Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

Grissom said, "Roger, I've unplugged my suit so I'm kinda warm now… so…"

Lewis said, "One, roger."

"One, roger."

"Now if you tell me to, ah, you're ready for me to blow, I'll have to take my helmet off, power down, and then blow the hatch."

"One, roger, and when you blow the hatch, the collar will already be down there waiting for you, and we're turning base at this time."

"Ah, roger."

As the helicopter pilot, Lewis, looked down on the capsule, it shaped up as a routine retrieval, such as he and his co-pilot, Lieutenant John Reinhard, had practiced many times. Reinhard had a pole with a hook on it, like a shepherd's crook, that he was going to slip through a loop at the neck of the capsule. The crook was attached to a cable. The helicopter could hoist up to 4,000 pounds in this fashion; the capsule weighed about 2,400 pounds. Lewis had swung out and was making a low pass toward the capsule when suddenly he saw the capsule's side hatch go flying off into the water. But Grissom wasn't supposed to blow the hatch until he told him he had hooked on! And Grissom—there was Grissom scrambling out of the hatch and plopping into the water without even looking up at him. Grissom was swimming like mad. Water was pouring into the capsule through the hatch and the damned thing was sinking! Lewis wasn't worried about Grissom, because he had practiced water egress with the astronauts many times and he knew their pressure suits were more buoyant than any life preserver. They even seemed to enjoy playing around in the water in the suits. So he gunned the helicopter down to the level of the water to try to snare the capsule. By now only the neck of the thing is visible above the water. Reinhard goes to work with the shepherd's crook, leaning out of the helicopter, desperately trying to hook on. He finally hooks on, as the capsule disappears under the water and starts sinking like a brick. Lewis is now down so low all three wheels of the helicopter are in the water. The helicopter is like a fat man squatting over a tree stump, trying to pull it out of the ground. Full of water, as it is, the capsule weighs 5,000 pounds, 1,000 over the helicopter's capacity. Lewis already has a red-light warning of impending engine failure—so he signals for a second helicopter, which is already nearby, to pick up Grissom. He finally pulls the capsule up out of the water, but he can't make the helicopter move forward toward the carrier. He's just hanging there in the air like a hummingbird. Red lights are lighting up all over the panel. He's about to lose the ship as well as the capsule. So he cuts the capsule loose. It drops and disappears forever. The water is three miles deep at that point.

They turn away finally. Grissom is still in the water. He's waving. He seems to be saying, "I'm okay." The second helicopter is moving in to lower the horse collar.

In fact, Gus's waves were saying, "I'm drowning!—you bastards—I'm drowning!"

As soon as Gus scrambled out of the hatch, he had begun swimming for his life. The goddamned capsule's going under! His suit caught momentarily on some sort of strap outside the capsule, probably leading to the dye canister. It was like a parachute!—it would pull him under!—He'd drown! The drowning man… No question about it… By this point he was neither an astronaut nor a pilot. He was the drowning man. Get away from the death capsule!—that was the idea. Then he calmed down a little. He was swimming around in the ocean under the roar of the helicopter blades. He wasn't sinking, after all. The pressure suit kept him bobbing in the water, as high as his armpits. He looked up. The horse collar was hanging out of the helicopter. The horse collar that gets him out of this! But they were pulling away from him!—they were going to the capsule! He could see the man named Reinhard leaning out of the helicopter trying to snag the loop of the capsule. Only the neck of the capsule was out of the water. He started swimming back to the capsule. It was hard swimming in the pressure suit, but it kept him up. He bobbed right up to his armpits when he stopped swimming. Little swells kept breaking over his head and he swallowed some water. He felt out of control. He was floundering around in the middle of the ocean. He looked up again and there was another helicopter. He kept waving and waving, but nobody seemed to pay any attention. And now he wasn't bobbing up so high any more. The pressure suit was losing its buoyancy. It was getting heavier… starting to drag him down… The suit had a rubber diaphragm that rolled up around his neck like a turtleneck sweater to keep the water from seeping down inside the suit. It didn't fit tight enough… air was escaping… No!—it was the oxygen inlet valve! He had completely forgotten! The valve allowed oxygen into his suit while he was in flight. He had unhooked the tube but forgotten to close the valve. The oxygen was bubbling out down there somewhere… the suit was becoming dead weight, pulling him down… He reached down and closed the valve underwater… But now his head kept going under and he had to fight to get to the surface and then the swells broke over his head and he swallowed more water and he'd look up at the helicopters and wave and they'd just wave back—the bastards!—how could they not know! In the window of one of the helicopters was a man with a camera, merrily taking pictures of him—they were waving and taking snapshots! The stupid bastards! They were going crazy over the goddamned capsule and he was drowning before their very eyes… He kept going under. He'd fight his way back up and swallow some more water and wave. But that drove him back under. The suit—he seemed to be packed in two hundred pounds of wet clay… The dimes !—and all that other shit! Christ, the dimes and those goddamned trinkets! Down there in his knee pocket… He'd had the bright idea of carrying a hundred one-dollar bills on the flight as souvenirs, but he didn't have a spare hundred dollars to his name—so he decided on two rolls of fifty dimes each—and he had put in three one-dollar bills for good measure and a whole bunch of little models of the capsule—and now this big junkheap of travel sentiment stuffed in his knee pocket was taking him under… Dimes!… Silver deadweight !

Deke! … Where was Deke!… Surely Deke would be here!… He had done as much for Deke. Somehow Deke would materialize and save him. Deke and Wally and him had been down at Pensacola practicing water egress, and somehow Deke, in his whole pressure suit, with his helmet on, had fallen off his raft and was going under and couldn't do a goddamn thing about it, but he and Wally had been nearby with their swimming flippers on, and they had swum straight to him and held him up until one of the Navy swabbos could reach them with the raft, and it was no sweat, because they had been by his side, and surely… Deke!… Or somebody! Deke !

Cox… That face up there!—it's Cox… Deke wasn't here and wasn't going to be here. But Cox!—Cox, whom he hardly knew, was his sole redeemer now. Cox was a Navy man in the second helicopter. Gus knew that face. Cox wasn't a stupid bastard. Cox had picked up Al Shepard! Cox had picked up the goddamned chimpanzee! Cox knew how to get people out of here!… Cox! … He could see Cox leaning out of the helicopter lowering the horse collar. There was a hell of a roar everywhere from the two helicopters. But Cox! Cox and his helicopter were just suspended there. They weren't coming any closer, and Gus's head kept going under. The wash from the helicopter propellers was driving him back. The closer his redeemer came in the helicopter, the farther he was driven back. The sharks — they can smell panic ! And he was sheer panic, 160 pounds of it, plus a hundred pounds of death dimes! Lost at last at 2,800 fathoms in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean! But helicopters can drive off sharks with their prop wash! Cox would rout the sharks and save him—but Cox got no closer, even though the horse collar was now touching the water. He was still about ninety feet away, across the billows. Now he could see it, now he couldn't. The swells kept washing over him. But it was the only thing left. He swam for it. He couldn't get his legs to come up. So he fought toward the horse collar with his arms. He had no strength left. Everything pulled him down. He couldn't get enough breath. There was nothing but furious noise… blazing water… The water kept getting in his mouth. He would never make it. But the horse collar! Cox was up there! There was the horse collar. It was in front of him. He grabbed it and hung on. He was supposed to sit in it as if he were sitting on a swing. The hell with that. He flopped through the hole like a dead flounder landing on the fish-market scales. He hung on with his arms. He felt as if he weighed a ton. The suit was full of water. And it had already dawned on him: I lost the capsule .