Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

The flight had been a great success, all things considered. But one thing bothered the NASA Life Sciences people. The animal's blood pressure had been badly elevated. It had run from 160 to 200 throughout—even when his pulse rate was normal and he was watching his lights and pulling his levers with great efficiency. Was this some sort of morbid and unforeseen effect of prolonged weightlessness? Were astronauts in earth orbit going to be candidates for apoplexy? The Holloman veterinarians hastened to reassure them that Number 85—er, Enos—had registered high-blood-pressure readings for two years now. It seemed to be the nature of the beast. The NASA folk nodded… although 200, systolic, was awfully goddamned high…

Privately, the situation had the Holloman scientists thinking, and not about space flight, either. The readings they had gotten from Number 85 in the past with the cuff may or may not have been reliable. But there was no mistaking the readings of the catheters during the flight and just before it. Once they were inserted, Number 85 wasn't even aware of them. They were giving true readings. His blood pressure had not gone up because of the stresses of the flight. He took the flight with the utmost aplomb; his heart and respiratory rates and body temperatures were actually below the readings obtained during the centrifuge runs. In fact, his blood pressure had not gone up at all. It had been up there all along. A theory with implications for man-on-earth, not man-in-space, was beginning to form… Number 85, smartest of the Simia satyrus, prince of the lower primates, had swallowed so much rage over the past two years, thanks to the operant-conditioning process, it had begun pumping out through his arteries… until every heartbeat was about to blow his eardrums out for him…

There was even a press conference at which the chimpanzee appeared. "Enos" he was, of course. At the press conference Bob Gilruth announced that John Glenn would be the pilot for the first manned orbital flight, with Scott Carpenter as the backup pilot. Deke Slayton would take the second flight, with Wally Schirra as the backup pilot. All the while the astronaut who took the first flight was sitting right there at the table (quoth the brethren, sotto voce). Number 85 stole the show, which was only just. He took the flashbulbs and all the talk and hubbub without blinking or even fidgeting, as if he had been waiting all along for his moment in the spotlight. Of course, the ape had been, as it were, overtrained for such a moment and was long past being able to let such things alter his behavior. Number 85 had been in rooms full of bright lights and large numbers of human beings before. Noise, vibrations, oscillations, weightlessness, space flight, fame—what earthly difference did it make compared to the shocks and the box?

At the outset neither Glenn nor his wife, Annie, foresaw the sort of excitement that was going to build up over his flight. Glenn regarded Shepard as the winner of the competition, since he looked at it the way pilots had always looked at it on the great ziggurat of flying. Al had been picked for the first flight , and there was no getting around that. He had been the first American to go into space. It was as if he were the project pilot for Mercury. The best Glenn could hope for was to play Scott Crossfield to Shepard's Chuck Yeager. Yeager had broken the sound barrier and become the True Brother of all the True Brothers, but at least Crossfield had gone on to become the first man to fly Mach 2 and, later on, the first man to fly the X-15.

Not even when reporters began arriving in New Concord, Ohio, his old hometown, and pushing his parents' doorbell and roaming and foaming over the town like gangs of strays, looking for anything, scraps, morsels of information about John Glenn—not even then did Glenn fully realize just what was about to happen. The deal with Life kept all but Life reporters away from him, and so the other fellows were out trying to root up whatever they could. That seemed to be the explanation. The Cape hadn't turned into a madhouse yet. As late as December, Glenn could go out to the strip on Route A1A in Cocoa Beach with Scott Carpenter, who was training with him as backup man, out to that little Kontiki Village joint, whatever the name of it was, and listen to the combo play "Beyond the Reef." John got a kick out of "Beyond the Reef." By early January, however, it was madness to try to get to the Kontiki joint or anywhere else in Cocoa Beach. There were now reporters all over the place, all of them rabid for a glimpse of John Glenn. They would even pile into the little Presbyterian church when John went there on Sunday and turn the service into a sort of muffled melee, with the photographers trying to keep quiet and muscle their way into position at the same time. They were really terrible. So John and Scott now stuck pretty much to the base, working out on the procedures trainer and the capsule itself. At night, in Hangar S, John would try to answer the fan mail. But it was like trying to beat back the ocean with a hammer. The amount of mail he was getting was incredible.

Nevertheless, the training regimen created a curtain around John, and he didn't really have as clear an idea of the storm of publicity… and the passion of it all… as his wife did. At their house in Arlington, Virginia, Annie was getting the whole storm, and she had practically no protection from it and few happy distractions. John's flight was first scheduled for December 20, 1961, but bad weather over the Cape kept forcing postponements. He was finally set to go on January 27. He was inserted into the capsule before dawn. Annie was in a state. She was petrified. This had little to do with fear for John's life, however. Annie could take that kind of pressure. She had been through the whole course of worrying over a pilot. John had flown in combat in the Pacific Theater in the Second World War and then in Korea. In Korea he was hit seven times by flak. Annie had also been through just about everything that Pax River had to inflict upon a pilot's wife, short of the visit of the Friend of Widows and Orphans at her own door. But one thing she had never done. She had never had to step outside after one of John's flights and say a few words on television. She knew that would be coming up when John flew, and she was already dreading the moment. Some of the other wives were at her house for the Danger Wake, and she asked them to bring some tranquilizers. She wouldn't need them for the flight. She would take them before she had to step outside for the ordeal with the TV people. With her ferocious stutter—the thought of millions of people, or even hundreds, or even five… seeing her struggling on television… She had been in front of microphones with John before, and John always knew how to step in and save the day. She had certain phrases she had no trouble with—"Of course." "Certainly." "Not at all." "Wonderful." "I hope not." "That's right." "I don't think so." "Fine, thank you," and so on—and most of the questions from the television reporters were so simpleminded she could handle them with those eight phrases, plus "yes" and "no"—and John or one of the children would chime in if any amplification was called for. They were a great team that way. But today she would have to solo.

Annie could see the impending catastrophe easily enough. All she had to do was look at the television screen. Any channel… it didn't matter… she could count on seeing some woman holding a microphone covered in black foam rubber and giving a declamation on the order of:

"Inside this trim, modest suburban home is Annie Glenn, wife of Astronaut John Glenn, sharing the anxiety and pride of the entire world at this tense moment but in a very private and very crucial way that only she can understand. One thing has prepared Annie Glenn for this test of her own courage and will sustain her through this test, and that one thing is her faith: her faith in the ability of her husband, her faith in the efficiency and dedication of the thousands of engineers and other personnel who provide his guidance system… and her faith in Almighty God…"