside one of his rocket thrusters.

The fields of knowledge seemed endless, sixteen major concentrations of information, all of which had to be mastered, and regardless of which field the men attacked next, the same rule applied: two hours of intellectual discussion, ten hours of laboratory break-down, then two hours of comparing notes and ten more hours of tackling the problem physically.

From its earliest days NASA had followed a sensible program of requiring all its astronauts to study everything, but then to assign each man a field of specialization in which he was expected to become a top expert, familiar with the most arcane concepts and possible future developments. It was always an exciting time when these assignments were made, and one morning Deke Slayton appeared with a list: “Claggett, because of your unusual knowledge of airplanes, structures. Lee, because you’ve already done a lot with electronics, the electrical system. Bell, because you specialized in aerodynamics at Allied Aviation, flight surfaces. Jensen, because you’re small and tight, flight gear and survival mechanisms. Cater, because you’ve done good work on propulsion at Edwards, rockets. Pope, because of your doctorate in astronomy, navigation and computers.”

John noticed that whenever assignments of any kind were published, the same pecking order maintained, with Claggett at the top and himself at the bottom, and one [422] day when he was alone in Dr. Mott’s office he saw on the desk a list giving the names in the accustomed ranking and titled ORDER OF SELECTION. Since he was reading upside down, he had no time to decipher the typing which accompanied the list, but when Mott returned, he asked him bluntly, “Why am I at the bottom of the list?”

“You weren’t supposed to see that.”

“I didn’t read it. Just saw the title and the order.”

After Mott put the list in a drawer he said, “That’s the order in which you were selected. There’s no better airman around than Claggett. I suppose you know that.”

“I knew him in Korea and Pax River. The best.”

“The others have terrific records, Pope. This boy Bell, the civilian. He flew everything with wings and helped Allied improve every machine they ever made.”

“But why me at the bottom?”

Since Pope seemed bewildered by this ranking, Mott decided to level with him. “It wasn’t your flying. You’re up there with the best. And certainly not your bravery, because in Korea and Pax River ... well, you have the medals to prove that.”

“What was it? What’s my hidden weakness, because I certainly don’t know and I ought to.”

“Patterns,” Mott said, and when the young flier looked amazed, he added, “You didn’t conform to the patterns. You don’t live with your wife. You have no children. Statistically you represented a gamble, especially your wife. NASA feels safer when unknowns like Claggett and Lee conform to patterns. Because then the numbers are in our favor. With you we were flying in the dark. I think you know that.” When Pope made no reply, Mott said, “It surfaced in Korea and it certainly surfaced at Patuxent.”

“What surfaced?”

“That you were a loner.”

“What’s that got to do with it? Seems to me, the main thing is ... I was also good,” Pope said with that charming frankness which characterized the best test pilots. John Pope was one of the best fliers in the business; he knew it and was not hesitant about claiming his rights.

“That’s why we chose you, John.” This sudden use of his first name, as if the discussion had entered a new and more confidential phase, mollified the astronaut, and he [423] asked, “Why were you willing to overlook the anomalies?”

And now this unusual word, so scientific and so exactly right in this context, relaxed Mott, and he broke into a laugh. Taking off his glasses, he looked at Pope, nine years his junior and one of the most capable men he had ever met, and said, “We chose you because we knew that in the air you would prove to be one of the very best men on our roster. And you will be.”

“But on the ground, watch out.”

“Yes.” An embarrassed pause, then: “Any chance you could persuade your wife to quit her job and move down here to Houston?”

“None.” Pope blew his nose, more to gain time than for any other reason, then said, “Penny told me last weekend that she felt your wife was the person closest to what she’s like. You must have faced these same problems.”

“Curious. My wife said the same about Mrs. Pope. “More like me than any of the others.” But I never faced your problem, John, because my wife accepted the work I did. Some day I’ll tell you about El Paso. And getting eased out at Huntsville. My wife stayed close.”

“Mine doesn’t,” Pope said crisply, and without waiting for Mott to indicate that the interview was over, he rose and left the room.

The specialty he had been assigned delighted him, and had he had a free choice from the entire field, he would have elected astronomy and the new navigational systems, for he found them captivating. “They drive my mind to its ultimate capacities,” he wrote his wife, “and I feel constantly submerged. But damn it all, I’ll work it out in the end.”

The heavy problem of field trips prevented him from becoming narrowly specialized in navigation, for the astronauts were required to jump about the nation and the world with an agility that left some watchers bewildered. In one three-month period Pope and Claggett were occupied with these trips:

... To Worcester, Massachusetts, the David Clark Company, to be fitted for two different kinds of spacesuits, plus an extra one for Pope in which he might walk in space.

[424] ... To Los Angeles, California, for a two-day meeting with General Funkhauser’s men, who had won a contract to supply the controls in the capsule.

... To St. Louis, Missouri, the McDonnell Astronautics Co., to work on the spacecraft itself.

... To Cleveland, Ohio, to work at NASA’s Lewis Center on the performance of jet engines and rockets.

... To Sunnyvale, California, the Lockheed Space Company, to check the progress of the Agena target vehicle with which Gemini would hook up in outer space.

... To Owego, New York, IBM, for familiarization with the new, smaller computers which would run the spacecraft.

... To Fort Apache, Arizona, to engage in a three-day survival test on the desert, finding food and water as they became available.

... To Canoga Park, California, Rocketdyne, to study the principles and controls governing reentry through the atmosphere.

... To Redondo Beach, California, the Ramo Corporation, to work on trajectory calculations.

Plus several more of the 319 industrial sites where components of the Gemini program were being assembled, including many of the foremost names in American business: Bell, Burroughs, CBS, Douglas, Engelhard Minerals, General Electric, General Motors, B. F. Goodrich, and on down the line.

Some of the excursions had special meaning to the fledgling astronauts, but each man seemed to identify particularly some visit which proved unique for him. Hickory Lee came back from the wild C-135 parabolic flights at Edwards Air Force Base ecstatic: “By damn, they took me up there to forty thousand feet, flew damned near straight up, then turned the nose down, and in that swift change, Zoom! No gravity! I bounced around in the padded cargo space like a feather in a Texas tornado. Absolutely no gravity. For thirty-two seconds. Down we went, then up [425] again in the parabolic curve, then over and down. We did it thirty-eight times and I came out bruised from ass to elbow. Them mats, they don’t protect you no-how.” But for several days he kept talking about those moments of accidental freedom from the pull of Earth.

Some men found it difficult physiologically to adjust to the C-135 routine; all they got was an unmerciful pounding as the huge plane nosed down, and John Pope was one of these: “I was probably free of gravity, as they say, but I barely knew it.” What imparted the sense of space to him were two much more mundane experiments, but in a way more sophisticated, since they depended upon simple perceptions of gravity.

“If you’re like me and fail to catch the feeling in that bang-about C-135,” he advised the others, “Try that Langley Space Walk they showed us in the movies. Outstanding!”

But his closest approach to a perception of null gravity came in a swimming pool, or rather a huge cubic tank installed at the new center in Huntsville, where in full astronaut’s gear he was thrown into the water wearing just enough lead weights about his waist to achieve a neutral buoyancy: “It was weird and kind of wonderful. Not real weightlessness, you understand, because if you stood on your head in the water, blood rushed to your head, because gravity still operated. But there was a marvelous sense of freedom. I loved it. Whenever I suited up and the crane dropped me into the drink, I thought I was a medieval knight being hoisted onto my white charger. But my lance was a monkey wrench. The world I was to conquer was outer space.”

The most dramatic expedition was Randy Claggett’s to Johnsville, the Naval Air Center, just north of Philadelphia, where he was to undergo tolerance tests on the mammoth centrifuge. Using exactly the kind of whirling machine used to separate cream from milk, but on a larger scale permitting many more controlled variations, the men conducting the tests placed their subject in a pilot’s chair and whirled him about at ever faster speeds until the required G was reached:

“One look at that sonnombeech and I wanted out. They strapped me in eyeballs out and said, “Can you [426] take ten G’s?” and I said, “How in hell do I know?” and they said, “Well, you’re gonna find out.” It was kind of hairy, but I yelled, “I ain’t feelin’ no pain,” so they yelled, “Here come fifteen big ones,” and I had a little trouble focusin’ my eyes, but when they yelled, “Think you could take twenty?” I yelled back, “Let me outa here,” and they said, “You’re the judge,” and when I got out, the register marked sixteen G’s. That’s what I took.

“But they was this farm-boy sailor sort of standin’ around and he volunteered to try the machine, and when they strapped him in they ran it to fifteen pretty fast and he grinned and yelled, “I kin take it,” and they whomped him up to eighteen and asked if he’d like to go for twenty, and he shouted, “Why not?” and they gave him that and then told him that no one had hit twenty-one yet, and he said, “Give it a whirl,” but he was spinnin’ so fast the words kinda slipped outa the corner of his mouth, and they gave him twenty-one G’s for about ten seconds. Dreadful pressure.

“When they stopped the centrifuge he jumped down as good as new, but he was kinda dizzy, I could see that. He started home drivin’ his own car, but when I left the test area I saw him parked dead across the median strip, sound asleep. His brain musta been completely addled by the twenty-one G’s, but when I took him back to the base the doctors never gave a damn. I often wonder what happened to that farm boy.”

The excursions, which never abated, were made doubly enjoyable when NASA acquired the use of several dozen T-38 two-seater supersonic Northrop jet trainers. These were sleek, exciting aircraft which could hit Mach 1.3 or better, and to leave a late-afternoon meeting at Cape Canaveral, hurry to the airfield and whip a T-38 through the sky to Houston in time for dinner was a delight.

Because the T-38 could carry two, Claggett and Pope, as two buddies from Pax River, often found themselves sharing a plane on some swift flight to a contractor’s [427] meeting or to the next field test, and one day they flew to Key West for a drill on parachute landings in water, since every emergency had to be anticipated. For three days the two pilots were hauled aloft in an old DC-3 and tossed overboard at a height of 9,000 feet. As they descended, slowly twisting in the Caribbean sunlight, they would make silent bets as to which powerboat on the waves below would get to them first. On the third afternoon, when the tests were over, they sped to the airfield, climbed into their T-38 and flew across the Gulf of Mexico to the haven of Ellington Air Force Base north of the Houston space center, landing just as the sun was setting behind the city.

To be young, to be at home in the heavens, and to have a T-38 at one’s disposal, with airfields across the nation at which one could land for fuel or for a critical meeting, was to know the best of life. By no means was it recreation; the pilots had to do this flying to maintain their skills, and it was obligatory that they fly a certain number of hours each month, some at night, to qualify for the salary adjustments which meant so much to them. “Hell,” Claggett said, “me and Debby Dee, we couldn’t live on my base pay. Without that good ole flight pay, our kids would have to live on grits.”

The flight they liked best was from Houston to Cape Canaveral, for this meant that they were headed toward the mystical site from which they would one day soar off into space, and with a kind of reverence, they approached the sandy spit on which the launching pads waited. “This is for real,” Claggett cried one day as he took his T-38 far out to sea before landing.

Also, several of the most effective simulators were located at the Cape, and the astronauts never wearied of climbing into these extraordinary devices and going through imaginary flight procedures. NASA had developed a simulator for everything, Claggett said, “except tying your shoes, and the minute that becomes important, presto, they’re gonna have one.”

There was a simulator for launch, another for coming back through the atmosphere. There was one for the guidance system, another for the computers. There was an amazing simulator for aborting a flight, and a Rube Gold berg type, all angles and elbows, for landing on the Moon. [428] There was a simulator covering every conceivable emergency, but the best of all was operated by a tall. mournful doctor in engineering from Purdue University who had a kind of Fu Manchu beard and whom everyone called Dracula.

His job was to anticipate disaster, to imagine the worst possible outcome of every step his astronauts would take and then to simulate the disasters they might encounter. Halfway into the launch on his simulator, power in three rockets would be lost and a set of highly sophisticated telemetry devices would register every mistake the agitated pilot made. Or just at the crucial moment the two main computers would blow, and every wrong move made by the pilot in the right-hand seat would be coldly registered. Engines would catch fire; the ablative shield would burn off; the drogue parachute wouldn’t pull out the main; when Dracula was on the scene, playing his simulators like a violin, disaster was omnipresent.

And when the test flight was over, he would meet with the two pilots and read them his scorecard: “At 00:01:49 into the flight compression was lost.” The bastard never said, “I cut compression.” It was always an impersonal compression that acted poorly. “The commander made two wrong responses before he hit the right one and the mission crashed. At 00:05:23 an exaggerated pogo began. Pilot attempted correction using procedure abandoned four months ago and mission crashed.” It sometimes seemed as if Dracula could never be content until the imaginary Gemini spacecraft plunged into the Atlantic, killing both pilots, but when real flight began and absolutely no crisis eventuated for which Dracula had not prepared his crews, the astronauts began to generate a real affection for him. But he was, as Claggett said, “a real bastard,” which the Twins verified one morning.

Dracula was a genius at devising sight-and-sound spectaculars that exactly duplicated what the astronauts would see in the flight. Motion picture cameras displayed the heavens which would surround the men at a particular moment; the seasick motion of the descending capsule could be evoked with gimbals; noises were easy to duplicate-so that by the time Claggett and Pope had flown the various simulators for well over a hundred and fifty hours. [429] they believed with some reason that space could hold no surprises for them.

In that mood they climbed into the main simulator one morning after it had been mysteriously shut down for three weeks, and as they listened to the countdown numbers coming over their earphones-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-blast off-they grew tense, as always, awaiting Dracula’s next disaster.

But on this day the simulator was playing for real. It blew up. There was a terrible explosion, wild noises, with flame and smoke invading the capsule as it simulated lifting into the air atop its Titan rocket. To his credit, Claggett in the left-hand seat took every step calculated to diminish the consequences of the explosion, and in his right-hand seat Pope did what he could to control the fire. The flames, from whatever cause, were extinguished, so that the simulator, badly damaged, could be repaired and used again.

And then the two astronauts realized that it had all been faked. Dracula had devised a set of excellent motion pictures, a new sound system and a machine which would rock the simulator while giving off flame and smoke. At the debriefing the gloomy man droned: “At 00:01:09 one of the main rockets exploded. Commander and pilot responded with all the right procedures except emergency control of oxygen, so the mission crashed.” When headquarters asked Claggett and Pope how they had reacted to the unexpected explosion, the latter retreated to his test-pilot training and said, “I tried this and it failed. I tried step two and it failed. But step three proved effective.” Claggett was more direct: “I was scared shitless.”

Senator Grant did not propose to do the Republican dirty work on the Space Committee for the Democrats Lyndon Johnson and Michael Glancey without getting something for his state in return, but when the time came to identify the quid pro quo he ran into difficulty. Eastland of Mississippi had cornered most of the easy plums controlled by the Senate, while Mendel Rivers of South Carolina commandeered so many posts and establishments that an admiral had once growled, “Mendel, if we give you one m7ore base, Charleston will sink.”

[430] Of the NASA assignments, Johnson was taking care of Texas, and Glancey was protecting Red River with multiple contracts. Trying to combat such patronage crocodiles was difficult, but Grant was not powerless, and when he threatened revolt, the Democratic leadership had to consider ways to placate him.

“Norman,” Glancey said one morning prior to a committee meeting, “Air Force and NASA both could use another airfield west of the Missouri, and we’ve decided to place it just north of your hometown. Very convenient when you get your own plane.” Glancey also persuaded General Funkhauser to locate a branch of Allied Aviation next to the industrial city of Webster, and Grant was mollified except for one additional boon in which he had a personal interest.

“Glancey, our astronomer at Fremont State has talked some well-to-do people into giving us a planetarium. His name’s Anderssen, splendid scholar. I think it would be proper if this new bunch of astronauts reported there for their star studies.”

“Well ... you know, Norman ... we’ve been sending our men to Chapel Hill in North Carolina. They do an excellent job.”

“I’m sure they do,” Grant said crisply, “but I’m equally sure Anderssen can do as well.”

Nothing came of this exchange, but Grant was so eager to have six astronauts walking on the streets of his college town that he returned twice to the matter, and in the end Glancey surrendered: “I’ll speak to NASA,” and when those officials said that although North Carolina was doing a fine job, they could see no reason why Anderssen at Fremont State couldn’t do as well, the indoctrination was moved west. At his first meeting in the new planetarium the old man told the astronauts:

“When a man has studied the heavens for ten thousand nights he is entitled to make certain generalizations. Space is without limit or definition. There is no east or west, no north or south, no down or up, no in or out. It is truly boundless and must be respected as such. It cannot be measured or comprehended. All we can do is behave in accordance with its laws as we dimly perceive them.

[431] “It is those laws I wish to speak about, and I need not exhort you to master them, for the day is not far off when you, and each of you, will be soaring in outer space, with the welfare of this nation and indeed of all mankind depending upon how you perform.

“This is a galaxy. [And he flashed on the heavens of the planetarium a stunning photograph of M-51, the Whirlpool.] There are about one billion stars in that galaxy, and about one billion galaxies in the universe as we are allowed to know it at this moment. That means that we may have as many as a billion billion different stars. I shall now increase the light so that you can write on your pads a billion billion. That’s the figure one followed by eighteen zeros.

[He lowered the light and showed the astronauts a beautiful photograph of the galaxy in Coma Berenices known as NGC-4565, an elongated mass of stars and galactic dust.] “If we could see our Galaxy, spelled always with a capital G, from a vast distance it would look like this, a collection of some four billion stars arranged about a central core. I want each of you to guess where our Sun, one of those stars, is situated within the Galaxy.

[He replaced 4565 with an artist’s conception of our Galaxy as viewed from above, and with a flashlight-pointer indicated how the Sun stood far off to one side, well away from the vital center.] “We are attached to a star of only average size, in a galaxy of only average size, far from the center of action where new stars are being born, far from those centers of the universe where new galaxies are being born. Never, never, young men, believe that we stand at the center of things, or even close to the center of anything.

“But the position we do occupy within our marvelous Galaxy is a magnificent one whose complexities will occupy you for the rest of your lives. I have spent sixty years, as a boy in Norway and an astronomer in this country, endeavoring to penetrate the mysteries of our planetary system, and I suppose I know [432] as much about it as anyone living but I do not know its precise origin, or the construction of any component except Earth, always spelled with a capital E, or the mechanics which ultimately hold the system together, or its final destiny.

“I stand before you an ignorant old man terribly jealous of the astounding opportunity you have to explore our system and most eager to help you acquire the tools to accomplish that exploration. To perform your task, you must know the stars.”

The next thing he showed them, with the aid of special devices on the planetarium instrument, was the ecliptic, that arbitrary band of the heavens through which the Moon and the planets moved and along which the Sun appeared to move, and when this imaginary line was fixed in the men’s minds, he threw upon it handsome streamlined interpretations of the zodiacal signs, immemorially ancient in origin, the signposts of the heavens.

“I have studied the zodiac in five different languages, and with every known mnemonic device, but a child’s rhyme fashioned in England long ago remains the best help so far devised. It’s printed in your material and I shall expect you to memorize it by tomorrow. I use it almost every night, and so will you.” And he recited the childish rhyme which helps astronomers organize their work, pointing with his light-wand to the curious collection of figures associated with the words:

“The Ram, the Bull, the Heavenly Twins.

Next the Crab, and the Lion shines.

The Virgin and the Scales.

The Scorpion, Archer and He-Goat,

Then the Man with the Watering Pot,

And the Fish with the glittering scales.”

Having made the circuit once, he returned the heavens to Aries and cried, “Now all together,” and like a group of kindergartners, the six astronauts recited the nursery rhyme.

Professor Anderssen was rigorous in demanding that the astronauts master the navigational stars situated along; [433] the ecliptic, for some of these would usually be visible, but they were not conspicuous, their names were unfamiliar, and they gave the young men much trouble: “You simply must learn the easy ones by tomorrow. Spica, Antares, Aldebaran, Pollux, Regulus.”

When these were mastered he turned to the difficult ones, some scarcely visible to unpracticed eyes: “Nunki in Sagittarius, easy to find in the group that looks like a Tea Kettle; Deneb Algedi in Capricornus, not easy to find. Hamal in Aries, very difficult to find. But the most difficult of all, either to find or say, this one in Libra, Zubeneschamali.”

He was having some difficulty with Randy Claggett, who gave the star names his own pronunciation. The Big Dipper became Ursula Major, Zubeneschamali was Reuben Smiley, and the important navigational star Nunki became Nooki. “Am I correct in thinking, Major Claggett, that the word Nooki has sexual overtones?”

“Well ... it means ... you’re getting some.”

“Then I think we’d better call that star by its right name, Nunki,” but when in oral review Anderssen pointed his wand at Sagittarius and asked Claggett to identify the principal star, he bellowed, “Nooki.” For a brief spell the professor thought of disciplining the Texan, but he observed that Claggett was learning the stars faster than anyone else except Pope, who had a Ph.D. in related fields, so he tolerated him, and once when he was trying to teach the more difficult stars he shouted, “Learn it! It’s difficult! It’s Reuben Smiley!” and the class applauded.

When the northern stars were mastered, he convened his students in the planetarium and told them something they would often refer to when they talked among themselves. He was proving to be an inspired teacher, one whose obvious enthusiasm brightened his subject; when he said that he had studied the stars for ten thousand nights he meant just that, three long nights of observation each week for sixty years:

“We have mastered, I think, the northern stars, the easy bright ones especially, and we have seen how fortuitous it was that God or nature placed Polaris at the precise spot where it would be most useful, at the North Pole. Now look at the South Pole and see [434] how empty it is. Look at the entire southern hemisphere and see how few bright stars we have to guide us.

[He allowed the sky to move slowly, majestically through three complete days, speaking a few words now and then to impress upon the men the emptiness of the southern regions and the obligation they faced of being just as familiar with these few helpful stars as with the more numerous and conspicuous ones of the north.]

“When I was a boy in Norway and had mastered the northern stars, as you have done, I used to stand on my hill and rage at the heavens, pleading with them to shift so that I could see the southern stars, which I knew to be hidden below the horizon. “Canopus,” I shouted. “Come forth! I know you’re down there. Southern Cross, let me see you!”

“Think of it, gentlemen. We seven are among the well educated, and not one of us has ever seen the stars that guide the south. Now we shall learn them, but I cannot convey how jealous of you I shall be when you leap into space and fly beyond the shadow of the earth and see in all their glory the southern stars which I have never seen.

[Quietly he moved into his heavens the Magellanic Clouds which had so captivated the Portuguese explorer, the Southern Cross which had guided and delighted Captain Cook, the brilliance of Centaurus and the cold beauty of Canopus, second brightest star in the heavens.]

“I will expect you to know all the easy stars by tomorrow morning. Then we shall drop down to the difficult ones.”

And they were difficult: Achernar, Al Na’ir and crazy stars that not even Pope had ever heard of: Miaplacidus and Atria. But as Anderssen insisted: “They’re essential because at some crucial moment up there, it may be only this part of the heavens that you will be able to see, and if you do not know these stars, you will be lost.”

[435] In his concluding lecture, when he was satisfied that his six students had learned in their 120 hours of assigned time more than he had known at the end of five years of study, he told them:

“You are prepared to identify the stars which will give you the data you need to navigate to the Moon, or Mars, or Jupiter. You must now move on to master the computers which will absorb these data and tell you exactly where you are. But in a larger sense, none of us will ever know where we are. We are lost in the stars, in our little Galaxy, among the billions of other galaxies that help to control us within a universe we can neither define nor comprehend. The steps you brave young men take with your marvelous machines will push back the veil of ignorance a little way, and then our concern will be with the newly revealed and greater ignorances which will dominate us until others like you, with their own machines and understandings, push their veils aside to reveal the new imponderables. How I envy you.”

Tucker Thompson was enjoying such a great run with the six astronauts that his magazine advertised his work as “a better job than Life,” and the astronauts applauded this because according to their contract with Folks, each man stood to make about $23,000 extra income if the series was sold abroad. The fliers therefore worked closely with Tucker and encouraged their wives to do the same, but all of the women resented Thompson’s invasion of their privacy, and he had some trouble getting them to do the things that the American public had a right to expect of their heroines.

Thompson had particular cause to worry about Cocoa Beach, the explosive town to the south of Canaveral which had once contained 2,600 people and would soon have many times that number. Never a pretty town, in the old days it had served as a winter resort for snow-birds who flocked south each December from places like Maine, Minnesota and especially Ontario. Those with wealth continued on to Palm Beach, a hundred and twenty-five miles farther south; only those on budgets parked their caravans at Cocoa Beach. The houses tended to be one story, frame, [436] unheated and dusty, the stores two-storied and jumbled. There had been bars, most of which were shuttered during the summer, and living quarters for a small permanent population whose men commuted to jobs north along the coast to Daytona Beach or inland to Orlando.

Like Canaveral itself, the little town huddled on the outer chain of islands and expanded not like a lovely rose which flowered in all directions, but rather like a radish which elongated at each end but stayed the same in the restricted middle. Yet the town had a wild beauty, for to the east roared the somber Atlantic.

When the astronauts flew in to Cape Canaveral on duty assignments, which was constantly, austere bachelor quarters were provided in NASA buildings, but they preferred the livelier scene at Cocoa Beach, twenty miles to the south, and if they brought their wives along, which they often did, it became the custom for them to take rooms at a new and glossy motel called the Bali Hai, a name borrowed by many joints across the country from a popular song that was supposed to be tropical and sexy. This Bali Hai had been built by Canadians, who seemed always to have an uncanny sense of which Florida beach was going to become popular next, but it was run by a pessimistic married couple from Maine who had spent one winter too many among the snowdrifts of that igloo.

They were the Quints, “named after the Dionnes,” they told guests who had never heard of the famous Canadian sisters, and in one way they were ill-prepared for the high nonsense that preempted their motel, for they were dour Yankees; but in another, they were a good choice, because in Maine they had spent their long winters studying wildlife and had learned that “animals, four-footed or two-, are capable of damned near anything.”

The Bali Hai had three considerable assets: a white beach from which the husbands could plunge into the high waves of the Atlantic, a blue-tiled swimming pool shaded by palm trees in which the wives could disport, and a large dark bar in which both could celebrate. The walls of the Dagger Bar were tastefully decorated with daggers, swords, knives, sabers, cutlasses, krisses, poniards, stilettos, rapiers, machetes and dirks, most of them contributed by well-traveled patrons who had brought them home from foreign ports. The effect was quite stunning, a congenial [437] bar with inviting tables surrounded by weaponry which recalled the violence of the world and reminded the drinkers of the violence which had sometimes threatened their lives.

About the room evocative objects hauled in from the Bahamas were placed: large clamshells, fishing nets, green-glass floats used by fishermen, and two gigantic stuffed swordfish. The Dagger Bar featured rum drinks with exotic names like Missionary’s Downfall or Virgin’s Last Stand and an excellent fish dinner for a flat three dollars including one free beer.

Each new group of astronauts was advised by those who had gone before: “The scene is at the Dagger Bar. You’ll love the Quints, gloomiest people since Cotton Mather. But those fresh oysters, all you can eat for fifty cents!” Tucker Thompson, anticipating that his crowd would want to lodge at the Bali Hai, checked the place out and satisfied himself that the rooms were clean and the drinks honest, but then he discovered something that sent icicles right up his spine: the Bali Hai was sometimes overrun by hordes of groupies who wanted to be where the action was, and since many of them were delectable and still in their teens, he could foresee disaster.

The Cocoa Beach groupies following space were identical with the girls of Europe who idolized bullfighters, those of South America who traipsed after race-car drivers, or those of Canada who chased hockey players. All societies appeared to produce a plethora of young girls eager for excitement and willing to break away from stable homes in order to seek it. And around the world they behaved the same: frequent the scene of action, haunt the popular bars, and jump into the right bed with practiced alacrity.

Rachel Mott, observing the phenomenon for the first time, was appalled by the undisciplined behavior of her sex; it was really quite shameless the way the girls threw themselves at the men, but when Tucker Thompson asked about it one night in the Dagger Bar while five or six toothsome girls, all under the age of twenty, were clustering around Randy Claggett, she admitted grudgingly, “I’ve been quite shocked by these children. Where are their parents? But upon reflection, I’ve had to conclude that girls just like these probably haunted the camps where [438] the gladiators trained, and on the day when the little men descend from another planet, a supply of our girls will be there to greet them.”

“Well, they’ve got to lay off my astronauts,” Thompson said, “or we’re going to look like fools.” And he showed the Motts his magazine’s next week’s issue, in which his long-range program for the Special Group was revealed. It displayed on the cover, in the neatest possible array, the new astronauts, each man looking right into the camera with chin set, eyes ablaze and hair cut short, Marine style. THE SOLID SIX cried the headline, and Thompson sat back, highly pleased with his work.

“In our business,” he said, “the battle’s half won if you can label your product with a snappy title. The Brown Bomber made Joe Louis twice the man he would have been otherwise. The Lone Eagle-nobody ever did better than that. It made the public see Lindbergh, who was not an easy man to sell, as both aloof and particularized, almost human, you could say. I like that one they’ve started using for Brooks Robinson-the Glove. That’s classy. And I liked the Velvet Fog, the name they gave Mel Tormé when they discovered he couldn’t reach the hard notes. Saved his career. But the best they ever did was for that likable London heavyweight who came over here, to disastrous results. Phil Scott, his name was, and when he was knocked flat three times by punkos even before the big fight and all seemed lost, some clown gave him the name Phainting Phil, the Swooning Swan of Soho, and thousands paid to see him.”

“The Solid Six,” Mott repeated. “It has a good sound, and they certainly look solid.”

“What we thought … and you understand, the final choice wasn’t mine. The whole board wrestled with this one. Our thinking was that Life had pretty well preempted the field of glamour with their crews. Glenn, Borman, Shepard. That’s a pretty classy group. Did you know that some people are now calling the original astronauts the Sacred Seven? Well, we couldn’t replay that record, but we could identify our men with something patriotic and lasting.” He stopped to make an entirely different point: “The lasting part is important. Because our boys are going to be on the scene for a long, long time. The Sacred Seven are dropping away like flies ... private business ... all that. It [439] will be our boys who make the great Gemini flights, the ones who’ll later fly the Apollos to the Moon.”

He drummed on the table, then looked past Rachel Mott to where the teenage groupies were still making a fuss over Claggett. “We blow the solid bit if any one of our boys explodes in scandal. The newspapers are already fussing about the fact that we have an exclusive, and if they could blast us out of the sky with a juicy scandal, they’d descend on us like hungry wolves.” He stopped, looked at Mott and asked, “Did I mix my metaphors?”

“You did,” Rachel said.

“Forgive it. Point is, Mott, I want you to talk with your boys.”

“Problem’s not mine.”

“You bet your sweet ass it is,” Thompson said sharply. “Excuse me, ma’am, but this is important. Mrs. Mott, here, is doing a great job with the girls. You keep the boys in line.”

He was so insistent and so irritated with Mott for not assessing the danger seriously, that he got in touch with his superiors at Folks and they called Senator Grant, who seemed to be the Senate spokesman for the space exercises, and he telephoned Cocoa Beach immediately: “Mott, Tucker Thompson is dead right. It would be disastrous if scandal touched this program. You get those men straightened out. Pass the word.”

“Senator, I can’t-”

His protest was not allowed. “Those lads are your responsibility, Mott. Pass the word!”

Mott waited till all the men were at Canaveral, for he did not want to discharge this messy task piecemeal, and the delay proved almost fatal, for a persistent teenager from Columbus, Missouri, the daughter of a professor no less, forced her way into Randy Claggett’s bedroom while he was working in one of the simulators at the Cape and was waiting for him, undressed, in bed when he returned to the Bali Hai.

Randy did not feel obligated to force the girl from his bed, or even to make her put her clothes back on, but when he told her at half past nine that he really must go down for some supper and that she could not walk down with him, she understood and used a fire escape. Tucker Thompson watched the way they came straggling in from [440] two different directions, painstakingly unassociated, then met casually as if for the first time and sat together for a huge plate of oysters and two bowls of chili, and he was positive that his carefully orchestrated plan for his six astronauts was on the verge of destruction. Looking hastily about the darkened room to see if any newsmen had witnessed the sexual charade, he was relieved to find that all of them were absent, attending a briefing at the Cape regarding the impending second Gemini shot in which the popular Edward White was going to walk in space. But even as he took a deep breath he saw at a corner table a compelling young Japanese woman, not yet thirty, small, exquisitely framed, with becoming bangs, high cheekbones and just a hint of Asia in her eyes. Her complexion was that delicate coloring which appears on the finest celadon vases of the Orient, smooth and placid, and she seemed the kind of woman with whom any responsive man would want to discuss his troubles. Also, she wore that special combination of informal clothing which invited men to approach her table when she sat alone: a pleated blouse in handsome tan colors that matched her skin, a casual sweater thrown carelessly about her shoulders, a very wide belt emphasizing the smallness of her waist, a free-swinging skirt and Italian-style loafers with broad, blunt toes.

As soon as Tucker saw her, warning bells started ringing: That one is no groupie. She’s for real. But what truly terrified him was the fact that from her corner, under the Malayan daggers which framed her lovely square face with its sensuous drooping mouth, she was watching with professional cynicism everything Randy Claggett and his teenage supper companion were doing and was occasionally writing in a notebook.

“Who’s that?” Thompson asked.

“The woman in the corner?” Mrs. Mott asked. “She’s an accredited reporter from Japan. Well regarded in the profession. Did a stint with the New York Times. Got an M.A. with top grades from Radcliffe. Now writes for the Asahi Shimbun, biggest paper in the world, and is syndicated in Europe.”

“What’s a Japanese doing at Cape Canaveral? Spying?”

“She writes beautifully about space. Has a real feeling for it. Has a pilot’s license, I believe, and she did a lot of [441] glider soaring in New Hampshire when she was at Radcliffe.”

“What’s her name? She’s not on my list.”

“Yes she is,” Rachel said with some embarrassment. “She’s the one we thought was a Japanese man. Rhee Soon-Ka. Rhee’s the last name. When I went to meet Mr. Rhee-voila!” And she pointed to the lovely young woman taking notes under the Malayan daggers.

“A Japanese!” Thompson growled. “Emperor Hirohito would do anything to get even.”

“Tucker, take it easy!”

He could not. He had lost too many battles with the press not to recognize an enemy when he saw one, and knew intuitively that he would find himself, during the next decade, doing continuous battle with Madame Fu Manchu. “You say she worked for the New York Times?”

“An exchange job, I believe.”

“The evil tricks she didn’t learn in Japan, I’m sure she picked up in New York.” A flash of genius struck him: “Do you think I could go over and strangle her right now?”

“Tucker! She’s a woman doing a job. She doesn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds.”

“A cobra doesn’t weigh six.” He studied the intruder for several minutes, then rose abruptly and walked to her table. “I’m Tucker Thompson, Folks.”

“I know,” she said in a lilting voice. “Sit down. You’re the one who keeps the six little Boy Scouts locked up.”

“It’s our job to write about them.”

“You don’t seem to have that one behind bars,” she said, pointing to Claggett.

“His niece, from Kansas.”

“Popes used to have nieces. Astronauts have pickups.”

“You write one word …”

“I intend to write about sixty thousand words.”

“You be careful ...”

“It’s your job, Mr. Thompson, to provide the American public with fairy tales. It’s mine to provide the rest of the world with adult interpretations.”

“You be very careful …”

“I don’t have to be. I’m not trying to sell anything. Tonight I’m taking notes on a most attractive young man, a most lecherous one.”

“Now, Miss ...” He hesitated. “What’s your name?”

[442] “Born Rhee Soon-Ka. In America, I use Cynthia Rhee.”

“As a Japanese alien, you could find yourself in a lot of trouble, Miss Rhee.”

“I’m Korean.”

“Just as bad. I have the power to cause you a lot of trouble.”

“Have you chanced to read my series on the Kremlin? I’m always in trouble. You get fine stories when you place yourself in harm’s way, as your Admiral John Paul Jones so handsomely phrased it.” She spoke a beautiful, halting English, so carefully pronounced that it stung and infuriated, and she was not even trivially disturbed by Tucker Thompson’s bluster.

“I wish you a lot of luck with your story, Miss Rhee,” he said as he rose to depart.

“And you will do everything possible to prevent me from getting it.”

“With my six astronauts, I will.”

“And they happen to be the very six about whom I am writing.” And without referring to her notes, she recited the names in order: “Randy Claggett of Texas, wife Debby Dee. Hickory Lee of Tennessee and his wife Sandy. Timothy Bell of Arkansas and his wife Cluny. Harry Jensen of South Carolina and his pretty wife Inger. Ed Cater of Mississippi and his wife Gloria. And perhaps the most interesting of all, John Pope of Fremont and his ambitious wife Penny. You’ll be reading about them, Mr. Tucker.”

When Thompson returned to his table he received the harshest shock of all, delivered by Rachel Mott: “She’s supposed to have said in the bar that in order to complete her research, she intended to sleep with every one of our six.” She paused a moment, then added, “The Solid Six, as you describe them.”

The urgent meeting was held in Thompson’s room at the Bali Hai, and although he had originally intended for Stanley Mott to carry the ball, he could not refrain from getting immediately to the heart of the crisis. “Men, it’s very simple. If you besmirch the name of astronaut with cheap sexual adventures, you endanger a program of vital importance to the nation and to the world.” The listeners could see that he was sweating, and as they wondered what he would say next, he added; “Rumors are [443] circulating. I myself have seen things that would have looked damned suspicious to a knowing reporter.”

He really did not know how to proceed past that point, so he shifted gears completely. “You stand to lose a great deal of money, all of you, if this thing blows up.” And as soon as he uttered these words, he knew he had blown it. What lusty young man would quarantine himself from some of the most nubile young women in the world simply because a monetary contract was in danger?

Mott took over. “Senator Grant just telephoned me. He’s responsible for the funds you fellows spend in your T-38s. He’s got to wangle through Congress the billion-odd dollars for your Gemini program.” He stopped and laughed at himself. “How in hell do you say that word? I hear it four ways. Hard G. Soft J. Dictionary says it ends -eye. NASA uses -ee.”

Ed Cater said. “Our radio station has an astrology program and they give it the hard G and the -eye.”

“I would despise taking my intellectual leadership from an astrology program. Forgive me if I call it Jem-in-ee.”

With the tension broken, Thompson adopted a different tone. “Men, the Senate leaders, the NASA leadership, all of us want to see this program move forward in an orderly way. You know you’re already being ticketed for future flights, ones of profound significance. Don’t blow it by allowing some silly-”

He was interrupted by a hard, flat, unemotional voice; it belonged to John Pope. “If you’re talking about sex, say so.”

“That’s exactly what we’re talking about,” Thompson snapped. “If you men allow yourselves to get mixed up with those groupies …”

Pope was inflexible. “It’s highly improper for you to come here and lecture us on such a subject. We’re not Boy Scouts.”

“The public thinks you are.”

“Maybe that’s because of what your magazine writes, Mr. Thompson.”

“We write what America needs to hear.”

“We’re test pilots. Each of us had to decide long ago how we’d behave. So far we’ve done a pretty good job, and frankly, we do not seek high-school counseling now.”

The words were so unexpected, and from a source so [444] surprising, that Mott made no effort to respond; these were not the statements of some young astronaut, but rather the end-of-life reflections of a Socrates or a Voltaire. But Tucker Thompson was not silenced, because he was custodian of property rights which must be protected. “Don’t take this too lightly. There’s a newswoman in these parts who’s announced publicly that she’s going to sleep with every one of you, then write a book about your performances.”

Some of the men gasped, but the effect Thompson sought was dissipated when the husky voice of Randy Claggett whispered, “Get that girl’s full name and address.”

When the NASA high command learned through its grapevine of the threat posed by Cynthia Rhee, they gave Tucker Thompson a clear directive: “Get that Korean reporter straightened out,” but Tucker, remembering his first encounter with her, knew that he was not the man for that job. Calling Mrs. Mott to his room at the Bali Hai, he said, “Ride herd on our Miss Kimchi.”

“Who’s that?”

Impatiently Thompson explained: “Kimchi is the smellingest coleslaw in the world, and the bitingest. It’s Korean, loaded with garlic. And that Rhee dame is twice as obnoxious. You’re to tell her what’s what. She’s to lay off our astronauts.”

Rachel laughed. “What an unfortunate use of words, Tucker. Lay off.”

“It’s your paycheck if she gets out of line.”

So Rachel went to the Dagger Bar, where Miss Rhee was sitting alone at her customary table in the rear. Walking up to her, Rachel said, “May I join you?”

“Has Mr. Thompson ordered you to check on me?” the Korean woman asked with transparent insolence.

“He did just that,” Rachel snapped, grabbing at a chair and pulling herself up to the table. “I’ve been informed that men at the bar heard you boast that you were going to sleep with each of our astronauts. What a vile thing to have said.”

To her surprise, the Korean woman lost all belligerence. Like an autumn sunrise a warm smile spread over her beautiful face and she placed her small, well-tended hands over Rachel’s. “Surely you must know that men [445] always spread such rumors when they feel challenged by women who are brighter than they are.”

“Do you challenge them?”

“I certainly do. Men like your Mr. Thompson have been getting away with murder ... the bullshit they write about the astronauts.”

“Do you have to use such words?”

“That word is the only one which describes what the men writers around here have been throwing into the wind.”

“And you intend to correct that?”

“I surely do.” She leaned back against the wall to study Mrs. Mott. “You know, of course, that I’m extremely pleased to have you here at my table. I’ve been wondering how I might meet you.”

“Why?”

“You’re just as much a part of my story as Randy Claggett.”

“I’m surprised,” Rachel said.

“Don’t be. Your husband is a prime part of NASA, and to understand him, I must understand you.”

“And to keep you from wrecking things,” Rachel said. “I must understand what motivates you.”

“I’m relatively simple. Fiercely oriented. Self-controlled. But never complex.”

“Tell me,” Rachel said, and the sincerity in her voice “ encouraged the Asian woman to confide:

“Because I was born at the right time, in 1936, I profited from the groundwork done by the great women journalists who preceded me. Simone de Beauvoir, Dorothy Thompson, and especially the three younger Americans of the postwar period. I have no illusions that I’m as good as they were, but I am their inheritor and I intend to send my profession forward, as they did.”

When Rachel said, “Tell me about the three Americans,” Cynthia replied, “A woman like you ought to know about them,” and Rachel said, “There’s a great deal I don’t know.”

“The significant fact is, they’re all dead. Each one killed herself at the extremes of her profession, and [446] I suppose I’ll do the same. Maggie Higgins worked herself to death in Korea. Dickie Chapelle proved herself braver than most men, parachuting behind enemy lines, submarining in dangerous waters, leading a patrol of Marines with flame-throwers, and finally blowing herself to fragments on a land mine in Vietnam. Nell Nevler, as you know, plunged to a shattering death when the Russian transport in which she and her Russian colonel were escaping plunged into the Kiev airport.

“They were brave women, brilliant women, who established new freedoms, who redefined how women could be employed. That they performed well in the 1950s enabled me to try my hand in the 1970s, and I assure you that I do not intend to be a lesser woman than they were.”

When Rachel probed as to what her intentions were with the Solid Six, Cynthia laughed. “Who knows? When NASA launches a satellite, who can certify where it will head? Many have gone their own ways, to the consternation of your bright boys in Houston. Same thing happens when you launch a person with ideas at a target with emotional content. Who can anticipate?”

The two women reflected on this for some time, then Cynthia added what was perhaps the most relevant in all that she had revealed:

“In comparison with the women I’ve mentioned, I consider myself rather limited, but I do have one thing none of them did. I’m driven by a compulsive force you would not believe. You see, I’m a Korean brought up in Japan, where Koreans are treated like dirt. And that’s a furnace which forges a special kind of steel-flexible ... keen ... indestructible. I’m like a sword of the Japanese samurai, whom I detest but also admire. Their swords cut to the quick of things, and I do the same.”

When Rachel looked up she saw Tucker Thompson approaching the table. “And how are you two girls getting along?” And Rachel thought: What an unequal battle this [447] is going to be! The Korean karate champ versus the Madison Avenue hack, but later, when she had watched how adroitly Tucker protected himself in the dirty infighting, she concluded that perhaps the duel would not be as uneven as she had thought.

John Pope’s blunt defense of the right of his fellow astronauts to behave without supervision by NASA and Folks had several repercussions. The five other astronauts, knowing him to be a rather stuffy straight arrow who never dallied with the groupies, were impressed by his willingness to defend them on a matter of principle, and they appreciated this. They had already elevated Randy Claggett to the position of master pilot, and now they conferred on Pope the unannounced title of political leader. This gave him no added perquisites, only additional responsibilities, but when difficult problems arose, or confrontations with the high command, they expected him to make the first statements and then to defend them. It was not a position he sought, nor one that gained him ease; observed behavior among one’s peers accounted for it, and herd of cattle in a meadow or a flight of geese at sunset will make the same kind of election for the same kind of reason.

It was perplexing that the men accorded Pope this honor, for they did not especially like him; he was too rigid, too much an overage Cub Scout, far too much a loner. He did not drink or smoke; he quarantined himself from the groupies; and while the other astronauts lounged in the Dagger Bar, he was apt to be on the beach, running six or seven miles to keep the fat down. This separation of Pope from the rest did not mean that the latter conformed to the pattern of Randy Claggett, with his wild and sometimes crazy Texas ways. The normative astronaut was Hickory Lee: quiet, fearfully efficient, solid drinker off duty, quick to anger if his rights were trespassed, and average in almost every other human reaction. Pope and Claggett stood at the extremes; Hickory commanded the middle.

For two reasons the NASA brass were not happy with Pope’s outspoken defiance of Stanley Mott and Tucker Thompson: they had carefully cultivated the myth that the astronauts were almost heavenly creatures-“a cross between Jesus Christ, Ulysses and Joe DiMaggio,” one [448] writer had said-and they had profited enormously from it; they must preserve this myth unsullied; and they had entered into a contract with Folks whereby it and Thompson enjoyed special privileges, and to have him rebuffed so harshly was distasteful. So for some weeks, until it became clear that the Twins were not going to continue any rebellion which might endanger the great project of ultimately placing a man on the Moon, Pope and Claggett were looked upon with suspicion.

The astronauts maintained a careful balance between rigorous attention to detail and rowdy relaxation, and one afternoon, following an informal meeting with the press, five of them huddled around a corner table in the Dagger Bar, conducting a noisy debate concerning where, during a journey to the Moon, Earth’s gravity ceased to exercise dominance and Moon’s took over. Preposterous guesses circulated, after which Hickory Lee banged his beer glass and cried, “Pope, you studied astronomy. Where is the break-even point?”

John did not know, but across the room he spotted Stanley Mott and invited him over to settle the debate, and after the answer was given-220,000 miles from Earth, 19,000 miles from the Moon-Mott lingered to check on how his young men were doing, and he was pleased. But as he talked with the five he noticed that they were looking over his shoulder at someone who had just entered.

It was Tim Bell, the civilian, fresh from the barber, who had given him an especially sharp haircut. It made Bell, always studiously neat, seem even more handsome than usual, a fact which the young man was approving as he looked at himself in the mirror. Mott was perplexed when Claggett whispered, “Let’s give him the haircut routine.”

The five young men rose and walked casually across the room toward where Bell was admiring himself, and as Mott watched them go he felt pride in being associated with them. Slim of hip, broad of shoulder and slightly underweight, they created a trim appearance, and because of the press meeting, each was still dressed in a dark suit and crisp white shirt, with a sober tie knotted in a severe V that nestled neatly within the collar. What differentiated them were their shoes, each having chosen a style which best reflected his way of life. Claggett wore Texas boots, tall and limber. Harry Jensen had chosen [449] French-style pumps with extremely thin soles. Pope, of course, preferred the 1920 wingtip decorated with little holes punched in the leather to make artistic patterns. And each of the others had his own unique wear, always highly polished.

What made them appear the same, like five clones of the one ideal astronaut, were their watches, each man wearing on his left wrist a chronograph, immensely big, heavy and expensive. It told local time, Greenwich Mean Time on the twenty-four-hour system, the day of the week, the month, the phase of the Moon, and served also as a stopwatch, lap timer and alarm clock. Hickory Lee said of his, “I had more trouble learning how to work this monster than I did with advanced calculus at MIT.”

For one brief moment, as they passed from the shadowy darkness of the barroom into an aureole of sunlight coming through a western window, they looked as if nature itself were applauding their excellence, and Mott wondered if anywhere else in America there was assembled a more attractive group. But when he looked again they had passed on, and surrounded Bell as if they intended to beat him up.

“Bell!” Claggett said with a rush of emotion. “We’ve decided to stand with you, no matter what.”

Ed Cater took him by the arm and said confidentially, “At first we thought you might be a jerk, but you’ve shown us you can fly with the best. I’m going to back you all the way.”

Jensen said brightly, “Call on me, Tim, whenever you need help. As for right now, you say the word and we’ll move out.”

“What’s this all about?” Bell asked nervously.

“That haircut,” Claggett said. “We’re ready right now to go in town and beat hell out of the man who gave you that haircut.”

Bell smiled weakly, suspecting correctly that the horseplay had something to do with his not belonging to the military.

Mott, watching the nonsense, experienced an intense desire to see his own son, who had elected a course so different from that chosen by these young gods, and that night he confessed to his wife: “I’ve been doing a great deal of thinking, Rachel. About Millard and us. And the fact [450] that we’d allowed his life style to drive a wedge between us.” His voice quavered and tears threatened.

“What is it, dear?”

“Working with these young men, day after day ... It’s made me hungry to see our boy. I don’t give a damn how he’s living or what other people think. He’s our son, and I see now that we’re obligated to stay with him, hell or high water.”

Rachel bowed her head to hide her own tears, then muttered, “You may be right. What do you intend doing?”

“I’ve asked headquarters for permission, next time I’m in California. Three-day leave to visit with Millard.”

“To what purpose?”

“No purpose. No purpose in God’s world. I just want to see him and let him know we love him.”

Stifled sobs prevented Rachel from speaking, but after a long interval during which she blew her nose twice, she laughed nervously, then said softly, “It’s strange, you know, speaking about how your work with the six men has affected you. I see their wives day after day, and I suppose I know everything that’s wrong with every one of them. But do you know what? I’d be overjoyed to have any one of them as a daughter-in-law. I wish to God that Millard would marry someone like them.”

“Apparently that’s not going to be, and frankly, I no longer give a damn. As Pope said the other morning, “We do not seek counsel from you.” Millard’s made a life decision and now we’re the ones who have to adjust.”

“Even though we despise the decision?”

“Yes. We must keep in contact with our son. No matter what he does.”

During the next visit of the astronauts to check on progress at Allied Aviation, Mott slipped away, rented a car and drove to Malibu Beach, where with the help of a girl in a bikini he found the cottage occupied by Millard and a young man from Indiana named Roger. Millard. taller than his father, no glasses, very slim, very tanned, appeared to be in excellent health. He wore his hair much longer than did the astronauts and apparently he owned no socks, for during their entire visit together his father never saw him in any.

The son, supposing that his father had come to lecture him, was decidedly cool at first, while Roger was openly [451] defensive, but as the afternoon passed with no lectures, the atmosphere eased, and by the time Stanley invited the young men to have dinner with him, they were almost eager to accept because they wanted to hear what had brought him to their cottage. At first the talk centered on the astronauts.

Are they really as ...” Young Mott did not know how to finish his question without insulting his father, and there was an awkward pause.

“As square as they seem?” Stanley suggested, and when the young men laughed, he raised three fingers and said, “Eagle Scouts, word of honor. Millard, you would not believe how square these fellows are.”

“To what purpose?”

“Every time they go aloft they lay their lives on the line. One slip and they’re dead. They need discipline.”

“They’ve had no accidents yet. Aren’t you overplaying it?”

“The accidents will come. But they’ll forge ahead. And one of these days they’ll stand on the Moon.”

“As I said, to what purpose?”

Stanley Mott spoke very carefully. “Because that’s the job they’ve given themselves. That’s their scene, as you say,” When neither of the young men spoke, he added, trying to sound casual, “The way you men have worked out your own scene.”

Silence. So he added, offhandedly, “I respect the astronauts’ choice. I respect yours.” And before either young man could respond, he launched hurriedly into a recitation of what the astronauts had to know before they could participate in a space flight: “Math, vector analysis, orbital mechanics, computers, rocket engines, the characteristics of three hypergolic fuels, digital systems, radio, television and another ten or eleven really tough fields.”

“You make them sound like geniuses,” Roger said. He “had been unable to master algebra.

“Let me tell you a funny thing, Roger. What I’ve just recited are the basic fields. When they get through them, then they begin the hard work. Tracing out the particular systems of their particular spacecraft. The manuals, eight and a half by eleven, typewriter size, stand this high.” And with his hands he indicated a pile nearly two feet high, waiting for his listeners to absorb that staggering fact.

[452] “The other day I saw two of the men running to a class, and they were on a slanting surface so that their heads were tilted to the left, and I had this crazy feeling: They better stop that or the knowledge will spill out their ear. They must have, right now, as much information in their heads as the human brain can accommodate. They must be among the brightest men on Earth.” He paused, then concluded: “Maybe only squares would be solid enough to absorb so much without going nuts. Maybe they have to be square.”

The young men nodded, and Roger smoothed the expensive cashmere sweater he was wearing. “Another round?” Mott asked, but no one wanted any further drinks, so the waitress brought the food, a delicious seafood salad with Italian garlic bread and iced tea.

As they ate, Millard said cautiously, “Back there you said something about life styles.”

“Yes. I said I respected life styles.”

“I have a job, you know.”

“I didn’t know.” He took off his glasses, wiped his tired eyes, and said, “I’m delighted, Millard. What’s it deal with?”

“Now that’s odd,” Millard replied. “You ask ‘What’s it deal with?’ as if the job itself was more important than the man doing the job.”

“Habit of speech, I guess.”

But Millard would not let his father off the hook so easily. “If I told you that I had a job which sounded important. Computers. Plastic forms. Damned near anything mechanical. You’d be proud, and you could say offhandedly at the country club, “My boy Millard’s into computers.” Well, your boy Millard’s into nurses’ helper in a children’s hospital. And so is Roger.”

“Damned good public service,” Mott said.

“We think so,” his son said defiantly.

“In the normal swing of events, what will it ...”

“Lead to? Nothing, so far as I can see. It’s a way of life for the present, and where anything leads to I haven’t a clue.”

“Go with the flow?” Mott asked.

“Yes.”

This required no further comment, so after a while Mott said brightly, as if opening a completely new subject, “Your [453] mother and I are eager to maintain contact, Millard. If your work ever brings you back East ... or vacations ... you must stay with us. You, too, Roger.”

“You won’t shoot me?” Roger asked.

“Why would you say that?”

“Because if I went home to Indiana, my father would shoot me. Especially if I took your son with me.”

“Four months ago I’d have shot you. But now ...”

“What happened?” Roger asked, boring in.

“My work with the new astronauts. I’m sort of their den mother. They’ve moved me deeply. Made me see that six men could be six radically different human beings, although as you implied a while back, they seem at first like paper cutouts. So different.”

“And?”

“I saw human capacities, human variations if you will-I saw the whole ball game in a different light. And I felt driven to tell you so, Millard.”

“This is a very good salad,” his son said.

“Would you like to hear what my father said in those circumstances?” Roger asked.

“I would.”

“He’s a minor official at the raceway. Very gung ho. When he heard how I was living he blew a gasket. Said if I ever let anyone at the raceway know what I was doing, he’d kill me. So I laughed and asked him, “Who do you think were the first two men I slept with?” And he damn near fainted when I told him, giving names, “Two of your best drivers.” He screamed, “I’ll kill them,” but they were important figures at the raceway, so he didn’t kill them. Father is very strong on killing people. His father was a leading figure in the days when the Klan ran the state.”

“What do young men like you ...” Mott was embarrassed at having used such a cliché phrase, but he could think of no circumlocution. “How do you envisage the future?”

“We don’t,” Roger said.

“But Millard’s mother and I-we look forward to gainful occupation till I’m sixty-five. Then forced retirement ... then a reduced standard of living. Grandchildren to occupy us. One of us dies ... we all die. An orderly progression, you might say.”

“A statistical one,” Roger said.

[454] “Statistics surely govern your situation, too.”

The young men did not care to discuss the probabilities which dictated their lives, but throughout the remainder of this first evening they talked freely of their jobs at the hospital and of the kinds of work beachboys were able to get. Roger said, “The post office employs a lot. If you can pass Civil Service.”

Stanley Mott spent two fascinating days with his son, discussing things he would never have imagined possible. As a straight arrow he could not approve of any deviation from the norm; indeed, a straight arrow was a man who defined the norm. But as a human being whose parameters of vision and understanding were being expanded by the expanding age in which he played a central role, he could appreciate the tangled drives, so unlike his own, which motivated these two young men.

“Do you find any satisfaction in what you do?” Roger asked on the last evening.

“Each day is a new beginning, an overwhelming challenge.”

“Like what?”

“You know, I didn’t take my doctorate-an entirely new field-till I was forty-four. Celestial mechanics. That wakes a man up.”

“So what are you doing with it now?”

“NASA assigns me to one committee after another. Where I can apply what I’ve learned.”

“Like what?” Roger persisted.

“Would you really want to hear? I mean, listen for about an hour?”

“Test me.”

So Mott took a large sheet of paper, and with the exquisite line and lettering he had mastered at Georgia Tech in Drafting II, drew a schematic of the solar system, naming the Sun at the left hand and the Earth fairly close in, but not naming what he called “the nine other wanderers.”

“Can you tell me how to name them?” he asked, and neither of his listeners could. So starting close to the Sun he printed the names: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.

“That’s only nine planets,” Roger said. “You just said there were nine besides Earth.”

[455] “I think of the collection of asteroids as a planet,” Mott said. “One that broke into fragments, from one cause or another. They hide between Mars and Jupiter.”

When the young men finished studying the diagram, Mott said, “What I’m engaged in is what we call the ‘grand tour.’ There used to be a time when young Englishmen of good family were not considered educated until they completed a grand tour of Paris, Geneva and Rome, with maybe a stopover in barbarian Germany. Long after the Moon shot is history, we propose to launch a single space vehicle which will take off from Florida, and move purposefully past all the other planets. Its course could be something like this.”

And with the most careful strokes of his pen, making never a mistake or a strikeover, he sketched a majestic itinerary, twisting and winding among the planets, sometimes turning in unexpected ways and leaping off into unexpected directions. When he finished his diagram he said, simply, “If we’re able to start this tour in 1970, we’ll end it with our craft heading past Pluto and out to the remote stars of our Galaxy sometime about 1997. It’ll wander among those near stars for about four million years, then leave for the remote galaxies, and after about two thousand billion years, it may get somewhere important.”

“You speak of it as if it was immortal.”

“It will be. No atmosphere to disturb it. No moisture to rust it. No burning fuel to clog the pipes. Only the perpetual journey.”

“How will you know it’s still on its journey?”

Mott pointed to the single light that illuminated the cottage and said, “It will carry a device which generates electricity from radioactivity. This will activate a radio that will send us messages ... one-tenth of the power of that little bulb. But it will penetrate the billion miles separating us from Saturn as if that planet were next door. “It’ll require ninety minutes for us to receive the message, of course, and when the grand tour reaches Pluto, nearly five billion miles away, it’ll take nearly four hours ... electrical impulses coming to us at the speed of light, and when the craft reaches the edge of our Galaxy its messages will require thousands of years to reach us, but the messages will come.”

[456] The young men contemplated this for a while, then Millard asked, “But how does the spacecraft get its power to keep moving outward?”

“We start it with a good boost at Cape Canaveral. And we head it with great precision, so that every time it encounters a planet, it does so in a way to pick up energy from the rotation of that planet about the Sun-sort of like the last child at the end of a crack-the-whip-and this throws the craft sharply onward to the next planet in line.”

“You can schedule it so exactly?” Roger asked.

“Almost to the second,” Mott said. “Almost to the mile.”

“And that’s what you’re doing ... when you’re not babysitting?”

“Yes.” And on a separate sheet of paper he drew a beautiful depiction of the planet Saturn, with its rings handsomely inclined and its ten known moons depicted, and what he now told the men paved the way for them to tell him things that concerned themselves. “My task, and I’m low man on the totem pole working on this, is to bring our craft toward Saturn on this kind of heading on a specified day in, say, August 1981, when the exact location of Saturn and its moons has been determined.”

“You like to use the word exact, don’t you?”

“If data can be known, they should be used.”

“And you know where Saturn will be?”

“Kepler and Newton taught us how to know.”

“And from a distance of a billion miles you’re going to pilot your tiny craft so that it threads its way past the moons and the rings.”

“That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

“How?”

“Newton once said that if he could see great distances, which he could, it was only because he stood on the shoulders of giants-the brilliant men like Kepler who went before him. We can solve the mechanical riddles of the Sun’s system because some damned good mathematicians completed the basic work before us. We will lead that spacecraft here and here and here and here, and we will make not one damned mistake.”

He spoke with such fury, such iron-hard determination, that his listeners dared not make snide attacks on his beliefs, and after they had sat for some time in the [457] near-darkness, Mott said, “The grand tour requires an infinity of calculations-where every planet and every moon will be down to the minute and the second. Then we must work backward to a specific two-week period, and within each twenty-four hours we will have a launch window of exactly-there’s that word again-four minutes and nine seconds. We’re going to penetrate the remotest corners of the universe, and we have four minutes and nine seconds to do it in.”

No comment, and then he said, “The point is, for Johannes Kepler to calculate the orbit of one planet required mathematical equations and solutions covering papers this high-ten years of solid work. With a good computer we do it in about seven seconds. What I’m doing has nothing to do with the Moon or Saturn. I’m building for the clowns who’ll be trying things in the next century. And there will never be an end.”

He had no more to say, nor did the young men. The three of them sat there, looking at the incredible diagrams, listening to the noisy surf, and after a long while Roger said, “At dinner last night you told us that you and your wife lived in a situation governed by statistics. The mortality tables say you’ll live to age seventy-nine, then kaput. I refused to admit that Millard and I also fall into the middle of statistical predictions. We do.”

It was approaching midnight, and now Roger wanted to talk. “At nineteen you’re a young god. You can handle any breaking wave. Girls stop to look as you pass, and men too. Those are the golden years. Christ, you can do anything, write any rules. The good years are these, twenty to thirty-five. So many opportunities in so many fields, you get dizzy. Beach houses everywhere. Girls with convertibles. Men with high salaries. California sunshine. You cannot imagine how good these years can be. And no responsibility-except to pray that the nuclear bomb doesn’t swoop down to wipe it all away before you’ve finished with your fun.

“From what I’ve watched, the numbers begin to tell at about forty, and at fifty you’re a real statistic. I’ll probably continue lucky and find someone to share a house with, and our salaries, too. Or maybe I’ll escort women without husbands, women who can help me pay my bills. I’ll have a steady job, I suppose, but I don’t look forward to that, [458] and if I’m still as strongly sexed as I am now, I’ll have trouble finding partners, because I know I’ll never be rich. I’m not built that way. But I’ll get along. And at sixty, just like you, the numbers will overwhelm me, and God knows what I’ll do. But I’ll survive. And if I’m lucky enough to have found an excellent person like your son, we’ll live where it’s warm and collect social security. Then our problem becomes identical with yours, Dr. Mott. Find a place to live, enough to eat on, and an orderly burial when we die.

To Stanley Mott’s surprise, his son now said with quiet vigor, almost accusingly, “Dad, you watch what happens to your godlike astronauts. I’ve seen a lot of retired Army and Navy people in this part of California, and I can tell you with certainty what it’s going to be. You have six under your wing. Two will be killed young. Two will be divorced and marry girls twenty years younger. One of the others will quit the program, go into business, and become an alcoholic. And the other will do something of minor significance, then sit around and show the neighbors his scrapbooks. Why go through all the hassle today to accomplish so little?”

Mott had an instant response: “And of the six, three will probably stand on that Moon. And that makes all the difference. Nothing, not time nor wrinkles nor scars nor divorce nor alcoholism, can erase that. They will have been there, and we will not.”

In the morning, when he had to return to General Funkhauser’s meetings, he told Millard, “The door will always be open. Bring Roger. You’re a bright son-of-a-bitch, Roger. You won’t be satisfied with beach life permanently.”

“Try me,” Roger said.

In the spring of 1964 Norman Grant found himself in good shape and his party in chaos: no Republican in the state of Fremont wished to run against him in the senatorial primary, but he could foresee that nationally his party might be sorely weakened if it split down the middle over the candidacy of Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Grant supported Goldwater and prayed that the stubborn Rockefeller liberals might see the light and halt their divisive actions.

“They can only damage us,” Grant told his long-time [459] assistant, Tim Finnerty, “and I’m beginning to think they mean to go through with it.”

“I’m more worried about Lyndon Johnson. That Texas cracker is a tough politician. He could win this thing going away, if we nominate Goldwater.”

“We’re going to nominate him. Give the people a choice, not an echo.”

“Are you happy with that cliché, Senator?”

“We’re going to win with it, if the Rockefeller people don’t do us in.”

“Your problem, Senator, is your own election in Fremont. I think we’re in trouble.”

“Trouble? We don’t even have an opponent in the primary.”

“But we could be vulnerable in November. This could be a big Democrat year.”

Such talk made sense to Grant, for he had learned that a politician or an admiral should approach every battle as if it were the culminating one; besides, as he said, “If I’ve learned anything in the Senate, it’s that Lyndon Johnson is a frightening opponent.”

So he began campaigning across Fremont in May and hit every major concentration of voters before the end of June. At the Republican convention he was a fortress of strength for Goldwater and a major irritation to the Rockefeller people, and when William Scranton of Pennsylvania made a belated run, spurred on perhaps by Eisenhower, he was remorseless in rejecting him. He spent much of the summer campaigning for Goldwater in other states, then hurried home to defend himself against a very strong Democratic senator from the Fremont legislature.

After only a few exchanges it became apparent that his early optimism was unfounded; his challenger knew far more about state conditions than he, and during one strategy session with Finnerty and his local aides, the Irishman slammed the cards on the table: “Senator, if you go on this way, you’re going to lose. Goldwater is an albatross around your neck. Stop defending him.”

“Barry Goldwater is my man, a fine decent man who could save this country.”

“Look at Hugh Scott in Pennsylvania. Faces the same race you do. He’s smart enough never to mention Goldwater’s name. Listening to him, you’d never know there [460] was a presidential race on. Look at this literature. “No matter who else you vote for, pull the lever for Hugh Scott, a great American.” Can I print up some of them for you, in the tough districts in Webster?”

“You cannot. Barry Goldwater is my candidate. I sink or swim with Goldwater.”

“I was afraid you’d say that, so I’ve been restructuring the last eight weeks. Hanley is killing you on local issues, and my polls show that you’re barely holding your own. You can’t match him where he’s strong, so you’ve got to club him down where you’re strong. National leadership. Patriotism. Space. Do you think you can get John Pope to campaign for you?”

“NASA forbids it. Absolutely.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. So we bring Penny Pope back here. She’s worked for you three times before. Strictly legitimate, and everyone in the state will remember that she’s John Pope’s wife.”

“Will Glancey permit it? Presidential election and all that?”

“I took the liberty of speaking with Glancey, and he and I both know that Goldwater’s going to lose by a landslide, but without saying so, he let me know that he’d be happy having you back in the Senate. Penny’s free.”

Penny Pope was proud to work for Norman Grant’s reelection, for she had watched him at close quarters for more than a dozen years and had never found him doing a dishonest thing. “He’s straight out of the Ark, an antediluvian, the poor man’s Barry Goldwater, but he has a backbone of steel. I love the man and want to see him get six more years.”

Finnerty asked her to appear with the senator in public as often as possible so that he might introduce her as “that brave daughter of Our Fair State who helps run Washington while her brave husband, a brave son of Our Fair State, heads for the Moon.” No mention was ever made of the fact that the only thing John Pope had flown so far was the Cape Canaveral simulator and a borrowed T-38. But when Grant did finagle orders allowing Pope to land his T-38, with Randy Claggett in the back seat, at the new NASA air base near Clay, Finnerty had photographers present, and after the two astronauts were shown [461] strapped into their seats, Penny was brought forward to hand them flowers.

She was also given the delicate task of explaining to the press why the senator’s wife and daughter were not campaigning for him this year: “Elinor Grant has had severe nervous headaches which quite incapacitate her, and Marcia, as you know, is busy with her work as dean of faculty at the university out West.” When one enterprising newsman flew to California to inspect the university and the nonexistent faculty, his exposé ran in several Eastern newspapers but appeared in no major paper west of the Missouri River and in none at all in Fremont.

“We got home free on that one,” Penny told Finnerty. “Thanks for having muzzled the jackals.”

“I didn’t threaten the press, just reasoned with them.”

To keep the lid on the Elinor Grant story, however, was much more difficult; Penny had to give sworn assurances that the problem was not acute alcoholism, as certain Washington papers had intimated when trying to explain her absences from the capital, but beyond that, Penny was not willing to perjure herself.

Mrs. Grant was drinking, but she was far from being a dipsomaniac; her problem was that the little men from outer space threatened more seriously than ever before to take over control of the country, and when Penny went to reason with her she found the woman as “spaced out” as if she had been taking drugs. Her first question to Elinor Grant was: “When did you first correspond with Dr. Strabismus?”

“Maybe ten years ago, maybe more.”

“Let’s say it was ten years. That means you’ve received one hundred and twenty monthly special deliveries, all saying about the same thing. Don’t you get suspicious?”

“The danger is very great, Mrs. Pope.”

“And in those ten years you’ve received not less than forty telegrams telling you that at the last minute the little men have refrained. Doesn’t that get monotonous?”

“When they do land, Mrs. Pope, adventuresses like you are going to get their just deserts.” When Penny ignored this, she continued: “Why do you come out here to flaunt your affair with my husband before the entire state?”

“Please, Mrs. Grant, let’s just talk about your husband. [462] He’s in the midst of a very difficult campaign. He could lose, you know. And this nation needs him.”

“It does. It does. Norman’s a real patriot and the country needs him.”

“So I come begging you to help this good man ... forget your personal feelings. Your father was a notable servant in this democracy ...”

“He was indeed, Mrs. Pope. Father was a saint, as big a hero in his way as Norman is in his.”

“I’ve often heard your husband say that.”

“I would not want to damage Norman’s political career. I’m sure Father wouldn’t want me to.”