Ian Sales: Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Deep Above

Gorelick fires the thrusters to bring the Gemini spacecraft in phase with the rendezvous target, and twenty minutes later fires them again to put them on the same orbital plane. Cobb is busy on the computer, calculating an intercept trajectory, and once she has the figures, she puts a hand to the joystick between the two seats. Gorelick reads out the range to the target and the range rate, the difference in velocity between their spacecraft and their target.

What’s R dot? asks Cobb, staring intently at the approaching target.

Eighty-three feet per second, replies Gorelick.

What should it be?

About seventy.

I’m going to brake.

Range is two miles. You’ve got sixty-five R dot at two miles.

The spacecraft draws closer. Though they have simulated such manoeuvres, and this is their second rendezvous of the flight, it still requires intense concentration and a delicate hand on the controls.

Twenty-nine R dot, range 0.8 miles, says Gorelick.

R dot is now eleven, says Gorelick, eleven still, holding eleven… nine… seven… 700 feet… 600… holding 600 feet…

Cobb brings the Gemini spacecraft alongside the target, matching its velocity, and now they’ve rendezvoused she gets her first proper look at it. It’s definitely not an Agena target vehicle. She estimates it’s around twelve feet long, much shorter than the Agena’s twenty feet; in shape, it’s a short cylinder topped by a long cone with a rounded tip. Cobb has no idea what it is. Man-made certainly, but she cannot tell if it is American or Soviet.

We’re here, she tells capcom. Are you going to tell us what it is?

There is a moment of silence.

It’s secret, whatever it is, says Gorelick.

Capcom says, I need you to look in your checklists binder, right at the back.

Puzzled, Cobb reaches for the checklists floating from a hook on the instrument panel and flips through the binder. The last page should be the postlanding checklist, but another has been added, and she reads it with mounting disbelief. She shows the page to Gorelick and says, Look at this.

According to the 33/8 by 8 inch card, the vehicle they have rendezvoused is a Corona KH-4B spy satellite. They are also instructed not to mention this over the radio, but to refer to the target as the “alternate Agena”.

Acknowledge, please, says capcom.

It’s an alternate Agena, says Cobb obligingly.

Gorelick looks at Cobb and raises her eyebrows. For a moment, they stare at each other, at their faces framed within their white pressure helmets. They’re wearing helmets because firing the manoeuvre thrusters shakes up the interior of the spacecraft, throwing dust and lint and small debris up into the air, and they need to keep their visors shut until it settles back down. They’re not wearing make-up, no astronaut ever has done so in space, and even Cochran stopped whipping that particular horse, especially after she sold her controlling shares in the Jacqueline Cochran Cosmetics Company back in 1966. It’s taken six years, eleven Mercury flights and eight Gemini flights, but they’re no longer “astronettes” or “space girls”, they’re astronauts . They’re the only Americans who have flown in space, and they’ve been beating the Russians in endurance flights for the past three years. There are some advantages to having a women-only astronaut corps, even the scientists and engineers say as much.

They’re not front-page news any more, and that suits them just fine because they’re just doing a job, something they love, and they’ve proven to pretty much everybody’s satisfaction they can do it and do it well. Only last year, Cobb and Funk, the youngest of the Mercury 13, went on a trip to see the troops in Korea, and everyone over there seemed happy to have real live astronauts visiting them. The pilots were quizzing Cobb on what it was like in space, how did she fly the spacecraft, they wanted to know everything. And all she could say in reply was, it’s the greatest feeling in the world, it’s like down here doesn’t matter anymore, it’s like you want to stay up there forever . Of course, she didn’t mention spending days in a tiny spacecraft, unable to bend her knees until she thinks her legs will never straighten again, the diapers and catheters and being poked and prodded by doctors before and after every flight, the G4C spacesuit with its six layers of nylon and Nomex which pinch and rub… It was all about the wonder and the going higher, further, faster. Even so, she was never very good with words and has always been a reluctant speaker, and she was uncomfortable with all the attention.

But now she peers out through the tiny window in the hatch at the spy satellite and she wonders what they’re doing here and when mission control is going to tell them.

Cobb asks capcom if they’re expected to EVA.

At this time no EVA is indicated, capcom replies. Can you confirm the alternate Agena looks to be in good order?

Gorelick in the right-hand seat is nearer to the KH-4B. She lifts the visor on her helmet and leans forward until her nose is only a few inches from the window before her.

It doesn’t look damaged, she says, it looks fine.

Cobb is wondering if she’s looking at the future of the space programme: will they be no more than orbital repair technicians, rendezvousing with satellites and fixing them in situ? The exercise with the real Agena is all part of the plan to go to the Moon. Next year, the first of the new Apollo spacecraft leaves the North American Aviation factory in San Diego, and though there’s one more Gemini flight planned, it’s expected Apollo I will launch in early 1969.

But to what end? For what purpose?

Though he never said anything, McIntyre was surprised when the kludge worked as intended and scooped up the bucket from the ocean bed. The bucket is not exactly intact—it hit the sea surface pretty goddamned hard, has split down one side, and long snakes of film have escaped from the stacks and now hang down through the bars of the kludge. McIntyre tells Stryker to drop the shot ballast—not all at once, because they don’t want to strain the damaged bucket too much or give the kludge an excuse to drop what it carries. And as the Trieste II begins its effortless rise from the ocean bottom, so McIntyre feels his spirits begin to lift, and his mind flies across the miles to the Washington Navy Yard and he knows more than ever he made the right move when he transferred to the Navy Experimental Diving Unit. He’s not enjoyed this dive and he feels no real sense of accomplishment at having retrieved the bucket. The Trieste II is too fragile a mistress, and though this descent has gone relatively smoothly—nothing broke!—he remembers all too well others where one damn thing after another went on the fritz. Which is not to say saturation dives are always snafu-free, or that mistakes and malfunctions cannot also prove fatal.

But, he has to admit, spending hours inside a steel ball seven feet in diameter cannot compare with the freedoms of saturation diving, the ability to move about underwater unrestricted, chained only by an umbilical—because at those pressures air in bottles would last mere minutes—limited only by his own physical endurance. True, the Trieste II can take him so much deeper—he’s here now on his way back up from 19,500 feet beneath the surface!—while the deepest he’s dived on helium-oxygen is 600 feet, and he had to spend six days in a steel can decompressing afterwards.

He looks across the pressure-sphere at the tiny window which gives the only direct view the three men have on the world outside. It’s a circle of inky blackness in the curved steel, and his eyes play tricks and he sees it as a pool of infinite depth, an opening without end in the steel, a shaft through the abyss and the hadal zone into who-knows-where and who-knows-what…