Tom Wolfe - The Right Stuff

"This is Friendship 7 ," he said. "Working just like clockwork on the control check, and it went through just about like the procedures-trainer runs."

Well, that was it. The procedures trainer and the ALFA trainer and the centrifuge… He noticed that, in fact, he seemed to be moving a little faster than he had been on the ALFA trainer. When you sat in the trainer, cranking your simulated hydrogen-peroxide thrusters, they ran films on the screen of the earth rolling by below you, just the way it would be in orbital flight. "They didn't roll it by fast enough," he said to himself. Not that it mattered particularly… The sensation of speed was no more than that of being in an airliner and watching a cloud bank slide by far below… The world demanded awe, because this was a voyage through the stars. But he couldn't feel it. The backdrop of the event, the stage, the environment, the true orbit… was not the vast reaches of the universe. It was the simulators. Who could possibly understand this ? Weightless he was, in the vacuum of space, humming around the earth… but his center of gravity was still back in that Baptist hardtack Low Rent stretch of sand and palmetto grass in Florida.

Ahhhh—but now this was truly something. Forty minutes into the flight, as he neared the Indian Ocean, off the east coast of Africa, he began sailing into the night. Since he was traveling east, he was going away from the sun at a speed of 17,500 miles an hour. But because he was riding backward, he could see the sun out the window. It was shaking the way the moon sinks out of sight as seen on earth. The edge of the sun began to touch the edge of the horizon. He couldn't tell what part of the earth it was.

There were clouds everywhere. They created a haze at the horizon. The brilliant light over the earth began to dim. It was like turning down a rheostat. It took five or six minutes. Very slowly the lights were dimming. Then he couldn't see the sun at all, but there was a tremendous band of orange light that stretched from one side of the horizon to the other, as if the sun were a molten liquid that had emptied into a tube along the horizon. Where there had been a bright-blue band before, there was now the orange band; and above it a wider dimmer band of oranges and reds shading off into the blackness of the sky. Then all the reds and oranges disappeared, and he was on the night side of the earth. The bright-blue band reappeared at the horizon. Above it, stretching up about eight degrees, was what looked like a band of haze, created by the earth's atmosphere. And above that… for the first time he could make out the stars. Down below, the clouds picked up a faint light from the moon, which was coming up behind him. Now he was over Australia. He could hear Gordon Cooper's voice. Cooper was serving as the capcom at the tracking station in the town of Muchea, out in the kangaroo boondocks of western Australia. He could hear Cooper's Oklahoma drawl.

"That sure was a short day," said Glenn.

"Say again, Friendship 7 ," said Cooper.

"That was about the shortest day I've ever run into," said Glenn. Somehow that was the sort of thing to say to old Oklahoma Gordo sitting down there in the middle of nowhere.

"Kinda passes rapidly, huh?" said Gordo.

"Yessir," said Glenn.

The clouds began to break up over Australia. He could make out nothing in the darkness except for electric lights. Off to one side he could make out the lights of an entire city, just as you could at 40,000 feet in an airplane, but the concentration of lights was terrific. It was an absolute mass of electric lights, and south of it there was another one, a smaller one. The big mass was the city of Perth and the smaller one was a town called Rockingham. It was midnight in Perth and Rockingham, but practically every living soul in both places had stayed up to turn on every light they had for the American sailing over in the satellite.

"The lights show up very well," said Glenn, "and thank everybody for turning them on, will you?"

"We sure will, John," said Gordo.

And he went sailing on past Australia with the lights of Perth and Rockingham sliding into the distance.

He was over the middle of the Pacific, about halfway between Australia and Mexico, when the sun began to come up behind him. This was just thirty-five minutes after the sun went down. Since he was traveling backward, he couldn't see the sunrise through the window. He had to use the periscope. First he could see the blue band at the horizon becoming brighter and brighter. Then the sun itself began to slide up over the edge. It was a brilliant red—not terribly different from what he had seen at sunrise on earth, except that it was rising faster and its outlines were sharper.

"It's blinding through the scope on clear," said Glenn. "I'm going to the dark filter to watch it come on up."

And then— needles ! A tremendous layer of them—Air Force communications experiment that went amok… Thousands of tiny needles gleaming in the sun outside the capsule… But they couldn't be needles, because they were luminescent—they were like snowflakes—

"This is Friendship 7 ," he said. "I'll try to describe what I'm in here. I am in a big mass of some very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they're luminescent. I never saw anything like it. They're round, a little. They're coming by the capsule, and they look like little stars. A whole shower of them coming by. They swirl around the capsule and go in front of the window and they're all brilliantly lighted. They probably average maybe seven or eight feet apart, but I can see them all down below me also."

"Roger, Friendship 7 ." This was the capcom on Canton Island out in the Pacific. "Can you hear any impact with the capsule? Over."

"Negative, negative. They're very slow. They're not going away from me more than maybe three or four miles per hour."

They swirled about his capsule like tiny weightless diamonds, little bijoux—no, they were more like fireflies. They had that lazy but erratic motion, and when he focused on one it would seem to be lit up, but the light would go out and he would lose track of it, and then it would light up again. That was like fireflies, too. There used to be thousands of fireflies in the summers, when he was growing up. These things were like fireflies, but they obviously couldn't be any sort of organism… unless all the astronomers and all the satellite recording mechanisms had been fundamentally wrong… They were undoubtedly particles of some sort, particles that caught the sunlight at a certain angle. They were beautiful, but were they coming from the capsule? That could mean trouble. They must have been coming from the capsule, because they traveled along with him, in the same trajectory, at the same speed. But wait a minute. Some of them were far off, far below… there might be an entire field of them… a minute cosmos… something never seen before! And yet the capcom on Canton Island didn't seem particularly interested. And then he sailed out of range of Canton and would have to wait to be picked up by the capcom at Guaymas, on the west coast of Mexico. And when the Guaymas capcom picked him up, he didn't seem to know what he was talking about.

"This is Friendship 7 ," said Glenn. "Just as the sun came up, there were some brilliantly lighted particles that looked luminous that were swirling around the capsule. I don't have any in sight right now. I did have a couple just a moment ago, when I made the transmission over to you. Over."

"Roger, Friendship 7 ."

And that was it. "Roger, Friendship 7." Silence. They didn't particularly care.

Glen kept talking about his fireflies. He was fascinated. It was the first true unknown anyone had encountered out here in the cosmos. At the same time he was faintly apprehensive. Roger, Friendship 7 . The capcom finally asked a polite question or two, about the size of the particles and so on. They obviously were not carried away by this celestial discovery.