Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

And if he didn't? This would have been even more difficult to explain: the evil odds were essential to the enterprise. That unmentionable stuff , after all, involved a man hanging his hide out over the edge in a hurtling piece of machinery. And such unmentionable payoffs it brought you! One, which he had started receiving even before this morning, was a look. It was a look of fraternal awe, of awe in the presence of manly honor , that came over the faces of other men at a base when a test pilot or combat pilot headed for the aircraft for a mission when the odds were known to be evil. Shepard had rated that look before, particularly when testing overpowered, overweight jet fighters in their first carrier landings. It was the look that came over another man when one's own righteous stuff triggered his adrenalin. And this morning, every step of the way, from the crew quarters in Hangar S to the gantry deck outside the capsule, where Glenn and the technicians had been waiting to help him inside, men had beamed that look straight at him—and then they had broken into applause . Just as he was getting ready to go onto the gantry and take the elevator up to the capsule, the entire ground crew had started applauding. They had that warm and humid smile on their faces and tears glistened in their eyes and they were banging their hands together and yelling things to him. Shepard had his helmet on, with the visor sealed, and he was carrying his own portable oxygen unit, which was pumping away, and so it was all happening in a muffled pantomime, but there was no mistaking what was going on. They were giving him the applause and homage… up front —come what may!… payable in advance!

From a sheerly analytical standpoint one knew that the odds in this flight, while bad enough, were no worse than the odds he had faced before in testing winged aircraft. Wernher von Braun had said repeatedly that the Redstone rocket's record of reliability was 98 percent, which was better than that of some of the Century series of supersonic jet fighters during the test stage. But the truth was that by now Shepard would have accepted far worse odds. He had accepted a great many rewards up front. He and his confreres had already been lionized, such as few pilots in history. The very top pilots, with the most righteous stuff, were content to receive that unmentionable glistening look from aviators and support personnel at their own base. Shepard had already had it beamed upon him by every sort of congressman, canned-food distributor, Associated Florists board chairman, and urban-renewal speculator, not to mention the anonymous little cookies with their trembling little custards who simply materialized around you at the Cape. He had already accepted the payment… up front !—and millions of wide-open humid eyes were now upon him. The ancient instinct of a people, their so-called folk wisdom, in the matter of the care, preparation, and recompense of single-combat warriors was indeed sound. Like his predecessors in the ancient past, he had reached the blessed state where one was far more afraid of not delivering on his end of the bargain—having been paid up front—than he was of getting killed. Please, dear Lord, don't let me fuck up . He was now where he belonged and had striven to be: atop the very thrust point of the danger. He was now precisely at that critical elevation that separated the great pilots, bearing their gigantic albeit invisible pictures of themselves, from the mere mortals on the terrain below. No one would ever know whether or not another type of human being would have handled this day with the same aplomb—this day when one became the first human being ever to sit up on top of an eight-story-high bullet and have a 66,000-pound Redstone rocket lit under his tail. All the racing drivers, mountain climbers, scuba divers, bobsledders, and Seabees they once considered using—what would have been the state of their souls at this moment? Well, by now it was pointless to ask. One could only say this: for the typical competitive military pilot, possessing the regulation-issue heroic self-esteem of the breed, throbbing with rude animal health, convinced of his utterly righteous stuff, and ravenous for glory—which is to say, for a man like Alan Shepard—being where he was right now was his vocation, his calling, his holy Beruf . He was home, upon the right stuff's highest elevations.

On top of everything else, the organism's deconditioning was very nearly complete. After all the full-dress rehearsals and simulations of this flight, complete with the sounds, the g-forces, and even the wires protruding from his body, after more than a hundred pre-creations of this moment, after riding up the gantry elevator over and over and fitting himself into the human holster and having them close the hatch and start the countdown, after lying in this very capsule, day after day, with the capsule communicator's voice coming over his headset and the signals of flight flashing on the instrument panel, until every inch and every second of the experience was familiar and the capsule had become more like an office than a vehicle… it was hard for a man to sense any difference this time in his own nervous system, even though intellectually he knew that this was that day . Now and then he could feel the adrenalin building up and his pulse rate increasing and his breathing speeding up and his heart palpitating slightly, and he would force himself to concentrate on the checklist, the console, the equipment connections, the radio hookup, and the rush would pass, and he would be back once more in his workshop, in his procedures trainer.

No, the one thing he had experienced all morning that was not second nature was his aching bladder. That had become the first terra incognita. Please, dear Lord, don't let me fuck up .

Shepard waited for another stop in the countdown—this time it was to wait for some clouds to pass over the launch area—and he announced his problem over the closed radio circuit. He said he wanted to relieve his bladder. Finally they told him to go ahead and "do it in the suit." And he did. Because his seat, or couch, was angled back slightly, the flood headed north, toward his head, carrying consternation with it. The flood set off a suit thermometer, and the Freon flow jumped from 30 to 45. On swept the flood until it hit his left lower chest sensor, which was being used to record his electrocardiogram, and it knocked that sensor out partially, and the doctors were nonplused. The news of the flood rushed through the worlds of the Life Science specialists and the suit technicians, like the destruction of Krakatoa, west of Java. There was no stopping it now. The wave rolled on, over rubber, wire, rib, flesh, and ten thousand baffled nerve endings, finally pooling in the valley up the middle of Shepard's back. Gradually it cooled, and he could feel a cool lake of urine in the valley. In any case, the discomfort in his bladder was gone and everything was still. They had not scratched the flight because of the dam break. He had not fucked up.

The next thing the medical team knew, a voice was coming over the closed loop, their private radio linkup with the Mercury capsule:

"Weh-ayl… I'm a wetback now."

The man was beautiful!

Imperturbable at every juncture!

Fifteen minutes, in the countdown, before they fire a seven-story bullet full of liquid oxygen underneath him, and he remains:

Smilin' Al!

The hold had now dragged on for four hours, and each engineer monitoring the panels showing the status of the various flight systems was agonizing over whether to declare, finally, that his system was "go"—after which it would be his responsibility if the system malfunctioned. By now there was agony on all sides. It was transmitted into the capsule in a thousand unspoken ways and sometimes in so many words. It was as if Shepard, lying here on his back, inserted, wired, strapped, and screwed into this tiny holster, were the ganglion, the agony junction, for a thousand tense and tortured souls on the gantry outside and on the ground below. Through it all he had remained Smilin' Al of the Cape. At T minus 6—six minutes before the completion of the sequence that would lead to the launching—there was yet another hold, and one of the doctors came on the closed telephone circuit and said to Shepard: