Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

"Are you really ready?"

It was hard to figure out whether the question was addressed to the body or the soul. It wandered into the unmentionable terrain of the most righteous stuff itself, and it was Smilin' Al who handled it.

He laughed and said: "Go!"

"Good luck, old friend," said the doctor.

Farewell… from the valley of the woeful abyss…

At T minus 2 minutes and 40 seconds there was another hold. Now Shepard could hear engineers in the blockhouse agonizing over the fuel pressure in the Redstone, which was running high. He could sense what would be coming next. They were going to talk themselves into resetting the pressure valve inside the booster engine manually. That would mean postponing the launch for another two days at least. He could see it coming! They were going to scrub the whole thing, lest they hold themselves accountable for his hide if something went wrong! This was not a job for Smilin' Al. It was time for the Icy Commander to arrive and take charge. So he got on the circuit and put the glacial edge on his voice, as only he could do it, and he said:

"All right, I'm cooler than you are. Why don't you fix your little problem… and light this candle ."

Light the candle ! he says. The words of Chuck Yeager himself! The voice of the rocket ace! Oddly enough, it seemed to do the trick. Realizing the astronaut's irritation, they began wrapping up the process and declaring their systems "go." It was nearly 9:30 a.m. by the time the countdown entered its last minute. Shepard's periscope began automatically retracting inside the capsule, and he remembered that he had put in the gray filter to cut out the sunlight. If he didn't remove it, he wouldn't be able to see any colors in flight. So he started moving his left hand toward the periscope, but his left forearm hit the abort handle. Shit! That was all he needed now! Fortunately, he had barely brushed it. The abort handle was the equivalent of the ejection seat cinch ring in an airplane. If the astronaut sensed some catastrophe that the automatic system had not picked up, he could turn the handle and the escape tower rocket would fire and pull the capsule free of the Redstone rocket and bring it down by parachute. That was all he needed—the world waits for the first American spaceman, and Shepard gives them an exhibition of a little man popping up a few thousand feet in a thimble and floating down by parachute… He could see it all in a flash… Another Popped Cork fiasco… The hell with changing the filter. He would look at the world in black and white. Who cared? Don't fuck up . That was the main thing.

Time seemed to speed up tremendously in the final thirty seconds of the countdown. In thirty seconds the rocket would ignite right underneath his back. In those last moments his entire life did not pass before his eyes. He did not have a poignant vision of his mother or his wife or his children. No, he thought about abort procedures and the checklist and about not fucking up. He only half paid attention to Deke Slayton's voice over his headset as he read out the final "ten… nine… eight… seven… six…" and the rest of it. The only word that counted, here in this little blind stuffed pod, was the last word. Then he heard Deke Slayton say it: "Fire!… You're on your way, Jose!"

Louise Shepard was not in the valley of the woeful abyss. She was here in her house in Virginia Beach—but beyond that it was hard to chart the locus of her soul at that moment. Never in the history of flight test had the wife of a pilot been put in any such bizarre position as this. Naturally all the wives had been aware that there might be some "press interest" in the reactions of the wife and family of the first astronaut—but Louise hadn't bargained for anything like what was now going on in her front yard. Every now and then Louise's daughters would peek out the window, and the yard looked like the clay flats three hours after the Marx Midway Carnival pulls in. Mobs of reporters and cameramen and other Big Timers were out there wearing bush jackets with leather straps running this way and that and knocking back their Pepsi-Colas and Nehis and yelling to each other and mainly just milling about, crazy with the excitement of being on the scene , bawling for news of the anguished soul of Louise Shepard. They wanted a moan, a tear, some twisted features, a few inside words from friends, any goddamned thing. They were getting desperate. Give us a sign! Give us anything! Give us the diaper-service man! The diaper-service man comes down the street with his big plastic bags, smoking a cigar to provide an aromatic screen for his daily task—and they're all over him and his steamy bag. Maybe he knows the Shepards! Maybe he knows Louise! Maybe he's been in there! Maybe he knows the layout of chez Shepard! He locks himself in the front seat, choking on cigar smoke, and they're banging on his panel truck. "Let us in! We want to see!" They're on their knees. They're slithering in the ooze. They're interviewing the dog, the cat, the rhododendrons…

These incredible maniacs were all out there tearing up the lawn and yearning for their pieces of Louise's emotional wreckage. The truth was, however, that Louise Shepard could hardly be said to be experiencing the feelings that all these people were so eager to wolf down. Louise had had her chances to become a nervous wreck over Al's flying many times, most recently at Pax River. In 1955 and 1956 Al had tested one hot new fighter plane after another. Their names were a delirium of sharp teeth, cold steel, cosmic warlords, and evil spirits: the Banshee, the Demon, the Tigercat, the Skylancer, and so on, and Al took them through not only maximum performance runs but also high-altitude tests, in-flight refueling tests, and "carrier suitability tests"—a stolid phrase that covered a multitude of ways for a test pilot to expire. Louise knew the entire world of the test pilot's wife… the calls from other wives saying that "something" has happened out there… the wait, in a little house with small children, to see if the Friend of Widows and Orphans is coming to make his duty call… Day after day she tries to be stoic, she tries not to think about the subject, not to pay attention to the clock when he doesn't return from the flight line on time—

Well, my God—what an improvement Project Mercury was over the daily lot of the test pilot's wife! No question about it! The worst part of the Pax River days had been the constant wondering and worrying, alone or with uncomprehending little faces around you. This morning Louise knew exactly where Al was every minute. He was hard to miss. He was on nationwide television. There he was. She had merely to look at the screen. On nationwide television they were talking about no one else. You could hear the laconic baritone voice of Shorty Powers, the NASA public affairs officer, in the Mercury Control room at the Cape periodically reporting the astronaut's status as the countdown proceeded. Then the telephone rings—and she hears that same voice, calling to speak to her, Louise. Al had spoken to Deke, and Deke had spoken to Shorty, and now Shorty—possessor of the voice that the entire nation was listening to—was talking to her personally, explaining the reasons for the delays, as Al had requested. Nor was she alone in this house. Hardly! It was getting crowded in here. In addition to the children, there were her parents, who had come from Ohio and had been here for days. A few of the other wives had arrived. Al had been stationed nearby in Norfolk when the program began, and so they had many Navy friends and neighbors whom they knew well, and quite a few of them had come by. There was quite a burble of voices building up in the living room. It didn't sound very tense in there. And of course she had merely half the newspapers in America in the front yard, plus the usual rabble of gawkers who materialize for car wrecks or roof jumps or traffic arguments, and the whole lot would have liked nothing better than to charge in and gather round if she had opened the front door to them so much as a crack. Life had wanted to have two writers and a photographer on the premises to record her reactions from start to finish, but she had held out against that. So they were waiting in a hotel on the beach, and it was agreed they could come inside as soon as the flight was completed. Louise hadn't even had all that much opportunity to sit in front of the television set and let the tension build. She had gotten up before dawn, in the dark, to fix breakfast for everybody who was staying in the house, and then there was the whole business of fixing coffee and whatnot for the other good folks as they arrived… until before she knew it she was caught up in the same psychology that works at a wake . She was suddenly the central figure in a Wake for My Husband—in his hour of danger, however, rather than his hour of death. The secret of the wake for the dead was that it put the widow on stage, whether she liked it or not. In the very moment in which, if left alone, she might be crushed by grief, she was suddenly thrust into the role of hostess and star of the show. It's free! It's open house ! Anybody can come on in and gawk! Of course, the widow can still turn on the waterworks—but it takes more nerve to do that in front of a great gawking mob than it does to be the brave little lady, serving the coffee and the cakes. For someone as dignified and strong as Louise Shepard, there was no question as to how it was going to come out. As hostess and main character in this scene, what else was there for the pilot's wife to do but set about pulling everybody together? The press, the ravenous but genteel Beast out there upon the lawn, did not know it but he was covering not the Anguished Wife at Lift-off… but the Honorable Mrs. Commander Astronaut at Home… in the first wake, not for the dead, but for the Gravely Endangered… Louise didn't even have time to collapse in neurasthenic paralysis over the possible fate of her husband. It was all that the star and hostess could do to get back to the TV room in time for the final minutes of the countdown, to watch the flames roaring out of the Redstone's nozzles.