Ian Sales: Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Deep Above

No, McIntyre can see something else spearing up out of the blackness at the limit of the bathyscaphe’s search lights. It’s no ship but it looks man-made. He stares at it, trying to make sense of the shape, of the play of darkness and shadow. It’s some kind of fin, a thin vertical triangle… and beyond it another triangle and beneath both what looks like a narrow cylinder…

He orders Stryker to release some of the gasoline, and they sink until the echo sounder tells them they’re 50 feet above the bottom. McIntyre can see what it is much better now, it glows in the bathyscaphe’s search lights. The cylinder depends from the rear of a boat-shaped hull, and he’s still puzzled until he realises the two flat stubs on the top of the hull are all that remain of wings. The shape swims into focus, the cockpit, the nose and its ball turret—

An airplane, he says. It’s a goddamn airplane. What the hell is an airplane doing down here?

What sort of airplane? asks Stryker.

A flying boat, McIntyre replies, a Martin PBM, I think.

He sits back from the window and rubs one palm up and down his cheek. Damn it, he says, it’s like a goddamn junkyard out there, we’ll never find the bucket in this. And I’m not risking finding our way through it on the bottom. Phil, drop some more shot, let’s go up to about 100 feet, then we’ll be clear of the wrecks and maybe we can see where we’re going.

But he’s still worried they have yet to get a signal from the zero dot and he hopes it doesn’t mean the battery on it has gone dead. Because their mission has just become a thousand times more difficult, now they’ve discovered the bucket landed in some abyssal graveyard of ships and planes…

And that prompts a thought—Bermuda is due north of here and Miami north-west and San Juan due south, and that puts this stretch of the Puerto Rico Trench firmly within the triangle formed by those three places…

Cobb reaches up and unlatches the hatch, struggling in the inflated spacesuit to work the mechanism. She unfastens her seat harness and pushes herself up. Gently, she floats from the spacecraft, through the open hatch and…

Her previous flight could not compare. Then she saw the Earth through a tiny window, but this … She hangs in space, the inflated bladder of the spacesuit forcing her arms out from her sides, and she’s uncomfortably warm but she ignores it. Below her curves a cerulean plain—she can see from horizon to horizon, she can see the Earth is a globe, a jewelled globe hanging in Creation. She feels a sense of ineffable serenity steal over her, the same peace she feels deep in her heart when she kneels before the altar in her Oklahoma City apartment. The presence of God is palpable, His handiwork is plain in all she can see, and the joy of it threatens to bring tears to her eyes.

She reaches out but it proves too tiring to keep her arms up before her. She wants to hold the Earth in her arms—she knows it is safe in God’s hands, but she wants the world to share her awe, her love of God, the purity of purpose she now feels. She floats there beside the Gemini capsule, basking in the light of Creation, a world unto herself, and she feels the nearest to God she has ever felt. It is all the more heartfelt because she is lucky to be here—

Her Mercury flight was a success and she was celebrated for it. Like Cagle before her, there was no ticker-tape parade but she got to meet President Kennedy. And Jackie too, of course. For a while, Cochran—magnanimous in the reflection of Cobb’s glory and what it said about her management of the astronaut corps—was even complimentary: I knew you were the right one for this flight, she told Cobb.

But there were another eleven astronauts to fly before Cobb got a second flight, and even then Jean Hixson and Gene Nora Stumbough found themselves with no Mercury spacecraft available. Which gave them priority on flights in the Gemini programme, the new two-person spacecraft. Cagle, of course, commanded the first flight, with Stumbough beside her, but Cobb is commander of this second one, Gemini 4, and Hixson is sitting in the left-hand seat…

Cochran has looked after her charges well, even Cobb has to admit as much. When Cobb asked Max Faget to add a window to the Mercury capsule, Faget said it was impossible, the weight penalty was too much. But Cochran made calls and marshalled her contacts, and pretty soon Faget changed the design. What Cochran wanted, Cochran got; and what Cochran’s “space girls” wanted, Cochran got. The men are away fighting and the women go up into space, and thanks to Jackie Cochran the Mercury 13 are treated like real pioneers, like astronauts.

Someone is talking to her. Cobb blinks and tries to focus.

It is Hixson: Jerrie, they want you to come back in now.

Back in?

Back in.

A minute longer, Cobb replies, please.

Mission Control say you have to come in now, Jerrie.

Hixson’s worry is audible—it is enough to remind Cobb of her mission, of what she was sent up here to do. She doesn’t want to leave, she wants to stay out here. The pure freedom of it is intoxicating, she is mistress of her own destiny, beholden to none, it is a tiny echo of this freedom Rosie the Riveter must feel. It is surely what God intended for her, to experience this, to see the entire Earth in its glory rolling sedately beneath her.

You still have two and a half more days to go, says Hixson.

I know, Cobb replies, I’m coming.

She takes hold of her umbilical with both hands, and uses it to turn herself about until she faces the capsule. Pulling herself hand over hand along the golden rope, her hands aching from the stiff gloves, her forearms burning with strain. This is so much harder than flying a four-engined bomber, that B-17 she flew to Paris when she was twenty-two. She nears the open hatch of the spacecraft.

Okay, ready on top, says Hixson.

Now I can enter, says Cobb. This is the saddest moment of my life.

It is a struggle to get herself back into her seat. The inflated spacesuit restricts her flexibility and though she hangs onto the rim of the hatch, she can’t swing her hips to get her legs inside. She lets go with one hand and tries again, her legs stiff and immobile and in they go but now her grip is beginning to slip… She’s standing on the seat, she slides her feet below the instrument panel, her rear is on the seat now and she reaches down to fasten her harness. She’s breathing heavily from the exertion by the time she’s buckled into her seat and the hatch above is shut and locked. She’s still feeling stunned from the experience of floating alongside the spacecraft, the freedom of it, the oneness , the revelatory sense of it all.

The spacecraft is coming up on Carnarvon now and they can once again talk to the ground. Though Cobb is commander, she has yet to recover fully from her EVA so Hixson reports in:

We are back inside the spacecraft. We are repressurised to five psi.

Roger, understand, says capcom. How are you feeling?

Everybody’s fine, says Hixson, feeling great.

Capcom requests battery readouts, and Hixson obliges. The numbers flowing back and forth between the spacecraft and the ground remind Cobb of her situation, act to centre her in this ejection seat in this capsule the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, causes the wonder she felt out there to recede so it no longer overwhelms her. She hears capcom say:

We’re going to give you a go for 6-4. I’ll update a 4-4 load for you with manoeuvre and 6-4 without manoeuvre time.

Cobb speaks before Hixson can answer: We are ready right now.

Okay, says capcom, transmitting a TR.

Got it, says Cobb.

Okay, we are ready to copy your times.

Ready to go.

Capcom says, 4-4: 153. 3 + 18. 21 08 57. 3 + 00. 8 + 43.