Irving Wallace - The Man

Dilman heard General Fortney’s Texas-accented voice drawl forth, “All righty, you fellows, you’ve had enough of your picture taking for now!” Fortney turned to General Leo Jaskawich. “What next? Want to put us into orbit?”

Jaskawich offered the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a restrained official smile, then he said to Dilman, “Mr. President, I hope you’ll allow me to ride you up to the top of the pad. There is a wonderful view from there.”

“I’d certainly like to see it,” said Dilman.

Dilman stepped into the elevator, followed by Fortney, Jaskawich, and the Operations Director. Slowly they ascended alongside the upper portion of the Titan rocket until they rattled to a halt 100 feet above the concrete pad.

Emerging onto the platform between the rocket’s nose and the steel tower overheard, Dilman found it windier and cooler. He followed Jaskawich’s arm and hand, straight as a signpost, as the astronaut pointed out the blockhouses, the Test Annex, the workstands, the service towers, the other launch rings, the moonport on Merritt Island. For the most, Dilman was inattentive, absently gazing out at the indigo-blue ocean to the east, the ocean that led to Washington.

Suddenly he became conscious of the fact that Jaskawich was looking at him, and that they were alone. Fortney and the Operations Director had moved to another section of the platform.

Jaskawich offered an understanding smile. “I can’t blame you for not listening, Mr. President,” he said. “I’m sure your thoughts today are more concerned with what’s happening on the ground than with what’s happened in outer space.”

The young man’s directness and quick perception nudged Dilman’s interest in him. He attempted to smile back. “As a matter of fact, you are quite right, General.”

“I-while I can speak to you like this-there is something I wanted to say to you, sir. I’ve been reading about your trip around the United States. I’ve been following the debate in the House of Representatives on television. I’ve never been more ashamed of my fellow Americans, or their representatives, and I wanted you to know. I want you to know also, there are many of us who feel this has been rigged, blown up out of all proportion, and that you are being judged solely because of prejudice against your color. Maybe I’m out of line, but I had to tell you.”

Not in days had Dilman been so genuinely moved by the friendliness of another human being. His eyes moistened, and he averted his head. “I thank you,” he said, almost inaudibly. “I sincerely appreciate your understanding. I-in fact, I was impressed from the moment I arrived here-by the courtesy, an air of decency, such as I have not seen in four days.”

Jaskawich’s frank, open face had become intensely serious. “We are another breed here at Cape Kennedy-not everyone, but certainly the men who have finally gone up, and the handful most closely involved with them. We’re trained to be cast closer to heaven and its planets. And when you leave the earth for orbit in space, as I have three times, you can see how small our little mudball of a world is in true godly perspective. When a one-and-a-half-million-pound thrust puts you up there, alone in the Mercury capsule, or with one other in the Gemini capsule, and you swing around the earth for several days, you come to have some spiritual knowledge of what the Maker meant when he packed our patty-cake together, and populated it with living beings, and gave this mudball a semblance of order and its men a modicum of intelligence. Believe me, Mr. President, you lose all petty poisons that corrupt men and spoil life. You lose all that in outer space. You come to understand how lucky man is even to exist, how fortunate he is to survive, and you come to speculate on why he lacks appreciation of his lot, and why he destroys so much of his own pleasure and the enjoyment of those around him with incredible pettiness of mind and action. One period, when I was up there, I thought-I know this will sound odd-but I thought, if only men like Caligula, Attila, Torquemada, Hitler, the jurors of Socrates, the witch burners of Salem, the bombers of Birmingham, the ravagers of reason and decency had been made to don our twenty-pound pressurized space suits and been hurtled into orbit, to look above and look below, and then had fired their retrorockets to descend to earth once more, they would come down like resurrected saints. That’s what can happen, Mr. President. No matter how many or few your failings, when you return from there to here, you are never the same again. You’ve left prejudice, hatred, destructiveness, lying, cheating in the reaches of outer space. You look upon your fellow men with the eyes of eternity, as your equals on the earth, and you want to live and let live. That’s why so many of us here-”

He stopped in mid-sentence. General Fortney and the Operations Director had walked back to join them again.

Fortney said to Dilman, “Had enough of this?”

Dilman smiled. “I find I like it up here. But I guess it’s time to get down to earth.”

In the elevator he studied General Leo Jaskawich with new interest. During an era already becoming jaded from continuous space exploits and achievements, Jaskawich was a special hero. He was the only astronaut to have been in orbit three times, once alone and then twice in the two-man Gemini capsule for six days. His physical aspect was deceptively average, in no proportion matching his legend. Dilman judged the astronaut to be perhaps five feet ten inches in height, and weighing around 160 pounds. His hair was short-cropped and sunblanched, his eyes quick and kind, his nose the most prominent feature on his swarthy Lithuanian face. He wore his uniform not as a martinet would, but with the confidence of one who had earned it through calculated and accepted risk. Not since Dilman had first met Nat Abrahams, and later The Judge and Tim Flannery, had he so quickly allowed himself to like and trust another being.

After that, for the remainder of their ground tour about the heart of Cape Kennedy, Dilman was entirely attentive to Leo Jaskawich. Especially in Hangar R, where rested the enormous Apollo spacecraft, with its two outer bays for equipment, that would hold three astronauts and bring them within 40,000 feet of the surface of the moon, did Dilman appreciate Jaskawich’s eloquence and become infected by the astronaut’s enthusiasm over the approaching lunar exploration.

The last stop before riding out to the beach was the horseshoe-shaped, one-story dormitory where the new astronauts, twelve in number, now training for the next Apollo flight, were supposed to reside while on the base.

As they examined the neat, furnished rooms, Jaskawich stated, “Ten of them live here, while their families live in Cocoa Beach.”

Some inconsistency joggled inside Dilman’s head. “Ten live here? I thought you said there were twelve in training.”

Before Jaskawich could reply, General Fortney brusquely intervened. “A couple of them preferred to stay in the old barracks. It’s the same as this. They’re doing special work that keeps them up later. Let’s move on.”

As he started away with the directors and public relations officers, Dilman held Jaskawich back. “Those other two, who are they? Why are they living separately?”

For the first time, Jaskawich appeared uneasy. “They are Negroes, sir,” he said.

“But I thought this place was-”

“I know, Mr. President,” Jaskawich said sadly. “When I spoke of a new breed of men that had grown out of this program, I meant the ones who had experienced orbital flight or been thoroughly indoctrinated for it. The new trainees are just groundlings, and while they are superior in some respects, they still carry the infection of groundling education and prejudices. Officially, like all military installations since 1951, this is a desegregated base, entirely so. But if two newcomers are made to feel-well-different, and know they’ll have more peace of mind for concentrating on their training if they can remove themselves from social abrasion, they do so, they volunteer. I don’t think our two colored astronauts give a damn. They’re too devoted to the work. That’s all that counts. Eventually, I promise you, the others will be inviting them back to this building.” He hesitated, and then added, “Even when done on a so-called voluntary basis, I didn’t back this segregation. I’m not running the show, but I stepped out of channels long enough to buck a note up to Fortney at the Pentagon. I never had a reply. Maybe Fortney never saw it.”