Lights in the Deep (8 page)

Losing a friend so suddenly was bad enough. But there were ramifications to this that went far beyond the mission.

Rob Lawrence would have understood.

Too bad he died when his F-104 went in at Edwards. The front-seater under Rob’s tutelage had made a rookie mistake, or so I’d heard from the other instructors.

Now there was only me. I could still remember the President—in a wheelchair since that nut put a bullet in his spine and killed Governor Connally back in ‘63—shaking my hand and telling me how important I was to the program. He didn’t say it at the time, but I think I was his way of extending black Americans a symbolic olive branch after Watts.

The only brown face in Group 3, tacked on two years late, as a replacement for Ted Freeman when he died.

Not that I was unused to that kind of isolation. Dr. King’s dream was still a long, long ways from fruition. Inside NASA, people knew me. And the press had given me a degree of national exposure which embarrassed Malachi Washington, the first Negro Astronaut!

But all blacks look alike to many white eyes, and I didn’t have to go very far from Houston or the Cape to be treated like just another nigger. Same for my wife Cheney and our two daughters, which galled me to no end. Cheney’s father was a prominent businessman in Chicago. She was educated. And I’d be damned if I expected her or the girls to put up with that shit, just so that we could all be close to my work.

So, they stayed close to her parents, with me being gone for months at a time. Not too different from when I was flying the F-8 off carrier decks for the Navy.

Vic’s body floated lifelessly outside the hatch. I considered what might happen now. With Vic gone, they’d order me to abort. Then the questions would begin. And the blame. Oh, maybe not from the other pilots. Neil and Mike and Ed. Even Al and the original Seven were cool. They knew the score.

It was the whisper campaign in the bureaucracy that I feared. They’d maroon me on the ground, like poor Deke. Only worse. Deke didn’t have the added pressure and expectation that came with being black. My failure was black America’s failure. And how in the hell was I going to look Vic’s wife Alice in the eye? She’d admitted before we went up that she had a funny feeling about this mission.

I kept my voice calm as I relayed information back and forth to the ground. I was shocked when Director Kraft himself got on the horn.

“We’ll proceed,” my boss told me in no uncertain terms.

“Sir?”

“Mal, the CIA liaison says the Soviets sent up one of their N1 boosters an hour ago. You know what that means.”

“Yessir,” I said. Kruschev wasn’t kidding around. We’d known for months that the Russians were rushing to get a capsule to the moon before we did. Only, none of us thought they’d be ready to go
before
Gemini 17 had already splashed down.

I considered my dead friend. “What about Vic?”

“Since you can’t get him back onboard, and since I really don’t think you’d want to be sitting next to his body for the next eight days, you’ll just have to cut Astronaut Hemshaw loose.”

“Jesus. Does Alice know?”

“Not yet. We’ll tell her.”

“With just me to run the show, we’ll have to chop a lot out of the itinerary.”

“Agreed. Look, Mal, under better circumstances I’d order an abort. But with that Russian mission on the way, and how things are going with the two wars, and Congress chopping at our budget—”

“I get the picture,” I said.

And it was true. In more ways than one.

So, three hours after the accident, I uncoupled Vic from the spacecraft and sent his body drifting slowly towards the Earth, and eventual reentry—a fiery end, like the Norse of old. I sent my co-pilot a mental farewell, closed his door, then mine, and set about trying to figure out how to get to the moon and back with just one man to watch all the instruments and flip all the switches.

• • •

By spacecraft standards, Gemini was an old horse. And if Kennedy’s first Vice President had had his way, Gemini would have been just a pit stop en route to Apollo. But with the U.S. military heavily committed to Cuba and Vietnam, neither Congress nor the Senate was in any mood to green-light yet another expensive NASA development project. Johnson was forced to be satisfied with ops remaining in Houston, while McDonnell kept its coveted contract. They flew the first Gemini-Chiron flights not long after dispensing with the Agena series, so that by 1967 things were ramping up for the first manned American reconnaissance of lunar space.

Technically, Chiron was the wedding of Agena hardware to the more robust Centaur booster stage. Launched separately on Titan II rockets, the Gemini docked in low Earth orbit with the Chiron and used the Chiron’s engines to break out of and insert into both Earth and lunar trajectories. And once McDonnell and Grumman ironed out their dispute over the proposed lunar lander design, Chiron would essentially be four separate spacecraft in one.

In the last 18 months, I’d done nothing but eat, drink, and sleep Gemini-Chiron. If the President had been determined to keep his promise to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, I’d been determined to be that man. Or at least one of the men. All other considerations aside.

The seat next to me was painfully empty, such that I found myself actually shying away from it, as much as the too-cramped confines of the capsule would allow. If this had been one of the actual landing flights planned for later in the year, I’d have had no choice but to abort, because without one man to stay in orbit while the other took the lander down to the surface, there would be no point.

But for this first circumlunar trip, one man would have to do, and there was plenty to keep me occupied in spite of how much Kraft and Co. sliced out of the schedule.

Still, Vic’s absence was ever-presently painful, such that I quickly grew to hate it. We’d trained together—relentlessly—in preparation for this historic flight. In spite of watching the Soviet Union roll ahead with its mighty super-booster. In spite of Dr. Von Braun’s forced retirement, on account of the absentee trial at the Hague. In spite of seeing the posted names of friends who had been killed or gone missing over the skies of Havana and Hanoi. Nothing had distracted us, and together we had made the circumlunar flight our co-religion.

By the time I slid into lunar orbit, the entire thing had begun to seem profoundly, stupidly empty. Vic was dead. They’d make him a hero no matter what happened now. Without him here to share the sweetness of victory, I took little comfort in the realization of our dream. Whether I, myself, got back to Earth or not, the headlines in the papers would continue to be crowded with news from the Long War against Communism, of which The Battle for the Moon was just that—a single battle. Symbolic, yes. Grand. But ultimately of little importance to the men scraping and fighting in the mud-filled ditches.

My orders called for me to take pictures, so I took them.

My orders also called for telemetry, so I took it, and sent it.

I was on my sixth circuit around the day side, and getting ready for the breakout burn that would put me on course back to Earth, when the feeds to the Chiron died. At first puzzled, I reset the breakers, only to watch them barber-pole again. Then a third time. By the fourth try I was flipping the switches back and forth with such panic that I almost broke them clean out of the panel.

Without the bell-bottomed rockets on the Chiron, there was no way I’d be breaking lunar orbit now.

Hollowly, I reported my situation back to Houston, who had no doubt already become appraised of the situation via the Gemini’s computer.

It took almost a quarter of an orbit before anyone on the ground had the nerve to respond. By which time I was screaming incoherent obscenities within the claustrophobic confines of the cabin.

“You’ll have to go check it outside,” was their only suggestion.

As if I didn’t already have the cabin depressurized.

• • •

Vic’s malfunctioning thruster pack had done more damage than I’d first noticed. There were pieces of it embedded in the Chiron down near the collar where the nose of the Gemini committed adultery with the business-end of the booster. I couldn’t see it, but I guessed that under the cowling some of those pieces had chewed part-way into the wiring. Why the connection hadn’t failed before now, I could not be sure. Suffice to say that there was absolutely no way of effecting a repair.

While the mission controllers on Earth went politely apeshit, I allowed myself to drift away from the joined space vehicles and examine the limb of the moon as I flew once again towards the night side. How long had that gray, cratered landscape been waiting for the first person from Earth to see it up close? Mountains and valleys, great heaping plains of what looked like soft putty…Vic would have given a gonad to see this view, especially from outside the spacecraft. I hoped—somewhat vainly—that where Vic was, he was vicariously enjoying the show.

The night side was black like no other blackness I’ve ever experienced. The stars away from the moon were bright, fixed, and perfect; silent suns all raging mightily in the far-off depths of the Milky Way. When I was a teenager, I used to sit out in the country at my uncle’s place, just he and I and the humid Mississippi air. Not a city light for fifty miles. And never had we ever gotten a night sky as perfect or as magnificent as this.

I felt my throat close up as dawn on the far limb greeted me, and I orbited back into radio contact.

The monkey house in Houston could offer me little, save for additional promises that they were “Working the problem.”

Bullshit. More likely they were working how to best couch the news to the rest of the nation that the circumlunar flight—had they even yet allowed it to get out that one astronaut had already died—was now a total disaster. Doubtless Kennedy would not take kindly to such news. He needed something positive for the American people, as he prepared to hand the country over to his old rival, Nixon.

Jack wanted his administration to go out on a high note, so that hopefully in four years Bobby could latch on to that legacy—following Nixon’s anticipated implosion under the weight of the two wars Jack had begun—and reclaim the throne for the family.

With me dead and the Gemini program badly stalled as a result, the President’s second term was set to close on a decidedly sour note.

Especially since there was a Soviet capsule orbiting somewhere in lunar space. The Communists would be happily trumpeting about their victory while my corpse slowly freeze-dried.

Radio with the ground failed thirteen minutes into my ninth orbit. More leftovers from Vic’s accident. Under normal circumstances, it would have been a perfect time for me to shit a brick. But I was all out of bricks, and could only muster a weak laugh, followed by silence as I continued to drift and stare at the implacable stars.

• • •

I saw the light moving. Perhaps a third of an orbit ahead of me. I hadn’t seen it before, but upon closer visual inspection, I guessed that it was at a higher altitude, with less velocity. I floated and waited quietly, watching through two more orbits as the light drew nearer. I found I didn’t at all miss the constant clucking from Houston. The silence of the radio had matched the silence of the cosmos.

One of the hand cameras had a telescopic lens. I fished it out of the Gemini and aimed it at the light. What initially seemed like a single object resolved into two, separate objects: another Chiron, and something I’d only ever seen in grainy black-and-white photos during security briefings.

The Soviet L3 was in big trouble. Panels had been blown off along one side of the booster assembly, with wires and plumbing strung out into space like the innards of a disemboweled man.

Apparently my mission wasn’t the only one to have had technical difficulties.

The Chiron was a derelict from the test flights. GCBV-7003 and GCBV-7004. The first had conducted remote operations and thruster tests, before being de-orbited over the Pacific. The second had been fired via radio to test the booster’s ability to break Earth orbit and maneuver in translunar space. GCBV-7004 had actually reached lunar insertion before Earth lost contact with it.

The Russians were hijacking my only hope of getting home.

I reeled myself back to the hatch and crammed myself down into my seat, hands and fingers moving almost too quickly for my thinking to catch up with them. Neither needing nor caring about the checklist, I closed the door, did a quick de-couple via rote memory, and slowly pulled the Gemini free of its wounded—and useless—Chiron booster. In Earth orbit the Gemini would not have had enough onboard fuel to jump the necessary distance. In the weaker Lunar gravity, I hoped the odds would be a little more in my favor. Using the Gemini’s onboard computer and radar, I locked on to the approaching light—which gave solid pingbacks, to my relief—then set about some back-of-the-envelope calculating, based on relative velocity and distance.

Whatever moroseness I’d been feeling about Vic’s death, it had been overcome with a single, maniacal drive to get home: kiss my wife, see my kids, breathe fresh air that didn’t come from a can. I forgot about what had gone wrong to that point and made rendezvousing with the defunct Chiron my sole goal in the universe.

How the Russians might feel about my arrival was something I’d deal with when I got there.

I didn’t realize I was sweating profusely until the pooled, salty liquid began to creep from my face into the corners of my eyes. I mopped at my face with a towel and blinked furiously, not daring to take my eyes off the instruments as I thrusted, the fuel dwindling down to near-zero and the Chiron—which had originally brought me here—drifting away to become a small light unto itself.

GCBV-7004 looked relatively undamaged as I neared it.

My thruster fuel was past the point of being dangerously low.

The bozo package—a collection of radio and computer equipment taken from the Gemini assembly line and cobbled together into a “brain” for the unmanned Chiron—was resting solidly in GCBV-7004’s docking collar. With no way to radio the Chiron and order an automated jettison, I put my helmet back on and depressurized for yet another EVA.