Part 5 (1/2)

”Don't worry. How could I get to see any girls down here? Every time I look away from my work all I can see is Bikini swim suits.”

”Cut that out!” she snickered, and put Cleary on the line.

There came a final day when the mission chief called me in to his office.

”Come in, Mike. Come in,” he said shortly. ”Sit down.” He leaned back against his desk and started talking to me, like they say, straight from the shoulder:

”I'll give it to you straight, Mike. We've tried every legal way to wash you out of this mission. There isn't a one of us here at the Cape that wants any part of taking an armchair theorist and slapping him into s.p.a.ce--into the kind of a mission you've cooked up. Somebody's going to get hurt out there, because you aren't fit for the job. Now, physically, yes, you have the capacity. But emotionally and environmentally, you simply don't add up. You're looking at this thing as an extension of your laboratory, and instead it is an enormous physical and mental hazard that you are undertaking. This country has never lost a man in s.p.a.ce--and you'll be the cause of our first casualty, as well as being one yourself. I'm asking you man to man to disqualify yourself.”

”And put an end to this mission?”

”We'll train one of our men,” he said.

”In two or three years your best man might be barely capable,” I said.

”I don't think COMCORP is prepared to waste that much time. After all,” I said ingratiatingly, ”all you have to do is refuse the mission. Say I'm a built-in hazard and let it go at that.” I grinned at him. I was learning from Paul Cleary. I _figured_ how s.p.a.ce-jockeys would react to that.

He told me: ”Do you think any of these men would admit they are not up to a mission a mere technician is ready to try? No! I can't get them to beg off, either!”

”When do we go?” I asked.

Sid Stein was a.s.signed as my pilot. He had made the trip into orbit and back four times with the Dyna-Soar rocket, and was considered the best risk to get me there and get me back. He was also the least convinced I had any right to sit beside him in the cabin.

His final briefing was a beaut: ”This is a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p, doctor,” he said frigidly. ”And I want you to remember the 's.h.i.+p' part of it. I'm in command, and my every word, my every _belch_, has got to be law. Do you understand that? This is my mission, and I'll tell you where to put your feet.”

”Sure,” I said. ”Who wants it?”

”Can't figure out why you do!”

”I'm just paying somebody back,” I said. ”Is it tomorrow?”

The start was a drag. Eighteen hours before blast-off Sid and I went into a tank so that we would get rid of our nitrogen. We breathed the standard helium-oxygen mix at normal pressure until about four hours before H-hour. They wouldn't even let me smoke. Then we suited up and were lifted by a crane and stuck in the control room of _Nelly Bly_, as I had named our Dyna-Soar rocket-glider. The hatch stayed open, but we were b.u.t.toned up tight in our suits. They had a couple of mods that were supposed to fit them better for the mission. Instead of the usual metal helmet with face plate, we had full-vision bubble helmets of clear plastic. The necks were large enough so that we could, in theory, drag our arms out of our suits and clean the inside of the bubbles. That was in case I sicked up out in s.p.a.ce, which all experience said was a real enough hazard. They figured that filling me full of motion sickness pills was partial prevention.

These s.p.a.ce-jockeys have their own vocabulary, and their own oh, so cool way of playing it during the countdown. I'm pretty familiar with complex components, but they were checking off equipment I never heard of. We had gyros--h.e.l.l, our _gyros_ had gyros. And we had tanks, and pressures and temperatures and voltages and who-stuck-John. It was all very impressive.

There were suited men up on the gantry unplugging our air feed and closing our hatch. Sid was straining up from where he lay on his back to dog it down tight.

”Roger,” Sid was saying to somebody, as he had been all morning.

The white vapor from our umbilical stopped, which let me know our tanks had been topped off and sealed, and that we were about to blast off.

”This is it, Seaman,” Sid Stein said. ”Now for Pete's sake don't move, don't speak, just lie there. I've got the con.”

That was a bunch of baloney. He really had nothing to do until we were in orbit. The delicate accelerometers and inertial guidance components did all the piloting until the second stage kicked us loose. But I kept my mouth shut. He'd have some work to do before the ride was over, and I might need him.

When the lift-off came, it was gentle as a dove's wing. But as we burned off fuel, the twenty-million pound thrust of our Apollo booster began to tell, and my vision started to go black. The gee-meter said we were pulling about ten gees when I could no longer read it, and I learned later we peaked out at eleven gees in the final seconds before first-stage burn-out. I didn't like it a little bit.