Ian Sales: Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Deep Above

It’s beautiful, says Miller.

Help me, B, says Cobb.

She takes the rim of the hatch in either hand and pulls herself up and out and abruptly she’s no longer floating horizontally but standing upright, half in and half out of the command module’s hatch. The silvery bright cone that is the Apollo spacecraft stretches before her, her ghostly white reflection smeared across it. She turns about and she can see the curve of the Earth, and at the horizon the radiant band of atmosphere which girdles it. She can see clouds drifting across the face of the world and she thinks, I want to do this forever. She remembers her first EVA on Gemini 4 and her reluctance to return to the spacecraft, and she’s lost none of the awe she felt then, if anything it now seems even more focused, more spiritual, more affirming.

She pushes herself from the command module and her umbilical slithers out after her. The KH-4B hangs in the sky some thirty feet away, a pale grey cylinder bright with reflected sunlight. It has ejected one recovery vehicle already and the bright gold mylar dome of the second now caps its length. Cobb takes her hand-held manoeuvring unit, her zip gun, and uses it to propel herself across the gap between the two spacecraft. She rolls over and sees one of her crew is now standing in Apollo II’s hatch, unidentifiable behind a gold visor.

Is that you, B? Cobb asks.

In the hatch? Yes.

Cobb turns back to face her destination and she raises the zip gun and takes aim at it, and she thinks maybe it’s an affront to nature and to God to populate this place with tools which serve a military purpose. The space programme has never been military, for all that it was in a race with the enemy, the USSR; and now finally these ploughshares, these chariots of Apollo, are going to be bent into swords, even as the war below has finally stuttered to a long and drawn-out end.

She’s moving too fast, the zip gun isn’t powerful enough to check her velocity. She puts up her hands, touches the KH-4B and slides down it, and her umbilical brings her to an abrupt halt and she swings about, banging both feet against the side of the satellite. She hangs there beside it and she knows her heart-rate is elevated, she’s feeling warm, the water circulating through her Liquid Cooling Garment isn’t cold enough to wick away the heat, and she feels as bent out of shape as the shadow she casts across the KH-4B’s curved side. She puts her hands to the spacecraft but there’s nothing to hold onto, she bobs at the end of her umbilical and she has no leverage to do anything but hang there. It’s a hard scrabble to explore the length of the spy satellite, to move herself around its circumference, and before long she’s panting and sweating and her arms are aching, and all the time she’s telling mission control what she’s doing.

When she does find the right panel, she takes a screwdriver, specially designed to be used with spacesuit gloves, and tries to unscrew the panel’s fastenings. It’s not working. As soon as she attempts to twist the screwdriver, her legs swing out and she cannot apply any turning force. She considers using the screwdriver as a pick, jamming it through the thin aluminium side of the KH-4B, so it will hold her steady.

Exhausted, she floats away from the spy satellite. Turning gently about, she finds herself gazing out at an ocean of stars. The KH-4B is forgotten, and she’s reminded of the hours she spent in a sensory deprivation tank back when she was paving the way for women to become astronauts, only then she lay in total darkness and absolute silence, she didn’t have this sea of light above her, these endless questions and instructions from mission control and B in her headset. She tells them she needs to rest, and her feet and hands are getting cold, but she’ll be fine in a minute, and she closes her eyes and relaxes, in her mind’s eye she can still see the Milky Way flowing across the sky. She is immersed in Creation, she lets it wash across and over and through her, and she knows this is not something she will ever give up.

Recovered, she fires her zip gun to push her back to the spy satellite. She uses the screwdriver to lever up an edge of a panel, and that becomes a handhold, and a fulcrum, so she can turn the screwdriver. But even that doesn’t help, so she reluctantly admits defeat. She puts her booted feet against the spy satellite’s side and launches herself back toward the Apollo command module. As she floats past the golden cone capping the KH-4B, she spots motion and, as she watches, the recovery vehicle is ejected and falls away. Fortunately, the KH-4B is pointed away from the Apollo II spacecraft and the bucket arcs away and down a good forty feet from the command module.

Steadman twists to watch it go and says, Was that supposed to happen?

I don’t know, says Cobb.

She watches the gold recovery vehicle dwindle and fall to Earth, and she knows it might as well be the Moon that’s falling away from them. Even if the rumours are not true about NASA selecting male astronauts, then the Apollo programme is likely to never get any higher than this, to go any further than this. The fighting is done but the war is not over, it will never really be over, and up here is not God’s own undiscovered country but just the generals’ high ground, it’s just the place that has the greatest view, a God-like view.

And Jerrie Cobb, who wants to be the first human being to walk on the Moon, can feel her dreams receding even as the KH-4B Corona recovery vehicle shrinks to a dot against the azure sky and then vanishes.

By the time they’ve lowered the shipping container into the water and the divers have oh-so-carefully transferred the film stacks into it, by the time they get the shipping container aboard the USS White Sands and into the giant refrigerator purposely built to hold everything at the same temperature as the ocean bottom, no one is all that confident there’s going to be much left that’s salvageable. McIntyre hopes whatever surveillance the spy satellite was doing isn’t too important, or maybe they have some other source of intelligence; because to him those film stacks don’t look like they’re going to be easy to get workable photographs off.

Mooney crosses the deck to McIntyre, who is by the rail enjoying his first cigarette in over twelve hours, and McIntyre’s eyes feel gritty from being awake so long and watery from the brightness and blueness—and yeah, maybe a bit from the smoke too—but he’s not ready to hit his bunk just yet.

I hear you had a bit of trouble down there, Mooney says.

McIntyre nods. He flicks his cigarette stub out into the Atlantic. I guess, he says. We couldn’t get a peep out of dot zero and all those wrecks made it harder than we expected.

There’s no wrecks on the charts, Mooney says.

It’s 20,000 feet deep, points out McIntyre. How would anyone know?

He shrugs. We found the bucket, he adds. Good luck getting anything useful out of it.

The spooks want a debriefing, John.

Yeah, I guess.

McIntyre looks across at the refrigerator, a white box eight feet by eight feet by eight feet with a cooling unit attached. He’s not sure what the spooks want to hear from him, he’s not sure what he wants to say to them. They asked him to fetch the bucket; he fetched the bucket. It’s not like he should have been here anyway. They only flew him in when the original commander of the Trieste II put himself in hospital; and now it’s all over, they’ll fly him back to Washington and the Navy Experimental Diving Unit.

He follows Mooney to the superstructure and they step through a hatch and along a gangway and into the ward room. The two spooks are there, sitting at the table, looking as hot and flustered as they had at the briefing. Stryker and Taylor have gone to their bunks, on McIntyre’s orders—and he wishes he had gone too. There’s no need for this now, it could wait until later.